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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

#131

Post by mistercheph »

janalsncm wrote: post #53
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 milli…

Those students should be separated from the students that want to learn, I know who I want to hire, or be sitting next to on the line and so does everyone else with a pulse: it's the person that is thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial.

Not the loser sitting in a class they hate, living out their big plan to set their life on fire doing a job that makes them sad because they love money.

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

#132

Post by phantomathkg »

frognumber wrote: post #67
janalsncm wrote: post #41

> 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…

I think the corollary is about taxpayer accountability. It's easy to make the argument: "If we invest $1M in education, we will have $10M in additional future economic output, $4M in future taxes, and $20M less in law enforcement / criminal prosecution / jail fees. It improves global competitiveness." That's a no-brainer. Education is a very high ROI investment for a country. Like infrastructure spending or industria…

Here we have an example of someone who see college/university as a vocational training center for worker, instead of seeing it as higher education that inspire civilized thinker.

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

#133

Post by mistercheph »

fwipsy wrote: post #49
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…

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…

Why should taxpayers pay for jobs training programs? since these vocational students expect to make lots of money with their certificate in hand, they can just take out a loan. this makes an actually rational system where the cost of job training is forced to be commensurate with the economic value of the output after the job program.

OTOH education should obviously be subsidized because it is a public good to have a society where everyone is educated, even though education will have close to zero measurable economic impact on any particular individual, every aspect of society benefits greatly from everyone having access to it.

It's crazy that education has been subverted into vocational training, and now that the transformation is nearly complete people are asking, wait why the hell is there any education going on in these places, aren't they supposed to be job training programs?

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

#134

Post by jltsiren »

wqaatwt wrote: post #123
LoveMortuus wrote: post #60

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.

England has a reasonably fair system where tuition fees are fixed and the loan functions more of like an additional tax only for university graduates (i.e. min income limit, low interest, etc.)

At least a decade ago the system was anything but fair. The income threshold for repayment was low, while the interest rate was very high. At that point, the expectation was that those who got an average job after graduation would pay an extra 10% income tax for 30 years, after which the debt would be forgiven. Those with good jobs would pay off the debt quickly enough, and they would pay much less overall for their education.

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

#135

Post by aaron695 »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #121
frognumber wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the corollary is about taxpayer accountability. It's easy to make the argument: "If we invest $1M in education, we will have $10M in additional future economic output, $4M in future taxes, and $20M less in law enforcement / criminal prosecution / jail fees. It improves global competitiveness." That's a no-brainer. Education is a very high ROI investment for a country. Like infrastructure spending or industria…

A lot of people severely underestimate the value and impact of the arts because they don't produce immediately visible results. But artistic works are often a massive source of inspiration and they help people through dark times.

[dead]

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

#136

Post by hahahaa »

red_admiral wrote: post #124
strken wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the argument was that they do contribute to a functioning democracy, as opposed to investment in training nurses and carpenters, who are being trained for economic reasons. The argument was that the two goals are so different that they should be funded differently.

In what way do nurses and carpenters not contribute to a functioning democracy?

The things thay directly help democracy are well considered viewpoints, humanities research, journalism, law etc. Stuff that influences decision makers including voters hopefully roughly for a greater good although we all may disagree exactly what that means.

Nurses and carpenters help society and functioning civilization.

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

#137

Post by ashdksnndck »

throw2ih020 wrote: post #117
AngryData wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If that was an actual problem wouldn't people be doing it without the college already? I see you haven't heard of /r/churning. Although it doesn't involve bankruptcy, because then the sheriff comes down and takes your property from you...

Churning is not about taking out debt and not paying it off. It’s about signing up for credit cards and spending money to earn rewards points, and paying off the balance soon to avoid owing interest.

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

#138

Post by yorwba »

mistercheph wrote: post #126
BeetleB wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't banning such programs. The question is why the federal government needs to support them. 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 yo…

Education is not something arcane, TBH it's really the vocational schools that should be forced to call themselves something different. 99% of university students are not there for an education, they are in welding school upper-middle-class edition. Vocational programs are essential infrastructure, but they are not education, and those programs should not receive funds allocated for education or be held to the same s…

What about job training disqualifies it from being education?

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

#139

Post by yorwba »

CircuitSeuss wrote: post #125
01100011 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system Are we sure about this or is federal aid one of the reasons education is so expensive?

If that were true, wouldn’t we be better served by auditing the finances of these universities and imposing caps on university profits based on operating expenses?

The problem is not that universities have high profits, but that they have high operating expenses.

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

#140

Post by ryzvonusef »

The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job... but the purpose of a college LOAN is 100% a job, and it's very important to differentiate between the two.

The whole point of the loan is to buy time; you don't want to wait for when you have savings to purchase the degree, you want to do it now. If you are not doing it for the job, then why the loan, what's the rush?

If knowledge and prestige is all that matters, then don't take the loan, take the scenic route, get your degree slowly as and when you have the time and money, and one day you will have something to look back at.

But if you are doing it so you can start earning as soon as possible, when you are still young and energetic... then you are doing it for the job, and in that case the degree better be financially worth it.

You have the right to a degree in XYZ... you should NOT have the right to a taxpayer backed grant/aid/loan/whatever to gain said degree unless you're on a reasonable path to become a tax payer yourself as soon as you are done with the degree.

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