171–180 of 565 posts
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Very sensible take. If you want to study Latin American gender roles and it’s your own money, and a college can break even on its cost to teach you that, you should be able to. When it’s someone else’s money, the outcome changes.
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Government spends all kinds of money that doesn't have an immediate and obvious RoI and often in ways that people are fine with (the military, the massive corruption of the current US executive branch, brutal immigration enforcement). Yet, letting people better their lives in the ways they want to gets people here riled up.
The whole system needs reworking, because capitalism, but there's no reason the US can't have universal university education, just like there's no reason we can't have universal health care, other than the complete lack of willpower and the complete capitulation to capital.
The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job... but the purpose of a college LOAN is 100% a job, and it's very important to differentiate between the two. The whole point of the loan is to buy time; you don't want to wait for when you have savings to purchase the degree, you want to do it now . If you are not doing it for the job, then why the loan, what's the rush? If knowledge and prestige is all that matters, then…
> But this new test, known as "do no harm," raises some thorny questions about the purpose of college. Like: Is it just about making more money? If this is a fair question to ask students, then it is a fair question to ask the schools as well. They are the ones charging enormous amounts of money to students for this. This doesn’t prevent people from learning to paint or play the clarinet. It prevents students from ta…
If it’s your own money, college can be whatever you want. When it’s someone else’s, they get to be involved in making a decision as to what college is for.
The problem is that the electorate tends to not understand the concept of second-order effects. For example, a college graduate in the arts might, directly or indirectly, generate more economic activity than someone without a college degree, regardless of the difference in income level of people in those two buckets.
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I mean, says you? We live in a society and to some extent we decide what that means. I believe many countries outside the US have heavily subsidised loans or cost deferment mechanisms, or just outright government funding for school. Certainly in Australia you essentially don't have to pay back your HECS debt if you don't end up with a salary of sufficient magnitude, and then the rate at which you pay it back is scale…
In the US, college is considered a privilege for those who can afford it or are poor enough to be granted it from poorly designed taxpayer funds. Then we set the bar for hiring to requiring a degree making it so that if you want anything above minimum wage, you’re going to have to get a degree. This is how the predatory lending prior to 2008 started with student loan debt. Glad to see that 20 years hasn’t taught us a…
We (Russia) have so called "free higher education" but it doesn't mean anyone can get a degree for free. There is a limited number of budget-funded places, and only students with better scores are accepted. For top universities like ITMO, you need to have 100/100 points on 3 subjects + 10 extra points for scientific activity to get "free" education. Otherwise, pay money.
Furthermore, within that government-funded quota almost half of places are reserved for olympiad winners and participants of a military operation, so the number of available places is even lower.
Of course, if you do not want to study computer science in a top university, the bar is much lower and you do not need to have the top scores. But then you will be working some job nobody wants for a low salary.
Furthermore, the government now puts a limit to number of paid places in cities like Moscow and Saint-Petersburg because they do not like that young people move to large cities to get an IT profession instead of studying in the college in their small city to work in the factory for a low salary.
I wonder what is the reality of "free education" in other countries. Can you get an IT, AI-related degree in a top university for free.
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> I feel like I have not really heard a compelling reason why student debt should not be dischargeable thru bankruptcy like (afaik) all other forms of debt. According to Reddit [1] it was to discourage students from immediately declaring bankruptcy upon graduation. I don't see why they couldn't have put a time limit on it though, if that was the reason. Say you can't declare bankruptcy for 7 years after you leave sch…
That answer is still begging the question of why it matters that bankruptcy rates stay low. It's obvious that bankruptcy costs the lender, but how that cost gets absorbed is very important here. A mortgage or a car loan are secured debts, where the lender can repossess and sell the collateral, to pay off most or all of the losses if the borrow defaults on the loan. A student loan is an unsecured debt, so any defaults…
Otherwise you end up in this perverse situation where the consumer degree tuition will be priced as if they were economically productive, which ends up pricing out poor people.
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In what way do nurses and carpenters not contribute to a functioning democracy?
The things thay directly help democracy are well considered viewpoints, humanities research, journalism, law etc. Stuff that influences decision makers including voters hopefully roughly for a greater good although we all may disagree exactly what that means. Nurses and carpenters help society and functioning civilization.
In other words, we need more people with a minor in the humanities and fewer people with a major in it.
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The full reason is that preventing bankruptcy is the only way to keep interest rates low and make the loans widely available. If bankruptcy was allowed then the obvious play would be to take the loan, max out credit cards right before graduation, then declare bankruptcy before you get your first job. Lenders would respond by increasing interest rates dramatically and restricting loans to those who had assets. This wo…
> The full reason is that preventing bankruptcy is the only way to keep interest rates low and make the loans widely available "They are eating the dogs and cats." It simply isn't true. I got my student loans a quarter century ago. Back then the loans were dischargeable and low. My loans came in at like 4% interest at the time. It is propaganda that it was a widespread problem and the "solution" was to legally protec…
So while student loans were technically dischargeable approx 28 years ago there were some big caveats.