Immediately fire nineteen out of twenty college administrators making more than $125k/yr. The cost reductions would be immense, with negligible impact otherwise. These hordes of millionaire administrators really don't serve any useful purpose.
For federal loans, which are the overwhelming majority of student loans the REPAYE plan allows borrowers to pay 10% of their income after 150% of the federal poverty line for their household size.
As a worked example a single person making $35,000 a year will owe $140/month regardless of total federal debt. After 20 years the remaining balance is forgiven (though the forgiven amount is taxable income).
There are certainly situations where ends can simply not be met, but in general it is not a good idea to default on those loans.
Nobody should be in that situation. You can make way more than $35,000 a year without even going to college. Doing that after college means that the college degree provided negative value.
One can look up jobs that don't need education past high school at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/ and see that there are 9 occupations with income of $75,000 or more, and numerous additional ones in the $55,000 to $74,999 range.
You could break $35,000 per year easily in the military. An E-1, the lowest rank, can do that if they get the housing allowance and submarine pay. An E-5, which is mid-level enlisted, can do it on base pay alone.
Smokejumpers get about $35,000 per year.
The national average for a truck driver is $43,464 or $75,672 per year, depending on who is counting. Either way, it beats $35,000 by quite a bit. Plumbers are about the same. Lots of trades people are doing way better than $35,000 per year.
So the answer it seems is to hide the worthless degree. For some of the really nonsense degrees, it might be better to let employers think you spent those years in prison. You'd get paid more if you didn't have the degree.
Both my father-in-law and an uncle ruined their health by truck driving. It seems to be common for truck drivers to not carry health insurance, as well. Therefore, medical bills have seriously eaten into their income.
I'd heavily discourage people from choosing the profession.
As a foreigner, it sounds to me the root of the problem is still university being way too expensive. Also, shouldn't the government provide direct financial assistance to low income people being admitted to good colleges without needing them to ever pay back?
In reverse: unlimited loans are give that cannot be waived in university. This bids up the cost of university and has schools compete on features rather than price.
In general, private university tuition is extremely expensive. There are certainly exceptions to this rule that keep costs reasonable--e.g. for the financially strapped, Stanford has a "student obligation" program[1] as an element of financial aid--but they're not all comparable.
Conversely, I personally think in-state tuition for public research universities of sound rapport are fair. A big issue is when an undergraduate student moves to a different state to study and is charged out-of-state tuition for at least a year before establishing residency; that single-year cost often exceeds what a 4-year student would pay at in-state rates. In some states--like CA--you're pretty much screwed[2] and will pay out-of-state rates comparable to private universities for the effective duration of study.
Then there's private student loans issued by banks at gouging rates. They're super easy to qualify for and super easy to get out of control. Anecdotally, I took one out (12.74%!) during my last semester of undergraduate study which amounted to ~10% of my total student loan obligation in the end before capitalization; it was my only option since I didn't meet full-time student status that semester and didn't qualify for federal aid. This was the first loan I paid off and within 6 months of graduating, yet the interest paid on this single private loan accounted for 15% of the interest paid on the 7 other federal student loans that I paid off over the subsequent 4.5 years! It's crazy to think what that one private student loan would have cost me if I had paid it off over 5 years, let alone a 10-year period that federal student loans are amortized over.
EDIT: > Also, shouldn't the government provide direct financial assistance to low income people being admitted to good colleges without needing them to ever pay back?
Forgot to mention, this takes the form of academic grants[3]. Pell and SMART Grants are fairly common.
I'm in the UK and went through tertiary education (Degree and Masters) at the point where we were switching towards the US model.
I never paid for the education itself, but never received any funding to pay for my existence over those years.
I was fortunate to have parents who could support me into my mid-twenties.
The system has changed since. We've got people racking up debts they're never going to pay off for useless degrees (in UK there's threshold of income before you have to repay, and if you never reach it, it's written off).
We've also got companies that used to recruit 'good' graduates (IT/accountancy behemoths) recruiting at school-exit age and offering a career to the good encumbered with debt.
