351–360 of 372 posts
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Don't forget profit, and the incentive for insurance companies to care less about what they pay and probably prefer higher prices.
Why would insurance companies prefer higher prices?
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Regarding 1. and 2. : In France 100% of high school graduates are (by definition) admitted to University, and more than half of them indeed decide to take that path. "Typical" university education lasts 5 years. (Though I wouldn't be surprised if only a minority actually makes it.) It's mostly free, students from poor families get grants, though there are limits on how many times you can retry university years while…
So France is an example where they spend 1.12% of GDP on tertiary education, about 12% more than Germany, and as a result they get a lot more university students, but their labor market overall is less skilled, and French schools -- similar to Italian schools -- are broke and their employees are paid less. So these are the kinds of trade offs to make -- e.g. what percent of your labor force do you need to have a coll…
And in a lot of jobs, you don't need much more than some core knowledge, and being independent enough that you can learn on your own - you can't teach a specific job at the university, that's what internships are for. Teaching jobs, (outside of technical schools), is the responsibility of the companies.
Note that the overwhelming majority of engineers, especially bridge ones in France don't come from the University system - but rather the élite ingénieur schools - maybe a bit like the US Ivy League ? (There's the super-élite school literally called "Bridges and Roads") Those get a disproportionate amount of funding, but aren't that relevant to the discussion, since they only teach a tiny minority of students (~5%).
I recently came upon an interview with Oliver Faron, administrator of one of these élite schools, which has a specific focus on education of people returning to superior education. They also have an especially good record with 20 times better results with technical (="low-quality") high school graduates than universities.
(I guess that extra funding and the self-selection of the most motivated students might have something to do with that ?)
And his dream is to have a mandatory year of university to replace the long-gone mandatory military service, so that the different social classes get to "live together" again ! (More than one year would probably make for diminishing results?) : https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-conversation-scien... (fr)
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There's a difference between risk and harm. Risks are something that represent an unknown future harm to the economy, likely in the form of a potential recession. The things you list undoubtedly waste resources, both from loss of productivity and from spending resources that otherwise could have been utilized for something else, but they're known quantities. In a sense the things you list are kind of like the broken…
Isn’t student loan repayment harm rather than risk as well, then? It seems like they’re also well known quantities.
Suppose that someone invents a better version of ELIZA, and everyone in the psychotherapy business is suddenly out of work.
Or slightly less absurdly, suppose that Intuit and H&R Block mess up their next round of lobbying, and the IRS implements that one-click tax payment we've all been asking for. And the accountant industry shrinks by a few percent and wages go down for the ones that are left.
Either of those would be a significant shift in the job prospects of a large group of people, which could affect how many student loans actually get repaid.
I think it might also count as a risk if it suddenly became fashionable to get degrees in, say, underwater basket weaving. As in, incoming students aren't perfectly rational with perfect information about what degrees have what job prospects, and I'm assuming the college loan system might not react quickly if something caused an overall shift towards less economically useful degrees.
It does lack one "feature" that helps the bad mortgages cause problems, in that I don't think it would be self-reinforcing. From what I understand, subprime defaults were contagious in a way that I don't think this would be.
We need to get rid of student loans. The problem is that Universities don't ever need to worry about a student defaulting and can keep increasing the prices of tuition with impunity. If they default, they don't care, because the money is already in the bank. If universities had to worry about students defaulting, they would get rid of bullshit degrees that don't result in an actual job and the prices would come done…
It's insane to me how quick some folks are to dismiss what they deem "bullshit degrees". It's our culture that has turned education into some kind of "investment" in future job prospects. To put it simply, education was never intended to be that way, nor should it. It's as if studying the arts is some kind of luxury for those who are already financially well-off. Education is supposed to be about learning just for th…
But if you are going to look at history, then why not go all the way to the root of the modern Western academia - where the word itself originates?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy
On one hand, it was indeed about learning just for the sake of learning. But on the other hand, it also didn't have degrees, positions, tenure, or any other attributes of a formal hierarchy.
And note that it was something that people did aside from gainful employment (or other source of income). Which means that it was closed to most, not even because they weren't welcome there, but because they didn't have the free time to devote to learning for the sake of learning.
Could we revive the Academy today, free for everybody? Sure, but I don't think this would solve any of the problems with "bullshit degrees".
