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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

#511

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sethammons wrote: post #447
Aurornis wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is it? Greed by banks. They were functionally fine up through the late nineties. Except the regulations for student loan discharge started with government loans, not private loans. Congress restricted discharge of government loans first, because they were trying to protect the continued existence of the program and the low interest rates. You've had incorrect facts all throughout this thread and you're refusi…

In all the cases you mentioned, the banks have risk. Normal lending falls into normal economic rules. We've (effectively) removed the risk for banks with education loan. Wanting "all their money" is a translation of "accept no risk." The risk is required for economic rules to apply. Why should banks not accept risk at all? Why was 7 years protection not effective? I have seen no evidence that the previous protections…

"No risk" is not a thing. For example, someone could borrow $250,000 from the bank and then get hit by a bus the day after graduation.

Moreover, interest isn't just about risk, it's the time value of money. If you put money in a CD at a major bank which is FDIC insured, the risk of you losing that money is as close to zero as anything reasonably gets, but you still get paid interest.

The risk premium is on top of that. And the higher the risk, the more interest people have to pay.

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

#512

Post by sajithdilshan »

pocksuppet wrote: post #482
sajithdilshan wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s quite easy to decide. If the students at the end of the study can contribute to the society as tax payers to fund the next generation, then what they have studied is meaningful. It doesn’t have to be STEM necessarily.

Why is tax payment the only possible contribution to society?

What other ways of contributions do you have in mind that can fund the education of the next generation?

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

#513

Post by reddozen »

AngryData wrote: post #450
reddozen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. And the interest on unsecured debts like credit cards are like 25%. Sounds like the risk is properly priced in. What's your point?

Why does the interest matter much if you are going to declare bankruptcy anyways?

This has to just be an IQ gap or something. Is it actually impossible for you to view agreements from different perspectives?

From the individuals' perspective, overusing uncollateralized debt to be discharged is a good deal. That loss is offset by the creditor by issuing higher interest to unsecured credit lines because people can default on their debts. From the creditor's perspective, it's risk adjusted for people who default.

It just logically follows. I can't help you understand past this.

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

#514

Post by watwut »

throw94949499 wrote: post #357
watwut wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The woke horrors of having take history and composition. Or art and reading. Or, OMG sociology! Oh no! A class about culture or race or gender! Famously race dont matter, except when choosing military leaders.

Black History Month lectures at $100/hour. Amazing deal!

Imo, this inherent issue with learning about history of non-whites gives the game away. It is as if the history of blacks or women or whoever else was some kind of threat.

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

#515

Post by tyleo »

atomicthumbs wrote: post #505
tyleo wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think folks would agree with you in valuing arts and humanities, just that they shouldn’t do it on someone else’s dime. I suspect you’d find that a widely held belief and not just an American one. It’s hard out there and I have some non-college educated family who also struggled in life wondering why we should pour money into degrees people can’t pay off when they received no help themselves.

This sort of attitude is how you get a culturally impoverished nation.

Yeah, I don’t know why people worry about feeding themselves when they could be reading books and looking at art instead.

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

#516

Post by ndriscoll »

UncleMeat wrote: post #492
ndriscoll wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can place them in a dialog with other texts, but that implies that students are reading and becoming intimately familiar with the canon being critiqued . And generally speaking, I'd expect more of a refinement than a critique per se. I didn't say we should forcefully propagate anything; I said we shouldn't fund things that aren't useful somehow. Some basic values would be that e.g. governments derive their author…

I don't understand how the only use of the humanities is to teach people about classical liberalism. Surely my polysci friend who worked on 21st century dictatorships and my history friend who worked on early modern communication networks are doing something valuable too? You are begging the question here and just starting from a position that only your very narrow conception of the humanities has any value at all. I…

I'm not making nearly that strong of an argument, and indeed neither is the regulation under discussion. They need to demonstrate that it's somehow beneficial on average to economic outcomes. That could mean:

  * You were able to apply that knowledge to something someone wanted. 
  * The experience somehow inspired you to find your own path to success. 
  * Your degree helped convince someone else that you're a generally intelligent or knowledgeable person and therefore more valuable to them.
etc. I added on top that as a liberal society, we could perhaps agree that being well versed in liberal tradition is itself valuable.

I take your friends' work to mean they're in some academic position? Because funding some small number of those is a different proposition from funding a significant portion of the population to study whatever.

