I've read that more Americans start college than in other developed countries but that the fraction of college graduates is similar. This suggests that there are too many unqualified students attending college in the U.S., and if the declining enrollments are coming primarily from that group, it's a good thing.
And now there are movements to eliminate SATs or similar standardized tests, allowing more unqualified students to enter college.
Enrollment might also be down because of COVID. For many, I think, college is more about getting away from home and living in a fun-filled alternate world for a few years with dorm rooms, frat parties, etc. With remote classes and restrictions, why bother?
(I'm imagining here -- I commuted to a local 4-year college on a public bus while also working. Then got my Master's degree in the evening while working full-time, in the early 80s.)
SATs are the dumbest thing I've encountered in testing. In the US scoring high in some SATs will even qualify you for Mensa(gifted stamp).
There are a handful of companies that own a huge margin of the standardized testing market(Pearson being one of them). From selling new test learning books every year, to the massive global standardized testing training market.
Maybe the movements to eliminate SATs have a different agenda, but generally the main reason you need those SATs is because the average education level in the US is so horrendous. Instead of fixing that problem there are a handful organizations acting as money printing machines and gatekeepers for higher education. It's frankly disgusting.
If you ever had to take ANY kind of industrialized generalized test, whether it's ISC2, PMI, 6 Sigma, TLA+ or just SAT's or IELTS/TOEFL GRE or even just normal US university multiple choice as a non American you might find the whole ordeal infuriatingly insulting(unless you studied medicine, in which case it's similar across the globe)
It's a lazy cop out for not giving teacher enough resources to actually teach.
College admissions officers need some way to decide which applicants to accept. If they don't use SAT scores then what should they use instead? SAT scores have pretty good correlation with college academic success (although not perfect). High school grades can't really be compared between schools due to inconsistent grading standards.
It used to be common for selective colleges to administer their own proprietary admission exams. But that was a huge burden on students applying to multiple schools, hence the switch to standardized testing.
> If they don't use SAT scores then what should they use instead?
The answer depends on institution type.
Highly Selective Institutions: the admissions process is so hands-on and personal that I could believe they are able to get a good sense of each candidate without testing. E.g., I absolutely believe Harvard's admissions folks have the bandwidth to compare grades between high schools (not that they need to). And they do all sorts of stuff that gives you a better sense for the candidate than test scores (alumni interviews, essays, rec letters, delving into performance in highly competitive extra-curriculars, exceptional community service work, etc).
Non-Selective Institutions (let's say admissions >70%): Standardized tests are kind of a waste of time and money for all involved. These institutions are functionally admitting everyone who can manage to fill out the admissions paperwork and didn't systematically fail high school courses. It makes sense to make test scores optional, because there might be a few diamonds in the 30% "oof" pile who can pull off a decent SAT score to compensate for their D-average-no-honors-courses transcript. But requiring the SAT/ACT is silly when your admissions standards are extremely low.
Moderately Selective Institutions: I definitely see utility in these universities still using the SAT. But notice that this is actually a very small set of institutions. Perhaps 100-300 the US's 3K+ colleges fit in this category.
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FWIW, my opinion on SAT/ACT is somewhere in the middle.
I think standardized tests can be an excellent instrument when some form of assessment is necessary but more nuanced assessments of merit are cost-prohibitive. So for places like competitive state flagships, I think getting rid of testing and replacing it with an admissions process that works at least as good as testing is probably more expensive than it's worth.
However, I also think the pro-testing camp is often extremely hyperbolic. Testing is just one way of assessing merit. It has all sorts of flaws. Tests are a model, and all models are wrong.
As an aside, I'm not surprised that so many pro-SAT-the-sky-is-falling folks are mathematicians. That entire field is completely fucked up when in comes to testing. Math as a discipline is bad about intellectual peacocking in general... if you think Mensa is insufferable, spend an afternoon in a math dept. Math professors are exactly the last set of people in the world I would trust to have a healthy attitude toward the ability of testing to suss out real merit. They literally talk about their prelim exams the same way frat bros talk about hazing rituals. Systematic misuse of testing is the second biggest reason that people choose to do phds in math-adjacent fields instead of math. (The biggest reason is job prospects.)
The average is not great, but it hides the underlying cause. If you look into education scores more closely you will find that subpopulations have greatly varying results. This implies that it isnt just about schools.
The same goes for infant mortality. People cite infant mortality as evidence that our healthcare system sucks. But really infant mortality is clustered in certain sub populations.
The same goes for murder rates and gun violence.
Unfortunately the problems cannot be fixed until people admit and are willing to talk about the underlying actual root causes.
I would have had a hard time recommending that someone start college during the pandemic given the option to defer for a year (or more). Of course, alternative activities weren't in a great place either.
I also have first-hand knowledge of a fair number of students who took some time off during the pandemic.
Some people fail out of college because the work is beyond their capabilities, but I think a significant percentage of people who start college but don't graduate do so for reasons other than being simply unqualified.
I admit it's anecdotal, but very few people I know who started college but didn't finish didn't finish due to academic reasons.
I am rather certain that, at least when I attended a decade ago, my university leaned into this as a revenue source.
My school, Michigan Tech, is in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a remote location averaging over 200" of snow per year with the nearest major city over 5 hours away, and most students traveling 8+ hours from their parent's homes in SE Michigan. The application was 4 pages long: 1 page of info, 2 pages for me to fill out, 1 for my guidance counselor. No essays. So, very easy to be accepted to, 90%+ acceptance rate.
The second year return rate was below 70% at the time, and anecdotally many freshmen didn't return for second semester after going home for Christmas. Not only is it remote, cold, and not sunny, but there was a dearth of women and some tough weeder classes (chemistry, calc 2).
If you can finish, you're in a great spot. Eng degrees from there are quite well regarded regionally (competitive with University of Michigan) and graduates had lower debt than any other school in the state. It seems obvious that the university avoided a more stringent up-front filter so it could soak kids for a year or two before forcing them out due to grades or environment.
I'm not sure that's entirely unreasonable, as I'm not sure how they could predict who would leave due to environment, but I also knew many freshmen who were obviously not setup to succeed academically, and didn't.
I went to a state school with a similar strategy: accept basically everyone then thin the herd with some brutal weed out courses. I don't think it was some cynical strategy to raise revenue though; they also offered tons of remedial courses to give ill-prepared students a chance to catch up.
imo this is an appropriate way for a public school to operate. everyone gets a shot, but people that can't make it get failed out early. way less debt for the student than dropping out years later, and more frugal with public funds too.
Obviously, but a university packages it up into one integrated community. You can't pay to create a community. Maybe that's worth it to you or maybe it isn't. I spent eight years in university in total and really enjoyed it.
I believe the socializing/networking thing is over-sold unless you go to a top-tier uni where students may be from wealthy families and are therefore well socialized, or do something non-cs like business studies. Everyone i studied with were introverts (gamer-types). High school was way better for socializing. Oh and there were like 2 females total in all of my CS classes.
> Everyone i studied with were introverts (gamer-types).
Trick is to find ways out of the engineering department. I did Latin as an optional, and I was in a sports team where nobody was an engineer. Plus presumably you aren't living in an engineering-specific halls?
why bother? you enroll to a college, you collect a huge debt that the government is not going to cancel - they prefer to give money to corporations instead.
covid-19 disrupted in-person education and it's not gonna away any time soon.
at the same time there are plenty of crypto startups that don't give a sh*t about education and could be pretty lukrative
Bad spelling/grammar are mostly just due to modern technology where people communicate differently. Those things aren't as important as they once were. You'll see "highly educated" individuals making the same mistakes.
Lastly, there's the possibility you're speaking with someone who is not a native English speaker. Obviously, with your high IQ you should have been able to consider that scenario though ;)
This is probably related to teenagers enrolling in college not only for an education but also for the amenities that come with college life (think of greek life, moving away from parents, college sports, freedom to explore your identity, etc.) The pandemic has put a stop on most of all non-academic stuff, making enrolling in college less appealing to this group of students.
It will be interesting to see a follow-up analysis that parses out enrollment behavior by subgroup (e.g., by SAT/ACT score) as it will be easier to understand who is choosing not to enroll in college.
Another follow-up could be to see which institutions are losing students. It is known that college enrollment is counter-cyclical to the economy and that enrollment declines at community colleges and open access universities when people can get a job right out of high school.
Most of the amenities you speak of are not available at community colleges, which have seen the biggest decline. The pandemic definitely figures into this, but I don't think amenities can account for the large decline in certificate and vocational training this represents.
Community college has also gotten really expensive. I was looking at the price for my alma matter, tuition has more than doubled since I graduated in 2010. The price has gone up faster than my university’s tuition, making the community college less competitive. I wouldn’t be surprised if economics also is contributing to declining community college enrollment.
No, it isn't. A tight labor market which provides more opportunities for on-the-job training is positive for everybody except those who made their money selling fake tickets.
US colleges have many students from foreign countries on visas. I wonder what the impact of the pandemic is on that segment of the student population.
This isn't likely to hit community colleges, which the article touches on. Just trying to point out that digging deeper might show some interesting details.
> US colleges have many students from foreign countries on visas. I wonder what the impact of the pandemic is on that segment of the student population.
The elephant in the room is that those foreign students are also the ones paying sticker price and subsidizing college for the other students, even at public schools.
colleges have been expanding with zero constraints for 20+ years - demand for degrees increased significantly, enrollment went up and up, student loans being federally backed were given out to anyone for any amount so tuition naturally increased substantially. seemingly limitless growth opportunity?
now many are massively bloated organizations with declining utility and the need to maintain their perpetual growth - who wants to cut costs? the downward spiral is only going to accelerate, IMO. and that doesn't even account for declining birth rates. my feeling is the next 20 years will see the higher ed industry contract rather quickly and the universities that remain will deliver either on quality (increasingly difficult to hold an advantage) or accessibility (inexpensive, contemporary workforce training since employers no longer do that).
Enrollment in higher ed decreased 7% from 2008 to 2018. It’s not true that colleges have been expanding with zero constraints. The increase in tuition at public colleges and universities has occurred with the decrease in public funding per student. At my system 20 years ago roughly 60% of the cost of education was publicly funded and now it is 40%. We’ve correspondingly increased tuition.
thank you for linking stats. going back to 1998 there is clearly huge growth. total enrollment might already be taking a hit but i am referring more to the expenditure side of things - dorm buildings, campus luxuries, etc. the figures from your link display this, IMO. especially the expenditures.
but to be fair, yes the stats do indicate a decrease in enrollment. however degrees conferred has increased despite a decline in enrollment, any guesses as to that?
There was growth in enrollment up until 2010. Colleges have been struggling since then. They need bodies and need to attract students. Standards for acceptance have gone down and grade inflation has gone up. Though grade inflation has been a thing for many decades now.
As to your question. It’s easier to get a degree now since standards have been lowered since we need to retain students. The cost of acquiring a student is much higher than retaining a student so a lot of effort has gone into retention. What this boils down to in my opinion is the need to pass students. Not failing students is the easiest way to retain them.
makes sense, i hadn't thought about the grade inflation aspect. somewhat akin to the prevalence of fraud in asset bubbles.
i also wonder if something like the power law is in play - larger schools fairing better with a larger student base to allocate acquisition costs over, vs smaller specialty schools. anecdotally i have seen one or two small schools close to me close/merge with other schools.
That's average, but when you look at what happens on the ground, the winners, like the name brand schools you've probably heard of before, are all expanding and building new dorms and labs and athletic facilities, and the losers, those random liberal arts schools in the middle of nowhere in new england and such, are closing down and selling off their property. It's hard to find a major university that isn't constructing some massive donor-backed capital project as we speak, and acceptance rates at major state schools across the board has been dropping like a stone; even schools like Cal State are becoming very competitive.
Might be a good think. You're not going to be overburdened by debt. You don't have to spend some of your time learning worthless topics. You might not meet as many women, which let's face it is a big reason to go to college. At least in programming you can train yourself to make well over 6 figures without any formal education. You might need a mentor. If there are any high school grads not going to college who are looking for a tech mentor, reach out.
Less than 3k kids under the age of 24 have died from covid since the start of the pandemic [0] yet they have some how wound up with the harshest restrictions.
These kids will never get these years back. What a disgrace.
The problem with highly infectious diseases is those who get it also infect others. The professors are likely in the age bracket that has a higher risk than the student.
China has been very successful at preventing the original variants from spreading. So they provide an existence proof that it is possible, at least pre-Omicron.
I'd rather live with ineffective American lockdowns than effective Chinese ones, but the Chinese example falsifies your statement.
Yeah I wouldn't believe anything related to the virus coming from China, especially numbers that make the CCP look good. They have too much of an incentive to lie, even more so that its finally not taboo to believe that the Wuhan lab was responsible for the outbreak.
Stop the cringe, China does not live outside of the World. Plenty of occidental people live in China and they would report if any member of their entourage was getting covid.
Also it's proven at this point that covid came from bats.
Like that number isn't horrendous in and of itself, but let's not forget that many young adults that have had Covid likely gave it to someone vulnerable as well.
It's not just who dies directly from Covid. It's also the spread of it to vulnerable populations.
It boggles the mind that this still has to be repeated. How many 22 year olds coming back from spring break will kill one of their parents or grandparents?
There are actually people that the vaccines won’t help. They are immunocompromised. They can only be protected by high vaccination rates and zero exposure to Covid.
Yes, but those people will never stop being vulnerable. Covid is never going away, period. Anyone saying otherwise has been living in a fantasy for nearly 2 years at this point. So completely distorting society to ensure zero Covid exposure has not only proven itself to be relatively ineffective, but it would be required to be done forever.
The situation will be no different in a year or 5 years than it is from now, so continuing to argue for societal shutdown is completely untenable.
So your plan is to harm millions in order to protect tens?
People who are immunocompromised have a tough life, but we can't shut down the world for them. COVID is here to stay. Forever. You can't shut the world down forever.
The temporary financial harm of everyone in exchange for ending the pandemic or ignoring the pandemic, hoping it goes away, but because so many people are unvaccinated, it keeps morphing and costing us billions of dollars anyway.
I can understand your opinion to a perspective, but I feel the position has changed dramatically. At this point, vaccines are available.
There is almost no feasibility in eliminating COVID at this point in time. It will mutate, and hence we need to be talking about the possibility of 'living with the disease'.
As such, how much damage are we doing damaging the education, and critical periods for these youths?
If the problem is protecting the parents and grandparents, why not do that, and isolate them rather than permanently damaging the youth.
In my college system I’m responsible for cleaning my classroom after each use. If I forget to do this and a student gets sick then I’m personally liable. I’m not paid enough to clean classrooms and teach and I’m not taking on the liability. Thus, I haven’t taught in the classroom for the last 2 years.
That is outrageous if true. An airborne virus is best treated with ventilation (i.e. opening windows). Surface transmission almost never happens [1]. The irony of course being that having a cleaner go in and out of rooms poses much greater risk of spread.
I went to the hospital two days ago. Plenty of COVID warnings were posted all over the place. One was a sign, last updated in February of 2020, that suggested you leave if you’ve been in contact with anyone who recently travelled to China, Korea, Iran, or Italy.
Consider that some colleges asked students to sign liability waivers to go back to the classroom. I don’t have the memorandum the chancellor sent to us at the beginning of the pandemic so I can’t prove that my statement is truthful but it does appear plausible given that some colleges asked students to sign waivers.
I don’t know if the rules that my system put in place at the beginning of the pandemic are still in force. They may have put that rule in place just to make sure we all went online when this mess first started. I just know I’m not going back to the classroom until most of my colleagues do too. My college is still almost entirely online.
EDIT: Chancellor’s memorandum was about cleaning protocols. The union advised us on liability issues and said that we could be liable for sicknesses if we fail to follow the protocol. My union membership includes a $1 million liability coverage for the classroom. They might have brought up this as a way of saying that our classroom insurance does not cover this possibility.
And yet we are 2 years into the pandemic with 0 successful lawsuits over personal liability for poor cleaning. There's just no realistic legal liability in the situation described.
> the relative risk of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is considered low compared with direct contact, droplet transmission, or airborne transmission
How on earth could they possibly identify your lack of cleaning with someone's infection? Seems like something that sounds scary but the real world implications are meaningless.
"I'm young and healthy, I should be allowed to spread a new virus to the entire planet. The health of my society is not my responsibility. What a disgrace."
> The logic follows that we should have let the original and more deadly variants rip through society?
I participate in two communities - one that completely ignores COVID (except for a couple months at the very very beginning). They don't test, they don't care if someone is positive. Lots of people are vaccinated, but lots aren't (they all had COVID, they can't think of any reason to get vaccinated since they already are immnune).
And another one that is freaked out about COVID, mask wearing, vaccine or you are excluded from everything, social distancing, keep everything closed.
Somehow the longterm death rate is the same in both - except for those first few months. But the mental health in the open community is far better.
It's over. COVID is over. It's time to stop closing everything. Take the vaccine (or don't if that's the risk you chose to take), and stop this meaningless theater.
Anecdotes are useless. And my experience has been the opposite of yours. Nil deaths, one infection, same mental health for the cares-about-COVID community. The community that doesn’t has had 3 deaths, dozens of infections, and worsened mental health from the deaths of loved ones.
So why am I supposed to give more of a shit about your anecdote than my experience again?
>It's over. COVID is over. It's time to stop closing everything.
Uh we know. We’re talking about what happened in the past. Everyone has been using past tense verbs.
The only reason we locked down initially was to "flatten the curve". This doesn't mean eliminate the virus, it meant slow it down long enough for the hospital system and government agencies to catch up in preparation. But even then, it was understood that this virus was going to be endemic and that elimination was never a possibility.
> Young people are part of society so they are obligated to protect it.
The point is that the part of society being protected is largely confined to older parts of the population, while much of the costs of doing so are disproportionately coming down on younger people. It's easy to say "do your part to protect society", but when the part of society being protected is the mental, social, and emotional development and well being of young people, as well as technical skills and future job prospects, older people seemingly have no problem casting it aside for what benefits them the most.
You're not the same person I was replying too or is it an alt account?
Either way, I didn't say anything about eliminating the virus. Hospital systems are still at risk of being overwhelmed... that's why restrictions are still in place.
You're acting like younger people are the only people affected by the restrictions.
I’m not an alt account, I just agree with them and disagree with you.
> You're acting like younger people are the only people affected by the restrictions.
I’m not, but I’m saying the calculus of restrictions only makes sense for the older parts of society. Younger people are getting a raw deal. They are far less financially secure, established in their careers, their education, their social lives, and even in their personal development. Immense damage is being done in all of these areas to protect society from a disease that isn’t actually a threat to the young in any large degree. Older generations are sacrificing less due to the restrictions, but are reaping all of the benefits. This is especially galling considering the availability of effective vaccines that prevent severe disease and death, meaning that whatever risk does exist for these older generations is largely mitigated for them except for those who refuse vaccination.
So yes, it is enormously selfish for our society to throw young people under the bus to protect the most selfish portion of older, more well-to-do generations who refuse to protect themselves.
You talk about young people as if in their own world able to act autonomously away from the rest of society. Young people have parents. And they frequently rely on them into their mid-twenties. Many young people lost one or both of their parents from this (and other people they loved dearly). As has been repeated elsewhere, dying isn’t the only thing their parents and loved ones have to worry about having had COVID. The purpose of the lockdowns was to try to prevent this.
And so I can ask the same question, why are you disregarding the harm done to them (them being the young people)?
Yea, it would have caused more deaths from lack of treatment from additional surgeries, heart attacks and cancers which would have been left untreated. It would have put an absolutely devastating consequence on social care that would have a long lasting impact.
It would have also prevented scaling of health systems due to a distinct and dramatic shortage in staffing and long term backlog.
The decision above was purely economic. You would have to be really stupid to think the people in charge would shut down trillion dollar industries because the parents of some children died.
None of that is what could be derived or implied from your statement you condescending prick. If that is what you were implying, maybe you should get a better grasp of English so that your point could come across clearer.
I apologize for adding unnecessary flame to the conversation. I shouldn't have responded the way I did and should have instead clarified my position. I'm a little tired of reading COVID anecdotes and brought that into my response to you. That's on me.
>The decision above was purely economic.
I think it's hyperbolic to say that it was purely economic. Everything we do has some connection to the economy. Everyone in this thread, including myself, is basically making an economic argument facaded by an emotional one. But to say it's purely economic forgets the connection we have with people and the reason why we want the hospitals to be open for people who need care. A real sort of "collapse" happened for some rural family members. They don't have a hospital for their whole county and have to rely on another county's hospital. After they ran out of beds, the people in that town just had to wait and hope whatever ailment they had could be resolved elsewhere.
Back to the economy, obviously bad mental health has long lasting effects and that has secondary effects on the economy. I'm not so sure the alternative, the one where everything is kept open, would have worked. The "hospitals will collapse" scare tactic was only one aspect of what would have been a much larger collapse. Not just economic, but societal.
>You would have to be really stupid to think the people in charge would shut down trillion dollar industries because the parents of some children died.
You mean the hospitals? With a health system collapse, they just wouldn't be able to handle a lot of cases like you said. It wouldn't shut down in the sense that it would be 100% ineffective, just that
> In analysis of the cluster index cases ... only 3.8% were identified as having a pediatric index case.
> These pediatric cases only caused 4.0% of all secondary cases, compared with the 97.8% of secondary cases that occurred when an adult was identified as the index case in the cluster.
> Clusters where the asymptomatic/symptomatic status of the contact cases was not described were excluded from the analysis. Even with this broader definition, 18.5% children were identified as the index case in the household clusters.
I don't think it's Covid related. The graph in the article clearly shows a steady decline that pre-dated Covid. Covid may have accelerated it a bit, but it's not a fundamental shift.
I dont disagree with the sentiment on lost years but I think its very easy to say that in retrospect. At beginning of 2020, no one knew how severe the pandemic is going to be. We did not have a vaccine and we did not know which age groups are going to be most vulnerable.
I'm trying to imagine some other cause of death where 3000 over a couple years is regarded as acceptable. I think covid has broken people's brains, because we have gone to war, spent trillions, and sacrificed the lives of thousands of people in the US for about that size of human loss, within recent memory.
Yeah, fentanyl is terrible! So are cars, and I spend most of my non-family, non-work time advocating for city planning that will let people who chose so to avoid cars.
That does not lessen the impact of 3000 deaths among people who did not take on that risk.
The level of car blindness in the US is at such insane levels that any advocacy for living that isn't car dependent is pretty much a completely radical take that people reject out of hand. So political movement is often limited more by what is possible rather than what the right course of action is.
But these are not equivalent things, cars are nowhere near as deadly as Covid, this pandemic is likely going to cause 25 years' worth of car deaths because of a subset of the population is too morally and logically weak to adopt small measures.
I have 3 college-aged kids and one nearly there. Their universal concern is the cost. It has become prohibitive.
Colleges assumed the trend of charging $25k to $50k per year would be sustainable. They were dead wrong, especially given the horrendously predatory loans backed by the government and barred from bankruptcy.
If we fix the college financial system, enrollment would likely skyrocket.
Millennials have been out there for nearly a decade yelling on social media about how ridiculous their student loans are. Kids on the precipice of college have started paying attention. Combine that with the restrictions for Covid, and you have a lot of kids who don't think that taking on tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt is worth it for some Zoom classes.
Plus the amount and quality of alternative learning resources is very high, at least in some fields. I know coding bootcamps get a bad rep, often justified, but at the same time my buddy went to college for a degree in HR and I went for STEM. He ended up hating HR, did a 9 week boot camp, managed to get a job, and after a few years of experience is in roughly the same place as me and is thriving. It took him a little longer because of the time spent in HR, but ultimately he ended up with the same skill set I did between the 9 weeks of intensive study combined with on the job experience. Meanwhile I got a broader education, but the majority of it isn't very relevant on a day to day basis, if ever.
It's a single anecdote, but between online resources and alternative training programs, it seems harder to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars on college.
>Meanwhile I got a broader education, but the majority of it isn't very relevant on a day to day basis, if ever.
While I agree with your core sentiment, my opinion is that this is a symptom of a cultural/societal problem and not one of the schools. Modern Universities are certainly ripe with problems (largely driven by adopting business structures), including generally poor quality courses and curriculum within them, but I think you've identified a larger societal problem we have.
Why is it that broad education which is generally, at the very least in my opinion, clearly valuable yet so lowly valued in society? It's my opinion that we have institutional structures that, given a lack of opportunities, value specialized and specific knowledge over general knowledge.
Meanwhile, if you have the capability to escape these institutional shackles, general knowledge becomes far more valuable. On the labor side, labor markets are all about jobs and specialized roles with efficient production from that role. On the capital side, you need more general knowledge to see, connect, and sieze opportunities. It seems to me that most lack enough genuine realizable opportunity where general knowledge becomes valuable (say, seeking entrepreneurship) and in such a set of constraints, it makes complete sense why people specialize and chase demand of specialization because it's their most optimal strategy for financial success.
I work in R&D in startup-esk environments and my general knowledge is fairly well valued, however even here leadership sometimes fail to see how some book or article I read years ago, course I took, project I worked on years ago, etc. was critical to making the connection that made this research thing possible.
They value the general subset of knowledge I have that made their thing possible (oh boy you know A, B, and C and those saved us!!!), never mind the hydrology work I've done, it's irrelevant (D, or so they think, even though I may draw on concepts from such domains opaquely) or perhaps hours of video gaming (E, which lead to a game theoretic intuition about approaching an underlying problem). That knowledge was only appreciated after the fact because it made someone a pile of money or positioned a large contract.
I remember hating taking geology in college because "I'd never use it," then I did a lot of applied science and R&D in the fossil fuels industry and suddenly a lot of "silly" things I did in geology gave me a foundation to jump from and to build upon. That silly geology course made me boatloads of money in retrospect. Throughout my career I always like to look back when I have a problem and say "ah ha, I sure am glad I studied or read about X years ago, that's one less thing I need to internalize now to do this thing." I'm always surprised how much old general knowledge I draw upon for new problems and how valuable they truly are.
It's a single anecdote, but between online resources and alternative training programs, it seems harder to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars on college.
The evidence suggests that bootcamp grads struggle at finding good jobs, and also bootcamps charge a lot up-front, whereas collages have more aid and other programs to defer payment.
From what I can see, new graduates also struggle to find good jobs. And while they may require more upfront, the actual costs still pale in comparison to college tuition and fees.
It’s not a panacea, but it’s a decent option when compared to going to college for 4 years, going tens of thousands of dollars into debt, all to get an education with a lot of material that is fairly irrelevant to a career, while not having much better job prospects, particularly after getting the first job in the field.
It may seem right now like someone who did a 9-week bootcamp is in the same place as you, but the differences will start to show up after a few years. I have degrees in both CS and Math, and I often say that I got the most benefit from my CS degree in the first ~5 years of my career, and from my Math degree since then. The tech your buddy learned in bootcamp will get stale and he'll have to start over; meanwhile your deeper level of knowledge will help you contribute to the development of the next era of whatever you're working on. This is assuming other factors are roughly equal; of course if your buddy spends more time on self-learning than you, this might not come true.
I graduated 10 years ago, and I don't feel like my degree benefits me much other than marginally in reputation.
I learned more practical skills from free online classes and tutorials than I did from my entire university program, and I can think of maybe a handful of times I've thought about complexity analysis. But I've also entirely avoided whiteboard interviews, so perhaps myself and prospective employers have selected for my weakness in academic computer science concepts.
Exactly. The fellow above is foolish to think that even $10k is manageable for people in entry level jobs. Even good coders have to strain to pay off $10k-20k.
Plus, you're right that the interest rate is insane when banks are paying 1%.
"Below $50,000". And student loans have low rates unless you go private. Of course, who is more likely to need private loans they may not be able to pay? Probably not the trust fund kids.
"Low rates" here meaning 8%?! It's lower than credit card APR, but would you take a large installment loan at that rate?
The interest rate especially shocking when you consider that interest is supposed to pay for the creditor taking on the risk of default, which is almost impossible with student loans.
If you are in the US and know people who are aged 30-50 and not software engineers, this is almost all that they talk about. Some people manage to pay them off, others (due to high interest) owe more than when they started. It is a huge problem.
Yep, I'm a software engineer and just about to pay them off (I slowed down because of the deferred loans, could have had it done in 2020).
Meanwhile my wife only makes an appreciable dent in hers whenever she gets a gift from family members, and she's still paying $900 a month to not do much more than tread water. She did get it paid down a bit more thanks to the past two years of deferrals, but she still owes a lot more than I ever borrowed (two years of my school were paid for by a scholarship).
