This is wonderful. Hopefully this is an extinction level event for all of the toxic degree factories that were created just to take advantage of the non-dischargeable student loans. US tuition almost tripled in the last 15 years but the quality of education didn’t triple.
Trump himself took advantage of this by creating Trump university which was a for-profit degree mill.
All of those “schools” needs to be wiped off the map and hopefully get replaced by schools that show real value.
It was not a degree mill, it was a stupid real estate seminar scam like dozens of others. It's even exaggerating to call it a scam - it preyed on people who thought that Trump knew something about real estate that he could teach, and they pretty much got what they paid for (the wisdom of a known real estate failure who instead decided to become a brand.)
Holy shit this is a great idea. I get the complaints about the arts, but colleges have enjoyed essentially unlimited patience for larding up their programs with extra fees, bullshit credit requirements, and more, for decades.
I don't personally think that efficiency should be the primary concern of colleges, but it should be a concern, and it just plain hasn't been for ages. And that indulgence has been cloaked in specious, ivory-tower claims about producing well-rounded students. "You can't complain about being require to take a 100-level history course because our job is to turn out renaissance scholars who can debate philosophy at cocktail parties before going to work doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with that."
All the while, those additional credit hours cost students a shitload of money and debt and take focus away from their actual fields of study.
Colleges and universities need a kick up the ass to make them actually give a shit about outcomes for their students. I'm not going to cry that they're getting one.
This is also a straw-man. You don't just need to establish that students should learn history, literature, etc -- you need to establish that 12 years of that is not enough, and they need to take an additional 4 years at a much higher cost. But why stop at 16 years? Why not 20 or 30 years? Clearly there are diminishing marginal returns. At some point you should trust students who are motivated to learn to continue their studies independently, rather than tacking it on as a massively expensive additional requirement to a vocational degree.
> You don't just need to establish that students should learn history, literature, etc -- you need to establish that 12 years of that is not enough, and they need to take an additional 4 years at a much higher cost.
Actually, I didn't get 12 years of most of the liberal arts courses I took at university. A number of them were completely new to me - no exposure in K-12 at all.
And you're being creative with numbers. No - for an engineering degree, you don't need to take 4 more years of humanities courses. Just a few credits that extend your education by (likely) less than a year.
No, we're not talking about defunding engineering degrees. We're talking about defunding (mostly) liberal arts degrees whose economic value, at least, does not justify their cost.
If those few liberal arts degrees you took in college were so valuable, why can't they be integrated into the k-12 curriculum? Or why couldn't you study them independently using free online resources, or at a community college? I'm not against people learning this stuff, and I enjoy reading about it in my spare time as much as the next guy. I'm just not clear why taxpayers should cover this when it's such an inefficient option.
And that indulgence has been cloaked in specious, ivory-tower claims about producing well-rounded students
I suspect your comment is exactly what they’re talking about. I actually agree with your claim, but with limits! And yet the proponents of your position always seem to want a blank check.
How much exactly should the taxpayers pay to ensure that little Timmy goes to college and gets “an appreciation for what makes life worth living”, and why that amount? And how do we know if it’s working or not?
Today we have the highest percentage of people with an university degree compared to any other time in the history. Do you think democracy today is healthier than it was 30 years ago?
I feel like I have not really heard a compelling reason why student debt should not be dischargeable thru bankruptcy like (afaik) all other forms of debt. I am curious what the ramifications would be if higher education institutions had to (in some form) co-sign the debt being issued.
I do get that not all education should be purely for economic reasons, but as an autodidact I feel that "learning for the sake of learning" does not need to come with the prices that people are paying for degrees.
What would stop graduates from declaring bankruptcy early in their careers to discharge their debt, before they use their education to build a lifetime of earnings and assets?
Bankruptcy is still inconvenient. But mostly, people would be less able to get loans and then colleges would get to pick between reducing prices or having only a few rich students.
I'm all for "learning for the sake of learning", but the federal government doesn't need to subsidize it. Losing federal aid is not the same as not permitting colleges to run the programs at all. Supply/demand is still alive and well.
You could say the same about all government programs, including pensions and defense. Yet somehow popularly-elected governments keep finding themselves maximizing public utility. A curious property indeed.
Also if they do subsidize it it should be in the form of public goods (libraries, publicly available research). There's some overlap there with loans to individuals but it's weak.
> I feel like I have not really heard a compelling reason why student debt should not be dischargeable thru bankruptcy like (afaik) all other forms of debt.
According to Reddit [1] it was to discourage students from immediately declaring bankruptcy upon graduation.
I don't see why they couldn't have put a time limit on it though, if that was the reason. Say you can't declare bankruptcy for 7 years after you leave school.
That answer is still begging the question of why it matters that bankruptcy rates stay low.
It's obvious that bankruptcy costs the lender, but how that cost gets absorbed is very important here. A mortgage or a car loan are secured debts, where the lender can repossess and sell the collateral, to pay off most or all of the losses if the borrow defaults on the loan. A student loan is an unsecured debt, so any defaults have to come out of the interest of the rest of the borrowers serviced by that loan program.
The more borrowers default on their payments, the higher the interest rate is needed to cover the write-downs. Without any protections against defaulting, interest rates would have to be near those of credit cards, while limiting when student loans can be discharged limits how much needs to be written down, which keeps interest rates lower.
Higher interest rates would not only make student loans cost more, it would also reduce their availability and increase the default rate, which could create positive feedback, causing the rates to increase significantly faster than inflation. Combine that with incentivization for college attendance already causing tuition itself to increase significantly faster than inflation, which itself makes student loans increasingly necessary, allowing student loans to be discharged during bankruptcy could have compounding effects on the fragile system that currently props up college attendance rates.
That still leaves the question of why the government should incentivize a significant portion of their constituency to be in college, (more than 1 out of every 13 US adults are currently enrolled) but I'll have have leave that question for politicians or maybe even voters.
The positive feedback you're talking about depends on the degree in question. If the degree is economically worthless the interest rate will rise and tuition has to drop to make the degree affordable.
Otherwise you end up in this perverse situation where the consumer degree tuition will be priced as if they were economically productive, which ends up pricing out poor people.
You can't really tell people that they just can't be bankrupt though. What are they supposed to do if they have debts they can't pay but they're not allowed to declare bankruptcy because they pinky swore they wouldn't do it seven years ago?
Yeah I had a big lol when I read “just don’t let people declare bankruptcy for 7 years after graduation” - how in the world could this be good public policy?
It was expressed in a strange way but I assume what they meant was that if the former student goes bankrupt within the 7-year period then the student loan is not cancelled.
Why would it be better to not allow the debt discharged ever? That is the current situation. 7 years as a limit is better policy than "you owe this forever no matter what"
Bankruptcy is such an alien concept. Adults took out consensual loans from another adult and now they get to just say oops "take backsies"?
It's one thing if you're in a crazy desperate situation and someone takes advantage of you, I could get that. But if you're not desperate and you took money from someone else and can't pay it back? Theft.
The rest is just how we manage to keep that low on an aggregate level in our society that takes care of our own - which we want to do.
The idea is that its better for society to hit the reset button, pay creditors what they can be paid out of liquidation, and potentially have a productive member of society instead of somebody with absolutely nothing left to lose and maybe some grudges.
Well the alternative is people do rational things like self emolate, self defenestrate, suicide, and familicide. During the ‘08 financial crisis I was reading horror stories of Spanish debtors topping themselves because financial fuckups in NYC, London, and Madrid caused a problem other people had to pay for.
> But if you're not desperate and you took money from someone else and can't pay it back? Theft.
Bankruptcy is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Charging somebody with theft, whether appropriate or not, does not resolve the civil debt. So, they are convicted of theft and still haven't paid back their debt. Then what? Fine them? Seems pointless in a bankruptcy situation. Indentured servitude? Slavery is not ever a winning argument. Debtors' prison? That just shifts the indentured servitude to the state, has been tried extensively throughout history, and doesn't actually make things better. Bankruptcy as as solution acknowledges that the situation is unwinnable and starting over from nothing, with a public notice to others to be wary about extending credit, is likely the only way out.
They don't really "just get to say" that. Declaring yourself bankrupt is a fairly major thing that will have long-term consequences. It clearly isn't desirable to do casually, we don't see it often (at least not in the personal sense; businesses can be a bit different).
> It's one thing if you're in a crazy desperate situation and someone takes advantage of you
In that kind of situation, declaring bankruptcy is likely not going to help you so much. Those people are going to come after you anyway.
I think you sort of fundamentally misunderstand this. Bankruptcy isn't thievery - it's a solution for people who get themselves into a bad situation and don't have a way forward. Say you bought a house with a mortgage, the value of the house has now dropped for some reason so you have negative equity, and you lose your job and can't afford to make the repayments any more. What should happen? You don't have money to pay what you owe, and you can't get it because your total net worth is negative. Saying that's theft doesn't help the question of what to do - society doesn't benefit from dumping on that poor person any more.
The full reason is that preventing bankruptcy is the only way to keep interest rates low and make the loans widely available.
If bankruptcy was allowed then the obvious play would be to take the loan, max out credit cards right before graduation, then declare bankruptcy before you get your first job.
Lenders would respond by increasing interest rates dramatically and restricting loans to those who had assets. This would basically turn into loans being for people with wealthy parents or having eye-watering interest rates.
To be fair, there would likely be fewer total slots for college education in aggregate. However, this probably isn't a bad thing as the marginal college degree probably isn't a practical one.
If that was an actual problem wouldn't people be doing it without the college already? When I was in my early 20s I got non-stop credit offers and I could have easily pulled out tens of thousands in crappy debt.
This has to just be an IQ gap or something. Is it actually impossible for you to view agreements from different perspectives?
From the individuals' perspective, overusing uncollateralized debt to be discharged is a good deal. That loss is offset by the creditor by issuing higher interest to unsecured credit lines because people can default on their debts. From the creditor's perspective, it's risk adjusted for people who default.
It just logically follows. I can't help you understand past this.
> If that was an actual problem wouldn't people be doing it without the college already?
I see you haven't heard of /r/churning. Although it doesn't involve bankruptcy, because then the sheriff comes down and takes your property from you...
Churning is not about taking out debt and not paying it off. It’s about signing up for credit cards and spending money to earn rewards points, and paying off the balance soon to avoid owing interest.
> The full reason is that preventing bankruptcy is the only way to keep interest rates low and make the loans widely available
"They are eating the dogs and cats." It simply isn't true. I got my student loans a quarter century ago. Back then the loans were dischargeable and low. My loans came in at like 4% interest at the time.
It is propaganda that it was a widespread problem and the "solution" was to legally protect banks from risk. Then rates exploded and regulatory capture kept people locked in.