Though actually if we back up a bit here, my original point was more that I doubt people are even learning things. e.g. if your history friend is unfamiliar with important parts of their own country's history (stuff that might even be expected in high school or earlier, but people don't do the readings), I'd be skeptical of the value of their program in the same way that I'd be skeptical of an engineer that doesn't know the difference between an ionic and covalent bond, or Newton's laws, or some basic programming, or RLC circuits, or other basic things that someone technical should know.

Self-governance and self-determination are the founding assumptions underlying our democracy. This is pretty clearly stated in our founding documents. This has nothing to do with capitalism.

I agree that people at Instagram and DraftKings are negatives to society, and probably they also failed to obtain their liberal arts education. Largely I think people with these things on their resume should be blacklisted by others as they proudly wear their lack of morals, and we should do more to regulate such things.

Maybe my wording was off; by textbook my meaning was more along the lines of treatise, i.e. not casual.

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

#517

Post by mishellaneous »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #436
xethos wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether we classify it as humanities or political science (as neither seems to be looked at as terribly useful in the states), a population without some grasp of civics does not lend itself to a healthy democracy Not everyone must be a plumber or electrician, but we're well-served by having some basic knowledge, and an ability to find answers to the questions that arise as we do basic handywork, such as…

I usually don't like to get into these subjects on HN, but I'll expand just a little bit on what I mean. All political systems (all of them) have "holes" in that they're more or less dependent on individual virtue to function in a long-term fashion - some of them having holes so large they can only work as naïve thought experiments with perfect civically-minded (thus imaginary) people - and not academic knowledge, wh…

i like your framing of "holes" in political systems. one way to put it is that a political system has "holes" if the ideal/desired outcome is not a Nash equilibrium.

however, my understanding (though i can't speak for the other commenters) is that the reasoning behind "humanities-educated people make better democracies" is NOT that humanities-educated people are more virtuous, and thus will willingly not degrade the commons (the reasoning you seem to be criticizing). rather, it's that humanities-educated people cannot be manipulated as easily by a demagogue (and other similar things).

the usually cited problem with democracy is that it gives the people the power to choose, but it does not automatically makes them capable to make good choices. that's where the education comes in.

clearly many questions require technical/domain knowledge to be answered and are not simply a matter of preference. for example, fixing your car, or building a bridge. and even running a business or cooking an elaborate meal. with technical knowledge, you are able to make better decisions whatever your preferences are. humanities education is then implied to be the "technical knowledge" for participating in society.

of course, in that case, we can discuss what should be the content of the "humanities education", but that's another discussion...

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

#518

Post by nradov »

treis wrote: post #466
nradov wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is simply wrong. Especially in underserved rural areas you'll often see primary care doctors delivering cardiology and nephrology treatments even though they lack board certification in those specialties. There are no certified specialists available so they make do. You guys need to expand your horizons a bit.

Primary care doctors are performing heart surgery?

There's a lot more to cardiology than performing heart surgery. Many cardiologists don't perform surgery either.

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

#519

Post by red-iron-pine »

ozim wrote: post #356
xyzelement wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job I think we are past the age where the folks who went to higher education were scholars in pursuit of some higher truth and a broad elevation of themselves. The percentage of people who care about that is very low. As college became "a universal must." Nearly 40 percent of US adults have a bachelor's degree or higher, and obviously 40% of any population aren't inherently…

Really not fun part is that loads of office jobs can be done with high school education level where companies require a degree. I guess it is because there are not enough office jobs and not enough masters/bachelors level jobs so we are all at rat race.

high school education is highly variant and, at least in the US, based entirely on funding from local property taxes; the quality varies greatly

universities are generally funded by other methods, and usually have real or practical minimums in terms of GPA and SAT/ACT requirements

put another way, someone coming out of Big State U may not be a superstar, but I can generally rule out the dumb-dumbs

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

#520

Post by mishellaneous »

nullc wrote: post #274
yorwba wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Standard non-profit grift-- you can't take profits out of a non-profit directly, but you can give particularly robust salaries for yourself and your friends, use the funds to build powerful influence networks by directing projects, build prestigious glittering facilities, etc. It's difficult to control because an outsider isn't in a position to know the best way to allocate funding. The best control is to not provide…

another possibility to combat grifting would be to have competition. another university comes up and provides the same service as the wasteful university at a smaller cost, and thus displaces the wasteful university. the advantage is that we don't need performance measurements and similar things that can create distorted interests / be gamed (just like the proposed profit limit). that's the theory, at least
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