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This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

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Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#51

Post by potatolicious »

philwelch wrote: post #41
india wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Au contraire, I think if everyone with a demonstrable ability to learn and the demonstrated desire to do so was allowed to do so free of expense, society as a whole would be way better off.

"Free of expense" doesn't exist. You're talking about transferring the expense onto people who do create wealth. Maybe it makes sense for people to have an inherent right to medical treatment or housing or something, but an inherent right to study feminism and religion at the $100,000 expense of others? I mean, we already have subsidies for people who are actually good at the humanities--tenured professorships. Philo…

You have a good point - my question would be why the studies of feminism and religion carry a $100K price tag. My engineering degree cost about half as much (in Canada, mind you), but is understandably pricy due to the earning potential.

Sure, there is a minimum cost to a degree that may or may not line up with its earning potential... but $100K? How in the world do schools get away with charging that much for a degree whose earning potential is so low?

This whole problem would be a lot less of an issue if degrees cost proportionally (or at least roughly proportionally) to their market value. People who want to study "useless" degrees can do so, and their costs would be likewise much lower than people who want "useful" degrees for employment. Perhaps we'd all be better off as a society this way.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#52

Post by earl »

patio11 wrote: post #4

Seen from another angle, she spent $100,000 of other people's money and is asking to never repay a penny of it. This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot the last two weeks, since client work has me doing some calculating from federal data on what the current value of a degree in $FOO is likely to be. (I'm sure you will not be surprised that neither religious studies nor women's studies appears near the top of t…

Seen from a more realistic angle, the school sold her a defective product for $100K. Better yet, the banks bought themselves a sweetheart deal where they sell one of the very very few products that is almost impossible to discharge in a bankruptcy. Hmm... I wonder how those two things came to be?

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#53

Post by houseabsolute »

DilipJ wrote: post #48
patio11 wrote: post #4

Seen from another angle, she spent $100,000 of other people's money and is asking to never repay a penny of it. This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot the last two weeks, since client work has me doing some calculating from federal data on what the current value of a degree in $FOO is likely to be. (I'm sure you will not be surprised that neither religious studies nor women's studies appears near the top of t…

Consider this from her point of view. Here's a girl, that has never worked in "the real world", and has no idea what the costs of living and consequences of this debt will be. Technically she's not old enough to go to a bar, but she should be allowed to accrue a six-figure debt? Consider if this was any other industry. If you bought a product at a store that the retailer knew would break the second you took it home,…

> there's a certain level of deceit that both the universities and lenders are complicit in: they know that they are charging excessively for a degree, based on the salary the student could expect to get with that degree.

The charge for the degree isn't based on the income you can make from it, it's based on the cost of producing it (ostensibly). This is true of most things you buy. How much can you buy a steak for? How much can you sell it for after it's cooked just right? But the price is determined mostly by the cost of production and its intersection with the market's willingness to pay.

The real solution is to remove all special protection from college loans. Bankruptcy should cancel them like any other loan, and they should not be especially easy to get, especially not for poor people (who, despite all hopes for an equal world, will probably be making less on average after school and thus be in a worse position to pay back). Let the banks take their risks and let the shareholders pay for the mistakes. And if people have to go to state schools or (gasp) not get educated in retarded subjects like womens' studies, so be it.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#54

Post by robryan »

liedra wrote: post #15

Yet another reason I'm glad I went through the Australian system... government funded loans and subsidised education (I paid about 2.5k AUD per year for my degree, which is about US$2200, at one of the top universities in Australia), where the loans gather no interest aside from inflation and you don't have to start paying them back until you earn over a certain amount (and then the payments are automatically taken f…

It's about $7000 a year for HECS subsidised uni now, well for me anyway, just looking at that wikipedia entry you need to earn at least $42000 a year and at that rate you would be paying back $1600.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#55

Post by potatolicious »

philk wrote: post #46

I can think of a couple of changes that would make this sort of thing much rarer: a) Force universities to publish[1] data on average graduate salaries after graduation. That way noone can delude themselves that a $100K major in Cultural Studies is going to be anything other than a financial disaster. b) Stop subsidising college loans. If not for the explicit and implicit[2] subsidies then no lender would have been w…

a) Don't forget job market growth rates vs. graduates matriculated nation-wide. That's as important as starting salary - there are a great many fields, particularly in the humanities, where the pay isn't half bad, but you're competing with a horde of fellow graduates for preciously few positions.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#56

