61–70 of 205 posts
Maybe when employers start to figure out that smart, hard working people exist who don't have college degrees and can do the job just as good as ivy leaguers, then we may finally start to see tuition costs come down to earth. Disclaimer: I have a degree from a top school
We have to ask ourselves why college is so expensive. When some people read articles like this, they call for more government aid to students. "We need to help young, hard working students from unprivileged backgrounds to pay for college!" Their hearts are certainly in the right place, and it isn't an unreasonable idea at first glance. However, could this idea be part of the problem? Maybe giving people free money fo…
I don't know anyone who gets free money for college, except for people who inherit their money or have rich parents. I feel like this is a really central part of your argument, and it doesn't hold water. Every cent we go into debt has to be paid back with interest, and the students who have to foot the bill have zero input in the hiring standards of the companies we have to work for when we graduate. I think trying t…
Here you go http://studentaid.ed.gov/types/grants-scholarships
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> $1k specifying down to the cent how you are to use it I would classify that as someone else spending money on you, with the superficial detail that the money happened to pass through your bank account.
Not exactly. Food stamps can only be spent on food, but you can determine what food you buy. Financial Aid must have tuition(and often books) deducted before the remainder is deposited into your account. Your company may pay for your hotel room and meal, but only a room at a 3-star hotel or lower and a $20 meal at a casual dining establishment. It's not as black and white as you guys put it. Strings can exist, but ho…
I agree with you that it isn't black and white. (This is simply a semantic argument.)
I had a well-paying software internship for most of my time in college, and still left college with ~$30k of debt. Even while making $600/week, it wasn't possible to manage living expenses and tuition payments without taking loans.
I bet half the audience sees this as an indictment of tuition increases, and the the other half sees this as an indictment of the lack of minimum wage increases. I know what the author is trying to convey, but I'm not sure he has the best metric.
Isn't this just basic supply and demand? There are more students trying to go to university now than there were in the 70s. It's basically become the next version of high school socially (and, sadly, also academically in many cases). What we need is a culture that respects people who want to just work at a factory, a big box store, a mall, whatever, without pushing them into doing something they don't want to do (sch…
That would be true only if supply were fixed. Many more people want computers now than in the 70s, but prices are much lower.
What seems to have expanded most is a means of getting a generic "college degree". Compared to that time, there are a lot more low-end places which will accept people with a checkbook (or federal student loan) and a pulse.
Also, you can even acquire the knowledge associated with a degree, but without an actual diploma (MOOCs, online learning, etc).
I'll just leave this here: http://www.geekation.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Geekatio...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If people were so rational, everyone would go to college because the expected value of college still dwarfs the cost of college. No, the expected value of a college degree is a result of a labour supply/demand curve and it wouldn't remain the same if you drastically shifted the supply curve. If everyone went to college, the additional earning power of a college graduate relative to the mean would be zero.
This is true within a fixed labor market, but it gets more complex with globalization. If a country's educational mix changes, its position vis-a-vis the world labor market can also change. How to manage that in a way that produces a net-positive outcome is more complex, though. The Danish educational strategy is more or less betting on "going upmarket" via levels of education that are much higher than the global nor…
Interestingly, the college enrolment rate is 66% in the USA with around 30% of the population completing. Similarly, in Canada, the university enrolment rate is 50% with 25% of the population completing.
Given that, it seems that the only way we might even be able to come close to a 50% degree attainment rate, in North America at least, is to force everyone into college or make it so easy that anyone can do it. Neither solution is one I would feel comfortable getting behind just to meet artificial targets.
Can you shed some more light on how the Danes hope to be able to achieve this beyond the financial aspect? What makes their population more successful in academic pursuits?