251–260 of 277 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the reason prices have gone up so much is that credit has become so easy. 50 years ago, if you wanted to go to college, you went, and the prices were reasonable because people could not afford a lot of money for it, and no one would lend it to them. There is almost no downward price pressure on college costs, and there is upward price pressure: since the students don't care about the price, they always want t…
the core problem with college loans is that they are non-dischargeable. this means that no matter what the student's ultimate financial situation (long term unemployed, finances wiped out, etc) they still have to pay down the debt, and it can't be wiped out in bankruptcy. This stands in contrast to virtually every kind of loan out there, which can be discharged (written off). As a result, there is less risk for the l…
The question "What makes a degree valuable?" is at the heart of its success. All these companies that demand a four year degree - what are their criteria? When they see that someone got their degree at a very inexpensive online school, will that hurt the perception of value?
The student loan issue is kinda like the Health Insurance issue in America (strictly an opinion). Prices are driven up because colleges can charge whatever they wish and the students pay for it in the form of loans mostly backed by the Government (STAFFORD etc.). Colleges have no incentive to reduce tuition cost because the money flows either way (student or the govt. ). Remove the option of getting subsidized/backed…
I wish it were that simple. I think if you remove the government backed loans, the private loan market will be happy to have no competition.
Also, it's precious to describe a market that the government has exited as then having "no competition".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would this be a bad thing? if loans are able to be discharged the federal government wouldn't be handing them out like free candy to anyone that wants it. It's exactly that there is no downside for the government that the situation is the way it is.
The problem here is that we can't just use a magic wand to fix the situation. There is over $1 trillion in outstanding student debt that needs to be dealt with. Much of it is already going bad. But the problem is bigger than the trillion dollars in debt you and I are already on the hook for. A lot of people like free candy, and if you take it away here, we'll go from "Tuition costs are too high, and I have too much d…
Well, in so far as the people (and our government) who are already in debt, I can't disagree. We're in bad shape.
However, I do have hope. The online instruction revolution is still in its infancy, and I have much hope that quality education will be spread far and wide (at low cost). And that anyone with a reasonable amount of motivation can learn and grow and become more productive and wealthy as a result.
I've got 2 links related to this:
- Ken Ilgunas wrote a book "Walden on Wheels" about living in a van to avoid graduate school debt (after working hard to pay off his undergraduate debt). I haven't read the book, but from his blog, he's a good writer and adventurer.
http://www.amazon.com/Walden-Wheels-Open-Road-Freedom/dp/054...
- Mr Money Mustache gets mentioned every now and then on HN, and his advice is to live frugally, avoid or pay off debt, save 50-75% of your earnings and retire early. For those that don't have 6-figure jobs in tech, he just wrote a 2-part series on jobs that could earn 50K without a degree. While some of it is unrealistic, it's also a good reminder that tradespeople and small-business owners are out there making a decent living by being creative and self-starting, and that you don't need a degree to deal with people in the real world.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/07/25/50-jobs-over-50000... http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/08/05/50-jobs-over-50000...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The overall price of education is the root of the problem, and the price of education has little correlation to the availability of student loans (contrary to popular belief). > Maybe it's time to cap total outstanding student debt to some reasonable expectation of when they can be repaid. I think that's a good start. Kind of resembling a loan-forgiveness mechanism (which there are already a few). It falls into the s…
> I think that's a good start. Kind of resembling a loan-forgiveness mechanism (which there are already a few). It falls into the same trap most solutions do, though. What's "a reasonable expectation," and who decides it? One simple change that would have drastic effects is modifying the forgiveness timeframe on income based repayment (IBR) for student loans. Right now, the expiration time is 25 years [1]. In other w…
With IBR they can do even better. Instead of charging everyone the average, they can charge each and every person his/her exact wage premium.
And it's all backed up by the IRS enforcing collection, too.
I can see why schools would freaking love this. Why would any one else?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's better, but what you will end up with is colleges pricing their "good" degrees higher and higher until they have captured almost all of the wage surplus that workers get from going to college.
Then people will stop getting that degree, and the competitive salary for that degree will get higher.
What, don't you want to become a botanist???
Earlier quoted context omitted.
STEM training alone might allow for more compartmentalization than an alternate curriculum.
I don't understand your point. One of the most important things STEM provides one is the most important tool to determine truth from garbage - the scientific method. This is applicable far beyond just the physical world. Another thing I learned from STEM is the opposite of compartmentalization - I learned how fundamentally similar hydraulics, electronics, mechanics, etc., are. The rules, processes, math, methods of s…
[1] This would likely involve a lot of pinning down just what STEM curricula and just what alternative curricula you are considering, unless you're able to establish there is no overlap in the distributions - a premise which I doubt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's another side to need-based financial aid that tends to be ignored. For you to attend an expensive college for less than the average rate, someone else had to pay more than the average. That is, your discounted tuition increased the sticker price for someone else. That's inherently unfair. It may sound reasonable to ask wealthy families to pay more in order to subsidise poor families, but there's no reasonable…
The article is about loans. A loan is not a discount. And if you're talking about need-based financial aid, that's usually financed by people (often alumni) who decide to pay into a fund specifically for tuition subsidies. That means he didn't get a "discount" that average students had to make up.
We hate it when the auto dealer tries to extract as much as we can afford from us, but for some reason people are happy to let the schools do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's great that you've used your communications studies in your career but you didn't have to get a communications degree to learn that. I feel that the anthropology, communications, biology, history, etc. classes I took in college were great and really opened my eyes to other things. However, I didn't pursue degrees in them because I knew it probably wasn't a good ROI (investment being time and money).
In my case, I had a bad semester where life crashed around me right before finals, which included two of the classes I needed to have a minimum GPA for admittance into the CS program. I had the option of losing a semester and retaking everything again, of course, but at the same time I had been involved with speech and debate during high school and loved the communications classes I was taking. It worked out for me.…
The only solution is bringing costs down. Plain and simple. If a majority of students can't pay for in-state college alone or with help from family the system is not working as intended.
EDIT: butchered that last sentence by missing one word (now in italics)