I was lucky enough to get a grant, 100% of cost, with two caveats, you have to finish, and once you finish you HAVE to work in the country for 2 years. Overall an amazing compromise for government.
I agree entirely, made my college decision based on these factors at 18. However, these analyses miss the mark by stressing the map, instead of the territory.
Ex. The graph about graduates being underemployed goes back to 1990, and there's no meaningful difference in the difference in the rate between then, and now.
Ex. 41% graduating after 4 years doesn't mean it is necessary colleges need to Find A Better Way: that would affect ex. the complain around graduates being not prepared with no discernible skills
> The graph about graduates being underemployed goes back to 1990, and there's no meaningful difference in the difference in the rate between then, and now.
this probably mattered less when the debt load was much lower
Not true... people were talking about this in the late 90's as being a bad idea because of misaligned incentives.
Loans are supposed to be inherently risky to the bank issuing the loan. Managing that risk is their business, and the reward for doing it right is the interest payments.
I remember people back then talking about "if the loans are non-dischargeable, then the bank is pretty much guaranteed it's money back, making it a no risk proposition to them. What's stopping them from becoming student loan mills? What's stopping colleges from asking for more and more money if the banks just lend it no risk?"
These ideas were out there, but get drowned out by the voices of the big pocket companies that are proposing the legislation. Tons of articles talking about the risk being overblown, the results are wonderful, etc. Think about the kids, good for 'murica, etc.
The big messages you hear over and over again in the media are being payed for by groups that aren't particularly interested in benefiting you. This is not a new problem, it's been this way for a long while.
And here we are 25 years later. Wondering how we got here. When anyone with a brain at the time knew this was coming.
The problem is only getting worse because of media consolidation and the vast reach of the internet into everyone's eyeballs. Be skeptical very of what you read.
I agree, and another way out is educating people who are about to enter university properly so they make an informed decision about the major they wanna choose more than their feelings and more on facts to see the outcome.
That's not a one-size-fits-all solution. Many 18 year olds will not be willing or capable of making a good financial long term decision regardless of education.
Mortgaging yourself into decades of indentured servitude shouldn't be an option that's available to young adults.
I actually beg to differ, most people who go into STEM for example have a pretty good understanding of their path and they are very smart 18 year olds who make really good decisions, but I agree that mortgages shouldn’t be like candies giving them to any kid. I agree that If banks were worried of not getting payed back, then maybe they would screen better, but still the issue of universities with bad incentives still remains there.
We should be way more willing to straight up kill multi-billion dollar industries. Without that willingness, most modern problems are impossible for governments to solve, and such industries and even their potential competitors are incentivised mostly to exacerbate the problem. I love a good market as much as anyone but there really are problems
markets will never solve
That's too disruptive, and there's too high a chance of unintended consequences. Instead of that what you'll see is a 'we'll kill this multi-billion dollar industry over the course of the next 30 years'
Entrenched and connected types tend to exit industries before the gavel hits, and enforcement from the CCDI isn't impartial, with plenty of bribery to remain off their radar.
Truly Schumpterian creative destruction is good in a vacuum, but reality isn't a vacuum.
They stopped the one child policy nine years ago; they had it in the first place because demographic projections had them severely overpopulated if they didn't.
During the period in which it was active, their GDP increased by a factor of about 62. Not percentage, multiple.
They reversed the policy too late. Their rapid growth was them seizing the low hanging fruit upgrading from a country of almost entirely peasants to slightly fewer peasants, all funded by Western greed. Those gains will never happen again.
With all due respect, fuck that. We do disruptive stuff with unintended consequences for millions of people as a matter of policy all the time, and the idea that it'll disrupt some finance goons' ponzi scheme does not bother me
If you mean banks, there’s the problem that “let it die” often translates to “shift the obligation”, which typically gets shifted to the tax payers, either in plain sight after a bailout, or under the table by devaluing the currency (basically taxation without having to say it).
This is the problem with a ton of policy thinking. The idea that we can solve a problem of this magnitude with disruption, and somehow prevent market forces from reacting, is incredibly short sighted.
It's incredibly expensive to run a university, and many people feel entitled to attend any university they can get into (not a bad thing, btw), but you can't suddenly erase the bill without drastically cutting costs, changing supply/demand, or otherwise altering the economics first.
The college level education system in the US employs almost 3.8 million people. Decisions here absolutely affect their employment, tax rates, employment rates, bank loans, financial industry solvency, etc.
This problem is incredibly far away from the space of YOLO tactics.
Multi-billion dollar industries represent jobs, stocks, and campaign contributions. The US government is not designed to beat those forces. It's the same reason we'll never see universal healthcare unfortunately.
We shouldn't see the government as solution to too many problems. If we overdo on it, we get socialism. And we know how it always ends.
Let the market forces decide. Eventually people will realise college doesn't work and will stop going there. Seriously problem is that too many people think they are smart and can benefit from a degree, when most can't. If 10% top graders go to college from school as it was in the boomers' era, ROI of higher education will be enormous (as there won't be an oversupply of useless graduates), and costs will be low (as low demand always reduces prices).
We shouldn't punish people who take the money because people are willing to pay it. Who's fault it is that they are dumb? Do we see much say, annoying advertisement to the tune of "go study X with us, you'll be rich and women will love you"? No. People are doing it because they are dumb. If we try to build a system that prevents smart people from taking money put on the table by dumb people, we will make the whole system dumber by incentivising dumbness.
I question utility of that reduction. When you reduce complex situations to simple words like 'socialism' you lose nuance and predictive power. It's not binary. It's more or less. Canada is more socialist than USA. Norway is more socialist than Canada.
Reducing to "is" or "isn't" doesn't help understand the problem or come up with viable solutions.
If we go along the route of "asking the government to ban every line of business where people waste money getting no value for it or even getting harmed, being driven by systematic delusion", as it is with the higher education - we will shoot ourselves in the foot in a massive massive way as this will kill almost all web startups as this is what they are - use manipulative tactics, knowingly false expectation and social effects to force people to spend money on... well nothing really. And the lower your chance of getting something in return, the more you pay (classic example are dating apps). I go to startup events frequently. Took me a few years to accept the truth that speaking about any industry (their slang for it is "vertical") - well, any except porn - like dating, pharma, so-called "nutra", etc. they actually mean "scam in the field of X", and the main idea of every successful one is "a genius way to obscure it is a scam".
For God's sake, it will even kill custom software development which most people sitting here, do for a living - because it is the same exact thing - vast majority of clients never get what they want and even if they did they won't be able to make the money on the useless "products" they invented, because this is nothing but a systematic delusion that's moving them. Almost all of them see themselves as genius inventors of the next world-changing thing but they are in fact random nobodies who raised cash from other random nobodies, to waste it on something that makes their contractors laugh so badly they even refrain from doing video calls. It's even worse than higher education. I seen multiple software dev companies throwing lavish parties on the April Fool's day as "professional holiday of our clients".
Should we first look at ourselves in the mirror before blaming the college cabal for doing the same as we do ourselves, just more successfully?
I said is I don't see the utility in reducing the concept from a continuum to a binary "is/isn't"
You seem to have doubled down on the is/isn't perspective and demonstrated what I was referring to. The more you reduce the less useful your reasoning becomes.
No, with high student loans, you are not supporting high talents; you are supporting the rich only. You are obstructing a lot of potential that poor students might have realized if they could have afforded it. It's not about banning universities; it's about broadening accessibility. Schools are state-funded for the same reason.
Socialism is a term too broad to mean anything. When we say socialism, do we include states that provide healthcare systems as infrastructure, as is common across the world? Do we include the vast amounts of market interference represented by decisions about what crimes can be hidden behind a corporate veil, what companies win lucrative government contracts to have decades of non-competitive profits?
The attitude that the government shouldn't intervene against companies on the behalf of human rights has been tried for fifty years, and it is an unprecedented failure even in financial terms for at least roughly 80% of the population of one of the largest and wealthiest countries in the world in terms of real purchasing power. Even for many of us in higher income brackets, the resulting crumbling infrastructure and drastic wealth disparities leave much to be desired as a society to live in. Many of these problems have solutions, and calling them "socialism" is meaningless as an argument against them
> If we overdo on it, we get socialism. And we know how it always ends.
First, no, we have some high-visibility examples of dictators claiming to be socialists, several of whom had purges of other internal opponents who said socialism was a different thing to what they were doing.
We don't point to the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea"* or "The Democratic Republic of Congo" then say of Democracy (or of republics) "And we know how it always ends".
Second, there's a huge gap between what the USA considers "dangerously lefty" and what is seen in northern Europe today, let alone states today which are or were explicitly socialist such as the USSR.
No, i mean EU socialist countries. To the tune of Sweden, Netherlands, etc. That are little but sleepy retirement community with no ways to make money. Why would anyone with any ambition want to live there? So they don't. They go to America in spite of all it's horrors and sins. Live there once they made they money? Also no, because taxes, they go to the likes of Cyprus or Malta, or since recently, Spain [1]. These countries are good only if you are a taker, or a tourist.
I moved from the UK to Germany, I actively decided against the USA. Why? Consider what was going on politically in the US right after the UK voted for Brexit.
Σκεφτόμουν την Κύπρο, αλλά οι Άγγλοι λένε όταν κάτι είναι δύσκολο να διαβαστεί: "It's all greek to me"
European social democracies may not be the best if you want to get rich, but for average Joe they offer superior quality of life compared to the US. IMO too much capitalism and socialism both suck, and certain EU countries have the best balance between them.
What is the total cap of those startups? How does it compare with what IPOs in the Valley in a single year? We are probably talking about same "startups" as in Spain that people only open to get startup visas. There are multiple business plans mills there who specialise in writing plausible "sitcom startup" BPs for that purpose.
There have been a lot of socialist countries that were proper and strong democracies, notably India. The result? Hundreds of millions in abject poverty in India until socialism was given up in the 90s, and is slowly recovering.
Funny you say that, Karnataka is an outlier beating its peers in all quality of life metrics and has been run by communist for decades.
Also, modern day India has a very strong government intervention bias, especially regarding lifting people out of poverty. Be it investments in infrastructure (such as running water), or downright giving food to people. Good luck explaining how that isn't "socialism" to an American.
> Funny you say that, Karnataka is an outlier beating its peers in all quality of life metrics and has been run by communist for decades.
You mean Kerala, not Karnataka.
And conversely, West Bengal was ruled by the Communists since the 1970s to the early 2010s, yet it's developmental indicators have regressed to those comparable to some of the poorest states of India.
Conversely, right leaning and nativist Himachal Pradesh (if you ain't Pahadi or Pahadi-adjacent we will give you the cold shoulder, and both the state chapters of the HP INC and BJP trace their origins to the RSS and Arya Samaj) has developmental indicators that can match Kerala and other traditionally richer states in India.
At the end of the day, all that matters is administrative capacity, not ideology.
If local government is held accountable, it will work hard to deliver.
In this case, government intervention is what caused the problem, and removing that intervention is what would disrupt the multi-million dollar industry.
Specifically, the government made it so college loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and backs many student loans.
The solution is to remove the exception for student debt in bankruptcy, and either have the government stop backing student loans, or make stricter requirements for colleges to quailify for its students qualifying for federal loans. Like say, require that a certain percentage of students graduate, and get jobs within a year of graduating, having reasonable tuition, etc.
Agree, but the result will be that far fewer kids get to go to college, or get to go to the best college that they can get into.
Loans will only be granted to students who have a track record of high achievement, parents willing to co-sign, and going into majors that make economic sense.
Enrollment will drop, universities will stop offering passion majors, mass layoffs in library science, academia, and college administrations (likely to the tune of 1M+ people).
In the end, students will be told by federal examination which school and major they get to pursue, or whether they get to go to college at all.
That's assuming the government is both effective and efficient in this process.
This is essentially how most consumer economics work.
But isn't it the goal? To make sure only the kids who have the brains and the right class to make value out of a degree (or don't care about value because their parents have cash), will go to study, not "just about everyone" as now. Working class kids without outstanding abilities should go to trade schools/apprenticeships and do blue collar labor. It pays decent bucks, and brings value to society too.
I think therec would also need to be a cultural shift to make trade schools and apprenticeships more acceptable, and make financial assistance for them more accessible.
And for that matter, I think it could make since to have trade schools for white colllar jobs too. In some sense that is what coding camps are, although I'd like to see them be a little more rigorous and include things like security, software design, algorithms, etc.
As for passion subjects and arts, maybe have more, and higher quality community classes available that people can go to when they already have a decent job and can pay for them outright instead of accruing massive debt.
That, probably can and should be fixed. Set a minimum age for someone to take a college loan to say 21. Otherwise, a parent takes it and it's subtracted from a parents' social security check before it does from kid's. Then people will think twice. Maybe that's fair.
Good idea. I think kids in high school should also be shown some real stats about monetary outcomes from different degrees. Not BS marketing material from educational institutions, but actual statistics. The whole society would benefit if number of students in different fields would roughly match labor market demand.
how many people do you think even understand “actual statistics”? i was reading a study done by actuaries working at one of the largest reinsurers in the world, and they made conclusions based on confidence level values overlapping, which is a nontrivial mistake i identified within seconds. and these are actuaries, people who by and large, so understand statistics. how do you expect the average person to interpret any of it when they struggle to understand what a rate of change (inflation) is?
Yep, and kids also smoke, vape, do drugs, gamble, assault people, play too many video games, etc.
The answers lie in educating them to make good decisions, and be there to help when good decisions happen to turn out poorly. The current dilemma is largely due to provably bad decisions (by students, banks, universities, government).
Are student loans the most pressing "bad decision" we have as a society? Definitely not. Is it a very electable topic? Yep
But…the whole point is that it is NOT a market. If student debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are “solved”.
Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. Universities that provide a poor ROI will shut down. Universities will need to reduce costs for traditional coursework, cut courses with poor returns, add courses with higher returns.
The inflation in higher education that has run rampant due to subsidized demand being removed.
> Universities will have to start focusing on ROI.
In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt.
The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduation something happens which prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you.