In 1978 loans were made non dischargeable for the first 5 years and extended to 7 years in 1990. In 1998 the waiting period was eliminated making them non dischargeable in perpetuity. Private loans were made non dischargeable in 2005.
So while student loans were technically dischargeable approx 28 years ago there were some big caveats.
Fact: they were dischargeable. Fact: there was no crisis else rates would have already factored in. Else the argument is they were losing money overall. They wouldn't do that for literal decades.
Fact: after the loans were no longer dischargeable, banks were guaranteed their rates and stopped being competitive with them and rates increased.
Loans are still dischargeable under certain conditions.
You claimed that "a quarter century ago" student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, but that's not really true either. The restrictions started in 1978 with waiting periods and those waiting periods were eliminated in 1998 for government loans and shortly after that for private loans.
The period in which you got this 4% loan was within the period where bankruptcy protections were in place, not before it.
It is impossible that you paid 4% interest on (easily) dischargeable student loans. Any lender would be insane to do that with zero risk premium, and the risk would be substantial given it’s an unsecured loan. Possibly there was a clause stating something like “if you are permanently disabled and unable to work forever, you can have this loan discharged.” That’s not what I would consider dischargeable, it’s just the lender acknowledging they can’t squeeze blood from a stone and writing of the debt lets them recover a portion of the money they lent via writing of off.
You are simply misremembering. If it’s true, scan and upload the loan agreement. I just don’t believe it based on how lenders operate.
If a non-negligible proportion of people would discharge their student loans in bankruptcy then the rates would have to increase by a non-negligible amount to make up for it.
If a negligible proportion of people would discharge the loans as you suggest then the need to do it is the "eating the dogs and cats" in this case, since it doesn't matter a whole lot if nobody can do something nobody would have done anyway.
Which is it? Greed by banks. They were functionally fine up through the late nineties. The rules changed because banks wanted all their money instead of nearly all their money.
This is not market economics. This is regulatory capture. Market economics suggests they were more market based when there was risks to banks. The risks are removed and they can print out debt.
> Which is it? Greed by banks. They were functionally fine up through the late nineties.
Except the regulations for student loan discharge started with government loans, not private loans.
Congress restricted discharge of government loans first, because they were trying to protect the continued existence of the program and the low interest rates.
You've had incorrect facts all throughout this thread and you're refusing to acknowledge all of the people trying to bring real facts into the discussion.
> The rules changed because banks wanted all their money instead of nearly all their money.
You're not understanding how interest rates work.
Banks aren't charities. They don't give people money and hope that it gets paid back. They set the interest rate in accordance with the risk.
There are two ways this can work:
1. The debts are easy to discharge in bankruptcy. Banks do their analyses, estimate how many will be lost ot bankruptcy, and increase interest rates until the net result makes lending justifiable.
2. The debts are hard to discharge. The analysis shows a higher recovery rate. They can lower interest rates because the risk of default is down.
There is not a 3rd scenario where banks keep interest rates low and eat the losses from bankruptcy.
If you think that a business wanting "all of their money" is greed then you don't understand how business works. If loans became a money-losing proposition, they just wouldn't loan the money! Though honestly there are some good arguments that we shouldn't be lending money to people who might not pay it back, but there are a lot of people who dislike this idea that we should only give loans to people pursuing careers that pay well.
In all the cases you mentioned, the banks have risk. Normal lending falls into normal economic rules. We've (effectively) removed the risk for banks with education loan. Wanting "all their money" is a translation of "accept no risk." The risk is required for economic rules to apply.
Why should banks not accept risk at all? Why was 7 years protection not effective? I have seen no evidence that the previous protections banks had were insufficient.
"No risk" is not a thing. For example, someone could borrow $250,000 from the bank and then get hit by a bus the day after graduation.
Moreover, interest isn't just about risk, it's the time value of money. If you put money in a CD at a major bank which is FDIC insured, the risk of you losing that money is as close to zero as anything reasonably gets, but you still get paid interest.
The risk premium is on top of that. And the higher the risk, the more interest people have to pay.
Good catch, sorry. Was trying to put it in terms of the parent comment's "quarter century ago" claim. They didn't realize that the student loan protections had gone in a full quarter century prior to their experience, which contributed to their 4% rate.
> it was to discourage students from immediately declaring bankruptcy upon graduation.
Yes, this was a thing in (IIRC) the late 70s / early 80s, and the fed crackdown on the non-dischargeability of school loans in bankruptcy was enacted very quickly in response.
I myself got my bachelors in '79 and read about this idea and did not try it cos it was so incredibly unethical (and it sounded risky). In the words of the infamous Vince Lombardi, "Nice guys finish last."
You would have to prove that you are unemployable to achieve any meaningful reduction in debt. For degrees that are demanded by the job market you wouldn't be able to declare bankruptcy and you would first have to make a reasonable attempt at paying off your loan.
Basically proving the point that the loan shouldn't have been given out in the first place.
Because then the normal thing to do would be to graduate, declare bankruptcy when you have nothing to lose in life because you are just starting out, work for 7 years and you’re in the clear by your late 20s. Everyone would do it.
Maybe not everyone, but certainly lots of unethical people would do it, and there are lots of those. They'd post unbearably smug posts on LinkedIn about it too, calling everyone a sucker who didn't walk away from their $200k in student loans via bankrupcty.
The justification for student loans being exempt from bankruptcy is simply that there is no asset to be repossessed. Car loans, mortgages, and HELOCs are different. Credit cards have very high interest to pay for the higher risk. I guess we could have student loans with 29% interest, would that be preferable?
No, they wouldn't. Source: go back a couple decades, and student loans had low interest rates and were dischargeable in bankruptcy. It was an option. And, in fact, practically nobody did that.
Spherical cows. You are applying economic theory in a vacuum. Sure, we joked at the time we could just declare bankruptcy and keep the degree. However, show me sources showing that this was a real problem. It wasn't.
Simply, people were not playing the game that way in any serious way. I am pretty sure I have never met a single person who declared bankruptcy purely to avoid a student loan.
People might not do it for a $15k loan (accounting for inflation back then), but they definitely will for $100k today. School was much cheaper back then.
Because its usually tax payer money that is used to fund these loans. If people started declaring bankruptcy tax payers would mandate that federal student loans stop existing as a matter of principle. People hold the value that its good to help students as long as they pay back at least what was given to them (adjusted for inflation).
We could also just decide to provide people higher level of education as a right. And, put some Medicare level pricing in place for colleges and universities to get cost in check.
I personally would want to see it with greater student participation/testing. The US education has been watered down to be so easy specifically because failing reduces LTV of a student. They want to just crank out degrees to as many people as they can. I personally think we need to figure out the healthy balance of education we need, because college for all isn’t it. Then just pay for them to learn at a high expectation level. Private schools will still exist to pump out full price degrees and that’s fine too.
I agree. College is not for everyone. Also, we already have an option for those of us who want to provide higher education for people who can't afford it: charities. The advantage of giving my money to a charity instead of the government is that if the organization mismanages the funds it takes me 2 minutes to switch my monthly donation to a different organization. If government mismanages funds it takes between 2-6 years for an election cycle, and even then my candidate may not win or take my needs as a priority.
Charity is fine, but the scale I’m talking about usually makes sense as a social program that we all participate in and that’s usually where governments come into the picture
Well, yes, and I agree, but that means colleges would need to do some considerable belt tightening. There’s plenty of fat to trim, mostly as a result of the last quarter century of student loan policy.
Yes, they can’t be expected to do so voluntarily though so I think the economic pressure to force them to decide how to prioritize their spending is a good thing
Student university edication shouldn't even be a loan. The vast majority of student loans are financed by the government itself. The US spends trillions procuring defense (or war), it should also procure an educated workforce without saddling the citizenry with all the extra red tape and misery of collecting back a loan
Any restrictive administrative loop is always hopelessly behind on what degrees are "valuable". I think colleges should be required to provide information on salary and employment info for a graduates given degree from the university, but otherwise let the choice be open. All the proscription of "value" is useless cost increasing administrative theater
What does the US spend towards NATO that it wouldn't spend if NATO didn't exist?
The US has as many aircraft carriers as the entire rest of the world combined, and thats not because NATO requested it. Nor does NATO demand the US produce 20 million dollar a piece missles.
Hopefully this will revamp the educational system in such a way that the pejoratively named "trade schools" can confer bachelor's degrees on their graduates as well.
I don't really see why some no name university can confer a bachelor's in some bullshit field, but the respectable local trade school cannot confer a bachelor's in plumbing. They honestly have more of a right to do so.
What’s pejorative about the term trade school? Also the difference is a bachelors degree is conferred to people that have had a well rounded education, not a 6 month course on a highly specific niche.
This is great. Those bullshit degrees are example of externalising costs and capturing profits.
Although, unfortunately, I suspect that this will be gamed by things like “this is super unique diploma” and there are no pros on market yet. Rotate that every 5 years and voila. I’m sure that every smart people are already thinking about schemes much more elaborate
> Wouldn't this punish a huge number of students who struggle academically, by comparing them against better-achievers who simply skipped school?
Why would it not just compare them to the average person who skips school, which can be a combination of better and worse achievers? Is there some part I'm missing where the academically struggling are selectively compared to elite school-skippers?
I read the parent comment as claiming that some colleges select student bodies that are on average worse than the average of people who don't go to college at all.
>> If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college,
Lots of things affect earnings. Obviously education is one of them, but it's not the only one.
Location, economic environment, social status, personal network - all are factors. In other words comparing unequal things leads to unequal results.
For example, a first-generation college attendee gets a solid job working at a non-profit helping others. Someone else in the same town goes straight into Dad's profitable factory as a manager.
Of course those might be outliers. We can use statistics to smooth things. But equally we can use statistics to show anything we want.
Yes, there are lots of really crap colleges. There are colleges that specialize in nonsense degrees in useless subjects. (English Poetry you say? Hah. Poets never made any money...)
But equally there are lots of community colleges, taking in marginal students, giving them opportunities where others won't. Some, maybe most, of those students won't make it. But some will.
The effect of a rule like this is that colleges are forced to game the system. To exclude those who might fail. To reduce social mobility.
A cynic might even suggest this is the real goal of the rule to begin with.
Clock hour schools have been held to this standard forever. It’s called gainful employment. It was always bullshit that credit hour schools didn’t have this standard, as if it was 1930 and colleges were here to help us think thoughts rather than as part of the jobs pipeline.
