61–70 of 77 posts
People think they need to pay $50k/year for an NYU education because the smaller, cheaper one located [insert your town] isn't nearly as good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?…
1) Making it more difficult for poor people to get the loans that are now pretty required for higher education is retrograde. The idea is to compensate for the already significant disadvantages that the poor face in climbing out of poverty, not to create yet another barrier. I'm guessing you're middle class, never experienced anything but?
2) Picking a subject out of the sky, like womens' studies, and declaring it "retarded" (classy in itself), is anti intellectual. What if evolution had to abide arbitrary rules about which biological configurations were "retarded" and which were acceptable? That's just not how it works.
There are three main actors in this case:
- The university that charged huge tuition fees for a course in Religious and Women's Studies. - The financial companies that loaned the huge sums of money needed to pay for those fees. - The poor girl who took out the loans to pay the tuition.
One could criticise the university either for charging such expensive tuition fees or for failing to provide advice that the girl needed. However, you could also argue that the university was acting in its own (financial) self interest. That self interest would have been damaged if the girl had gone to a cheaper university.
One could criticise the companies that loaned the girl the money, money that they must have known she would spend a lifetime repaying. However, again, they acted in their own financial self interest, knowing that they'd probably get their money one way or another.
One could also criticise the girl but the article makes it clear that she thought that she was acting in her own self interest by getting a degree that she thought would be of great help to her career.
Many commenters here have suggested that either the girl could have benefited from better advice when choosing a degree course (which would have helped her to better act in accordance with her self interest) or that student loans should be dischargeable under bankruptcy (which would be an incentive not to loan to students who would find it impossible to pay the loan off).
How about a third option, give the university an incentive that is better aligned with the interests of the student after graduation: instead of charging large tuition fees up front, a university could instead say "in exchange for getting a degree from us, you owe us a certain percentage of all of your future income." A lot of people are prepared to voluntarily give a tenth of their income to the church so why not to your alma mater? I guess it would be the equivalent of selling "shares" in yourself to the university rather than taking out a loan.
I'm sure there are a million reasons why this wouldn't be workable but it would be rather wonderful if the interests of the university and the student could be aligned in this way.
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…
They charge whatever the market will bear! Apparently there is a large intersection between "rich" and "willing to piss away four years on a nonproductive enterprise". Whodathunkit.
1000 words later... She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. [...] "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me." Words fail me.
I think that's a relic from the time when just having a degree did matter, but those days are over, and people are just starting to realize it. That being said, there's still a big problem with the ridiculous amount you have to pay for a degree these days.
Part of that has to do with the enormous fixed costs of running a college. For example; every walking path at a Maryland college I attended must be kept clear of snow and ice at all times. Including in the middle of a blizzard. This results in a friend of mine (and his whole department) working 16 hours a day during all snowstorms to keep the paths clear. During a blizzard, he makes hazard pay the first 8, then overtime hazard pay the second eight, and sleeps on campus. He paid his mortgage this year with just snow crew money.
So clearly cutting costs and unnecessary "services" would help. Cutting executive salaries would help too. But until student loans can be discharged in bankruptcy (thus forcing lenders and schools to actually cut tuition to match the value of a degree) nothing is likely to force schools to make the hard decisions.
1000 words later... She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. [...] "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me." Words fail me.
If you're going to get a liberal arts degree, either have enough money to afford it, or be so intensely interested in the liberal arts that you're willing to pay back your damn loans. There's no human right to be educated in something useless at no expense to yourself, and I say that as someone with a BA in philosophy.
Really, that is the justification in all this? I felt like I should get a loan (not "I truly need the loan because I've reasoned through all the details and risks involved") is now an excuse?
Who's fault is that exactly?
1000 words later... She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. [...] "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me." Words fail me.
If you're going to get a liberal arts degree, either have enough money to afford it, or be so intensely interested in the liberal arts that you're willing to pay back your damn loans. There's no human right to be educated in something useless at no expense to yourself, and I say that as someone with a BA in philosophy.
Yep, I know how that feels. I'd love to call a do-over and make sure I invested in AAPL around 2001/2002 and maybe some more in a few other companies as well (even MSFT at the time). Alas, the real world doesn't offer time machines, at least yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?…
I'm trying really hard not to down vote you. Since you kept it relatively civil, I won't, but let me say that I'm extremely disappointed in your attitude: 1) Making it more difficult for poor people to get the loans that are now pretty required for higher education is retrograde. The idea is to compensate for the already significant disadvantages that the poor face in climbing out of poverty, not to create yet anothe…
I applaud your restraint!
> . . . higher education is retrograde . . . not to create yet another barrier
The individual being discussed in this essay is far from unique. The question is whether many poor people aren't being saddled with even more debt for very little payoff; debt that the education lobby has made it very difficult to escape. Poor people studying in subjects for which there is likely to be a good return on the investment ought to still be able to get loans. But you won't see as many poor womens' studies majors. And you won't see as many poor kids woefully underprepared for college going in the first place to throw five or ten thousand dollars and two years of earning potential in the garbage when they have to drop out.
I think the takeaway is that sometimes it is good to limit peoples' ability to get credit if it's not going to be used for a productive purpose that's likely to result in it being paid back. But since you can't discharge the debt through bankruptcy, the banks have no incentive to help make this determination. I don't mean that there should be government mandated limits, by the way; I just want the government to stop giving people nooses to hang themselves with.
The other factor is that if we stop propping up the market, colleges will likely be forced to stop charging so much money, especially the private ones. Or they will do something like what Stanford has done and adopt a graduated pay scale to maintain that desirable trait of diversity.
> Picking a subject out of the sky
If you'll read the article you'll note that the person in question was a women's studies major. It's hardly picked out of the sky. But even if it was, what does it matter if I picked an example out of the constellation of disciplines whose study do not deserve financial support? I could have picked religious studies too but I had forgotten that part of her degree's name.
> What if evolution had to abide arbitrary rules
Might as well call gravity, by which evolution does have to abide, "arbitrary." The rule that makes Women's Studies retarded is that it's not a productive or useful course of education. To wit:
1. Essentially no one except a government subsidized education facility and a few rare counseling jobs will pay you more at the margin for having a degree in Women's Studies because it is useless and nobody wants to pay for that.
2. Women's Studies is not, in most cases, very important in determining how effective a feminist you will become.
So if no one will pay for it and it offers little broader societal benefit that we might want to subsidize, what is it for? The entire field, like academic literary criticism, is masturbatory. That is why it is stupid and study in it should not be subsidized. Especially for poor people who cannot use it to climb out of their difficult situation.
"It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners."
You know what ... anyone who would walk away from you because of your student debt is NOT a potential life partner.