And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.
> Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduation something happens which prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you.
That's why the article's saying you should be able to declare bankruptcy.
> And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.
Teaching is relatively well paid and there are huge numbers of jobs. It's highly likely that a teacher could repay loans. There are plenty of degrees far less capable of providing employment than teaching.
I think most people would agree with me in saying the European model sounds pretty swell compared to forcing people into declaring bankruptcy because of economic/personal factors potentially out of their control, while also inserting an incredible amount of volatility into the entire university system that would make long term institutional planning much less possible.
And in the US, bankruptcy doesn't help with the student debt, so if the majority of your debt is student loans, there's really nothing that can be done other than die to get rid of them. And I'm 100% certain that if the student loan - industrial complex could saddle relatives and kids with that debt after death, they'd sure go after that too.
Many will agree, but that's part of the reason why the US has a 50% higher GDP with 30% lower population. Focusing on well-beeing, fun and experience comes at a price.
The U.S. GDP per capita is behind Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, and these countries are known for low cost and excellent education.
What do you mean about 30% lower population? How is that relevant? You’re quoting a per-capita stat, the population was already factored out. And you’re comparing a single country to 27 countries. Makes zero sense.
Be careful what you wish for. The majority of my fellow engineering graduates would not have gotten an engineering degree in Germany.
They would have flunked the first year - a weed out year - and then been forced into a technical diploma program and not be allowed to call themselves engineers.
My friend who went to the German school said they have a target of flunking half the students that first year. Funds are limited and shape how many can graduate.
Sure -- though that's almost just two ways of describing the same thing. If teachers were paid $500k, few would describe them as overworked, and if they only had to work 4-hour days (with current salaries and benefits), they might be fairly compensated.
Not to be argumentative (really ), but that's borderline nonsensical; you're comparing a profession to a broad category of educational attainment. Teachers typically have a degree in the humanities. What other profession is so commonly viewed as underpaid?
>In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt.
That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education?
>And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.
Sounds like the solution is to raise teacher pay, which would also have the added benefit of retaining teachers after they graduate. Giving teachers cheap training but paying them poorly seems worse than the status quo because you end up shoveling money into training teachers that'd end up dropping out anyways.
A country's which population is educated, usually bodes well, unless it's an authoritative govt one, in which case dumbing down the population is the way (from the govt POV, at least)
> That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education?
We can say the same thing about K-12 education -- it's just something we choose to fund collectively, because that's the kind of society we want to be.
But also, progressive taxation means that the rich fund it more than the poor. So the general idea is that if law school and medical school are expensive to provide but result in vastly higher salaries, then it gets paid for in the end out of those lawyers' and doctors' taxes. Not the taxes from average Americans.
Progressive taxation isn’t even necessary. If someone makes $10,000 and is taxed 10%, they give up $1,000. And if someone makes $10,000,000 then they give up $1,000,000.
It isn’t necessary, no, and in fact a flat super simple tax code would probably result in more tax revenue. However, since politicians like the power of the tax code, and because the wealthy like a complex tax code for all the loopholes, and since ordinary people like the idea of those wealthier than them paying more tax as a percentage of their income, then we’re never going to get a simple tax code.
And absolutely the same logic can and should apply for universities - there can be private exclusive institutions, but the majority should be affordable and mostly paid for by taxes.
This already is the case. 75% of student debt is private universities and colleges.
If you get into Stanford but can't afford it, a loan seems like a good idea, but in reality the loan eligibility should consider the degree and future earning potential (along the same lines of how banks qualify other types of loans).
If we simply cancel student debt or remove private colleges' ability to charge a market rate the result will be no more private colleges (similar to other countries with fully publicly funded education). In these countries you typically have a national exam that determines where you go, or you have to lottery in to a school if it isn't in your district.
>We can say the same thing about K-12 education -- it's just something we choose to fund collectively, because that's the kind of society we want to be.
But in K-12 education, the taxpayer/state has strong control over what's taught. In the last few years there's some latitude by the students, but nothing close the panoply of programs offered by universities. If education is state funded, but only for programs with proven ROI (eg. STEM), I'd be fine with that.
When the state pays, what matters is the ROI to the state. There is a need for teachers, social workers, and people familiar with various cultures, but the market will never pay them well.
Public funding models often have incentives for delivering the degrees the state wants. For example, there could be field-specific quotas for degrees. The university gets paid for each degree up to the quota, but not for exceeding the quota. That can have interesting effects in fields that are popular but in low demand. For example, the acceptance rate to psychology can be as low as 2-3%.
Simpler isn’t always preferable: note that the key feature from the consumer perspective in that system is
> you pay no matter what
Meaning if it’s assumed “despite learning little, you still will be able to pay for it”, there’s no longer any motive force towards quality, as your payment is assured. Incentives on taxpayers thereafter who want to minimize their tax burden would therefore be optimizing primarily toward cheapness of the educational process, rather than efficacy and quality of the education which outbound students received.
A vigorous market for education, would suggest you would likely get a variety of nodes along a “costliness to quality” options frontier.
> there’s no longer any motive force towards quality, as your payment is assured
There are many excellent European universities, including ones which have been around for centuries, telling me there are ways to handle your concerns.
> A vigorous market for education
How's that Corinthian Colleges degree working out? Costly and no quality. And exactly the life-crippling outcome we should expect in a 'vigorous market'.
This is non-responsive to my point. Pointing out that paid universities like Corinthian in a grossly distorted market predictably are not very competitive offerings, or that good offerings can nevertheless still exist in heavily distorted markets, both fail to address that
> Current educational incentives caused by how payment is handled in these all-pay systems mean there is very little or no pressure exerted towards promoting an educational arms race towards quality, rather than minimizing cost to service that education.
In a more competitive market, yes, I believe you'd both likely see better European offerings, as well as substantially more compelling American paid offerings than the current batch of cash grab for-profit universities. They exist in their current form almost exclusively because financial lenders in the US have no incentive not to issue loans to students - even if the program is bogus, they are guaranteed re-payment.
This is a commonality shared between both current European offerings (via taxation guaranteeing repayment), and American alternatives (via guaranteed load repayment).
'In a more competitive market' sounds like an article of faith, akin to the No True Scotsman, where there's no definition of what is competitive enough until it meets the proponents' sniff test.
What would a sufficiently competitive market entail? Has it ever existed?
Would it look like modern US K-12 systems where commercial schools prioritize the most profitable students and leave the others to the public schools? Where good marketing beats good education?
How would it not be "heavily distorted" by impositions like Title 9 and other civil rights requirements? By government requirements on the school in order to receive state and federal money? By accreditation requirements?
This question being written as singular suggests to me you’re conflating some combination of education as a concept, education in America, and education in Europe. I see this as muddled thinking, they each have their own issues and their own timetables over which issues can and do exist.
Education history in Europe is actually decently hyperlocal and pretty path dependent for each country during the 19th and 20th century. Talking about it as a monolith is challenging, but there’s a pretty consistent pattern in societies with all-pay taxation-paid schooling that it has clear incentive structures that a school, having been “paid up front“, is not incentivized to put in the work to provide a high quality education, and as the financier of that education is the taxpayer, the pressure is primarily to keep costs low.
As for America, you don’t need much faith to believe that in the US instituting dischargeability would dramatically improve competition and quality in these spaces and the market for education - so yes, this market used to be substantially more competitive and used to exist. Since the 1970s when these laws were passed, student debt and tuition costs have skyrocketed, low quality for-profit university creation skyrocketed, and people have been hobbled with debt for degrees many are never going to pay back. Dischargeability reduces this greatly - it causes financiers to create motive pressure on education to not be a fiscal vampire preying on its students and equip them with meaningful trades and socially useful knowledge.
As for standards and regulations on schools, assuming the public sees fit to fund higher education through government spending, having requirements for a school to receive that government funding seems reasonable, so long as they reflect the desires of the local populace.
Ultimately, all this is a discussion of tradeoffs - I think someone can happily prefer
> everyone gets a free tertiary education paid for by their taxes
I think that it being free and paid-by-all means it’ll have low motive pressure towards quality and therefore be comparably mediocre to free elementary and secondary compulsory education, which even based on your own reckoning seems to be a two-tier system where the public institutions get short shrift - but you seem to care about it being free or less focused on fiscal student outcomes as its own value. It’s a tradeoff.
I care about having actual definitions of what "more competitive market" and "vigorous market for education" means, and gave examples of markets with significant market failures.
Is it even possible to have a vigorous market without strong government oversight?
> define more competitive markets - Is it even possible?
Yes it is, and I am using it in the traditional sense of "Sellers vying to make their offerings more compelling so consumers prefer them to alternatives". A more competitive market has more of the above fighting happening, which can be incentivized in several ways.
Specifically for the US, I already gave a massive truck-sized example of how you can make offerings more competitive: repeal recent 1970s policy changes that make college debt work different than essentially all other debt in being non-dischargeable, and lenders will put pressure by refusing to lend for failschools. This will slash their demand, and survivors will be expected to provide more compelling “when examined actuarially” lifetime student economic outcomes: from the lender’s perspective, the education needs to be expected to at least pay for itself. Schools in a world with dischargeability will therefore make efforts to compete on being able to compellingly show “we are imparting an effective education which equips you to repay what you spent”, and in general will be less able to get away with “we have a strong brand and you’re young and naïve, come study here!”. You can fool an 18 year old, you won’t fool the underwriter.
Specifically for the EU, there’s three approaches I’d like to see considered, the first and last more experimental than the others. It’s a widely agreed upon problem that faculty aren’t incentivized or often even that good at actually teaching, and to a lesser extent they’re also bad at training graduate students, because professorial incentives are to be good at research and grant writing, the thing for which universities pay their salary.
Historically, many universities used a different mode where they kept permanent salaried faculty positions very limited, and rather than charge a tuition, most schools and professors were expected to charge a fee or honorarium they would collect from their individual pupils as the bulk or totality of a professor’s compensation.
We moved away from this because historically teacher compensation was abysmal and we wanted to better support educators in studying - the pendulum swung way too far the other way though, and professors are essentially totally insulated from needing to seriously engage with their student body - they make a salary no matter what and it shows when they teach like it. Returning to a market where teachers’ financial outcomes are at least partially linked to their students explicitly choosing and paying professors chosen fees rather than a tuition which everyone in society pays stochastically, professors are incentivized to competitively vie for being better at training and teaching, because their prosperity and success would be linked to it.
Second, as much criticism as the US model gets for its prices, much of that appears to be driven by administrative bloat and nondischargeability, payment itself is actually really great when dischargeable because it seems prices stay low and this bloat doesn’t happen when it is. It also means a significant fraction of students do try to get into the best school they can and the schools have some incentive to fight to be seen as better - they make their money when students go. The results speak for themselves: something like half to two-thirds of the world’s top 100 universities are all in America.
Last, I’d like to see both European and US models collaborate harder on job and work placement as part of ensuring student success. Colleges being a source of a liberal education without concern for fiscal outcomes can be great, but the pendulum swung too far and these students are essentially thrown out into the world without any expectation of success, because the school no longer has any investment in them. I’d like to see some portion of the fee of education be moved to explicitly garnished wages from placed-into-their-trained field employees - you succeeding would therefore be the university’s success.
I agree that non-dischargeable debt for education was a horrible change, given the predatory response of the colleges and collusion between the increasing power of the administrative class over the university and the capitalists providing debt funding.
US schools are increasingly extractive because if higher education is indeed necessary then it is economically beneficial for someone to go to college - so long as the result is more profitable than not going to college. If the college charges less than that (or rather, the college + debt industry), then they leave money on the table.
There is little interest in providing quality low-cost education because it is capital intensive, and capitalists want to maximize their profits. As the recent news about rent collusion shows, capital owners will collude to extract more profits.
> the pendulum swung too far
This has been a trope since the 1960s when the right started their culture war against college education as the post-GI bill era meant college was no longer a place primarily for the children of the privileged classes.
That is, be specific - when was the pendulum enough in the other direction that you wouldn't have complained thusly? It seems you like the 1960s, when the right complained about ivory tower academics filling student brains with anti-American nonsense.
> reductions in permanent salaried academic positions
We have that. These are called adjunct professors. "Editorial: U.S. colleges are overusing — and underpaying — adjunct professors" / "The American Assn. of University Professors reports that 70% of faculty are adjunct, most of them without benefits, job security or union representation; they teach more than half of all college courses in the U.S."
They are also poorly paid, exactly as you would expect from an extractive industry.
How low should it be? 20% 10%? But in the 1960s in the era you praise, those numbers were much higher, back when academic positions included significant administrative responsibilities.
If you really want to remove "administrative bloat", remove administrators.
> garnished wages from placed-into-their-trained field employees
Ahh, so you follow the meat widget model of college education. Got a degree in physics but decide to open a chocolate boutique? Sorry, you'll need to pay back your education first.
It costs a lot to go to med school, so those who go often end up in debt, which means they need to get jobs which pay enough to pay back that debt, which means they can't afford to provide medical care to poor communities.
It costs a lot to become a lawyer, which is one of the factors for public defenders are 1) needed, and 2) so overworked.
Besides, we've had similar policies for a long time. I had teachers back in the 1980s whose agreed to debt relief for their teacher education which contingent on being a teacher for enough years.
I've also heard stories about the consequent problems in such a bureaucratized system.
> see both European and US models collaborate harder on job and work placement as part of ensuring student success
In the USA, the government also pays for education. That’s part of the problem, in fact. Since the loan to the college is always paid for by the government, the college is effectively handed a blank check. Said check, now filled in with an arbitrarily high amount, is handed to the student as a bill to pay back to the government. The same is done in your system, in fact, except that the entire country suffers that burden, regardless of if that degree actually amounts to any meaningful contribution.
I would imagine in Europe they select more carefully the students whom will go to College. Here in the US we've told students that everyone must go to College. We now have too many people in College and many of them aren't going to be successful once they are in. It's not sustainable. In many of our public universities, the graduation rate is well below 50%
> I would imagine in Europe they select more carefully the students whom will go to College. Here in the US we've told students that everyone must go to College
You imagine wrong. Pretty much everyone goes to university in most and European countries. Even in wildly tourist dependent places, a degree in tourism is a normal thing for a young person to pursue before going to work at hotels/restaurants.