It's been a steady drag on our income since we've been together. At least mine is just about to go away, mine was $400/month as well... that $1300/month is almost as much as our mortgage payment.
I have multiple friends that have just given up on ever paying off their student loan debt in their lifetime and only pay enough to keep it where it is (or slowly increasing even). You wonder why people aren't buying homes and having children, there it is. I guess the solution to overpopulation is just saddle everyone with a bunch of debt, then.
It would if it were true. But in reality, there are lots of people with $40k starting salary jobs (example: a librarian, which requires a masters degree!) paying off $50k loans with 8% interest rates.
Part of the issue is that you can get these loans regardless your program. Chemical engineering? Here you go. Studying gay romances in 14th century literature? Yup, here's your 50k too.
One of those people can pay that loan off in two years. One of them is likely never going to pay it off without a career change.
Of course, we probably don't want loan officers picking what poor people can major in either.
The person studying gay romances in 14th century literature is probably a PhD student with a stipend and full tuition remission. They're getting subsidized by MBA tuition dollars, not by loans.
Sure, but they go through an undergrad in English or something similar before they are a PhD, for which they take the loan, then they don't earn any money (just enough to subsist) while the interest on their undergrad loan accrues. Or the interest may be deferred but the loan is still there.
I'm an advocate for requiring career counseling before taking out student loans.
I would not say that people should be denied based on their chosen major, but prospective students should be shown statistics on the average salaries, unemployment, and usage rates of the major they're interested in and compare it to the projected costs and resulting loan debt.
this times 100x. The problem may seem really bad, but wages are high enough that college grads still earn more than high school grads even after accounting for inflation and student loan debt.
It's probably my Canadian experience talking, but this sentence:
> 85% of graduates have less than $50,000 in student loans. Paid off over 20 years, that’s really not much.
It is pretty terrifying that you manage to mentally justify going in debt for 20 years over your college education. I understand that given a good job it's easy to pay it back, but I never even borrowed even a tenth of that to complete my engineering degree and I've probably paid my education back several time in taxes to the government.
1. Efficiency. Canadian universities deliver similar/better products at much lower cost. Not just cost at point of use, but actual "amount of money spend annually to deliver education".
2. Financing model. Taxation allows you to fund things without paying interest to a middle man. If you pay off a set of loans whose principle is 50K, but with 5%-7% interest rates, then you're paying a lot more than 50K. So even if the products were equal in price, the taxation model might work out ahead.
1. That number seems way off. What are your assumptions?
2. I haven't looked at the data, but I'm going to go out on a VERY short branch here and assert that the entire delta between US and CA tax rates is not consumed by higher education.
Honestly (I know that's not true of all states) but I worked in California and the taxes I was paying there were higher than my taxes in Quebec/British Columbia.
Yes taxation is higher, but I still feel like we get a lot more bang for our bucks here.
Yes, we shouldn’t penalize people for getting an education and becoming better citizens. Many are drowning in the non-absolvable debt for student loans. And the entry level out of med school is a residency making a third of that number.
Federal guarantees for the $120+ billion in annual new student loans that the DOE boasts of in its annual letter are still one of the primary drivers of tuition inflation - with tuition increases compounded over decades that increases costs for both those who take loans and those who don't.
I know someone who's about to a Physical Therapist, doctorate. she's gonna leave school owing 200k+. yet starting salary will be 85k that I made coming out of state college as a CS grad.
you have a lot of kids who don't think that taking on tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt is worth it for some Zoom classes.
Yeah, but you are assuming people only go to college for its educational value , ignoring that college grads tend to have much higher wages and lower unemployment compared to high school grads. If you look at FIRE subs for example, almost everyone who attains early retirement has a degree. The college wage premium is amplified by both higher wages and higher returns from investments by investing said wages in rapidly appreciating stocks and real estate (the post-2009 bull market in real estate and stocks, on an real basis, exceeds even the '80s and '90s).
> you have a lot of kids who don't think that taking on tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt is worth it for some Zoom classes.
> Yeah, but you are assuming people only go to college for its educational value , ...
But that's exactly the point, a huge expectation of going to college is the whole college experience: building independence, lifelong friendships, extracurriculars, etc. 50k for Zoom? Fuck that.
You’re implying causation - that a college degree is the cause of these outcomes. I’m not convinced that’s true, and in my mind, it might be one of the most damaging beliefs.
It could be that people who are driven or passionate, on average, want to pursue higher education, or that they take on risks, exercise their brains in learning endeavors, and it’s their effort and drive that leads to success.
It’s entirely possible that high earners have college degrees because they were told that to be successful, they had to go to college. It’s a belief they were raised with.
I think it’s highly misguided that we give college so much credit. And we also demonstrate survivorship bias where those who went to college but didn’t get the pay off are blamed for having made some wrong decision.
We treat higher education as a silver bullet and put it on a pedestal when it’s not.
This may be true, but at the same time, if the goal is to make a lot of money, rich parents and other luck aside, a college degree in a high-paying major is probably the best shot at it, instead for example trying to copy Garry Vanverchuck or Steve Jobs. Drive and effort apply for all professions, but it's just that college grads will get a higher return for their effort.
Yup, it's certain traits that lead people to go for certain degrees and we use the degree as a quick and fair signal for those traits. If you have a problem with that signal, try develop another one which is at least as quick and fair of a representation of those traits as a degree is.
Also if companies gain a substantial advantage using other signals outside of degrees, you can be guaranteed that their competitors in their industry will follow. In media and marketing, degrees have long been abandoned for other signals such as portfolios and social media engagement
I'm glad that there is much more awareness and consideration around cost.
When I was in high school and applying to colleges around 2011, the advice given to us was to not take cost too seriously. Many authority figures (like high school counselors) told my peers and I to, "follow your heart" or "go where you think you'll fit in best".
On top of that, student loans and interest rates where not explained to us very well. Very few of us understood that borrowing 160k-200k to go to an out-of-state/private school could very well mean you were signing up for a lifelong debt.
Looking back, its insane we could make such a life altering/hindering decision with so little oversight from the "adults".
It’s mind boggling how bad student loans are looking back at it. It was just normal to spend $100k over 4 years.
I finally paid mine and my wife’s off in 2020 and when I did the math, combined we paid $216k over 7 years post college. We were both lucky enough to have well paying jobs, but so so many people don’t. Some of these people even with decent jobs will be paying $500-$1000/m for nearly the rest of their lives.
This Happened to me on loans taken out between ‘07 and ‘10. The liquidity crises meant that banks stopped lending to students, and everyone assumed that interest rates would rise. I got locked into 7.25-8% fixed on roughly 80k in debt which I paid off over the next 10 years. Unfortunately a bout of unemployment in 2010 prevented me from refinancing.
> Any loan that is charging 6.28% interest and also cant be discharged by bankruptcy
The interest rates are high because so few loans can be discharged by bankruptcy. You can refinance your mortgage with anyone. Far few companies will refinance your student loans.
Meanwhile, it makes prefect sense that bankruptcy cannot discharge student loans. Otherwise, every single student would have crappy credit from 21-28 and no student loans ever.
If "makes perfect sense" solution to college is usury, we have serious problems with our higher education system.
It's time to start funding these schools adequately so that they do not immiserate everyone except those with wealthy parents. It's the opposite of a meritocracy.
I'm not sure if the spending or funding side is bigger issue, and surely this depends somewhat on the school, but both must be brought in line rather than forcing it onto our future workers.
The one thing we can't do is stop funding because we have pre-decided that it won't lower tuition. It's easy to attach strings to money, let's do that.
I would start by looking at variance in state funding pre-covid. Reducing funding: increasing tuition to market limits, then cutting expenses. Increasing funding: increasing expenses and increasing tuition to market limits. Tuition has roughly on an 8% track and historical circumstances vary, so pricing and spending reactions aren't immediate.
They should be dischargable after 8-10 years. If you are willing to declare 8 years after graduating, you should be able to get your debt restructured or forgiven.
An interest rate on something that is entirely uncollateralized and granted to someone with no income and often no credit history nor assets is usurious at a rate of around 2x that of an owner-occupied house with 20% down, an income of >3x the monthly payments, and a 740+ credit score? That is quite far from obvious to me.
How much money would you personally be willing to lend to a high school senior with no collateral, no credit, and no job who plans to study for 4 years and then file for bankruptcy?
That’s why they’re not discharged in bankruptcy: to make them possible to be made en masse.
I'm not disagreeing with that point, I'm disagreeing that these sorts of loans should be legal at all, much less that they should be a common method of funding the education necessary for the knowledge workers of the future.
If you’re going to have people study for 4 years past grade 12, someone’s got to pick up the tab for their rent, food, entertainment, and clothes/supplies at least.
If we disallow lending, that would tend to limit the attendance at “away from home” colleges and universities to the upper middle and upper classes. I don’t know that outcome is obviously “better”. It would be a massive boon to the wealthier families as compared to today.
I benefited massively from student loans and Army ROTC scholarship; I don’t want to see that taken away from future generations (even if removing that would benefit my family).
Rather than loans, we should reinvest in state universities, which in general have been massively defunded over the past decades, and also tie that additionally funding to reduced student costs so that the money goes where it should. The decision to attend university should be made more on the basis of student capabilities and available slots than on having big loans or ROTC access (and ROTC experience is a great thing, that has its own wonderful merits)
Bankruptcy isn't a get out of debt free card. You can only get debt that you can't realistically repay discharged. The new graduate with a job at Google making $150k isn't getting their student loans discharged.
So the answer to your question is as much as I think they could reasonably repay based on their earning potential after graduation. Which is a reasonable answer to the whole problem except that it hands a huge advantage to rich kids who's parents can write that tuition check.
I recall that in 2016 First Marblehead (now Cognition Financial) was offering interest rates of up to 13% (!) and averaging 11% (!!) on NYU tuition ($60k/yr for a 4 year degree). I recall during my application that they were very heavily pushing for me to finance my degree there. Thankfully, I went elsewhere.
The chair of NYU's Board of Trustees at the time was William Berkley. Perhaps coincidentally, he also headed the board of First Marblehead. I'm sure there was no conflict of interest, though.
Without room and board, University of California fees are around $20k. And none of the college towns have adequate housing, so any sort of housing is absolutely through the roof.
“The University of California is the world’s leading public research university.” [1] So $20k/yr seems like a steal. Meanwhile, if you’re price sensitive then you can go to one of the 26 Cal State campuses for ~$8k/yr (Cal Poly SLO is an outlier at $10k). [2] If you’re really looking to keep costs down, head to community college for two years to finish a Cal State transferable AA, then have guaranteed admission to a Cal State school and only two years there to finish your BS/BA. [3] It should cost <$20k in total to do community college and cal state if you did it in 4 years.
Housing and supplies are still expensive, and _yes_ it’s still very expensive to go to college, but there are affordable options out there for college.
In my experience, "Research universities" are a joke for undergrad students. All it means for most of them is that their classes will be taught by graduate students because the "professors" are too busy doing research to be bothered with such trivial work.
You need to be pretty lucky in your final years or actually going for masters or PHD to really be exposed to the research side of things.
It's a steal alright, but I cant say I agree with who is coming out ahead.
I guess my point was that the price of a school system that touts itself as a world-leading research university may not be the best baseline for the cost of college—even if it’s a public university system. The Cal State system has always been the “affordable” public option for college in California.
Yeah, that is fair. I guess my gripe is with the idea that research universities charge undergraduates more at all. If anything, most students get a much worse experience and learning environment as a result.
My own experience was that professors who were not currently research oriented tended to have a much more personal interest in actually teaching- not just the material, but in the practice of pedagogy overall.
Compare that to researching professors (or worse, their grad student substitutes) and it is often a night and day difference. All you're really paying more for is often the name on your diploma at the end of the day.
When I went to Colorado State University (by no means prestigious) tuition ran around $2,300 [1] and is now almost triple [2] per semester, I could rent a 2 bedroom apartment and live alone for $735, where as that's now sharing a 3 bedroom apartment. Renting the apartment I had is closer to $1,300 per month, or nearly double what I paid. It's not very affordable, whereas I could relatively easily afford it.
State colleges can be cheaper, but they're not as cheap as they used to be in a lot of places. Many states cut back funding for their universities.
"Overall state funding for public two- and four-year colleges in the school year ending in 2018 was more than $6.6 billion below what it was in 2008 just before the Great Recession fully took hold, after adjusting for inflation."
"Between school years 2008 to 2018, after adjusting for inflation:
* 41 states spent less per student.
* On average, states spent $1,220, or 13 percent, less per student.
* Per-student funding fell by more than 30 percent in six states: Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania."
There's tuition and there's room & board. In my state the tuition is $10K/yr but the room & board is $15K/yr. It doesn't help that the largest public college in my state doesn't have enough dorm rooms for all their students so by Junior year you have to have moved out. Have you seen rent lately? Taken a look at your grocery bill? There are many costs factoring in to the high cost of higher education.
Many now make room and board mandatory and when you factor that in with tuition, books, etc you can get to $25k total cost even with in-state tuition. I don’t know how common this is exactly but Ohio State does this for freshman and sophomores now.
In addition there is COVID which means a lot of online learning and none of the college social experience. I know of a coop on my team is considering pausing finishing his degree because he hates online learning and does not feel like he's getting the education he paid for.
What's the alternative? Wait for this to "blow over"? We've been waiting for two years now. Maybe omicron will be it. Or maybe not. We simply don't know. One thing we do know from past experience is those opting-out of college or putting their degree on "pause" rarely return to complete their degree. You simply reach a point where you're focusing on your career, maybe start a family, and so forth and the next thing you know there's simply no time (or money) for college.
The better alternative is to immediately return all students and staff to full in-person education with no mandates or restrictions. Yes that will incur some small but acceptable level of additional risk.
Real life is full of risks. I despise this modern culture of safetyism and fragility. We should teach our youth to be stoic and resilient in the face of danger.
I think the youth are plenty stoic and resilient. They have to be in response to increasing inequality, a shrinking middle class, climate change, and increased authoritarianism. They have never known a time without war and terrorism. School shootings are no longer newsworthy and they grew up drilling for a lone shooter.
The 3rd calendar year into this this, I'm willing to make that sacrifice. Everyone who wants to be vaccinated is vaccinated. Young people will overwhelmingly be fine. The old should make sacrifices for the young, not the other way around.
For all of human history, there's been a chance that a child will die in a car-accident or be abducted by a child predator on his way to school every day. We haven't said that kids should stop going to school because of this, have we?
There's a non-zero chance people will die traveling to and from work today. We haven't said that people should stop working to save lives, have we?
I think that most people being bad at understanding risk-management is at the core of why there's there's such big divide with how to react to Covid.
We have grown to depend on automobiles for modern life and the economy to function. People can function with kids in masks and home learning, just about. Their quality of life compared to my childhood/teen years is trash though. Additionally society cannot live with hospitals operating at reduced capacity because of COVID overflow. I mean, that alone is reason for managing the risk aggressively.
> We have grown to depend on automobiles for modern life and the economy to function.
So when it comes to cars, what you're saying is that "some of you will die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make". Am I reading that correctly?
PS: The above is obvious sarcasm. See how ridiculous bad risk-management calculations sound?
> Additionally society cannot live with hospitals operating at reduced capacity because of COVID overflow.
Color me skeptical about the severity of this risk for 2 big reasons.
1) Look at actions, not words. Think about how governors and hospitals are acting. If there was a genuine fear of the hospitals collapsing, they'd be putting out daily public service announcements begging for retired doctors, people with any medical training whatsoever, or even random nuns to come and volunteer to tend to the sick and dying. Instead they're mass-firing healthy "health care heroes" who refuse to get a vaccine. Is that the act of people who are genuinely concerned about overwhelming the health care system?
2) This sensationalism has been happening every cold and flu season: see pic-related. Hospitals are designed to perpetually run at close to full capacity for financial reasons. https://i.imgur.com/50eqkXq.jpg
Point #2; Your only source is a screen shot and exclusively focusing on the NHS, which is notoriously underfunded anyway. COVID certainly isn't helping the NHS which as you have observed struggles in regular flu seasons.
Point #1 government is doing everything they can to prevent that collapse scenario. I'd need to understand more about the machinations of the hospital policies you mentioned. No link to your sources, but I imagine it's not as black and white as you are suggesting.
I find it interesting that some people are like "it's not that bad, why do we need these restrictions? Everything is functioning, what's the problem?"
The thing is "it's not that bad" because of all the restrictions and vaccines. If we did nothing hospitals would absolutely be fucked and people would be dying in the halls.
Model me a world where we didn't bother with masks and other measures, then let's talk.
> government is doing everything they can to prevent that collapse scenario.
Deeds show intent better than empty words.
If they were genuinely concerned about the healthcare system collapsing due to a flood of sick people, they would be screaming daily begging for more health care workers: not firing healthy workers to have Covid positive health-care workers work.
Here is the thing, if COVID is like the flu even with heavy measures to prevent the spread, what would it be like it we just didn't bother with restrictions? Seasonal influenza is not as lethal as COVID and hospitals stress to accommodate it. COVID is being controlled world-wide and still hospitals face the potential of being rapidly overwhelmed. The deeds you are looking for are all around you, from vaccines to masks, limited capacity venues, rapid tests, and so on.
None of your sources talk about hospitals being "designed" to run at full capacity for profit. Canadian, UK, and most other EU hospitals don't run for profit, so that leaves the US. I doubt you'll find a medical director that claims the way to maximize profit is to design a hospital that is on the edge of meltdown every flu season.
"they would be screaming daily begging for more health care workers"
There are many more sources citing hospitals struggling to find nurses, your last two citations demonstrate how desperate hospitals are by re-hiring folk who refuse to get vaccinated or are asymptomatic. How desperate do you have to be to put patients at risk of getting infected from their health care worker? I mean talk about rock and a hard place, that's a fucked up position to have to be in and shows that there are very few other avenues to go down.
> Here is the thing, if COVID is like the flu even with heavy measures to prevent the spread, what would it be like it we just didn't bother with restrictions?
There's 2 movies on 1 screen when it comes to the actual stats surrounding Covid-19, so I'm not going to argue that with you.
I'll just ask you about what's serving as the "control groups". How are, say, Amish Country PA and Florida doing? Forget any stats about "cases" you can come up with for a moment: how are normal peoples' actual lives going in places where masks and most preventative measures are less common? Are people living their lives more or less normally, or are these regions wastelands of disease and death with survivors roaming the streets begging for medical attention?
> Forget any stats about "cases" you can come up with for a moment: how are normal peoples' actual lives going in places where masks and most preventative measures are less common?
Forget stats about cases in order to understand stats on cases in areas with fewer preventative measures? What kind of crazy is that?
Yes, forget the stats and look at peoples' actual lives.
Life in these places is more or less the same as it always has been, other than it passing the peak of cold season. People go out without forced masks and having to show their medical histories to enter buildings. Yet these places haven't collapsed. Why not?
If the Covid narrative that we had to mask up everywhere and check your papers to ensure safety or society would collapse is accurate, why is this "control group" (for lack of a better term) not collapsing?
The loans are exactly why the colleges were able to continue jacking up the prices. As with homes, people will pay as much as institutions are willing to loan them. In both cases the currently low interest rates allow the loan principal to be much higher (given that folks calculate cost based on recurring payments). If you remove the student loan system then tuition would become cheaper. However that does unfairly impact those from economically disadvantaged households.
Also, in-state tuition for state schools is much less than $50k/yr so try going to Cal and/or your best local public school and supplement with self teaching (e.g. via public/free lectures from MIT)? The self directed learning/motivation is the hard part for many people of that age, but few have said living frugally should or would be easy.
Would it really penalize disadvantaged households? I’d imagine that many such students lack a co-signer for these predatory loans, or would be further disadvantaged by a 200k degree that doesn’t meaningfully change their economic outcomes in 2022. To make college work you need to pick a dwindling number of high leverage disciplines such as CS, even picking something technical like Chemistry won’t yield a return on a 200k degree.
I think the only tenable solutions are 1) a ceiling on the loan amount tethered to public college costs to increase price elasticity and prevent runaway costs, along with a quota on loans to address the 'future ability to repay' issue with many majors/low caliber schools 2) free public college (or equivalent private college voucher)
Giving out loans with no cap on how much schools can charge and with no ability-to-repay check is a recipe for catastrophe.
I think option 2 is the best equitable outcome but is probably politically unsavory given the heterogeneity in public school costs/quality across states (which typically aligns with political divides).
Option 2 is the only tenable solution. Option 1 is just more of the same we have now.
Either society puts their money where their mouth is and actually pays for people to be educated, or they can choose to keep taxes lower and let people fend for themselves. Either of these options is fine, but the bullshit blank check taxpayer funded loans non dischargeable in bankruptcy is only good for politicians and taxpayers today at the expense of taxpayers and members of society tomorrow.
The pertinent question of where the money goes needs an answer. Afaict universities are simply spending money on more things because they can or taking on debt to drive prestige projects.
We know college can be cheaper, Brigham young goes for 5k/yr, European and Canadian schools still charge less than 10k/yr.
The answer would be investigated and evident if proper underwriting had to be done and there was not an unlimited guarantee from future taxpayers to make good on the debt.
If I were college-age and I were planning on going to college I would certainly do one of two things. I would postpone college until the COVID issues died down -or- I would use the fewer applicants to get into a more prestigious school banking on a better 3 year experience (out of 4) starting in the fall of 2022 and more impressive degree going forward. Either way, I can imagine admittance numbers falling off.
Yeah I suspect people have wised up to the fact that the alumni base of a program matters more than pretty much anything else. So unless you’re at a prestige program at a prestige school, college probably isn’t going to pay off as well. Thus the piling in to elite universities while overall enrollment drops off.
Education is primarily a prestige product. Secondarily, the social and alumni effects of the network around you when you attend. Thirdly, it is the college campus experience. Fourthly, it is what you actually learn.
If you just price the value of each of these four pieces, the dynamic in the market is completely explained. Community college still provides learning, but not much on the other three factors. That is, it has become poor value for the fees it charges despite them being lower in absolute terms than prestige schools.
The prestige is all that matters. It’s really the only chance someone has to achieve class mobility; i.e. a kid from the working class might get into an Ivy League prestige program and rub elbows with the children of rich and powerful people, thus getting access to that network.
But if you’re going to a second-tier state university I really wonder if any of those students are getting a positive payback.
Tend to agree. I did my Masters degree (pre-Covid) as part of a predominantly online program at a large university. It worked out well, but I cannot even begin to imagine doing an undergraduate program remotely and missing out on the campus experience. There's much more to "going off to college" than taking classes, and I fully understand why 18-22 year olds would not want to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to miss the bulk of that experience.
I'm currently about 2/3 through an online Master's degree: Georgia Tech OMSCS. Same as you?
For me it's been a drastically different experience compared to my in-person undergrad. Whereas my Bachelor's degree was full of camaraderie and formative life experiences, my Master's has been more or less bereft of social or personal growth and focused entirely on course material. This is okay for me since my primary goal is to develop a deeper technical background, but I would not recommend such an experience for your average 18 year old kid who is about to start their first university experience.
Agreed. About 50% of the value I got out of uni was outside the classroom. Though now I’m good to take online courses as I’m looking for skills, not personal transformation
This makes a lot of sense. I took a couple online classes when I was in college, and despite my efforts, I definitely didn't learn as much as I would have otherwise. THere's something about someone telling you something in person that makes it easier for my brain to absorb, even if it's in a giant lecture hall and you don't go to office hours. I can recall accounting principles (taken in person) far better than material from my project management class (taken online). I took the former for an easy minor and never use what I learned, but the latter has proven much more important in my career, yet I managed to forget it all.
And my online classes were explicitly taken online, with professors who had done online stuff before, not hastily moved online in the midst of a pandemic. Knowing how computer-averse some of my professors were, I can only imagine the transition to online was rough, and I bet I'd be scared away from online classes in college if I had to go through high school like that, even if I got a full ride.
And, as others have said, going to college isn't just for the degree. Yes, that's a big part of it (the expensive piece of paper at the end), but just being able to be away from your parents really helps you grow up and become independent.
> And my online classes were explicitly taken online, with professors who had done online stuff before, not hastily moved online in the midst of a pandemic. Knowing how computer-averse some of my professors were, I can only imagine the transition to online was rough, and I bet I'd be scared away from online classes in college if I had to go through high school like that, even if I got a full ride.
Universities are moving into a new space by taking so much online, and people will realize that some institutions are better at this than others. MOOCs can be done well, but it is largely not those traditional institutions that will be doing that.
I'm very interested to see if some education disruptors come out of this time.
Prestigious schools are seeing record numbers of applications, and record low in acceptance rates. If there is a hit in college attendance, its not happening at the top of the food chain.
True, but prestigious schools are playing games. For example, my alma mater is currently waiving the application fee for students they know will not get in simply so they can reject them. It is incredibly fucked up.
Here in Canada the government simply dictates to universities how much they can charge. It seems beyond insane to me to do it any other way, seeing as our entire societies are dependent on getting enough people educated to perpetuate a service economy.
To be fair, this kind of means that universities should be completely public. And although they are for all intents and purposes, in theory they are still non-governmental entities. And that's strange as well.
The department of education in the USA kind of does that too. The amount of government-backed loans a student can receive for undergrad is capped at ~$35,000 (it's unlimited for graduate school). It's also graduated, so a freshman can only receive ~$4,000 their first year, and it goes up from there. Grants are given to freshman to cover the shortfall. Also, students/parents are expected to contribute, based on household income.
Most public state schools keep their pricing in line with these caps ($35k in loans + ~$5k in grants). I just picked on Iowa because, and here's a list I found:
> The amount of government-backed loans a student can receive for undergrad is capped at ~$35,000 (it's unlimited for graduate school). It's also graduated, so a freshman can only receive ~$4,000 their first year, and it goes up from there.
I believe this only applies to the subsidized federal student loans that don't collect interest while you're in school. The limit on unsubsidized federal loans that start collecting interest right away is much higher.
When I started college in 2009, I got $9,000 in federal student loans for my freshman year.
Can't speak of all schools, but at my local state school (which I attended) - which as far as sports teams is way down on the list of being considered important (i.e. you'll never see them on TV), they constantly bringing in coaches making $1M/year, who then hire a bunch of assistant coaches making $200K a year etc - and then when the teams don't do well - like losing 80% of their games - they fire the coaches (paying out the rest of their contracts) and hire the next million dollar coaches, rinse and repeat - and this is at a state-run school; I would imagine at private schools with top tier teams, its even worse.
There is so many overspending problems its not even funny - and yet the people actually teaching the classes are TA's, probably getting $20K/year, while the professors work on their 'research' and are rarely available to students.
Starting to think the whole higher-education model is hopelessly broken.
this is a conscious calculation to attract alumni donations — people who are into their college teams donate more than others, and even more when the teams do well
Sports are generally separate from the rest of the university budget. It's not tuition dollars that are paying the coach, it's season tickets, TV contracts, and donors. Men's football/basketball makes obscene money for the big schools, and the little schools get paid to be beat up by the big schools. The reports that sports don't make money are like how movies don't make money, it's largely creative accounting not actual losses.
Hollywood accounting only works because the producers are taking the profits out by spending the money on outside firms that they get a piece of. That does not work in college sports: they are just plain losing money... except for the coaches and he staff who are making it hand over foot (even on the small schools with horrible records).
The vast majority of college sports programs in the U.S. are losing a lot of money for the school. They are operating at a detriment to the school's main goal of learning.
They "lose" money because they offer more than men's basketball and football. Those two sports finance everything else, it's easy to document millions in losses for swimming, soccer, track, field, baseball, softball, tennis, golf, and everything else.
Also a Universities goal of learning is research, not teaching, especially not undergrad teaching.
This has always seemed like a weird defense of college sports to me, because college swimming, soccer, etc. are still an elite cadre of extremely physically fit young people.
Maintaining physical health is huge, but the demographic that needs to be targeted is lower performance level that club sports. Even THOSE are quite competitive. Even the (very fit) people who participate often cease physical activity and healthy eating soon after graduation.
On the other hand, subsidizing college gym facilities does tend to reach most of the student body. Required athletics classes is even more effective and pays long-term dividends (if they haven't been canceled due to COVID by now). But even more-so than that, consistent physical activity for grade school and high school would be even better from a whole society perspective.
Armies of administrators, shiny new amenities to attract more students (competing on quality of education is too difficult / more expensive). There's probably some good that it goes towards too, but its hard not to be cynical about it.
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy at play again.