Post by houseabsolute »

potatolicious wrote: post #51
philwelch wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Free of expense" doesn't exist. You're talking about transferring the expense onto people who do create wealth. Maybe it makes sense for people to have an inherent right to medical treatment or housing or something, but an inherent right to study feminism and religion at the $100,000 expense of others? I mean, we already have subsidies for people who are actually good at the humanities--tenured professorships. Philo…

You have a good point - my question would be why the studies of feminism and religion carry a $100K price tag. My engineering degree cost about half as much (in Canada, mind you), but is understandably pricy due to the earning potential. Sure, there is a minimum cost to a degree that may or may not line up with its earning potential... but $100K? How in the world do schools get away with charging that much for a degr…

The charge is based on the cost to deliver. And an unsubsidized private school must naturally pass on a greater portion of this burden to its students.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#57

Post by houseabsolute »

patio11 wrote: post #14
dmor wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's really disgusting is that she spent $100,000 on such a useless degree maybe she should suck up her pride and take a night job at Fedex, McDonalds, Starbucks, etc. to pay that off.

Colleges are sort of, shall we say, circumspect about the value of the degrees they issue. They charge the same no matter what your major is, and most do not publish per-major salary studies. That is part of the mystique -- "clearly an education in English is worth as much as a degree in anything else, look, the English professors even say so!" (Substitute your favorite or least favorite degree for English.) A few of…

> circumspect about the value of the degrees they issue

Students are not so naive as to not realize how much their education will be worth when they exit. It is (or was in 2006 at my school) a topic of constant discussion among undergrads. But that knowledge is for some reason not connected with action . . . maybe because these "adults" have never been responsible for or on the hook for anything in their entire lives leading up to this decision.

(Interestingly, I went to the same school as you.)

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#58

Post by earl »

philk wrote: post #46

I can think of a couple of changes that would make this sort of thing much rarer: a) Force universities to publish[1] data on average graduate salaries after graduation. That way noone can delude themselves that a $100K major in Cultural Studies is going to be anything other than a financial disaster. b) Stop subsidising college loans. If not for the explicit and implicit[2] subsidies then no lender would have been w…

While I think that subsidizing student loans is probably a good thing for the government to do in order to help create a more educated and hopefully more productive populance, I think that schools should be forced to publish stats on how much students make by major 1,2,5, and 10 years postgraduation. I think it would be eye opening. I also think that many universities are essentially in the business of selling defective products, if you consider (as I think the vast majority of people do) the point of college to be job training. I have friends who've gotten degrees in eg environmental studies and the university did not go out of their way to make clear how difficult it would be to get a job.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#59

Post by liedra »

robryan wrote: post #54
liedra wrote: post #15

Yet another reason I'm glad I went through the Australian system... government funded loans and subsidised education (I paid about 2.5k AUD per year for my degree, which is about US$2200, at one of the top universities in Australia), where the loans gather no interest aside from inflation and you don't have to start paying them back until you earn over a certain amount (and then the payments are automatically taken f…

It's about $7000 a year for HECS subsidised uni now, well for me anyway, just looking at that wikipedia entry you need to earn at least $42000 a year and at that rate you would be paying back $1600.

I assume it's $1600/year that you'd be paying back :) That's still not bad (I finished uni in 2003 and the Howard government was busy killing VSU and pushing the fees up at the time). Also, I believe it's tiered depending on what sort of degree you are studying too? So if you do arts or nursing or something that's either desperately wanted or not very "useful", it's a lot cheaper than if you do medicine or vet science.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#60

Post by liedra »

robryan wrote: post #50
liedra wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit close to home since I did a PhD in a "useless" area (philosophy) but my area of philosophy happens to be very popular at the moment in industry as well as university so it's more likely that I'd get a job (I do technology ethics). However, I have a friend who did a PhD in gender studies and is having a bit of trouble finding a permanent position (she tutors at university level). Mind you, unlike me, she wa…

It's true that there needs to be people in these areas and I don't think people should be discouraged from obtaining these degrees if they are really passionate about them. It's just they need to sit down before they start and assess if they are realistically going to be able to pay for what they are signing up for in the long run. The system may well suck but it's no good signing up for it all then crying fowl about…

Yeah, I agree that this woman made some pretty stupid decisions, I mean I wouldn't exactly get a home loan to buy a house unless I knew I would be able to pay it off! The difference though is that you probably wouldn't enter into a home loan situation unless you already had a job -- going to university is supposed to be the groundwork to get you a job. There's a much higher uncertainty there, so much bigger risk. But I mean I always think it's a good idea to have a backup plan -- I did a major in computer science too, and worked in industry as a programmer, and though I'm pretty poor (out of practice) at it and don't particularly enjoy it, I can always do it if I "get stuck". :)
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