If those students/graduates move to other European countries (which they mostly do), they'll be counted in their destination country, evening things out.
Where did you get the idea most Europeans get a degree?
> If those students/graduates move to other European countries (which they mostly do), they'll be counted in their destination country, evening things out
If they move to the Netherlands, the NL will only count what % of its citizens have degrees, not everyone else (because many may go back or move elsewhere after finishing their studies, you can't count them easily alongside the rest of your population; students are usually counted as some sort of temporary resident, if counted at all). And then there's also the UK which is a top study destination for Eastern Europeans.
> Where did you get the idea most Europeans get a degree
I come from one EU country, live in another, have friends from all over the EU, have visited as a student and now working adult. Most young people pursue degrees, even in forestry or tourism or whatever topic. Of course some will fail getting them, but 30% of under 30s is absurdly low for stats to be reliable.
It‘s a pretty efficient (and quite unique) system. People learn to do their job at a normal company and attend school for usually two days a week. And they can still switch to the university track later without starting from the beginning.
Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduation something happens which prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you.
And if you’re a nurse or a police officer or a teacher or a lawyer and you lose your license under specious circumstances, it really sucks to be you.
> If student debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are “solved”.
Chesterton's fence definitely applies here.
If you don't understand what that law attempted to prevent in the first place, you're just going to get your pocket picked by a different group of people.
Yep, exactly. Current situation is clearly bad, but most of the solutions seem to focus around the idea that dismissing trillions of dollars in debt through bankruptcy is a great idea (it isn't)
Trade schools should definitely focus on ROI, and a lot more people should attend them. The idea of the public university is to bring a traditionally aristocratic practice - the devotion of several years of one’s young life to not-necessarily-practical intellectual pursuits - to the middle class. I think our civilization would lose something worthwhile by returning this practice to the exclusive domain of rich families. Much the same as if we sold off all our public parks for development.
The issue is that we have democratized not only the class background part but also the “intellectual pursuits” part. College should be a lot more selective and a lot more rigorous; only a small minority of students have any business attending. The rest can get their credentialing and coming-of-age ceremony in an ROI focused trade school.
See also the excellent book "Shop Class as Soulcraft" for a thorough examination of skilled trades as an under-appreciated and vital aspect of our economy and culture.
> The idea of the public university is to bring a traditionally aristocratic practice - the devotion of several years of one’s young life to not-necessarily-practical intellectual pursuits - to the middle class
The entire idea that spending 4 years learning useless knowledge is somehow valuable is completely mistaken bullshit.
Aristocrats could get away with it because they were rich but there is 0 evidence this practice brought fundamental value to them or society other than serving as an expensive status signal.
They already focus on ROI, the problem is it's ROI for them not the student. In most states the biggest or second biggest company is a university because they run for profit sports programs with no pay to players, make money off commercial research grants and classes using pHd students making 34k/year, use the students as both low wage workers for campus jobs in high value retail space leased to franchises and as a captive populace to price gouge with required meal plans using the student loans, capitalize again off the real estate that is often land granted to them by the state by offering overpriced student housing that is often mandatory for freshmen. You basically have to accept getting scammed to get a degree.
Yes, but this is also the preferred solution of the people who caused the current crisis with university cost inflation.
Universities used to be expensive schools for rich people's failsons to "find themselves". That's why there's a lot of focus on "well-rounded" educations even today. Then western governments started offering taxpayer-funded tuition, which resulted in a new wave of educated kids who refused to believe government narratives regarding wars and refused to comply with conscription and drafts. This came to a head during the Vietnam War, where the US found that it's usual ability to start wars against labor in other countries had been stymied by them educating the enemy (their own workers).
While the draft has been relegated to a vestigial function in the US today, the people in power were able to shut the people down. Saudi Arabia, a theocratic dictatorship that belongs in the 10th century, not the 20th, did the American ruling class a solid by embargoing the US and shutting down our economy for a decade. This gave cover for the complete overturning of Progressive Era policies. Most importantly for this subject, public state universities were stripped of their government funding. Instead, they would charge ever-increasing tuition which students would pay for with loans. This ensured that the poor could not access education and that the educated middle class would be in permanent debt slavery.
Public universities went along with this because they were promised more money than they could get from public funding. This is why you see massive amounts of money being wasted by universities on bullshit. The ruling class gave universities a seat at the table of lavish excess in exchange for, y'know, letting the cops shoot their students with rubber bullets any time they get antsy. Your student debt is a bribe from the military-industrial complex to the university system that you pay for.
However, this gambit did not fully succeed. For one, students are still protesting, despite the debt noose around their necks, and university officials' best efforts to rubber-bullet their students into compliance. So there's a lot of politicians who want to get rid of university education altogether and replace it with trade schools. I may have harshed the concept of a "well-rounded" education before, but it does mean universities still have to teach things like history and economics, which is the sort of thing that makes the lower classes resist their social programming.
So a lot of people in power want to get rid of universities and replace them with trade schools. Now, I actually don't have a problem with trade schools; a lot of good paying jobs are going undone because they don't confer the kinds of status middle-class families want. But there's a lot of right-wingers who want kids in trade schools solely because trade schools generally do not teach all the problematic subjects and forbidden knowledge (aka "traditional coursework") that makes tools of society start asking questions.
If you want an actual way to fix universities (without just turning them into trade schools):
- Have a ONE TIME student debt forgiveness event, contingent on shutting down the student loan system, so this shit doesn't happen twice.
- Restore public university funding sufficient to allow tuition-free education for all poor and middle class students.
- Purge the university administrative class, they've grown overbloated and turned universities into their own personal hedge funds.
Once this is done, then we can start talking about what classes and degrees actually have good ROI on the public money the universities will be getting again. The thing is, though, the existing "low ROI" degrees mainly existed so the university administrative class could pump up admissions numbers. Remember, that was part of the deal they made with the devil. Taking away the student loan system means there's less incenti...
> Universities used to be expensive schools for rich people's failsons to "find themselves". That's why there's a lot of focus on "well-rounded" educations even today. Then western governments started offering taxpayer-funded tuition
Replace western by "US" for "well-rounded". AFAIK, all European university degrees are focused on a single topic, and its requirement (so, lots of math if you're studying physics). No literature classes required (or even available in some cases) if you're, e.g., getting a computer science degree.
which would make lenders more cautious which would make it harder to get a loan which would make less money available so tuitions would be competing for less and prices would come down this is how it's supposed to work yes
You seem to imply that a general willingness is what would allow this to happen when the article spells it out pretty clearly: it's powerful organizations clinging to power. Your sentiment amounts to nothing more than wishful thinking.
It's tempting to just agree with your sentiment, but I think that day dreaming about an unrealistic solution sucks energy away from more effective actions. The main challenge of solving a difficult puzzle is to avoid dead ends and red herrings.
A more promising plan involves explicitly strategizing against the agents who have the opposite agenda.
> I love a good market as much as anyone but there really are problems markets will never solve
The problem with student loans is that they are not driven by markets. If they were, absolutely nobody would give a loan to an 18 yo to spend 4 years and $160k to study psychology.
1. Provide a counterbalance to private industries by having the government player to be a significant player in that market. That means a free or near-free high-quality state higher education system like the California system used to be until it was made an explicit political goal to avoid an "educated proletariat" [1]. It also goes for housing, hospitals, banks, ISPs and so on;
2. Nationalize failing industries rather than providing them loans for no reason. Banks fail in 2008? Well, you belong to the state now. Just like the FDIC does with failing banks.
3. Federal dollars for pharma research should come with an equity stake in the private corporations that monetize it. Most drugs are developed with Federal grants.
> I love a good market as much as anyone
Just curious: where do you see markets actually working?
> 2. Nationalize failing industries rather than providing them loans for no reason. Banks fail in 2008? Well, you belong to the state now. Just like the FDIC does with failing banks.
I kind of agree with this, but as a taxpayer, I don't necessarily want the government to have an equity stake in a failing or horribly-run business.
We need the government to grow a backbone and allow large businesses and even entire sectors of the economy to FAIL when they suck. I hate the narrative "We have to keep ShittyCo alive because it provides 10,000 jobs!!" as if those jobs would just disappear if ShittyCo got flushed down the toilet like it should be.
Taxpayers should not bail out GM and Chrysler and AIG and US Airways and these shit companies. We should have let them fail, let their careless shareholders eat it, and created a regulatory environment that allowed better-run competitors to spring up.
Can you imagine if we could kill MLMs, pay day loan sharks, bail-bondsmen (My state fully banned this lunacy), Psudoscientific medicine (chiropractors), Scientology and other useless trash from society?
God going after just one is liable to get you a fate worse than Daphne Caruana Galizia
Getting a BA in Underwater Basketweaving from your local commuter state university is much less financially damaging than at Duke or UChicago.
I'm not a fan of the idea of "useful" and "useless" degrees (ime, the best predictor for success is critical thinking skills, not major), but I do find private universities don't make as much financial sense, especially given that well paying industries like Engineering, Accounting, etc don't place much weight on your initial Alma mater beyond your first job.
Anecdotally, I had an alumni interview with a successful tech IB/PE/HF alum from CS@CMU years ago while I was applying to colleges, and he was very insistent about how he felt the RoI at SJSU or CalPoly is superior to CS@CMU. I didn't end up attended CMU (I was lured to a more "prestigious" LAC) but he was absolutely right.
That's the twist though. If your first job is better, the second job is likely better too. It took me a decade before I made it to a first class job, sitting next to people who worked there straight out of college.
That's why Baruch has Ivy level representation in IB and High Finance, and SJSU plus CalPoly SLO has Stanford level representation in the tech industry at large.
Just looking at the Linkedins of the most successful EMs, PMs, and SEs in my network, most attended a normal state flagship and worked at an "OK" company like Oracle or Splunk.
This whole "FAANG"-or-bust or "Ivy"-or-bust mentality is legitimately divorced from reality, especially now that the market is legitimately horrid for new college grads.
> It took me a decade before I made it to a first class job
What do you define as a "first class job"? Where was your first job located? Were you open to moving to a major tech employment hub (eg. Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, NYC)? Did you start your career during a tech slowdown (eg. 01-04, 08-12, 20-21, 23-present)?
"Meh" companies like Oracle or Cisco pay early-to-mid career employees roughly the same as similarly leveled employees at Google or Amazon.
The main thing is, these employees need to be based in the Bay Area, Seattle, or Austin to justify those salaries.
And if you start your career during a hiring slowdown, it doesn't matter if you went to Stanford or SJSU - you're screwed. I'm already seeing the desperation right now at on-campus recruiting events at Harvard/MIT as well as at regional publics.
Well from the sounds of it you've gotten on track! And that's something us Techies take for granted.
If you don't get on the career train for law or finance on time, you're de facto unemployable.
And this is why I love being in tech - we can grind and still find a strong path to upward mobility.
Hard skills like engineering, accounting, actuary, and medicine/dentistry/nursing are always employable. Sure you may earn less in some downturns, but at least we can get jobs.
And, unlike high finance, so long as you keep kinda up to date on technology and architecture, you can negotiate your way into IB level salaries (IB, VC, and High Finance pays fairly bad for the hours spent working, and I myself imagine returning to being a SWE).
You don't have "an industry" that hikes prices, and there is a central authority without ulterior motive that has an influence over what is funded. Not to mention that you don't put young people into debt from get go.
My understanding of a free education is one that is 100% paid for by the government, since someone still has to pay the professor's salary. In that case, you still have an issue of an industry that can demand increased prices (from the government, of course) if university enrollment suddenly increases (and I think it would if students didnt have to pay tuition). So I think you still have to figure out how to handle the market forces, but you're right that shifting the burden from the students to the government lets people start off their lives with less debt, which is a benefit of its own.
I think in part because on the "buyer" side, there's often a problem of how to sort through 100 resumes for a position. Given that in any given pile of resumes, probably 70% are unqualified, filtering for "degree" is an easy way (though naturally not great, though how not great it is is hard to measure, which of course means we do it) to cut the work required in half or more.
Yeah I don't get why this isn't talked about more. It feels like one of those things in the 80s/90s during the free market fad where people decided that private loans would fix education and it ended up just disastrous.
Many states do operate tuition-free programs for residents at their public colleges. But students with good grades often prefer to take a large amount of debt rather than go to the local state school, and it's not clear how you would go about changing that.
The competition then switches from spending direct financial resources to the university to spending financial resources to out compete other students vying for the same university. In China there's usually 1 seat per 50 candidates for good university spots, and the only thing that matters is your ranking in the entrance exams. It's not exactly uncommon for high school students to be spending 14 to 19 hours a day 7 days a week for 3 to 4 years preparing academically to win a spot.
But on the other hand it would encourage other universities to build better programs. Who cares if it’s difficult to get into a good university. That’s already true without free tuition. Post-high school education already has marginal gains. Networking is a completely different story but one that isn’t affected by the cost of tuition.
It may be better to start with understanding why on earth the it’s so expensive to get educated in the USA, while in other countries it’s much cheaper, even when unsubsidized
Any mention of reducing (or eliminating) profit in America is STRICTLY taboo.
You’re just not allowed.
Profit is the foundation of the American culture and society.
I think it's really sad that we so reflexively consider universities vocational training that criticism of universities so often includes "offering degrees that won't get you a job"
Actually academia predates the push to gate jobs behind undergraduate degrees, and trying to repurpose these institutions that mainly exist to train and employ researchers to be fully general vocational schools has been a disaster in every respect for everyone but the parasitic class of administrators it's spawned
Yea, and jobs that selected by university degree wanted to implicitly select for class
Making the path to go to a university more accessible is admirable. Entrenching this hiring practice with policy designed to enforce its implications on universities was always ill-conceived and the consequences have mostly been negative, creating a class of permanent debtors, turning universities into dysfunctional and corrupt quasi-businesses, and not really causing a significant de-stratification of job opportunities on balance at all
And some jobs do. As I've noted elsewhere if you want to go into Big Law, you go to a relative handful of law schools, which are heavily fed by undergrad Ivies, and clerk at a high federal level.
