221–230 of 457 posts
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This. Banks give home/auto/business loans based on value of the home and ability to pay. Why not have similar metrics for education?
Because there is no collateral for education.
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> Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back But for the vast majority of jobs people don't care what degree you have! In technology yes you often want someone with a particular degree. But if you're hiring a civil servant, a advertising executive, a business consultant, or any one of hundreds of other jobs, you can have any degree you…
And that is obviously ridiculous. > I have friends with theology degrees who work in business and earn more than I do in technology with my CS PhD. The companies that hire them value having people with a very wide range of academic backgrounds. That has nothing to do with their degree and everything with their ability. They would probably still get hired without the degree. Degrees only really matter in formal subjec…
As I said, their companies value diverse academic backgrounds. Not no academic background.
Let's look at some real jobs, outside the technology industry.
The UK civil service: "you need, or expect to have, a 2:2 degree in any subject or higher".
UK NHS project management role just requires "a degree" (the NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world).
Goldman Sachs graduate analyst "open to final year undergraduate and graduate level students from any field of study".
That's the reality. They don't care what degree, they just care about a degree. So if you're passionate about art history, get a degree in it. Almost nobody cares.
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I feel like the value of adversity is lost sometimes on HN. We should be especially familiar with it. Earning a high level of income makes life extraordinarily comfortable, to the point where it is easy to become complacent and stop trying to really contribute to society in a meaningful way. Some times a struggle is not a bad thing. Not to the point where one should be homeless or starving of course, but having every…
> Earning a high level of income makes life extraordinarily comfortable, to the point where it is easy to become complacent and stop trying to really contribute to society in a meaningful way. Earning a high level of income in general already signifies that a person is contributing to society in a meaningful way. Their income is reflective of the service provided to others. All corporations exist to better the lives…
This is absolutely no different to the anti vaccination movement.
People are simply too lazy and arrogant to listen to what the economics profession has to say, and ignore that fact that the methods, organization and incentives of the economics profession are identical to the rest of academicia.
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Okay, but how does that translate into policy? Fact 1: Education in the US is very expensive, in large part because the ready availability of loans removes most downwards pressure on prices. Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back. Fact 3: If you loan people money without expecting people to pay it back, then it's not a loan, it's a…
Those aren't facts, they are premises It is as likely that tying a university degree as the minimum pre-requisite for a decently paying career is driving the price upwards. Increased competition for desirable placements is the classic limited supply high demand scenario. The problem isn't the availability of loans which are just a side effect but the focus of education as a gate to future success. BTW from ancient ti…
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Okay, but how does that translate into policy? Fact 1: Education in the US is very expensive, in large part because the ready availability of loans removes most downwards pressure on prices. Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back. Fact 3: If you loan people money without expecting people to pay it back, then it's not a loan, it's a…
Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.
One day, I hope and imagine, we will live in a post-scarcity world, and then yes, that sounds like a great plan for organizing society.
> rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.
Perhaps we should wait to relax that focus once we've actually solved the problem. If you look around, you'll notice employment, especially among people 18-29, is a real challenge, while government finances and pensions are grossly underfunded.
It's the old hierarchy of needs thing; self-actualization is at the top of the pyramid not only because it's the most important, but because it relies on all the others being fulfilled in order to be an acheivable goal.
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Okay, but how does that translate into policy? Fact 1: Education in the US is very expensive, in large part because the ready availability of loans removes most downwards pressure on prices. Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back. Fact 3: If you loan people money without expecting people to pay it back, then it's not a loan, it's a…
If I was designing policy? Really all I'm talking about is not defunding/sidelining Arts etc "because it's not financially viable". The idea is really to provide a well rounded education, (giving students a broader perspective on the world, a stronger vocabulary for expressing ideas, etc), as opposed to a purely career focused one. I think it would be detrimental to culture and society in general if everyone was groo…
The result is our current educational system, where costs have ballooned and administrative and facilities costs dwarf the spending on actual education. I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was an excellent article that traced beginning of our rapidly increasing education costs to the era when Reagan was governor of California and he pushed that shift in mindset. The whole system and all the problems we're experiencing suddenly make perfect sense when you view it from that perspective.
I'd personally like to see a hybrid approach. We should identify a core curriculum that leads to a well-educated populace. Things like statistics and formal logic that make it much harder to manipulate people the way that our current politicians and media do. It should be free to study that curriculum. Anything beyond that, including vocational training, could be market based and lenders should consider the likelihood of repayment when loaning money for tuition.
I'm curious why we treat student loan debt as being special. We don't make a huge deal out of people taking on other debt and then being unable to pay for it. I think probably if anything, what we should have are better controls for what types of degrees you are allowed to take a loan out for. If your degree of choice is unlikely to yield the kind of return that will pay for it, then you should be required to save up…
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And that is obviously ridiculous. > I have friends with theology degrees who work in business and earn more than I do in technology with my CS PhD. The companies that hire them value having people with a very wide range of academic backgrounds. That has nothing to do with their degree and everything with their ability. They would probably still get hired without the degree. Degrees only really matter in formal subjec…
I don't think they would get hired anyway. As I said, their companies value diverse academic backgrounds. Not no academic background. Let's look at some real jobs, outside the technology industry. The UK civil service: "you need, or expect to have, a 2:2 degree in any subject or higher". UK NHS project management role just requires "a degree" (the NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world). Goldman Sachs gradu…
Also, as an ability metric it’s an outdated one, and personally I would never pass on an employee just because (s)he doesn’t have a degree. Having a degree doesn't even mean someone will make a good employee. Results are infinitely more important than credentials. Most people just can't get stuff done.
There seems to be a strong sentiment in this thread that the only value provided by education is the contribution to career (e.g. that loans should only be provided for financially viable courses, that studying arts is as useful to one's career as studying finger painting, etc). This just seems so wrong. Optimising for vocational training means you're effectively tuning out the abstract arts and sciences and... oh, t…
You really don't need to pay tuition to gain a rich education in art and humanities and sciences if you want one. There are resources aplenty - buy a book! I'd even go so far as to say the majority of college grads learned almost nothing during college, and the few who did would, after a few years of maturity, pick up a book of their own free will and enrich themselves. I think the costs of university (huge amounts o…
True.
And, if you live in the US, patronize one of our great public libraries. If you're in New York or Boston, just walk in. If you're elsewhere you can borrow via interlibrary loan.