At this point, my feeling is that the local maximumizations that have driven us to this point are irrecoverable. There is no “fixing” this system. It will carry on for a while yet out of momentum, but something disruptive will dethrone it eventually.
I was a one of two developers at a small relatively unknown private college (costs over $70k and wasn't even top 5 in this state) in a communications (see: marketing B team for admissions, mostly PR and crisis response) department of around 15. I cannot emphasize how inept and slow everyone was. Simple tasks took 10x longer than they should. There were 3-4 people dedicated solely to managing contractors for the bi-annual magazine that likely gets tossed by 90% of the recipients, then people whose sole job was to manage an ad agency in a committee with at least 4 other people. They were in the 6 month process of launching a 5 page WP site for the newly funded careers institute that had ~15 employees to try and help graduates find jobs paying more than $15/hr with their newly minted liberal arts degrees when I finally left. Their solution for making soon/new graduates more employable? Linkedin courses for specific skills like digital marketing, Excel and microcertificates through external resources.
Then there are other leaks, like $50k/yr hosting bills for a CMS serving under 200k pageviews per day, or other ancillary a11y compliance tools that cost nearly as much. If there is budget, it has to be spent.
In the past, people with sinecures could just go home and spend their time painting or composing poetry or inventing scientific disciplines or something else not-entirely-useless. Now they’re managing contractors by committee! How soul-deadening.
The answer I get from my friends in the higher ed business are that the costs are covering decreased investment by state level government in colleges and universities.
On one hand, I am not sure I agree. My son is going to the same state university I went to, and it's substantial more expensive, but they 've also built a ton of infrastructure that I find questionable.
"Deep state cuts in funding for higher education over the last decade have contributed to rapid, significant tuition increases and pushed more of the costs of college to students, making it harder for them to enroll and graduate."
> The answer I get from my friends in the higher ed business are that the costs are covering decreased investment by state level government in colleges and universities.
I’d take that with a big grain of salt. They love to play up this angle but I just don’t see where funding has been cut at the same rate as tuition has increased.
I remember back when I was in school, one year the state government asked for some belt-tightening, to the tune of a 2% budget cut. Y’know, asking the school to go back to the budget they had like two years prior. The admin started going nuclear, “there’s no fat in our budget, these cuts will go straight to the bone!”, saying they’d have to cut the entire music department, 10% of all class sections, etc. Even got the students riled up enough to march on the capitol building. Even at the time, being significantly less jaded than I am now, I knew this was complete BS. Ever since I’ve been very wary of this narrative that colleges are driving up tuition because of state budget cuts. And it didn’t help shake my belief when I went back to campus a few years later and saw that they did a complete renovation of the library to include multiple gaming kiosks (!) and other such creature comforts.
Simply put, the schools can basically charge whatever they want and students will pay because any 18 year old with a pulse will get approved for unlimited money so long as it goes toward college. Put limits on student loans and you’ll see the situation change quickly.
I feel like it's a bit of a Pandora's box. Once the student loan box got opened and administrators began to realize the incentives at play (for the lenders, e.g. most student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy), they saw dollar signs. It's easy to justify tuition hikes when you know most of your students are already taking out loans which they'll basically always get. And since each student is usually only there for about four years, the increases while they're there don't seem significant because their frame of reference is so small. And even if they do realize the highway robbery taking place, what are they gonna do, transfer half their credits to somewhere cheaper and spend even more time in school to finish their degree?
A lot of it is going to the administrative staff. They have massive departments, many buildings, and many unnecessary staff members with high salaries. Meanwhile, a lot of the teaching faculty is making a pittance.
Buildings are traditionally paid for by a benefactor who gets their name on it. And the school often ends up with higher costs as a result (and one less parking lot or green area). Such donors are kind of a mixed bag.
Yup, I didn't look at your source only what information you posted. The "(2018 dollars)" on only one line implied to me the other numbers were unadjusted.
It's going to the facilities and the staff needed to support them.
When I was an undergrad in the mid 1990s, the dorms were square rooms with cinderblock walls, concrete floors, metal frame beds, and a simple desk, the cafeteria was like an oversized high school cafeteria, and the gym was a basic weight room. A couple of years ago I received a brochure from my alma mater asking for donations and showing the modernized campus - the dorms were now luxury apartments, the cafeteria was a gourmet eatery, and the gym looked like a Lifetime.
Room and board is entirely separate from tuition though. That said, when I was leaving college in 2002 it was essentially a giant construction zone as they were building facilities all over the place. This was not unique- there was something of an arms race to make the glossy brochures even better than the competition. This was a large state school with a good but not really elite reputation and was trying to change that.
Some percentage of tuition dollars are effectively cross subsidizing other students (e.g., masters candidates subsidize PhD students, wealthier undergraduates subsidize other undergraduates receiving institutional grants or discounts, etc.), but the biggest factor in private education has to be the increase in administrative staff and facilities.
The one place is almost certainly not going its faculty salaries. The industry's shift to adjuncts has been great for university endowments but terrible for those who got their PhD in the last couple decades
Two biggest drivers are 1) massive declines in public support (for public universities, obviously) and 2) more administrators.
Much of the growth in administration is driven by a significant rise in the costs to comply with federal regulation. Those regulations are not bad--it's the cost of complying with things like disability laws, Title IX, etc--but they require collecting and reporting significant amounts of data, and that isn't free.
There's other stuff too; some colleges do have the lazy rivers and fancy dorms, many colleges lose money on their football program, etc. But those aren't the fundamental drivers.
By the way, in case anyone is wondering, the money is definitely NOT going to faculty salaries. Salaries for full-time faculty have been stagnant for decades even though an increasing percentage of classes are taught by poorly-paid adjuncts.
> Much of the growth in administration is driven by a significant rise in the costs to comply with federal regulation. Those regulations are not bad
Similar things happen in healthcare. My SO works in pharma and the amount of red tape they are required to navigate significantly increases the complexity of their administrative work and decreases the cost-efficiency of their business, partially passing on the costs to the price of drugs.
Again, like you said, the regulations are not bad (like regulating the types of communication they can have with doctors), but there is a price to pay to keep them.
> These things probably could actually be resolved by governmental regulation.
They could, but I wonder if it would actually improve the state of things. We would then need to increase the size of the bureaucracy (in the government and in each institution that does any of these things) to meet these regulations, and given that a bureaucracy becomes less efficient with size it may not actually make things any cheaper.
No, I think public prices would definitely make things cheaper. It would also incentivize keeping bureaucracy lean, there is little to no price incentive to do so now.
The guy probably did donate all of that but keeping these buildings open running and maintained with university maintenance workers is expensive as heck
there's been a proliferation of administrators in colleges. the ratio of administrators to professors/instructors has been steadily climbing since the 70s.
Endowments. They are lining their pockets with it. A lot of Unis are becoming investment firms that happen to supplement their income with a school attached to them.
Sports team boondoggles are a popular way to spend tuition money.
As far as where it goes, I think a ton goes into new buildings and amenities. I went to Auburn a decade ago and the campus looks completely different. Everything is new and shiny. I assume there are also a ton of administrators.
> Are Colleges and Universities pocketing the money?
They are. Why wouldn't they? Kids and parents can get massive loans from the government, it would be silly for universities and all their admin staff to pass up the opportunity to enrich themselves.
Universities have started to compete on which ones have more gyms, clubs, luxury dorms, various interest groups. Well, the basket weaving club needs an instructor, a secretary, a janitor, a new facility, a maintenance person for it etc. Some of them may be friends and cousins of the existing administrators, but you're not supposed to notice that too much.
I couldn't stop laughing when I visited my alma mater, a decade later and seeing how they had build a brand new gym with a huge lazy river around it. In my head I could hear the enthusiastic tour guide "Your child can type their homework while floating around in a lazy river, isn't that great!". But then, of course, I realized that it was my tuition that has paid for the lazy river.
On a related note - who in their right mind thinks donating to their college is a good decision? I don't understand why rich people keep donating buildings rather than donating parks to their communities. When I begin to donate money for serious, colleges are getting exactly $0. The money will go to places and people that actually need it.
When you have an organisation full of people creating worth that you can cream off, you've bought a few houses, yacht, fast cars. You get to a point where you realise you're not leaving anything of value behind and think "if I pay for a university building then I've created a legacy of education for generations to come".
TL;DR it's like a shiny name plaque for billionaires.
I get it - and I agree with the reasoning - but I want to leave a shiny new park with my name on the plaque, not a building in an overpriced university.
I remember when my public college was banned from starting new building projects due to state wide budget restrictions. The year the ban was lifted, half a dozen projects immediately kicked off.
That completely shifts the blame to bureaucracies, and that isn't fair. Loans are where they are because students prefer newer dorms, amenities, programs, and research opportunities. Student competition leads to prestige, leads to demand from employers for graduates from a specific institution. It is a self-reinforcing dynamic.
The fact student loads have special bankruptcy treatment is bad. But absent Sallie Mae (or Navient, whatever it is now) students would be paying whatever Harvard or Stanford asked, and that would determine pricing for the next tier of schools.
Students tour campuses and look at facilities, including dorms, and that factors into their decisions.
Research may be funded. But research salaries are high as are facility costs and upkeep. There are numerous costs to support a top tier research program and maintain it that are not covered by grants.
It's a little rich to blame 18 year olds for college costs skyrocketing don't you think?
Of course students prefer newer dorms, amenities, programs and research opportunities. But asking someone who might have been getting $5/week allowance to figure out how much a newer dorm is worth when the prices are in the 10s of thousands is an impossible task. They don't know how much money is worth.
And then to tell them that they can't discharge it in bankrupcy because they knew what they were getting into is very much bullshit.
And I don't say all this because I have student loans. I was very lucky, I went to a state college with a full tuition scholarship. But I've seen a lot of my peers struggle with student loans because teenagers don't understand fiscal policy, and shouldn't be expected too.
It's a simple economic argument. If students care only about quality, Universities will only care about it also. And improving quality leads to higher price.
The demand for top tier education drives prices, just like the financing structure for loans for that education drives prices. Excluding one or the other is a false choice. Maybe if risk of default were factored into loans that would change the trajectory of the tuition cost curve. But taking away agency the consumers in the model doesn't lead us to the insights we need to actually fix the underlying problem.
I have a vested interest in this problem. But saying popular things for upvotes isn't going to change the underlying problem of how to allocate scarce resources.
I disagree with you on "teenagers don't understand fiscal policy, and shouldn't be expected too.". This isn't fiscal policy. This is a pretty straightforward introduction to being an adult and budgeting. I went through it, too. A mortagage was harder and more daunting. Rental terms on apartments were more predatory. The fact that people even discuss bankruptcy to discharge student loan debt is a horrible sign, given how much of ones' life potential one i throwing away to recover prime loan eligibility.
Also, "And then to tell them that they can't discharge it in bankrupcy because they knew what they were getting into is very much bullshit." - what part of where I wrote, "The fact student loads have special bankruptcy treatment is bad" is unclear?
I'm not trying to make it black-and-white, there's certainly some degree of personal choice weighing in here - but it's not the core issue and it's probably a distraction. When we realized cigarettes were bad it was partially about informing people, but the main thing was to change marketing laws so you could make sure that wasn't undoing all the good info.
If I give you two loan options with bad terms and you have to choose one, then that is a fiscal policy thing and your choice is ultimately pretty inconsequential. You may be slightly better off than the person who made the other choice but the bad policy is affecting both of you.
Ultimately it's both a policy and a personal choice thing, but as with most society-wide issues the personal choice aspect falls away pretty quickly and we need to get realistic and figure out what a solution is instead of just blaming individuals.
They care so much about dorms and the food programs that schools have to mandate that the student live on campus and pay for on campus food their first year!
This is an institutional problem and they should be blamed though.
It doesn't really matter what students "prefer", if a bank doesn't do their due diligence and a student isn't able to repay their loan, then the bank should be losing that money as a bad investment. They won't give a $1M mortgage loan to buy a 50k lot, and likewise won't give it to someone that doesn't seem like they could pay it back. I do think there's value in people getting degrees that don't pay well - but then you shouldn't be getting a loan to do so.
> students would be paying whatever Harvard or Stanford asked
I don't think this is true - people simply can't go to a school they can't afford and people don't have infinite money. We gave the banks the freedom to tell children that they will indeed be able to pay back loans that they often cannot, so it's the bad actions of one organization(banks) enabling another(school). Ivy league schools may be like Veblen goods where increased prices also increase demand - but that can't be true for all schools and we've seen tuition increases across the board.
The solution that seems best to me is to first fix the bankruptcy issue - if someone can't pay back a loan that is a risk the bank is accepting by giving the loan, just like any other loan. I think that alone would probably have enough of a chilling effect that way less people would be able to attend colleges at first and they would be forced to lower tuition rates. That would correct the market going forward, but it doesn't really help people that already fell victim to this system. That seems like it could be remedied by either making interest rates 0 or capping total interest to some amount relative to the principal (e.g. the total amount can never grow to more than 110% of the principal).
Similar to healthcare, I don't think education shouldn't be profitable in the short term - it's a long term investment a society has to make in itself so you can't really track it as an individual investment in any one person. If someone else becomes a doctor I'm still benefitting from that so it makes sense that I'd pay into some of the cost to educate that person. Unfortunately in the US at least we seem to be totally unable to do anything without a short-term and concrete path to profit regardless of the amount of good it would do.
> won't give [a student loan] to someone that doesn't seem like they could pay it back
I wonder what groups of people might be harmed by such a policy, but I would bet it won’t be middle and upper class families who are willing to co-sign for loans.
Yeah I think the initial motivation behind setting it up this way was good - "let's try to get as many people into college as possible". I'm narrowly making an argument against loans that are not dischargeable by bankruptcy or death.
Changing that in isolation would almost definitely have an effect where low income families can't afford college. I see that as a gap the govt should be filling either through public colleges or directly funding people to go to school, probably both. The core issue I see here is we're letting private companies make bad investments without liability, into something that probably shouldn't be profit-driven to start with
I agree with you except for your thoughts regarding paying to educate doctors. Indeed we do benefit from people becoming doctors and they are well paid, have prestige, and are generally one of the most well respected professions. This should be plenty to incentivize one to pursue medicine. You will be paying them when you receive care, exchanging money for their service, directly via billing or indirectly via insurance.
> given that folks calculate cost based on recurring payments
That’s very true for mortgages, but in my experience this isn’t how student loans work. Nobody I knew before college had any idea what their loans would cost on a monthly basis once they went into repayment, and I don’t think it was disclosed to me (or I forgot).
Also unlike my mortgage, my loans have trivially changed repayment plans. I changed some of them several times based on my economic circumstances without refinancing, which makes nailing down a single payment kind of hard, even if the interest rate hasn’t changed.
I wonder what would happen if banks could deny student loans. Students would need to prove that they are a good investment but it also means that colleges would have to prove they are good investments as well.
Yes, exactly. One way to help college-age kids go to college if they want to without having the impact that you describe is to just give everybody ages 18-22 $20k per year in cash to do what they like with it. This still preserves their incentive to choose wisely, compare prices and consider alternate options.
> The loans are exactly why the colleges were able to continue jacking up the prices.
This is partly true. The US also DID use to subsidize more University tuition.
However: Agreed. The loans are dumb. They feed into the issue in exactly the way you describe. They should be interest free as long as you are making regular payments.[1]
> Also, in-state tuition for state schools is much less...
This is so thorny... I have a younger cousin, and what he ended up doing was going to a community college for two years, then transferring. It worked out well for him! But it was a gamble.
When I was in school my parents were very obsessed with me "having the college experience" even though we were much less well-off than they were in uni and were not able to support me financially[0]. I say this to point out: I am not advocating for this. College should not be fun! If it is: Great! Glad you had a good time. But that is not necessarily the reality you should expect.
However: I have noticed a lot of people made a lot of friends in Uni, and those develop into professional relationships later in life.
Additionally, if you are an ambitious person, going to community college has the risk of failing to prepare you for higher level university teaching.
Finally: I am an extremely extroverted person. I found the community aspect of going to class, studying with friends, etc. extremely helpful in my motivation and understanding of the material. I've tried to do the MIT classes and such, but it rarely sticks.
0: Not their fault, not whining. Shit happens!
EDIT:
1: AS A VERY MODERATE ACCOMMODATION. I'm not advocating for this policy as the end-all-be-all, but I feel like this is a very reasonable suggestion.
The issue with student loans no one talks about is that the interest collected on them is already earmaked to help pay for Obamacare and Pell Grants.
If you wonder why Democrats get so hesitant to do anything about the situation there is one of your reasons why. (there are alot more reasons but thats a decent reason)
At least in a house loan they will check your income and job before giving you the loan. For college they will give anyone a loan for an immense amount of money without verifying anything.
The problem comes in when you try to verify someone's ability to repay the loan. It's not just one's choice in major — for example, the graduation rate for Historically Black Colleges & Universities is only 35%. There are significant deltas between GPA, test scores, and college success rates between various ethnicities. Further, there are significant differences in the repayment of student loans between various ethnicities.
I would not want to be on the team that does a risk assessment with these facts as inputs, because the results would be politically untenable.
I was simply pointing out the most politically hot topic that such a risk assessment would run into, but if you prefer to put class first that is your prerogative. Of course, with even a small amount of research you might find that these issues tend to collide and ethnicity is what gets talked about the most. You might also find out that the disparate rate of repayments between ethnicities is perhaps the leading issue for those who favor debt forgiveness, many of whom frame it as a civil rights issue [0][1][2][3].
That said, it's perhaps a moot point because Biden's not forgiving anything, and the way things are looking I don't imagine Congress will any time soon either.
> Also, in-state tuition for state schools is much less than $50k/yr so try going to Cal and/or your best local public school and supplement with self teaching (e.g. via public/free lectures from MIT)?
Unrelated question: does "Cal" mean Berkeley here? Do you really need to "supplement it with self-teaching"? I don't really understand why state schools are viewed that way, since Berkeley consistently ranks world top-10.
Also AP classes and dual enrollment while in high school. You can knock off 1 - 2 semesters of college level coursework in high school that way.
I’m not American, but there are lots of stories on here I’ve seen of people being able to dual enroll in a local community college or university in grades 11/12 and shorten the time spent in college.
I’ve been looking at going back to school for some years, and it’s finally looking like I’ll be able to begin the process this year.
I can do the first two years of undergrad, through a community colleges while still working, and grad school can be figure out later if I decide on it, but I’m still concerned about how much I need to save for those last two years of undergrad.
Tuition is one thing, while generally expensive, I’m in a state that’s not too bad if you can get in-state tuition. It’s still probably expensive, but nothing unmanageable (doesn’t seem much worse than financing a new car). The main concern is living expenses.
The financial aid system is a bureaucratic joke as far as I’m aware, and “estimated family contribution” seems like a delusion in the case of most people. I half-joked with some friends about living in a car for the last couple years, and one thought I was crazy, responding with an anecdote about how “you don’t have to do that, I worked 3 jobs to pay for my education” which to me almost seems more miserable at this point.
Yes, this is the issue right on the head. At a $0 income, federal and state grants + student loans will not cover tuition and housing costs at the most affordable of in state universities.
We can't just look at tuition, but housing costs. The cost of housing sometimes rivals tuition. A fun fact is they make freshmen have to buy $2200 meal plans for their first year. They also prevent freshmen from better housing where they can cook for themselves and save money through food stamps.
Ontop of this part of those grants are work study, you have to work to receive that money. This is again even if you're dirt poor with nothing. You will have to take a second job if you need to buy personal items like deodorant.
The vast majority of students don't fit into this, they come from middle class parents and have to take out private loans. Students have to pay on private loans, so, again, more and more work. I know students working 30 hours a week just to meet living costs and pay what they owe to the University so they are not barred from signing up for classes. These students are not learning what they should be, even though they are very bright hard workers it's wasted because we let universities charge these ridiculous amounts.
It's not as if the unis are using it responsibly, either. They're not funding extracurriculars or programs students can learn more by being involved in. I recall one of our programs having to be funded by professors themselves to go anywhere. There are many different administrative workers that simply don't need to exist. The system has become lazy and inefficient. I recall in HS teachers spent hours grading. In uni - it's largely automatic. Yet we continue to have multiple teachers per subject and give professors just 1 or 2 classes.
If we defund universities they will shape up quickly. Defund, regulate, start firing people.
The bill infront of me isnt lying. The amount of student loans is not enough to cover the costs, therefore requiring private loans or someone else to pay it. So either all these parents are paying it, or they're taking out private loans. Or, more likely, the stats are collected poorly as they typically are. Same as how unis are allowed to lie about job placement rates.
The fact that you are forced to take out private loans isn't evidence that the vast majority of students are.
College tuitions and housing prices vary wildly, many students live with family, many students have merit based scholarships. Many states have copied Georgia and have lottery funded scholarships that covers the majority of in state tuition for students with a B average in high school.
>Or, more likely, the stats are collected poorly as they typically are.
The stats are widely available along with the data collection methodology. If you want to stick with your confirmation bias that's fine I suppose.
I've done enough work in data collection and stats to know that generalized statistics are almost always associated with false conclusions that avoid context of their data. An org will not advocate against itself willingly because it's workers like their jobs. Therefore, I trust the bill that many students have. The evidence I have readily available concludes that scholarships are rare, student loans aren't enough, and students have become cash cows.
>I've done enough work in data collection and stats to know that generalized statistics are almost always associated with false conclusions that avoid context of their data.
There's no context that changes this. Private loans make up less than 8% of all student debt. There are numerous sources available. This isn't in dispute by anyone (except maybe yourself).
Given that fact, the only way your premise, that the vast majority of students take private loans, can be true is if most students take very very small private loans of less than a few thousand dollars.
And even that is demonstrably false. Because we have data that clearly shows that the vast majority of students don't take private loans.
More than 75% of full time students receive at least 1 scholarship or grant. Most of them aren't enough to cover the full tuition much less room and board, but they aren't rare.
And in many states have large scholarship programs as I've mentioned where tens of thousands of students in the state get that scholarship.
>The evidence I have readily available concludes...
Confirmation bias is something to watch out for. There's no evidence outside of your personal experience to support the conclusion that "the vast majority of students take private loans."
I've always been curious about who's winning the lionshare of the pie of these gluttonous institutions. Is it administrators? they're an easy scape goat. Does it fund more research, so presumably the PHDs and their research assistants?
They are an easy target, but I would argue justifiably so. My ( supposedly non-profit mind you ) university had a president, who paid himself a salary in line with regional bank's president; he was kicked out. Current one is paid less but still high 6 figures. And this is not some prestigious university, where you could reasonably argue he really, really deserves it, because he is running it so well.
I don't know a full answer, but I believe we can start with administrators and work our way through the system. Something has got to give. This system cannot stay as it currently exists.
It would also help to encourage and support people choosing to attend regional colleges for many fields of study, particularly given that educational content from state universities can easily be made available at the local level.
College was once to be reserved for the rich elite.
But central bank and government policies starting in the 70's gutted US manufacturing and took away most of the non-information worker jobs - so there was little else for the middle class to go for a career except first to college.
Hence today.
However, today it's easier than ever to live off the nanny state WITHOUT a career.
This chart includes Social Security and Medicare. I don't think it makes sense to include retirees in a data set when making an argument about "welfare."
Yes, I'm aware, but that doesn't actually affect my objection. And no, I don't have any alternate data, and I don't feel it's my responsibility to come up with any. You're the one presenting this data set to make an argument; you do the work.
Thought it's not as glamorous as a 4 year college experience, I highly suggest going to a Community College for the first two years and then transferring to a state school.
I did this and through I resented it at the time, I existed college with around $30k in student debt versus my friends that all has something in range of ($40k to $80k). IMO 30k in student debt is very manageable, currently have the thing paid down to like $12k and I like knowing I can reach into savings at any time and wipe out this debt if need be.
yeah, plus you have to knock out some random 100 level courses anyway. If you end up burning a semester of cc on some topics you end up hating it's a less expensive mistake.
>>IMO 30k in student debt is very manageable, currently have the thing paid down to like $12k and I like knowing I can reach into savings at any time and wipe out this debt if need be.
Absolutely - $30K in debt is completely reasonable imo; if after 4 years in college you have not improved your job prospects enough to cover that payment, then you probably didn't work very hard, or didn't pick a marketable major.
Most of these 'college debt is out of control' stories being pushed in the press, are usually focusing on outliers - i.e. people that borrowed $250K for multiple useless majors and now work at Starbucks because they chose badly. Public policy shouldn't be based on edge cases like this; not do we want to reward people for making bad decisions.
Last I read, the median college debt that people owe is less than $20K, and should be more than manageable for most people.
If we want to fix the college debt problem, focus on getting the college costs down - anything that tries to make it easier to pay for, without controlling the cost side of the equation, will almost certainly cause the cost to go up even faster then before.
Assuming 20k in debt is more than manageable for most people really says more about you than it does others who can't pay that back.
The OP said he could just "reach into savings" and whip out 12k. That is an INCREDIBLY privileged position to be in and I would urge you both to re-evaluate your perspective.
People taking care of their sick mother, or paying for expensive medication for chronic illnesses, or living in a poor job market area, or have poor credit due to narcissistic parents taking out loans in their name, battling mental illness, or are paying child support, etc; are not "edge cases". They make up a considerable number of people who are struggling with the compounded failures of the system layered over of them.
It was Margaret Mead who said something to the effect that "The earliest sign of true civilization, was that of a healed femur." This was said because a femur is not something that can be healed without assistance from someone else to bandage you, care for you, and fetch food for you.
What is the point of civilized society and public policy if not to ensure that "edge cases" are treated as equitably as the general public? Why do you not have the same mentality when somebody breaks a leg? Why should society care for the outcomes of poor decision making: for example, such as playing contact sports, that results in a broken leg?
Also please quit spewing the nonsense of "didn't choose a marketable major". I see this a lot with STEM grads, shitting on the arts, and then turning around and watching DUNE on HBOMax. Everybody enjoys the work of "non-marketable" majors, but nobody wants to pay for it.
People are obviously willing to pay some price for the arts, but perhaps not enough to support all the people who want to work in them at a very high standard of living. It's generally not been a very well compensated field throughout history for a reason.
Most of these 'college debt is out of control' stories being pushed in the press, are usually focusing on outliers - i.e. people that borrowed $250K for multiple useless majors and now work at Starbucks because they chose badly. Public policy shouldn't be based on edge cases like this; not do we want to reward people for making bad decisions.
That's quite the story you've created for yourself. I'm sure it makes it easy to dismiss the issue out of hand.
Not a story at all - check for yourself what the median student debt is - people who owe $250K are outliers, not the average college graduate.
Pushing these $250K horror stories, is self serving to people who want all loans forgiven - even for those people who owe much less, and who can easily afford to make payments; of course people who owe money, would prefer to get let off the hook, who wouldn't.
If you happen to live near a decent community college, this isn’t a bad idea. But I know a lot of people who did 2 years at community college, and then got screwed over by transfer credits enough that they ended up doing 3 years at a normal college. So the savings isn’t quite ideal. I actually went to community college instead of a senior year at high school, and think you should really inspect the quality of the programs at your community college before trying this. For instance, my community college only had a couple of token CS classes, and they basically taught C++ in a C-style (all declarations at the top of the file, no object orientation) as the only style of programming. Not a great way to get a head start on a CS degree. But the math, humanities, science, and social science programs could probably give you a very cheap head start on those degrees.
For the truly frugal student, I would probably recommend something like what I did: take community college or AP classes aplenty in your senior year. Go straight to a college that has the best program for your interests (keeping in mind your interests may change). Graduating in three years is easy enough if you have a semester’s worth of transfer credits for gen eds, and classes like calculus and linear algebra in particular are really easy to cover before you go to college. Administration will probably try to make graduating early as hard as possible, but they really won’t be able to stop you if you have the credits already.
A lot of community colleges have comprehensive transfer agreements with four-year schools in the same city and/or state. You can generally avoid getting screwed on transfers if you do a little research.
> But I know a lot of people who did 2 years at community college, and then got screwed over by transfer credits enough that they ended up doing 3 years at a normal college
This was the case for me, though I wouldn't classify as being "screwed."
I attended a private tech school, and they were upfront they would not accept credits for any engineering program pre-reqs (Math, Chem, CS, Tech Comm, etc). However, they would accept "humanities" credits an apply them to any electives required for our chosen degree.
Luckily, I had participated in our schools "running start" so I earned those credits while in high school, and my only intention of taking math at the time was to fulfill my highschool math requirements. I did also take 2-years of mandarin, which my school gladly accepted and counted towards my electives.