Yes, like I said before, this hasn't de-stratified the job market. Jobs that want to select applicants by class can find plenty of ways to do so easily
E.G.: More expensive vocational programs that haven't been subsidized, selecting among universities for especially "prestigious" (read "class-signaling") ones, baking cultural assumptions of the upper classes into the expectations surrounding "professionalism" in the interview process, etc
I think that's effectively what a lot of people here are arguing they should be. You're not going to have cheap and quality research institutions (except via financial aid/loans). You can imagine different systems--and they exist to some degree in Europe. It's presumably not a terrible system but it probably does tend to be more exclusive.
And then on other side universities started as vocational schools for clergy. Who then also had time on the side to do at least some research or muse about things.
If you would like to study something economically useless I have no problem with that. If you ask me to pay for it, I do. It isn't the business of society at large to fund anyone who wants to study whatever they want.
Academia does predate its role as employment gatekeeper, but it was privately funded then.
Seems like a good overview, but I do find this bit unclear:
"But why don’t market forces correct these issues?
The answer lies in the unique shield that non-dischargeable student loans provide to educational institutions and lenders.
In a normal market, if a product consistently fails to deliver value, consumers stop buying it. Producers either improve or go out of business. But in the world of higher education, this feedback loop is broken.
Colleges and universities, shielded by the guarantee of student loan money, have no real incentive to improve their product or direct students to majors that have an ability to pay back their loans.
They can raise tuition year after year, even as the value of their degrees stagnates or declines. "
Sure, colleges can charge a lot due to loans, but they are still competing with each other and differences in tuition could make a big difference. I went to Georgia Tech over other universities because it was in-state and Georgia has generous scholarships for students with good grades. So why does competition among schools not lower costs?
I don't know about nationally but my local universities are having year over year enrollment decreases. I think there are some market forces in play, but they aren't reducing tuition, just making the universities ask for more state or local tax money.
> But why don’t market forces correct these issues?
Another theory: The value creation is not linked to the value capture. So market forces make a bad feedback loop.
Look, I'm totally pro business, but business is only "good" at allocating capital when value capture and creation are linked. Education isn't like that. The closest we have are the bootcamp schools, where they take a cut out of your first 2 year's salary if you find a job or nothing if you don't.
When capture/creation are not linked, you need a different social organization method. "Government" or "Religion/non-profit" come to mind. Perhaps others have additional suggestions.
I ran a coding bootcamp school that had both your typical pay-upfront and later added an option like you outline. I can't speak for all programs, but schools use an affiliate third party lender for those "free" loan programs.
It was relatively new for us when I left, so I never saw the aftermath. I know it worked out well for some students, but my biggest concern was ensuring payments only kicked in if the job was "in-industry or field". My logic was the value isn't there if you go to a coding bootcamp only to not use the skills.
I was still worried they'd basically ask "do you use a computer?" and consider it in-field.
Another issue here is we had folks just looking to up-skill and the value return was harder to gauge if they were returning or continuing to work their job. This was mostly limited to our part-time program so we didn't offer the delayed-loan for it.
Apparently yeah at least arguably the most prominent boot camp takes a verry broad stance on 'related' occupations for income sharing: https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-school/
The fundamental problem in job education is that it needs to be linked to the needs of future employers, but those employers do not have an incentive to hire workers and train them, thereby aligning the education program with the needs of the employers. Employers do not want to pay for training, because employees can leave at any point, so they decided to let employees go to university and pay for their own education. This then leads to a misalignment between what people elect to receive an education in and what employers want, because people aren't mind readers and know exactly what will make their boss five years into the future happy. So what happens instead is that higher education becomes purely about standardising worker skills, so that each worker is a replaceable cog according to their degree. This means you can just hire X amount of Y degree holders instead of caring about their individual skills.
Also people get their first loan when they’ve just been legally considered adults. Nobody knows for sure they’ll be able to start paying these back in five years.
You buy a car so you can work and eat. These are very straightforward causes and effects. No car no job. Buy car that costs << than job. Done. Buy an education and you get more bills, not more income, for years. You might not even finish.
> I went to Georgia Tech over other universities because it was in-state and Georgia has generous scholarships for students with good grades. So why does competition among schools not lower costs?
All the schools have access to loans that are guaranteed to be repaid. We still have the mindset that degrees are required for employment (I'm not commenting on whether that's good or bad; that's just the current cultural mindset). Because of this, schools have no incentives to control costs. The students will go regardless because they have access to money that will pay for the tuition, no matter how much it costs. There's no penalty for the universities to raise costs because they will get students anyways.
The profit motive reliably exposes brokenness. What changed to make loans for useless activity profitable? Normally, a loan for useless activity wouldn’t be issued, because of the expectation that it wouldn’t be repaid.
That's exactly what political parties in a democracy should do.
You know who never says no to handouts from the government? Wealthy people. In fact, they don't just say no, they demand handouts. It's only when the government gives money to poor people that it suddenly becomes a moral hazard.
> debt forgiveness was a hot topic
... until a politicized Supreme Court killed it because it was giving money to poor people.
Human capital contracts are another partial solution that flips the incentives: instead of using loans to pay tuition up front, institutions are paid a % of your income for a fixed period of time, after which any remaining amount is forgiven. Typically this only applies to income over a base amount (such as 10% of income above a 40,000 base). Naturally this works great in fields with strong employment outcomes and terribly everywhere else.
The return window should be time limited so that the uni shoulders some of the risk - that their degree has market value. Masters programs can be particularly egregious, they are profit centers where only a small fraction of those getting the degree advance to a PhD program or some position where the degree matters. If the time is limited and one only need to pay a % over a threshold pay, the uni has some skin in the game and can lose on the gamble. In this market design they may be more careful about the promises they make and better guide our population towards programs that have better market value (and less personal debt).
and if nobody is willing to lend to these students any longer because their field of study won't yield enough income to pay back a loan... well, mission accomplished
Meanwhile, I know of German and Dutch peers of mine who upon completing their masters in Europe, enrolled in California to do a second Masters ( at the time I believe they paid in the range of $100k) for the VISA and internship opportunities. And IIRC, the bet paid off because they all found employment in California, with salaries 3x to 4x what they could get here.
Their parents paid taxes like everyone else. If anything I would say it is unfair, that they are forced to move to the US, because the imbeciles in power mismanaged the economy so much that there are few adequate jobs for them, and the local Germany/Dutch economy is not competitive on the world stage.
It is genuinely insane that US Colleges are basically holdings companies at this point. They priority is investments. It seems hostile to the goal of students
It's somewhat besides the point of the piece and might be unfair, but I can't help to feel an immediate sense of distrust for any piece of writing that uses AI images.
Anyways, tying lending terms to the value of the degree sounds like a horrible idea, because how do you even determine that?
Seems to me the big issue is A) that the loans are managed b private companies with ridiculous terms and that even public state universities can basically behave like private companies by increasing prices this much.
Why can't the government not just radioactive prices for their own universities
> It's somewhat besides the point of the piece and might be unfair, but I can't help to feel an immediate sense of distrust for any piece of writing that uses AI images.
Im guessing that you’re probably not representative of the target audience, or the author doesn’t know his audience well.
The image is thematically appropriate. I don’t think the author is trying to bamboozle anyone with that image.
My problem is that it’s extremely poorly-done. The chain seems to sprout from the first student’s hair. If the author couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to the first thing people see when they click on the webpage, how much thought is put into the rest of the article?
Same here about distrusting pieces that use AI art. It’s like… a signifier of something hard to describe — values, qualities — that makes me want to listen to someone’s point of view less.
It's bizarre to me how accepting we are of the idea that higher education should cost anything let alone be mind-bogglingly expensive. This is wildly successful propaganda. Student loan debt was an explicit political goal [1]:
> "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat," announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970. Freeman, an economics professor at Stanford, was also an advisor to President Richard Nixon.
> "We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher education]," Freeman added.
Poverty is intentional and a necessary condition for capitalism. It creates a malleable and compliant labor force. Student debt, medical debt, housing debt. All of it only exists to make a handful of extremely wealthy people slightly more wealthy.
Modern universities aren't really about education at all. They're simply hedge funds in a trenchcoat.
Harvard, for example, makes what? Half a billion in tuition per year? But they have upwards of $50 billion in their endowment. The interest alone could fund the entire university.
Harvard's endowment is $50 billion, and its expenses in 2023 were $6.25 billion [1]. To fund that, the endowment will need 12.5% annual interest, which is impossible. Tuition revenue is not remotely suitable enough for Harvard's operational expenses.
Again, people don't understand how endowments work. When endows a specific program at Harvard, their money must be used for that program alone. The funds can't be sent to the general pool for the entire university.
There are many ways to criticize wealthy educational institutions, but calling them "hedge funds" makes no sense. Which hedge fund subsidizes their clients' expenses with donations?
In-state University of California, Riverside tuition is roughly $13k/year. This isn't mind-bogglingly expensive IMO. Less than 25% of student debt is from public colleges, with the majority due to expensive private schools. Most of my friends also worked part-time during undergrad, to further lower their loan burden.
You aren't making this point directly, but I think it's worth pointing out: not everyone is entitled to attend Harvard, Princeton, (etc.) any more than they are entitled to a Maserati.
There are, and should always be, affordable public options, so that anyone who wants a college degree can get one. We need to stop romanticizing elite universities, and acknowledge that you can get a great education, with hard work, at almost any university.
I don't know if this is some kind of heresy, but here we go.
I don't think universities provide much value at all to the common student who is not going to be a PhD.
I went to a very well-known institution known for putting the students in a room with the professors, maybe two or three students, to one professor. My economics professor taught me one on one.
I still think, in the end, the work is mostly done alone, in a pile of books, on your own time.
Not with other students, and not in lectures, and not in tutorials.
This is a bit different from school where you can actually learn the material in class because, let's face it, school doesn't have a very deep curriculum.
So at university my impression is that they mainly tell you what to go and read about, and then you read about it yourself. The tutor is there to course correct you a bit, but they aren't going to do much other than save you a bit of time learning the orthodoxy of your subject. The lectures are a table of contents. At most, it's really just a guy telling you that you should know what an eigenvalue is, or you should have read about the ISLM model, and so on. For you to actually understand something, well, you have to have spent a lot of time in the books rearranging your mind.
Given that this is what you actually do at university, why have it this way?
Make an examination authority. "Here is the national linear algebra test. Anyone who wants to try it, sign up, and come to this hall on this date." Everyone who passes, whether they studied at home or went to fancy U, gets a paper that says they passed it. Do it as a 12 year old prodigy or a 75 year old grandma, you get a diploma.
Now, maybe there is already an authority that does this, I don't know. But it isn't very well known or authoritative.
The current incumbents are gatekeepers. Everybody thinks that smart kids go to the most prestigious universities, and that includes employers. It's a Schelling point that doesn't need to be there, and it allows the universities to extract a great deal of value from the kids.
If you made this authority of examinations, many people could learn the material and show their competence without incurring huge costs.
People could start working earlier. You could separate the coming-of-age experience from academic learning. Poor people could participate more.
> I still think, in the end, the work is mostly done alone, in a pile of books, on your own time.
I feel compelled to link the quote from Good Will Hunting here, I will refrain. However I agree completely. I also went to a “great” school, and I learned everything from overpriced books on my own time. In fact, in my entire tenure of undergrad I never attended a full week of class, not even the first week.
Absolutely worth it because of the environment that it put around me for four years and the peers who inspired and pushed me to do better (and also helped me grow socially, become more independent, etc).
There is nothing in adult life that's even close to that kind of environment and the growth that it fosters.
Although you have to go to a good school with great peers to experience these benefits.
I mean, a lot of trades do have standardized tests. The LSAT for law school, the MCAT for medical school, and the CPA exams for accounting come to mind. I don't know why computer science hasn't organized in this manner, maybe because it's a younger field or maybe because there are simply too many people and employers don't care enough about having certified employees.
It's a younger field. A lot of self-taught people think they will be excluded (they wouldnt be). There is a deliberate effort by execs to lower the salaries of software developers by ensuring there are no barriers to entry and flooding the market which the vast majority of the workforce has been tricked into going along with.
CS does have a lot of certifications, which are generally regarded as crap by most university-educated CS people. Part of the reason is that a lot of certifications test you knowledge with specific tooling, and that tooling may become obsolete rather quickly in the field.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the tests you talk about aren't valued particularly higher by their own fields. Most lawyers I know have commented that the bar exam [1] primarily tests material that is largely irrelevant to the actual practice of law, to a degree that scoring too highly on the exam tends to be seen as "you wasted too much time preparing for the exam."
[1] The LSAT isn't a test of whether or not you've mastered law school material, it's a test of whether or not you are allowed to be admitted to law school in the first place. The bar exam is the actual necessary certification to be a lawyer.
Except for medical students, who require a teaching hospital and all its equipment.for their education
Except for EE and other engineering students, who require lab and other equipment for their education
Except for chemistry, biology, and other science students, who require chemistry equipment, etc. for their education. You get the idea.
Even for fields that require no specialized facilities, frankly, I don't see any Fields Medal or Turing Award winners that are self-taught nor do I have any reason to expect to see any in my lifetime.
> Except for medical students, who require a teaching hospital and all its equipment.for their education
They're not really students in the normal sense, they fit more into the PhD category that I mentioned, since they need actual personal help.
> Except for EE and other engineering students, who require lab and other equipment for their education
I have an engineering master's from a world famous university where the lab work was pretty pointless. It didn't count for much if at all, and was more or less just entertainment.
If you were doing a PhD, you would do experiments where the outcomes were not a foregone conclusion. In undergrad, it's not any different from baking a cake, it ain't gonna go any differently than expected.
I suspect you'll learn more watching a video of someone doing the experiment, that way you are not concerned with trivialities like converting units and wearing safety goggles. Something like what NileRed does for chemistry.
