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

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

#491

Post by ryandrake »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #333
class3shock wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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. I already wrote it quite some times on HN: at least in Germany, where university is rather cheap, the situation is typically different: - The really rich kids will typically have a "career on rails",…

The real rich don’t have “careers on track”. They don’t need careers because they and their descendants will be wealthy forever. If these guys are attending university, it is not because it is an annoying requirement needed to be an Investment Banker in daddy’s firm—that’s what the lesser rich people are doing. The actual rich are doing University just because it is an interesting side quest.

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

#492

Post by UncleMeat »

ndriscoll wrote: post #485
UncleMeat wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean to undermine it? Is your position that no matter what the rigorous application of some research method produces that you should always come to a predetermined conclusion that some particular form of western liberalism fro the 17th century is the best? Or is it possible to place these texts in complex and even critical dialog with other texts? Can you be specific about which "values and traditions" y…

You can place them in a dialog with other texts, but that implies that students are reading and becoming intimately familiar with the canon being critiqued . And generally speaking, I'd expect more of a refinement than a critique per se. I didn't say we should forcefully propagate anything; I said we shouldn't fund things that aren't useful somehow. Some basic values would be that e.g. governments derive their author…

I don't understand how the only use of the humanities is to teach people about classical liberalism. Surely my polysci friend who worked on 21st century dictatorships and my history friend who worked on early modern communication networks are doing something valuable too? You are begging the question here and just starting from a position that only your very narrow conception of the humanities has any value at all.

I don't think that your claim that "our entire system is predicated on the idea that people are qualified and able to define their own destiny and self-govern" is actually well supported by the evidence. You are excising nuance and evidence in favor of a top down constraint on allowable ideas. You are doing the thing that University of Iowa is doing now, which is insisting on coursework that explicitly teaches things like "capitalism is the best system" rather than being driven by expert analysis and research.

I also feel that my wife, also a historian, contributes far more to our society than somebody working at Instagram finding a way to make children look at more ads or somebody working at DraftKings find a way to get problem gamblers to restart their addiction. But those people have STEM degrees so they are automatically net benefits to the world.

Also, a humanities education is not typically built from textbooks.

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

#493

Post by aleph_minus_one »

thisislife2 wrote: post #487
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was surprised that Germany doesn't offer a similar pathway to a Bachelors in Engineering for its vocational program students. Germany does, though in a different way: Normally, to study, you need an Abitur (Allgemeine Hochschulreife) high school diploma from your school [1] to study at a university (Hauptschulabschluss or mittlere Reife (these kinds of high school diplomas are hard to translate into English)). Re…

But does it take 3 years or 4 years to get the engineering degree, after completing vocational training? In India, you have two paths to earn a Bachelors degree in Engineering - the most popular one is to complete 12 years of schooling (i.e. high school), and then join a college / university to study Engineering for 4 years. Or, you can complete 10 years of schooling, and then join for a vocational Engineering progra…

> But does it take 3 years or 4 years to get the engineering degree, after completing vocational training?

You will have the ordinary amount of time at the university.

As I wrote: the time that you save is getting "(fachgebundenes) Abitur" via evening school, which was historically necessary. So you do save time, just not during attending the university.

In the vocational training, one learns practical skills, while the university is there to teach you the theoretical grounding. So, basically nothing that you learned in your vocational training transfers to university. There is a reason why vocational training vs university were historically two completely different and separated kinds of tertiary education.

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

#494

Post by tzs »

mchusma wrote: post #245

This is great. Federally subsidized loans is directly (not solely) responsible for rapid inflation of college costs in the US. Anything to limit its use is a good thing. I’d argue that this test would be better expanded to actually having an ROI, not just do no harm, to encourage schools to not only provide value but also constrain costs (eg your school may make sense at $10k debt not $100k debt). This and/or making…

> Federally subsidized loans is directly (not solely) responsible for rapid inflation of college costs in the US.

Is it? Several years ago I looked for historical data on tuition rates. I wasn't able to find much only, but did find data for Stanford and some large public university whose name I don't recall.

When I graphed their tuitions over 100 years starting from the early 1900s along with a graph of inflation over that same time the tuitions grew at roughly a fixed multiple of the inflation rate.