My takeaway thought is that tertiary education is no longer worthwhile for the sake of education. We're becoming much more utilitarian.
Short term it makes sense, but long-term seems insane to not invest in people.
If you think the US government borrows money, look at the total amount and ask: who had that much money to loan? That much money did not exist to be borrowed.
It's pretty well accounted for. The money is borrowed from primarily the American people and American businesses in the from of treasury bills, notes, and securities.
Printing money does not increase the national debt (I'm assuming that is what you are referring to.)
Many of these schools have run deceptive marketing campaigns to convince students to get useless degrees. Meanwhile, many colleges have hired endless useless administrators, while most classes get taught by underpaid adjuncts. They should get rid of the loan guarantee and instead subsidize the cost of education or just give young people money.
The whole student loans system just seems designed to enslave students to debt. It is just a cruel way for elites to control people.
I wonder if it would help college tuition prices if the government were to institute a maximum bureaucrat/administrator to full time professor ratio for federally funded colleges/universities.
Unfortunately those bureaucrats are actually doing work. A good chunk of it is around Title IX since the consequences were so severe if you didn't have enough bureaucrats to handle the extra-judicial pseudo-tribunals to handle any sex-related allegations. Jump forward to the woke 2018s and now you need even more bureaucrats because all of a sudden each group needs a bureaucrat from it's own race/gender/religion/disability. And now we need even more processes because #metoo and #believethesurvivors and how do you handle a scenario like Mattress Girl which is basically a Kobayashi Maru for a university? So now we also need a bigger legal department and consultants to help develop best practices when there is no clear innocence or guilt, but if you don't assume guilt it could go viral and your funding will get hit.
And then people wonder why education is more expensive despite teaching staff getting paid less and less.
Wouldn't the sensible solution be to say exchange your tertiary education for say 25% of your income over the next 20 years?
Would seem sensible to align the interests of both the provider and the consumer to the common goal of making you worth more on the market.
But then there's the obvious next step of cutting out the middle-man and the government paying for the education and clawing it back with progressive taxation.
Maybe, maybe not. You'd then see universities working with employers to get you in the workplace on day one after graduation. Sounds great you say.
But, now you have someone else involved in your career and choices. They'll be mapping out your career for the next 20 years and your education will be tailored to just that employers practices.
Sure you'll be consulted and made to feel part of the process, but there would be a whole set of administration from the university making sure that you sit at a desk and bring in that money. It would be like HR for your life.
1. Remove all trade barriers, allowing corporations to outsource all low skill manufacturing jobs and ship back the finished product with no consequences
2. Don't enforce border laws, allowing the remaining low skill jobs that weren't offshored to be taken by illegal immigrants with no federal labor protection, forcing native citizens to go for higher education if they don't want to accept 3rd world wages
3. Create a student loan program that doesn't allow debt to be discharged and allows colleges to continually increase prices, resulting in skyrocketing tuition costs, turning your citizens into debt slaves and driving down skilled wages due to the flood of college graduates
4. Enjoy your increased profits as the middle class dies and is replaced by a two tier society of elites and plebes.
The current system has been created by corrupt politicians and the rich who have bought them. Productivity has increased but all the wealth is going to the rich because of current broken free trade laws allowing infinite labor arbitrage.
Nobody wants to hear it but the only reason people vote for anti-establishment candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is because the establishment is failing the people.
#3 could also be solved by not having the government back student loans and allow creditors to decide risk on things like your major, your GPA, or your class attendance record, but that would be insanely politically incorrect. Essentially you're either given an amount that your career will pay for, or you have to choose a major that will pay for an amount that you desire.
It will be great when individuals learn to not conflate institutionalized schooling with education; they may overlap in the best of times, but stick you with a raw deal if one is made to think they must take out a bunch of un-dischargable debt in order to pursue knowledge…
Though that will never happen, masses of people will always seek the easy solutions that fill the void, and opportunists will be willing to sell them it along the way.
