371–380 of 535 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much do European history professors get paid? Better yet, how many professors get hired as non-adjuncts?
Not sure, but I know a full professor in Philosophy at a top public University that makes 70k
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The external benefits are quite clear to me. That they are not clear to you suggests to me that nothing I write or say will change your mind. So what's the point of asking me to list them? Are you merely trying to see if I understand the concept of a external benefits or genuinely trying know what possible external benefit there could be with someone being provided a subsidized education? I think you can think of som…
Are you merely trying to see if I understand the concept of a external benefits or genuinely trying know what possible external benefit there could be with someone being provided a subsidized education? I'm trying to know what external benefits you think exist and why you think they are uniform across all fields of study , which is a much stronger claim that you made. I cannot think of any such benefits. E.g., one mi…
Some ideas to improve the "situation on the ground":
- reduce the demand for college education
- reduce the cost of attending college by providing better material support for students in the form of affordable room and board.
- reduce the cost of attending college by providing better public funding (by an order of magnitude) for public universities, state schools, and community colleges for students of proven ability (3rd/4th year students).
- fail students who are wasting their money more quickly and aggressively.
- make it easier to attend college part-time while working or while raising kids (the idea of intensive four-year study with "Summer Breaks" is absurd in the modern non-agrarian economy)
- publish clear metrics on loan-repayment/income prospects after achieving a 4-year degree of from with and use these to gate loans (it is probably rational to take out loans to get a philosophy degree from Harvard, it is probably not rational to take out loans to get a philosophy degree from a random state school in Minnesota.
- regulate predatory loan-lending even more aggressively.
- offer insurance as part of loans to allow students to hedge against catastrophic life/economic problems.
If you are a dead average intellect with dead average work-ethic and ambitions, I see absolutely no reason to support your post-secondary education beyond a year or so. That's throwing damp logs on a dead fire.
If you're a dead average intellect with dead average work-ethic and ambitions and you take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans gambling on a future that doesn't exist, I see no reason to treat you any differently than someone who gambles and loses in the market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one's stopping you from cutting them a check. Ideally you would not hold a gun to my head and demand I do the same.
You completely missed the point. Further, this "holding a gun to your head" thing is completely asinine.
That's bullshit. In reality OP proposes to transfer money from me to people who made investments in human capital that didn't pan out.
Maybe that's their fault, because they invested foolishly. Maybe it's nobody's fault, because they invested in a positive-expectation bet and got bit by the variance (it does suck when you take out a loan to go to nursing school, and the feds decide to import a bunch of Filipino nurses instead). Maybe they were the victim of fraud, and someone sold them a bill of goods.
In any case, it has nothing to do with me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably, the Fed will send new money to Treasury for this, which will actually inflate the currency just a wee smidgen ( and in an economy in which the Fed's growth targets go chronically unmet this is no sin - quite the opposite). Otherwise... While there is an element of truth to that, see "the marginal value of a dollar". You "spend" your ten millionth dollar quite differently than you spend your ten thousandth…
My bad, that makes a difference (ie: if you're increasing the monetary base, there will indeed be a change in spending - and theoretically it could even result in a lower velocity of money, as the money base might increase proportionally more than the increase in GDP). I didn't realise that Treasury actually held this paper. Still, I'm hesitant to draw the conclusion that giving cash to someone with a high MPC result…
It'll end up in the deficit just like everything else. As it should. Unlike QE{I,II,III}, this will increase the base.
Saving and spending are both morally neutral; it's just that we think it's Good To Be A Rentier, so we (curiously) bias in a moral case for saving. The New Testament of finance :) allows for bankruptcy, to implement a mechanism for forgiveness.
Saving is pragmatically good. But we seem to make a moral fetish of it - in fact, if our neighbor spends, spends, spends, we benefit. But Liberal Atomism doth make hypocrites of us all...
Ignoring all this, monetary velocity is important and all other things being equal, I'd rather have it than not have it.
College is just all sorts of disgusting in the US right now. I support relief, but I'm sure that we're going to have to see a massive crash in the system before anything happens. I managed to go to a small public university after the tuition hike but before the Great Fees Gouging. I'd probably have escaped with $5,000 less in debt if I had started with my state's (Georgia's Hope) merit based scholarship instead of ha…
I'm teaching one class as a part-time instructor now back at my old university (basically for beer money on top of the day job), and it's blowing my mind how much more flashy the campus is. And naturally, how ridiculously expensive it is after only 10 years. The focus on "student life" facilities strikes me as an odd set of priorities considering how long hiring and pay raise freezes for faculty seem to last.
The mandatory online book thing is pretty insidious. We're required to use it by the department, and I can see how there is a kernel of a good idea there. It basically helps you run gigantic course sections while grading all homework for you, but while simultaneously killing the secondary textbook market (which is pretty evil). Worse, they are clearly implemented by the lowest bidder and break every web standard you could imagine.
Basically, with increased class sizes and mandatory online content, every core course is slowly turning into a weird online hybrid class. I think this is decreasing the difference between a traditional education and a MOOC bit by bit, which is eventually going to give a lot of universities a bit of an identity and marketing crisis.
Pearson, Wiley, Mcgraw-Hill et. al. are the entities that I would most like to see disappear when the college bubble pops. Free open-source community maintained textbooks seem like the obvious way forward to my software developer brain.
On the bright side, I do enjoy actual lecturing. It's a lot more fun when you can do it with few or no stakes, since I don't have to rely on it for a living. I'm literally on the exact opposite of the spectrum from a tenured professor, but I weirdly feel like I have to same level of freedom.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're incorrectly implying that people aren't successfully graduating? The problem is that people are graduating with huge debt and can't get jobs that pay well enough to pay off their debt.
Did you read the article? A large number of the people who default on their debt never graduated.
"Federal figures show most people in default on student debt owe relatively little—under $10,000—because they dropped out of school"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Upvoted. But. The argument against this could be that due to the unsecured nature of the six-figure (potentially) debt the free market rates will be insane effectively reducing access to higher ed for those who can't afford it without the loans. Then again, if less ppl could afford a degree in Queer Musicology (does exist - https://www.musicology.ucla.edu/mission-and-history-1 ) or let's say Environmental Studies etc…
>Environmental Studies God forbid.
Am I the only one who hates the notion of being forced to pay for other people's bad financial decisions? I made the choice to go to a slightly less prestigious school so I wouldn't have to go into debt for college. I also worked all through college to pay for my expenses. Should I now be punished for that decision? Why should we make people's financial mistakes consequence-free? I think the government should get out…
You may be right that it's a poor financial decision, but I still hope to one day live in a country where people can pursue education in any subject matter (not just STEM/other money makers) for the pure purpose of educational fulfillment. That can only be done with a system that helps pay for education instead of letting the market decide which degrees are most valuable in terms of pure capitalistic measures
Is there a country in the world where this isn't possible now?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Upvoted. But. The argument against this could be that due to the unsecured nature of the six-figure (potentially) debt the free market rates will be insane effectively reducing access to higher ed for those who can't afford it without the loans. Then again, if less ppl could afford a degree in Queer Musicology (does exist - https://www.musicology.ucla.edu/mission-and-history-1 ) or let's say Environmental Studies etc…
> The argument against this could be that due to the unsecured nature of the six-figure (potentially) debt the free market rates will be insane effectively reducing access to higher ed for those who can't afford it without the loans. Given that federal loans have always had rates set by government policy (not market rates) and the fact that private participation in the program was ended in favor of exclusively direct…