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How America's universities became debt factories

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Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#551

Post by pokerface_86 »

huuhee3 wrote: post #150
anovikov wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, probably can and should be fixed. Set a minimum age for someone to take a college loan to say 21. Otherwise, a parent takes it and it's subtracted from a parents' social security check before it does from kid's. Then people will think twice. Maybe that's fair.

Good idea. I think kids in high school should also be shown some real stats about monetary outcomes from different degrees. Not BS marketing material from educational institutions, but actual statistics. The whole society would benefit if number of students in different fields would roughly match labor market demand.

how many people do you think even understand “actual statistics”? i was reading a study done by actuaries working at one of the largest reinsurers in the world, and they made conclusions based on confidence level values overlapping, which is a nontrivial mistake i identified within seconds. and these are actuaries, people who by and large, so understand statistics. how do you expect the average person to interpret any of it when they struggle to understand what a rate of change (inflation) is?

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#552

Post by pokerface_86 »

seizethecheese wrote: post #300
next_xibalba wrote: post #243

I’ve said it before on HN and I’ll say it again: I don’t support any reform with respect to student loans that doesn’t see the academic institutions participate in the pain. I’d like to see a large number of universities get bankrupted by assuming some portion of the student loan liabilities of their alums, then allow the alums to file bankruptcy if they can’t pay off any remaining balances. Did you know that federal…

1) I do not agree with applying this retroactively. You shouldn’t change the rules in the middle of the game. 2) it would be unfair to make universities participate in the downside but not the upside. Perhaps the federal government should also turn the interest earned over to universities. This could actually go some way towards lessening resistance.

fuck the Uni’s, they’ve spent decades profiteering off of us. my degree was an absolute waste of time (mathematics, cs+ stats minor) other than telling employers that i’m not a dumbass. i barely attended 30% of classes and graduated with a 3.5. uni is too easy, admits too many people, and serve as just a bottleneck in the system to actually living my life (profitably). the only reason i, and im assuming most others, went and did a hard degree was to signal to employers that im intelligent (and deserved to earn a proper living wage) , not bc i genuinely gave a shit about learning more lol

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#553

Post by jldugger »

lapcat wrote: post #247
zozbot234 wrote: post #200

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.

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…

> 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'm reminded of that quote from Interstellar: "I never really fully considered the possibility that I wasn't the one."

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#554

Post by chrisweekly »

robertlagrant wrote: post #542
chrisweekly wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Teaching is relatively well paid" Compared to what? In the US, teachers are absolutely underpaid relative to their similarly-educated and -skilled peers in other professions.

Compared to degrees that could struggle on average to pay back a loan, e.g. a degree in the humanities.

Not to be argumentative (really ), but that's borderline nonsensical; you're comparing a profession to a broad category of educational attainment. Teachers typically have a degree in the humanities. What other profession is so commonly viewed as underpaid?

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#555

Post by WalterBright »

pokerface_86 wrote: post #546
cdaringe wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Username checks out. :) Ya the arithmetic is easy. Building up the associated algebraic expression(s) though is certainly high school level where I’m from. I wish I understood why math education is the way it is. I really have no idea. I suspect the problem’s complexities are both wide and deep

no one actually good at math is going to become a K-5 teacher, they’re gonna get paid, so it creates a doom loop where each new generation of primary school teachers get progressively shittier at math.

There's a reason why 3rd grade "teachers' edition" textbooks for math exist. It's because those teachers need an answer key for 100+200.

As for "good at math", it's hard to see how a teacher with a degree can fail at 3rd grade arithmetic.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#556

Post by pokerface_86 »

WalterBright wrote: post #555
pokerface_86 wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no one actually good at math is going to become a K-5 teacher, they’re gonna get paid, so it creates a doom loop where each new generation of primary school teachers get progressively shittier at math.

There's a reason why 3rd grade "teachers' edition" textbooks for math exist. It's because those teachers need an answer key for 100+200. As for "good at math", it's hard to see how a teacher with a degree can fail at 3rd grade arithmetic.

i have literally witnessed students in a senior level discrete math class struggle with simple algebraic operations. they were on the math education track.

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#557

Post by majani »

skrebbel wrote: post #127
lenerdenator wrote: post #89

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…

The reality is that people constantly vote for well-intentioned, empathetic interventions that have adverse economic effects in the long run

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#558

Post by maerF0x0 »

pokerface_86 wrote: post #547
maerF0x0 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged. I mean it's a pretty simple concept that you borrow money and you must pay it back. However we agree that the failure is that we do not educate them enough already in the first 12 years we force upon them. For that I blame a lack of options, government "standards" which become ceilings…

canadians are highly educated yet their economy is in the absolute shitter. i know which country id rather live in.

It's unclear to me which country you mean you'd rather live in.

But for me, I actually do prefer to live in the US. But it's a fallacy to think there aren't ways the best could be improved. IMO the US could stand to do a little bit of growing up, and get rid of this "life is a club/party, and partying is the meaning of life" mentality that I see is so the root of many different kinds of behaviors (that are not partying in and of themselves)

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#559

Post by pokerface_86 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #558
pokerface_86 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

canadians are highly educated yet their economy is in the absolute shitter. i know which country id rather live in.

It's unclear to me which country you mean you'd rather live in. But for me, I actually do prefer to live in the US. But it's a fallacy to think there aren't ways the best could be improved. IMO the US could stand to do a little bit of growing up, and get rid of this "life is a club/party, and partying is the meaning of life" mentality that I see is so the root of many different kinds of behaviors (that are not partyi…

i agree, but the life is a club/party mentality isn’t what’s plaguing education, it’s the waste of time trying to get the bottom 10% of kids to perform at the median level. when i was in school, those kids got sent to alternative school so the rest of us could actually learn.

furthermore, i think not enough attention is being paid to the top 10% of students, most of whom are ignored as the teacher tries to wrangle a few shitheads poisoning the well of the classroom so to speak.

i think teachers should be paid roughly 5x their current median wage while simultaneously making it as difficult to become a teacher as a doctor , lawyer, or any other prestigious licensed position

the problem solves itself

Re: How America's universities became debt factories

#560

Post by pokerface_86 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #558
pokerface_86 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

canadians are highly educated yet their economy is in the absolute shitter. i know which country id rather live in.

It's unclear to me which country you mean you'd rather live in. But for me, I actually do prefer to live in the US. But it's a fallacy to think there aren't ways the best could be improved. IMO the US could stand to do a little bit of growing up, and get rid of this "life is a club/party, and partying is the meaning of life" mentality that I see is so the root of many different kinds of behaviors (that are not partyi…

not sure why the formatting on my previous post is fucked, on mobile, apologies.
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