> It’s really not about education it’s about credentials.
Credentialisim, yes, even better…
The trite Robin Hanson argument goes "X is not actually about X", where here X is education.[0]
>It’s really not workers who can decide to stop playing that game.
It's about people making choices. A lot of people choosing to go in debt without realistic options to pay it off, a lot of people thinking un-dishcharable debt by the federal government is a good thing, and a lot of people thinking they must enforce the above because reasons.
Interesting, but it’s missing the human factor. People that gather credentials have incentives to make them more important.
You can look at how quickly the MBA took off as a product of many things. But a huge factor is MBA programs convincing people taking them to higher other MBA’s.
Or how lawyers have made it illegal for people without the right credentials from practicing law.
If you get X degree you overestimate it’s importance and want to build a team of others with X degree. Thus the bias moves the equilibrium point. Further when asked you end up promoting the credentials to others considering getting them.
Yes, I get that. What I am saying is that one will ultimately have to face whatever downsides will be from engaging in what Hanson would call "Prestige-Based Discretion" if one actually cares about X and not just the signals of X https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based...:
"In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research.
This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress.
Of course if we don’t really care about research progress, or students learning, or medical effectiveness, etc., if what we mainly care about is just affiliating with the most impressive folks, well then all this isn’t much of a problem. But if we do care about these things, then unthinkingly presuming that the most prestigious people are the best to tell us how to do things, that can go very very wrong."
And many years later when an increasingly non productive citizens can no longer be expected to reasonably shoulder the tax burden, when governments can no longer borrow agaisnt the future, the piper will be paid… but somehow, this time is different… yawn…
If you are referring to certain privileged european countries compared to others, the piper has yet to be paid… unless you think negative real interest rates on government debt will last forever with no repercussions…
Yeah but most people don't have the environment growing up to appreciate learning and knowledge.
Learning itself is a skill...and University teaches you how to learn and to appreciate knowledge...no matter what degree you get you're better off afterwards.
It's sad the capitalistic cynicism about University these days.
I have a feeling it's going to hurt us massively in the long run.
> Learning itself is a skill...and University teaches you how to learn and to appreciate knowledge
True that learning is a skill. University is not the only place people can "learn to learn", it is one option out of innumerable many that people can think of if they can so dare to imagine.
>...no matter what degree you get you're better off afterwards.
I think some people would question this when they get to the point where they are destitute trying to pay off loans that they can't discharge, which I'm not sure how capitalist non discharagble loans are. Usually, a lendee being able to default on a loan is the risk lenders take when underwriting…
> I have a feeling it's going to hurt us massively in the long run.
I disagree with that statement, the church (like universities are now) use to be a massive powerful force that acted as a gate keeper to knowledge, and over time, became mostly irrelevant to such ends…
>University is not the only place people can "learn to learn.
I disagree. There are no institutions in modern capitalism that teach you how to learn if you don't already know how. It's extremely rare for them to even train you in skills they need if you already KNOW how to learn.
>think some people would question this when they get to the point where they are destitute trying to pay off loans
Hence my original point...
> Claiming that universities are a gate keeper to knowledge in the age of the internet...
You are missing the point of universities and basically everything I've just said.
> I disagree. There are no institutions in modern capitalism that teach you how to learn if you don't already know how. It's extremely rare for them to even train you in skills they need if you already KNOW how to learn.
Man, how did people ever learn to do anything before institutions arise? Oh yes, the glorious institutions of spear making and rock chucking.
> Hence my original point...
Calling something capitalist when it is not? Seems like a straw man… no matter what the institution, perverse incentives will corrupt it if left unchecked, society will either put a bullet to its head, or make it irrelevant in the long run except to the most ardent believers.
> > Claiming that universities are a gate keeper to knowledge in the age of the internet... You are missing the point of universities and basically everything I've just said.
I said nothing about the internet, you added that.
