341–350 of 447 posts
How come no one is talking about the actual costs of schools? Why are they so expensive? Perhaps bloated budgets, systemic mismanagement across the country...?
Seems pretty obvious to me which part of schools needs slimming down.
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Truthfully, depending on your definition of majority, most college students ARE already pursuing more profitable majors. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_322.10.a... The "underwater basketweaving" so to say, may be at most 10-15% of current college graduates. I think the solution lies more with reducing the cost of college, open source textbooks, more elearning, etc. Regardless of government fundin…
You could do all those cost reduction things, but until you either decrease demand or decrease the supply of money, costs will never go down -- profits will just go up.
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Similar to Twitter, it's hard to nuance a complex thought on a garish protest sign. With the example of a sign reading "Sciences isn't wrong", that's not literally a statement of science's infallibility, it's just something some guy wrote on a sign. If you had a conversation with the individual I'm sure they would espouse to you what they meant with their sign. It feels like an act of willful ignorance to interpret t…
That's part of the problem now though, there's no room for nuance. You almost HAVE to take an extreme position in order to be heard. For instance, the GP mentioned anti-vaxxers. There are many different kinds of "alternative" stances on vaccinations, and only one (very) extreme position is "vaccines cause autism". But if you mention anything about vaccines that isn't 100% of vaccines are amazing 100% of the time you…
I think we're seeing a completely different trend, spurred on by social media and the ability for people to broadcast their own messages/opinions about a topic, and that is, everyone has a loud, and often spurious, opinion about everything. This is something that's always been true, social media is just amplifying this aspect of human nature.
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The thing I don't understand is, how does it unravel? It feels like politically acceptable short-termism of shunting education costs onto future generations. No-one's going to 'lose' money over it. Who will suffer? It doesn't look like it will be corporations that will suffer, save some institutions will close when the endless supply of money suddenly dries up. It looks to me like it will be governments, a political…
I think it unravels over time. The feedback loop is very long. At some point, large amounts of young adults will accept loans that exceed the value-add of college by a significant amount. Then, those who chose not to attend college and pursued a trade will be more visibly affluent. The trend will swing the other way, universities will experience downward pressure on tuition, and trade schools will be inundated as uni…
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The "March for Science" that happened earlier this year had estimated attendance of 1.07 million. Now go to Google Images and search for "March for Science". Nearly every sign I see is either political in nature, elevating science to a level of religion/infallibility, or casting science as a fashion/meme ("Scientific is the new chic", "Science isn't wrong", "In science we trust").
I'm not convinced, I haven't followed that particular event closely but as far as I know it was mostly about opposing the anti-science views of Trump and his administration. Given that he said multiple times that global warming was a chinese conspiracy I'm not sure this reaction is particularly extreme or uncalled for, regardless of your opinion on the topic. Using this to say that this million of people participatin…
> I'm not sure this reaction is particularly extreme or uncalled for
But opposition can easily veer into defining, and then rigorously defending, a 'pro-scientific' dogma that actually ends up opposing new, legitimate research.
As a complete hypothetical, what if an esteemed climate scientist discovers evidence that global temperature increase estimates actually are too high by, say, a factor of 2? Will people take that evidence seriously, or write it off as 'climate change denial'?
There is definitely an education bubble. It's way too easy to get money for college. You hear a lot of stories about the increasing costs of college and crushing debt on graduation, but you don't hear a lot of stories of "I wanted to go to college but couldn't get a loan". Almost everyone gets approved, regardless of their future ability to pay it back. We need a fundamental shift in the way college is paid for. Some…
I tend to lean libertarian, so that's my bias. I'll be upfront with that. That said, I'd be okay eliminating student loans both in government and even in private markets. Like private personal loans take over. I think it would work out over time. I can't speak for the overall society, but I know personally I noticed locally amongst friends and family that when student loans became more widespread under Obama local pr…
> “it seems any way you cut it people are going to get thrown under the bus.”
Incorrect, every other western country at least has a pretty workable system.
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That punishes everyone who took out private loans or worked to put themselves through college. Not to mention it hurts those who worked to pay down their loans earlier. There are a lot of ways of socializing the cost of education, doing it retroactively opens up a whole can of worms.
That's where a TARP-like buyback would come into play. Negotiate to buy private student loans and extinguish them also. I know there are charity-type groups that do this with mortgages, though I'm having trouble finding any links at this current moment. But, honestly, I'm not a huge fan of logic lines that sound like, "We can't help everyone, so therefore we should help no one." We should absolutely strive to help ev…
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Having the government step in and pick up the tab isn't as ridiculous as you think. The majority cost increase (65%)[1] of higher education in the US over the last couple decades is due to a systematic defunding of government support for schools. It would be nice if we started investing in our country's education again. [1]2015 Study by the New York Federal Reserve - https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/rese…
How about the government lets the banks pick up the tab? Why should taxpayers bail out (wealthy, educated, intelligent) bankers who made bad loans?
Why shouldn't Americans bail out Americans for the collective decisions of Americans?
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The problem with subsidizing college in any way, including the current student loan system is that it encourages people to go to college whether it makes sense or not, and as several people have mentioned in this discussion, in a lot of cases, it doesn't make sense. Anyone who is properly motivated should be able to go to college, but when I hear cries for a free college education, I can imagine that that would stimu…
I'm going to say something that probably isn't that popular here... all education is a good thing and valuable. The problem is that the costs have made it such that the only education worth pursuing is STEM, which IMO is a travesty.
How could this not be popular? Where will would be without the next generation of literature, teachers, artists? Society would start to suck.