> Even for fields that require no specialized facilities, frankly, I don't see any Fields Medal or Turing Award winners that are self-taught nor do I have any reason to expect to see any in my lifetime.
Well, that level of work requires a personal contact, like a PhD advisor. I am addressing undergrad work, which is fairly ordinary material that has already been well digested.
> I have an engineering master's from a world famous university where the lab work was pretty pointless. It didn't count for much if at all, and was more or less just entertainment.
For me personally, having a maker space and access to expensive equipment was how I learned to do useful things as an electrical engineer. Was it entertaining? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. In fact, the things I’ve had the easiest time learning were things I’ve done because they were inherently enjoyable.
Most received the Fields Medal or Turing Award are not "the common student who is not going to be a PhD" so you and GP agree on the importance of universities in that regard. In general I read what they say as solely relating to what I'd categorize as "undergrad or non-specialized track students".
I agree with you there is a lot universities have to offer students though. Your examples of equipment are a great highlight. On the other hand I think when you weight the ever growing cost of attendance with the amount of unique values provided it has been shrinking quite a bit, in favor of the "not providing much value" side. This is especially true for the relative lack of unique values brought for the vast majority of students during the first ~2 years of general education. It's difficult or impossible to get many of these organizations to let you just jump in at that point though.
Overall I think, for many at least, the biggest value is an environment which helps guide them to doing the self learning. Many (most?) can't just sit down to write and then follow their own multi year study plan and end up with something comparable to what they'd get out of going to a university, even if they end up spending the majority of their time there self learning. GP may well not be part of that group but I'm not sure their conclusions apply to those who are.
University is too rushed. That's why you feel like the work is done on your own. Cause of course you have to acquaint yourself with the subject at your own pace. Once you become acquainted, that's when it becomes useful to have access to a leader in the field. But by that time you are writing your finals and preparing for the next semester.
If you can drop 90% of administrators and real estate by moving online, student loans become a thing of the past. College becomes a halfway house commune for young people to
who want to leave their parents nest.
So the way you fix a broken system is to replace it with something cheaper and better. The issue of course is that 99% of people who start online courses don't finish them. Universities provide motivation for learning, which is required for many learners.
> Make an examination authority. "Here is the national linear algebra test. Anyone who wants to try it, sign up, and come to this hall on this date." Everyone who passes, whether they studied at home or went to fancy U, gets a paper that says they passed it. Do it as a 12 year old prodigy or a 75 year old grandma, you get a diploma.
> Now, maybe there is already an authority that does this, I don't know. But it isn't very well known or authoritative.
Western Governors University operates this way. You can get a full, recognized degree that way (in a limited set of topics).
I don't think this is heresy at all. I read this and just think you have a giant blind spot because you seem to be assuming that the way you learn is universally applicable.
I went to an unremarkable state school where I had classes with a hundred other students. Even my senior level courses were about a dozen to one teacher ratio. I still remember my professors and specific moments during their lectures when I was able to ask a follow up question which triggered that Eureka moment we're all looking for.
I wish I was able to just sit down with a textbook and learn a meaty subject but that doesn't work for me. I, and many others, need (or at least it helps a lot) the academic structure to learn effectively. The academic calendar, lectures, textbooks, homework, and other students you can study with all work in concert. The way you're dismissing all of that strikes me as really myopic.
There are many examination authorities but employers basically ignore all of them and have gone all in on college degrees as the signal for employment. In that way colleges are gatekeepers to higher level jobs, but they're hardly the only actor here.
I also attended a well-known institution and this was precisely my experience of university. I stayed home and read the textbook, supplementing with materials online, hardly attending lectures at all.
I had paid for university almost entirely out-of-pocket with earnings from co-operative internships in software; when "real-life" problems started to rear their ugly head, the choice came down to incurring debt or working in a (still to this day) lucrative industry.
What was the point? Why join the rat race of my peers who would rush through the material, only for it to be forgotten amidst the torrent of next semester's information? Does this style of studying actually produce a level of erudition equal to or greater than one who obsessively pores over the literature at their own pace, taking their time to slowly digest and process and crystallize the information in their mind? Or have they just found the most expedient route past the gatekeepers of higher education and diplomas?
I would much rather do exactly what I did in university - read through the material on my own terms and take time to digest it at my own pace, but without the crippling debt. That said, I still very much view education as a privilege, open to those of financial means, who have the opportunity to put aside several years' worth of earnings and time to pursue academic studies, irrespective of practical application. I am reminded of a second-year philosophy professor who took half a lecture to explain how the purpose of higher education is not as a vocational school to bring one wealth and employment (taking shots perhaps at the career focus of the institution's co-operative program), but rather to give one a more fulsome perspective of the world and enrich their intellectual life - not in hopes of some mundane, worldly reward, but for its own sake.
Had I the wealth, I would love to go back to complete a degree, not for practical employment prospects or even prestige, but to (at least attempt to) feel intellectually whole. A merit based system of standardized testing that awards degrees based on examination performance would be right up my alley, for I could prepare myself to meet its demands at my own pace and according to my terms; I consider the hacker spirit of measuring the quality of a software solution not according to the attributes of its author (wealth, status, degree, or otherwise), but on whether or not the code works correctly and efficiently adjacent to this sentiment. For everyone else, there's debt - and I can't justify making that decision.
Not a heresy at all. I went to two of the top 5 CS schools in the US and I barely recall anything I learned in there, almost everything I know ended up being self-taught later in a much more efficient manner than being student n.200 in a class taught by a researcher who barely speaks English and doesn't want to be teaching. The main upside was associating myself with those two brand names which later got me jobs and cofounders, but that's about it.
You are correct, but universities did use to actually teach. SICP is still relevant 40 years later, and it was because the professors who created the class and textbook actually gave a fuck, knew what they were doing, and were still allowed to do their jobs. I really do think this is a recent phenomenon, but I have no idea how to get back what we once had from the parasite class.
When I went to a public university in Europe, I realized after a month or two that lectures are a waste of time, and I stopped attending most of them. But the structure and guidance provided by the university allowed me to study things more efficiently than I could have done on my own.
I think the key is that universities are not schools. They are places of learning, not teaching. If you go to a university and expect to be taught, you are probably wasting your time.
And that vision is not really compatible with tuition fees, because they can easily turn you from a student to a paying customer.
Academia is not a monoculture, but people who take the path suggested by the administrative faction are the ones ending up in debt. The marketing is like that for dodgy credit cards or subprime home loans. (The Ivy League strata is more about getting to network and socialize with clubs of the wealthy and powerful, possibly getting a lucrative position as in the British Empire's public school system, so set them aside as a special case.)
Otherwise, for people who want to learn arcane technological skills and curious knowledge for the science and engineering world, community colleges and research universities are the way to go. Two years in a community college at low cost, ideally some kind of grant/scholarship for 2-3 years more at a research university, preferably in collaborative/teamwork situations with actual professionals in their fields. You also have access to tools and equipment that you'd never get to use otherwise, and experience with such setups can lead right into a good R & D job.
It's not worth being weighed down with debt at the end, though, since the loan payments will eat up revenue that could have gone to savings for a home, founding a startup, etc.
Students should thus view the academic finance system as a hostile adversary that's always trying to force them to take on as much debt as possible. Student loans are traded like subprime mortgages were in 2008, I imagine tranched into pyramid schemes, and the industry always needs fresh meat.
I wasn't an engineering major, I was a computer science major, but I still asked and was allowed to work evenings in the facility.
I got on the job training from experienced experts on orbital mechanics, the practical operation of spacecraft, and the infrastructure behind space flight activities. I also got to write some software that is used in the command and control of spacecraft.
Going to school gave me access to supercomputers and mainframes, practical hands-on experience that cannot be learned from a book.
Also, my university is somewhat unique in that it has an extremely rigorous writing requirements for all graduates, including creative and business writing. A comment I received multiple times at the beginning of my career is that my writing skills were extremely advanced compared to my peers. This is a double-edged sword because now, decades later, coworkers send me paragraphs to edit before being sent out.
I also minored in studio art, because as a young freshman I figured it was an easy A. Little did I realize that free and easy access to studios, models, screen printing equipment, and photography labs would lead to several lifelong hobbies.
My school also had telescopes I got to use as a member of the astronomy club, and amateur radio equipment far beyond my ability to afford as a member of the ham radio club. There is an exact and precise 0.0% chance that I would have ever gotten to even touch a 20" reflector, high quality CCD cameras, or sophisticated mounts and star trackers without going to school. Ditto for 1.5kW amplifiers and vast fields of specialized antennas for radio communications.
After I realized that staring at an IDE window all day was actual, literal, hell to me I transitioned to being an aerospace engineer. No degree, I just explained to people what I knew and did in school, what programs I had worked on, and they said "good enough, here's a board assembly drawing start spec'ing out space-rated micro- and nano-d connectors for it" and decades later I'm a senior principal engineer designing satellites.
Hell, just understanding what SWR is, what multiplexers and other RF terms meant, and knowing about polarization, propagation, and effective radiated power from my university ham radio club days went a long way to getting me to where I am today.
All of this is possible to learn autodidactically.
It would require a level of income (to gain access to the tools), foresight (to focus on specific subjects relevant to your goals), and drive (to have realistic goals laid out and to actually do it) not typically found in young adults, or old adults.
I assert it is easier, and outcomes are more favorable, if you pay someone to do all of this for you.
My perspective may be warped. I used the GI Bill and paid $0.00 for all of this. But if I had to pay the $54k it cost it would have been worth it 100 times over (I make a lot of money now).
I think that a student debt could be replaced by dischargeable debt if you churned $100,000 of credit card cash advances in the same month, paid down your student debts, and then after the one year zero interest period expires, declare bankruptcy on your credit card debts that replaced your student loan debts. Can anyone confirm?
As with other industries, there is a steady increase in demand but not enough supply. Make it easier for accredited universities to be setup and let the free market forces drive the cost of an undergraduate degree down.
I actually think we should be decreasing demand rather than increasing supply. Not every job needs a college degree, and allowing more people to avoid college altogether would naturally drive prices down from the demand side. The hard part is that I don't know how to make employers accept non-degreed applicants, outside of having Peter Thiel shout at them to do so.
I agree. At least in my country degrees are commonly used to filter applicants for jobs that could easily be done by someone with way lower level of education. That's not a healthy system. A degree should teach you skills that you need and can actually utilize in the work you will do.
The education-politician complex as we know it will face a dramatic reckoning in the next few years. Many mid-tier universities are likely to go under.
Perhaps, as a society, we will rethink how education is attained. In a world shaped by AI, maybe kids will take MOOCs just for fun.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadAustralia has similar loan system for tertiary education.
Ex. The graph about graduates being underemployed goes back to 1990, and there's no meaningful difference in the difference in the rate between then, and now.
Ex. 41% graduating after 4 years doesn't mean it is necessary colleges need to Find A Better Way: that would affect ex. the complain around graduates being not prepared with no discernible skills
this probably mattered less when the debt load was much lower
Loans are supposed to be inherently risky to the bank issuing the loan. Managing that risk is their business, and the reward for doing it right is the interest payments.
I remember people back then talking about "if the loans are non-dischargeable, then the bank is pretty much guaranteed it's money back, making it a no risk proposition to them. What's stopping them from becoming student loan mills? What's stopping colleges from asking for more and more money if the banks just lend it no risk?"
These ideas were out there, but get drowned out by the voices of the big pocket companies that are proposing the legislation. Tons of articles talking about the risk being overblown, the results are wonderful, etc. Think about the kids, good for 'murica, etc.
The big messages you hear over and over again in the media are being payed for by groups that aren't particularly interested in benefiting you. This is not a new problem, it's been this way for a long while.
And here we are 25 years later. Wondering how we got here. When anyone with a brain at the time knew this was coming.
The problem is only getting worse because of media consolidation and the vast reach of the internet into everyone's eyeballs. Be skeptical very of what you read.
Mortgaging yourself into decades of indentured servitude shouldn't be an option that's available to young adults.
Entrenched and connected types tend to exit industries before the gavel hits, and enforcement from the CCDI isn't impartial, with plenty of bribery to remain off their radar.
Truly Schumpterian creative destruction is good in a vacuum, but reality isn't a vacuum.
During the period in which it was active, their GDP increased by a factor of about 62. Not percentage, multiple.
If you mean banks, there’s the problem that “let it die” often translates to “shift the obligation”, which typically gets shifted to the tax payers, either in plain sight after a bailout, or under the table by devaluing the currency (basically taxation without having to say it).
It's incredibly expensive to run a university, and many people feel entitled to attend any university they can get into (not a bad thing, btw), but you can't suddenly erase the bill without drastically cutting costs, changing supply/demand, or otherwise altering the economics first.
The college level education system in the US employs almost 3.8 million people. Decisions here absolutely affect their employment, tax rates, employment rates, bank loans, financial industry solvency, etc.
This problem is incredibly far away from the space of YOLO tactics.
And many, many of the outcomes of that are bad
Let the market forces decide. Eventually people will realise college doesn't work and will stop going there. Seriously problem is that too many people think they are smart and can benefit from a degree, when most can't. If 10% top graders go to college from school as it was in the boomers' era, ROI of higher education will be enormous (as there won't be an oversupply of useless graduates), and costs will be low (as low demand always reduces prices).
We shouldn't punish people who take the money because people are willing to pay it. Who's fault it is that they are dumb? Do we see much say, annoying advertisement to the tune of "go study X with us, you'll be rich and women will love you"? No. People are doing it because they are dumb. If we try to build a system that prevents smart people from taking money put on the table by dumb people, we will make the whole system dumber by incentivising dumbness.
Reducing to "is" or "isn't" doesn't help understand the problem or come up with viable solutions.
For God's sake, it will even kill custom software development which most people sitting here, do for a living - because it is the same exact thing - vast majority of clients never get what they want and even if they did they won't be able to make the money on the useless "products" they invented, because this is nothing but a systematic delusion that's moving them. Almost all of them see themselves as genius inventors of the next world-changing thing but they are in fact random nobodies who raised cash from other random nobodies, to waste it on something that makes their contractors laugh so badly they even refrain from doing video calls. It's even worse than higher education. I seen multiple software dev companies throwing lavish parties on the April Fool's day as "professional holiday of our clients".