I agree with the value of studying arts, social sciences, etc. But why should taxpayers cover that? There are lots of online courses which could provide the same education for free. Community colleges also show that it's possible to provide a decent in-person education at a fraction of the cost of major universities. If we could get tuition under control, then federal tuition assistance would be fine, but also hardly necessary. Federal tuition assistance creates a perverse incentive.
Individuals may rationally avoid the downside risk of a college degree, even if the expected value is positive. As a toy example, suppose college costs $200k and increases lifetime earnings by $2m 90% of the time, or by $0 10% of the time. As a high school grad, I'm not sure I would take those odds; $200k of debt could ruin my life. But the government may prefer that everyone take this gamble, because most individuals will benefit and also it will pay for itself in increased tax revenue, etc.
I'm not sure how well this maps to reality, and maybe you're right-- maybe the government should only offer loans, and only to students who have a high probability of paying them off. But I still feel that this is a step in the right direction.
Why should taxpayers pay for jobs training programs? since these vocational students expect to make lots of money with their certificate in hand, they can just take out a loan. this makes an actually rational system where the cost of learning is forced to be commensurate with the economic value of the output after the job program
The issue IMO is precisely that taxpayers don’t pay, they give out loans. Yes, sometimes those loans are “forgiven”, but only after decades of struggle and distress. And I put forgiven in scare quotes because often the original balance has been paid by then anyway.
Not providing loans for programs that will not provide the means for a student to repay them is the right thing to do, as those loans are a path for the exploitation of the student.
Sure, continue providing free k-12 education. Continue funding community colleges and free online courses. But funding private universities with public money creates a huge misaligned incentive. Universities are incentivized not to provide the best education, but the best experience so that they can attract more students and more public money. This can be actually detrimental to education - e.g. grade inflation because universities are unwilling to delay graduation for underperforming students, which reduces the rigor of education for high performers.
> The purpose of higher education is not to get you a job.
This is the line universities give, knowing full well that the only reason students pay exorbitant tuitions is because bachelor’s degrees are necessary for most salaried jobs in the US. Schools want to have their cake and eat it too. If education isn’t about the money they should have no problem charging lower tuition rather than paying their presidents million dollar salaries.
The reason lecture halls are packed at 7:50am on a Monday is not because students are thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial function, but because Calc 1 is a prerequisite to their engineering degree, which is a prerequisite to their job.
If one thinks doing simple derivatives is a chore, I'd suggest a career other than engineering.
I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers.
I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000, without using a calculator or phoning a friend. He was surprised at how many could not, and it was an easy way to filter out the no hires.
It's a trivial task and certainly does not require attending an early morning class. In fact, most engineering does not require the degree. Almost everything in the field is self-learnable in a short period. The reason the students are in the class at 0750 is not to learn how to do this, since it is trivial and almost everyone I know could do it by the 10th standard two years prior to college. It's because no matter what you know, the credential is bestowed by 4 year attendance of 0750 classes, and the credential is what the university provides.
An engineer who does not understand the math is not an engineer, but a technician. Technicians can do very good work as the result of experience. But knowing the math behind it is what makes an engineer.
Credentialism is why the recruiter asked the simple math question.
I remember an engineer who was trying to solve a noise problem in an analog circuit. He spent days trying various combinations of resistors and capacitors. Finally, a real engineer stepped in, did a quick calculation, and picked the correct resistor and capacitor and solved the problem in a few minutes.
> None of my real engineering jobs benefited from it.
At Boeing, there were two parallel engineering groups. The design group, and the stress group. The design group did things by eye, the stress group did the math.
I was in the design group. I did the math for my work (and so did a couple others), and we got the good assignments as a result. the stress group normally required a master's degree, but they invited me to join their group. (I declined, because I wanted to do design work, not check other peoples' work.) But it was a very nice compliment from the stress guys.
I've also seen the EEs at work who avoided the math. They'd just try random things until the circuit worked.
When my house was built, an architect designed it. But a structural engineer did the math on it - and I have copy of his work. It involved the usual beam formulae. But sometimes a beam is not in the book of formulae, and you gotta use calculus to do the stress calculations.
I've also watched engineers use book formulae with zero understanding of the basis of them. I was not impressed.
Engineering is math. If your job doesn't need math, it's more of a technician job.
Math is also needed to engineer a building that won't fall down in an earthquake, or is susceptible to dynamic instability in a wind storm. Same for a bridge. And a submarine. And so on.
P.S. Have fun guessing if your hydraulic feedback flight control system can go unstable and tear itself apart. Or if the spinning differential gearbox will disintegrate if it hits the stops. Or if the gear profile is minimum weight for the loads.
This is the kind of attitude exposes the hubris that leaves schools exposed. The idea that students should pretend this isn’t largely irrelevant work, ignore the opportunity costs of this subject, pay enormous amounts of money, and be happy for the privilege.
> I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000
This point would have been stronger if the recruiter asked some calculus trivia like the derivative of sin(2x). Perhaps this means the recruiter agrees with me that it is not nearly as useful as schools think it is.
The problem is administrators and professors who want to be paid well, since they are performing essential white collar job training, but do not want to be accountable for actually prioritizing the knowledge students will actually need. Having their cake and eating it too.
Those students should be separated from the students that want to learn, I know who I want to hire, or be sitting next to on the line and so does everyone else with a pulse: it's the person that is thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial.
Not the loser sitting in a class they hate, living out their big plan to set their life on fire doing a job that makes them sad because they love money.
I enjoyed most of my math classes like multivariate calculus and differential equations, though I pursued my BS and MS degrees in CS later in life, and was already independently wealthy so didn't need to take out student loans. I also took many of the core STEM courses first at a California community college, which were honestly quite rigorous, and not obviously lower quality education than what I got at UCSD. The idea that students must go into vast debt attending an expensive 4 year university is dubious.
It's also easy to condescend and indict the students who may not necessarily love every single class they're forced to take. They're also not going to be using most of the concepts they're required to learn. In my personal career I've worked in software engineering, computational biology, machine learning, and quantitative finance, yet I don't think I've ever had to explicitly use Stokes' theorem or Cauchy-Euler equations. There are various tools I've used which I'm sure relied on these mathematics, yet it's really only at the frontier of advanced research that people will be using anything more complex than algebra.
> Making art and humanities programs demonstrate some kind of pecuniary benefit is disgusting and myopic. My wife pursued English because she loves writing. She's earned about 0 dollars from that degree because she's home with our kids. And that's OK! Our lives are so much richer because of her degree—as well as the classes I took from the English department. So we should penalize the humanities because it merely makes people better thinkers and doesn't have as high of an ROI as an MBA? Yuck!
It's not a given that most arts/humanities programs are impacted. Just some arcane ones.
And while we're at it, they really should can the MFA programs. Most MFA programs exist just to milk money out of students.
No offense to your wife, but why should the taxpayers fund her English degree so that she can then stay home with the kids? Sure, there might be some diffuse societal benefit, but if you can’t quantify it, how can we collectively decide if the benefit is worth the cost?
I'm all for informed consent - publish the data - but leave the choice to the individual. The goal of education is self-improvement, not necessarily/only money.
The way student debt is (mis)managed is a different issue.
imo this is pants on head backwards. The whole problem with the current university system is that it has become exclusively a credentialing system that everyone uses to justify higher salaries. We’ve completely left the education part of it by the wayside…except for the liberal arts majors who are actually there just to learn! This rule is just encoding the existing tulip mania into federal law directly, by making it clear that the ONLY reason one goes to school is for future $$$
Still it would seem to make some amount of sense for federal aid to be restricted to economically advantageous persuits, no? Doesn't mean that's the only thing institutions can offer nor do I necessarily think it's the best way to improve the status quo.
On the contrary, who else is going to fund fundamental research that is not immediately useful? Stuff that prints money will have no problem finding funding, looking at the greater picture is exactly what the government is supposed to do
How much of these new grad researchers have undergrad degrees in music vs. science or math? I’d suspect there’s very few of the former, and even then they got the position despite their music degree not because of it.
Do you only consider fundamental research in maths or sciences worth pursuing? Do you even realise how much of your everyday life depends on the results of fundamental research in philosophy and humanities?
> Do you even realise how much of your everyday life depends on the results of fundamental research in philosophy and humanities?
Approximately zero? Could you articulate what exactly you have in mind here?
A liberal arts degree is certainly beneficial to the individual's broader understanding of the world, and I certainly would prefer my elected representatives to have a thorough grasp of history and philosophy, but where is the fundamental research that my everyday life depends on?
Human rights? Personal freedom? The entire structure of society? The economy? The political system? Laws? Modern views on morality? Even science itself was created by philosophy, what is knowledge and how to get it is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. Every time you interact with other human beings you're doing through the lens of what philosophy and humanities achieved in the last millenia
The same private sector that's famous for not wanting to hire juniors even though the seniors obviously need to come from somewhere? People are allowed to move between employers at will despite any investment in their education. Economically advantageous to the individual and to the employer are separate things.
No, it's making it clear that government aid, i.e. taxpayer money, should not be paying for education that won't result in the population, and in turn the government, earning more.
liberal arts majors who are actually there just to learn
Yeah, this comment demonstrates my own perspective on it quite well, in that it's likely just another bald political attack by the current administration on education, wherein a bureaucrat will get to decide what does and does not constitute a worthwhile degree, and is allowed to become the gatekeeper of what universities may teach by selective topic by topic defunding.
Will they decide to ignore the salaries of students "not working in their field"? That could be used as an instant bludgeon against anything centered on history, philosophy, or other educational paths that do not generally have high paying careers associated with them, even if those graduating from them do generally earn more on average than those with only a high school diploma.
Twenty years ago something like half of those in tech didn't have a college degree of any kind. Plenty of businesses are run by folks that don't have college degrees. Crafting statistics through careful manipulation of who is counted for making the comparisons could be used to exclude almost any set of courses that isn't STEM, law or medicine.
This isn't banning such programs. The question is why the federal government needs to support them.
If you want to set up a teaching program to learn something arcane, by all means go for it and charge a fair/reasonable/whatever amount. Just because you're teaching it doesn't mean the Federal government should give you money. Let those who can afford it pay for it. If not many can, you need to make an argument why your program should be subsidized (and by who)? It shouldn't be a default that the support will come from the Federal government.
From the article:
> Specifically, certificate programs in cosmetology and somatic body work have the highest predicted failure rates.
Do you really want to make the case that the Federal government should fund these?
For more common arts/music programs, the Federal government can fund arts/music initiatives (not tied to education).
Education is not something arcane, TBH it's really the vocational schools that should be forced to call themselves something different. 99% of university students are not there for an education, they are in welding school upper-middle-class edition. Vocational programs are essential infrastructure, but they are not education, and those programs should not receive funds allocated for education or be held to the same standards as education programs and vice versa.
