Live data from Hacker News

Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

npr.org

291–300 of 565 posts

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#291
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think folks would agree with you in valuing arts and humanities, just that they shouldn’t do it on someone else’s dime. I suspect you’d find that a widely held belief and not just an American one. It’s hard out there and I have some non-college educated family who also struggled in life wondering why we should pour money into degrees people can’t pay off when they received no help themselves.

> do it on someone else’s dime. Money is just a social construct and the amount of tax dollars spent on classes in progressive tea pot clay handcraft is minuscule. Non-tech academics were more or lessed forced into getting degrees by the job market. There were no choice involved on part on the victims of a systematic issue, which is, gatekeeping access to middleclass jobs by the parents' bank account size with usury…

> Money is just a social construct

I'm not sure what you're trying to say but it hardly matters if "X is social construct" if having it is the difference between struggling and not.

TBH this is the exact thing that frustrates people who get screwed by the system, "Silly peasants! Don't they know that money is just a social construct!"

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#292

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…

"The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job" Check the marketing literature for any college and you will find that is not true. The only people doing degrees for knowledge and prestige are the filthy rich and while they may make up a significant percentage of students at the top 5 schools, they make up a tiny percentage of all college students. The last point is where I end up aswell though and I think no matter ho…

I'd say the purpose is usually to get a "career" i.e. good job, possibly as a paid researcher and/or professor.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am foreigner. It is normal spoken english in UK where I lived. Sorry for not using "proper cambridge english" here.

No need to be defensive. If you were unaware of the irony before my comment, then my point was that there may be more still for the education system to offer. This isn't directed at you specifically. I am making a broader connection to the need for higher education even when people feel it has no immediately obvious value. Sometimes the things learned in school are more subtle than what's on the syllabus.

Ok, some points:

* I do not consider HN forum to be place for formal english

* I could think harder, and run my post through some tool to polish grammar. Why not: I consider this low effort post, and proper grammar sounds like AI generated content.

* I was not being defensive

* I am non native speaker, I got advanced english cambridge cert from private school lomg time ago . Complete with proper accent.

* when I came to UK I got relentlessly mocked for "posh english"! It took me a few years to drop that and speak "normally".

* I get the irony from your comment (I love "double negative" joke from IT Crowd). But that argument was valid maybe 10 years ago. After “Dear Colleague” letter, clawn show during covid, and recent raise of AI; I consider this topic irelevant. Now university is just a scam on poor people.

* I have research background, know how academia works. Job and pay wise it is a joke.

> no immediately obvious value

> Sometimes the things learned in school are more

Academia has no monopol on this, you can get it outside of academia. Millions of free books. Several PhDs ready to teach for $20/hour...

If anything, academia relentlessly kills independent critical thinking. You have to agree with teacher to get credit and to pass, that is learnet at school.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vouched for this. When I worked in IT at a second-tier university (not Ivy), I saw some of the classes that passed for humanities. And you have profs who are legit teaching cited facts, and some who teach their political persuasion as facts. BTW, depending on the school, the hard left/hard right flips. Schools of law, economics, engineering - are usually hard right. Now its also an experience that conservatives in cl…

> the hard left/hard right flips. Schools of law, economics, engineering - are usually hard right. This is just objectively not true at all, accept in cases so specific that mentioning it as a general rule is misleading

"Ur not true" is not objective in any way.

Counterpoint, I'm right. Look at figure 3.

https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-23-winter/the-hyperpoli...

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So company A pays for your education to go work for company B (their competitor) and all they get is a lousy interest rate with no security? If they don’t get ten years (or whatever amount) of your output, why waste the time and energy when someone else will do it for them?

Lending is a business in itself, no?

Sure. Maybe in the future we can just add a years tuition to the Apple Card when buying the Macbook for college.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated This is what the public school system is for. Post-secondary education was not meant to be for everyone. But the world has changed and universities and colleges only service as the gate-keepers to degrees and diplomas that every employer now has required to get a job (regardless of whether that education is needed for the actual job). It's not that young…

Why not expand “public school” to include post secondary education to reflect the realities of the modern economy?

If a program doesn't leave the student [economically] better off, then it wasn't about the realities of the modern economy.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just checked with ai about Berkley (I like this uni from telly): EECS B.S.: You must complete six humanities/social-science courses. Two are Reading and Composition courses, and four come from approved areas such as history, philosophy, arts, international studies, or social sciences. At least two must be upper-division. https://engineering.berkeley.edu/students/undergraduate-guid... All Berkeley undergraduates must…

Putting a broad label of “woke garbage” on simple liberal arts requirements of taking a few classes from “history, philosophy, arts, international studies, or social sciences,” almost does not even justify a response. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’ve never taken such a class, but I can assure that unless you live in a reality so warped by politics, that basic logic and reason is out the…

Thing is, I have takrn a class like that. Was a political science class. Extreme hard right (chinese dissident, hard anti-left).

I wrote the requisite papers. All of them were F, with no commentary. I brought this to the department chair, and the grades changed to b's and a-'s.

He was absolutely grading on political position for the paper, and not a proper discussion of content per the rubric.

And, aside from going to the chair every time, theres little you can do to fight this sort of obvious bias.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#298

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…

> The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job

Superior education is the ladder towards self-sufficiency because that's what the labor market does, it requires you to hold a degree. Now, you may be right that the degree by itself doesn't guarantee it but you are ignoring that the students don't have any choice to do so. So your solution actually punishes the students rather than fix the labor market inflated requirement values. Fix the labor market and suddenly education doesn't have to be financed to allow youngsters be able to look after themselves.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#299
post #163

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…

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.

There are not that many of those students. But oh boy, conservatives hate that kind of research regardless of how students do in the market.

It is ideologically inconvenient, because the whole premiss is that gender roles depend.

Re: Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

#300
post #247

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…

>> The purpose of a college degree is NOT a job >> If knowledge and prestige is all that matters I disagree. The primary purpose of the college degree is the job. If you don't need a job (which derives from the signaling factor of the degree == the prestige), you can just study the same material and gain the knowledge by yourself without getting a degree.

I think it's best for universities to train their own future researchers. Research, science, and the university's own core goals should be the focus of teaching.

Anything that spills over from that can be jobs, industry, innovations and all that.

Post reply on HN