Should we first look at ourselves in the mirror before blaming the college cabal for doing the same as we do ourselves, just more successfully?
You seem to have doubled down on the is/isn't perspective and demonstrated what I was referring to. The more you reduce the less useful your reasoning becomes.
The attitude that the government shouldn't intervene against companies on the behalf of human rights has been tried for fifty years, and it is an unprecedented failure even in financial terms for at least roughly 80% of the population of one of the largest and wealthiest countries in the world in terms of real purchasing power. Even for many of us in higher income brackets, the resulting crumbling infrastructure and drastic wealth disparities leave much to be desired as a society to live in. Many of these problems have solutions, and calling them "socialism" is meaningless as an argument against them
With a place in the top 10 happiest countries? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
First, no, we have some high-visibility examples of dictators claiming to be socialists, several of whom had purges of other internal opponents who said socialism was a different thing to what they were doing.
We don't point to the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea"* or "The Democratic Republic of Congo" then say of Democracy (or of republics) "And we know how it always ends".
Second, there's a huge gap between what the USA considers "dangerously lefty" and what is seen in northern Europe today, let alone states today which are or were explicitly socialist such as the USSR.
* AKA North Korea, AKA Naughty Korea
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beckham_law
I moved from the UK to Germany, I actively decided against the USA. Why? Consider what was going on politically in the US right after the UK voted for Brexit.
Σκεφτόμουν την Κύπρο, αλλά οι Άγγλοι λένε όταν κάτι είναι δύσκολο να διαβαστεί: "It's all greek to me"
Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
Also, modern day India has a very strong government intervention bias, especially regarding lifting people out of poverty. Be it investments in infrastructure (such as running water), or downright giving food to people. Good luck explaining how that isn't "socialism" to an American.
You mean Kerala, not Karnataka.
And conversely, West Bengal was ruled by the Communists since the 1970s to the early 2010s, yet it's developmental indicators have regressed to those comparable to some of the poorest states of India.
Conversely, right leaning and nativist Himachal Pradesh (if you ain't Pahadi or Pahadi-adjacent we will give you the cold shoulder, and both the state chapters of the HP INC and BJP trace their origins to the RSS and Arya Samaj) has developmental indicators that can match Kerala and other traditionally richer states in India.
At the end of the day, all that matters is administrative capacity, not ideology.
If local government is held accountable, it will work hard to deliver.
Specifically, the government made it so college loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and backs many student loans.
The solution is to remove the exception for student debt in bankruptcy, and either have the government stop backing student loans, or make stricter requirements for colleges to quailify for its students qualifying for federal loans. Like say, require that a certain percentage of students graduate, and get jobs within a year of graduating, having reasonable tuition, etc.
Loans will only be granted to students who have a track record of high achievement, parents willing to co-sign, and going into majors that make economic sense.
Enrollment will drop, universities will stop offering passion majors, mass layoffs in library science, academia, and college administrations (likely to the tune of 1M+ people).
In the end, students will be told by federal examination which school and major they get to pursue, or whether they get to go to college at all.
That's assuming the government is both effective and efficient in this process.
This is essentially how most consumer economics work.
And for that matter, I think it could make since to have trade schools for white colllar jobs too. In some sense that is what coding camps are, although I'd like to see them be a little more rigorous and include things like security, software design, algorithms, etc.
As for passion subjects and arts, maybe have more, and higher quality community classes available that people can go to when they already have a decent job and can pay for them outright instead of accruing massive debt.
They are young. And therefore there is an asymmetry in information.
The answers lie in educating them to make good decisions, and be there to help when good decisions happen to turn out poorly. The current dilemma is largely due to provably bad decisions (by students, banks, universities, government).
Are student loans the most pressing "bad decision" we have as a society? Definitely not. Is it a very electable topic? Yep
Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. Universities that provide a poor ROI will shut down. Universities will need to reduce costs for traditional coursework, cut courses with poor returns, add courses with higher returns.
The inflation in higher education that has run rampant due to subsidized demand being removed.
In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt.
The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduation something happens which prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you.
And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.
That's why the article's saying you should be able to declare bankruptcy.
> And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.
Teaching is relatively well paid and there are huge numbers of jobs. It's highly likely that a teacher could repay loans. There are plenty of degrees far less capable of providing employment than teaching.
The fact that despite 50% higher GPD and 30% less population there's still rampant homelessness is damning enough.
You can't solve all of that through GDP. There are social and drug and mental health issues that seem to not present to nearly the same extent.
What do you mean about 30% lower population? How is that relevant? You’re quoting a per-capita stat, the population was already factored out. And you’re comparing a single country to 27 countries. Makes zero sense.
They would have flunked the first year - a weed out year - and then been forced into a technical diploma program and not be allowed to call themselves engineers.
My friend who went to the German school said they have a target of flunking half the students that first year. Funds are limited and shape how many can graduate.
Compared to what? In the US, teachers are absolutely underpaid relative to their similarly-educated and -skilled peers in other professions.
That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education?
>And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.
Sounds like the solution is to raise teacher pay, which would also have the added benefit of retaining teachers after they graduate. Giving teachers cheap training but paying them poorly seems worse than the status quo because you end up shoveling money into training teachers that'd end up dropping out anyways.
We can say the same thing about K-12 education -- it's just something we choose to fund collectively, because that's the kind of society we want to be.
But also, progressive taxation means that the rich fund it more than the poor. So the general idea is that if law school and medical school are expensive to provide but result in vastly higher salaries, then it gets paid for in the end out of those lawyers' and doctors' taxes. Not the taxes from average Americans.
It isn’t necessary, no, and in fact a flat super simple tax code would probably result in more tax revenue. However, since politicians like the power of the tax code, and because the wealthy like a complex tax code for all the loopholes, and since ordinary people like the idea of those wealthier than them paying more tax as a percentage of their income, then we’re never going to get a simple tax code.
If you get into Stanford but can't afford it, a loan seems like a good idea, but in reality the loan eligibility should consider the degree and future earning potential (along the same lines of how banks qualify other types of loans).
If we simply cancel student debt or remove private colleges' ability to charge a market rate the result will be no more private colleges (similar to other countries with fully publicly funded education). In these countries you typically have a national exam that determines where you go, or you have to lottery in to a school if it isn't in your district.
But in K-12 education, the taxpayer/state has strong control over what's taught. In the last few years there's some latitude by the students, but nothing close the panoply of programs offered by universities. If education is state funded, but only for programs with proven ROI (eg. STEM), I'd be fine with that.
Public funding models often have incentives for delivering the degrees the state wants. For example, there could be field-specific quotas for degrees. The university gets paid for each degree up to the quota, but not for exceeding the quota. That can have interesting effects in fields that are popular but in low demand. For example, the acceptance rate to psychology can be as low as 2-3%.
> you pay no matter what
Meaning if it’s assumed “despite learning little, you still will be able to pay for it”, there’s no longer any motive force towards quality, as your payment is assured. Incentives on taxpayers thereafter who want to minimize their tax burden would therefore be optimizing primarily toward cheapness of the educational process, rather than efficacy and quality of the education which outbound students received.
A vigorous market for education, would suggest you would likely get a variety of nodes along a “costliness to quality” options frontier.
There are many excellent European universities, including ones which have been around for centuries, telling me there are ways to handle your concerns.
> A vigorous market for education
How's that Corinthian Colleges degree working out? Costly and no quality. And exactly the life-crippling outcome we should expect in a 'vigorous market'.
> Current educational incentives caused by how payment is handled in these all-pay systems mean there is very little or no pressure exerted towards promoting an educational arms race towards quality, rather than minimizing cost to service that education.
In a more competitive market, yes, I believe you'd both likely see better European offerings, as well as substantially more compelling American paid offerings than the current batch of cash grab for-profit universities. They exist in their current form almost exclusively because financial lenders in the US have no incentive not to issue loans to students - even if the program is bogus, they are guaranteed re-payment.
This is a commonality shared between both current European offerings (via taxation guaranteeing repayment), and American alternatives (via guaranteed load repayment).
What would a sufficiently competitive market entail? Has it ever existed?
Would it look like modern US K-12 systems where commercial schools prioritize the most profitable students and leave the others to the public schools? Where good marketing beats good education?
How would it not be "heavily distorted" by impositions like Title 9 and other civil rights requirements? By government requirements on the school in order to receive state and federal money? By accreditation requirements?
This question being written as singular suggests to me you’re conflating some combination of education as a concept, education in America, and education in Europe. I see this as muddled thinking, they each have their own issues and their own timetables over which issues can and do exist.
Education history in Europe is actually decently hyperlocal and pretty path dependent for each country during the 19th and 20th century. Talking about it as a monolith is challenging, but there’s a pretty consistent pattern in societies with all-pay taxation-paid schooling that it has clear incentive structures that a school, having been “paid up front“, is not incentivized to put in the work to provide a high quality education, and as the financier of that education is the taxpayer, the pressure is primarily to keep costs low.
As for America, you don’t need much faith to believe that in the US instituting dischargeability would dramatically improve competition and quality in these spaces and the market for education - so yes, this market used to be substantially more competitive and used to exist. Since the 1970s when these laws were passed, student debt and tuition costs have skyrocketed, low quality for-profit university creation skyrocketed, and people have been hobbled with debt for degrees many are never going to pay back. Dischargeability reduces this greatly - it causes financiers to create motive pressure on education to not be a fiscal vampire preying on its students and equip them with meaningful trades and socially useful knowledge.
As for standards and regulations on schools, assuming the public sees fit to fund higher education through government spending, having requirements for a school to receive that government funding seems reasonable, so long as they reflect the desires of the local populace.
Ultimately, all this is a discussion of tradeoffs - I think someone can happily prefer
> everyone gets a free tertiary education paid for by their taxes
I think that it being free and paid-by-all means it’ll have low motive pressure towards quality and therefore be comparably mediocre to free elementary and secondary compulsory education, which even based on your own reckoning seems to be a two-tier system where the public institutions get short shrift - but you seem to care about it being free or less focused on fiscal student outcomes as its own value. It’s a tradeoff.
I care about having actual definitions of what "more competitive market" and "vigorous market for education" means, and gave examples of markets with significant market failures.
Is it even possible to have a vigorous market without strong government oversight?
Yes it is, and I am using it in the traditional sense of "Sellers vying to make their offerings more compelling so consumers prefer them to alternatives". A more competitive market has more of the above fighting happening, which can be incentivized in several ways.
Specifically for the US, I already gave a massive truck-sized example of how you can make offerings more competitive: repeal recent 1970s policy changes that make college debt work different than essentially all other debt in being non-dischargeable, and lenders will put pressure by refusing to lend for failschools. This will slash their demand, and survivors will be expected to provide more compelling “when examined actuarially” lifetime student economic outcomes: from the lender’s perspective, the education needs to be expected to at least pay for itself. Schools in a world with dischargeability will therefore make efforts to compete on being able to compellingly show “we are imparting an effective education which equips you to repay what you spent”, and in general will be less able to get away with “we have a strong brand and you’re young and naïve, come study here!”. You can fool an 18 year old, you won’t fool the underwriter.
Specifically for the EU, there’s three approaches I’d like to see considered, the first and last more experimental than the others. It’s a widely agreed upon problem that faculty aren’t incentivized or often even that good at actually teaching, and to a lesser extent they’re also bad at training graduate students, because professorial incentives are to be good at research and grant writing, the thing for which universities pay their salary.
Historically, many universities used a different mode where they kept permanent salaried faculty positions very limited, and rather than charge a tuition, most schools and professors were expected to charge a fee or honorarium they would collect from their individual pupils as the bulk or totality of a professor’s compensation.
We moved away from this because historically teacher compensation was abysmal and we wanted to better support educators in studying - the pendulum swung way too far the other way though, and professors are essentially totally insulated from needing to seriously engage with their student body - they make a salary no matter what and it shows when they teach like it. Returning to a market where teachers’ financial outcomes are at least partially linked to their students explicitly choosing and paying professors chosen fees rather than a tuition which everyone in society pays stochastically, professors are incentivized to competitively vie for being better at training and teaching, because their prosperity and success would be linked to it.
Second, as much criticism as the US model gets for its prices, much of that appears to be driven by administrative bloat and nondischargeability, payment itself is actually really great when dischargeable because it seems prices stay low and this bloat doesn’t happen when it is. It also means a significant fraction of students do try to get into the best school they can and the schools have some incentive to fight to be seen as better - they make their money when students go. The results speak for themselves: something like half to two-thirds of the world’s top 100 universities are all in America.
Last, I’d like to see both European and US models collaborate harder on job and work placement as part of ensuring student success. Colleges being a source of a liberal education without concern for fiscal outcomes can be great, but the pendulum swung too far and these students are essentially thrown out into the world without any expectation of success, because the school no longer has any investment in them. I’d like to see some portion of the fee of education be moved to explicitly garnished wages from placed-into-their-trained field employees - you succeeding would therefore be the university’s success.
I’d there...
However, removing that does not fix the underlying political goal of assuring access to higher education, which Johnson back in 1965 described as "no longer a luxury, but a necessity". https://archive.org/details/4730960.1965.001.umich.edu/page/...
US schools are increasingly extractive because if higher education is indeed necessary then it is economically beneficial for someone to go to college - so long as the result is more profitable than not going to college. If the college charges less than that (or rather, the college + debt industry), then they leave money on the table.
There is little interest in providing quality low-cost education because it is capital intensive, and capitalists want to maximize their profits. As the recent news about rent collusion shows, capital owners will collude to extract more profits.
> the pendulum swung too far
This has been a trope since the 1960s when the right started their culture war against college education as the post-GI bill era meant college was no longer a place primarily for the children of the privileged classes.
