301–310 of 564 posts
Besides this, I also agree to the 200+ upvotes, system is broken y'all!
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 f…
I don't like this type of comment because it's makes it seem like that this was all planned like this on purpose (by some cabal of evil schemers, I suppose?), but without the need to provide any evidence that that's indeed how it went, because nothing of the kind of is explicitly claimed. Things can go wrong without people scheming to do evil. It's not helpful to twist "these and these circumstances combined to produ…
And of course there is a cabal of evil schemers, they have hardly bothered to hide themselves, e.g.:
> Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon.
> The theory was first articulated by James H. Hammond, a Democratic United States senator from South Carolina and a wealthy Southern plantation owner, in a speech on March 4, 1858. Hammond argued that every society must find a class of people to do menial labor, whether called slaves or not ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory
It gets worse from there.
You can go look up the people who passed these laws and the arguments they used to promote them, but in the end it hardly matters.
What matters is disassembling the mudsill machine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bulk of education debt in the U.S. is not about undergrad degrees in English literature or the like. By and large, it gets incurred either for lucrative postgrad degrees (MBA, law, medical etc.) or for earning degrees at "non-traditional" for-profit colleges.
there is a difference in prospects of payback/ROI between Harvard MBA and University of South Podunk MBA. they are the same though for the federal student loan program. same with law degrees
In this particular conversation Harvardbro was obviously and factually incorrect, but his pompous rhetoric usually gets everybody else to silence themselves (not in awe).
Interestingly, Harvardbro only got accepted into the two schooltypes you mentioned (and no 2nd tiers).
It's bizarre to me how accepting we are of the idea that higher education should cost anything let alone be mind-bogglingly expensive. This is wildly successful propaganda. Student loan debt was an explicit political goal [1]: > "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat," announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970. Freeman, an economics professor at Stanford, was…
You aren't making this point directly, but I think it's worth pointing out: not everyone is entitled to attend Harvard, Princeton, (etc.) any more than they are entitled to a Maserati.
There are, and should always be, affordable public options, so that anyone who wants a college degree can get one. We need to stop romanticizing elite universities, and acknowledge that you can get a great education, with hard work, at almost any university.
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You're correct except for one word: "lucrative". To this day, almost two decades after I left my philosophy PhD program (without a PhD), I still have massive student loan debt. Even if I had completed my degree, though, philosophy PhDs aren't particularly lucrative. Tenured professors at major universities do ok, but the road to getting tenure-track jobs and then tenure is littered with the bodies of grad students. I…
> It's worth noting, by the way, that the United States has a shortage of medical doctors. That's a pipeline problem. What the U.S. actually has is a severe bottleneck in available places at medical schools and for residency training.
I programmers were smart, they would:
1. Lobby the government to prohibit anyone from practicing programming without a license.
2. Limit the number of licenses granted each year
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building. Not everything can be, or is supposed to be, taught by schools. Your parents should've taught you those things, and if they didn't do that they failed you.
The problem of financially illiterate people doesn't go away when we find someone to blame for not teaching them. Parents "should" teach a lot of things they often don't, and one of the values of schools is that they plug some of those gaps to help produce better educated members of society. Whether or not schools are the right place to teach those things is irrelevant if the end goal is for people to actually have the right knowledge to be successful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine in Europe they select more carefully the students whom will go to College. Here in the US we've told students that everyone must go to College. We now have too many people in College and many of them aren't going to be successful once they are in. It's not sustainable. In many of our public universities, the graduation rate is well below 50%
> I would imagine in Europe they select more carefully the students whom will go to College. Here in the US we've told students that everyone must go to College You imagine wrong. Pretty much everyone goes to university in most and European countries. Even in wildly tourist dependent places, a degree in tourism is a normal thing for a young person to pursue before going to work at hotels/restaurants.
Perhaps college has expanded to select too many people? I wonder if this could be solve by simply restricting college admissions to 20% of graduating seniors.
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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.
I'm sorry the match doesn't even remotely work. $20k in loans over 4 years, when full sticker price was about $10k for the same 4 years and you had a 75% scholarship, and started as a junior? That plus it somehow taking you 20 years to pay $20k in loans makes this smell pretty fishy. The real question is why make something like this up?
1. I took more in loans than I technically needed for school and spent it on living expenses like video games, gambling, fun stuff, etc.
2. I signed up for 4 classes a semester, often in things unrelated to my degree. Figured since I had 4 years of scholarship (and 4 years of loans available), I may as well just hang around and have fun.
3. By my math, (feel free to double check) 2021 minus 2005 is not 20. Loan payments didn’t start until after graduation. It was about $50 a month for minimum payments when I started paying and around $150 at the end. Don’t remember the exact way the payments increased over time. It was just steps, but not related to income.
Any follow ups?
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 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.
I went to college before I had internet access and my decision on what college degree to get and where to go to get it was based upon the salary I would receive upon graduation and my ability to repay my loans. I went to the library to figure these things out for myself.
Nowadays, you don't even have to get up out of your chair. If you are a young person and you make stupid decisions on your college education and student loans, that's a YOU thing.
I personally think college should be free because education is a worthwhile endeavor for everyone. But since it isn't, I'm not willing to make excuses for those who attend without weighing the costs and benefits. It's one of the easiest things in the world to do.