E.g. most computer science departments where computer science is not taught, students just participate in a charade of memorizing arbitrary facts that they never even attempt to understand in order to get a certificate that entitles them to receive on-the-job training to glue javascript components together for 6 figures.
Elitist ivory tower as in free education for all that want it.
8th order effects like a well functioning society that isn't on the verge of collapse, where people live well, love each other, and think about interesting, important problems.
Distinct from the 1st order effects of a really high GDP thanks to all of the code monkeys we've trained to glue react components together: which has netted us a society on the verge of collapse, where poverty abounds, crime is universal, basic infrastructure like roads and water are crumbling, and we are plagued by mental illnesses, suicide, drug addiction, and mass shootings.
Hmm, if only there were any analogues in history that could show us the way forward, anyways, I've got to run, I've got a meeting in five with my agent who's going to show me how to 100x my SAAS revenue.
Briefly: education is concerned with thinking, vocational training is concerned with task performance. There are lots of synergies and gray areas between the two, e.g. certain kinds of task proficiency are really helpful tools while thinking (e.g. arithmetic), and thinking is a really helpful tool while task performing (e.g. an unseen permutation of a task)
That question probably deserves a much longer, more complete answer than this, but another poor imprecise framework is that education empowers people to tackle new problems poorly and taking lots of time, vocational training empowers people to tackle existing problems with known solutions excellently. In the language of the greeks, nous and techne.
> Do you really want to make the case that the Federal government should fund these?
No, but I don't think means testing is a better alternative. You and I both know that this is a wedge to punish perceived political enemies, as much as you know that the total number of people who graduate with a degree in "somatic body work" is such a small fraction of people as to be negligible
> Nationally, about 10,600 to 10,700 students graduate annually with a degree or certificate in the broader category of Somatic Bodywork & Therapeutic Services. The vast majority (over 10,500) specialize in Massage Therapy, while purely focused Somatic Bodywork programs see much smaller cohorts, averaging roughly 40 to 50 graduates per year across all US institutions.
(From Gemini)
This is kinda like saying we should get rid of encryption because a few people may use it for bad things, or that we should require identification before anyone can get on the Internet because some people may be hurt by it
If it's such a negligible amount of people then what is the issue with denying them student loans? Very few people will be affected by this, so you say; not worth arguing about then I suppose.
Gut feeling here is that this is going to result in significantly lower higher ed enrollment, and therefore a less educated populace.
We do not teach history or ethics, or much in general to our pipeline welders, but they make bank. Meanwhile our well educated teachers are paid nearly nothing. Both are needed (teachers arguably more so).
Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system. This will pull up the ladder on the younger generations.
We need a solution that both
increases educational access and quality everyone regardless of their career path, while also lowering tuition costs. This does not achieve that.
Aggravating the issue is the administration’s goal. They want an undereducated population and are using the more popular issue of student debt as a fig leaf. Note especially how it’s on the university to prove that each program justifies itself economically, increasing the administrative burden on colleges. If they really cared about limiting taxpayer burden, they’d exempt in-state tuition at state schools from this rule.
> But this new test, known as "do no harm," raises some thorny questions about the purpose of college. Like: Is it just about making more money?
If this is a fair question to ask students, then it is a fair question to ask the schools as well. They are the ones charging enormous amounts of money to students for this.
This doesn’t prevent people from learning to paint or play the clarinet. It prevents students from taking out enormous loans for it.
I think the corollary is about taxpayer accountability.
It's easy to make the argument:
"If we invest $1M in education, we will have $10M in additional future economic output, $4M in future taxes, and $20M less in law enforcement / criminal prosecution / jail fees. It improves global competitiveness."
That's a no-brainer. Education is a very high ROI investment for a country. Like infrastructure spending or industrial policy, it's about cold, hard economics.
One step more complex -- but equally high ROI -- is towards having a functioning democracy. That's economics, but a bit more squishy.
Investing in the arts, humanities, and music is a good thing as well. However, that's a very different bucket of money. I wouldn't lump it in with the former two.
I believe the argument was that they do contribute to a functioning democracy, as opposed to investment in training nurses and carpenters, who are being trained for economic reasons. The argument was that the two goals are so different that they should be funded differently.
Regardless of whether we classify it as humanities or political science (as neither seems to be looked at as terribly useful in the states), a population without some grasp of civics does not lend itself to a healthy democracy
Not everyone must be a plumber or electrician, but we're well-served by having some basic knowledge, and an ability to find answers to the questions that arise as we do basic handywork, such as changing a lightswitch or replacing a faucet. Similarly, we are well-served as a society when we can answer basic questions about our democracy past the age of 18; IE, shortly after testing ends, and typically before it actually matters - when voting.
Not everyone needs to become a licensed electrician, or have a deeper-than-average understanding of civics. But knowing someone you can trust with an answer that isn't purely to line their own pocket is still important.
I usually don't like to get into these subjects on HN, but I'll expand just a little bit on what I mean.
All political systems (all of them) have "holes" in that they're more or less dependent on individual virtue to function in a long-term fashion - some of them having holes so large they can only work as naïve thought experiments with perfect civically-minded (thus imaginary) people - and not academic knowledge, which is completely orthogonal to said virtue.
That "grasp of civics" you're talking about is the same, it's not about knowing but being willing to make some real thankless efforts; the culprits in the proverbial "Tragedy of the commons" aren't ignorant.
i like your framing of "holes" in political systems.
one way to put it is that a political system has "holes" if the ideal/desired outcome is not a Nash equilibrium.
however, my understanding (though i can't speak for the other commenters) is that the reasoning behind "humanities-educated people make better democracies" is NOT that humanities-educated people are more virtuous, and thus will willingly not degrade the commons (the reasoning you seem to be criticizing). rather, it's that humanities-educated people cannot be manipulated as easily by a demagogue (and other similar things).
the usually cited problem with democracy is that it gives the people the power to choose, but it does not automatically makes them capable to make good choices. that's where the education comes in.
clearly many questions require technical/domain knowledge to be answered and are not simply a matter of preference. for example, fixing your car, or building a bridge. and even running a business or cooking an elaborate meal. with technical knowledge, you are able to make better decisions whatever your preferences are. humanities education is then implied to be the "technical knowledge" for participating in society.
of course, in that case, we can discuss what should be the content of the "humanities education", but that's another discussion...
> rather, it's that humanities-educated people cannot be manipulated as easily by a demagogue (and other similar things).
I can see where you reasoning is coming from but I mostly disagree. I can see two factors that could prevent manipulation: 1. The rare case of wisdom (that I define as being strong willed enough to think independently and not fall for self-deception/wishful thinking + intelligent enough to think correctly) which doesn't apply here since education doesn't influence this and 2. Manipulation going too much against the previous indoctrination, which does apply but kinda defeats your point.
In fact, I'm mostly distrustful of intellectuals (!= intelligent people). That misattributed Thucydides quote about scholars ("The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.") further illustrated by Uncle Ted ("Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are (allowing for individual exceptions) the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated, the most pampered, dependent, and spineless group in America today.") summarize my position.
Where I do agree is that practical/technical knowledge allowing individuals to be more independent and less reliant on specialized technicians to change a light bulb is highly important. Sadly, the Western world I (we?) belong to has almost finished removing teaching of DIY and even the individual ability to do so (cf modern cars, appliances or operating systems). I suspect that this isn't a coincidence considering the aforementioned ramifications...
i agree that wisdom / an independent thinking spirit is an important factor to prevent manipulation and that it's not something easily taught.
but i also believe that in fact knowledge is another very important factor in resisting manipulation (absent from your list), and more generally, being part of a functioning democracy.
i mean here knowledge of lofty things like history, economics, sociology, which can then serve as a base to know and understand more practical things, like laws, regulations, taxes, government subsidies, or how roads, schools, or health insurance is funded -- otherwise how could anyone make any decision regarding these topics? and all of these things can be taught.
independent thinking is important but with zero knowledge you could maybe be convinced to join a cult or something, for example. like, for ancient peasants the king was effectively a god anyway.
of course, all of this is highly idealized. i agree with you and Uncle Ted. academia, in practice, often is not a place that champions these ideals. but maybe it could be.
> Sadly, the Western world I (we?) belong to has almost finished removing teaching of DIY and even the individual ability to do so
And it is false. Those are truthisms, except at one point, college can destroy people’s lives. College can teach people wrong things. College can misdirect people from being about to contribute to the economy and redirect them towards the political goals of the teachers, especially when those don’t derive revenue from their contribution to the economy. College can also misdirect people who would have been happier and more useful with immediate work.
There goes my demonstration: College can be harmful to society, it’s subjective to judge when the threshold was crossed. For my opinion, it was crossed in 2013 through politicization.
A lot of people severely underestimate the value and impact of the arts because they don't produce immediately visible results. But artistic works are often a massive source of inspiration and they help people through dark times.
> One (or a few) sculpture can satisfy the needs of a large community.
I cannot disagree more. You may as well say that no one should tell stories anymore because we already have the Iliad and Hamlet. You may as well say that Vincent van Gogh was wasting his time picking up a paintbrush because we already had so many great Renaissance paintings.
Art isn't a commodity where you spend 15 minutes a day Admiring Art and it gives you the aesthetic equivalent of your daily protein intake.
> But artistic works are often a massive source of inspiration and they help people through dark times
I completely agree with you, but
1) you can make art without taking out enormous loans and
2) if you want to pay cash or take out a private loan to attend these schools you still can
3) learning about art does not make you an artist, it makes you a museum curator.
The last one is probably the most important. An expensive degree does not make your painting more beautiful, or your notes more in-tune, or your bakery more delicious. It is a credential.
Here we have an example of someone who see college/university as a vocational training center for worker, instead of seeing it as higher education that inspire civilized thinker.
Right. And also, when you have paid $240k for that degree, don't write endless screeds complaining that the degree was a "scam" and that it's someone else's fault that you're not earning much with that degree.
Even in the 00s and 10s, there used to be people complaining bitterly that they have a lot of student loans after getting a degree in puppetry (seriously.) And the same people would have lit themselves on fire in a public square if they had been denied student loans for getting a puppetry degree.
I feel that you can't have it both ways: guaranteed student loans for any degree, no matter how impractical, and also complaining that some degrees funded with student loans don't lead to a lucrative career. Choose one or the other.
Is this like, a real sum of money americans pay for a degree? Overhead must be mind-boggiling if like just two students are needed to pay educator's salary for the period.
There are a lot of dumb people that pay ridiculous amounts for college. I went to a state school and they paid ME to go there. My job prospects have been just as good as anyone elses. I learned the same material they did. I had all the same experiences.