That is, be specific - when was the pendulum enough in the other direction that you wouldn't have complained thusly? It seems you like the 1960s, when the right complained about ivory tower academics filling student brains with anti-American nonsense.
> reductions in permanent salaried academic positions
We have that. These are called adjunct professors. "Editorial: U.S. colleges are overusing — and underpaying — adjunct professors" / "The American Assn. of University Professors reports that 70% of faculty are adjunct, most of them without benefits, job security or union representation; they teach more than half of all college courses in the U.S."
They are also poorly paid, exactly as you would expect from an extractive industry.
How low should it be? 20% 10%? But in the 1960s in the era you praise, those numbers were much higher, back when academic positions included significant administrative responsibilities.
If you really want to remove "administrative bloat", remove administrators.
> garnished wages from placed-into-their-trained field employees
Ahh, so you follow the meat widget model of college education. Got a degree in physics but decide to open a chocolate boutique? Sorry, you'll need to pay back your education first.
It costs a lot to go to med school, so those who go often end up in debt, which means they need to get jobs which pay enough to pay back that debt, which means they can't afford to provide medical care to poor communities.
It costs a lot to become a lawyer, which is one of the factors for public defenders are 1) needed, and 2) so overworked.
Besides, we've had similar policies for a long time. I had teachers back in the 1980s whose agreed to debt relief for their teacher education which contingent on being a teacher for enough years.
I've also heard stories about the consequent problems in such a bureaucratized system.
> see both European and US models collaborate harder on job and work placement as part of ensuring student success
There is no "European model". The UK has a very different system than Germany, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_education_system
In Germany: "After passing through any of the above schools, pupils can start a career with an apprenticeship in a Berufsschule ( vocati...
You imagine wrong. Pretty much everyone goes to university in most and European countries. Even in wildly tourist dependent places, a degree in tourism is a normal thing for a young person to pursue before going to work at hotels/restaurants.
Where did you get the idea most Europeans get a degree?
If they move to the Netherlands, the NL will only count what % of its citizens have degrees, not everyone else (because many may go back or move elsewhere after finishing their studies, you can't count them easily alongside the rest of your population; students are usually counted as some sort of temporary resident, if counted at all). And then there's also the UK which is a top study destination for Eastern Europeans.
> Where did you get the idea most Europeans get a degree
I come from one EU country, live in another, have friends from all over the EU, have visited as a student and now working adult. Most young people pursue degrees, even in forestry or tourism or whatever topic. Of course some will fail getting them, but 30% of under 30s is absurdly low for stats to be reliable.
It‘s a pretty efficient (and quite unique) system. People learn to do their job at a normal company and attend school for usually two days a week. And they can still switch to the university track later without starting from the beginning.
The thing you mentioned is not unique to Swiss Germany had it as well. But I think still you have there more people who study...
Only three European countries are above the US in tertiary education rate: Ireland, UK and Luxembourg.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1227287/share-of-people-...
And if you’re a nurse or a police officer or a teacher or a lawyer and you lose your license under specious circumstances, it really sucks to be you.
Europe does NOT have an education system!
The ~50 different European countries all have their own systems, with huge differences between them.
Credentialism is pernicious regardless.
Chesterton's fence definitely applies here.
If you don't understand what that law attempted to prevent in the first place, you're just going to get your pocket picked by a different group of people.
The issue is that we have democratized not only the class background part but also the “intellectual pursuits” part. College should be a lot more selective and a lot more rigorous; only a small minority of students have any business attending. The rest can get their credentialing and coming-of-age ceremony in an ROI focused trade school.
The entire idea that spending 4 years learning useless knowledge is somehow valuable is completely mistaken bullshit.
Aristocrats could get away with it because they were rich but there is 0 evidence this practice brought fundamental value to them or society other than serving as an expensive status signal.
Universities used to be expensive schools for rich people's failsons to "find themselves". That's why there's a lot of focus on "well-rounded" educations even today. Then western governments started offering taxpayer-funded tuition, which resulted in a new wave of educated kids who refused to believe government narratives regarding wars and refused to comply with conscription and drafts. This came to a head during the Vietnam War, where the US found that it's usual ability to start wars against labor in other countries had been stymied by them educating the enemy (their own workers).
While the draft has been relegated to a vestigial function in the US today, the people in power were able to shut the people down. Saudi Arabia, a theocratic dictatorship that belongs in the 10th century, not the 20th, did the American ruling class a solid by embargoing the US and shutting down our economy for a decade. This gave cover for the complete overturning of Progressive Era policies. Most importantly for this subject, public state universities were stripped of their government funding. Instead, they would charge ever-increasing tuition which students would pay for with loans. This ensured that the poor could not access education and that the educated middle class would be in permanent debt slavery.
Public universities went along with this because they were promised more money than they could get from public funding. This is why you see massive amounts of money being wasted by universities on bullshit. The ruling class gave universities a seat at the table of lavish excess in exchange for, y'know, letting the cops shoot their students with rubber bullets any time they get antsy. Your student debt is a bribe from the military-industrial complex to the university system that you pay for.
However, this gambit did not fully succeed. For one, students are still protesting, despite the debt noose around their necks, and university officials' best efforts to rubber-bullet their students into compliance. So there's a lot of politicians who want to get rid of university education altogether and replace it with trade schools. I may have harshed the concept of a "well-rounded" education before, but it does mean universities still have to teach things like history and economics, which is the sort of thing that makes the lower classes resist their social programming.
So a lot of people in power want to get rid of universities and replace them with trade schools. Now, I actually don't have a problem with trade schools; a lot of good paying jobs are going undone because they don't confer the kinds of status middle-class families want. But there's a lot of right-wingers who want kids in trade schools solely because trade schools generally do not teach all the problematic subjects and forbidden knowledge (aka "traditional coursework") that makes tools of society start asking questions.
If you want an actual way to fix universities (without just turning them into trade schools):
- Have a ONE TIME student debt forgiveness event, contingent on shutting down the student loan system, so this shit doesn't happen twice.
- Restore public university funding sufficient to allow tuition-free education for all poor and middle class students.
- Purge the university administrative class, they've grown overbloated and turned universities into their own personal hedge funds.
Once this is done, then we can start talking about what classes and degrees actually have good ROI on the public money the universities will be getting again. The thing is, though, the existing "low ROI" degrees mainly existed so the university administrative class could pump up admissions numbers. Remember, that was part of the deal they made with the devil. Taking away the student loan system means there's less incenti...
Replace western by "US" for "well-rounded". AFAIK, all European university degrees are focused on a single topic, and its requirement (so, lots of math if you're studying physics). No literature classes required (or even available in some cases) if you're, e.g., getting a computer science degree.
No, it just means everyone will complete their degree then file for bankruptcy immediately before starting their first job.
It's tempting to just agree with your sentiment, but I think that day dreaming about an unrealistic solution sucks energy away from more effective actions. The main challenge of solving a difficult puzzle is to avoid dead ends and red herrings.
A more promising plan involves explicitly strategizing against the agents who have the opposite agenda.
The problem with student loans is that they are not driven by markets. If they were, absolutely nobody would give a loan to an 18 yo to spend 4 years and $160k to study psychology.
1. Provide a counterbalance to private industries by having the government player to be a significant player in that market. That means a free or near-free high-quality state higher education system like the California system used to be until it was made an explicit political goal to avoid an "educated proletariat" [1]. It also goes for housing, hospitals, banks, ISPs and so on;
2. Nationalize failing industries rather than providing them loans for no reason. Banks fail in 2008? Well, you belong to the state now. Just like the FDIC does with failing banks.
3. Federal dollars for pharma research should come with an equity stake in the private corporations that monetize it. Most drugs are developed with Federal grants.
> I love a good market as much as anyone
Just curious: where do you see markets actually working?
[1]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educate...
I kind of agree with this, but as a taxpayer, I don't necessarily want the government to have an equity stake in a failing or horribly-run business.
We need the government to grow a backbone and allow large businesses and even entire sectors of the economy to FAIL when they suck. I hate the narrative "We have to keep ShittyCo alive because it provides 10,000 jobs!!" as if those jobs would just disappear if ShittyCo got flushed down the toilet like it should be.
Taxpayers should not bail out GM and Chrysler and AIG and US Airways and these shit companies. We should have let them fail, let their careless shareholders eat it, and created a regulatory environment that allowed better-run competitors to spring up.
God going after just one is liable to get you a fate worse than Daphne Caruana Galizia
Getting a BA in Underwater Basketweaving from your local commuter state university is much less financially damaging than at Duke or UChicago.
I'm not a fan of the idea of "useful" and "useless" degrees (ime, the best predictor for success is critical thinking skills, not major), but I do find private universities don't make as much financial sense, especially given that well paying industries like Engineering, Accounting, etc don't place much weight on your initial Alma mater beyond your first job.
Anecdotally, I had an alumni interview with a successful tech IB/PE/HF alum from CS@CMU years ago while I was applying to colleges, and he was very insistent about how he felt the RoI at SJSU or CalPoly is superior to CS@CMU. I didn't end up attended CMU (I was lured to a more "prestigious" LAC) but he was absolutely right.
That's the twist though. If your first job is better, the second job is likely better too. It took me a decade before I made it to a first class job, sitting next to people who worked there straight out of college.
That's why Baruch has Ivy level representation in IB and High Finance, and SJSU plus CalPoly SLO has Stanford level representation in the tech industry at large.
Just looking at the Linkedins of the most successful EMs, PMs, and SEs in my network, most attended a normal state flagship and worked at an "OK" company like Oracle or Splunk.
This whole "FAANG"-or-bust or "Ivy"-or-bust mentality is legitimately divorced from reality, especially now that the market is legitimately horrid for new college grads.
> It took me a decade before I made it to a first class job
What do you define as a "first class job"? Where was your first job located? Were you open to moving to a major tech employment hub (eg. Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, NYC)? Did you start your career during a tech slowdown (eg. 01-04, 08-12, 20-21, 23-present)?
"Meh" companies like Oracle or Cisco pay early-to-mid career employees roughly the same as similarly leveled employees at Google or Amazon.
The main thing is, these employees need to be based in the Bay Area, Seattle, or Austin to justify those salaries.
And if you start your career during a hiring slowdown, it doesn't matter if you went to Stanford or SJSU - you're screwed. I'm already seeing the desperation right now at on-campus recruiting events at Harvard/MIT as well as at regional publics.
If you don't get on the career train for law or finance on time, you're de facto unemployable.
And this is why I love being in tech - we can grind and still find a strong path to upward mobility.
Hard skills like engineering, accounting, actuary, and medicine/dentistry/nursing are always employable. Sure you may earn less in some downturns, but at least we can get jobs.
And, unlike high finance, so long as you keep kinda up to date on technology and architecture, you can negotiate your way into IB level salaries (IB, VC, and High Finance pays fairly bad for the hours spent working, and I myself imagine returning to being a SWE).
No need to over complicate things.
Most states in the US already have public university systems, but that isn't where most of the debt comes from.
Everyone wants to go to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, etc.
The competition then switches from spending direct financial resources to the university to spending financial resources to out compete other students vying for the same university. In China there's usually 1 seat per 50 candidates for good university spots, and the only thing that matters is your ranking in the entrance exams. It's not exactly uncommon for high school students to be spending 14 to 19 hours a day 7 days a week for 3 to 4 years preparing academically to win a spot.
Trading one bad situation for another one really.
Actually academia predates the push to gate jobs behind undergraduate degrees, and trying to repurpose these institutions that mainly exist to train and employ researchers to be fully general vocational schools has been a disaster in every respect for everyone but the parasitic class of administrators it's spawned
Making the path to go to a university more accessible is admirable. Entrenching this hiring practice with policy designed to enforce its implications on universities was always ill-conceived and the consequences have mostly been negative, creating a class of permanent debtors, turning universities into dysfunctional and corrupt quasi-businesses, and not really causing a significant de-stratification of job opportunities on balance at all
E.G.: More expensive vocational programs that haven't been subsidized, selecting among universities for especially "prestigious" (read "class-signaling") ones, baking cultural assumptions of the upper classes into the expectations surrounding "professionalism" in the interview process, etc
Academia does predate its role as employment gatekeeper, but it was privately funded then.
The answer lies in the unique shield that non-dischargeable student loans provide to educational institutions and lenders.
In a normal market, if a product consistently fails to deliver value, consumers stop buying it. Producers either improve or go out of business. But in the world of higher education, this feedback loop is broken.
Colleges and universities, shielded by the guarantee of student loan money, have no real incentive to improve their product or direct students to majors that have an ability to pay back their loans.
They can raise tuition year after year, even as the value of their degrees stagnates or declines. "
Sure, colleges can charge a lot due to loans, but they are still competing with each other and differences in tuition could make a big difference. I went to Georgia Tech over other universities because it was in-state and Georgia has generous scholarships for students with good grades. So why does competition among schools not lower costs?
Another theory: The value creation is not linked to the value capture. So market forces make a bad feedback loop.
Look, I'm totally pro business, but business is only "good" at allocating capital when value capture and creation are linked. Education isn't like that. The closest we have are the bootcamp schools, where they take a cut out of your first 2 year's salary if you find a job or nothing if you don't.
When capture/creation are not linked, you need a different social organization method. "Government" or "Religion/non-profit" come to mind. Perhaps others have additional suggestions.
It was relatively new for us when I left, so I never saw the aftermath. I know it worked out well for some students, but my biggest concern was ensuring payments only kicked in if the job was "in-industry or field". My logic was the value isn't there if you go to a coding bootcamp only to not use the skills.
I was still worried they'd basically ask "do you use a computer?" and consider it in-field.
Another issue here is we had folks just looking to up-skill and the value return was harder to gauge if they were returning or continuing to work their job. This was mostly limited to our part-time program so we didn't offer the delayed-loan for it.
You buy a car so you can work and eat. These are very straightforward causes and effects. No car no job. Buy car that costs << than job. Done. Buy an education and you get more bills, not more income, for years. You might not even finish.
