471–480 of 564 posts
What happens to all the existing student debt? Debt is just a number on a computer, I'm sure they'll figure something out...
For that matter, some serious thought should be given to going to college overseas. I don't care that "American universities are always more prestigious," there are some countries that are handing out full ride scholarships to internationals and some where the full sticker cost is as little or less than a US in-state public school. Most high school counselors know nothing about this and most students don't even consider it.
Ironically, many American study abroad programs probably cost more than just enrolling in the foreign institution directly for a semester (whereas the same is never true in reverse).
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That’s only because doctors collude to limit the number of available residency places. 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
Unfortunately since most of our jobs can be done remotely, that would likely drive a ton of software jobs overseas.
In much the same way that a doctor in $FOREIGN_COUNTRY cannot practice telemedicine in the USA, I would expect the regulations to make a distinction between software (and services provided by software) developed by foreign and licensed programmers.
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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 have my PhD in Greek and Latin. I applied to many schools for my PhD program and, on the advice of professors who had told me what I repeated above, accepted admission to the department that gave me the best aid offer, not necessarily the one with the best reputation. They were right, and I never paid a dime for my education.
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Plenty of smart people who get liberal arts degrees from top schools do just fine. I know plenty of them even though I have engineering degrees myself. They may not get FAANG salaries in general--unless they end up in management--but plenty of people I know are just fine.
I see a problem here. Why are English majors in Management positions? With LLMs, I don't see a value on an English degree anymore. So I personally believe it's just a money sink at this point. I don't believe art can be taught in universities as a degree program. Universities should only be for domains that have tangible value.
> don't believe art can be taught in universities as a degree program
what does that have to do with studying English literature?
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> debt instruments that cannot be discharged Your regular reminder that debt bondage is a form of slavery, and is illegal in most countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage There are only two options with debt: bad debt are written off, lender takes a hit and the lender must be careful who they lend money to. Or bad debt lingers forever and accrues lucrative interest, in which case giving out bad debt is t…
> is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt a student does not pledge their services as security for the debt. It's not debt bondage at all.
I wonder why there's no mention of a free education as an alternative solution to the broken system
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You don't have "an industry" that hikes prices, and there is a central authority without ulterior motive that has an influence over what is funded. Not to mention that you don't put young people into debt from get go.
My understanding of a free education is one that is 100% paid for by the government, since someone still has to pay the professor's salary. In that case, you still have an issue of an industry that can demand increased prices (from the government, of course) if university enrollment suddenly increases (and I think it would if students didnt have to pay tuition). So I think you still have to figure out how to handle t…
No need to over complicate things.
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This is non-responsive to my point. Pointing out that paid universities like Corinthian in a grossly distorted market predictably are not very competitive offerings, or that good offerings can nevertheless still exist in heavily distorted markets, both fail to address that > Current educational incentives caused by how payment is handled in these all-pay systems mean there is very little or no pressure exerted toward…
'In a more competitive market' sounds like an article of faith, akin to the No True Scotsman, where there's no definition of what is competitive enough until it meets the proponents' sniff test. What would a sufficiently competitive market entail? Has it ever existed? Would it look like modern US K-12 systems where commercial schools prioritize the most profitable students and leave the others to the public schools?…
This question being written as singular suggests to me you’re conflating some combination of education as a concept, education in America, and education in Europe. I see this as muddled thinking, they each have their own issues and their own timetables over which issues can and do exist.
Education history in Europe is actually decently hyperlocal and pretty path dependent for each country during the 19th and 20th century. Talking about it as a monolith is challenging, but there’s a pretty consistent pattern in societies with all-pay taxation-paid schooling that it has clear incentive structures that a school, having been “paid up front“, is not incentivized to put in the work to provide a high quality education, and as the financier of that education is the taxpayer, the pressure is primarily to keep costs low.
As for America, you don’t need much faith to believe that in the US instituting dischargeability would dramatically improve competition and quality in these spaces and the market for education - so yes, this market used to be substantially more competitive and used to exist. Since the 1970s when these laws were passed, student debt and tuition costs have skyrocketed, low quality for-profit university creation skyrocketed, and people have been hobbled with debt for degrees many are never going to pay back. Dischargeability reduces this greatly - it causes financiers to create motive pressure on education to not be a fiscal vampire preying on its students and equip them with meaningful trades and socially useful knowledge.
As for standards and regulations on schools, assuming the public sees fit to fund higher education through government spending, having requirements for a school to receive that government funding seems reasonable, so long as they reflect the desires of the local populace.
Ultimately, all this is a discussion of tradeoffs - I think someone can happily prefer
> everyone gets a free tertiary education paid for by their taxes
I think that it being free and paid-by-all means it’ll have low motive pressure towards quality and therefore be comparably mediocre to free elementary and secondary compulsory education, which even based on your own reckoning seems to be a two-tier system where the public institutions get short shrift - but you seem to care about it being free or less focused on fiscal student outcomes as its own value. It’s a tradeoff.
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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…
Distinguishing between malice and ineptitude at the systemic level is nearly impossible. If the OP's type of comment makes you uncomfortable, you might be leaning too far into putting blame on ineptitude by default, instead of a healthy at least 50/50 mix of blaming greedy malice. OP just listed the 20/20 hindsight of this all. If that makes it sound like it was all a scheme, well - who knows - but it's just as unhel…
Here, there's a kind of "big picture malicious", Sith-Lord-level piece of action being sketched, and that's in my opinion a categorically different thing. No group of conspirators got together in the 80s and secretly schemed for decades to make America's universities debt factories, at times against their own short-term interests, and are now sitting at the country club making evil laughter sounds. This vibe is the road to nihilist fatalism, it adds nothing, it helps nobody, it's just throwing your hands in the air and saying "I give up! The world is terrible!"