That pattern and multiple were the same before and after the arrival of federally subsidized loans.

Maybe if I had found data on a lot more schools something would have shown up.

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

#495

Post by tencentshill »

CircuitSeuss wrote: post #36

Gut feeling here is that this is going to result in significantly lower higher ed enrollment, and therefore a less educated populace. Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system. This will pull up the ladder on the younger generations. We do not teach history or ethics, or much in general to our pipeline welders, but they make bank for their hard labor. Meanwhile our wel…

Well, these Heritage Foundation guys in charge are all about the big picture. Less educated populace? Make it happen, I don't care how.

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

#496

Post by mistercheph »

yorwba wrote: post #138
mistercheph wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is not something arcane, TBH it's really the vocational schools that should be forced to call themselves something different. 99% of university students are not there for an education, they are in welding school upper-middle-class edition. Vocational programs are essential infrastructure, but they are not education, and those programs should not receive funds allocated for education or be held to the same s…

What about job training disqualifies it from being education?

Briefly: education is concerned with thinking, vocational training is concerned with task performance. There are lots of synergies and gray areas between the two, e.g. certain kinds of task proficiency are really helpful tools while thinking (e.g. arithmetic), and thinking is a really helpful tool while task performing (e.g. an unseen permutation of a task)

That question probably deserves a much longer, more complete answer than this, but another poor imprecise framework is that education empowers people to tackle new problems poorly and taking lots of time, vocational training empowers people to tackle existing problems with known solutions excellently. In the language of the greeks, nous and techne.

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

#497

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #140

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…

"You have the right to a degree in XYZ... you should NOT have the right to a taxpayer backed grant/aid/loan/whatever to gain said degree unless you're on a reasonable path to become a tax payer yourself as soon as you are done with the degree."

Are you a US taxpayer. Profile says you are located in Pakistan

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

#498

Post by ryzvonusef »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #497
ryzvonusef wrote: post #140

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…

"You have the right to a degree in XYZ... you should NOT have the right to a taxpayer backed grant/aid/loan/whatever to gain said degree unless you're on a reasonable path to become a tax payer yourself as soon as you are done with the degree." Are you a US taxpayer. Profile says you are located in Pakistan

I'm Pakistani, and I'm just stating the facts as I see them.

Many countries have free college education, but at the end of the day some one has to pay for it, and those are the tax-payers.

And frankly, if your country's tax payers are, for whatever reason, NOT willing to subsidise it (in whatever way or form)... what can you do?

It's not like I like this situation, but those are the facts. The wave of anti-social trend going in the west is because of this belief; tax payers in those countries no longer feel program XYZ is worth it... so it goes.

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

#499

Post by ryzvonusef »

nradov wrote: post #361
ryzvonusef wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I should have written it a bit more clearer, but in my mind I was comparing degrees with certifications. I feel studies/degrees that have an associated certification (possibly legally mandated) linked to it should have a different loan profile as compared to open-ended degrees. Whether you are going to Trade school to become a Plumber, or Med school to become a Doctor; in both cases there is the study part (t…

I think you might be a little confused about how the practice of medicine works. State medical boards license physicians. Earning a license usually requires an MD/DO degree, passing the USMLE exam, and completing some amount of post-graduate training (residency). Once you're licensed you can legally perform pretty much any medical procedure regardless of whether it's in your specialty or not. There may be separate co…

Again, maybe I could have phrased things better, but I feel you are digging to deep into the analogy rather than seeing the broader picture that I was attempting to present.

The point was that certifying/licensing exams have a more direct correlation with a specific job/set of jobs than a simple degree, which are more open-ended.

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

#500

Post by ryzvonusef »

dragonwriter wrote: post #387
ryzvonusef wrote: post #140

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... but the purpose of a college LOAN is 100% a job, and it's very important to differentiate between the two. No, the purpose of a college loan is to enable a student to pay for college with future earnings. It can be perfectly rational even if the loan/degree doesn't improve job prospects (and even more especially so if it doesn’t “improve” them in a purely financial se…

> No, the purpose of a college loan is to enable a student to pay for college with future earnings.

Aren't you and I saying essentially the same thing? If you are taking a loan, there better be a job that helps pay for it.

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