All that being said, in Washington state, all publicly funded schools must accept all credits from Community Colleges, AND guarantee admission, so if you are a student looking to attend a state school in Washington state, community college is a very attractive route.
I did community college, got a guaranteed transfer agreement to UC Davis, but was admitted to UCLA and so went there instead.
The quality of teaching at the community college often exceeded that at UCLA. Researchers are not necessarily the best teachers.
In my department there were a number of community college transfer students. They were almost always the most ambitious, and ended up going the furthest. YMMV.
I had a similar experience. Much better teaching at the two-year school than at the four-year. One of my upper-level professors didn't even teach at all; he just threw us a book, said "read this," and then we didn't hear from him again until the end of the semester.
Also, you're more likely to get a smaller lecture for Calculus and maybe some of the Physics or Chemistry at a junior college because they're higher level courses there. At a university, those are lower level courses and may be in giant lecture halls, which is not great for Calculus anyway. For science, lab sections are usually small because you can't fit that many students in a lab, so you get some smaller class size stuff there at least.
But certainly, not all community colleges are alike. If you want to transfer to a bachelor's program, you want to find a community college with a competent transfer program that is hopefully aligned with your destination and at least has a track record of transfering students who go on to get their bachelors. Some community colleges aren't great at that.
Also, California community colleges are very affordable, but some states don't have that. If community college has costs in line with 4 year schools, then it might not be a great choice.
>Colleges assumed the trend of charging $25k to $50k per year would be sustainable.
I understand that commuting to schools is not available to everyone but State schools are affordable. Entertaining the idea to go away for school either leads to higher costs or more debt. A 4 year degree from UT Dallas landed my oldest a 110k + first job in DFW. His entire degree cost approx 45-50k and that included gas, books, etc.
>horrendously predatory loans backed by the government
What's predatory about public loans. They all qualify for income based repayment, which means you'll never pay more than 10% of your disposable income (any income over 1.5x the federal poverty level). If you make below that amount, you'll never be required to pay back anything. And they are cancelled after 20 years.
Theoretically you'd owe tax on cancelled debt, but only up to the point of solvency. And a borrower who hasn't made enough income to pay back a student loan after 20 years probably isn't solvent, so won't pay anything. This also assumes that as more and more people reach this point, there isn't demand for congress to change the tax code.
Public loans make up about 92% of all student loan debt as well, so the vast majority of loans are going to qualify.
The predatory part is the pushing kids who don't understand finances into taking massive loans with high interest rates.
I've passed on a traditional uni for this because I want to avoid debt, and still get "why don't you go to uni?"'d every so often by family and acquaintance's.
And if the argument is "well, if you don't make enough to pay it, just don't!", as GP appears to be, I don't like spending other people's tax dollars dishonestly - especially not on textbook companies [0] and an expanding administrative staff.
[0] Which bribe and cut-throat their way into forcing $100+ payments per student per class per semester. Pirating or buying second hand doesn't even work half the time now - you need the "online access", aka DRM.
>The predatory part is the pushing kids who don't understand finances into taking massive loans with high interest rates.
There's literally lectures and a quiz you have to pass before you can take the loans that explains how repayment and interest rates work.
For public loans the actual amount doesn't really matter because payment is income based. And the cap on lending is around $60k for 4 years, so I'd hardly use the word massive.
>"why don't you go to uni?"'
Of course all this only applies assuming you're American, which I'd guess your not since your friends call it uni.
> There's literally lectures and a quiz you have to pass before you can take the loans that explains how repayment and interest rates work.
Yes, but they are told their whole life "after college, you'll make enough to pay it off easy, no problem!"
> For public loans the actual amount doesn't really matter because payment is income based. And the cap on lending is around $60k for 4 years, so I'd hardly say it's predatory.
60k, with an extremely high interest is most definitely a problem.
> Of course all this only applies assuming your American, which I'd guess your not since your friends call it uni.
Nope, I live in Texas. Anecdotally, my group of friends all flip between "school name"/School/Uni in conversation. In this case, I picked uni because I'm on mobile and typing is hard.
>Yes, but they are told their whole life "after college, you'll make enough to pay it off easy, no problem!"
If anything, the predominant messaging today is the exact opposite of that. It also doesn't matter because public loans qualify for income based repayment, so it doesn't matter. If you end up stuck working at McDonalds for the rest of your life, you'll never pay back a dime.
>60k, with an extremely high interest is most definitely a problem.
Current undergrad rates are fixed at 3.73%.
>Anecdotally, my group of friends all flip between "school name"/School/Uni in conversation.
Interesting, (as an American myself) I've never heard an American use uni outside of conversation with Europeans.
> If anything, the predominant messaging today is the exact opposite of that. It also doesn't matter because public loans qualify for income based repayment, so it doesn't matter. If you end up stuck working at McDonalds for the rest of your life, you'll never pay back a dime.
Unless you do get a job in your field, with enough income that you're supposed to pay it back, but can't. This probably will be less common with the current rates, but as recently as 2012 the interest rates were at 6.8% .
> Current undergrad rates are fixed at 3.73%.
Indeed. I was operating off of the rates from those who took loans in 2012 or before, the current rate is much more reasonable.
> Interesting, (as an American myself) I've never heard an American use uni outside of conversation with Europeans.
I probably picked it up from the internet and spread it to the group, I like saying less syllables :P
>Unless you do get a job in your field, with enough income that you're supposed to pay it back, but can't. This probably will be less common with the current rates, but as recently as 2012 the interest rates were at 6.8% .
There's also the fact that now (even for someone who took out loans before 2012) you'll never pay more than 10% of your disposable income, for more than 20 years. Up to a max of about $500 a month (which is the 20 year payoff rate for a $60k loan at 6.8%).
There are ways you could end up paying more. Say if you spent 10 years unemployed running up interest and suddenly got a job paying $100k, but even then you're talking $700 a month for 10 years before it gets cancelled.
It distorts prices and results in a suboptimal allocation of society’s resources, and results in people complaining about having a “degree” and having to sling coffee cups as their career.
The predation is from voters today to taxpayers tomorrow.
Politician A says they want to help students by paying for their education, or at least some of it. This requires cash flow, which results in more taxes, or at the least, entries into the government’s debt figures. Either way it shows up on the balance sheet and can affect tax liabilities today.
Politician B says they want to help students, but they will instead have the government lend money to them, with zero under writing other than the “school” needing to be credentialed by some entity. The cash is spent, but an even bigger asset in the form of the debt is recorded, actually improving the balance sheet. Then you can whittle down whatever taxpayer subsidy is being given to the schools as is, and they can make up for it with tuition increases. Either way, government finances look good, and taxes can even be reduced.
Yes, it is not the traditional use of the term. But for me, lending an 18 to 21 year old $200k +/- $50k to get a degree in literature from a non top school would qualify as predatory lending.
The probability of that person digging themself out of that hole and being able to achieve the common expectations of a family, house, vacations, retirement, weekends, etc is pretty low.
You can't get a public loan for $200k. Public loans max out at around $60k. The OP was talking about government backed loans being predatory.
And someone with $60k in public loans most certainly can dig themselves out of that hole, because repayment is capped at 10% of disposable income, and it is cancelled after 20 years.
I was under the impression that private student loans were also guaranteed by the government, but based on my searches trying to source my information, it seems Obama administration changed this since I went to college.
Here's what happened. Federal loans have existed for a long time. The Federal government would guarantee loans made by private organizations. However, these were always "Federal loans", the Federal government controlled the interest rate and the maximum amounts available.
The government under the Obama administration changed things so that "Federal" loans instead of being made by private organizations and backed by the government, were directly distributed from the treasury.
However even before this, there were separate Federal and private loans, and the only way to get to $200k (for undergrad) was to get unsubsidized private loans that weren't backed by the government.
I honestly think keeping people in debt so they have to work more & for longer is considered a feature of the system by a majority of the people running it
Absolutely true. And many of the degrees don't lead anywhere. The smart kids are the ones that aren't in college.
When I hire now, I always look for kids who are willing to teach themselves and learn from all of the good sources on the Internet. Places like Coursera, Udemy or even YouTube. They're reasonably priced.
Public schools average about $10k per year for in-state students. That's a far cry from the $25k-$50k per year people tend to quote when arguing against the cost of college. How important that difference is depends on which state a student lives in. In California there are literally dozens of options including several prestigious ones, whereas many states only have a couple of middling schools to choose from, and out-of-state public tuition averages around $25k/year.
Most state schools are easily $20k for in state students once you add in the room and board. Then they try to get $50k from the out-of-staters. Top flight state schools like Michigan, Cal Berkeley and Cornell start at $75k+ for out-of-staters. Of course financial aid does enter the picture for many students.
No, I am not thinking of twenty years ago, I accurately stated the cost of tuition today, which generally does not include renting a place to live, on-campus or otherwise, or a meal plan.
But its still a cost you have to pay for somehow, and since you are, hopefully, going to classes, studying, and doing homework, you are largely preventing from having a job lucrative enough to pay for those things completely.
I went to UIUC and paid ~$6k / year in-state (not including living costs). That has now increased dramatically to ~$20k/year. And, obviously, you still have to pay for living costs while you're a student and the part-time jobs typically available to you don't pay very much.
You didn't say "cost of tuition" in your original comment.
Further, I think it's disingenuous to only consider tuition. Cost of living in e.g. Berkeley is ridiculous, literally more than tuition. [1]
(I understand that living is not something Berkeley can fix, but it's very much their problem and a concern on students' minds, regardless of whose "fault" it is)
To only consider tuition is a cost-shifting marketing tactic that these schools use so you don't focus on the bottom line. Their goal is to get you to attend. Period.
Let's look at a less prestigious school-- UCSB tuition is about 12k, but total cost might be 24k (official estimate says 32k [2], but I have the random fees they have to not be applicable, e.g. "campus fees" or "books")
Depends how you look at it. If you're from a poor state, you can get into a solid flagship school (including medical school) even if you could never get in to places with single-digit admissions (like the top tier ofCalifornia schools). Whereas people who would be able get into the high-ranked California Universities can probably get full scholarships to solid out-of-state private schools too.
Public schools average about $10k per year for in-state students.
That seems low to me. Are you only counting the cost of tuition (and not books, room and board, etc)?
I just grabbed some numbers for NH, one site says the average for tuition alone is $10k, with another $1.5k for books/etc, and another $15k for room/board. So, unless you are able to commute from your parents, looking at closer to 25k+ in loans, per year.
I also checked UNH specifically, where the numbers are roughly $20k for tuition/fees and $33k all in.
> Public schools average about $10k per year for in-state students.
Where is that? At my school (Oregon State University) in-state tuition is $13k, and room & board is an additional $13k (which is way overpriced -- more than double what you'd pay in rent & groceries living off-campus, but all first-year students are required to live in the dorms). And out-of-state tuition is triple the in-state rate. So that $25k-50k estimate is exactly on-point here.
College cost less than a brand new car, yet does not lose a third of its value when you drive it off the lot, but rather gains value due to the wage premium and better job prospects overall. There is no crisis of car affordability yet people talk about college being unaffordable even though student loans are cheaper and have much better terms than car loans. Same for credit card debt. Also the price actually paid on tuition , especially after accounting for generous aid and other programs, is much less than the sticker price.
Knowledge and education should be free of cost and barriers. Any society that thinks otherwise, will not be able to sustain and expand knowledge in the long run.
> Colleges assumed the trend of charging $25k to $50k per year would be sustainable.
Barely anyone pays full tuition.
Look up the statistics for any of the big colleges that share numbers. It’s usually less than 10% of students paying full tuition. Significant numbers of students pay under $10K and many pay basically nothing at all.
It’s still too expensive, but the myth that everybody is paying $50K/year at these colleges needs to die. It ends up convincing a lot of people who shouldn’t be paying that much that everyone else is doing it and therefore they should too.
Here's mine [1] -- at UIUC, full tuition is 35-50k depending on residency. 30% get free tuition (given their family's net worth <50k/gross income < 67k) and 40% got some form of a loan averaging 20k.
Assuming very generous loans (unlikely), 30% of people paid full price, or about 10,000 students (undergrad class size is 30-35k). That's not trivial, but definitely off your 10% claim.
(Here [2] it is more succinctly, and not in a large picturesque landing page advertisement fashion)
Now some anecdata-- I paid 35k. Every college friend I knew also paid full, except one, who had crazy interest rates on her loan. I recognize my friend group may be a bubble, so I preface this with "anecdata" and gave you some sources on my own.
Doesn't it vary pretty wildly depending on the school?
I also was very concerned about cost when going college, so I went with the cheapest route possible and also worked a job during college. I went to community college for 2 years while living at my parent's house, which was very cheap, it cost about $1000 per year for that. Then I transferred to a cheaper in-state school, in my case it was one in the California State University system (CSU) which is way cheaper though not quite as well known as the UC system (UC Berkeley is part of that system), which cost me about 10k per year for the final 2 years.
In all I was able to get through college with no debt and a degree in Computer Science for a total cost of 22k. I think there is a mindset that students should always attend the best possible school that they are admitted to, but this seems pretty dumb to me as they are usually expensive for big brand names and in the end you receive the same degree and learn the same things.
What I did also happened in California, I think some states have even cheaper paths through college if you go with the community college + in-state university route.
If you go to a big name school the aid packages are usually much more generous, so total cost may even be below $22k (depending on your circumstances). Also, I’d push back on the idea that outcomes are comparable across schools. A degree from most Ivies has a measurable impact on future earnings, even controlling for parental income and academic aptitude.
I have a senior in high school right now and although I think you're right - he's concerned about a potential quarter-million dollar tuition bill before this whole thing is over - he's also concerned about the whole selectivity of it all. From the outside looking in, you never know what's important and what's not. He has this feeling (and I'm not sure I can dispute it) that the only degrees that matter are degrees from hyper-selective ivy league schools and if the only school he can get into is Texas Tech, he might as well just give up and go into a trade. I remind him that I went to a no-name school and I'm doing fine but he says "things are different than when you were young", and I'm not 100% sure he's wrong.
The average debt for recent college grads is around $30-40k, quarter-million figures are outliers . Doctors may accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, but they easily make up for it in income.
About 7% (3.2 million) of federal student loan borrowers have over $100,000 in debt. Many of these are likely law (avg $145,500), pharmacy ($179,514), veterinary ($183,302), medical ($201,490), and dental ($292,169).
Law is very bimodal. The median engineer likely makes more than the median lawyer.
Pharmacy: If you get a doctorate and work in a hospital (e.g. in ER), you'll get good pay. The average pharmacist in the pharmacy: Not as much in the future. And there's been a lot of wage pressure due to:
1. Amount pharmacies have to pay to obtain the drugs (i.e. what drug manufacturers charge).
2. Amount insurers will pay for medicine. These are contractual. So if you have insurance and go in, there's an upper bar on what the pharmacy can get from you.
The profit a pharmacy makes is between these two numbers, and that margin has shrunk a lot in the last decade. The upshot? Pharmacies are cutting staff, and cutting hours. In my state, there are towns with no pharmacies at all - they had to shut down as they were losing money.
I feel the key bit here is to look at the outcome of the education. He is right to be worried about a quarter-million dollar tuition bill, and there is absolutely no point in doing so for a path with poor job prospects.
There are some paths where the university choice does matter, others that don't.
Going into the trades is not a bad idea I think, but again it needs to be a conscious decision for the pros and the cons.
I think the key bit is do some research, try and get a week long internship in the job that he is looking for and/or try to speak with seniors/grads.
How many people are getting into selective schools? It cant be more than a few thousands, so indeed there are opportunities for those who go to non-selective schools. It depends in the end.
Problem is we always keep hearing about these selective schools in the media and that colours out perception a lot. Of course try as much as possible to get into a selective school, but if one is unable to, there are still opportunities.
>How many people are getting into selective schools? It cant be more than a few thousands,
Much more than that. The ivy league admits ~20k a year. That number jumps to a few hundreds of thousands if you extend to flagship state schools & the Dukes, Northwesterns, and Stanfords of the world.
If you want to be a college grad hired by Google, college name matters. If you want to move across the country, college name matters. If you want to stay in the region/state, not choose a garbage tier college is all that matters. It's not Ivy league or bust, but choosing top 100 university for chosen field is a good bet.
Exactly this, without the "give up" part. Why is going into a trade giving up? It's choosing a different path than the one that has been shoved down all our throats like it is the only respectable option. University is not for everyone, and not everyone can go there. There's simply not enough room.
I think going into trades is what I want my son to do. I love Mike Rowe's thoughts on this - you can make excellent money, get started fast and be working for yourself by the time you would get a precious 4-year degree. And trades are in serious need of new people; seems like a great opportunity.
I have many family members in the trades. "The trades" is not a homogenous group of jobs. Some of them got lucky and got good union jobs. Most of them work hard jobs that are hard on their bodies. They have an income that's enough to live on, but money is always tight. I know very few tradesmen in their 50s and 60s who would tell their children to follow their career path, other than the relative few who have managed to work their way up so that they are managing tradesmen, not working as a tradesman.
If you have a very specific career in mind then sure go for it, but just telling people to "go into the trades" is probably harmful.
If he doesn't want to be in the trades, he should go to Texas Tech. The degree will serve him just as well as a degree from any other school, bar a handful of elite institutions.
The degree is only part of the value proposition of a college, though. The actual education you get (not just the paper proving it), the meaningful experiences you have, the social connections you forge, and the opportunities you encounter in the environment are all hugely important.
I went to college and dropped out, so the value of my non-existent degree is literally zero. But I got a ton of value out of my time there. I met a lot of friends, grew significantly as a person, and found a job opportunity that started me on my career path.
I still think college is way too expensive these days, but if you think of it as only purchasing a degree, you're missing a lot.
My cousin seemed to have it worked out. Do as many relevant AP classes for credit as possible, finish the first two years worth of credits at a community college for $cheap and then transfer to a brand-name school for the final part.
My general impression is "has a degree with min GPA x.y" is a HR check-box that is necessary to get past an initial screen for a lot of large company roles. After you've got a couple of years experience no-one on the interview panel likely cares about the school you went to (and if they do, maybe give that firm a miss) compared to what you've done in the past 3 years.
Barely scraping through an engineering degree or getting a degree in architecture at texas tech is certainly a bad idea, but the average engineering graduate is doing better than the trades.
> If we fix the college financial system, enrollment would likely skyrocket.
Enrollment was at record numbers immediately preceding the pandemic, and this was a trend that held for several years prior as well. Lots of colleges had been expanding their campuses like crazy in the Before Times.
I don't think the pandemic will result in a long-term shift away from this trend. By-and-large, college education remains is a worthwhile expenditure, despite the costs. You even agree, hence why you have three kids in college!
I can appreciate not going to college right now. Classes have been randomly cancelled, there have been lockdowns/classes going remote, professors aren't grading/lecturing at the levels they should be, students are doing the work, etc, etc. But once society reaches some level of normalcy again, I believe enrollment numbers will explode back to record levels.
Plus, cost-conscious students have more options than ever. A lot of community colleges are starting to offer 4 year degrees.
I am convinced college is more or less priced off of prestigious private high schools where the parents simply pay cash. For the wealthy it is acceptable to pay 60-70K per year for their kids. Clearly this represents the wealth gap in this country.
in addition to cost, there is also a feeling I didn't get ANY value from the curriculum. Some majors are great but many give you 0 skills for the real world. I majored in communications cause I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. By the time I figured out I loved software, I had graduated.
The best lessons I learned in college were off campus and developing my social skills (which is important).
I remember reading a while back something like, "It used to be that you could mostly pay for college with a summer job. Today, the only summer job that could pay for college is being Elon Musk."
The administrative fees are outrageous. Administration staff effectively getting paid from student loans just to set more guidelines and procedures in place for students to follow and for themselves to gain more power is perverse incentives.
My nephew did community college (free) for two years and transferred in state to the UC system which is about 14K a year. He qualified for some grants/scholarships which covered more than half the cost for each semester. He was able to pay off his school loans in his first year out of college. School costs are insane, but there are easy ways to save considerable amounts of money.
> Colleges assumed the trend of charging $25k to $50k per year would be sustainable.
It's worth noting that the vast majority of students don't pay the sticker price because financial aid is provided early and often (beyond just loans). Very few students are actually paying $50k.* [0]
The average net price at a public college last year is $19,230 and the average net price at a private college is $33,720. Note that this doesn't just include tuition, but also room and board. So if you're going to public college you're probably paying $20k to eat, sleep, and learn. Plus you generally get some kind of health insurance too.
These averages can be significantly lower still for in-state public colleges and community colleges.
No doubt the massive inflation in college prices is driven by the government loans, and the federal government's policy around them should be modified at best. But we should speak in reality instead of the hyperbolic articles that often just look at tuition which is what most people are familiar with. Colleges below the top tier compete on their "discount rate" which is what percentage of the sticker price does the average student actually pay because almost no students pay the sticker price.
* "The average grant aid awarded per student was $8,100 at public colleges and $23,080 at private schools."
Cost is the primary reason I dropped out of college, with not knowing what I wanted to do with my life being the secondary reason.
It was about 15 years ago, I was 19. At the time, I was attending community college because I had no idea what I wanted to major in, or what I wanted to do with my life as far as careers go, but I had so much societal pressure telling me that I had to go to college in order to be successful. I'd tried steering myself towards a few subjects that were hobbies/passions of mine, but every time I dipped my toes into doing something with them professionally, I quickly became concerned about money/profit/work/bosses bastardizing my love for them and opted to keep them as hobbies/passions. 15 years later, I am still enamored by some of those same hobbies and am happy I kept them as such.
While the "goal" was to transfer to a university from the community college, I consistently found myself thinking, "I'm seeing a ton of my friends, and people who graduated HS a few years before me, taking out these massive loans. Why am I going to go into debt if I don't even know what I want to do?". It just made no sense to me, so I stopped. I've been incredibly lucky that I found a career path in an area that I'm good at, and have risen to a level in my career that I'm happy with, but I absolutely did have to work really hard to get here.
All that is to say, not only do I think we put far too much pressure on people to know what they want to do when they're still too young to truly have that figured out, but I also completely agree with you that cost is the primary concern here. If I didn't have to go into so much debt in order to have continued my college education, I have a feeling I would've opted to keep at it and figure out what I wanted to do along the way.
This is a good thing. Too many people are entering college and taking on enormous debt to get something which is less of an edge for getting a job.
Worse, many get saddled with debt and don't finish for various reasons.
Meanwhile tuition and books keep skyrocketing as schools divert more of their attention away from academics and toward more profitable uses of institutional time and capital.
But in a bit of good news, more jobs are ditching the degree requirement as workers as more scarce. I am glad the pandemic has opened the eyes of employers to realize that a degree is not the indicator it once was.
Opinion: the self-taught are just as capable in the workforce and college degree requirements are gatekeeping.
College simply isn't the most effective way to be learning these days. Especially for undergraduate degrees, places like Kahn Academy, Qvault.io (mine) and FreeCodeCamp are working really well
Start by lowering tuition fees. University administrations have become bloated, profiteering from the truism that you gotta go to college to get a good job.
I got my B.A. in 1968; I owed $800 balance on my student loan ($6,400 today).
My plumber just charged me $430 to install a sink, about an hour and a half's work. That doesn't include the cost of the sink. Are Gender Studies majors making this kind of money?
Government dollars went a lot further when a smaller percentage of people were enrolling in college. And there was unmet demand for college educated professionals (which is true in some fields today, but probably not as broadly true), so there was more willingness to spend government dollars educating people.
As the father of a 16-year old, I can say that the current generation of teenagers has heard a lot more about the issues of college debt than previous generations did. Partly because it's a lot higher, partly because even if newsmedia doesn't report on it, there are enough adults out there saddled with it that they just hear about it from a relative or friend. It used to be a no-brainer; you go to college if you can. No longer.
Any industry that sees nothing but expansion for decades, has a rough time when it stops. I think higher ed is in for a rough time.
No. Things are just going back to the way they used to be: higher education is for the elites. Once upon a time we understood that higher education was important for all and having a well-educated public was good for the Republic. Now that view no longer holds - the politicians have learned that their flim-flam doesn't work as well on a well-educated public and so they've been making cuts to higher education for the past 20 years. We're just now getting to the point where the cuts are having a serious impact to the middle class being able to afford college. Don't worry though - the elites will be just fine.
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
It's enough to assume elites were greedy (and/or dense) and didn't consider long-term effects, you don't even need a decades-spanning conspiracy for it.
The elites won't be as fine once they realise much of their wealth stems from the rest of the republic, but that seems to be the circle humanity is caught in for eternity.
it is my vague impression from history that in real yet slow-moving crisis, those that are able to command and control high-value resources do in fact continue to thrive while others fail in increasing numbers. This works, until it doesn't, to make a cute phrase, because in dynamic systems, either the system re-stabilizes in a new and different composition, or there is sudden, increased failure.
If I understood you correctly, you're describing the efficiency-resilience problem: A system that is efficient is highly specialised for their environment, and thus susceptible to failure if the environment changes; a system that is resilient will not be as efficient, but can adapt to a changing environment.
This seems to apply to all kinds of things - people, organisations, software, religions.
I guess as often in live, balance is important here :)
The reason colleges cost so much is that they've expanded their administration, facilities, and sports programs to soak up all of the available loan money.
I went to a state school that focused on STEM. The acceptance rate was low, class sizes were small, and the tuitions were reasonable. The buildings dated from the 60's. We didn't have extensive athletic programs, and our gym was falling apart. The school didn't spare expenses on things that didn't contribute directly to education.
We still had access to full machine shops, doppler radar installations, flow cytometers, BSL-3 labs, electron microscopes, wind tunnels, robotics facilities, and a boat load of really cool stuff. But it certainly didn't feel like an ivory tower.
Though our school wasn't losing money, the state board of regents decided to merge it into a much larger "liberal arts" school. This was done so that it could hit the student body requirements in order to qualify for building its own division I football program.
They built lots of fancy buildings for their dance program and theater productions. I can't even count how many stadiums and sports facilities they've constructed - it feels like two dozen! They're also purchasing lots of expensive real estate to enhance the size of the main campus. Meanwhile tuition has quadrupled and fees have gone up 1,000%.
I wonder if there's a market for schools that specifically don't have a sports program. I suspect the atmosphere at such a place would be attractive to a large minority of prospective students.
A lot of students who may not play sports competitively still enjoy playing sports recreationally and really, given the sad state of American's health these days, we really need to be promoting the development of both mind and body.
Could somebody explain to me (Australian) why/how sport and higher education became so closely linked? We certainly have university sporting teams here, but they are not really notable and certainly don't have the political clout that they do in US schools.
In Europe all the football teams have their own junior teams that are separate from education. Eg there are Chelsea/Real Madrid/Bayern under-10s teams that kids attend after school and feed up to the seniors. In addition, the leagues in Europe are a pyramid. Part-timers play at the bottom, superstars at the top. There's relegation and promotion, and players can develop at lower league teams to get bought by the top clubs later.
In the US they don't have that. AFAIK, there's no "Green Bay Packers U-18s" football team that is integrated with the professional club and promotes young players. Baseball does have a farm team system called the Minor Leagues.
The NCAA which runs university athletics in the US managed to make a junior league feeding all the professional leagues in various sports. The progression for an American athlete is then to get a scholarship to play at some university, and then get drafted by a professional team once they finish.
The administrative bloat helps cover the fact that their graduates aren't able to get jobs upon graduating. Parents and prospective students feel good that 99.7% of the graduates got a job within their first year of graduation and don't realize 7% of that was as an administrator for the college.
Student loans are government-guaranteed and cannot be absolved by bankruptcy. This IMO creates a perfect storm whereby under-informed teenagers can get massive loans they have no hope of repaying. Without the government/no bankruptcy components to this equation, the market would not support this kind of debt market.
Fortunately, this is easy to fix. There are two simple options (and probably many more complex ones):
1. Make it a free market. Make student debt absolvable by bankruptcy. Don't give government guarantees. Private loans will account for the viability of student's repaying those loans, while allowing bankruptcy helps ensure that unfair or predatory loans will be costly to the loan-issuer.
2. Make it a government service, like K-12. The government will actively manage the tertiary education market, thus making "the cost of college" a policy decision.
IMO the first one is not particularly desirable because it will limit college access to the upper socio-economic classes, further exacerbating wealth inequality and reducing social mobility. That leaves us with the second option, which is both straightforward to implement and has many case-studies abroad.
not only the higher costs of education but my generation (millennial) learned that most degrees offered provide no real jobs that can contend with massive rise in cost for every significant thing that constitutes a decent life (housing, childcare etc...). Things look even bleaker for younger generations. The people who were born just in time to ride the swelling wave greatly benefited, if you were born when the wave is crashing down, unfortunately your life will be much much harder. We have this notion that everything we earn is based on merit but as i get older i see how much external context greatly influences the opportunities for merit as well as the outcomes.