I'm sure there were priests proselytizing in the past to others about the point of the Church in the pursuit of knowledge…
you've romanticized higher education into something it's never been. It started off as a means for the children of the wealthy to network and show off that they were wealthy enough to waste years of their lives learning information with no practical value like Latin. Actual useful skills required for society to function were learned on the job
The most logical and efficient option is for the government to subsidize some open source books for crucial topics and then provide a testing and credential system to prove knowledge on said topic.
Both of the two things you mention are great ideas, but don't necessarily require a state actor. It could be a good thing for a state to kick of and get the ball rolling.
5.) Make it legal to form a PAC that can take unlimited money from any entity or person globally and spend it on politicians to ensure the cycle of wealthy people doesn’t break.
6.) Watch socialism and communism become more interesting systems of governance again as more people are frustrated.
It's easy to criticize federal student loan programs, but there's an even bigger problem: people are choosing majors that aren't valuable in the market, and are later somehow surprised they are worse off than when they started. Weird.
We're also bad at predicting what's valuable in the market, and lots of just-so stories aren't true (i.e. not all STEM majors are viable or better than some humanities degrees).
> people are choosing majors that aren't valuable in the market, and are later somehow surprised they are worse off than when they started
It's not "people," it's children.
Children who are told by every single successful adult they trust that they need to go to college and that it doesn't matter what they get the degree in, just that they have one.
There's another big problem: People who choose valuable majors end up with classes that don't matter with professors that don't care, with a university that puts more effort and money into advertising than quality of life.
The fact that you have to spend 4 years to get a bachelors in something is complete BS. Padded time. Universities really don't pander to the 'market', they are their own market and you being prepared for the workforce is an afterthought based upon how much your instructor cares about it.
The only times these becomes exceptions is in Engineering, Law, and Medicine. Things that have dedicated schoolings for them. It's still padded but they have an explicit direction that feeds into a market.
It's stuck this way because accreditation creates a cartel.
To issue an accreditation degree, time-wasting requirements must be satisfied. Accreditation requirements are effectively controlled by the customers, which are the universities that are already accredited. Those universities don't want competition to be able to offer students a better deal, with a cheaper degree or with a more-focused degree full of classes that are expensive to operate.
For example, consider a 4-year BS in Computer Science. It contains about 1 year of Computer Science, 1 year of vaguely-related things (physics, calculus, etc.) and 2 years of cheap filler nonsense that makes you less-educated than when you started.
Accreditation blocks any attempt to offer a full 4 years of actual value.
Letting "the market" decide what is and isn't valuable in terms of human knowledge seems dubious at best. We are talking about a system that prioritizes extraction of non-renewable resources to produce dumb shit like bluetooth toothbrushes.
"Value" is subjective - you or I might value a type of knowledge differently from the way the market does.
However, to the extent that a student is pursuing an education as a means to achieve employment and income, the value of a piece of knowledge to the student _is_ its value to the market.
That an education should be pursued primarily or solely as a means to achieve employment is even more dubious. Unless, of course, you're trying to claim that having a highly educated populace isn't, in and of itself, a Social Good?
I'm not claiming that, or making any value proposition at all.
I'm saying IF your main or only goal is career advancement, THEN the value of a college education to you is the same as the value of that education to the market.
If you have other goals then by all means major in Theater, Filipino Literature, Marine Biology, or whatever major best suits your goals.
The GP's point, in the post you replied to above, is that you should not expect, having done that, to be able to easily repay a $100k loan.
Maybe your point is that we should, as a society, revise our scheme for funding people's educations, so that the pursuit of degrees in less lucrative fields is not such a burden. And if so, maybe you're right.
The fact is, though, a lot of college students have no clear goals. Maybe they want a job after they get out but don't know what. Or maybe their parents just expect them to get a degree but haven't given them much guidance in choosing a major. If such a student chooses "Communications" or English Lit just because it seems easier or somewhat more interesting than a more technical field, and they just have vague expectations of being better able to find employment having finished their degree, I don't think it qualifies as much of a social good for the student to get that education. I certainly don't want to pay for it in my tax dollars.
What happens when people peacefully revoke their consent to be governed in such a manner?
