How America's universities became debt factories • Hacker News Board

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#411

Post by gruez » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:15 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #200

scoofy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Source?

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#412

Post by ghaff » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:20 AM UTC

pixodaros wrote: post #391

ghaff wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your specific example, there are a lot of jobs that involve content marketing and other types of writing that aren't exactly hitting the pavement journalism but probably pay a lot better, are more reliable employment, and may be close enough. As you say, it's about finding the intersection. If I were looking for a writing job today--which I did a lot of over the past 10 years--I wouldn't be looking to the New York…

Your example of having engineering degrees but spending much of your working life writing is a good example of how income and academic degree don't necessarily go together. If you get training rather than an education you have a clear path but if the job you trained for is not hiring when you need a job you can be SOL.

Interests change too. I had degrees in Mech E and material science and I drifted into computer hardware related product management in relatively early days. From there to being a tech industry analyst and from there to doing a fair bit of early-on cloud strategy and content marketing work. Back to doing sort of part-time analyst work.

I suspect a lot of people here have had more linear and well-defined paths as the industry has matured.

I don't consider any of it a waste and I've enjoyed a lot of it. I've had conversations with people I've known for decades about it and they're kind of meh. You've done fine whether or not your formal training was necessarily on target for what you ultimately did.

I'll also add that working on newspapers has been probably been more useful than a lot of the technical stuff I've done.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#413

Post by victor106 » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:20 AM UTC

> In 2003, total student loan debt was around $250 billion. Today? It’s over $1.7 trillion.

> That’s not growth; that’s an explosion.

That's about 9.5% CAGR. About the same as the return of S&P 500 over the long term.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#414

Post by missedthecue » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:22 AM UTC

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #343

NemoNobody wrote: post #182

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…

> 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. I kind of disagree with this. At least in my high school this was definitely taught, but at the time we were all dumb 14-17 year olds who didn’t care about any of that stuff we just wanted to know what is needed to ge…

I really don't understand the people who complain that they weren't taught about debt and loans and checking accounts. You were given a 6th grade math education, and you were taught how to read. High school classes cannot be expected to teach every possible circumstance or decision you'll find yourself in. At some point you have to self-start.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#415

Post by toomuchtodo » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:29 AM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #216

NemoNobody wrote: post #182

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.

"Try to be more lucky."

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#416

Post by fallingknife » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:29 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #254

fallingknife wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we stopped subsidizing the degrees less people would have them, but employers would still need the same number of employees. They would be forced to drop necessary degree requirements or go understaffed.

Who knows what would happen? Maybe they'd do their own educational curricula with requirements that would require minimum tenures with payback requirements. (Not sure of all the US laws in this regard. There used to at least be relocation payback requirements.) But I suspect a lot of people here wouldn't like 1 year bootcamps for jobs that included an extended employment commitment.

I suspect they would like it better than paying for 4 years of education with no guarantee of employment at the end. But most likely it would be nothing of the sort. Most jobs that require degrees don't actually use any of the material in the degree (any job that doesn't care what your major was). Those jobs could just hire HS grads without any other changes.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#417

Post by ghaff » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:34 AM UTC

w4 wrote: post #346

adityamwagh wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might understand this but I would like to believe and employer won't. Anyways, my main point is universities should focus more on tangible skills - accounting, engineering etc and should not have random useless degrees of little value. Maybe English major is still valuable, but I personally don't see the tangible value in it - other than being an English teacher.

English is the global lingua franca. It’s how we interact with and transmit information, including ideas about accounting, engineering, etc. It’s very fair to argue about the ROI of the average undergraduate English degree given the outrageous prices that universities are charging for them. But if you cannot see the tangible value in English language expertise, I don’t really know what to tell you.

I'm not sure an English degree vs. a history degree vs. a political science degree vs. just just working on the school newspaper is super useful. But certainly fluency and the ability to communicate is.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#418

Post by DiscourseFan » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:38 AM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #392

DiscourseFan wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're wondering if you were perhaps mislead somewhat, because in our experience its quite rare for a department not to have any funded PhDs with stipends.

> We're wondering if you were perhaps mislead somewhat I wasn't. But I'm not going to write an autobiography here. I already regret revealing personal details in this thread. > in our experience its quite rare for a department not to have any funded PhDs with stipends. Who is "our" and what is your "experience"? Are you referring to Telemakhos and yourself? Are either of you even former humanities PhD students? And h…

I'll be very honest with you, I've never met a humanities PhD student without funding who should've been pursuing a PhD, and if the department you were in was so poorly funded that it couldn't give out stipends, then it's likely that you would've never found a job in academia afterwards anyway.

Look, its not your fault, some people don't end up in the right undergraduate programs, they don't meet the right people, make the right connections, and get into good PhD programs with funding. In any other case, if you don't have a lot of money and time to waste, its almost always a bad idea.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#419

Post by lupusreal » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:39 AM UTC

grecy wrote: post #165

paulcole wrote: post #139

Earlier 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…

Woah, you were paying off that debt with interest from 2005 to 2021? Damn I’m happy to live in a country with free university.

Heh, I paid off all my student debt, about that much, with the starting bonus from my first job after school. America educations are basically free if you don't do some goofy shit like go into debt to study literature.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#420

Post by nyokodo » Sun, Sep 15, 2024, 1:41 AM UTC

tourmalinetaco wrote: post #104

crazygringo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Progressive taxation isn’t even necessary. If someone makes $10,000 and is taxed 10%, they give up $1,000. And if someone makes $10,000,000 then they give up $1,000,000.

> Progressive taxation isn’t even necessary

It isn’t necessary, no, and in fact a flat super simple tax code would probably result in more tax revenue. However, since politicians like the power of the tax code, and because the wealthy like a complex tax code for all the loopholes, and since ordinary people like the idea of those wealthier than them paying more tax as a percentage of their income, then we’re never going to get a simple tax code.