I can relate to info/knowledge about that edu debt, went to undergrad in the 90's and while I might be naive, I can say I didn't comprehend the debt side of things. And my edu debt pales in comparison to today's students. Fortunately I grew up, buckled down, and paid it off but there were some lean years right after school. Now? I can't even imagine.
And I also agree: how will these institutions scale back? What if tuition was cut significantly? What programs are on the chopping block?
Businesses and industries that have never had layoffs (or not in a long time), tend to do them badly (more unfairly and in a more disorganized manner) than ones which have had them recently.
Maybe it just got too damn expensive. I make pretty good money and I'm still planning carefully for how I'm going to deal with it for my kids (who still have 7-9 years left before college).
I'm hoping that online school really takes off, and that colleges follow Georgia Tech's lead on pricing for it. OSU still wants full price for online classes, which is bogus.
Beyond that, I'm going to strongly incentivize my kids to stay home the first couple years and hit the local community college for the first half of their degree, just because it's dramatically cheaper than what it'll cost to send them to live at a university.
I thought college was expensive when I was going in the 90s. Now it's just ridiculous.
Relatively, yes, I believe so. But Oregon State still tells me to budget 30K/year for a resident undergrad. About half of that is living expenses, half is school.
Well they said they were told to budget 30K a year, half for school expenses, and half for living expenses, so it sounds like their experience isn't contradictory with yours.
I'm losing the thread of this conversation. The original poster said that OSU costs around $30K per year, with $15K for tuition and school fees and $15K for living expenses. The person who replied said their wife only paid about $15K per year for online courses, which is in line with the above mentioned costs.
Yes and OSU is in a relatively rural and affordable part of Oregon. So even with the insane housing market explosion - $1200/month is probably doable for a bare minimum type of living situation for a student. It’ll be just enough if the student has no emergencies. $600/month rent for a room. $400/month for food. $200 for misc.
If this was not a college town or somewhere as rural - you’d likely have to make it closer to $2000+ just because that’s how expensive it is these days to live in cities unless you were able to buy a house a couple decades ago.
> You will not be paying 30K a year for OSU e-campus. More like 10-15K a year or so.
Yeah, last time I looked it is the same tuition as if you were using the in-person facilities. I think that's too much for an online program. I paid less than $10K for my master's degree at Georgia Tech. That works out to about a third of what OSU is charging for the online undergrad CS degree, if my math is right. For online videos recorded once and watched many times, I think it should not cost anywhere close to what sitting in a room with a professor does.
This is because the degree granted does not mention if it was earned online or not (and this is why we choose OSU). It gives literally the same degree as if you earned it in person.
The dynamics of this play out different on various campuses but at my alma mater we had a bunch of "right off campus" apartments that competed heavily with the dorms. Well, it wasn't much of a competition, if you calculated your monthly rent based on what you paid for room and board, you got about $700/mo to live in a dorm with 3 others.
By comparison you could go off campus and rent an entire 1bd for like $750/mo. A similar living situation off campus with 3 roommates would set you back $300-400/mo and $550 if you really wanted the nice place.
The thing that always bugged me about dorms is they aren't treated as regular residences. School having a week long break? You have to be out of your dorm during the break with no where to go but back to your parents. Also that 30k for a year only covers two semesters, about 6-7 months of actual housing, which works out to $2.5k/mo for board if we take half of that 30k you mentioned.
I don't know where this college is but I'm going to bet that you can get a seriously nice place, probably a small house for that amount.
In my undergrad, when I was living in dorms, it also came with a meal plan (I think ~2 meals a day covered). So for in state, 10-15k was tuition. The rest was rent + meals. So 15k / 12 = $1250 a month, which is not cheap, but considering it includes food is really not bad at all.
But you can't divide it by 12 since school is only in session for roughly 9 months. During summer session you're on your own for food and housing. That makes it more like $1666/month. That's nuts.
I started college almost 20 years ago, so I don't know the current situation. Back then the state schools had acceptance rates of only 20%-30% because so many people wanted to go to state schools to save money. There wasn't nearly enough supply to meet demand.
I never applied to any public school, but I was legitimately worried about not being accepted. I wouldn't depend on it.
I'm really glad I went to a private college in the end. People who went to state schools said class sizes were huge (like 150 students per class) and they were being taught by TAs. I really don't think I would have succeeded in that sort of environment - At my private school we didn't have any TAs and I never had a class over ~30 people, which was important because classes were very interactive.
My state school (Washington State) nearly doubled while I was attending. Of course I was there between 2009 and 2013 which is where all colleges really jacked their prices up.
Yes and no. I used to work at a state university recently. The cost of most state universities (in my state) has stayed largely the same over the last 10 years. However state appropriations (tax dollars from the state government) has been going down each year. So students are responsible for more of the bill.
Back in the 70's and 80's state appropriations covered between 70-80% of tuition. Now my state covers roughly 35-40% of funding for most public universities [1]. Part of this is the university offering more programs - athletics, counseling, therapy, other student services, which all need additional funding. The other part is that state funding is going down due to a variety of political budget reasons.
We have to do something about what people think college is to an employer. I'm excluding courses where you specifically need the degree: medicine, law, and maybe some others. Clearly you can't be a doctor or lawyer who hasn't passed his exams. Also if you are going to be a professor or phd naturally you will need to have studied whatever it is.
For everyone else, all college does is shows people that you are diligent: you read the books, wrote the essays, passed the quizzes.
Now, the thing is most jobs are not directly related to any particular degree. For example if you become an option trader like I did, nothing on my Engineering/Econ/Mgt was relevant. Even the finance parts of the management course were not relevant. You learn on the job. Think about it, you are at work 50-70 hours a week the whole year vs splitting your time at uni over a much shorter calendar. At work you sit next to an expert, at school you sit next to novices.
So the whole idea that college qualifies you to do something is bogus. It's mainly a signal that you're teachable, and a weak signal that you're interested in some particular broad area.
I would guess that the great majority of jobs that people with degrees take could have been done by the same people without their degree. You'll never get people to admit that if you aren't friends with them, but that is generally what people think as well.
Are there other benefits to college? Certainly. You get to socialize, mature a bit away from home, and for most people it's the last time they are exposed to the great ideas that mankind has found over the centuries. Those things can all be done separately without paying for it, but currently the system is broken and everyone uses degrees as a social status marker, which is self-reinforcing: you still need a degree because if you don't have one you can't get those jobs that you don't need a degree to perform.
A college degree is a filter that someone is reasonably diligent, socialized to some level, and compliant enough to play the game. Most employers don’t want some self-taught “I learned the same stuff for $1.50 in late charges at the library” type. If only 1/3 of people attend college, and 1/3 have a high GPA, employers get a filter for the top 11% of compliance & diligence without much effort.
If we can align the incentives of colleges and students to find jobs, it will also be a win for the economy. Let students bargain with their future earning potential, if they don’t make anything, the school doesn’t make anything.
Here's my counter: what if, instead of taxing students after their graduation, we taxed all adults income, then used the tax proceeds to make university tuition cost-free. The advantage would be that more students would attend, we'd have a more educated society, and alumni would not be worried about having to take the best paying job instead of one that they desire.
It's win-win-win, taxpayers get free access to universities for themselves and their children, students avoid debt or garnished wages in the future, and universities get government support and can shut down complicated administrative overhead for helping students navigate financing.
Now I know your thinking - does it scale? Yes! We have data from secondary and primary schools with the same cohort of students, who attend school for no cost. Attendance and graduation of these schools is closely correlated with life outcomes and success! We could apply this existing financing model to universities and solve the problem of tuition fees with by reusing the ideas from other tuition-free primary and secondary schools.
the linked article describes a percentage-based income sharing scheme. the student isn't necessarily incentivized to get a higher paying job than they would otherwise. the school definitely is incentivized to guide students into more lucrative jobs, but that's probably a good thing for the median student.
as for the free college idea, this seems like a solution for the wrong problem. I'd argue a large chunk of students are already wasting their time getting a credential that shouldn't be necessary for the work they plan to do. I'm not convinced it's automatically good for more people to graduate college. four years is a long time to spend doing something without a clear, concrete reason to do so.
Cost and COVID hitting guaranteed in person learning is what I imagine. I remember thinking online learning was as waste in the mid-2000s. Has it improved?
- Depending on what you choose it might not even be rewarding
- You'll be saddled with crippling debt forever
Nah.
You're better off paying a couple of thousand for a coding bootcamp and have a better chance of finding some work and actually pay off the smaller debt you might have incurred.
This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right?
America is still stuck in this alternate universe where it's a great privilege to have the opportunity to learn, which is of course true to some extent, but they really put it on a pedestal there.
Compared to the rest of the world, I think they over index on attending prestigious out-of-state and thus expensive, regardless of public or private, instead of building a really strong system for locals.
I think of my (non-US) classmates, maybe 1-2 per 100 were from a different region or country? I paid a total of $20k over five years which I easily covered with internships/summer jobs. Can you say the same in the US?
> after all we want humanity to be advancing, right?
I don't know how much our reams of communications, generic business and English majors are advancing humanity. (Granted, I studied finance [and engineering] in undergrad.)
Communicating with eachother, knowledge of business, and understanding language seem like things we would want more of in society. Not sure why they would be demonized. Is the goal of higher-education to promote learning and build a well-rounded citizenry or to create worker drones?
Because they're in large part neither functional nor artistic. Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not.
There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, not mastering new ways to think. That doesn't advance society, particularly when it burdens young people with debt.
> Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not.
What exactly do you think an English major is like? Humanities majors absolutely force you to think in new ways, and I'd argue much more so than engineering or CS majors.
> What exactly do you think an English major is like? Humanities majors absolutely force you to think in new ways
I agree, and was on the edge in not including that major, but did so because there are English majors and there are undergrads who got a degree in English. At a lot of tier 2 public universities (e.g. the one I went to), the latter dominate. A student showing initiative can get a top-notch liberal arts education. But the average student won't. They'll skim, read the SparkNotes and pass through unchanged because the point isn't studying literature but getting a diploma.
Students who want to learn anything should be given the opportunity. I strongly believe that. But more people with degrees doesn't make for a better-educated population. And driving money into encouraging that doesn't necessarily advance society either.
This sounds like a bias working backwards to find a justification. Is there any studies or data that support your stance? Which are the "good" majors? Who gets to judge that?
> There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, and not mastering new ways to think.
The biggest complaint from anyone I know who studied medicine/pre-med is the sheer amount of memorization involved. Must be a useless field of study.
> biggest complaint from anyone I know who studied medicine/pre-med is the sheer amount of memorization
This is a straw man. Nobody said memorization is verboten.
A certificate granted for mainly memorization, where no new modes of thinking or doing were involved, is not worth tends of thousands of dollars. If a med school matriculated students who never did practical and had never deliberated treatment modes and tradeoffs, et cetera, yes, it would be close to useless.
>A certificate granted for mainly memorization, where no new modes of thinking or doing were involved, is not worth tends of thousands of dollars.
And here is your straw man. Nobody said they were worth that much. You haven't demonstrated that a significant portion of any major exhibits these traits.
Four years of a young person's time is worth tens of thousands of dollars. So beyond the direct cost of education, that is the opportunity cost, to the individual and to society. I think that's money well spent for e.g. a proper liberal arts degree. It isn't for a piece of paper pursued for its own end.
You haven't presented evidence or sources that any individual major is "A certificate granted for mainly memorization, where no new modes of thinking or doing were involved."
This is the basis of your entire point, and you haven't backed it up with anything of substance. You can keep tossing red herrings, but this hasn't been addressed.
Anecdotally, I have a friend who recently retired from teaching psychology and linguistics at a university level, and his observation over twenty years at the same institution was that standards were aggressively lowered to move more paying customers through the system. Not sure you'd say that's substantial or not, but I'm inclined to believe him.
> Not sure you'd say that's substantial or not, but I'm inclined to believe him.
I would certainly believe that person. However, saying "this major at this school has low standards" is not the same as saying "a bunch of majors at all schools have low standards and are thus worthless."
> There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization
I have a degree in physics with a minor in literature. I took one upper div lit class a quarter. I never memorized a thing. Instead I read a ton, both assigned and peer review, and wrote a ton, both essays and creative. My lit classes are far more memorable than my physics classes because I learned the skill of communicating my ideas. "Low-grade" creative writing taught me that my ideas will never be conveyed as I hoped; good criticism can be immensely helpful; and rewriting my work is when something truly useful comes together.
Stephen King was an English major. Word art, literature, helps people advance cognitively.
English is an unowned cultivated intellectual property that greases communication which greases all other human endeavors. I think its underappreciated.
Not all education needs to advance the frontier, much of it is about maintaining what we've already claimed and passing it on to new generations.
I think it's a quite good argument, and at very least one that doesn't rely on colleges literally producing a larger number Stephen Kings, as if something about the quantity produced could matter at all (really curious how you even arrived at that counter).
Regardless, creative writing is but a subset of the discipline of English, if not an entirely separate department in a lot of schools. Most of it is studying what has already been written, making connections and forming articulations that understand our human world.
If you see the study of any humanities at all as only possibly measured by what success you gain in the domains of social status or notoriety, then I wonder if you apply that same rubric to STEM fields? Please be mindful that just because you dont know about something, doesn't make it dumb, bad, or pointless. At the very least, don't wave away so simply an entire discipline!
Future authors don't need a college program to "...study what has already been written, making connections and forming articulations that understand our human world".
They can do this by reading books. There are even books of criticism that help you learn about other books.
Yes I can say the same in the US. My state paid full tuition for B average and above students if you went to a college in the state. After a little over a year I took off and went back to school while working at a later point. By that time I qualified for federal tuition aid but lost my state one. It wasn’t much over $20k for 5 years out of pocket for me.
Georgia’s hope scholarship did in the 2000s. Now Hope doesn’t cover everything but there’s something called the Zell Miller grant that you can get in conjunction with Hope that pretty much pays most of tuition like the old program. Hope is funded by the lottery.
I've lived in the U.S. my entire life, and I agree with you. Our culture somehow misses the fact that as a society we benefit from educated citizens. There's even a segment of the population that fetishizes ignorance as a virtue, and knowledge as leftist indoctrination.
There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government.
Almost all of my classes had leftist brainwashing. In my machine learning class, the professor would use voting republican as a classifier making the wrong decision. Given that people had made it this far in education to be good at repeating and learning what ever the professor says and that the professor is in a position of power over the students, this is very bad.
> There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government.
Well, we now have to show our papers to go to restaurants, bars, work, etc and are now required to mask our faces in public. its considered an act of terrorism to raise your voice at a school board meeting, and we're being censored on internet platforms. so yeah, you already accomplished your soviet-style authoritarianism.
Academia is a hostile environment for a right-leaning person. When less than 5% of professors identify as conservative, why would you gravitate to it, as a conservative? That's half the country, by the way. Maybe that has something to do with low engagement. Consequently, the institution suffers dramatically from its own groupthink.
That being said, there's a difference between academic education and other forms of education, such as vocational or work experience. One is not better than the other. I'm weary of people that think they're smarter or better than someone else on the basis of what school they went to or how long for. Academia does not have a monopoly on knowledge. Particularly in the information age, but even well before the age we find ourselves in, there's always been value in the pragmatic experience of less intellectual pursuits.
I'd say the U.S.'s slant towards pragmatism and away from intellectualism is one of my favorite things about the country. I'd say it showed itself pretty well on the Covid response. Red states were more quicker to re-open, quicker to drop restrictions, and quicker to move on to living with Covid and in spite of it. People knew intuitively that you wouldn't be able to control a virus more infectious than the common cold.
And many people know this, intuitively as well, that's why New York loss record population last year and why Florida and Texas grew dramatically. The intellectuals running New York and New York City probably have tons of education and not one bit of common sense, because all they know is conformity. When an ordained expert says jump, they ask how high?
That doesn't even begin to cover the other part of it, which is how poorly adapted academia is for the 21st century. Even if it were free, it wouldn't fix that problem.
Some of the 'let's saddle students with debt' vibe seems to have pollinated the Netherlands, though for reasons that I applaud but don't quite understand pretty much everyone now considers it a bad idea.
I have no data, I'm simply stating my beliefs to give you an understanding, since I feel I'm one of the people you happen to be surprised about.
Free education levels the playing field. Moreover, I feel guilt. I have been a beneficiary of free education. Free transport, free college tuition, free books and some paid assistance with living somewhere else. Coming from a working class family it has given me an amazing boost in:
* Career (master computer science)
* Spiritual knowledge (one Buddhism course was enough)
* Outlook on the world
* Network
University isn't perfect, but if I wasn't given this chance then I would not be able to replicate certain pivotal experiences simply by using the internet and my own wit. In that sense, I still believe it levels the playing field by quite a bit.
School was always meant as the great equalizer and I think it still should be, as imperfect as it is.
This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right?
I think foreign colleges have stricter entry requirements and fewer amenities compared to American colleges. So yes, college may be free in Japan, but also much harder to be accepted.
>I think foreign colleges have stricter entry requirements and fewer amenities compared to American colleges. So yes, college may be free in Japan, but also much harder to be accepted.
Yeah this is problematic, on one hand you have people who work harder for it pass the entrance exams and get in (like in France for example where some engineering schools like Polytechnique and ENS have a super difficult entrance exam but then you know everyone studying there earned it), but on the other hand you get some people who are just lazy or not good at physics get filtered from top tier positions in CS because the entrance exam had Math and Physics equally attribute to your grade.
In Germany, the overall entry requirement is a not horrible high school degree (type of high school intended to prepare for an academic career) for engineering. You can just go and sign up to the university of your choice. The flip side is that you then sit there with hundreds of other students that will be weeded out by a harsh curriculum and zero advisement. That said, whoever gets through that system will be worth their price later on when you hire them.
College is, overall, cheaper in Japan than in the U.S., but it isn’t free [1]. You might be thinking of some countries in Europe.
The top schools in Japan are indeed quite competitive, but there are also universities that admit almost any high school graduate. A few decades ago, a lot of new universities were established just when the birthrate was starting to drop. Now some lower-tier private universities are struggling to attract enough students to survive.
>Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right?
the number of STEM degrees in the US has basically been flat for decades, majority of degrees being handed out are effectively useless in terms of boosting productivity and "advancement". Go around and ask people with college degrees how often they actually use them, probably 90% admit it was worthless, I know mine was. Luckily I had academic scholarships so I didn't have any debt
kids are effectively being propagandized and brainwashed into chasing worthless credentials while racking up debt that will impact their lives for years. The amount of emotional manipulation around college is disgusting
My theatre degree has been useless from a compensation standpoint for me. It was somewhat helpful when I was in sales but I only got it because it was the easiest degree that required the least amount of maths.
I went to college because my parents forced me to. Thankfully I got out without any debt. I cant imagine how upset I would be if I racked up 100K is debt and ended up with a useless degree like many of my friends did.
That being said... I cant really blame my parents for forcing me to go. It did seem like the best option at the time. No one told me, or I guess them, about alternative educational programs or trade schools. I'd probably be a carpenter now if someone had. I had pretty much zero plans for my life post high school so college at least gave me something to do while I figured it out.
Paying for the Party is a good book about this issue of STEM degrees being flat and money being pumped in by students doing marketing, PR, communications, and business management degrees.
> after all we want humanity to be advancing, right?
Hell no! Life is a zero-sum game, so if I'm hurting other people, that must mean I'm winning! Besides, if we all collectively come together to make the world better, those people might have nice things too! That would make me so angry! I'd rather live in poverty than see those people do well in life!
Sarcasm, obviously, but at least 100 million Americans believe all of the above. They are single-issue voters, and their single issue is hurting other people.
> Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all...
I don't know about all of the rest of the world, but many countries require you to "test in" to college (and then it's free). The US basically lets anyone go to college if they can pay.
You can argue one is better than the other. But you should be honest/aware of the difference.
> I paid a total of $20k over five years which I easily covered with internships/summer jobs.
You paid with five years of your life. Even if college were "free", it still wouldn't be the optimal thing for everyone to do. It is the best choice for some, but unfortunately those who make other choices are often looked down upon in much of the world unless they're an outlier success.
The cost of US schools is a massive problem, but the increasing assumption that everyone needs to take multiple years out of what could be the most productive phase of their life to engage in a tracked cookie-cutter experience is an even bigger problem.
Schooling and education aren't the same thing and the first doesn't always lead to much of the second.
This is an important point that isn't being made enough in this thread. Must we all trade our youth for what amounts to a cost sunk fallacy that commits us to a path we may not even like?
Think of college as a social experience for children of privileged backgrounds. Four years of minimal responsibility, ample social activities and idle study. I would love to have that now.
Our state has a program that covers tuition if you are in-state, received good grades in high school, and continue to maintain those.
Of my (undergraduate) classmates, I believe 60% were out of state, including out of country. Unfortunately, most that came from states with similarly ranked public schools did not have access to a similar program in those states.
My payments to the university totaled $60k for 7 years, undergraduate and masters. (I lost full tuition coverage my first year.)
> America is still stuck in this alternate universe where it's a great privilege to have the opportunity to learn, which is of course true to some extent, but they really put it on a pedestal there.
I think the facts don't really support the idea of it being a "great privilege" in the sense of being inaccessible to most. E.g. if you look at this table of tertiary education by country, in OECD countries plus a few others, the US is in the top 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
In the section below that, if you look at 4-year degrees or higher, more Americans have a 4-year equivalent than Israelis, Swedes, Canadians, Norwegians, French, German etc.
We're not an outlier in how many of us go to college, just in how much of people's lives they end up paying for it.
I don't know in which non-American worldview you subscribe, but America has a higher rate of tertiary education achievement than practically every European nation (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...). European countries have more selective and restrictive advanced education requirements, they just don't charge for them. This is the literal opposite of "supporting advanced education for all".
To be clear, I think this is a more sensible system than what we do here in America, where anyone can get an advanced education because even if you can't afford it, the government will guarantee loans of arbitrary size.
There is little hope anymore for actual advancement anyway, just a tendency downwards, punctuated by small spurts of different kinds of enthusiasm.
We get a new iPhone every once in a while, or a UI refresh of twitter, to simulate a feeling of advancement, but we all, deep down, know it's just that, a feeling.
How could anyone even really want advancement when we know that finance thrives on predictable cycles.
The word for the next centuries should be 'humility,' not 'progress'. Humility is the only thing I think we can possibly achieve anymore
> This is nearly a strictly American problem. Much of the rest of the world has realized that society requires and is capable of supporting advanced education for all -- after all we want humanity to be advancing, right?
Yeah subsidization of education, of mostly useless degrees will solve all problems of humanity, totally.
It's different and worse than you say. We put it on a pedestal, decided it was worth any cost, decided everyone should have the ability to go, but that they should all have to shoulder that burden themself. A large part of the issue right now is the system we've built allows any student to obtain a predatory loan to cover the entirety of the outrageous costs, and any political effort to change this is likely career suicide because it will be seen as keeping underprivileged students out of the best programs and therefore stunting their futures.
There are a lot of people blaming federal loans for the inflation in college costs, however, private secondary school (high school) tuition has also grown at a comparable rate (maybe even faster). There are not, to my knowledge, federal loans for private secondary schools. Does anyone have an explanation for this?
Edit: clarified that private secondary school = private high school. Of course federal student loans are available for accredited private colleges/universities.
They are very much for private schools. There's no real limit on them. They tend to cover the difference between what a family can pay and what the tuition is. They're generally low interest and you don't need to start paying them back until you're done with school.
Since the loans always cover the difference the impact of tuition costs going up isn't immediately felt
First birth rates are generally down. Not only in America,but worldwide.
>Wages at the bottom of the economy have increased dramatically, making minimum-wage jobs especially appealing to young people as an alternative to college.
This isn't an ether or situation. I worked full time while going to school full time. In fact this was my entire senior year of college.
I actually got to 6 figures without a degree, but the entire point of college for me was getting away from my horrible family. It's still a good way to get distance.
This is great news overall.
Tuition will have to drop and schools will offer more flexibility to working students.
In my home state of California the UCs are hostile to anyone with a 9-5, I hope this changes.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 398 ms ] threadEnrollment might also be down because of COVID. For many, I think, college is more about getting away from home and living in a fun-filled alternate world for a few years with dorm rooms, frat parties, etc. With remote classes and restrictions, why bother?
(I'm imagining here -- I commuted to a local 4-year college on a public bus while also working. Then got my Master's degree in the evening while working full-time, in the early 80s.)
There are a handful of companies that own a huge margin of the standardized testing market(Pearson being one of them). From selling new test learning books every year, to the massive global standardized testing training market.
Maybe the movements to eliminate SATs have a different agenda, but generally the main reason you need those SATs is because the average education level in the US is so horrendous. Instead of fixing that problem there are a handful organizations acting as money printing machines and gatekeepers for higher education. It's frankly disgusting.
If you ever had to take ANY kind of industrialized generalized test, whether it's ISC2, PMI, 6 Sigma, TLA+ or just SAT's or IELTS/TOEFL GRE or even just normal US university multiple choice as a non American you might find the whole ordeal infuriatingly insulting(unless you studied medicine, in which case it's similar across the globe)
It's a lazy cop out for not giving teacher enough resources to actually teach.
It used to be common for selective colleges to administer their own proprietary admission exams. But that was a huge burden on students applying to multiple schools, hence the switch to standardized testing.
The answer depends on institution type.
Highly Selective Institutions: the admissions process is so hands-on and personal that I could believe they are able to get a good sense of each candidate without testing. E.g., I absolutely believe Harvard's admissions folks have the bandwidth to compare grades between high schools (not that they need to). And they do all sorts of stuff that gives you a better sense for the candidate than test scores (alumni interviews, essays, rec letters, delving into performance in highly competitive extra-curriculars, exceptional community service work, etc).
Non-Selective Institutions (let's say admissions >70%): Standardized tests are kind of a waste of time and money for all involved. These institutions are functionally admitting everyone who can manage to fill out the admissions paperwork and didn't systematically fail high school courses. It makes sense to make test scores optional, because there might be a few diamonds in the 30% "oof" pile who can pull off a decent SAT score to compensate for their D-average-no-honors-courses transcript. But requiring the SAT/ACT is silly when your admissions standards are extremely low.
Moderately Selective Institutions: I definitely see utility in these universities still using the SAT. But notice that this is actually a very small set of institutions. Perhaps 100-300 the US's 3K+ colleges fit in this category.
--
FWIW, my opinion on SAT/ACT is somewhere in the middle.
I think standardized tests can be an excellent instrument when some form of assessment is necessary but more nuanced assessments of merit are cost-prohibitive. So for places like competitive state flagships, I think getting rid of testing and replacing it with an admissions process that works at least as good as testing is probably more expensive than it's worth.
However, I also think the pro-testing camp is often extremely hyperbolic. Testing is just one way of assessing merit. It has all sorts of flaws. Tests are a model, and all models are wrong.
As an aside, I'm not surprised that so many pro-SAT-the-sky-is-falling folks are mathematicians. That entire field is completely fucked up when in comes to testing. Math as a discipline is bad about intellectual peacocking in general... if you think Mensa is insufferable, spend an afternoon in a math dept. Math professors are exactly the last set of people in the world I would trust to have a healthy attitude toward the ability of testing to suss out real merit. They literally talk about their prelim exams the same way frat bros talk about hazing rituals. Systematic misuse of testing is the second biggest reason that people choose to do phds in math-adjacent fields instead of math. (The biggest reason is job prospects.)
The same goes for infant mortality. People cite infant mortality as evidence that our healthcare system sucks. But really infant mortality is clustered in certain sub populations.
The same goes for murder rates and gun violence.
Unfortunately the problems cannot be fixed until people admit and are willing to talk about the underlying actual root causes.
I also have first-hand knowledge of a fair number of students who took some time off during the pandemic.
Some people fail out of college because the work is beyond their capabilities, but I think a significant percentage of people who start college but don't graduate do so for reasons other than being simply unqualified.
I admit it's anecdotal, but very few people I know who started college but didn't finish didn't finish due to academic reasons.
My school, Michigan Tech, is in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a remote location averaging over 200" of snow per year with the nearest major city over 5 hours away, and most students traveling 8+ hours from their parent's homes in SE Michigan. The application was 4 pages long: 1 page of info, 2 pages for me to fill out, 1 for my guidance counselor. No essays. So, very easy to be accepted to, 90%+ acceptance rate.