Hard to say I'm sure some pay that price, because that is the sticker price. However, most Americans are getting scholarsips of some sort. There's one college near me that automatically gives every student a 40% scholarship before they even look at what others you're eligible for.
That is the sticker price of college is a competition to be who is the most elite. There's also a scholarship competition, so if you have a higher sticker price, and then you give a scholarship, you can advertise you give the most scholarship money to your students.
Sticker prices are usually designed for specific cases (eg wealthy international students). However, the fact that there's no clear price is a huge problem, much like the American medical industry.
In my rural located college it was 9k per year for undergrad tuition if you lived in-state, add 5k or more if you aren't from the state, but you also needed food and a place to live and books and computer. I would expect atleast 12k per year for a decent college if you don't do anything but eat ramen. Maybe take 1-2k off for a community college, tuition makes it look like a bigger savings but there are a lot of extras you lose by not going to a campus university.
Of course you might need others things too like a car if you aren't on a larger more urban (and thus more expensive) campus. But that obviously varies.
The "good" univeristy in my state would be more like 20k for tuition in-state and like 35k for out of staters.
Yeah it is absolutely despicable to tell students that they shouldn't make a profit off their education, while the colleges are allowed to inflate tuition fees and profit as much off the student's education as possible.
If you look at the music teacher example you see the end result of these perverse incentives turning into a pyramid scheme. Being a music teacher at the college is one of the few profitable ways to pay off your student debt while staying in your preferred career so of course she doesn't want to give that up, she's still in debt.
If college isn't about money, that turns college into a consumer good, but if college is a consumer good, why should the government let people borrow money for their consumption?
By that logic the government should lend money to young people so they can go on expensive vacations and enjoy their youth.
Is United Airlines “just about making more money”? Yes. Has it done so by offering people a valuable product and generating massive consumer surplus? Also yes.
If it’s your own money, college can be whatever you want. When it’s someone else’s, they get to be involved in making a decision as to what college is for.
The problem is that the electorate tends to not understand the concept of second-order effects. For example, a college graduate in the arts might, directly or indirectly, generate more economic activity than someone without a college degree, regardless of the difference in income level of people in those two buckets.
That's an odd way to say "a country that elects stupid people deserves to collapse". It's true, but it's an odd way to say it, and also quite pessimistic.
Do countries actually collapse or it's another bit of christian end of the world lore? It doesn't have to be that dramatic to be noticed and course corrected. No, it won't be course corrected based on the hypothetical (even if it's highly likely hypothetical) before the feedback function slaps somebody in the face.
Countries collapse very often. The land, cities, and people remain, and organize into new countries. Democracy was meant to pre-empt this with a regular controlled collapse and handover, like a controlled forest burn, but a democracy itself can also collapse.
> This doesn’t prevent people from learning to paint or play the clarinet. It prevents students from taking out enormous loans for it.
The problem is going to that there's going to be a large shock to the system. As pointed out in the article, a lot of teachers make $55k. So basically no education degree should be awarded because the average worker is better than a teacher.
Eventually the supply of teachers will dry up so much that salaries will go up. But how many years do you think until that happens? And then add 4 to when the supply catches up. Although I would bet what happens is that states no longer require a degree.
Schools can develop training and scholarship programs. Maybe we'll find out a degree in Egyptology isn't necessary to teach basic reading and writing? Although walking like an Egyptian sure is fun. /s
Many educators are unionized. These days (it comes and goes, I wish it had been waxing when I was that age) the electricians' and HVAC techs' unions offer apprenticeships to pretty much all comers, not just the niece or nephew of a member.
Isn’t this already a solved problem with models that are used in various countries in the EU? Where the education is financed through taxes, thus you don’t pay anything up front, but keep paying for it for the rest of your life.
In Australia we have interest free loans, I believe they are issued by the government. You are only required to pay it back if you earn over a certain amount per year, in which case it’s like an extra tax that lasts until the loan is paid back or you earn less than threshold.
It’s not perfect but it sounds like a good starting point.
Room & board constitutes 1/2 - 2/3 of the cost of undergraduate school. Even in European countries with free tuition (and that's not as common as you think) students still often must take out loans for living costs. With financial aid the typical American student ends up financially similarly situated to their European counterparts.
The problem of college affordability is arguably another dimension of the housing crisis. You can look at the numbers yourself. Yet oddly I've never seen this pointed out or discussed, not in the media or anywhere else.
In principle an easy way to lower the cost of college would be for public universities to invest in building more subsidized or free dormitories. The problem is that most of the popular coastal universities are in areas where development is absurdly expensive and contentious, even for government.
England has a reasonably fair system where tuition fees are fixed and the loan functions more of like an additional tax only for university graduates (i.e. min income limit, low interest, etc.)
At least a decade ago the system was anything but fair. The income threshold for repayment was low, while the interest rate was very high. At that point, the expectation was that those who got an average job after graduation would pay an extra 10% income tax for 30 years, after which the debt would be forgiven. Those with good jobs would pay off the debt quickly enough, and they would pay much less overall for their education.
As a European, both the idea of taking a loan for a useless degree and the idea of considering this loan you took out of your own free will as an adult as some kind of evil and malicious thing you shouldn‘t have to pay back are extremely bizarre to me.
There are many programs that exploit credentialism to funnel public money into highly endowed universities. People leave with Bachelors degrees, Masters degrees, and even PhDs in fields that have no purpose but to serve the student as a crop to extract money from the government for. This kind of structure where the student has learned so little that no one finds their extra credentials worth the slightest wage premium is exploitative of students, certainly, but it also has knock-on effects as these under-educated over-credentialed people are then forced to request student loan waivers.
An atrocious way to take public funds and transfer them to private institutions. These kinds of things work so long as our economy is growing, but this kind of extractive behaviour will hurt us if we can't find the next great thing the next time.
I’m an arts graduate from a well-ranked public Canadian university where domestic/in-state students are heavily subsidized by public funds (domestic students pay only 20-30% of the real cost of enrollment[1]), and I’m probably more sympathetic to this rule than a lot of people in this thread.
A lot of my peers fell behind financially after graduation, struggled to find work relevant to their interests, and then concluded that they needed a master’s degree to become competitive. But in many cases the real problem was not that they lacked another credential or the right credential. They were aimless, had no clear professional direction, and were using more school to postpone dealing with that. They got into $200-300k CAD of debt because Canadian universities are built to enroll at scale and no real meaningful filter exists to weed out people who have no business going down this path. [2]
Universities encourage this because they want to have it both ways. They market the degree as a path to professional opportunity, admit at enormous scale, and charge enough to sustain constantly growing faculties (with the majority of those costs being borne by the public ledger). Then, when graduates struggle, they retreat to “education was never about earnings” and “you learned lots of useful soft skills that employers want.”
An arts degree should at least certify some meaningful level of writing ability, judgment, discipline, and intellectual competence. In my experience, the same credential was awarded to excellent students and to people who could barely construct an argument. Some of the dumbest arguments I heard during my degree were in fourth-year seminar courses.
Anecdotally, most of the international students I knew were very capable and competent, which made sense given how much they were paying to be there. Meanwhile, the domestic admissions system felt largely non-selective and seemed designed around educating as many people as possible. That may be a defensible public policy goal, but it also means the credential itself becomes a pretty weak signal and a lot of people were never there for educational enrichment or to pursue Liberal Arts as a meaningful field, but because their parents made them - and they thought they must have a degree to be successful.
Earnings are a crude metric, but “trust us, they became better thinkers” is not accountability. And funneling underemployed graduates into master’s programs and aimless paths are not a solution.
[2] The sad irony is that pretty much everyone I know (n=5) who took 2+ years between graduating high school and starting post-secondary got jobs or snazzy PhD offers shortly after graduating post-secondary, on top of having to pay nothing for tuition because parental contributions aren't expected for "independent" students for Canadian student aid. I think making more students discover themselves in the real world before letting them do post-secondary could genuinely yield better results in way-finding and independence that's critical for post-grad outcomes.
As a fellow arts graduate, I strongly agree. I’ve seen many friends and colleagues fall into catastrophic student loan debt as they tried to find some direction in life, helpfully exploited by universities along the way. It’s borderline predatory.
What if it takes decades or centuries to pay off for society and perhaps never for the individual (in strictly monetary terms)? How should these things be funded?
Could also look the other way around: if things pay off anyway, why should should tax payers fund it?
> if things pay off anyway, why should should tax payers fund it?
i believe the idea is that when someone is educated, it's not themselves alone that benefits from it, but rather everyone else around them. thus the interest in funding the education of other people.
> What if it takes decades or centuries to pay off for society and perhaps never for the individual (in strictly monetary terms)? How should these things be funded?
i'd look into how other things having such characteristics are funded. for example, research. a lot of research is indeed funded by companies because even though, say, "the cure for cancer" may be 40 years into the future, they do make money off of the incremental improvements along the way. what about more fundamental research? like, particle physics. or, whoever funded the research that led to the discovery of the structure of DNA, what were they thinking?
i haven't read a lot about it actually, but i get the idea that they were simply some forward/long-term thinking people.
... overall, i think these are good questions. the kind of questions people with a (ideal) humanities education should be more capable of answering (mine is lacking...)
When evaluating whether public money is well spent on education it must be more important how valuable it is to the public, not what the price for the work is to the individuals.
I like the "what if these workers stopped today" test:
Pick a professions. For example pick from 'trader', 'dentist', 'cleaner', 'sales person' or 'nurse'. Then imagine that all people in that profession stop working today.
How bad would it be for society? Is it better or worse than some other profession?
I think this is a much better test for value to society than looking at what people get payed.
For example, I think it would be much worse if all nurses stop working than if all bankers stop working. Yet bankers tend to get paid more.
Fascists and neoliberals don't understand or appreciate academic curiosity, art, history, philosophy, or electives because they value quick income maximization through modern undergraduate degree mills (most consumer-first universities these days) to the exclusion of all else.
make it 7 years instead of 3 and count median student debt as a factor. that would remove the obvious flaws.
of course it would be better to make college free, or give everyone zero interest federal loans that can be paid off with normal taxes and auto deferred until you start making serious money.
humanities should probably by funded with a different program anyway. ask a panel of experts how many graduates we need then offer X scholarships a year that upgrade to a full ride if your family is low income. allocate them with something like a national lottery where school districts nominate some amount of students based on their population.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 82.3 ms ] threadTrump himself took advantage of this by creating Trump university which was a for-profit degree mill.
All of those “schools” needs to be wiped off the map and hopefully get replaced by schools that show real value.
