171–180 of 264 posts
Oh, hey. Somebody just reinvented indentured servitude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude Good job.
Excepting that they aren't able to 'sell' your labor to a third party, nor are you expected to work for them after graduation.
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My parents didn’t have mountains of wealth. We grew up in a home where sometimes my mom forced me to go to school even when I was feeling sick because I could get one of my meals there. In your view of the world, people like me essentially wouldn’t have access to opportunity that would be reserved for the wealthy folks. You shouldn’t have to care about me individually, but if there are enough people like me, it takes…
> In your view of the world, people like me essentially wouldn’t have access to opportunity that would be reserved for the wealthy folks. That is just not true. Historically, working your way through college was completely feasible. It still is feasible, unless you need one of those fancy 50,000$-100,000$ degrees, in which case you need a loan. In Germany, a lot of students are working and living modestly through col…
>If you're not willing to work your way through college, or get a loan, or get one of these ISAs, then society isn't worse off if your place is taken by someone else.
It absolutely could be. People are not interchangeable pieces. Our society is built on the achievements of improbable people doing improbable things. You need only imagine a world where Einstein was born on a struggling farm without the resources or encouragement to prosper to understand the problem.
At some level it's a statistical game of trying to distribute opportunity to get the relatively few outliers into position for us to reap the rewards of their output. If you narrow the funnel you minimize the probability of great intellectual work getting done to help steer society, which holds all of society back.
And if you don't understand how it could be infeasible to be able to pay your way through $50k on top of living expenses before starting your career, or how it could be unbearably risky to take on $50k+living expenses in debt as a 20y/o, even if you expect to exit that pipeline with good career prospects, you really need to explore outside of your bubble.
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It is a terrible deal. Lambda School’s stipend programme (places limited) pays students $2,000 a month for the nine months of their job training, while they get trained 40 hours a week and that includes interview prep and placement and job search help that makes university careers offices look like they’re going through the motions, not trying to get the students a job. And after paying students $18,000 and spending…
This seems pretty amazing. If anyone who's gone through this program sees this, what's the catch/is there a catch? Seems almost too good to be true.
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> let everyone take part Surely you mean “force everyone to take part”. > and have all of society invest in education I would prefer you not “have” me or other people do things against my or their will.
Interesting... I would prefer you not use the roads, schools, courts, plumbing, utilities, waste management, firefighting, ... that our taxes pay for. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I'm forced to tolerate you against my will. I guess we all have to make sacrifices
Are you saying that violence used to force me to do things I don’t consent to is the same as you having to “tolerate” me getting to use the things my money paid for, the same as anyone else?
I’m not sure I follow your reasoning.
Let's scale this up huge, let everyone take part, and have all of society invest in education and reap the rewards. We can call it "public education" and even capture the public externalities of having a well-educated population!
And watch the value of the college degree follow the trend of a high school diploma! If we offered free college, how long before we start dropping the standards to earn a degree (for the same reasons we did so with high school diplomas) and have students waste even more of their lives in extremely sub par education environments?
The most successful and competent people who I have ever worked with don't share much in the way of education, but they all feel some sort of passion and drive for what they do. They see potential in their work and think about it all the time, so they are good at it and they have a lot of useful insights.
"Education" shouldn't be a simple signal that you have enough diligence and financial werewithal to consistently show up in the same place over the course of 4 years. It should be a lifelong process of both asking and informing people what they are capable of.
Personally, I think the all-or-nothing approach of primary school->secondary school->career->grave is a huge waste of people. I think we just need to figure out how to provide adults with the time and safety to uproot their lives for a couple of years at a time.
I'm having a hard time thinking of ISAs as much more than a ridiculously high interest loan, especially for those who are self-motivated have a high probability of landing a job after doing X course. E.g. Lambda school is $20k if you prepay and maxes out at $30k over 2 years, which is effectively a 45% interest loan. Even if you didn't have the cash (or didn't want to fork out) the cash, a typical loan taken out toda…
In a way, this is a pessimistic bet, and either way you're a winner. If you don't get a good paying job, you win because you don't have to pay; if you do get a good paying job, you win because you have a good paying job, so it's OK to pay a little more.
The details matter though; if the program is really restrictive and everyone who gets funding ends up with a good paying job, the borrowers are being exploited and there's likely an opportunity gap: people who could have done well with the education, but weren't able to access it because the funders risk model wouldn't let them.
Let's scale this up huge, let everyone take part, and have all of society invest in education and reap the rewards. We can call it "public education" and even capture the public externalities of having a well-educated population!
And watch the value of the college degree follow the trend of a high school diploma! If we offered free college, how long before we start dropping the standards to earn a degree (for the same reasons we did so with high school diplomas) and have students waste even more of their lives in extremely sub par education environments?
Am I reading this right? You have to pay 2.5% of your income for 7 years as a comp sci graduate for a loan of only $10k. Seems like a pretty terrible deal. Edit: Avg comp sci grad salary from Purdue is $72k, assuming 5% raises on average including promotions, you'd pay about $14.6k for this loan, which is roughly equivalent to a loan with an 11% interest rate per year over 88 months. Edit2: I was a business major, an…
On one hand, I could see this working for students going for degrees with less job certainty than comp sci. But on the other hand, this does seem like treating a symptom rather than the causes, like we're encouraging too many people to go for degrees that don't lead to gainful employment or self-sufficiency.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...
Let's scale this up huge, let everyone take part, and have all of society invest in education and reap the rewards. We can call it "public education" and even capture the public externalities of having a well-educated population!
And watch the value of the college degree follow the trend of a high school diploma! If we offered free college, how long before we start dropping the standards to earn a degree (for the same reasons we did so with high school diplomas) and have students waste even more of their lives in extremely sub par education environments?
The key piece of this is that should any universal college education legislation pass, it needs to be designed in such a way that we don't make the focus of college be the same as high school where the goal is to make sure everyone can pass. And in turn, include a very rigorous minimum education standard in order for an institution to provide government funded education.
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Absolutely not, at least not without making college much more difficult. Otherwise it is just subsidizing adult daycare. Many people do not belong in college and learn next to nothing, but go because they're shoo'ed along into it and the universities are in on the joke, and in on the money-making, and undergoing a drastic reduction of standards as a result. Some data on just how bad higher ed is getting, from 2017: h…
Most people are (somewhat) stupid in their early 20s. I don't disagree that not everyone belongs in university, however, most people don't realise that until it is too late and are already in debt. Free higher education works well in the European countries that offer it. What better investment could a society make than allow someone to pursue a field they are passionate about, and letting them start life with a clean…
It depends what you're looking at. I think it hurts local communities by exporting all the young talent and gets people plugged into the white collar, global economy.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy what I do, but I think a lot of the time in college could have been better spent learning how to build houses, make furniture, grow food, etc.
If the government is going to pay for it I would like it to be a better resource for enriching the nation, not just a tool for generating more wealth.