The second year return rate was below 70% at the time, and anecdotally many freshmen didn't return for second semester after going home for Christmas. Not only is it remote, cold, and not sunny, but there was a dearth of women and some tough weeder classes (chemistry, calc 2).
If you can finish, you're in a great spot. Eng degrees from there are quite well regarded regionally (competitive with University of Michigan) and graduates had lower debt than any other school in the state. It seems obvious that the university avoided a more stringent up-front filter so it could soak kids for a year or two before forcing them out due to grades or environment.
I'm not sure that's entirely unreasonable, as I'm not sure how they could predict who would leave due to environment, but I also knew many freshmen who were obviously not setup to succeed academically, and didn't.
imo this is an appropriate way for a public school to operate. everyone gets a shot, but people that can't make it get failed out early. way less debt for the student than dropping out years later, and more frugal with public funds too.
If his major/career had the choice of degree vs work, the latter would be a really good choice right now.
Trick is to find ways out of the engineering department. I did Latin as an optional, and I was in a sports team where nobody was an engineer. Plus presumably you aren't living in an engineering-specific halls?
Bad spelling/grammar are mostly just due to modern technology where people communicate differently. Those things aren't as important as they once were. You'll see "highly educated" individuals making the same mistakes.
Lastly, there's the possibility you're speaking with someone who is not a native English speaker. Obviously, with your high IQ you should have been able to consider that scenario though ;)
It will be interesting to see a follow-up analysis that parses out enrollment behavior by subgroup (e.g., by SAT/ACT score) as it will be easier to understand who is choosing not to enroll in college.
Another follow-up could be to see which institutions are losing students. It is known that college enrollment is counter-cyclical to the economy and that enrollment declines at community colleges and open access universities when people can get a job right out of high school.
And Zoom interactions are still terribly inferior to real life in-person ones regardless of what kind of college you go to.
No, it isn't. A tight labor market which provides more opportunities for on-the-job training is positive for everybody except those who made their money selling fake tickets.
This isn't likely to hit community colleges, which the article touches on. Just trying to point out that digging deeper might show some interesting details.
* Some abandoned their international studies plan and attended local colleges instead.
* Some took a gap year to wait until 2021.
* A minority pushed on and took classes online until they're able to come to the US.
The elephant in the room is that those foreign students are also the ones paying sticker price and subsidizing college for the other students, even at public schools.
now many are massively bloated organizations with declining utility and the need to maintain their perpetual growth - who wants to cut costs? the downward spiral is only going to accelerate, IMO. and that doesn't even account for declining birth rates. my feeling is the next 20 years will see the higher ed industry contract rather quickly and the universities that remain will deliver either on quality (increasingly difficult to hold an advantage) or accessibility (inexpensive, contemporary workforce training since employers no longer do that).
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/ch_3.asp
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/figures/fig_12.asp
but to be fair, yes the stats do indicate a decrease in enrollment. however degrees conferred has increased despite a decline in enrollment, any guesses as to that?
As to your question. It’s easier to get a degree now since standards have been lowered since we need to retain students. The cost of acquiring a student is much higher than retaining a student so a lot of effort has gone into retention. What this boils down to in my opinion is the need to pass students. Not failing students is the easiest way to retain them.
i also wonder if something like the power law is in play - larger schools fairing better with a larger student base to allocate acquisition costs over, vs smaller specialty schools. anecdotally i have seen one or two small schools close to me close/merge with other schools.
These kids will never get these years back. What a disgrace.
[0] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...
You're just pretending that you can actually do something by making restrictions, you actually can't.
I'd rather live with ineffective American lockdowns than effective Chinese ones, but the Chinese example falsifies your statement.
Also it's proven at this point that covid came from bats.
It's not just who dies directly from Covid. It's also the spread of it to vulnerable populations.
It boggles the mind that this still has to be repeated. How many 22 year olds coming back from spring break will kill one of their parents or grandparents?
And if you're really concerned about spring break, then add all these restrictions 2 weeks before spring break.
There are actually people that the vaccines won’t help. They are immunocompromised. They can only be protected by high vaccination rates and zero exposure to Covid.
The situation will be no different in a year or 5 years than it is from now, so continuing to argue for societal shutdown is completely untenable.
People who are immunocompromised have a tough life, but we can't shut down the world for them. COVID is here to stay. Forever. You can't shut the world down forever.
Hmmm....which seems better?
There is almost no feasibility in eliminating COVID at this point in time. It will mutate, and hence we need to be talking about the possibility of 'living with the disease'.
As such, how much damage are we doing damaging the education, and critical periods for these youths?
If the problem is protecting the parents and grandparents, why not do that, and isolate them rather than permanently damaging the youth.
[1] COVID-19 rarely spreads through surfaces. So why are we still deep cleaning? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4
It's not true.
I don’t know if the rules that my system put in place at the beginning of the pandemic are still in force. They may have put that rule in place just to make sure we all went online when this mess first started. I just know I’m not going back to the classroom until most of my colleagues do too. My college is still almost entirely online.
EDIT: Chancellor’s memorandum was about cleaning protocols. The union advised us on liability issues and said that we could be liable for sicknesses if we fail to follow the protocol. My union membership includes a $1 million liability coverage for the classroom. They might have brought up this as a way of saying that our classroom insurance does not cover this possibility.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/08/03/students-aske...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...
> the relative risk of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is considered low compared with direct contact, droplet transmission, or airborne transmission
1. COVID was always going to become endemic to humans.
2. Young people are part of society — and you’re blatantly disregarding harm to them in your appeal to the “health of my society”.
Young people are part of society so they are obligated to protect it.
I participate in two communities - one that completely ignores COVID (except for a couple months at the very very beginning). They don't test, they don't care if someone is positive. Lots of people are vaccinated, but lots aren't (they all had COVID, they can't think of any reason to get vaccinated since they already are immnune).
And another one that is freaked out about COVID, mask wearing, vaccine or you are excluded from everything, social distancing, keep everything closed.
Somehow the longterm death rate is the same in both - except for those first few months. But the mental health in the open community is far better.
It's over. COVID is over. It's time to stop closing everything. Take the vaccine (or don't if that's the risk you chose to take), and stop this meaningless theater.
So why am I supposed to give more of a shit about your anecdote than my experience again?
>It's over. COVID is over. It's time to stop closing everything.
Uh we know. We’re talking about what happened in the past. Everyone has been using past tense verbs.
> Young people are part of society so they are obligated to protect it.
The point is that the part of society being protected is largely confined to older parts of the population, while much of the costs of doing so are disproportionately coming down on younger people. It's easy to say "do your part to protect society", but when the part of society being protected is the mental, social, and emotional development and well being of young people, as well as technical skills and future job prospects, older people seemingly have no problem casting it aside for what benefits them the most.
Either way, I didn't say anything about eliminating the virus. Hospital systems are still at risk of being overwhelmed... that's why restrictions are still in place.
You're acting like younger people are the only people affected by the restrictions.
> You're acting like younger people are the only people affected by the restrictions.
I’m not, but I’m saying the calculus of restrictions only makes sense for the older parts of society. Younger people are getting a raw deal. They are far less financially secure, established in their careers, their education, their social lives, and even in their personal development. Immense damage is being done in all of these areas to protect society from a disease that isn’t actually a threat to the young in any large degree. Older generations are sacrificing less due to the restrictions, but are reaping all of the benefits. This is especially galling considering the availability of effective vaccines that prevent severe disease and death, meaning that whatever risk does exist for these older generations is largely mitigated for them except for those who refuse vaccination.
So yes, it is enormously selfish for our society to throw young people under the bus to protect the most selfish portion of older, more well-to-do generations who refuse to protect themselves.
And so I can ask the same question, why are you disregarding the harm done to them (them being the young people)?
The purpose of the lockdown wasn't to prevent deaths, it was to prevent the hospital systems collapsing.
>it was to prevent the hospital systems collapsing
Can you please apply this logic a little further as to what would occur if the hospital systems collapsed? Do you want me to spell it out for you?
It would have also prevented scaling of health systems due to a distinct and dramatic shortage in staffing and long term backlog.
The decision above was purely economic. You would have to be really stupid to think the people in charge would shut down trillion dollar industries because the parents of some children died.
None of that is what could be derived or implied from your statement you condescending prick. If that is what you were implying, maybe you should get a better grasp of English so that your point could come across clearer.
>The decision above was purely economic.
I think it's hyperbolic to say that it was purely economic. Everything we do has some connection to the economy. Everyone in this thread, including myself, is basically making an economic argument facaded by an emotional one. But to say it's purely economic forgets the connection we have with people and the reason why we want the hospitals to be open for people who need care. A real sort of "collapse" happened for some rural family members. They don't have a hospital for their whole county and have to rely on another county's hospital. After they ran out of beds, the people in that town just had to wait and hope whatever ailment they had could be resolved elsewhere.
Back to the economy, obviously bad mental health has long lasting effects and that has secondary effects on the economy. I'm not so sure the alternative, the one where everything is kept open, would have worked. The "hospitals will collapse" scare tactic was only one aspect of what would have been a much larger collapse. Not just economic, but societal.
>You would have to be really stupid to think the people in charge would shut down trillion dollar industries because the parents of some children died.
You mean the hospitals? With a health system collapse, they just wouldn't be able to handle a lot of cases like you said. It wouldn't shut down in the sense that it would be 100% ineffective, just that
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/12/e1146/6024998
> In analysis of the cluster index cases ... only 3.8% were identified as having a pediatric index case.
> These pediatric cases only caused 4.0% of all secondary cases, compared with the 97.8% of secondary cases that occurred when an adult was identified as the index case in the cluster.
> Clusters where the asymptomatic/symptomatic status of the contact cases was not described were excluded from the analysis. Even with this broader definition, 18.5% children were identified as the index case in the household clusters.
but yes, I agree education was in a sorry state prior to the pandemic as well
People's brains were already broken. People are bad at statistical risk.
People are afraid of flying despite driving be much more dangerous.
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-ag...
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
Under the age of 24, vehicle fatalities, suicide, and homicide lead in >3k deaths each year.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/fentanyl-overdoses-leading-cause-...
Meanwhile, 18-45 79k have died from fentanyl overdoses in the past 2 years vs. ~50k covid deaths in that time frame.
You don't need to imagine 3k deaths being acceptable, it's in the data for all to see.
That does not lessen the impact of 3000 deaths among people who did not take on that risk.
Are any of them on the order of magnitude of measures we've taken against covid?
But these are not equivalent things, cars are nowhere near as deadly as Covid, this pandemic is likely going to cause 25 years' worth of car deaths because of a subset of the population is too morally and logically weak to adopt small measures.
Colleges assumed the trend of charging $25k to $50k per year would be sustainable. They were dead wrong, especially given the horrendously predatory loans backed by the government and barred from bankruptcy.
If we fix the college financial system, enrollment would likely skyrocket.
Millennials have been out there for nearly a decade yelling on social media about how ridiculous their student loans are. Kids on the precipice of college have started paying attention. Combine that with the restrictions for Covid, and you have a lot of kids who don't think that taking on tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt is worth it for some Zoom classes.
It's a single anecdote, but between online resources and alternative training programs, it seems harder to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars on college.
Out of interest, what are other fields besides IT?
While I agree with your core sentiment, my opinion is that this is a symptom of a cultural/societal problem and not one of the schools. Modern Universities are certainly ripe with problems (largely driven by adopting business structures), including generally poor quality courses and curriculum within them, but I think you've identified a larger societal problem we have.
Why is it that broad education which is generally, at the very least in my opinion, clearly valuable yet so lowly valued in society? It's my opinion that we have institutional structures that, given a lack of opportunities, value specialized and specific knowledge over general knowledge.
Meanwhile, if you have the capability to escape these institutional shackles, general knowledge becomes far more valuable. On the labor side, labor markets are all about jobs and specialized roles with efficient production from that role. On the capital side, you need more general knowledge to see, connect, and sieze opportunities. It seems to me that most lack enough genuine realizable opportunity where general knowledge becomes valuable (say, seeking entrepreneurship) and in such a set of constraints, it makes complete sense why people specialize and chase demand of specialization because it's their most optimal strategy for financial success.
I work in R&D in startup-esk environments and my general knowledge is fairly well valued, however even here leadership sometimes fail to see how some book or article I read years ago, course I took, project I worked on years ago, etc. was critical to making the connection that made this research thing possible.
They value the general subset of knowledge I have that made their thing possible (oh boy you know A, B, and C and those saved us!!!), never mind the hydrology work I've done, it's irrelevant (D, or so they think, even though I may draw on concepts from such domains opaquely) or perhaps hours of video gaming (E, which lead to a game theoretic intuition about approaching an underlying problem). That knowledge was only appreciated after the fact because it made someone a pile of money or positioned a large contract.
I remember hating taking geology in college because "I'd never use it," then I did a lot of applied science and R&D in the fossil fuels industry and suddenly a lot of "silly" things I did in geology gave me a foundation to jump from and to build upon. That silly geology course made me boatloads of money in retrospect. Throughout my career I always like to look back when I have a problem and say "ah ha, I sure am glad I studied or read about X years ago, that's one less thing I need to internalize now to do this thing." I'm always surprised how much old general knowledge I draw upon for new problems and how valuable they truly are.
The evidence suggests that bootcamp grads struggle at finding good jobs, and also bootcamps charge a lot up-front, whereas collages have more aid and other programs to defer payment.
It’s not a panacea, but it’s a decent option when compared to going to college for 4 years, going tens of thousands of dollars into debt, all to get an education with a lot of material that is fairly irrelevant to a career, while not having much better job prospects, particularly after getting the first job in the field.
I learned more practical skills from free online classes and tutorials than I did from my entire university program, and I can think of maybe a handful of times I've thought about complexity analysis. But I've also entirely avoided whiteboard interviews, so perhaps myself and prospective employers have selected for my weakness in academic computer science concepts.
85% of graduates have less than $50,000 in student loans. Paid off over 20 years, that’s really not much. https://www.rclco.com/wp-content/uploads/advisory-student-de...
Additionally, those that have much higher loans are usually medical students who make $200,000/year at the entry level.
Plus, you're right that the interest rate is insane when banks are paying 1%.
The interest rate especially shocking when you consider that interest is supposed to pay for the creditor taking on the risk of default, which is almost impossible with student loans.
They're pushing these onto kids who are barely adults because its FREE MONEY to them.
Meanwhile my wife only makes an appreciable dent in hers whenever she gets a gift from family members, and she's still paying $900 a month to not do much more than tread water. She did get it paid down a bit more thanks to the past two years of deferrals, but she still owes a lot more than I ever borrowed (two years of my school were paid for by a scholarship).
It's been a steady drag on our income since we've been together. At least mine is just about to go away, mine was $400/month as well... that $1300/month is almost as much as our mortgage payment.
I have multiple friends that have just given up on ever paying off their student loan debt in their lifetime and only pay enough to keep it where it is (or slowly increasing even). You wonder why people aren't buying homes and having children, there it is. I guess the solution to overpopulation is just saddle everyone with a bunch of debt, then.
That seems rather small for such a huge debating point?
One of those people can pay that loan off in two years. One of them is likely never going to pay it off without a career change.
Of course, we probably don't want loan officers picking what poor people can major in either.
I would not say that people should be denied based on their chosen major, but prospective students should be shown statistics on the average salaries, unemployment, and usage rates of the major they're interested in and compare it to the projected costs and resulting loan debt.
> 85% of graduates have less than $50,000 in student loans. Paid off over 20 years, that’s really not much.
It is pretty terrifying that you manage to mentally justify going in debt for 20 years over your college education. I understand that given a good job it's easy to pay it back, but I never even borrowed even a tenth of that to complete my engineering degree and I've probably paid my education back several time in taxes to the government.
1. Efficiency. Canadian universities deliver similar/better products at much lower cost. Not just cost at point of use, but actual "amount of money spend annually to deliver education".
2. Financing model. Taxation allows you to fund things without paying interest to a middle man. If you pay off a set of loans whose principle is 50K, but with 5%-7% interest rates, then you're paying a lot more than 50K. So even if the products were equal in price, the taxation model might work out ahead.
2. I haven't looked at the data, but I'm going to go out on a VERY short branch here and assert that the entire delta between US and CA tax rates is not consumed by higher education.
Right, I figured. This is entirely orthogonal to the discussion about the problems with higher ed in the us...
Yes taxation is higher, but I still feel like we get a lot more bang for our bucks here.
Yeah, but you are assuming people only go to college for its educational value , ignoring that college grads tend to have much higher wages and lower unemployment compared to high school grads. If you look at FIRE subs for example, almost everyone who attains early retirement has a degree. The college wage premium is amplified by both higher wages and higher returns from investments by investing said wages in rapidly appreciating stocks and real estate (the post-2009 bull market in real estate and stocks, on an real basis, exceeds even the '80s and '90s).
> Yeah, but you are assuming people only go to college for its educational value , ...
But that's exactly the point, a huge expectation of going to college is the whole college experience: building independence, lifelong friendships, extracurriculars, etc. 50k for Zoom? Fuck that.
Children literally taking out 5 and 6 figure loans for a glorified multi-year vacation with some half arsed “education” strapped to it.
It could be that people who are driven or passionate, on average, want to pursue higher education, or that they take on risks, exercise their brains in learning endeavors, and it’s their effort and drive that leads to success.
It’s entirely possible that high earners have college degrees because they were told that to be successful, they had to go to college. It’s a belief they were raised with.
I think it’s highly misguided that we give college so much credit. And we also demonstrate survivorship bias where those who went to college but didn’t get the pay off are blamed for having made some wrong decision.
We treat higher education as a silver bullet and put it on a pedestal when it’s not.
Also if companies gain a substantial advantage using other signals outside of degrees, you can be guaranteed that their competitors in their industry will follow. In media and marketing, degrees have long been abandoned for other signals such as portfolios and social media engagement
When I was in high school and applying to colleges around 2011, the advice given to us was to not take cost too seriously. Many authority figures (like high school counselors) told my peers and I to, "follow your heart" or "go where you think you'll fit in best".
On top of that, student loans and interest rates where not explained to us very well. Very few of us understood that borrowing 160k-200k to go to an out-of-state/private school could very well mean you were signing up for a lifelong debt.
Looking back, its insane we could make such a life altering/hindering decision with so little oversight from the "adults".
I finally paid mine and my wife’s off in 2020 and when I did the math, combined we paid $216k over 7 years post college. We were both lucky enough to have well paying jobs, but so so many people don’t. Some of these people even with decent jobs will be paying $500-$1000/m for nearly the rest of their lives.
https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/interest-r...
Any loan that is charging 6.28% interest and also cant be discharged by bankruptcy is just usury with current interest rates.
The interest rates are high because so few loans can be discharged by bankruptcy. You can refinance your mortgage with anyone. Far few companies will refinance your student loans.
Meanwhile, it makes prefect sense that bankruptcy cannot discharge student loans. Otherwise, every single student would have crappy credit from 21-28 and no student loans ever.
It's time to start funding these schools adequately so that they do not immiserate everyone except those with wealthy parents. It's the opposite of a meritocracy.
The one thing we can't do is stop funding because we have pre-decided that it won't lower tuition. It's easy to attach strings to money, let's do that.
I'm not sure there is evidence of that at all. Do you have some statistics?
Here's a high level report showing some of the state funding changes. https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/10-24-1...
That’s why they’re not discharged in bankruptcy: to make them possible to be made en masse.
If we disallow lending, that would tend to limit the attendance at “away from home” colleges and universities to the upper middle and upper classes. I don’t know that outcome is obviously “better”. It would be a massive boon to the wealthier families as compared to today.
I benefited massively from student loans and Army ROTC scholarship; I don’t want to see that taken away from future generations (even if removing that would benefit my family).
So the answer to your question is as much as I think they could reasonably repay based on their earning potential after graduation. Which is a reasonable answer to the whole problem except that it hands a huge advantage to rich kids who's parents can write that tuition check.
The chair of NYU's Board of Trustees at the time was William Berkley. Perhaps coincidentally, he also headed the board of First Marblehead. I'm sure there was no conflict of interest, though.
Housing and supplies are still expensive, and _yes_ it’s still very expensive to go to college, but there are affordable options out there for college.
[1] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-system [2] https://www.calstate.edu/attend/paying-for-college/Documents... [3] https://www.calstate.edu/apply/transfer/pages/ccc-associate-...
You need to be pretty lucky in your final years or actually going for masters or PHD to really be exposed to the research side of things.
It's a steal alright, but I cant say I agree with who is coming out ahead.
My own experience was that professors who were not currently research oriented tended to have a much more personal interest in actually teaching- not just the material, but in the practice of pedagogy overall.
Compare that to researching professors (or worse, their grad student substitutes) and it is often a night and day difference. All you're really paying more for is often the name on your diploma at the end of the day.
[1] http://irpe-reports.colostate.edu/pdf/tuition/Tuition_Fees_H...
[2] https://financialaid.colostate.edu/media/sites/38/2018/05/Un...
"Overall state funding for public two- and four-year colleges in the school year ending in 2018 was more than $6.6 billion below what it was in 2008 just before the Great Recession fully took hold, after adjusting for inflation."
"Between school years 2008 to 2018, after adjusting for inflation:
https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...For all of human history, there's been a chance that a child will die in a car-accident or be abducted by a child predator on his way to school every day. We haven't said that kids should stop going to school because of this, have we?
There's a non-zero chance people will die traveling to and from work today. We haven't said that people should stop working to save lives, have we?
I think that most people being bad at understanding risk-management is at the core of why there's there's such big divide with how to react to Covid.
So when it comes to cars, what you're saying is that "some of you will die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make". Am I reading that correctly?
PS: The above is obvious sarcasm. See how ridiculous bad risk-management calculations sound?
> Additionally society cannot live with hospitals operating at reduced capacity because of COVID overflow.
Color me skeptical about the severity of this risk for 2 big reasons.
1) Look at actions, not words. Think about how governors and hospitals are acting. If there was a genuine fear of the hospitals collapsing, they'd be putting out daily public service announcements begging for retired doctors, people with any medical training whatsoever, or even random nuns to come and volunteer to tend to the sick and dying. Instead they're mass-firing healthy "health care heroes" who refuse to get a vaccine. Is that the act of people who are genuinely concerned about overwhelming the health care system?
2) This sensationalism has been happening every cold and flu season: see pic-related. Hospitals are designed to perpetually run at close to full capacity for financial reasons. https://i.imgur.com/50eqkXq.jpg
Point #1 government is doing everything they can to prevent that collapse scenario. I'd need to understand more about the machinations of the hospital policies you mentioned. No link to your sources, but I imagine it's not as black and white as you are suggesting.
I find it interesting that some people are like "it's not that bad, why do we need these restrictions? Everything is functioning, what's the problem?"
The thing is "it's not that bad" because of all the restrictions and vaccines. If we did nothing hospitals would absolutely be fucked and people would be dying in the halls.
Model me a world where we didn't bother with masks and other measures, then let's talk.
Here's a few American, Canadian, and European news stories detailing similar sentiments from well before the Covid mass hysteria programming.
https://www.westernjournal.com/2018-flu-bad-hospitals-treati...
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/01/11/flu-levels-rise-texa...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-flu-idUSBRE9080WD2013...
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthc...
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/nyregion/full-emergency-r...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-09-mn-52273...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/health-headlines/hospitals-ove...
https://www.france24.com/en/20170111-french-hospitals-cancel...
> government is doing everything they can to prevent that collapse scenario.
Deeds show intent better than empty words.
If they were genuinely concerned about the healthcare system collapsing due to a flood of sick people, they would be screaming daily begging for more health care workers: not firing healthy workers to have Covid positive health-care workers work.
Citations:
https://abc7.com/asymptomatic-california-health-care-workers...
https://afn.net/medical-health/2022/01/12/jab-or-job-califor...
Society has been sold a false bill of goods.
None of your sources talk about hospitals being "designed" to run at full capacity for profit. Canadian, UK, and most other EU hospitals don't run for profit, so that leaves the US. I doubt you'll find a medical director that claims the way to maximize profit is to design a hospital that is on the edge of meltdown every flu season.
"they would be screaming daily begging for more health care workers"
Ahem:
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210812/hospitals-struggle-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-07/hospitals...
https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/hospitals-innovate-amid-d...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/staff-shortages-hospit...
There are many more sources citing hospitals struggling to find nurses, your last two citations demonstrate how desperate hospitals are by re-hiring folk who refuse to get vaccinated or are asymptomatic. How desperate do you have to be to put patients at risk of getting infected from their health care worker? I mean talk about rock and a hard place, that's a fucked up position to have to be in and shows that there are very few other avenues to go down.
There's 2 movies on 1 screen when it comes to the actual stats surrounding Covid-19, so I'm not going to argue that with you.
I'll just ask you about what's serving as the "control groups". How are, say, Amish Country PA and Florida doing? Forget any stats about "cases" you can come up with for a moment: how are normal peoples' actual lives going in places where masks and most preventative measures are less common? Are people living their lives more or less normally, or are these regions wastelands of disease and death with survivors roaming the streets begging for medical attention?
We're fucked.
We've had very high rates of death, and we've destroyed our economy.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the UK implemented vaccine and mask mandates?
Forget stats about cases in order to understand stats on cases in areas with fewer preventative measures? What kind of crazy is that?
If you do care to look at stats on the Amish community there is this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34117598/
And I think we all know how Florida is doing: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25729082...
I don't know how else to understand COVID impact without data and factual, meaningful statistics.
Life in these places is more or less the same as it always has been, other than it passing the peak of cold season. People go out without forced masks and having to show their medical histories to enter buildings. Yet these places haven't collapsed. Why not?
If the Covid narrative that we had to mask up everywhere and check your papers to ensure safety or society would collapse is accurate, why is this "control group" (for lack of a better term) not collapsing?
Also, in-state tuition for state schools is much less than $50k/yr so try going to Cal and/or your best local public school and supplement with self teaching (e.g. via public/free lectures from MIT)? The self directed learning/motivation is the hard part for many people of that age, but few have said living frugally should or would be easy.
Giving out loans with no cap on how much schools can charge and with no ability-to-repay check is a recipe for catastrophe.
I think option 2 is the best equitable outcome but is probably politically unsavory given the heterogeneity in public school costs/quality across states (which typically aligns with political divides).
Either society puts their money where their mouth is and actually pays for people to be educated, or they can choose to keep taxes lower and let people fend for themselves. Either of these options is fine, but the bullshit blank check taxpayer funded loans non dischargeable in bankruptcy is only good for politicians and taxpayers today at the expense of taxpayers and members of society tomorrow.
We know college can be cheaper, Brigham young goes for 5k/yr, European and Canadian schools still charge less than 10k/yr.
And no, they do NOT make good money.
If I were college-age and I were planning on going to college I would certainly do one of two things. I would postpone college until the COVID issues died down -or- I would use the fewer applicants to get into a more prestigious school banking on a better 3 year experience (out of 4) starting in the fall of 2022 and more impressive degree going forward. Either way, I can imagine admittance numbers falling off.
https://thetech.com/2021/03/18/regular-admissions-2025
Tuition has doubled since I went there, but at least they can afford good financial aid for those who can get in.
Education is primarily a prestige product. Secondarily, the social and alumni effects of the network around you when you attend. Thirdly, it is the college campus experience. Fourthly, it is what you actually learn.
If you just price the value of each of these four pieces, the dynamic in the market is completely explained. Community college still provides learning, but not much on the other three factors. That is, it has become poor value for the fees it charges despite them being lower in absolute terms than prestige schools.
But if you’re going to a second-tier state university I really wonder if any of those students are getting a positive payback.
For me it's been a drastically different experience compared to my in-person undergrad. Whereas my Bachelor's degree was full of camaraderie and formative life experiences, my Master's has been more or less bereft of social or personal growth and focused entirely on course material. This is okay for me since my primary goal is to develop a deeper technical background, but I would not recommend such an experience for your average 18 year old kid who is about to start their first university experience.
Apart from the labs, I do not see a reason to go to college to learn.
You just described a campus.
What would you do instead?
And my online classes were explicitly taken online, with professors who had done online stuff before, not hastily moved online in the midst of a pandemic. Knowing how computer-averse some of my professors were, I can only imagine the transition to online was rough, and I bet I'd be scared away from online classes in college if I had to go through high school like that, even if I got a full ride.
And, as others have said, going to college isn't just for the degree. Yes, that's a big part of it (the expensive piece of paper at the end), but just being able to be away from your parents really helps you grow up and become independent.