I don't personally think that efficiency should be the primary concern of colleges, but it should be a concern, and it just plain hasn't been for ages. And that indulgence has been cloaked in specious, ivory-tower claims about producing well-rounded students. "You can't complain about being require to take a 100-level history course because our job is to turn out renaissance scholars who can debate philosophy at cocktail parties before going to work doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with that."
All the while, those additional credit hours cost students a shitload of money and debt and take focus away from their actual fields of study.
Colleges and universities need a kick up the ass to make them actually give a shit about outcomes for their students. I'm not going to cry that they're getting one.
Actually, I didn't get 12 years of most of the liberal arts courses I took at university. A number of them were completely new to me - no exposure in K-12 at all.
And you're being creative with numbers. No - for an engineering degree, you don't need to take 4 more years of humanities courses. Just a few credits that extend your education by (likely) less than a year.
If those few liberal arts degrees you took in college were so valuable, why can't they be integrated into the k-12 curriculum? Or why couldn't you study them independently using free online resources, or at a community college? I'm not against people learning this stuff, and I enjoy reading about it in my spare time as much as the next guy. I'm just not clear why taxpayers should cover this when it's such an inefficient option.
I suspect your comment is exactly what they’re talking about. I actually agree with your claim, but with limits! And yet the proponents of your position always seem to want a blank check.
How much exactly should the taxpayers pay to ensure that little Timmy goes to college and gets “an appreciation for what makes life worth living”, and why that amount? And how do we know if it’s working or not?
I do get that not all education should be purely for economic reasons, but as an autodidact I feel that "learning for the sake of learning" does not need to come with the prices that people are paying for degrees.
According to Reddit [1] it was to discourage students from immediately declaring bankruptcy upon graduation.
I don't see why they couldn't have put a time limit on it though, if that was the reason. Say you can't declare bankruptcy for 7 years after you leave school.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StudentLoans/comments/ufejjg/why_ca...
premature optimization is the root of all evil. Seems like we shouldve actually shown that kids would do that before putting it into law
It's obvious that bankruptcy costs the lender, but how that cost gets absorbed is very important here. A mortgage or a car loan are secured debts, where the lender can repossess and sell the collateral, to pay off most or all of the losses if the borrow defaults on the loan. A student loan is an unsecured debt, so any defaults have to come out of the interest of the rest of the borrowers serviced by that loan program.
The more borrowers default on their payments, the higher the interest rate is needed to cover the write-downs. Without any protections against defaulting, interest rates would have to be near those of credit cards, while limiting when student loans can be discharged limits how much needs to be written down, which keeps interest rates lower.
Higher interest rates would not only make student loans cost more, it would also reduce their availability and increase the default rate, which could create positive feedback, causing the rates to increase significantly faster than inflation. Combine that with incentivization for college attendance already causing tuition itself to increase significantly faster than inflation, which itself makes student loans increasingly necessary, allowing student loans to be discharged during bankruptcy could have compounding effects on the fragile system that currently props up college attendance rates.
That still leaves the question of why the government should incentivize a significant portion of their constituency to be in college, (more than 1 out of every 13 US adults are currently enrolled) but I'll have have leave that question for politicians or maybe even voters.
Otherwise you end up in this perverse situation where the consumer degree tuition will be priced as if they were economically productive, which ends up pricing out poor people.
It's one thing if you're in a crazy desperate situation and someone takes advantage of you, I could get that. But if you're not desperate and you took money from someone else and can't pay it back? Theft.
The rest is just how we manage to keep that low on an aggregate level in our society that takes care of our own - which we want to do.
It's not like bankruptcy is painless.
Sometimes it's better for both parties to cut their losses and move on to do better things.
Looking at this from the other angle: if value can be created out of nothing it can also disappear into nothing when investment fails.
Bankruptcy is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Charging somebody with theft, whether appropriate or not, does not resolve the civil debt. So, they are convicted of theft and still haven't paid back their debt. Then what? Fine them? Seems pointless in a bankruptcy situation. Indentured servitude? Slavery is not ever a winning argument. Debtors' prison? That just shifts the indentured servitude to the state, has been tried extensively throughout history, and doesn't actually make things better. Bankruptcy as as solution acknowledges that the situation is unwinnable and starting over from nothing, with a public notice to others to be wary about extending credit, is likely the only way out.
> It's one thing if you're in a crazy desperate situation and someone takes advantage of you
In that kind of situation, declaring bankruptcy is likely not going to help you so much. Those people are going to come after you anyway.
I think you sort of fundamentally misunderstand this. Bankruptcy isn't thievery - it's a solution for people who get themselves into a bad situation and don't have a way forward. Say you bought a house with a mortgage, the value of the house has now dropped for some reason so you have negative equity, and you lose your job and can't afford to make the repayments any more. What should happen? You don't have money to pay what you owe, and you can't get it because your total net worth is negative. Saying that's theft doesn't help the question of what to do - society doesn't benefit from dumping on that poor person any more.
If bankruptcy was allowed then the obvious play would be to take the loan, max out credit cards right before graduation, then declare bankruptcy before you get your first job.
Lenders would respond by increasing interest rates dramatically and restricting loans to those who had assets. This would basically turn into loans being for people with wealthy parents or having eye-watering interest rates.
From the individuals' perspective, overusing uncollateralized debt to be discharged is a good deal. That loss is offset by the creditor by issuing higher interest to unsecured credit lines because people can default on their debts. From the creditor's perspective, it's risk adjusted for people who default.
It just logically follows. I can't help you understand past this.
I see you haven't heard of /r/churning. Although it doesn't involve bankruptcy, because then the sheriff comes down and takes your property from you...
Is it the low single digits of a student loan which is not easily dischargeable?
Or is it 18-30% like you’d expect from a loan where the recipient can discharge it more easily?
This proves the point.
"They are eating the dogs and cats." It simply isn't true. I got my student loans a quarter century ago. Back then the loans were dischargeable and low. My loans came in at like 4% interest at the time.
It is propaganda that it was a widespread problem and the "solution" was to legally protect banks from risk. Then rates exploded and regulatory capture kept people locked in.
So while student loans were technically dischargeable approx 28 years ago there were some big caveats.
Fact: they were dischargeable. Fact: there was no crisis else rates would have already factored in. Else the argument is they were losing money overall. They wouldn't do that for literal decades. Fact: after the loans were no longer dischargeable, banks were guaranteed their rates and stopped being competitive with them and rates increased.
Loans are still dischargeable under certain conditions.
You claimed that "a quarter century ago" student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, but that's not really true either. The restrictions started in 1978 with waiting periods and those waiting periods were eliminated in 1998 for government loans and shortly after that for private loans.
The period in which you got this 4% loan was within the period where bankruptcy protections were in place, not before it.
You are simply misremembering. If it’s true, scan and upload the loan agreement. I just don’t believe it based on how lenders operate.
If a negligible proportion of people would discharge the loans as you suggest then the need to do it is the "eating the dogs and cats" in this case, since it doesn't matter a whole lot if nobody can do something nobody would have done anyway.
So which one is it?
This is not market economics. This is regulatory capture. Market economics suggests they were more market based when there was risks to banks. The risks are removed and they can print out debt.
Except the regulations for student loan discharge started with government loans, not private loans.
Congress restricted discharge of government loans first, because they were trying to protect the continued existence of the program and the low interest rates.
You've had incorrect facts all throughout this thread and you're refusing to acknowledge all of the people trying to bring real facts into the discussion.
> The rules changed because banks wanted all their money instead of nearly all their money.
You're not understanding how interest rates work.
Banks aren't charities. They don't give people money and hope that it gets paid back. They set the interest rate in accordance with the risk.
There are two ways this can work:
1. The debts are easy to discharge in bankruptcy. Banks do their analyses, estimate how many will be lost ot bankruptcy, and increase interest rates until the net result makes lending justifiable.
2. The debts are hard to discharge. The analysis shows a higher recovery rate. They can lower interest rates because the risk of default is down.
There is not a 3rd scenario where banks keep interest rates low and eat the losses from bankruptcy.
If you think that a business wanting "all of their money" is greed then you don't understand how business works. If loans became a money-losing proposition, they just wouldn't loan the money! Though honestly there are some good arguments that we shouldn't be lending money to people who might not pay it back, but there are a lot of people who dislike this idea that we should only give loans to people pursuing careers that pay well.
Why should banks not accept risk at all? Why was 7 years protection not effective? I have seen no evidence that the previous protections banks had were insufficient.
Moreover, interest isn't just about risk, it's the time value of money. If you put money in a CD at a major bank which is FDIC insured, the risk of you losing that money is as close to zero as anything reasonably gets, but you still get paid interest.
The risk premium is on top of that. And the higher the risk, the more interest people have to pay.
The Bankruptcy Reform Act which introduced restrictions on discharging student loans was introduced in 1978, almost two centuries ago.
Loan dischargeability was further restricted in subsequent years.
If you got your loans a quarter century ago, you were deep into the time when it was hard to discharge loans. You are remembering wrong.
Yes, this was a thing in (IIRC) the late 70s / early 80s, and the fed crackdown on the non-dischargeability of school loans in bankruptcy was enacted very quickly in response.
I myself got my bachelors in '79 and read about this idea and did not try it cos it was so incredibly unethical (and it sounded risky). In the words of the infamous Vince Lombardi, "Nice guys finish last."
Basically proving the point that the loan shouldn't have been given out in the first place.
The justification for student loans being exempt from bankruptcy is simply that there is no asset to be repossessed. Car loans, mortgages, and HELOCs are different. Credit cards have very high interest to pay for the higher risk. I guess we could have student loans with 29% interest, would that be preferable?
No, they wouldn't. Source: go back a couple decades, and student loans had low interest rates and were dischargeable in bankruptcy. It was an option. And, in fact, practically nobody did that.
Simply, people were not playing the game that way in any serious way. I am pretty sure I have never met a single person who declared bankruptcy purely to avoid a student loan.
Student loans are still dischargeable in bankruptcy to this very day, but there are restrictions.
Those restrictions started being introduced in 1978, so more than a couple decades ago.
I personally would want to see it with greater student participation/testing. The US education has been watered down to be so easy specifically because failing reduces LTV of a student. They want to just crank out degrees to as many people as they can. I personally think we need to figure out the healthy balance of education we need, because college for all isn’t it. Then just pay for them to learn at a high expectation level. Private schools will still exist to pump out full price degrees and that’s fine too.
It also should not waste tax payer’s money of worthless degrees
The US has as many aircraft carriers as the entire rest of the world combined, and thats not because NATO requested it. Nor does NATO demand the US produce 20 million dollar a piece missles.
I don't really see why some no name university can confer a bachelor's in some bullshit field, but the respectable local trade school cannot confer a bachelor's in plumbing. They honestly have more of a right to do so.