Or leave the country?
Or simply the economy?
I'm no longer participating in the traditional workforce, choosing instead to meet my needs primarily through decentralized communities founded around giving or trading. I have no wages to garnish. What are they going to do? Jail me? Pretty sure that's no longer considered legal.
Even if I'm wrong, what happens when a large collective of people do this? How will investors respond?
The Buy Nothing Project is awesome. Most recent things my wife and I have gotten: a slightly queen mattress, a cosleeper for our 2 week old, a breastfeeding pillow, baby clothes to fit our slightly smaller-than-most-newborn-clothes newborn. We got these things in the past 2 weeks for free.
When it comes to our friends, we all offer support in various ways to each other, including mediating conflicts between couples or groups. Most of us practice nonviolent communication to various degrees. We orient ourselves around mutual aid and practice asking/offering help on a near-daily basis.
Edit: I'll add more later. I'm exhausted and falling asleep trying to type.
68 comments
[ 0.95 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadAs a worked example a single person making $35,000 a year will owe $140/month regardless of total federal debt. After 20 years the remaining balance is forgiven (though the forgiven amount is taxable income).
There are certainly situations where ends can simply not be met, but in general it is not a good idea to default on those loans.
One can look up jobs that don't need education past high school at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/ and see that there are 9 occupations with income of $75,000 or more, and numerous additional ones in the $55,000 to $74,999 range.
You could break $35,000 per year easily in the military. An E-1, the lowest rank, can do that if they get the housing allowance and submarine pay. An E-5, which is mid-level enlisted, can do it on base pay alone.
Smokejumpers get about $35,000 per year.
The national average for a truck driver is $43,464 or $75,672 per year, depending on who is counting. Either way, it beats $35,000 by quite a bit. Plumbers are about the same. Lots of trades people are doing way better than $35,000 per year.
So the answer it seems is to hide the worthless degree. For some of the really nonsense degrees, it might be better to let employers think you spent those years in prison. You'd get paid more if you didn't have the degree.
I'd heavily discourage people from choosing the profession.
Conversely, I personally think in-state tuition for public research universities of sound rapport are fair. A big issue is when an undergraduate student moves to a different state to study and is charged out-of-state tuition for at least a year before establishing residency; that single-year cost often exceeds what a 4-year student would pay at in-state rates. In some states--like CA--you're pretty much screwed[2] and will pay out-of-state rates comparable to private universities for the effective duration of study.
Then there's private student loans issued by banks at gouging rates. They're super easy to qualify for and super easy to get out of control. Anecdotally, I took one out (12.74%!) during my last semester of undergraduate study which amounted to ~10% of my total student loan obligation in the end before capitalization; it was my only option since I didn't meet full-time student status that semester and didn't qualify for federal aid. This was the first loan I paid off and within 6 months of graduating, yet the interest paid on this single private loan accounted for 15% of the interest paid on the 7 other federal student loans that I paid off over the subsequent 4.5 years! It's crazy to think what that one private student loan would have cost me if I had paid it off over 5 years, let alone a 10-year period that federal student loans are amortized over.
EDIT: > Also, shouldn't the government provide direct financial assistance to low income people being admitted to good colleges without needing them to ever pay back?
Forgot to mention, this takes the form of academic grants[3]. Pell and SMART Grants are fairly common.
[1] https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/how/student.html
[2] https://www.ucop.edu/residency/residency-requirements.html
[3] https://www2.ed.gov/programs/smart/index.html
Of course, the federal government borrows much more than that each year in new debt, though it's at best unclear if this is really a positive.
[0] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/commentaries/2018...
Printing money does not increase the national debt (I'm assuming that is what you are referring to.)
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/mspd/mspd.htm
The whole student loans system just seems designed to enslave students to debt. It is just a cruel way for elites to control people.
And then people wonder why education is more expensive despite teaching staff getting paid less and less.
But, now you have someone else involved in your career and choices. They'll be mapping out your career for the next 20 years and your education will be tailored to just that employers practices.
