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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

#471

Post by labcomputer »

pocksuppet wrote: post #409
fc417fc802 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's economically advantageous shouldn't the private sector be able to fund it for a profit already?

It is (already). Private sector employees pay off their loans from the money paid by their private sector employers.

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

#472

Post by UncleMeat »

ndriscoll wrote: post #467
UncleMeat wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you get this impression from? Faculty? Published research? My observation is that people working in the humanities have a deeper and wider reading list than at any point in prior history. If you are complaining about students then I don't see what the problem is with not having read these particular texts. The humanities is so incredibly wide and it is good that we have widened curricula to not just focus ev…

I'm mostly speaking to the students, but certainly there are faculty that would apply to as well. If we're talking about some intangible benefit to society for having lots of educated people, I would interpret that as being in service to civic contributions, so yes I would expect that means a liberal arts education should teach Western canon, and certainly it should not undermine it. If not in service to economic uti…

What does it mean to undermine it? Is your position that no matter what the rigorous application of some research method produces that you should always come to a predetermined conclusion that some particular form of western liberalism fro the 17th century is the best? Or is it possible to place these texts in complex and even critical dialog with other texts?

Can you be specific about which "values and traditions" you need to see forcefully propagated through higher education? And are we to assume that a particular form of libertarian economic project is best for "economic utility?" And should we even be optimizing for economic utility rather than human flourishing?

Hobby study? Graduates in the humanities also consistently get jobs that require degrees and go into the work force.

I am curious how much time you've spent engaged with the college humanities departments of today.

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

#473

Post by hahahaa »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #179
hahahaa wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For that to work, what you need is for the nurses and carpenters to be well versed in basic economics and how pundits lie with statistics etc. for when they go to the polls, rather than to have an oversupply of English majors who go on to have careers as a Walmart greeter or become structurally unemployed. In other words, we need more people with a minor in the humanities and fewer people with a major in it.

I can agree with that. You need everyone to be a thinker and some to be deeper thinkers.

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

#474

Post by aleph_minus_one »

thisislife2 wrote: post #453
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only people doing degrees for knowledge and prestige are the filthy rich and while they may make up a significant percentage of students at the top 5 schools, they make up a tiny percentage of all college students. I already wrote it quite some times on HN: at least in Germany, where university is rather cheap, the situation is typically different: - The really rich kids will typically have a "career on rails",…

That is interesting! Wish more countries emulated the German education system as affordable education (and healthcare) is a basic necessity and a human right. I especially like the German vocational training "earn and learn" programs - not just the paid internship part but also how the course content is 20-30% theory and 70-80% practical. India, in association with the Indo-German business chamber, has now started of…

> I was surprised that Germany doesn't offer a similar pathway to a Bachelors in Engineering for its vocational program students.

Germany does, though in a different way:

Normally, to study, you need an Abitur (Allgemeine Hochschulreife) high school diploma from your school [1] to study at a university (Hauptschulabschluss or mittlere Reife (these kinds of high school diplomas are hard to translate into English)).

Recently, it has become possible that if you got your vocal training in a technical area and have work practice, you can also study for an engineering degree without gettting Abitur via an evening school.

[1] There exist exceptions like Fachhochschulereife oder fachgebundenes Abitur, but let's not complicate things.

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

#475

Post by ericd »

WillAdams wrote: post #469
ericd wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, good point, especially at the higher levels. Our public high school offered differential equations as the level after calc only because they randomly had a really exceptionally capable math teacher who was a teacher as a passion project after he'd made his money elsewhere, but most schools don't have access to that sort of capability. Remote learning could offer that sort of headroom in every subject. I guess l…

One of the big regrets in my life is that the tiny rural county school system I graduated from couldn't find a math teacher qualified to teach calculus for my junior or senior year, which precluded applying to pretty much every college I was interested in.

Agh sorry, but yeah, great example of the problem of the variance in access.

