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How America's universities became debt factories

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Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#81

Post by gruez »

tway_GdBRwW wrote: post #48
mchusma wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But…the whole point is that it is NOT a market. If student debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are “solved”. Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. Universities that provide a poor ROI will shut down. Universities will need to reduce costs for traditional coursework, cut courses with poor returns, add courses with higher returns. Th…

> Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt. The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduat…

>In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt.

That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education?

>And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.

Sounds like the solution is to raise teacher pay, which would also have the added benefit of retaining teachers after they graduate. Giving teachers cheap training but paying them poorly seems worse than the status quo because you end up shoveling money into training teachers that'd end up dropping out anyways.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#82

Post by freshtake »

jancsika wrote: post #76
mchusma wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But…the whole point is that it is NOT a market. If student debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are “solved”. Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. Universities that provide a poor ROI will shut down. Universities will need to reduce costs for traditional coursework, cut courses with poor returns, add courses with higher returns. Th…

> If student debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are “solved”. Chesterton's fence definitely applies here. If you don't understand what that law attempted to prevent in the first place, you're just going to get your pocket picked by a different group of people.

Yep, exactly. Current situation is clearly bad, but most of the solutions seem to focus around the idea that dismissing trillions of dollars in debt through bankruptcy is a great idea (it isn't)

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#83

Post by BoxedEmpathy »

anovikov wrote: post #53
BoxedEmpathy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question utility of that reduction. When you reduce complex situations to simple words like 'socialism' you lose nuance and predictive power. It's not binary. It's more or less. Canada is more socialist than USA. Norway is more socialist than Canada. Reducing to "is" or "isn't" doesn't help understand the problem or come up with viable solutions.

If we go along the route of "asking the government to ban every line of business where people waste money getting no value for it or even getting harmed, being driven by systematic delusion", as it is with the higher education - we will shoot ourselves in the foot in a massive massive way as this will kill almost all web startups as this is what they are - use manipulative tactics, knowingly false expectation and soc…

I said is I don't see the utility in reducing the concept from a continuum to a binary "is/isn't"

You seem to have doubled down on the is/isn't perspective and demonstrated what I was referring to. The more you reduce the less useful your reasoning becomes.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#84

Post by tough »

gruez wrote: post #81
tway_GdBRwW wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt. The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduat…

>In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt. That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education? >And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school t…

A country's which population is educated, usually bodes well, unless it's an authoritative govt one, in which case dumbing down the population is the way (from the govt POV, at least)

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#85

Post by fardo »

tway_GdBRwW wrote: post #48
mchusma wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But…the whole point is that it is NOT a market. If student debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are “solved”. Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. Universities that provide a poor ROI will shut down. Universities will need to reduce costs for traditional coursework, cut courses with poor returns, add courses with higher returns. Th…

> Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt. The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduat…

Simpler isn’t always preferable: note that the key feature from the consumer perspective in that system is

> you pay no matter what

Meaning if it’s assumed “despite learning little, you still will be able to pay for it”, there’s no longer any motive force towards quality, as your payment is assured. Incentives on taxpayers thereafter who want to minimize their tax burden would therefore be optimizing primarily toward cheapness of the educational process, rather than efficacy and quality of the education which outbound students received.

A vigorous market for education, would suggest you would likely get a variety of nodes along a “costliness to quality” options frontier.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#86

Post by magnoliakobus »

robertlagrant wrote: post #57
tway_GdBRwW wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt. The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduat…

> Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduation something happens which prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you. That's why the article's saying you should be able to declare bankruptcy. > And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.…

I think most people would agree with me in saying the European model sounds pretty swell compared to forcing people into declaring bankruptcy because of economic/personal factors potentially out of their control, while also inserting an incredible amount of volatility into the entire university system that would make long term institutional planning much less possible.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#87

Post by firejake308 »

lordnacho wrote: post #47

I don't know if this is some kind of heresy, but here we go. I don't think universities provide much value at all to the common student who is not going to be a PhD. I went to a very well-known institution known for putting the students in a room with the professors, maybe two or three students, to one professor. My economics professor taught me one on one. I still think, in the end, the work is mostly done alone, in…

I mean, a lot of trades do have standardized tests. The LSAT for law school, the MCAT for medical school, and the CPA exams for accounting come to mind. I don't know why computer science hasn't organized in this manner, maybe because it's a younger field or maybe because there are simply too many people and employers don't care enough about having certified employees.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#88

Post by crazygringo »

gruez wrote: post #81
tway_GdBRwW wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt. The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduat…

>In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt. That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education? >And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school t…

> That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education?

We can say the same thing about K-12 education -- it's just something we choose to fund collectively, because that's the kind of society we want to be.

But also, progressive taxation means that the rich fund it more than the poor. So the general idea is that if law school and medical school are expensive to provide but result in vastly higher salaries, then it gets paid for in the end out of those lawyers' and doctors' taxes. Not the taxes from average Americans.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#89

Post by lenerdenator »

1) Move most good careers that do not require a college degree out of the country for the benefit of shareholders

2) Tell everyone born between 1980 and 1995 that they'll be unable to compete in the global marketplace if they don't get at least some post-high school education, and imply that the mere presence of a degree will help instead of having a specific type of degree

3) Have next-to-zero standards for public funds used in grant and loan programs for college education, meaning people can take out loans for any sort of degree program at almost any sort of institution

4) Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other types of debtors. You cannot discharge them through bankruptcy, it's very difficult to renegotiate, and SCOTUS has said that the chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case, the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#90

Post by freshtake »

advael wrote: post #18
WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's too disruptive, and there's too high a chance of unintended consequences. Instead of that what you'll see is a 'we'll kill this multi-billion dollar industry over the course of the next 30 years'

With all due respect, fuck that. We do disruptive stuff with unintended consequences for millions of people as a matter of policy all the time, and the idea that it'll disrupt some finance goons' ponzi scheme does not bother me

This is the problem with a ton of policy thinking. The idea that we can solve a problem of this magnitude with disruption, and somehow prevent market forces from reacting, is incredibly short sighted.

It's incredibly expensive to run a university, and many people feel entitled to attend any university they can get into (not a bad thing, btw), but you can't suddenly erase the bill without drastically cutting costs, changing supply/demand, or otherwise altering the economics first.

The college level education system in the US employs almost 3.8 million people. Decisions here absolutely affect their employment, tax rates, employment rates, bank loans, financial industry solvency, etc.

This problem is incredibly far away from the space of YOLO tactics.

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