Sure you'll be consulted and made to feel part of the process, but there would be a whole set of administration from the university making sure that you sit at a desk and bring in that money. It would be like HR for your life.
1. Remove all trade barriers, allowing corporations to outsource all low skill manufacturing jobs and ship back the finished product with no consequences
2. Don't enforce border laws, allowing the remaining low skill jobs that weren't offshored to be taken by illegal immigrants with no federal labor protection, forcing native citizens to go for higher education if they don't want to accept 3rd world wages
3. Create a student loan program that doesn't allow debt to be discharged and allows colleges to continually increase prices, resulting in skyrocketing tuition costs, turning your citizens into debt slaves and driving down skilled wages due to the flood of college graduates
4. Enjoy your increased profits as the middle class dies and is replaced by a two tier society of elites and plebes.
The current system has been created by corrupt politicians and the rich who have bought them. Productivity has increased but all the wealth is going to the rich because of current broken free trade laws allowing infinite labor arbitrage.
Nobody wants to hear it but the only reason people vote for anti-establishment candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is because the establishment is failing the people.
Why capitalism is involved I have no idea.
Ignorant people favor simple political messages...which is one reason certain groups of politicians put education immediately on the chopping block.
Though that will never happen, masses of people will always seek the easy solutions that fill the void, and opportunists will be willing to sell them it along the way.
Workers who can decide to stop playing that game.
Credentialisim, yes, even better…
The trite Robin Hanson argument goes "X is not actually about X", where here X is education.[0]
>It’s really not workers who can decide to stop playing that game.
It's about people making choices. A lot of people choosing to go in debt without realistic options to pay it off, a lot of people thinking un-dishcharable debt by the federal government is a good thing, and a lot of people thinking they must enforce the above because reasons.
[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/who-wants-school.html
You can look at how quickly the MBA took off as a product of many things. But a huge factor is MBA programs convincing people taking them to higher other MBA’s.
Or how lawyers have made it illegal for people without the right credentials from practicing law.
because reasons addresses this, each individual reason given is not really that important to understand what can come from it over time.
> Or how lawyers have made it illegal for people without the right credentials from practicing law.
This might be true now, and for when it comes to representing others that are not yourself, but this does not have to remain true.
If you get X degree you overestimate it’s importance and want to build a team of others with X degree. Thus the bias moves the equilibrium point. Further when asked you end up promoting the credentials to others considering getting them.
"In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research.
This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress.
Of course if we don’t really care about research progress, or students learning, or medical effectiveness, etc., if what we mainly care about is just affiliating with the most impressive folks, well then all this isn’t much of a problem. But if we do care about these things, then unthinkingly presuming that the most prestigious people are the best to tell us how to do things, that can go very very wrong."
Knowledge and credentials to better oneself and the economy at large should be available to anyone who is willing to put in the work.
Intellectual capital of a countries citizens is the best investment of tax money there can be.
That's like saying people work ONLY for the money.
Learning itself is a skill...and University teaches you how to learn and to appreciate knowledge...no matter what degree you get you're better off afterwards.
It's sad the capitalistic cynicism about University these days.
I have a feeling it's going to hurt us massively in the long run.
True that learning is a skill. University is not the only place people can "learn to learn", it is one option out of innumerable many that people can think of if they can so dare to imagine.
>...no matter what degree you get you're better off afterwards.
I think some people would question this when they get to the point where they are destitute trying to pay off loans that they can't discharge, which I'm not sure how capitalist non discharagble loans are. Usually, a lendee being able to default on a loan is the risk lenders take when underwriting…
> I have a feeling it's going to hurt us massively in the long run.
I disagree with that statement, the church (like universities are now) use to be a massive powerful force that acted as a gate keeper to knowledge, and over time, became mostly irrelevant to such ends…
I disagree. There are no institutions in modern capitalism that teach you how to learn if you don't already know how. It's extremely rare for them to even train you in skills they need if you already KNOW how to learn.
