I think we are going to have an era of entrepreneurial maximalism coming soon. For a lot of young people, the employment deal is rather broken. Also, AI will benefit smaller companies far more than larger ones.
How America's universities became debt factories
181–190 of 564 posts
Re: How America's universities became debt factories
#1821) 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 f…
You forgot the most important part. The people agreeing to these debts, by definition , do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged. Taking our a vast loan to study English literature might seem unwise, but it’s something I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding to do.
Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building.
Instead, all I was told was to go to college.
So... the people that made me woefully sheep like and "financially innocent" then sent me to the wolves because they believed in me.
Seriously, they made huge changes to the way people were accepted into college - created High School "career counseling" (college/University recruiters) to tell everyone kid they were smart enough to go, and the dumber down tests convinced enough to convince the rest.
The loans went up each year - the costs more than doubled between my Freshman and Sophomore year and just never stopped going up - the more you owe the more you HAVE to finish to get the job to pay the loans.
Before all this, when less than 1% of all student loans had been defaulted on, the loan debt was made unforgivable by 6 people - a committee of bankers created by the people in Congress they bought.
It was setup so that of a millennial "Wins" it means they can afford to pay their loans - so the bank wins. If we lose we still have to pay/often must pay more with all the fees and added interest - bank still wins.
During the time I lived thru all this I was reading shit about how lazy all f are bc we don't own as many houses as we are supposed at our age - this is still true to this day actually.
This is an intolerable and disgusting thing for a society to do to an entire generation - any group is wrong but to plan out the demise of a generation of, at the time all this was first set in motion, we were literal Elementary Students.
These loans destroyed lives, relationships, sets parents against their children, divided families.
- All just part of the plan.
Re: How America's universities became debt factories
#183I 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.
CS does have a lot of certifications, which are generally regarded as crap by most university-educated CS people. Part of the reason is that a lot of certifications test you knowledge with specific tooling, and that tooling may become obsolete rather quickly in the field.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the tests you talk about aren't valued particularly higher by their own fields. Most lawyers I know have commented that the bar exam [1] primarily tests material that is largely irrelevant to the actual practice of law, to a degree that scoring too highly on the exam tends to be seen as "you wasted too much time preparing for the exam."
[1] The LSAT isn't a test of whether or not you've mastered law school material, it's a test of whether or not you are allowed to be admitted to law school in the first place. The bar exam is the actual necessary certification to be a lawyer.
Re: How America's universities became debt factories
#184but it makes a nice opportunity for Democrats to buy votes later with selective debt forgiveness debt forgiveness was a hot topic exactly one month before the midterms and it is already becoming a hot topic as we head in to the general election if these students were not in debt, there would be no debt to forgive and no votes to buy
> a nice opportunity for Democrats to buy votes
That's exactly what political parties in a democracy should do.
You know who never says no to handouts from the government? Wealthy people. In fact, they don't just say no, they demand handouts. It's only when the government gives money to poor people that it suddenly becomes a moral hazard.
> debt forgiveness was a hot topic
... until a politicized Supreme Court killed it because it was giving money to poor people.
Re: How America's universities became debt factories
#185Human capital contracts are another partial solution that flips the incentives: instead of using loans to pay tuition up front, institutions are paid a % of your income for a fixed period of time, after which any remaining amount is forgiven. Typically this only applies to income over a base amount (such as 10% of income above a 40,000 base). Naturally this works great in fields with strong employment outcomes and te…
A bootcamp called Lambda School had an income sharing agreement (ISA) to that effect. They did not do well.
Re: How America's universities became debt factories
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in part because on the "buyer" side, there's often a problem of how to sort through 100 resumes for a position. Given that in any given pile of resumes, probably 70% are unqualified, filtering for "degree" is an easy way (though naturally not great, though how not great it is is hard to measure, which of course means we do it) to cut the work required in half or more.
Free education does not mean "no degrees", it means "funded from taxes/ by goverment".
That's still not "free." Taxpayers are footing the bill, with the government taking its cut.
Re: How America's universities became debt factories
#187One thing that really annoys me about universities is being forced to take random classes under the dubious banner of being well rounded. The incentives for the university are to make us spend more time and money on them. So of course, they want us to waste time in arbitrary forced requirements. My observation is that people are not actually well-rounded just because they went to a university. And I don’t think they’re even studying the fields that we need as a society. There are too many random fields that just seem like activism rather than something rigorous. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing those, and the government needs to be much smarter about managing the bad incentives for administration.
Re: How America's universities became debt factories
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took out around $20k in loans to study literature starting in 2001. Graduated in 2005. Rent was $150 a month. Played a lot of poker and disc golf. Studied and learned a bit. Had a 75% scholarship to help with tuition. Had a $300/semester book stipend as part of that and just bought penny books off Amazon (one of the benefits of an English degree) and pocketed the difference. Basically for 5-8% or so of my (estimate…
> Had a 75% scholarship to help with tuition.
State school was hella cheap (it was back when Florida’s lotto money mostly went to scholarships for in-state students). I think full sticker price would’ve been around $2500/year for tuition+fees at the time?
I also started with enough credits to be nearly to (the equivalent of being in) junior year and took the bare minimum credits to keep the scholarship.
Re: How America's universities became debt factories
#189The problem here is the time value of money. If the world is based on a production function of compound interest then in a world of finite resources what becomes cheaper over time are cell phones and what becomes more expensive are people's time, because the per unit cost of clean water and housing goes up and technology makes virtualizable goods cheaper. This also has the added benefit of screwing with the Gini coef…
Silvio Gesell essentially makes the argument that the return on mere ownership of real capital is negative in the real world. Positive interest can only exist in a world where demand for capital exceeds supply. Since capital produces capital, we reach the excess capital "regime" eventually. The holding costs of excess capital are negatively therefore people destroy the excess capital. In the positive interest range there is a tendency for the interest rate to drop. In the negative interest rate range there is a tendency for the interest rate to rise. Both lead to the equilibrium real interest rate being exactly 0% in the long run.
But a 0% interest rate has some quite significant implications. The value of non-extracted rock in earth's crust and the mild steel it eventually becomes are equivalent, despite being separated in time. Capital requires energy to operate, which also comes from the earth's crust. In other words, everything that exists today is just a long winded transformation of one chunk of the universe into another. Nothing is ever "produced". All wealth is based on the direct or indirect ownership of land and its resources playing out over the ages. Mind you, in this framework, owning an expensive machine is equivalent to having the mining rights to dig out the materials and energy sources. It is not literal ownership of land that is important, but the access to its benefits.
Basically, we will never escape feudalism.
Re: How America's universities became debt factories
#1901) 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 f…
I feel like the key thing missing from this discussion are the employers who still demand these degrees. Let's say we reformed both higher education and student loans - does that have any meaningful impact on the demand side beyond pushing the salaries of degree holders up (thus increasing the value of a degree, thus making larger loan values easier to justify, thus...)