So, Universal Basic Income....
Why? Keeping afloat a system that siphons all the fruits of progress to the 0,01% by throwing just enough trickles to the bottom so they don't revolt?
Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
31–40 of 588 posts
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#32> the feds should handle student loans the same way they handle medicaid/medicare reimbursement. I'm not sure how anyone looks at our health care reimbursement system and the decides that's the approach to apply to fix anything else? Personally, I'd like to see: * Employers are allowed to test students to see what they can do, but not evaluate them based on whether they went to school or where. * Make student loan de…
The fix for both is the same. Get the government out of the demand side and, if anything, only work on the supply side. Want lower doctor and hospital prices? Try competing against a “free but you have to wait” government option. Budget $X million dollars per year to put some primary care doctors on retainer. Want lower private school tuition? Try competing against a free (or at least low cost) government / public op…
I would not make "Get the government out of the demand side" a rallying cry because UBI is the huge counter-example of something governments should be doing.
Better to say governments should do, not fund, on the institutional level (run the school, run the hospital, like you say), and fund, not do, in the individual level (UBI not SNAP).
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#33> the feds should handle student loans the same way they handle medicaid/medicare reimbursement. I'm not sure how anyone looks at our health care reimbursement system and the decides that's the approach to apply to fix anything else? Personally, I'd like to see: * Employers are allowed to test students to see what they can do, but not evaluate them based on whether they went to school or where. * Make student loan de…
But strictly speaking, employers do not look where did you go to school - they look at which school has given you a degree.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#34"The question then becomes a matter of how we fix this without diminishing access to a college education."
This is the crux of it that everyone needs to get over. Universality, High Quality, Low Cost. Pick two. By letting the government meddle you have guaranteed no one can afford college and will be long in debt to a loan they cannot discharge in bankruptcy. I'd rather have cheap college then universal access for every single person who wants a English Literature or Anthropology degree with low ROI. Colleges are now awash in money and they pump it into newer and fancier campuses to attract more of that government backed debt from all the masses, driving up cost significantly.
Or how about breaking the degree monopoly with something like equivalent certification programs and let private companies fill the gap. Similar to what Google is doing with its certificate program they are rolling out. 4 years for a piece of paper that includes 2 years of general education classes for "well roundness" is starting to look more and more ridiculous considering the cost of that "well roundness" is years of non-dis chargeable debt weighing you down during your best decades.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#35Is this surprising to anyone? Colleges battle each other to provide amenities, loans are easy to come by, and the colleges have nothing to lose when the students default. I remember my first day of college (in 1993!) and remember part of registering was signing all of these forms where my options were a) take out loans and go to school or b) don't take out loans and don't go to school. I had no idea what it meant to…
An article doesn't have to be "surprising" to be with writing, or reading. It even says "unsurprisingly" right in it.
In the commenters defense, I think they mean that the outcome shouldn't be surprising once we really dig into the underlying causes.
I was surprised to learn that the federal government were the ones now directly making the loans, and I'm sure many others are too.
I had to do quite a bit of research to come to the conclusion that this was causing tuition increases. It's rarely ever talked about for some reason.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#36> the feds should handle student loans the same way they handle medicaid/medicare reimbursement. I'm not sure how anyone looks at our health care reimbursement system and the decides that's the approach to apply to fix anything else? Personally, I'd like to see: * Employers are allowed to test students to see what they can do, but not evaluate them based on whether they went to school or where. * Make student loan de…
> Employers are allowed to test students to see what they can do, but not evaluate them based on whether they went to school or where. This would never work. People who went to high-prestige schools want to signal that to their employer and when barred would find other ways to signal like "Interned in Dr. Blah's group at the MIT media lab" or "Secretary of the Princeton chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa." > Make student…
> "Interned in Dr. Blah's group at the MIT media lab" or "Secretary of the Princeton chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa."