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I heard an interesting proposal recently that sounded like venture capital for education. Students would receive tuition money and the lender would receive a percentage of their post graduation salary for a specified number of years. Even without novel approaches students already get non-subsidized lines of credit so I don’t think it’s unheard of
That reminds me of the Paradox of the Court. Obviously not quite as straightforward but such a payment model does encourage at least some degree of sandbagging. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_the_Court On another note the idea rubs me as immoral in ways that loans don't for reasons I am not quite able to articulate. Like viscerally seeming too far too similar to indenteture.
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So France is an example where they spend 1.12% of GDP on tertiary education, about 12% more than Germany, and as a result they get a lot more university students, but their labor market overall is less skilled, and French schools -- similar to Italian schools -- are broke and their employees are paid less. So these are the kinds of trade offs to make -- e.g. what percent of your labor force do you need to have a coll…
IMHO jobs and economy are secondary. University is first and foremost about having educated citizens. And you can't do that in school because you need the freedom of not being forced to go to class and freedom from your parents too. And in a lot of jobs, you don't need much more than some core knowledge, and being independent enough that you can learn on your own - you can't teach a specific job at the university, th…
I sympathize with this view. When I was young (and foolish), I was really upset at how university education was being commoditized to teach job skills when really it should (in my opinion) follow the Classical Greek model of education designed to better a person -- the word for school also means "leisure". I also bemoaned the lack of intellectual curiosity and anti-intellectual atmosphere in universities, even elite universities.
But over time, I realized that this model of a university where you go and find yourself or discover the truth or become an enlightened person was fundamentally impossible as a method of national policy.
It is an indulgence for the elite which doesn't scale to 70% of the population, most of whom have zero desire to become intellectuals and are going to school so that they can have job skills. They need job skills. Why would we make them take out huge loans or waste a key portion of their lives role playing as intellectuals?
Moreover, it's really hard to teach young people insight about life because most of us are complete fools when we are young and all we get is the feeling of having deep insight into things, we don't really get that insight except by _doing_, whether that means engaging directly with the world via travel or talking to people outside our bubble, reading things that challenge us, experience life by having kids or watching a relative die, or whether that means doing on the job -- secluding yourself into a dream world on a walled off campus with a strictly controlled idealized environment is an indulgence that does not actually make you a more knowledgeable person.
In terms of an elite school offering superior results, that is always easy to do if you are selective. It's trivial to create a high school with much superior results than the average high school if you can pick out good students. The hard thing to do is to scale that to a national policy for everyone.
So if this secluded campus model of the university doesn't promote your intellectual life and it doesn't give you job skills, then why are we doing it?
There is a reason why the original schools were basically theological training institutions and later became finishing schools for the wealthy. That model of university education was always a type of bubble, but at least in the past, people were sent to the bubble because they were going to live in that bubble for the rest of their lives so the university was preparing them for their future life, either in a monastery or in elite circles where employment was considered a dirty word.
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Some universities have started doing income share agreements. They front the tuition cost for a portion of your future income. Depending on your degree program, they will take X percentage for Y years. Purdue was in the news for being one of the first: https://www.purdue.edu/dfa/types-of-aid/income-share-agreeme... Planet Money had a nice podcast about how they work: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/29/7081…
How does that work for people who receive a large portion of their compensation in things like equity in a private company that is extremely hard to value? Would these plans result in the proliferation of odd compensation schemes to get around these repayment plans?
We need to get rid of student loans. The problem is that Universities don't ever need to worry about a student defaulting and can keep increasing the prices of tuition with impunity. If they default, they don't care, because the money is already in the bank. If universities had to worry about students defaulting, they would get rid of bullshit degrees that don't result in an actual job and the prices would come done…
It's insane to me how quick some folks are to dismiss what they deem "bullshit degrees". It's our culture that has turned education into some kind of "investment" in future job prospects. To put it simply, education was never intended to be that way, nor should it. It's as if studying the arts is some kind of luxury for those who are already financially well-off. Education is supposed to be about learning just for th…
Does it?
Human instructed education is a limited resource. Unlike self-directed or automated education, it doesn't scale without educators. And there aren't an infinite supply of those.
Ergo, a price must be paid to be educated.
What should that price be? How should it be set? Who should pay it?
I'm honestly asking, regarding your assertion (I believe) that education shouldn't be driven by utility and future-ability-to-repay.