161–170 of 209 posts
graduating from college makes you almost as likely to own a home, by age 36, as someone from a high-income family. I assume they mean "own" in the sense "get a mortgage on" not "have fully paid for", no?
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You make a good point. Yet the entire time I'm reading it, the main thought going through my mind, is people shouldn't have to make choices like this about education. And definitely not in a democracy.
100%. It's a broken system with misaligned incentives. The college doesn't have to care if you get a job, the loans are backed by the federal government so there's no risk there, and 100% of the risk is placed on the shoulders of the student. Even if we didn't have government sponsored education straight up, if any of the money involved were dependent upon a student's career success I believe we'd see a very differen…
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My youngest is going to Olin college of engineering next fall and we talk about debt a lot. We had a conversation last night about debt. We are blessed that Olin is a needs based school that provides grants (debt free) for families that can't fully afford college. They want their students to have a little debt (skin in the game) but we are talking a little not a lot. We talk about personal finance, net worth, investi…
Highly recommend that your son/daughter cross register for biz classes (negotiations, basic accounting) at Babson and a liberal arts class or 2 at Wellesley in junior/senior year. The best class I took at Babson was a combination biz/engineering course at Olin called Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship. The lead instructor, Ben Linder, is amazing. Wrote more about the project/experience here if you're interested:…
Edit: added a "Pretty cool"
Pretty cool project. Thanks for sharing.
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This makes me sad and mad. I work at a small liberal arts university in IT and they are still telling the students to take whatever Arts and Sciences major. The school I work at does limit student debt and is a needs based school (they provide a lot of debt free aid in the form of grants), so that is good. But still majoring in the classics or art (especially from a school not known for art), art history and art mana…
It is not just stupid. It is politically motivated. The idea that people should be responsible for individual decision making is somehow contradict with today's teaching in humanities and liberal arts. It is no coincidence that almost all of those professors are far left and they advocate students should just major in whatever they like, and at the same time they hate business school, and at the same time them agree…
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I made that mistake as well. Did what people were telling me to do and it got me nowhere. Got a useless university degree in something I liked because I thought having a degree would help, and was told by everyone that I was too "gifted" not to get one. Found out it just makes you super pretentious at retail jobs while you struggle to pay off the debt. I managed to pay that debt off, and 5 years ago I figured out wha…
Did what people were telling me to do and it got me nowhere There will always be people who give you bad advice. I know it's cliche to beat up on the "everyone gets a trophy" mentality that has grown in dominance, but maybe this is a legitimate beef against it. If kids grow up thinking that there are no winners and losers, how do they learn to discriminate when it comes to important matters like college, degree, and…
Even STEM can be a bad investment, depending on what you do. I graduated with a degree in Chem, wanting to do nanoscale computers and -later- optical computing. Found out 3rd year that unless I got a doctorate, I'd be a glorified lab rat. What's worse is that even if I got a doctorate, I'd still be a lab rat while trying to get one and would have a sliver of a chance to get a job anyways. My choice? I graduated, but…
Now I've got a MS in bioinformatics and while I got a slight raise, I also had to take out more loans for the second degree. So I'm still floundering. If I had known what I know now, I never would have attended college (even though I had 70k worth of scholarships thrown at me).
Would have picked up some programming on my own and maybe taken a few courses at a community college. Feel like I've completely wasted a decade of my life and it looks like I'm about to waste another decade.
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Why is that beneficial for the society? I don't think that's as clear cut as you make it to be. Cities are pretty efficient things.
Wealth concentration to cities has lots of drawbacks. Housing can get incredibly expensive, mental illness rates go up, local government reflects the people less because of the larger population, and people feel like they need to upend their entire family just to live a quality life. There are tons of places in SF, NYC and others where there are 6 men in a 2 bedroom apartment. All that just so that corporations can r…
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How is someone 18 years old supposed to figure out what to do? At that age I had no idea how the workplace works or how to get a career, don't event talk about a career I like. Some people have parents with insight or they just have luck but without guidance what do you do?
I think that 18 year-olds today are quite a lot more sophisticated than I was at 18. But yeah, it's tough; you need to survey multiple sources.
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But choices like that are inevitable. There are only so many places available at the top schools. Somebody has to make the choice about which students get to go there. That somebody may be the students deciding whether the cost is worthwhile, or it may be the school deciding which students to accept, but the decision is inevitable.
The large debt is very evitable, in many countries higher education is free or negative cost (=everyone gets a student allowance). This doesn't mean top schools have unlimited admissions.
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Where the overfishing analogy breaks down is that we have the power to provide enough fish. College doesn't have to be expensive. As little as 15 years ago it was quite possible to work your way through college and come out with manageable debt. Something else happened to balloon the cost of education in that time period. Perhaps the increased reliance on loans, cuts in financial aid to students and state assistance…
College costs are, IMO, entirely because student loans removed the need for colleges to compete on price. Regardless of cost and value, students could get loans to cover it. So in order to compete, institutions branched out into what's basically bling, with sports being a salient example. There's also a fundamental economic pressure from non-education productivity. It takes just as many man-hours to teach a class, bu…
But I do think the supply can be solved. I think "everyone gets loans" oversimplify the issue because most institutions are state run, there isn't really much competition in the free-market sense of the word. Because the government controls the bulk of higher education in the US, we are in a better position to solve this problem than any other discussed. Part of it is to start supporting it again. Return grant programs and create real financial aid so people who need money can get it and people who don't aren't forced to take it.