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College for Grownups

nytimes.com

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Re: College for Grownups

#41

Post by chrisseaton »

cSoze wrote: post #40
wyager wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most 18 year olds are nowhere near mature enough to take college education as seriously as it deserves to be taken. But they're mature enough to kill for and be killed for the national military (sometimes against their will), contribute to governmental policy decisions, and have children? Just because their brains are still plastic doesn't preclude them from making good (or at least reasonable) decisions.

>But they're mature enough to kill for and be killed for the national military (sometimes against their will), contribute to governmental policy decisions, and have children? I don't think they are mature enough for that, no. We weren't arguing that part (at least not yet). 21 would be a much more reasonable age for that, but 25 would probably be best. There's a reason that you can't rent a car below 21 and that you…

Are you proposing preventing people from having children below 25? That seems incredibly draconian and intrusive.

Are you also proposing preventing people from joining the military below 25? In terms of a male physical's peak, 25 is pretty late on in the game to start trying to train him to be a soldier.

Re: College for Grownups

#42

Post by humanrebar »

Domenic_S wrote: post #26
pc86 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you were a jerk to a volunteer or student calling you to ask for a donation. Kudos. In all seriousness, I think most college administrators take their job seriously, and on the whole are not going to raise tuition $10k/year so they can add a gazebo or a river to campus. I think it's just an unintended consequence of not being forced to react to market stimulus. In a free market, a college that raised its tuition h…

What are you talking about? That free market is why colleges "Club-Med" their facilities. It's what the high schoolers (and importantly, their parents) see when they're touring the school, deciding who to sign a decade of future earnings to.

Who owns the student loans of Americans? It's not the free market.

Re: College for Grownups

#43

Post by humanrebar »

Spoom wrote: post #16

Teenagers and young adults are coveted by universities because they are old enough for their parents to let them do their own thing, but young enough that they are OK with taking on tens of thousands of dollars of debt for a questionable outcome.

That and they would feel bad to ask the mother of a 40 year old to liquefy her assets to pay for her son's overpriced degree.

Re: College for Grownups

#44

Post by cSoze »

chrisseaton wrote: post #41
cSoze wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But they're mature enough to kill for and be killed for the national military (sometimes against their will), contribute to governmental policy decisions, and have children? I don't think they are mature enough for that, no. We weren't arguing that part (at least not yet). 21 would be a much more reasonable age for that, but 25 would probably be best. There's a reason that you can't rent a car below 21 and that you…

Are you proposing preventing people from having children below 25? That seems incredibly draconian and intrusive. Are you also proposing preventing people from joining the military below 25? In terms of a male physical's peak, 25 is pretty late on in the game to start trying to train him to be a soldier.

No, I'm not proposing that at all, however, we certainly discourage people from having children at a young age. Military leadership could fairly easily adjust its recruitment practices, it relies far less on physical aptitude nowadays. Regardless, I don't really think this tangent is relevant to the discussion of college education.

You can shift mean college attendance age in a myriad of ways. Off the top of my head, bring public universities back under federal funding, reduce the for profit motives. Then start preferentially admitting students with a year or more of work experience as well as the current academic standards.

Re: College for Grownups

#45

Post by cma »

michaelochurch wrote: post #37

Cynicism alert. The purpose of widespread college education is socioeconomic. People simply wouldn't throw so much money and time after this game (starting, in some places, with preschool admissions, and often totaling near the half-million mark) if it weren't. The leaders of our society don't value culture or education that much; they do value tradition, pedigree, and position. Our colleges actually do a pretty good…

You over-systemize things. When congress subsidizes higher education, no one debates it primarily as needed to prevent horny male youth from revolution, but we are supposed to assume that is the subtext, and is the dominating reason really driving things? Which The Office episode is this from :-/?

Re: College for Grownups

#46

Post by ethanpoole »

nlh wrote: post #24
ethanpoole wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the University of Minnesota, those with degrees from the university can audit courses at a greatly reduced rate. I'm not sure whether this applies to online courses, but it's very likely that it does. During my undergraduate education there, I encountered many such post-degree students; they were quite a joy to have in class.

That's awesome. Question: Could those post-degree auditors get any credit for those classes? Or was it simply for the content?