All the schools have access to loans that are guaranteed to be repaid. We still have the mindset that degrees are required for employment (I'm not commenting on whether that's good or bad; that's just the current cultural mindset). Because of this, schools have no incentives to control costs. The students will go regardless because they have access to money that will pay for the tuition, no matter how much it costs. There's no penalty for the universities to raise costs because they will get students anyways.
debt forgiveness was a hot topic exactly one month before the midterms and it is already becoming a hot topic as we head in to the general election
if these students were not in debt, there would be no debt to forgive and no votes to buy
That's exactly what political parties in a democracy should do.
You know who never says no to handouts from the government? Wealthy people. In fact, they don't just say no, they demand handouts. It's only when the government gives money to poor people that it suddenly becomes a moral hazard.
> debt forgiveness was a hot topic
... until a politicized Supreme Court killed it because it was giving money to poor people.
why not a % until the cost of the degree is paid back? Why does there have to be a forgiveness component?
Of cause it is all wishful thinking: big corrupt institutions exist not as if nobody can come up with better solutions
[1] https://youtu.be/zN2_0WC7UfU
If your constitution includes provisions for free education, it might also be super hard to fix. (E.g. Poland.)
Students' parents would need to co-sign, and if the parents were poor, the student would be out of luck.
Anyways, tying lending terms to the value of the degree sounds like a horrible idea, because how do you even determine that?
Seems to me the big issue is A) that the loans are managed b private companies with ridiculous terms and that even public state universities can basically behave like private companies by increasing prices this much.
Why can't the government not just radioactive prices for their own universities
Im guessing that you’re probably not representative of the target audience, or the author doesn’t know his audience well.
The image is thematically appropriate. I don’t think the author is trying to bamboozle anyone with that image.
> "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat," announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970. Freeman, an economics professor at Stanford, was also an advisor to President Richard Nixon.
> "We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher education]," Freeman added.
Poverty is intentional and a necessary condition for capitalism. It creates a malleable and compliant labor force. Student debt, medical debt, housing debt. All of it only exists to make a handful of extremely wealthy people slightly more wealthy.
Modern universities aren't really about education at all. They're simply hedge funds in a trenchcoat.
Harvard, for example, makes what? Half a billion in tuition per year? But they have upwards of $50 billion in their endowment. The interest alone could fund the entire university.
[1]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educate...
somebody has to pay it - whether it's the students themselves via loans, or via tax payers.
> Harvard, for example
so may be harvard, if they should so feel charitable, could pay for their student's costs via their endowment funds. But what about _every other uni_?
Not to mention that the endownment's a private source of funds - you're just as well be asking why don't billionairs just fund more public costs?
Again, people don't understand how endowments work. When endows a specific program at Harvard, their money must be used for that program alone. The funds can't be sent to the general pool for the entire university.
There are many ways to criticize wealthy educational institutions, but calling them "hedge funds" makes no sense. Which hedge fund subsidizes their clients' expenses with donations?
1- https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/421...
You aren't making this point directly, but I think it's worth pointing out: not everyone is entitled to attend Harvard, Princeton, (etc.) any more than they are entitled to a Maserati.
There are, and should always be, affordable public options, so that anyone who wants a college degree can get one. We need to stop romanticizing elite universities, and acknowledge that you can get a great education, with hard work, at almost any university.
I don't think universities provide much value at all to the common student who is not going to be a PhD.
I went to a very well-known institution known for putting the students in a room with the professors, maybe two or three students, to one professor. My economics professor taught me one on one.
I still think, in the end, the work is mostly done alone, in a pile of books, on your own time.
Not with other students, and not in lectures, and not in tutorials.
This is a bit different from school where you can actually learn the material in class because, let's face it, school doesn't have a very deep curriculum.
So at university my impression is that they mainly tell you what to go and read about, and then you read about it yourself. The tutor is there to course correct you a bit, but they aren't going to do much other than save you a bit of time learning the orthodoxy of your subject. The lectures are a table of contents. At most, it's really just a guy telling you that you should know what an eigenvalue is, or you should have read about the ISLM model, and so on. For you to actually understand something, well, you have to have spent a lot of time in the books rearranging your mind.
Given that this is what you actually do at university, why have it this way?
Make an examination authority. "Here is the national linear algebra test. Anyone who wants to try it, sign up, and come to this hall on this date." Everyone who passes, whether they studied at home or went to fancy U, gets a paper that says they passed it. Do it as a 12 year old prodigy or a 75 year old grandma, you get a diploma.
Now, maybe there is already an authority that does this, I don't know. But it isn't very well known or authoritative.
The current incumbents are gatekeepers. Everybody thinks that smart kids go to the most prestigious universities, and that includes employers. It's a Schelling point that doesn't need to be there, and it allows the universities to extract a great deal of value from the kids.
If you made this authority of examinations, many people could learn the material and show their competence without incurring huge costs.
People could start working earlier. You could separate the coming-of-age experience from academic learning. Poor people could participate more.
I feel compelled to link the quote from Good Will Hunting here, I will refrain. However I agree completely. I also went to a “great” school, and I learned everything from overpriced books on my own time. In fact, in my entire tenure of undergrad I never attended a full week of class, not even the first week.
There is nothing in adult life that's even close to that kind of environment and the growth that it fosters.
Although you have to go to a good school with great peers to experience these benefits.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the tests you talk about aren't valued particularly higher by their own fields. Most lawyers I know have commented that the bar exam [1] primarily tests material that is largely irrelevant to the actual practice of law, to a degree that scoring too highly on the exam tends to be seen as "you wasted too much time preparing for the exam."
[1] The LSAT isn't a test of whether or not you've mastered law school material, it's a test of whether or not you are allowed to be admitted to law school in the first place. The bar exam is the actual necessary certification to be a lawyer.
Except for EE and other engineering students, who require lab and other equipment for their education
Except for chemistry, biology, and other science students, who require chemistry equipment, etc. for their education. You get the idea.
Even for fields that require no specialized facilities, frankly, I don't see any Fields Medal or Turing Award winners that are self-taught nor do I have any reason to expect to see any in my lifetime.
They're not really students in the normal sense, they fit more into the PhD category that I mentioned, since they need actual personal help.
> Except for EE and other engineering students, who require lab and other equipment for their education
I have an engineering master's from a world famous university where the lab work was pretty pointless. It didn't count for much if at all, and was more or less just entertainment.
If you were doing a PhD, you would do experiments where the outcomes were not a foregone conclusion. In undergrad, it's not any different from baking a cake, it ain't gonna go any differently than expected.
I suspect you'll learn more watching a video of someone doing the experiment, that way you are not concerned with trivialities like converting units and wearing safety goggles. Something like what NileRed does for chemistry.
> Even for fields that require no specialized facilities, frankly, I don't see any Fields Medal or Turing Award winners that are self-taught nor do I have any reason to expect to see any in my lifetime.
Well, that level of work requires a personal contact, like a PhD advisor. I am addressing undergrad work, which is fairly ordinary material that has already been well digested.
For me personally, having a maker space and access to expensive equipment was how I learned to do useful things as an electrical engineer. Was it entertaining? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. In fact, the things I’ve had the easiest time learning were things I’ve done because they were inherently enjoyable.
I agree with you there is a lot universities have to offer students though. Your examples of equipment are a great highlight. On the other hand I think when you weight the ever growing cost of attendance with the amount of unique values provided it has been shrinking quite a bit, in favor of the "not providing much value" side. This is especially true for the relative lack of unique values brought for the vast majority of students during the first ~2 years of general education. It's difficult or impossible to get many of these organizations to let you just jump in at that point though.
Overall I think, for many at least, the biggest value is an environment which helps guide them to doing the self learning. Many (most?) can't just sit down to write and then follow their own multi year study plan and end up with something comparable to what they'd get out of going to a university, even if they end up spending the majority of their time there self learning. GP may well not be part of that group but I'm not sure their conclusions apply to those who are.
If you can drop 90% of administrators and real estate by moving online, student loans become a thing of the past. College becomes a halfway house commune for young people to who want to leave their parents nest.
So the way you fix a broken system is to replace it with something cheaper and better. The issue of course is that 99% of people who start online courses don't finish them. Universities provide motivation for learning, which is required for many learners.
> Now, maybe there is already an authority that does this, I don't know. But it isn't very well known or authoritative.
Western Governors University operates this way. You can get a full, recognized degree that way (in a limited set of topics).
I went to an unremarkable state school where I had classes with a hundred other students. Even my senior level courses were about a dozen to one teacher ratio. I still remember my professors and specific moments during their lectures when I was able to ask a follow up question which triggered that Eureka moment we're all looking for.
I wish I was able to just sit down with a textbook and learn a meaty subject but that doesn't work for me. I, and many others, need (or at least it helps a lot) the academic structure to learn effectively. The academic calendar, lectures, textbooks, homework, and other students you can study with all work in concert. The way you're dismissing all of that strikes me as really myopic.
There are many examination authorities but employers basically ignore all of them and have gone all in on college degrees as the signal for employment. In that way colleges are gatekeepers to higher level jobs, but they're hardly the only actor here.
I had paid for university almost entirely out-of-pocket with earnings from co-operative internships in software; when "real-life" problems started to rear their ugly head, the choice came down to incurring debt or working in a (still to this day) lucrative industry.
What was the point? Why join the rat race of my peers who would rush through the material, only for it to be forgotten amidst the torrent of next semester's information? Does this style of studying actually produce a level of erudition equal to or greater than one who obsessively pores over the literature at their own pace, taking their time to slowly digest and process and crystallize the information in their mind? Or have they just found the most expedient route past the gatekeepers of higher education and diplomas?
I would much rather do exactly what I did in university - read through the material on my own terms and take time to digest it at my own pace, but without the crippling debt. That said, I still very much view education as a privilege, open to those of financial means, who have the opportunity to put aside several years' worth of earnings and time to pursue academic studies, irrespective of practical application. I am reminded of a second-year philosophy professor who took half a lecture to explain how the purpose of higher education is not as a vocational school to bring one wealth and employment (taking shots perhaps at the career focus of the institution's co-operative program), but rather to give one a more fulsome perspective of the world and enrich their intellectual life - not in hopes of some mundane, worldly reward, but for its own sake.
Had I the wealth, I would love to go back to complete a degree, not for practical employment prospects or even prestige, but to (at least attempt to) feel intellectually whole. A merit based system of standardized testing that awards degrees based on examination performance would be right up my alley, for I could prepare myself to meet its demands at my own pace and according to my terms; I consider the hacker spirit of measuring the quality of a software solution not according to the attributes of its author (wealth, status, degree, or otherwise), but on whether or not the code works correctly and efficiently adjacent to this sentiment. For everyone else, there's debt - and I can't justify making that decision.
I think the key is that universities are not schools. They are places of learning, not teaching. If you go to a university and expect to be taught, you are probably wasting your time.
And that vision is not really compatible with tuition fees, because they can easily turn you from a student to a paying customer.
Otherwise, for people who want to learn arcane technological skills and curious knowledge for the science and engineering world, community colleges and research universities are the way to go. Two years in a community college at low cost, ideally some kind of grant/scholarship for 2-3 years more at a research university, preferably in collaborative/teamwork situations with actual professionals in their fields. You also have access to tools and equipment that you'd never get to use otherwise, and experience with such setups can lead right into a good R & D job.
It's not worth being weighed down with debt at the end, though, since the loan payments will eat up revenue that could have gone to savings for a home, founding a startup, etc.
Students should thus view the academic finance system as a hostile adversary that's always trying to force them to take on as much debt as possible. Student loans are traded like subprime mortgages were in 2008, I imagine tranched into pyramid schemes, and the industry always needs fresh meat.
I wasn't an engineering major, I was a computer science major, but I still asked and was allowed to work evenings in the facility.
I got on the job training from experienced experts on orbital mechanics, the practical operation of spacecraft, and the infrastructure behind space flight activities. I also got to write some software that is used in the command and control of spacecraft.
Going to school gave me access to supercomputers and mainframes, practical hands-on experience that cannot be learned from a book.
Also, my university is somewhat unique in that it has an extremely rigorous writing requirements for all graduates, including creative and business writing. A comment I received multiple times at the beginning of my career is that my writing skills were extremely advanced compared to my peers. This is a double-edged sword because now, decades later, coworkers send me paragraphs to edit before being sent out.
I also minored in studio art, because as a young freshman I figured it was an easy A. Little did I realize that free and easy access to studios, models, screen printing equipment, and photography labs would lead to several lifelong hobbies.
My school also had telescopes I got to use as a member of the astronomy club, and amateur radio equipment far beyond my ability to afford as a member of the ham radio club. There is an exact and precise 0.0% chance that I would have ever gotten to even touch a 20" reflector, high quality CCD cameras, or sophisticated mounts and star trackers without going to school. Ditto for 1.5kW amplifiers and vast fields of specialized antennas for radio communications.
After I realized that staring at an IDE window all day was actual, literal, hell to me I transitioned to being an aerospace engineer. No degree, I just explained to people what I knew and did in school, what programs I had worked on, and they said "good enough, here's a board assembly drawing start spec'ing out space-rated micro- and nano-d connectors for it" and decades later I'm a senior principal engineer designing satellites.
Hell, just understanding what SWR is, what multiplexers and other RF terms meant, and knowing about polarization, propagation, and effective radiated power from my university ham radio club days went a long way to getting me to where I am today.
All of this is possible to learn autodidactically.
It would require a level of income (to gain access to the tools), foresight (to focus on specific subjects relevant to your goals), and drive (to have realistic goals laid out and to actually do it) not typically found in young adults, or old adults.
I assert it is easier, and outcomes are more favorable, if you pay someone to do all of this for you.
My perspective may be warped. I used the GI Bill and paid $0.00 for all of this. But if I had to pay the $54k it cost it would have been worth it 100 times over (I make a lot of money now).
Loan forgiveness ... in essence, a form of vote-buying ... vote for me, and we'll forgive your loan (aka someone else will pay the loan).
If there is a chance that, at some point, we forgive loans - why would the cost of education ever decrease?
Perhaps, as a society, we will rethink how education is attained. In a world shaped by AI, maybe kids will take MOOCs just for fun.