Universities are moving into a new space by taking so much online, and people will realize that some institutions are better at this than others. MOOCs can be done well, but it is largely not those traditional institutions that will be doing that.
I'm very interested to see if some education disruptors come out of this time.
Couldnt it just be wanting to waive fees for those it would help? How are they supposed to only waive fees for those who have a shot at getting in?
The problem is, the pandemic has been in full swing for the past two application seasons, and you can only take so many gap years.
There is a large backlog of very talented students. It's not a good time to be an applicant.
To be fair, this kind of means that universities should be completely public. And although they are for all intents and purposes, in theory they are still non-governmental entities. And that's strange as well.
Most public state schools keep their pricing in line with these caps ($35k in loans + ~$5k in grants). I just picked on Iowa because, and here's a list I found:
https://www.universityreview.org/iowa-colleges/
You'll notice that in-state tuition for all public state schools is around $8k a year. Here's the same for Tennessee:
https://www.universityreview.org/tennessee-colleges/
I believe this only applies to the subsidized federal student loans that don't collect interest while you're in school. The limit on unsubsidized federal loans that start collecting interest right away is much higher.
When I started college in 2009, I got $9,000 in federal student loans for my freshman year.
Perhaps you were classified as a independent student?
Where the hell is the money _going_?
Are Colleges and Universities pocketing the money? Are they publicly traded and distributing dividends? Are they building rockets?
I know some of it goes back to financial aid, and some goes to football coaches...
But we're talking about so much freaking money, and I just can't visualize where it's going.
My point is I don’t think the money is going to university teaching staff at least…
There is so many overspending problems its not even funny - and yet the people actually teaching the classes are TA's, probably getting $20K/year, while the professors work on their 'research' and are rarely available to students.
Starting to think the whole higher-education model is hopelessly broken.
The vast majority of college sports programs in the U.S. are losing a lot of money for the school. They are operating at a detriment to the school's main goal of learning.
Also a Universities goal of learning is research, not teaching, especially not undergrad teaching.
Maintaining physical health is huge, but the demographic that needs to be targeted is lower performance level that club sports. Even THOSE are quite competitive. Even the (very fit) people who participate often cease physical activity and healthy eating soon after graduation.
On the other hand, subsidizing college gym facilities does tend to reach most of the student body. Required athletics classes is even more effective and pays long-term dividends (if they haven't been canceled due to COVID by now). But even more-so than that, consistent physical activity for grade school and high school would be even better from a whole society perspective.
At this point, my feeling is that the local maximumizations that have driven us to this point are irrecoverable. There is no “fixing” this system. It will carry on for a while yet out of momentum, but something disruptive will dethrone it eventually.
Then there are other leaks, like $50k/yr hosting bills for a CMS serving under 200k pageviews per day, or other ancillary a11y compliance tools that cost nearly as much. If there is budget, it has to be spent.
On one hand, I am not sure I agree. My son is going to the same state university I went to, and it's substantial more expensive, but they 've also built a ton of infrastructure that I find questionable.
On the other hand, I don't really have data and when I look for it I find articles like https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig... :
"Deep state cuts in funding for higher education over the last decade have contributed to rapid, significant tuition increases and pushed more of the costs of college to students, making it harder for them to enroll and graduate."
I’d take that with a big grain of salt. They love to play up this angle but I just don’t see where funding has been cut at the same rate as tuition has increased.
I remember back when I was in school, one year the state government asked for some belt-tightening, to the tune of a 2% budget cut. Y’know, asking the school to go back to the budget they had like two years prior. The admin started going nuclear, “there’s no fat in our budget, these cuts will go straight to the bone!”, saying they’d have to cut the entire music department, 10% of all class sections, etc. Even got the students riled up enough to march on the capitol building. Even at the time, being significantly less jaded than I am now, I knew this was complete BS. Ever since I’ve been very wary of this narrative that colleges are driving up tuition because of state budget cuts. And it didn’t help shake my belief when I went back to campus a few years later and saw that they did a complete renovation of the library to include multiple gaming kiosks (!) and other such creature comforts.
Simply put, the schools can basically charge whatever they want and students will pay because any 18 year old with a pulse will get approved for unlimited money so long as it goes toward college. Put limits on student loans and you’ll see the situation change quickly.
1970-71: $81,798
2018-19: $88,703
Mean salary of American college and university presidents in 1983: $160,640 (2018 dollars).
Median compensation of private college and university presidents in 2018: $668,000.
Median compensation of public college and university presidents in 2019: $495,808
More, and primary source links:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/03/university-admi...
"ALL FIGURES ARE INFLATION-ADJUSTED INTO CONSTANT 2018 OR 2019 DOLLARS."
When I was an undergrad in the mid 1990s, the dorms were square rooms with cinderblock walls, concrete floors, metal frame beds, and a simple desk, the cafeteria was like an oversized high school cafeteria, and the gym was a basic weight room. A couple of years ago I received a brochure from my alma mater asking for donations and showing the modernized campus - the dorms were now luxury apartments, the cafeteria was a gourmet eatery, and the gym looked like a Lifetime.
The one place is almost certainly not going its faculty salaries. The industry's shift to adjuncts has been great for university endowments but terrible for those who got their PhD in the last couple decades
Much of the growth in administration is driven by a significant rise in the costs to comply with federal regulation. Those regulations are not bad--it's the cost of complying with things like disability laws, Title IX, etc--but they require collecting and reporting significant amounts of data, and that isn't free.
There's other stuff too; some colleges do have the lazy rivers and fancy dorms, many colleges lose money on their football program, etc. But those aren't the fundamental drivers.
By the way, in case anyone is wondering, the money is definitely NOT going to faculty salaries. Salaries for full-time faculty have been stagnant for decades even though an increasing percentage of classes are taught by poorly-paid adjuncts.
Similar things happen in healthcare. My SO works in pharma and the amount of red tape they are required to navigate significantly increases the complexity of their administrative work and decreases the cost-efficiency of their business, partially passing on the costs to the price of drugs.
Again, like you said, the regulations are not bad (like regulating the types of communication they can have with doctors), but there is a price to pay to keep them.
Also, medical profession trade unions/cartels (aka AMA) constricting the labor market for medical work.
These things probably could actually be resolved by governmental regulation.
They could, but I wonder if it would actually improve the state of things. We would then need to increase the size of the bureaucracy (in the government and in each institution that does any of these things) to meet these regulations, and given that a bureaucracy becomes less efficient with size it may not actually make things any cheaper.
Where football coaches have very large salaries (EDIT: compared to peer schools), those salaries are paid by athletic department revenue and boosters.
I'd bet a lot of it comes down to how modern values are implemented.
Being kind and embracing meritocracy should be completely free.
But adding a department of "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" isn't.
Sports team boondoggles are a popular way to spend tuition money.
Administrative salary and staffing bloat.
https://247sports.com/LongFormArticle/Ranking-college-footba...
As far as where it goes, I think a ton goes into new buildings and amenities. I went to Auburn a decade ago and the campus looks completely different. Everything is new and shiny. I assume there are also a ton of administrators.
They are. Why wouldn't they? Kids and parents can get massive loans from the government, it would be silly for universities and all their admin staff to pass up the opportunity to enrich themselves.
Universities have started to compete on which ones have more gyms, clubs, luxury dorms, various interest groups. Well, the basket weaving club needs an instructor, a secretary, a janitor, a new facility, a maintenance person for it etc. Some of them may be friends and cousins of the existing administrators, but you're not supposed to notice that too much.
I couldn't stop laughing when I visited my alma mater, a decade later and seeing how they had build a brand new gym with a huge lazy river around it. In my head I could hear the enthusiastic tour guide "Your child can type their homework while floating around in a lazy river, isn't that great!". But then, of course, I realized that it was my tuition that has paid for the lazy river.
TL;DR it's like a shiny name plaque for billionaires.
Also such donations kind of guarantee your kids will get into the university, so some additional perks are there too
I remember when my public college was banned from starting new building projects due to state wide budget restrictions. The year the ban was lifted, half a dozen projects immediately kicked off.
The fact student loads have special bankruptcy treatment is bad. But absent Sallie Mae (or Navient, whatever it is now) students would be paying whatever Harvard or Stanford asked, and that would determine pricing for the next tier of schools.
Research is usually grant funded.
Research may be funded. But research salaries are high as are facility costs and upkeep. There are numerous costs to support a top tier research program and maintain it that are not covered by grants.
Of course students prefer newer dorms, amenities, programs and research opportunities. But asking someone who might have been getting $5/week allowance to figure out how much a newer dorm is worth when the prices are in the 10s of thousands is an impossible task. They don't know how much money is worth.
And then to tell them that they can't discharge it in bankrupcy because they knew what they were getting into is very much bullshit.
And I don't say all this because I have student loans. I was very lucky, I went to a state college with a full tuition scholarship. But I've seen a lot of my peers struggle with student loans because teenagers don't understand fiscal policy, and shouldn't be expected too.
I have a vested interest in this problem. But saying popular things for upvotes isn't going to change the underlying problem of how to allocate scarce resources.
I disagree with you on "teenagers don't understand fiscal policy, and shouldn't be expected too.". This isn't fiscal policy. This is a pretty straightforward introduction to being an adult and budgeting. I went through it, too. A mortagage was harder and more daunting. Rental terms on apartments were more predatory. The fact that people even discuss bankruptcy to discharge student loan debt is a horrible sign, given how much of ones' life potential one i throwing away to recover prime loan eligibility.
Also, "And then to tell them that they can't discharge it in bankrupcy because they knew what they were getting into is very much bullshit." - what part of where I wrote, "The fact student loads have special bankruptcy treatment is bad" is unclear?
If I give you two loan options with bad terms and you have to choose one, then that is a fiscal policy thing and your choice is ultimately pretty inconsequential. You may be slightly better off than the person who made the other choice but the bad policy is affecting both of you.
Ultimately it's both a policy and a personal choice thing, but as with most society-wide issues the personal choice aspect falls away pretty quickly and we need to get realistic and figure out what a solution is instead of just blaming individuals.
It doesn't really matter what students "prefer", if a bank doesn't do their due diligence and a student isn't able to repay their loan, then the bank should be losing that money as a bad investment. They won't give a $1M mortgage loan to buy a 50k lot, and likewise won't give it to someone that doesn't seem like they could pay it back. I do think there's value in people getting degrees that don't pay well - but then you shouldn't be getting a loan to do so.
> students would be paying whatever Harvard or Stanford asked
I don't think this is true - people simply can't go to a school they can't afford and people don't have infinite money. We gave the banks the freedom to tell children that they will indeed be able to pay back loans that they often cannot, so it's the bad actions of one organization(banks) enabling another(school). Ivy league schools may be like Veblen goods where increased prices also increase demand - but that can't be true for all schools and we've seen tuition increases across the board.
The solution that seems best to me is to first fix the bankruptcy issue - if someone can't pay back a loan that is a risk the bank is accepting by giving the loan, just like any other loan. I think that alone would probably have enough of a chilling effect that way less people would be able to attend colleges at first and they would be forced to lower tuition rates. That would correct the market going forward, but it doesn't really help people that already fell victim to this system. That seems like it could be remedied by either making interest rates 0 or capping total interest to some amount relative to the principal (e.g. the total amount can never grow to more than 110% of the principal).
Similar to healthcare, I don't think education shouldn't be profitable in the short term - it's a long term investment a society has to make in itself so you can't really track it as an individual investment in any one person. If someone else becomes a doctor I'm still benefitting from that so it makes sense that I'd pay into some of the cost to educate that person. Unfortunately in the US at least we seem to be totally unable to do anything without a short-term and concrete path to profit regardless of the amount of good it would do.
I wonder what groups of people might be harmed by such a policy, but I would bet it won’t be middle and upper class families who are willing to co-sign for loans.
Changing that in isolation would almost definitely have an effect where low income families can't afford college. I see that as a gap the govt should be filling either through public colleges or directly funding people to go to school, probably both. The core issue I see here is we're letting private companies make bad investments without liability, into something that probably shouldn't be profit-driven to start with
That’s very true for mortgages, but in my experience this isn’t how student loans work. Nobody I knew before college had any idea what their loans would cost on a monthly basis once they went into repayment, and I don’t think it was disclosed to me (or I forgot).
Also unlike my mortgage, my loans have trivially changed repayment plans. I changed some of them several times based on my economic circumstances without refinancing, which makes nailing down a single payment kind of hard, even if the interest rate hasn’t changed.
This is partly true. The US also DID use to subsidize more University tuition.
However: Agreed. The loans are dumb. They feed into the issue in exactly the way you describe. They should be interest free as long as you are making regular payments.[1]
> Also, in-state tuition for state schools is much less...
This is so thorny... I have a younger cousin, and what he ended up doing was going to a community college for two years, then transferring. It worked out well for him! But it was a gamble.
When I was in school my parents were very obsessed with me "having the college experience" even though we were much less well-off than they were in uni and were not able to support me financially[0]. I say this to point out: I am not advocating for this. College should not be fun! If it is: Great! Glad you had a good time. But that is not necessarily the reality you should expect.
However: I have noticed a lot of people made a lot of friends in Uni, and those develop into professional relationships later in life.
Additionally, if you are an ambitious person, going to community college has the risk of failing to prepare you for higher level university teaching.
Finally: I am an extremely extroverted person. I found the community aspect of going to class, studying with friends, etc. extremely helpful in my motivation and understanding of the material. I've tried to do the MIT classes and such, but it rarely sticks.
0: Not their fault, not whining. Shit happens!
EDIT:
1: AS A VERY MODERATE ACCOMMODATION. I'm not advocating for this policy as the end-all-be-all, but I feel like this is a very reasonable suggestion.
If you wonder why Democrats get so hesitant to do anything about the situation there is one of your reasons why. (there are alot more reasons but thats a decent reason)
I would not want to be on the team that does a risk assessment with these facts as inputs, because the results would be politically untenable.
I was simply pointing out the most politically hot topic that such a risk assessment would run into, but if you prefer to put class first that is your prerogative. Of course, with even a small amount of research you might find that these issues tend to collide and ethnicity is what gets talked about the most. You might also find out that the disparate rate of repayments between ethnicities is perhaps the leading issue for those who favor debt forgiveness, many of whom frame it as a civil rights issue [0][1][2][3].
That said, it's perhaps a moot point because Biden's not forgiving anything, and the way things are looking I don't imagine Congress will any time soon either.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/20/us/black-borrowers-debt-study...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/06/us/black-student-loan-crisis/...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-20/calls-for...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/04/66percent-of-black-borrowers...
Unrelated question: does "Cal" mean Berkeley here? Do you really need to "supplement it with self-teaching"? I don't really understand why state schools are viewed that way, since Berkeley consistently ranks world top-10.
I’m not American, but there are lots of stories on here I’ve seen of people being able to dual enroll in a local community college or university in grades 11/12 and shorten the time spent in college.
I can do the first two years of undergrad, through a community colleges while still working, and grad school can be figure out later if I decide on it, but I’m still concerned about how much I need to save for those last two years of undergrad.
Tuition is one thing, while generally expensive, I’m in a state that’s not too bad if you can get in-state tuition. It’s still probably expensive, but nothing unmanageable (doesn’t seem much worse than financing a new car). The main concern is living expenses.
The financial aid system is a bureaucratic joke as far as I’m aware, and “estimated family contribution” seems like a delusion in the case of most people. I half-joked with some friends about living in a car for the last couple years, and one thought I was crazy, responding with an anecdote about how “you don’t have to do that, I worked 3 jobs to pay for my education” which to me almost seems more miserable at this point.
We can't just look at tuition, but housing costs. The cost of housing sometimes rivals tuition. A fun fact is they make freshmen have to buy $2200 meal plans for their first year. They also prevent freshmen from better housing where they can cook for themselves and save money through food stamps.
Ontop of this part of those grants are work study, you have to work to receive that money. This is again even if you're dirt poor with nothing. You will have to take a second job if you need to buy personal items like deodorant.
The vast majority of students don't fit into this, they come from middle class parents and have to take out private loans. Students have to pay on private loans, so, again, more and more work. I know students working 30 hours a week just to meet living costs and pay what they owe to the University so they are not barred from signing up for classes. These students are not learning what they should be, even though they are very bright hard workers it's wasted because we let universities charge these ridiculous amounts.
It's not as if the unis are using it responsibly, either. They're not funding extracurriculars or programs students can learn more by being involved in. I recall one of our programs having to be funded by professors themselves to go anywhere. There are many different administrative workers that simply don't need to exist. The system has become lazy and inefficient. I recall in HS teachers spent hours grading. In uni - it's largely automatic. Yet we continue to have multiple teachers per subject and give professors just 1 or 2 classes.
If we defund universities they will shape up quickly. Defund, regulate, start firing people.
Private loans only make up about 8% of total student loan debt
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude... https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics
College tuitions and housing prices vary wildly, many students live with family, many students have merit based scholarships. Many states have copied Georgia and have lottery funded scholarships that covers the majority of in state tuition for students with a B average in high school.
>Or, more likely, the stats are collected poorly as they typically are.
The stats are widely available along with the data collection methodology. If you want to stick with your confirmation bias that's fine I suppose.
There's no context that changes this. Private loans make up less than 8% of all student debt. There are numerous sources available. This isn't in dispute by anyone (except maybe yourself).
Given that fact, the only way your premise, that the vast majority of students take private loans, can be true is if most students take very very small private loans of less than a few thousand dollars.
And even that is demonstrably false. Because we have data that clearly shows that the vast majority of students don't take private loans.
https://research.collegeboard.org/pdf/trends-student-aid-201...
>...that scholarships are rare...
More than 75% of full time students receive at least 1 scholarship or grant. Most of them aren't enough to cover the full tuition much less room and board, but they aren't rare.
And in many states have large scholarship programs as I've mentioned where tens of thousands of students in the state get that scholarship.
>The evidence I have readily available concludes...
Confirmation bias is something to watch out for. There's no evidence outside of your personal experience to support the conclusion that "the vast majority of students take private loans."
I don't know a full answer, but I believe we can start with administrators and work our way through the system. Something has got to give. This system cannot stay as it currently exists.
But central bank and government policies starting in the 70's gutted US manufacturing and took away most of the non-information worker jobs - so there was little else for the middle class to go for a career except first to college.
Hence today.
However, today it's easier than ever to live off the nanny state WITHOUT a career.
What should the role of college be today?
In what way?
PPP was a boon - 'Here is a loan that converts to freebie money for millions of companies'. Where'd the money go? Buying Lambo's and the like.
Or, when can I get a tax abatement for 10 years? COmpanies can because of this mythical 'they create jobs' tripe.
Just look up corporate welfare. And if I was permitted to, I would.
That figure has risen to about 36% today, a 3.5x increase.
Chart: http://www.mygovcost.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/governme...
Source: http://www.mygovcost.org/2011/03/14/the-u-s-as-welfare-state... (the first random example I found on Google)
Anyway, do you have some alternate data to consider?
I did this and through I resented it at the time, I existed college with around $30k in student debt versus my friends that all has something in range of ($40k to $80k). IMO 30k in student debt is very manageable, currently have the thing paid down to like $12k and I like knowing I can reach into savings at any time and wipe out this debt if need be.
Absolutely - $30K in debt is completely reasonable imo; if after 4 years in college you have not improved your job prospects enough to cover that payment, then you probably didn't work very hard, or didn't pick a marketable major.
Most of these 'college debt is out of control' stories being pushed in the press, are usually focusing on outliers - i.e. people that borrowed $250K for multiple useless majors and now work at Starbucks because they chose badly. Public policy shouldn't be based on edge cases like this; not do we want to reward people for making bad decisions.
Last I read, the median college debt that people owe is less than $20K, and should be more than manageable for most people.
If we want to fix the college debt problem, focus on getting the college costs down - anything that tries to make it easier to pay for, without controlling the cost side of the equation, will almost certainly cause the cost to go up even faster then before.
The OP said he could just "reach into savings" and whip out 12k. That is an INCREDIBLY privileged position to be in and I would urge you both to re-evaluate your perspective.
People taking care of their sick mother, or paying for expensive medication for chronic illnesses, or living in a poor job market area, or have poor credit due to narcissistic parents taking out loans in their name, battling mental illness, or are paying child support, etc; are not "edge cases". They make up a considerable number of people who are struggling with the compounded failures of the system layered over of them.
It was Margaret Mead who said something to the effect that "The earliest sign of true civilization, was that of a healed femur." This was said because a femur is not something that can be healed without assistance from someone else to bandage you, care for you, and fetch food for you.
What is the point of civilized society and public policy if not to ensure that "edge cases" are treated as equitably as the general public? Why do you not have the same mentality when somebody breaks a leg? Why should society care for the outcomes of poor decision making: for example, such as playing contact sports, that results in a broken leg?
Also please quit spewing the nonsense of "didn't choose a marketable major". I see this a lot with STEM grads, shitting on the arts, and then turning around and watching DUNE on HBOMax. Everybody enjoys the work of "non-marketable" majors, but nobody wants to pay for it.
That's quite the story you've created for yourself. I'm sure it makes it easy to dismiss the issue out of hand.
Pushing these $250K horror stories, is self serving to people who want all loans forgiven - even for those people who owe much less, and who can easily afford to make payments; of course people who owe money, would prefer to get let off the hook, who wouldn't.
For the truly frugal student, I would probably recommend something like what I did: take community college or AP classes aplenty in your senior year. Go straight to a college that has the best program for your interests (keeping in mind your interests may change). Graduating in three years is easy enough if you have a semester’s worth of transfer credits for gen eds, and classes like calculus and linear algebra in particular are really easy to cover before you go to college. Administration will probably try to make graduating early as hard as possible, but they really won’t be able to stop you if you have the credits already.
This was the case for me, though I wouldn't classify as being "screwed."
I attended a private tech school, and they were upfront they would not accept credits for any engineering program pre-reqs (Math, Chem, CS, Tech Comm, etc). However, they would accept "humanities" credits an apply them to any electives required for our chosen degree.
Luckily, I had participated in our schools "running start" so I earned those credits while in high school, and my only intention of taking math at the time was to fulfill my highschool math requirements. I did also take 2-years of mandarin, which my school gladly accepted and counted towards my electives.
All that being said, in Washington state, all publicly funded schools must accept all credits from Community Colleges, AND guarantee admission, so if you are a student looking to attend a state school in Washington state, community college is a very attractive route.
The quality of teaching at the community college often exceeded that at UCLA. Researchers are not necessarily the best teachers.
In my department there were a number of community college transfer students. They were almost always the most ambitious, and ended up going the furthest. YMMV.
But certainly, not all community colleges are alike. If you want to transfer to a bachelor's program, you want to find a community college with a competent transfer program that is hopefully aligned with your destination and at least has a track record of transfering students who go on to get their bachelors. Some community colleges aren't great at that.
Also, California community colleges are very affordable, but some states don't have that. If community college has costs in line with 4 year schools, then it might not be a great choice.
I understand that commuting to schools is not available to everyone but State schools are affordable. Entertaining the idea to go away for school either leads to higher costs or more debt. A 4 year degree from UT Dallas landed my oldest a 110k + first job in DFW. His entire degree cost approx 45-50k and that included gas, books, etc.
What's predatory about public loans. They all qualify for income based repayment, which means you'll never pay more than 10% of your disposable income (any income over 1.5x the federal poverty level). If you make below that amount, you'll never be required to pay back anything. And they are cancelled after 20 years.
Theoretically you'd owe tax on cancelled debt, but only up to the point of solvency. And a borrower who hasn't made enough income to pay back a student loan after 20 years probably isn't solvent, so won't pay anything. This also assumes that as more and more people reach this point, there isn't demand for congress to change the tax code.
Public loans make up about 92% of all student loan debt as well, so the vast majority of loans are going to qualify.
To some folks, having to pay off their loan, is considered predatory.
I've passed on a traditional uni for this because I want to avoid debt, and still get "why don't you go to uni?"'d every so often by family and acquaintance's.
And if the argument is "well, if you don't make enough to pay it, just don't!", as GP appears to be, I don't like spending other people's tax dollars dishonestly - especially not on textbook companies [0] and an expanding administrative staff.
[0] Which bribe and cut-throat their way into forcing $100+ payments per student per class per semester. Pirating or buying second hand doesn't even work half the time now - you need the "online access", aka DRM.
There's literally lectures and a quiz you have to pass before you can take the loans that explains how repayment and interest rates work.
For public loans the actual amount doesn't really matter because payment is income based. And the cap on lending is around $60k for 4 years, so I'd hardly use the word massive.
>"why don't you go to uni?"'
Of course all this only applies assuming you're American, which I'd guess your not since your friends call it uni.
Yes, but they are told their whole life "after college, you'll make enough to pay it off easy, no problem!"
> For public loans the actual amount doesn't really matter because payment is income based. And the cap on lending is around $60k for 4 years, so I'd hardly say it's predatory.
60k, with an extremely high interest is most definitely a problem.
> Of course all this only applies assuming your American, which I'd guess your not since your friends call it uni.
Nope, I live in Texas. Anecdotally, my group of friends all flip between "school name"/School/Uni in conversation. In this case, I picked uni because I'm on mobile and typing is hard.
If anything, the predominant messaging today is the exact opposite of that. It also doesn't matter because public loans qualify for income based repayment, so it doesn't matter. If you end up stuck working at McDonalds for the rest of your life, you'll never pay back a dime.
>60k, with an extremely high interest is most definitely a problem.
Current undergrad rates are fixed at 3.73%.
>Anecdotally, my group of friends all flip between "school name"/School/Uni in conversation.
Interesting, (as an American myself) I've never heard an American use uni outside of conversation with Europeans.
Unless you do get a job in your field, with enough income that you're supposed to pay it back, but can't. This probably will be less common with the current rates, but as recently as 2012 the interest rates were at 6.8% .
> Current undergrad rates are fixed at 3.73%.
Indeed. I was operating off of the rates from those who took loans in 2012 or before, the current rate is much more reasonable.
> Interesting, (as an American myself) I've never heard an American use uni outside of conversation with Europeans.
I probably picked it up from the internet and spread it to the group, I like saying less syllables :P
There's also the fact that now (even for someone who took out loans before 2012) you'll never pay more than 10% of your disposable income, for more than 20 years. Up to a max of about $500 a month (which is the 20 year payoff rate for a $60k loan at 6.8%).
There are ways you could end up paying more. Say if you spent 10 years unemployed running up interest and suddenly got a job paying $100k, but even then you're talking $700 a month for 10 years before it gets cancelled.
It distorts prices and results in a suboptimal allocation of society’s resources, and results in people complaining about having a “degree” and having to sling coffee cups as their career.
Politician A says they want to help students by paying for their education, or at least some of it. This requires cash flow, which results in more taxes, or at the least, entries into the government’s debt figures. Either way it shows up on the balance sheet and can affect tax liabilities today.
Politician B says they want to help students, but they will instead have the government lend money to them, with zero under writing other than the “school” needing to be credentialed by some entity. The cash is spent, but an even bigger asset in the form of the debt is recorded, actually improving the balance sheet. Then you can whittle down whatever taxpayer subsidy is being given to the schools as is, and they can make up for it with tuition increases. Either way, government finances look good, and taxes can even be reduced.
The probability of that person digging themself out of that hole and being able to achieve the common expectations of a family, house, vacations, retirement, weekends, etc is pretty low.
And someone with $60k in public loans most certainly can dig themselves out of that hole, because repayment is capped at 10% of disposable income, and it is cancelled after 20 years.
The government under the Obama administration changed things so that "Federal" loans instead of being made by private organizations and backed by the government, were directly distributed from the treasury.
However even before this, there were separate Federal and private loans, and the only way to get to $200k (for undergrad) was to get unsubsidized private loans that weren't backed by the government.
When I hire now, I always look for kids who are willing to teach themselves and learn from all of the good sources on the Internet. Places like Coursera, Udemy or even YouTube. They're reasonably priced.
Most state schools are easily $20k for in state students once you add in the room and board. Then they try to get $50k from the out-of-staters. Top flight state schools like Michigan, Cal Berkeley and Cornell start at $75k+ for out-of-staters. Of course financial aid does enter the picture for many students.
Further, I think it's disingenuous to only consider tuition. Cost of living in e.g. Berkeley is ridiculous, literally more than tuition. [1]
(I understand that living is not something Berkeley can fix, but it's very much their problem and a concern on students' minds, regardless of whose "fault" it is)
To only consider tuition is a cost-shifting marketing tactic that these schools use so you don't focus on the bottom line. Their goal is to get you to attend. Period.