It's simply for the content, not credit. I assume that if they wanted to get a second degree, they would have to reenroll. I should point out that university employees could also take classes for free, while earning credit; though there have been some cuts to this program recently, if I recall.

Re: College for Grownups

#47

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

sp332 wrote: post #13
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental flaw in your comment is the assumption that education is an investment that compounds in value. That's not the case for a large percentage of the young people who go to college today. Many will exit with weak earnings prospects and crippling debt that will compound.

Weak earnings prospects? Unemployment among people with a bachelors degree was under 4% last year. It was over 7% for people without one. http://www.businessinsider.com/college-vs-no-college-unemplo... Edit: Obama's pay-as-you-earn program puts an upper limit on how harsh the debt load can get.

You seem to be confusing employment and earnings. Just because you're employed doesn't mean that your earnings prospects are good. Many college graduates are employed but underemployed, and many others have low-paying jobs that don't even require a college education.

As for pay-as-you-earn, which I believe requires a high debt-to-income ratio (a red flag to begin with), you need to do the actual math. Even with forgiveness, many pay-as-you go borrowers will pay more over the life of their loan.

Your comment about "making sure the monthly amount is doable is really important" is how people who live beyond their means justify purchasing things they can't really afford. This mentality is why we have 72+ month auto loans.

If you purchase a college education using debt and it does not produce monthly income that comfortably enables you to repay said debt within a reasonable amount of time, just how good is the "investment" you're making? Five figures of debt (the national average) should not take two decades to pay off; many people pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars of mortgage debt in 15 years.

The fact that relatively small amounts of debt so frequently become crippling tells you everything you need to know about how college is working out for lots of young people who don't know how to do basic math and are being mislead by adults who lack financial literacy themselves.

Re: College for Grownups

#48

Post by rwallace »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #8
doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

"First to market" applies as much to education as to business. The payoffs for finishing education sooner rather than later are enormous. A student may benefit from being more mature if they delay college or graduation. But it's unlikely that benefit exceeds the compounding value of finishing the same amount of school two years earlier. In other words, I strongly disagree with the premise that teenagers should delay…

The fundamental flaw in your comment is the assumption that education is an investment that compounds in value. That's not the case for a large percentage of the young people who go to college today. Many will exit with weak earnings prospects and crippling debt that will compound.

Right, but starting college a couple of years later isn't the solution to that problem. The solution is to do something other than going to college, or at least other than going to such an expensive college for such an economically valueless degree.

Re: College for Grownups

#49

Post by webhat »

wyager wrote: post #6

I dislike the condescending attitude of the author towards the young adults (referred to in the article as "children") attending college. The author claims that leaving home to live at college poses a "serious psychological risk". Are we talking about 18-year-olds or 5-year-olds? Are we afraid that these more-or-less fully fledged citizens, whom we allow to drive, smoke, enlist, vote, marry, and have children, are go…

There has been some research which suggests that there are some psychological risks in going to college. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/15/leibow

Re: College for Grownups

#50

Post by hnisfoolish »

cma wrote: post #45
michaelochurch wrote: post #37

Cynicism alert. The purpose of widespread college education is socioeconomic. People simply wouldn't throw so much money and time after this game (starting, in some places, with preschool admissions, and often totaling near the half-million mark) if it weren't. The leaders of our society don't value culture or education that much; they do value tradition, pedigree, and position. Our colleges actually do a pretty good…

You over-systemize things. When congress subsidizes higher education, no one debates it primarily as needed to prevent horny male youth from revolution, but we are supposed to assume that is the subtext, and is the dominating reason really driving things? Which The Office episode is this from :-/?

Exactly, many of the conclusions drawn sound far more 'Conspiratorial' rather than insightful. College is in no way an invention (especially considering Universities are an idea from the 11th century) to keep young, hot-blooded, and useless men at bay for a few years.

Although, from personal experience the social hierarchy is very true and is simply a result from an older-male dominated world/society. Young men and (sometimes) older women are potential competition, and young women are potential sex objects. Basic biology at play.

EDIT: But I would like to say that college is nearly useless, because the world economy is slowly collapsing in on itself (overall trend since the 70s) and sending more kids to college is no fix to that. In fact it may only make things worse (depending on how college systems work).

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