101–110 of 565 posts
Could also look the other way around: if things pay off anyway, why should should tax payers fund it?
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…
I agree with the value of studying arts, social sciences, etc. But why should taxpayers cover that? There are lots of online courses which could provide the same education for free. Community colleges also show that it's possible to provide a decent in-person education at a fraction of the cost of major universities. If we could get tuition under control, then federal tuition assistance would be fine, but also hardly…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The full reason is that preventing bankruptcy is the only way to keep interest rates low and make the loans widely available. If bankruptcy was allowed then the obvious play would be to take the loan, max out credit cards right before graduation, then declare bankruptcy before you get your first job. Lenders would respond by increasing interest rates dramatically and restricting loans to those who had assets. This wo…
If that was an actual problem wouldn't people be doing it without the college already? When I was in my early 20s I got non-stop credit offers and I could have easily pulled out tens of thousands in crappy debt.
When evaluating whether public money is well spent on education it must be more important how valuable it is to the public, not what the price for the work is to the individuals.
I like the "what if these workers stopped today" test:
Pick a profession. For example pick from 'trader', 'dentist', 'cleaner', 'sales person' or 'nurse'. Then imagine that all people in that profession stop working today.
How bad would it be for society? Is it better or worse than some other profession? Compare this to how well-payed the profession is.
I think this is a much better test for value to society than looking at what people get payed.
For example, I think it would be much worse if all nurses stop working than if all bankers stop working. Yet bankers tend to get paid more.
> But this new test, known as "do no harm," raises some thorny questions about the purpose of college. Like: Is it just about making more money? If this is a fair question to ask students, then it is a fair question to ask the schools as well. They are the ones charging enormous amounts of money to students for this. This doesn’t prevent people from learning to paint or play the clarinet. It prevents students from ta…
If you look at the music teacher example you see the end result of these perverse incentives turning into a pyramid scheme. Being a music teacher at the college is one of the few profitable ways to pay off your student debt while staying in your preferred career so of course she doesn't want to give that up, she's still in debt.
If college isn't about money, that turns college into a consumer good, but if college is a consumer good, why should the government let people borrow money for their consumption?
By that logic the government should lend money to young people so they can go on expensive vacations and enjoy their youth.
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…
If you want to set up a teaching program to learn something arcane, by all means go for it and charge a fair/reasonable/whatever amount. Just because you're teaching it doesn't mean the Federal government should give you money. Let those who can afford it pay for it. If not many can, you need to make an argument why your program should be subsidized (and by who)? It shouldn't be a default that the support will come from the Federal government.
From the article:
> Specifically, certificate programs in cosmetology and somatic body work have the highest predicted failure rates.
Do you really want to make the case that the Federal government should fund these?
For more common arts/music programs, the Federal government can fund arts/music initiatives (not tied to education).
Isn’t this already a solved problem with models that are used in various countries in the EU? Where the education is financed through taxes, thus you don’t pay anything up front, but keep paying for it for the rest of your life.
The problem of college affordability is arguably another dimension of the housing crisis. You can look at the numbers yourself. Yet oddly I've never seen this pointed out or discussed, not in the media or anywhere else.
In principle an easy way to lower the cost of college would be for public universities to invest in building more subsidized or free dormitories. The problem is that most of the popular coastal universities are in areas where development is absurdly expensive and contentious, even for government.
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Because then the normal thing to do would be to graduate, declare bankruptcy when you have nothing to lose in life because you are just starting out, work for 7 years and you’re in the clear by your late 20s. Everyone would do it.
Maybe not everyone, but certainly lots of unethical people would do it, and there are lots of those. They'd post unbearably smug posts on LinkedIn about it too, calling everyone a sucker who didn't walk away from their $200k in student loans via bankrupcty. The justification for student loans being exempt from bankruptcy is simply that there is no asset to be repossessed. Car loans, mortgages, and HELOCs are differen…
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You can't really tell people that they just can't be bankrupt though. What are they supposed to do if they have debts they can't pay but they're not allowed to declare bankruptcy because they pinky swore they wouldn't do it seven years ago?
Yeah I had a big lol when I read “just don’t let people declare bankruptcy for 7 years after graduation” - how in the world could this be good public policy?
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> "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 the…
Actually, I didn't get 12 years of most of the liberal arts courses I took at university. A number of them were completely new to me - no exposure in K-12 at all.
And you're being creative with numbers. No - for an engineering degree, you don't need to take 4 more years of humanities courses. Just a few credits that extend your education by (likely) less than a year.