Let's look at a less prestigious school-- UCSB tuition is about 12k, but total cost might be 24k (official estimate says 32k [2], but I have the random fees they have to not be applicable, e.g. "campus fees" or "books")
[1] https://admissions.berkeley.edu/cost
[2] https://www.finaid.ucsb.edu/cost-of-attendance
That seems low to me. Are you only counting the cost of tuition (and not books, room and board, etc)?
I just grabbed some numbers for NH, one site says the average for tuition alone is $10k, with another $1.5k for books/etc, and another $15k for room/board. So, unless you are able to commute from your parents, looking at closer to 25k+ in loans, per year.
I also checked UNH specifically, where the numbers are roughly $20k for tuition/fees and $33k all in.
Where is that? At my school (Oregon State University) in-state tuition is $13k, and room & board is an additional $13k (which is way overpriced -- more than double what you'd pay in rent & groceries living off-campus, but all first-year students are required to live in the dorms). And out-of-state tuition is triple the in-state rate. So that $25k-50k estimate is exactly on-point here.
Barely anyone pays full tuition.
Look up the statistics for any of the big colleges that share numbers. It’s usually less than 10% of students paying full tuition. Significant numbers of students pay under $10K and many pay basically nothing at all.
It’s still too expensive, but the myth that everybody is paying $50K/year at these colleges needs to die. It ends up convincing a lot of people who shouldn’t be paying that much that everyone else is doing it and therefore they should too.
Here's mine [1] -- at UIUC, full tuition is 35-50k depending on residency. 30% get free tuition (given their family's net worth <50k/gross income < 67k) and 40% got some form of a loan averaging 20k.
Assuming very generous loans (unlikely), 30% of people paid full price, or about 10,000 students (undergrad class size is 30-35k). That's not trivial, but definitely off your 10% claim.
(Here [2] it is more succinctly, and not in a large picturesque landing page advertisement fashion)
Now some anecdata-- I paid 35k. Every college friend I knew also paid full, except one, who had crazy interest rates on her loan. I recognize my friend group may be a bubble, so I preface this with "anecdata" and gave you some sources on my own.
[1] https://admissions.illinois.edu/invest/financial-aid
[2] https://osfa.illinois.edu/other-financial-aid-options/
I also was very concerned about cost when going college, so I went with the cheapest route possible and also worked a job during college. I went to community college for 2 years while living at my parent's house, which was very cheap, it cost about $1000 per year for that. Then I transferred to a cheaper in-state school, in my case it was one in the California State University system (CSU) which is way cheaper though not quite as well known as the UC system (UC Berkeley is part of that system), which cost me about 10k per year for the final 2 years.
In all I was able to get through college with no debt and a degree in Computer Science for a total cost of 22k. I think there is a mindset that students should always attend the best possible school that they are admitted to, but this seems pretty dumb to me as they are usually expensive for big brand names and in the end you receive the same degree and learn the same things.
What I did also happened in California, I think some states have even cheaper paths through college if you go with the community college + in-state university route.
I have a senior in high school right now and although I think you're right - he's concerned about a potential quarter-million dollar tuition bill before this whole thing is over - he's also concerned about the whole selectivity of it all. From the outside looking in, you never know what's important and what's not. He has this feeling (and I'm not sure I can dispute it) that the only degrees that matter are degrees from hyper-selective ivy league schools and if the only school he can get into is Texas Tech, he might as well just give up and go into a trade. I remind him that I went to a no-name school and I'm doing fine but he says "things are different than when you were young", and I'm not 100% sure he's wrong.
Pharmacy: If you get a doctorate and work in a hospital (e.g. in ER), you'll get good pay. The average pharmacist in the pharmacy: Not as much in the future. And there's been a lot of wage pressure due to:
1. Amount pharmacies have to pay to obtain the drugs (i.e. what drug manufacturers charge).
2. Amount insurers will pay for medicine. These are contractual. So if you have insurance and go in, there's an upper bar on what the pharmacy can get from you.
The profit a pharmacy makes is between these two numbers, and that margin has shrunk a lot in the last decade. The upshot? Pharmacies are cutting staff, and cutting hours. In my state, there are towns with no pharmacies at all - they had to shut down as they were losing money.
There are some paths where the university choice does matter, others that don't.
Going into the trades is not a bad idea I think, but again it needs to be a conscious decision for the pros and the cons.
I think the key bit is do some research, try and get a week long internship in the job that he is looking for and/or try to speak with seniors/grads.
Problem is we always keep hearing about these selective schools in the media and that colours out perception a lot. Of course try as much as possible to get into a selective school, but if one is unable to, there are still opportunities.
Much more than that. The ivy league admits ~20k a year. That number jumps to a few hundreds of thousands if you extend to flagship state schools & the Dukes, Northwesterns, and Stanfords of the world.
Exactly this, without the "give up" part. Why is going into a trade giving up? It's choosing a different path than the one that has been shoved down all our throats like it is the only respectable option. University is not for everyone, and not everyone can go there. There's simply not enough room.
I think going into trades is what I want my son to do. I love Mike Rowe's thoughts on this - you can make excellent money, get started fast and be working for yourself by the time you would get a precious 4-year degree. And trades are in serious need of new people; seems like a great opportunity.
If you have a very specific career in mind then sure go for it, but just telling people to "go into the trades" is probably harmful.
I went to college and dropped out, so the value of my non-existent degree is literally zero. But I got a ton of value out of my time there. I met a lot of friends, grew significantly as a person, and found a job opportunity that started me on my career path.
I still think college is way too expensive these days, but if you think of it as only purchasing a degree, you're missing a lot.
My general impression is "has a degree with min GPA x.y" is a HR check-box that is necessary to get past an initial screen for a lot of large company roles. After you've got a couple of years experience no-one on the interview panel likely cares about the school you went to (and if they do, maybe give that firm a miss) compared to what you've done in the past 3 years.
Barely scraping through an engineering degree or getting a degree in architecture at texas tech is certainly a bad idea, but the average engineering graduate is doing better than the trades.
More of this data is public now on graduate outcomes, e.g. https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/texas/texas-tech-univ...
Enrollment was at record numbers immediately preceding the pandemic, and this was a trend that held for several years prior as well. Lots of colleges had been expanding their campuses like crazy in the Before Times.
I don't think the pandemic will result in a long-term shift away from this trend. By-and-large, college education remains is a worthwhile expenditure, despite the costs. You even agree, hence why you have three kids in college!
I can appreciate not going to college right now. Classes have been randomly cancelled, there have been lockdowns/classes going remote, professors aren't grading/lecturing at the levels they should be, students are doing the work, etc, etc. But once society reaches some level of normalcy again, I believe enrollment numbers will explode back to record levels.
Plus, cost-conscious students have more options than ever. A lot of community colleges are starting to offer 4 year degrees.
The best lessons I learned in college were off campus and developing my social skills (which is important).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-feeding-college-bureaucrat...
It's worth noting that the vast majority of students don't pay the sticker price because financial aid is provided early and often (beyond just loans). Very few students are actually paying $50k.* [0]
The average net price at a public college last year is $19,230 and the average net price at a private college is $33,720. Note that this doesn't just include tuition, but also room and board. So if you're going to public college you're probably paying $20k to eat, sleep, and learn. Plus you generally get some kind of health insurance too.
These averages can be significantly lower still for in-state public colleges and community colleges.
No doubt the massive inflation in college prices is driven by the government loans, and the federal government's policy around them should be modified at best. But we should speak in reality instead of the hyperbolic articles that often just look at tuition which is what most people are familiar with. Colleges below the top tier compete on their "discount rate" which is what percentage of the sticker price does the average student actually pay because almost no students pay the sticker price.
* "The average grant aid awarded per student was $8,100 at public colleges and $23,080 at private schools."
0: https://www.collegedata.com/resources/pay-your-way/whats-the...
It was about 15 years ago, I was 19. At the time, I was attending community college because I had no idea what I wanted to major in, or what I wanted to do with my life as far as careers go, but I had so much societal pressure telling me that I had to go to college in order to be successful. I'd tried steering myself towards a few subjects that were hobbies/passions of mine, but every time I dipped my toes into doing something with them professionally, I quickly became concerned about money/profit/work/bosses bastardizing my love for them and opted to keep them as hobbies/passions. 15 years later, I am still enamored by some of those same hobbies and am happy I kept them as such.
While the "goal" was to transfer to a university from the community college, I consistently found myself thinking, "I'm seeing a ton of my friends, and people who graduated HS a few years before me, taking out these massive loans. Why am I going to go into debt if I don't even know what I want to do?". It just made no sense to me, so I stopped. I've been incredibly lucky that I found a career path in an area that I'm good at, and have risen to a level in my career that I'm happy with, but I absolutely did have to work really hard to get here.
All that is to say, not only do I think we put far too much pressure on people to know what they want to do when they're still too young to truly have that figured out, but I also completely agree with you that cost is the primary concern here. If I didn't have to go into so much debt in order to have continued my college education, I have a feeling I would've opted to keep at it and figure out what I wanted to do along the way.
Worse, many get saddled with debt and don't finish for various reasons.
Meanwhile tuition and books keep skyrocketing as schools divert more of their attention away from academics and toward more profitable uses of institutional time and capital.
But in a bit of good news, more jobs are ditching the degree requirement as workers as more scarce. I am glad the pandemic has opened the eyes of employers to realize that a degree is not the indicator it once was.
Opinion: the self-taught are just as capable in the workforce and college degree requirements are gatekeeping.
I got my B.A. in 1968; I owed $800 balance on my student loan ($6,400 today).
My plumber just charged me $430 to install a sink, about an hour and a half's work. That doesn't include the cost of the sink. Are Gender Studies majors making this kind of money?
Any industry that sees nothing but expansion for decades, has a rough time when it stops. I think higher ed is in for a rough time.
It's enough to assume elites were greedy (and/or dense) and didn't consider long-term effects, you don't even need a decades-spanning conspiracy for it.
The elites won't be as fine once they realise much of their wealth stems from the rest of the republic, but that seems to be the circle humanity is caught in for eternity.
This seems to apply to all kinds of things - people, organisations, software, religions.
I guess as often in live, balance is important here :)
The reason colleges cost so much is that they've expanded their administration, facilities, and sports programs to soak up all of the available loan money.
I went to a state school that focused on STEM. The acceptance rate was low, class sizes were small, and the tuitions were reasonable. The buildings dated from the 60's. We didn't have extensive athletic programs, and our gym was falling apart. The school didn't spare expenses on things that didn't contribute directly to education.
We still had access to full machine shops, doppler radar installations, flow cytometers, BSL-3 labs, electron microscopes, wind tunnels, robotics facilities, and a boat load of really cool stuff. But it certainly didn't feel like an ivory tower.
Though our school wasn't losing money, the state board of regents decided to merge it into a much larger "liberal arts" school. This was done so that it could hit the student body requirements in order to qualify for building its own division I football program.
They built lots of fancy buildings for their dance program and theater productions. I can't even count how many stadiums and sports facilities they've constructed - it feels like two dozen! They're also purchasing lots of expensive real estate to enhance the size of the main campus. Meanwhile tuition has quadrupled and fees have gone up 1,000%.
It's bloat. That's why everything costs so much.
In the US they don't have that. AFAIK, there's no "Green Bay Packers U-18s" football team that is integrated with the professional club and promotes young players. Baseball does have a farm team system called the Minor Leagues.
The NCAA which runs university athletics in the US managed to make a junior league feeding all the professional leagues in various sports. The progression for an American athlete is then to get a scholarship to play at some university, and then get drafted by a professional team once they finish.
Student loans are government-guaranteed and cannot be absolved by bankruptcy. This IMO creates a perfect storm whereby under-informed teenagers can get massive loans they have no hope of repaying. Without the government/no bankruptcy components to this equation, the market would not support this kind of debt market.
Fortunately, this is easy to fix. There are two simple options (and probably many more complex ones):
1. Make it a free market. Make student debt absolvable by bankruptcy. Don't give government guarantees. Private loans will account for the viability of student's repaying those loans, while allowing bankruptcy helps ensure that unfair or predatory loans will be costly to the loan-issuer.
2. Make it a government service, like K-12. The government will actively manage the tertiary education market, thus making "the cost of college" a policy decision.
IMO the first one is not particularly desirable because it will limit college access to the upper socio-economic classes, further exacerbating wealth inequality and reducing social mobility. That leaves us with the second option, which is both straightforward to implement and has many case-studies abroad.
Looking at recent graduates are we sure that this system is truly preparing them for the realities of the real world and how to understand it.
Feels more to me that a whole generation is being scammed into paying for broken tools.
And I also agree: how will these institutions scale back? What if tuition was cut significantly? What programs are on the chopping block?
I'm hoping that online school really takes off, and that colleges follow Georgia Tech's lead on pricing for it. OSU still wants full price for online classes, which is bogus.
Beyond that, I'm going to strongly incentivize my kids to stay home the first couple years and hit the local community college for the first half of their degree, just because it's dramatically cheaper than what it'll cost to send them to live at a university.
I thought college was expensive when I was going in the 90s. Now it's just ridiculous.
You will not be paying 30K a year for OSU e-campus. More like 10-15K a year or so.
If this was not a college town or somewhere as rural - you’d likely have to make it closer to $2000+ just because that’s how expensive it is these days to live in cities unless you were able to buy a house a couple decades ago.
Yeah, last time I looked it is the same tuition as if you were using the in-person facilities. I think that's too much for an online program. I paid less than $10K for my master's degree at Georgia Tech. That works out to about a third of what OSU is charging for the online undergrad CS degree, if my math is right. For online videos recorded once and watched many times, I think it should not cost anywhere close to what sitting in a room with a professor does.
By comparison you could go off campus and rent an entire 1bd for like $750/mo. A similar living situation off campus with 3 roommates would set you back $300-400/mo and $550 if you really wanted the nice place.
The thing that always bugged me about dorms is they aren't treated as regular residences. School having a week long break? You have to be out of your dorm during the break with no where to go but back to your parents. Also that 30k for a year only covers two semesters, about 6-7 months of actual housing, which works out to $2.5k/mo for board if we take half of that 30k you mentioned.
I don't know where this college is but I'm going to bet that you can get a seriously nice place, probably a small house for that amount.
/sarcasm (in case it wasn't obvious).
$1250 a month housing
$1250 a month on education and staff
The numbers aren't crazy with the housing prices we're experiencing right now.
I never applied to any public school, but I was legitimately worried about not being accepted. I wouldn't depend on it.
I'm really glad I went to a private college in the end. People who went to state schools said class sizes were huge (like 150 students per class) and they were being taught by TAs. I really don't think I would have succeeded in that sort of environment - At my private school we didn't have any TAs and I never had a class over ~30 people, which was important because classes were very interactive.
Back in the 70's and 80's state appropriations covered between 70-80% of tuition. Now my state covers roughly 35-40% of funding for most public universities [1]. Part of this is the university offering more programs - athletics, counseling, therapy, other student services, which all need additional funding. The other part is that state funding is going down due to a variety of political budget reasons.
[1]: https://www.house.mi.gov/hfa/PDF/Summaries/21h4400h2cr1_Educ...
For everyone else, all college does is shows people that you are diligent: you read the books, wrote the essays, passed the quizzes.
Now, the thing is most jobs are not directly related to any particular degree. For example if you become an option trader like I did, nothing on my Engineering/Econ/Mgt was relevant. Even the finance parts of the management course were not relevant. You learn on the job. Think about it, you are at work 50-70 hours a week the whole year vs splitting your time at uni over a much shorter calendar. At work you sit next to an expert, at school you sit next to novices.
So the whole idea that college qualifies you to do something is bogus. It's mainly a signal that you're teachable, and a weak signal that you're interested in some particular broad area.
I would guess that the great majority of jobs that people with degrees take could have been done by the same people without their degree. You'll never get people to admit that if you aren't friends with them, but that is generally what people think as well.
Are there other benefits to college? Certainly. You get to socialize, mature a bit away from home, and for most people it's the last time they are exposed to the great ideas that mankind has found over the centuries. Those things can all be done separately without paying for it, but currently the system is broken and everyone uses degrees as a social status marker, which is self-reinforcing: you still need a degree because if you don't have one you can't get those jobs that you don't need a degree to perform.
I think I learned a thing or two at university.
The number of jobs that are just "general business role" is enormous.
If we can align the incentives of colleges and students to find jobs, it will also be a win for the economy. Let students bargain with their future earning potential, if they don’t make anything, the school doesn’t make anything.
It's win-win-win, taxpayers get free access to universities for themselves and their children, students avoid debt or garnished wages in the future, and universities get government support and can shut down complicated administrative overhead for helping students navigate financing.
Now I know your thinking - does it scale? Yes! We have data from secondary and primary schools with the same cohort of students, who attend school for no cost. Attendance and graduation of these schools is closely correlated with life outcomes and success! We could apply this existing financing model to universities and solve the problem of tuition fees with by reusing the ideas from other tuition-free primary and secondary schools.
Prob a bit long for an elevator pitch, but hey.
as for the free college idea, this seems like a solution for the wrong problem. I'd argue a large chunk of students are already wasting their time getting a credential that shouldn't be necessary for the work they plan to do. I'm not convinced it's automatically good for more people to graduate college. four years is a long time to spend doing something without a clear, concrete reason to do so.
- Depending on what you choose it might not even be rewarding
- You'll be saddled with crippling debt forever
Nah.
You're better off paying a couple of thousand for a coding bootcamp and have a better chance of finding some work and actually pay off the smaller debt you might have incurred.
America is still stuck in this alternate universe where it's a great privilege to have the opportunity to learn, which is of course true to some extent, but they really put it on a pedestal there.
Compared to the rest of the world, I think they over index on attending prestigious out-of-state and thus expensive, regardless of public or private, instead of building a really strong system for locals.
I think of my (non-US) classmates, maybe 1-2 per 100 were from a different region or country? I paid a total of $20k over five years which I easily covered with internships/summer jobs. Can you say the same in the US?
I don't know how much our reams of communications, generic business and English majors are advancing humanity. (Granted, I studied finance [and engineering] in undergrad.)
Because they're in large part neither functional nor artistic. Both force one to think in novel ways. The certification-for-its-own-sake majors do not.
There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, not mastering new ways to think. That doesn't advance society, particularly when it burdens young people with debt.
What exactly do you think an English major is like? Humanities majors absolutely force you to think in new ways, and I'd argue much more so than engineering or CS majors.
I agree, and was on the edge in not including that major, but did so because there are English majors and there are undergrads who got a degree in English. At a lot of tier 2 public universities (e.g. the one I went to), the latter dominate. A student showing initiative can get a top-notch liberal arts education. But the average student won't. They'll skim, read the SparkNotes and pass through unchanged because the point isn't studying literature but getting a diploma.
Students who want to learn anything should be given the opportunity. I strongly believe that. But more people with degrees doesn't make for a better-educated population. And driving money into encouraging that doesn't necessarily advance society either.
> There are reams of low-grade degrees in which the majority of teaching is in memorization, and not mastering new ways to think.
The biggest complaint from anyone I know who studied medicine/pre-med is the sheer amount of memorization involved. Must be a useless field of study.
This is a straw man. Nobody said memorization is verboten.
A certificate granted for mainly memorization, where no new modes of thinking or doing were involved, is not worth tends of thousands of dollars. If a med school matriculated students who never did practical and had never deliberated treatment modes and tradeoffs, et cetera, yes, it would be close to useless.
And here is your straw man. Nobody said they were worth that much. You haven't demonstrated that a significant portion of any major exhibits these traits.
Four years of a young person's time is worth tens of thousands of dollars. So beyond the direct cost of education, that is the opportunity cost, to the individual and to society. I think that's money well spent for e.g. a proper liberal arts degree. It isn't for a piece of paper pursued for its own end.
This is the basis of your entire point, and you haven't backed it up with anything of substance. You can keep tossing red herrings, but this hasn't been addressed.
I would certainly believe that person. However, saying "this major at this school has low standards" is not the same as saying "a bunch of majors at all schools have low standards and are thus worthless."
I have a degree in physics with a minor in literature. I took one upper div lit class a quarter. I never memorized a thing. Instead I read a ton, both assigned and peer review, and wrote a ton, both essays and creative. My lit classes are far more memorable than my physics classes because I learned the skill of communicating my ideas. "Low-grade" creative writing taught me that my ideas will never be conveyed as I hoped; good criticism can be immensely helpful; and rewriting my work is when something truly useful comes together.
English is an unowned cultivated intellectual property that greases communication which greases all other human endeavors. I think its underappreciated.
Not all education needs to advance the frontier, much of it is about maintaining what we've already claimed and passing it on to new generations.
http://airshipdaily.com/blog/05232014-authors-teachers
If you see the study of any humanities at all as only possibly measured by what success you gain in the domains of social status or notoriety, then I wonder if you apply that same rubric to STEM fields? Please be mindful that just because you dont know about something, doesn't make it dumb, bad, or pointless. At the very least, don't wave away so simply an entire discipline!
They can do this by reading books. There are even books of criticism that help you learn about other books.
There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government.
Almost all of my classes had leftist brainwashing. In my machine learning class, the professor would use voting republican as a classifier making the wrong decision. Given that people had made it this far in education to be good at repeating and learning what ever the professor says and that the professor is in a position of power over the students, this is very bad.
> There also seems to be a deep seated fear that any sort of public investment in people is seen as a slippery slope to soviet-style authoritarian government.
Well, we now have to show our papers to go to restaurants, bars, work, etc and are now required to mask our faces in public. its considered an act of terrorism to raise your voice at a school board meeting, and we're being censored on internet platforms. so yeah, you already accomplished your soviet-style authoritarianism.
That being said, there's a difference between academic education and other forms of education, such as vocational or work experience. One is not better than the other. I'm weary of people that think they're smarter or better than someone else on the basis of what school they went to or how long for. Academia does not have a monopoly on knowledge. Particularly in the information age, but even well before the age we find ourselves in, there's always been value in the pragmatic experience of less intellectual pursuits.
I'd say the U.S.'s slant towards pragmatism and away from intellectualism is one of my favorite things about the country. I'd say it showed itself pretty well on the Covid response. Red states were more quicker to re-open, quicker to drop restrictions, and quicker to move on to living with Covid and in spite of it. People knew intuitively that you wouldn't be able to control a virus more infectious than the common cold.
And many people know this, intuitively as well, that's why New York loss record population last year and why Florida and Texas grew dramatically. The intellectuals running New York and New York City probably have tons of education and not one bit of common sense, because all they know is conformity. When an ordained expert says jump, they ask how high?
That doesn't even begin to cover the other part of it, which is how poorly adapted academia is for the 21st century. Even if it were free, it wouldn't fix that problem.
I can agree with you on that.
Free education levels the playing field. Moreover, I feel guilt. I have been a beneficiary of free education. Free transport, free college tuition, free books and some paid assistance with living somewhere else. Coming from a working class family it has given me an amazing boost in:
* Career (master computer science)
* Spiritual knowledge (one Buddhism course was enough)
* Outlook on the world
* Network
University isn't perfect, but if I wasn't given this chance then I would not be able to replicate certain pivotal experiences simply by using the internet and my own wit. In that sense, I still believe it levels the playing field by quite a bit.
School was always meant as the great equalizer and I think it still should be, as imperfect as it is.
I think foreign colleges have stricter entry requirements and fewer amenities compared to American colleges. So yes, college may be free in Japan, but also much harder to be accepted.
Yeah this is problematic, on one hand you have people who work harder for it pass the entrance exams and get in (like in France for example where some engineering schools like Polytechnique and ENS have a super difficult entrance exam but then you know everyone studying there earned it), but on the other hand you get some people who are just lazy or not good at physics get filtered from top tier positions in CS because the entrance exam had Math and Physics equally attribute to your grade.
The top schools in Japan are indeed quite competitive, but there are also universities that admit almost any high school graduate. A few decades ago, a lot of new universities were established just when the birthrate was starting to drop. Now some lower-tier private universities are struggling to attract enough students to survive.
[1] https://schoolynk.com/media/articles/245ea105-7e5e-49db-ad13...
the number of STEM degrees in the US has basically been flat for decades, majority of degrees being handed out are effectively useless in terms of boosting productivity and "advancement". Go around and ask people with college degrees how often they actually use them, probably 90% admit it was worthless, I know mine was. Luckily I had academic scholarships so I didn't have any debt
kids are effectively being propagandized and brainwashed into chasing worthless credentials while racking up debt that will impact their lives for years. The amount of emotional manipulation around college is disgusting
I went to college because my parents forced me to. Thankfully I got out without any debt. I cant imagine how upset I would be if I racked up 100K is debt and ended up with a useless degree like many of my friends did.
That being said... I cant really blame my parents for forcing me to go. It did seem like the best option at the time. No one told me, or I guess them, about alternative educational programs or trade schools. I'd probably be a carpenter now if someone had. I had pretty much zero plans for my life post high school so college at least gave me something to do while I figured it out.
They also force each other into "worthless credentials", as many college graduates will only date other college graduates.
Between 2008 and 2015 the number grew by nearly 50%.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_318.45.a...
Hell no! Life is a zero-sum game, so if I'm hurting other people, that must mean I'm winning! Besides, if we all collectively come together to make the world better, those people might have nice things too! That would make me so angry! I'd rather live in poverty than see those people do well in life!
Sarcasm, obviously, but at least 100 million Americans believe all of the above. They are single-issue voters, and their single issue is hurting other people.
I don't know about all of the rest of the world, but many countries require you to "test in" to college (and then it's free). The US basically lets anyone go to college if they can pay.
You can argue one is better than the other. But you should be honest/aware of the difference.
You paid with five years of your life. Even if college were "free", it still wouldn't be the optimal thing for everyone to do. It is the best choice for some, but unfortunately those who make other choices are often looked down upon in much of the world unless they're an outlier success.
The cost of US schools is a massive problem, but the increasing assumption that everyone needs to take multiple years out of what could be the most productive phase of their life to engage in a tracked cookie-cutter experience is an even bigger problem.
Schooling and education aren't the same thing and the first doesn't always lead to much of the second.
It's expensive, but nice work if you can get it
Of my (undergraduate) classmates, I believe 60% were out of state, including out of country. Unfortunately, most that came from states with similarly ranked public schools did not have access to a similar program in those states.
My payments to the university totaled $60k for 7 years, undergraduate and masters. (I lost full tuition coverage my first year.)
I think the facts don't really support the idea of it being a "great privilege" in the sense of being inaccessible to most. E.g. if you look at this table of tertiary education by country, in OECD countries plus a few others, the US is in the top 10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
In the section below that, if you look at 4-year degrees or higher, more Americans have a 4-year equivalent than Israelis, Swedes, Canadians, Norwegians, French, German etc.
We're not an outlier in how many of us go to college, just in how much of people's lives they end up paying for it.
To be clear, I think this is a more sensible system than what we do here in America, where anyone can get an advanced education because even if you can't afford it, the government will guarantee loans of arbitrary size.
America just wants new grads to be indebted to motivate them to get to work.
We get a new iPhone every once in a while, or a UI refresh of twitter, to simulate a feeling of advancement, but we all, deep down, know it's just that, a feeling.
How could anyone even really want advancement when we know that finance thrives on predictable cycles.
The word for the next centuries should be 'humility,' not 'progress'. Humility is the only thing I think we can possibly achieve anymore
Yeah subsidization of education, of mostly useless degrees will solve all problems of humanity, totally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
Edit: clarified that private secondary school = private high school. Of course federal student loans are available for accredited private colleges/universities.
Not sure the reliability of this source but the trend is there across sources: [0] https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-private-school
I guess they've since changed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Direct_Student_Loan_Pr...
They are very much for private schools. There's no real limit on them. They tend to cover the difference between what a family can pay and what the tuition is. They're generally low interest and you don't need to start paying them back until you're done with school.
Since the loans always cover the difference the impact of tuition costs going up isn't immediately felt
Private high school costs have gone up as fast or faster than college. This cannot be explained by the availability of federal loans.
First birth rates are generally down. Not only in America,but worldwide.
>Wages at the bottom of the economy have increased dramatically, making minimum-wage jobs especially appealing to young people as an alternative to college.
This isn't an ether or situation. I worked full time while going to school full time. In fact this was my entire senior year of college.
I actually got to 6 figures without a degree, but the entire point of college for me was getting away from my horrible family. It's still a good way to get distance.
This is great news overall. Tuition will have to drop and schools will offer more flexibility to working students.
In my home state of California the UCs are hostile to anyone with a 9-5, I hope this changes.