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Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

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Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#51

Post by fwipsy »

ashton314 wrote: post #24
EPWN3D wrote: post #5

Holy shit this is a great idea. I get the complaints about the arts, but colleges have enjoyed essentially unlimited patience for larding up their programs with extra fees, bullshit credit requirements, and more, for decades. I don't personally think that efficiency should be the primary concern of colleges, but it should be a concern, and it just plain hasn't been for ages. And that indulgence has been cloaked in sp…

> "You can't complain about being require to take a 100-level history course because our job is to turn out renaissance scholars who can debate philosophy at cocktail parties before going to work doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with that." > All the while, those additional credit hours cost students a shitload of money and debt and take focus away from their actual fields of study. This is a straw-m…

This is also a straw-man. You don't just need to establish that students should learn history, literature, etc -- you need to establish that 12 years of that is not enough, and they need to take an additional 4 years at a much higher cost. But why stop at 16 years? Why not 20 or 30 years? Clearly there are diminishing marginal returns. At some point you should trust students who are motivated to learn to continue their studies independently, rather than tacking it on as a massively expensive additional requirement to a vocational degree.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#52

Post by bruce511 »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #37
bruce511 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much more complicated than that. >> If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college, Lots of things affect earnings. Obviously education is one of them, but it's not the only one. Location, economic environment, social status, personal network - all are factors. In other words comparing unequal things leads to unequal results. For example, a first-generation college…

Also unclear how it works for the PhD pipeline. If you roll straight from bachelor's to a doctorate program - you have abysmal earnings for the next 5-6 years of your life.

Indeed. Equally the person who has 4 Years experience in the workplace probably does better than a first year grad.

In other words, when trying to measure value outcomes, what time period should one consider?

And does the rule apply at the college level or the program level? If I churn out 100 people in my law school, can I average their prospects with 50 from my Archaeology degree? Or with 50 from my "music in movies" degree?

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#53

Post by janalsncm »

ashton314 wrote: post #21

This is not great. The purpose of higher education is not to get you a job. That's certainly a nice side-effect and I hope that all my students will be able to support themselves through good employment. The university is there to educate you, not train you. It's to turn you into a better thinker, a better person, and someone more capable of living well. Making art and humanities programs demonstrate some kind of pec…

> The purpose of higher education is not to get you a job.

This is the line universities give, knowing full well that the only reason students pay exorbitant tuitions is because bachelor’s degrees are necessary for most salaried jobs in the US. Schools want to have their cake and eat it too. If education isn’t about the money they should have no problem charging lower tuition rather than paying their presidents million dollar salaries.

The reason lecture halls are packed at 7:50am on a Monday is not because students are thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial function, but because Calc 1 is a prerequisite to their engineering degree, which is a prerequisite to their job.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#54

Post by [deleted] »

tbrownaw wrote: post #31
quadrifoliate wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't this punish a huge number of students who struggle academically, by comparing them against better-achievers who simply skipped school? Why would it not just compare them to the average person who skips school, which can be a combination of better and worse achievers? Is there some part I'm missing where the academically struggling are selectively compared to elite school-skippers?

I read the parent comment as claiming that some colleges select student bodies that are on average worse than the average of people who don't go to college at all.

[deleted]

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#55

Post by fc417fc802 »

jjav wrote: post #20
nibbleyou wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the interests would rise to accommodate for all the bankruptcies that inevitably happen exactly 7 years after

If bankrupcy is allowed some reasonable number of years later (not sure if that is 7 or 10, but some reasonable time) then if your education worked out and you're in a good career path and maybe close to buying a home, etc, declaring bankrupcy would probably hurt more than help. OTOH if you're still poor after those years and don't care about consequences of bankrupcy then maybe that's fair enough to wipe out the deb…

> declaring bankrupcy would probably hurt more than help.

It wouldn't help at all as you are typically forfeiting all but essential assets by declaring it. The only people who benefit are those with nothing to their name except perhaps the home they live in and the car they drive to work everyday.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#57

Post by fc417fc802 »

theahura wrote: post #34

imo this is pants on head backwards. The whole problem with the current university system is that it has become exclusively a credentialing system that everyone uses to justify higher salaries. We’ve completely left the education part of it by the wayside…except for the liberal arts majors who are actually there just to learn! This rule is just encoding the existing tulip mania into federal law directly, by making it…

Still it would seem to make some amount of sense for federal aid to be restricted to economically advantageous persuits, no? Doesn't mean that's the only thing institutions can offer nor do I necessarily think it's the best way to improve the status quo.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#58

Post by dataflow »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #37
bruce511 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much more complicated than that. >> If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college, Lots of things affect earnings. Obviously education is one of them, but it's not the only one. Location, economic environment, social status, personal network - all are factors. In other words comparing unequal things leads to unequal results. For example, a first-generation college…

Also unclear how it works for the PhD pipeline. If you roll straight from bachelor's to a doctorate program - you have abysmal earnings for the next 5-6 years of your life.

Unless a program has a habit of sending the majority of its undergrads into PhDs, that part might not be so hard to resolve -- just exclude everyone who does that from the measurement sample.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#59

Post by fc417fc802 »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #23
tbrownaw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pejoratively named "trade schools" That's an accurate name, and only seems pejorative if you see learning a trade as lesser than studying academics. > name university can confer a bachelor's in some bullshit field, but the respectable local trade school cannot confer a bachelor's in plumbing This misunderstands what the different kinds of credentials are .

You're hiding behind semantics. Why should there be a difference in the degree being conferred at all? And if so, why not split off the departments that confer degrees with a low-earning potential and call them "entertainment schools" or something?

Yeah I can't wait for the opportunity for those perjoratively named "community" colleges to be able to award MDs and JDs in whatever fields they teach. Maybe also licenses while we're at it. I'd love to be a licensed physicist with an MD in math.

Terms have meanings and they matter, even if you don't choose to bother to understand them.

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