That's an accurate name, and only seems pejorative if you see learning a trade as lesser than studying academics.
> name university can confer a bachelor's in some bullshit field, but the respectable local trade school cannot confer a bachelor's in plumbing
This misunderstands what the different kinds of credentials are.
Although, unfortunately, I suspect that this will be gamed by things like “this is super unique diploma” and there are no pros on market yet. Rotate that every 5 years and voila. I’m sure that every smart people are already thinking about schemes much more elaborate
Why would it not just compare them to the average person who skips school, which can be a combination of better and worse achievers? Is there some part I'm missing where the academically struggling are selectively compared to elite school-skippers?
>> If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college,
Lots of things affect earnings. Obviously education is one of them, but it's not the only one.
Location, economic environment, social status, personal network - all are factors. In other words comparing unequal things leads to unequal results.
For example, a first-generation college attendee gets a solid job working at a non-profit helping others. Someone else in the same town goes straight into Dad's profitable factory as a manager.
Of course those might be outliers. We can use statistics to smooth things. But equally we can use statistics to show anything we want.
Yes, there are lots of really crap colleges. There are colleges that specialize in nonsense degrees in useless subjects. (English Poetry you say? Hah. Poets never made any money...)
But equally there are lots of community colleges, taking in marginal students, giving them opportunities where others won't. Some, maybe most, of those students won't make it. But some will.
The effect of a rule like this is that colleges are forced to game the system. To exclude those who might fail. To reduce social mobility.
A cynic might even suggest this is the real goal of the rule to begin with.
I'm not sure how well this maps to reality, and maybe you're right-- maybe the government should only offer loans, and only to students who have a high probability of paying them off. But I still feel that this is a step in the right direction.
Not providing loans for programs that will not provide the means for a student to repay them is the right thing to do, as those loans are a path for the exploitation of the student.
This is the line universities give, knowing full well that the only reason students pay exorbitant tuitions is because bachelor’s degrees are necessary for most salaried jobs in the US. Schools want to have their cake and eat it too. If education isn’t about the money they should have no problem charging lower tuition rather than paying their presidents million dollar salaries.
The reason lecture halls are packed at 7:50am on a Monday is not because students are thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial function, but because Calc 1 is a prerequisite to their engineering degree, which is a prerequisite to their job.
I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers.
I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000, without using a calculator or phoning a friend. He was surprised at how many could not, and it was an easy way to filter out the no hires.
Credentialism is why the recruiter asked the simple math question.
I have an engineering degree and did "real" engineering (electronics/semiconductors) before switching to SW.
Almost all my engineering courses required calculus knowledge. None of my real engineering jobs benefited from it.
And I say that as someone who tried to find any and every excuse to use calculus at work. I love calculus.
My role is not an outlier. Every grad who came back to talk to students said the same.
At Boeing, there were two parallel engineering groups. The design group, and the stress group. The design group did things by eye, the stress group did the math.
I was in the design group. I did the math for my work (and so did a couple others), and we got the good assignments as a result. the stress group normally required a master's degree, but they invited me to join their group. (I declined, because I wanted to do design work, not check other peoples' work.) But it was a very nice compliment from the stress guys.
I've also seen the EEs at work who avoided the math. They'd just try random things until the circuit worked.
When my house was built, an architect designed it. But a structural engineer did the math on it - and I have copy of his work. It involved the usual beam formulae. But sometimes a beam is not in the book of formulae, and you gotta use calculus to do the stress calculations.
I've also watched engineers use book formulae with zero understanding of the basis of them. I was not impressed.
Math is also needed to engineer a building that won't fall down in an earthquake, or is susceptible to dynamic instability in a wind storm. Same for a bridge. And a submarine. And so on.
> I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000
This point would have been stronger if the recruiter asked some calculus trivia like the derivative of sin(2x). Perhaps this means the recruiter agrees with me that it is not nearly as useful as schools think it is.
The problem is administrators and professors who want to be paid well, since they are performing essential white collar job training, but do not want to be accountable for actually prioritizing the knowledge students will actually need. Having their cake and eating it too.
Not the loser sitting in a class they hate, living out their big plan to set their life on fire doing a job that makes them sad because they love money.
It's also easy to condescend and indict the students who may not necessarily love every single class they're forced to take. They're also not going to be using most of the concepts they're required to learn. In my personal career I've worked in software engineering, computational biology, machine learning, and quantitative finance, yet I don't think I've ever had to explicitly use Stokes' theorem or Cauchy-Euler equations. There are various tools I've used which I'm sure relied on these mathematics, yet it's really only at the frontier of advanced research that people will be using anything more complex than algebra.
It's not a given that most arts/humanities programs are impacted. Just some arcane ones.
And while we're at it, they really should can the MFA programs. Most MFA programs exist just to milk money out of students.
The way student debt is (mis)managed is a different issue.
The choice is not being taken away - the Federal government is merely telling the universities to find some other way to fund those programs.
Approximately zero? Could you articulate what exactly you have in mind here?
A liberal arts degree is certainly beneficial to the individual's broader understanding of the world, and I certainly would prefer my elected representatives to have a thorough grasp of history and philosophy, but where is the fundamental research that my everyday life depends on?
liberal arts majors who are actually there just to learn
s/learn/be indoctrinated/
Yeah, this comment demonstrates my own perspective on it quite well, in that it's likely just another bald political attack by the current administration on education, wherein a bureaucrat will get to decide what does and does not constitute a worthwhile degree, and is allowed to become the gatekeeper of what universities may teach by selective topic by topic defunding.
Will they decide to ignore the salaries of students "not working in their field"? That could be used as an instant bludgeon against anything centered on history, philosophy, or other educational paths that do not generally have high paying careers associated with them, even if those graduating from them do generally earn more on average than those with only a high school diploma.
Twenty years ago something like half of those in tech didn't have a college degree of any kind. Plenty of businesses are run by folks that don't have college degrees. Crafting statistics through careful manipulation of who is counted for making the comparisons could be used to exclude almost any set of courses that isn't STEM, law or medicine.
I didn't go to college to get an engineering degree. I am a born engineer and I wanted very much to learn the craft.
My diploma sits in the basement somewhere. I never put it on the wall.
If you want to set up a teaching program to learn something arcane, by all means go for it and charge a fair/reasonable/whatever amount. Just because you're teaching it doesn't mean the Federal government should give you money. Let those who can afford it pay for it. If not many can, you need to make an argument why your program should be subsidized (and by who)? It shouldn't be a default that the support will come from the Federal government.
From the article:
> Specifically, certificate programs in cosmetology and somatic body work have the highest predicted failure rates.
Do you really want to make the case that the Federal government should fund these?
For more common arts/music programs, the Federal government can fund arts/music initiatives (not tied to education).
E.g. most computer science departments where computer science is not taught, students just participate in a charade of memorizing arbitrary facts that they never even attempt to understand in order to get a certificate that entitles them to receive on-the-job training to glue javascript components together for 6 figures.
Job training != education
Elitist ivory tower as in free education for all that want it.
8th order effects like a well functioning society that isn't on the verge of collapse, where people live well, love each other, and think about interesting, important problems.
Distinct from the 1st order effects of a really high GDP thanks to all of the code monkeys we've trained to glue react components together: which has netted us a society on the verge of collapse, where poverty abounds, crime is universal, basic infrastructure like roads and water are crumbling, and we are plagued by mental illnesses, suicide, drug addiction, and mass shootings.
Hmm, if only there were any analogues in history that could show us the way forward, anyways, I've got to run, I've got a meeting in five with my agent who's going to show me how to 100x my SAAS revenue.
That question probably deserves a much longer, more complete answer than this, but another poor imprecise framework is that education empowers people to tackle new problems poorly and taking lots of time, vocational training empowers people to tackle existing problems with known solutions excellently. In the language of the greeks, nous and techne.
No, but I don't think means testing is a better alternative. You and I both know that this is a wedge to punish perceived political enemies, as much as you know that the total number of people who graduate with a degree in "somatic body work" is such a small fraction of people as to be negligible
> Nationally, about 10,600 to 10,700 students graduate annually with a degree or certificate in the broader category of Somatic Bodywork & Therapeutic Services. The vast majority (over 10,500) specialize in Massage Therapy, while purely focused Somatic Bodywork programs see much smaller cohorts, averaging roughly 40 to 50 graduates per year across all US institutions. (From Gemini)
This is kinda like saying we should get rid of encryption because a few people may use it for bad things, or that we should require identification before anyone can get on the Internet because some people may be hurt by it
We do not teach history or ethics, or much in general to our pipeline welders, but they make bank. Meanwhile our well educated teachers are paid nearly nothing. Both are needed (teachers arguably more so).
Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system. This will pull up the ladder on the younger generations.
We need a solution that both increases educational access and quality everyone regardless of their career path, while also lowering tuition costs. This does not achieve that.
Also, if history and philosophy are so important maybe we can come up with a more affordable way to teach them to people those things than university.
Jesus Mary and Joseph we are cooked.
A significant reason it is insanely expensive is because we keep shoveling public money into it.
Higher ed is a cash incinerating inferno. When there is an out of control fire you must stop throwing fuel into it.
If this is a fair question to ask students, then it is a fair question to ask the schools as well. They are the ones charging enormous amounts of money to students for this.
This doesn’t prevent people from learning to paint or play the clarinet. It prevents students from taking out enormous loans for it.
It's easy to make the argument:
"If we invest $1M in education, we will have $10M in additional future economic output, $4M in future taxes, and $20M less in law enforcement / criminal prosecution / jail fees. It improves global competitiveness."
That's a no-brainer. Education is a very high ROI investment for a country. Like infrastructure spending or industrial policy, it's about cold, hard economics.
One step more complex -- but equally high ROI -- is towards having a functioning democracy. That's economics, but a bit more squishy.
Investing in the arts, humanities, and music is a good thing as well. However, that's a very different bucket of money. I wouldn't lump it in with the former two.
Not everyone must be a plumber or electrician, but we're well-served by having some basic knowledge, and an ability to find answers to the questions that arise as we do basic handywork, such as changing a lightswitch or replacing a faucet. Similarly, we are well-served as a society when we can answer basic questions about our democracy past the age of 18; IE, shortly after testing ends, and typically before it actually matters - when voting.
Not everyone needs to become a licensed electrician, or have a deeper-than-average understanding of civics. But knowing someone you can trust with an answer that isn't purely to line their own pocket is still important.
All political systems (all of them) have "holes" in that they're more or less dependent on individual virtue to function in a long-term fashion - some of them having holes so large they can only work as naïve thought experiments with perfect civically-minded (thus imaginary) people - and not academic knowledge, which is completely orthogonal to said virtue.