>think some people would question this when they get to the point where they are destitute trying to pay off loans
Hence my original point...
> Claiming that universities are a gate keeper to knowledge in the age of the internet...
You are missing the point of universities and basically everything I've just said.
Man, how did people ever learn to do anything before institutions arise? Oh yes, the glorious institutions of spear making and rock chucking.
> Hence my original point...
Calling something capitalist when it is not? Seems like a straw man… no matter what the institution, perverse incentives will corrupt it if left unchecked, society will either put a bullet to its head, or make it irrelevant in the long run except to the most ardent believers.
> > Claiming that universities are a gate keeper to knowledge in the age of the internet... You are missing the point of universities and basically everything I've just said.
I said nothing about the internet, you added that.
I'm sure there were priests proselytizing in the past to others about the point of the Church in the pursuit of knowledge…
It's actually a perfect metaphor for conservative vs progressives views of the world.
The most logical and efficient option is for the government to subsidize some open source books for crucial topics and then provide a testing and credential system to prove knowledge on said topic.
6.) Watch socialism and communism become more interesting systems of governance again as more people are frustrated.
It's not "people," it's children.
Children who are told by every single successful adult they trust that they need to go to college and that it doesn't matter what they get the degree in, just that they have one.
The fact that you have to spend 4 years to get a bachelors in something is complete BS. Padded time. Universities really don't pander to the 'market', they are their own market and you being prepared for the workforce is an afterthought based upon how much your instructor cares about it.
The only times these becomes exceptions is in Engineering, Law, and Medicine. Things that have dedicated schoolings for them. It's still padded but they have an explicit direction that feeds into a market.
To issue an accreditation degree, time-wasting requirements must be satisfied. Accreditation requirements are effectively controlled by the customers, which are the universities that are already accredited. Those universities don't want competition to be able to offer students a better deal, with a cheaper degree or with a more-focused degree full of classes that are expensive to operate.
For example, consider a 4-year BS in Computer Science. It contains about 1 year of Computer Science, 1 year of vaguely-related things (physics, calculus, etc.) and 2 years of cheap filler nonsense that makes you less-educated than when you started.
Accreditation blocks any attempt to offer a full 4 years of actual value.
However, to the extent that a student is pursuing an education as a means to achieve employment and income, the value of a piece of knowledge to the student _is_ its value to the market.
I'm saying IF your main or only goal is career advancement, THEN the value of a college education to you is the same as the value of that education to the market.
If you have other goals then by all means major in Theater, Filipino Literature, Marine Biology, or whatever major best suits your goals.
The GP's point, in the post you replied to above, is that you should not expect, having done that, to be able to easily repay a $100k loan.
Maybe your point is that we should, as a society, revise our scheme for funding people's educations, so that the pursuit of degrees in less lucrative fields is not such a burden. And if so, maybe you're right.
The fact is, though, a lot of college students have no clear goals. Maybe they want a job after they get out but don't know what. Or maybe their parents just expect them to get a degree but haven't given them much guidance in choosing a major. If such a student chooses "Communications" or English Lit just because it seems easier or somewhat more interesting than a more technical field, and they just have vague expectations of being better able to find employment having finished their degree, I don't think it qualifies as much of a social good for the student to get that education. I certainly don't want to pay for it in my tax dollars.
Or leave the country?
Or simply the economy?
I'm no longer participating in the traditional workforce, choosing instead to meet my needs primarily through decentralized communities founded around giving or trading. I have no wages to garnish. What are they going to do? Jail me? Pretty sure that's no longer considered legal.
Even if I'm wrong, what happens when a large collective of people do this? How will investors respond?
Care to share any more details? This sounds like an unusual and interesting lifestyle.
https://buynothingproject.org
When it comes to our friends, we all offer support in various ways to each other, including mediating conflicts between couples or groups. Most of us practice nonviolent communication to various degrees. We orient ourselves around mutual aid and practice asking/offering help on a near-daily basis.
Edit: I'll add more later. I'm exhausted and falling asleep trying to type.