Both of these are about what you have done, and not what you can do. I'm proposing limiting interviews, at least entry-level ones, to relevant skills, abilities, and knowledge. "Read this judicial decision and tell me whether you think it was correctly decided and why." etc.
> destroy all specialized scientific research, education degrees, agricultural science, all high-level maths, biology, ecology, zoology, environmental research
The government should fund students in these directly, as we do with grants in graduate level education.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#37No, the real reason was that country wasn't producing enough jobs for the expanding labor force so we artificially created a new requirement to keep young people out of the job market for an additional 4+ years. Credentialism is a tool governments/businesses use keep control of the labor situation. The college tuition fiasco is a private/public creation. Now who wears the pants in the private/public relationship, tha…
I think your analysis is right, but there is another pernicious issue. We now inhabit a world where no one is encouraged or even expected to do a trade (well except for the modern slave caste: illegals). The result is lots of HS grads who should be getting an Electricians degree instead trying to do a 4 year program. The result not only inflates tuition cost, but also leads to 'degree inflation', that is everyone now…
We are all looking for guarantees. Degrees were insurance, but they begin to resemble protection money.
And while it's definitely true that lifetime income expectations are higher for salaried people, I wonder if they're high enough to offset the negative compound interest most people are saddled with during their 20's.
I think we may be playing fast and loose with our comparisons elsewhere too. There's sort of an image that going to college for 4 or 6 years is a huge investment of energy in your future, and the alternative is to just take 1 year of trade school and then skip to the post-graduation part of on-the-job learning. Like we paused the clock for the college people to catch up?
If someone put half the time and energy into trade school + life skills + finances that we expect of college students, I think they'd turn out pretty okay. Stressing about money is expensive. Starting your nest egg eight years late is also expensive. If you make your early lead count for something, I don't expect too many regrets later on.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#38How did this hit the front page of HN? There's literally no analysis in a piece on a topic that has been analyzed to death. The hypothesis is that increased availability of loans in 1993 is responsible for the rise in tuition between 2010 and 2020. Just stated as a fact, with nothing to back it up. Okay. The most obvious answer that is cited by literally everyone that looks at this topic is that it's partially caused…
Cuts in state funding don't explain the rapid tuition increases at private universities.
I know first-hand that this is not how pricing decisions work at regional private colleges/universities. The process regional private colleges go through is as follows:
1. List a set of "peer institutions", usually with the primary input coming from admissions. Here, "peer" means "competes for the same set of students we're after". Almost always the region's public colleges and universities will be on this list.
2. Set prices relative to these "peer institutions".
If Local State College charges $X, then most (read: non-elite) regional private colleges can get away with charging after-discount-factor $(X+Y) for some relatively modest Y Increasing $X also increases $(X+Y).
Cutting state subsidies will lead to higher prices and private institutions. 100% probability. I've seen the exact process by which it happens.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#39"The question then becomes a matter of how we fix this without diminishing access to a college education." This is the crux of it that everyone needs to get over. Universality, High Quality, Low Cost. Pick two. By letting the government meddle you have guaranteed no one can afford college and will be long in debt to a loan they cannot discharge in bankruptcy. I'd rather have cheap college then universal access for ev…
Too many people are enrolling in College, and this is a problem. The end result in many cases has been lower the standards to get students to graduate. More people need to be geared towards trades and manufacturing jobs. The Covid Pandemic has shown us what happens when you put all your manufacturing in one country.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#40"The question then becomes a matter of how we fix this without diminishing access to a college education." This is the crux of it that everyone needs to get over. Universality, High Quality, Low Cost. Pick two. By letting the government meddle you have guaranteed no one can afford college and will be long in debt to a loan they cannot discharge in bankruptcy. I'd rather have cheap college then universal access for ev…
Universities in Europe are generally high quality and low cost. It does have it's problems but it is not one or the other.
You do not need a degree 30 years ago to do lots of jobs that now require one. Higher education for a lot of organizations is just an easy way to cut the application stack down