That "grasp of civics" you're talking about is the same, it's not about knowing but being willing to make some real thankless efforts; the culprits in the proverbial "Tragedy of the commons" aren't ignorant.
however, my understanding (though i can't speak for the other commenters) is that the reasoning behind "humanities-educated people make better democracies" is NOT that humanities-educated people are more virtuous, and thus will willingly not degrade the commons (the reasoning you seem to be criticizing). rather, it's that humanities-educated people cannot be manipulated as easily by a demagogue (and other similar things).
the usually cited problem with democracy is that it gives the people the power to choose, but it does not automatically makes them capable to make good choices. that's where the education comes in.
clearly many questions require technical/domain knowledge to be answered and are not simply a matter of preference. for example, fixing your car, or building a bridge. and even running a business or cooking an elaborate meal. with technical knowledge, you are able to make better decisions whatever your preferences are. humanities education is then implied to be the "technical knowledge" for participating in society.
of course, in that case, we can discuss what should be the content of the "humanities education", but that's another discussion...
I can see where you reasoning is coming from but I mostly disagree. I can see two factors that could prevent manipulation: 1. The rare case of wisdom (that I define as being strong willed enough to think independently and not fall for self-deception/wishful thinking + intelligent enough to think correctly) which doesn't apply here since education doesn't influence this and 2. Manipulation going too much against the previous indoctrination, which does apply but kinda defeats your point.
In fact, I'm mostly distrustful of intellectuals (!= intelligent people). That misattributed Thucydides quote about scholars ("The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.") further illustrated by Uncle Ted ("Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are (allowing for individual exceptions) the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated, the most pampered, dependent, and spineless group in America today.") summarize my position.
Where I do agree is that practical/technical knowledge allowing individuals to be more independent and less reliant on specialized technicians to change a light bulb is highly important. Sadly, the Western world I (we?) belong to has almost finished removing teaching of DIY and even the individual ability to do so (cf modern cars, appliances or operating systems). I suspect that this isn't a coincidence considering the aforementioned ramifications...
but i also believe that in fact knowledge is another very important factor in resisting manipulation (absent from your list), and more generally, being part of a functioning democracy. i mean here knowledge of lofty things like history, economics, sociology, which can then serve as a base to know and understand more practical things, like laws, regulations, taxes, government subsidies, or how roads, schools, or health insurance is funded -- otherwise how could anyone make any decision regarding these topics? and all of these things can be taught.
independent thinking is important but with zero knowledge you could maybe be convinced to join a cult or something, for example. like, for ancient peasants the king was effectively a god anyway.
of course, all of this is highly idealized. i agree with you and Uncle Ted. academia, in practice, often is not a place that champions these ideals. but maybe it could be.
> Sadly, the Western world I (we?) belong to has almost finished removing teaching of DIY and even the individual ability to do so
yeah, i fear these developments
And it is false. Those are truthisms, except at one point, college can destroy people’s lives. College can teach people wrong things. College can misdirect people from being about to contribute to the economy and redirect them towards the political goals of the teachers, especially when those don’t derive revenue from their contribution to the economy. College can also misdirect people who would have been happier and more useful with immediate work.
There goes my demonstration: College can be harmful to society, it’s subjective to judge when the threshold was crossed. For my opinion, it was crossed in 2013 through politicization.
A lot more than we have now.
> One (or a few) sculpture can satisfy the needs of a large community.
I cannot disagree more. You may as well say that no one should tell stories anymore because we already have the Iliad and Hamlet. You may as well say that Vincent van Gogh was wasting his time picking up a paintbrush because we already had so many great Renaissance paintings.
Art isn't a commodity where you spend 15 minutes a day Admiring Art and it gives you the aesthetic equivalent of your daily protein intake.
I completely agree with you, but
1) you can make art without taking out enormous loans and
2) if you want to pay cash or take out a private loan to attend these schools you still can
3) learning about art does not make you an artist, it makes you a museum curator.
The last one is probably the most important. An expensive degree does not make your painting more beautiful, or your notes more in-tune, or your bakery more delicious. It is a credential.
Even in the 00s and 10s, there used to be people complaining bitterly that they have a lot of student loans after getting a degree in puppetry (seriously.) And the same people would have lit themselves on fire in a public square if they had been denied student loans for getting a puppetry degree.
I feel that you can't have it both ways: guaranteed student loans for any degree, no matter how impractical, and also complaining that some degrees funded with student loans don't lead to a lucrative career. Choose one or the other.
A fool and his money are easily parted.
That is the sticker price of college is a competition to be who is the most elite. There's also a scholarship competition, so if you have a higher sticker price, and then you give a scholarship, you can advertise you give the most scholarship money to your students.
Of course you might need others things too like a car if you aren't on a larger more urban (and thus more expensive) campus. But that obviously varies.
The "good" univeristy in my state would be more like 20k for tuition in-state and like 35k for out of staters.
If you look at the music teacher example you see the end result of these perverse incentives turning into a pyramid scheme. Being a music teacher at the college is one of the few profitable ways to pay off your student debt while staying in your preferred career so of course she doesn't want to give that up, she's still in debt.
If college isn't about money, that turns college into a consumer good, but if college is a consumer good, why should the government let people borrow money for their consumption?
By that logic the government should lend money to young people so they can go on expensive vacations and enjoy their youth.
The problem is that the electorate tends to not understand the concept of second-order effects. For example, a college graduate in the arts might, directly or indirectly, generate more economic activity than someone without a college degree, regardless of the difference in income level of people in those two buckets.
The problem is going to that there's going to be a large shock to the system. As pointed out in the article, a lot of teachers make $55k. So basically no education degree should be awarded because the average worker is better than a teacher.
Eventually the supply of teachers will dry up so much that salaries will go up. But how many years do you think until that happens? And then add 4 to when the supply catches up. Although I would bet what happens is that states no longer require a degree.
Many educators are unionized. These days (it comes and goes, I wish it had been waxing when I was that age) the electricians' and HVAC techs' unions offer apprenticeships to pretty much all comers, not just the niece or nephew of a member.
Whether public or private it seems that the correct price that all systems asymptotically approach is exactly infinity.
It’s not perfect but it sounds like a good starting point.
The problem of college affordability is arguably another dimension of the housing crisis. You can look at the numbers yourself. Yet oddly I've never seen this pointed out or discussed, not in the media or anywhere else.
In principle an easy way to lower the cost of college would be for public universities to invest in building more subsidized or free dormitories. The problem is that most of the popular coastal universities are in areas where development is absurdly expensive and contentious, even for government.
An atrocious way to take public funds and transfer them to private institutions. These kinds of things work so long as our economy is growing, but this kind of extractive behaviour will hurt us if we can't find the next great thing the next time.
Oh, we'll just lower requirements for teachers so they don't need a degree...ok [1]
[1] https://www.k12dive.com/news/florida-to-let-veterans-spouses...
A lot of my peers fell behind financially after graduation, struggled to find work relevant to their interests, and then concluded that they needed a master’s degree to become competitive. But in many cases the real problem was not that they lacked another credential or the right credential. They were aimless, had no clear professional direction, and were using more school to postpone dealing with that. They got into $200-300k CAD of debt because Canadian universities are built to enroll at scale and no real meaningful filter exists to weed out people who have no business going down this path. [2]
Universities encourage this because they want to have it both ways. They market the degree as a path to professional opportunity, admit at enormous scale, and charge enough to sustain constantly growing faculties (with the majority of those costs being borne by the public ledger). Then, when graduates struggle, they retreat to “education was never about earnings” and “you learned lots of useful soft skills that employers want.”
An arts degree should at least certify some meaningful level of writing ability, judgment, discipline, and intellectual competence. In my experience, the same credential was awarded to excellent students and to people who could barely construct an argument. Some of the dumbest arguments I heard during my degree were in fourth-year seminar courses.
Anecdotally, most of the international students I knew were very capable and competent, which made sense given how much they were paying to be there. Meanwhile, the domestic admissions system felt largely non-selective and seemed designed around educating as many people as possible. That may be a defensible public policy goal, but it also means the credential itself becomes a pretty weak signal and a lot of people were never there for educational enrichment or to pursue Liberal Arts as a meaningful field, but because their parents made them - and they thought they must have a degree to be successful.
Earnings are a crude metric, but “trust us, they became better thinkers” is not accountability. And funneling underemployed graduates into master’s programs and aimless paths are not a solution.
[1] https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/1896-who-pays-universit...
[2] The sad irony is that pretty much everyone I know (n=5) who took 2+ years between graduating high school and starting post-secondary got jobs or snazzy PhD offers shortly after graduating post-secondary, on top of having to pay nothing for tuition because parental contributions aren't expected for "independent" students for Canadian student aid. I think making more students discover themselves in the real world before letting them do post-secondary could genuinely yield better results in way-finding and independence that's critical for post-grad outcomes.
Could also look the other way around: if things pay off anyway, why should should tax payers fund it?
i believe the idea is that when someone is educated, it's not themselves alone that benefits from it, but rather everyone else around them. thus the interest in funding the education of other people.
> What if it takes decades or centuries to pay off for society and perhaps never for the individual (in strictly monetary terms)? How should these things be funded?
i'd look into how other things having such characteristics are funded. for example, research. a lot of research is indeed funded by companies because even though, say, "the cure for cancer" may be 40 years into the future, they do make money off of the incremental improvements along the way. what about more fundamental research? like, particle physics. or, whoever funded the research that led to the discovery of the structure of DNA, what were they thinking? i haven't read a lot about it actually, but i get the idea that they were simply some forward/long-term thinking people.
... overall, i think these are good questions. the kind of questions people with a (ideal) humanities education should be more capable of answering (mine is lacking...)
When evaluating whether public money is well spent on education it must be more important how valuable it is to the public, not what the price for the work is to the individuals.
I like the "what if these workers stopped today" test:
Pick a professions. For example pick from 'trader', 'dentist', 'cleaner', 'sales person' or 'nurse'. Then imagine that all people in that profession stop working today.
How bad would it be for society? Is it better or worse than some other profession?
I think this is a much better test for value to society than looking at what people get payed.
For example, I think it would be much worse if all nurses stop working than if all bankers stop working. Yet bankers tend to get paid more.
of course it would be better to make college free, or give everyone zero interest federal loans that can be paid off with normal taxes and auto deferred until you start making serious money.
humanities should probably by funded with a different program anyway. ask a panel of experts how many graduates we need then offer X scholarships a year that upgrade to a full ride if your family is low income. allocate them with something like a national lottery where school districts nominate some amount of students based on their population.