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

#476

Post by LPisGood »

nekusar wrote: post #297
LPisGood wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting a broad label of “woke garbage” on simple liberal arts requirements of taking a few classes from “history, philosophy, arts, international studies, or social sciences,” almost does not even justify a response. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’ve never taken such a class, but I can assure that unless you live in a reality so warped by politics, that basic logic and reason is out the…

Thing is, I have takrn a class like that. Was a political science class. Extreme hard right (chinese dissident, hard anti-left). I wrote the requisite papers. All of them were F, with no commentary. I brought this to the department chair, and the grades changed to b's and a-'s. He was absolutely grading on political position for the paper, and not a proper discussion of content per the rubric. And, aside from going t…

Frankly, I have never seen such ridiculous things. Having taught students have claimed similar things about professors and seen the exact opposite, I am hesitant to believe you. I have never in my life seen a professor unwilling to explain a grade or give helpful feedback, especially on an essay.

It sounds like you had a professor committing malpractice on the verge of being fired.

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

#477

Post by LPisGood »

throw94949499 wrote: post #306
LPisGood wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting a broad label of “woke garbage” on simple liberal arts requirements of taking a few classes from “history, philosophy, arts, international studies, or social sciences,” almost does not even justify a response. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’ve never taken such a class, but I can assure that unless you live in a reality so warped by politics, that basic logic and reason is out the…

Friend told me that teacher followed neutral curriculum, but every five 5 minutes there was smugly inside joke about "rape culture" or "white man bad". Kind of like bad standup performance. Try to bring up something factually correct like: cristian culture in 19th century UK abolished slavery worldwide , and you would get harassed and kicked out of school! And you do not have to take my word on that, they proudly ann…

> Try to bring up something factually correct like: cristian culture in 19th century UK abolished slavery worldwide, and you would get harassed and kicked out of school!

These are the sorts of things that are easy to say but just completely don’t hold water in any serious university setting. If you made this argument in a paper and properly cited sources and formed reasonable arguments based on the historical record I’m quite certain any historian, even a woke leftist atheist one, would happily give good marks.

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

#478

Post by eudamoniac »

IsTom wrote: post #128
tadfisher wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I want a philosophy degree then it's my God-given right to pay $240,000 plus interest for it. Maybe it shouldn't be subsidized, though.

Is this like, a real sum of money americans pay for a degree? Overhead must be mind-boggiling if like just two students are needed to pay educator's salary for the period.

People pay this for college like people pay $40k for a handbag. I.e. not really anyone with a brain does this but you can find outliers.

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

#479

Post by rainsford »

picofarad wrote: post #389
rainsford wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, that calculation sounds fundamentally wrong if it's comparing median college graduate earnings after 4 years against high school graduate earnings in general. After 4 years the median college graduate is still early in their career and likely hasn't hit their maximum income potential, but they're being compared against high school graduates at every stage of their careers, including those…

A bachelors degree should be a large jump in earnings. I think in the 90s it was stated that high school diploma was lifetime ~$600,000, bachelors was $1,200,000,and so on up to PhD at $6,000,000 lifetime median earnings. So a bachelors degree should get something like 25-50% more money after graduatation than the median high school graduate.

A significant difference in lifetime earnings doesn't necessarily imply a large jump in early career earnings. For example the difference in lifetime earnings could come entirely from significantly higher income later in a career that more than makes up for a lower starting salary.

Some professional careers work exactly like this, for example pilot or doctor. Lifetime earnings would be a much better comparison than just looking at the first few years of a career to asses if the educational investment was worth it or not.

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

#480

Post by eudamoniac »

theahura wrote: post #374
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…

> Do you really want to make the case that the Federal government should fund these? No, but I don't think means testing is a better alternative. You and I both know that this is a wedge to punish perceived political enemies, as much as you know that the total number of people who graduate with a degree in "somatic body work" is such a small fraction of people as to be negligible > Nationally, about 10,600 to 10,700…

If it's such a negligible amount of people then what is the issue with denying them student loans? Very few people will be affected by this, so you say; not worth arguing about then I suppose.
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