There seems to be a strong sentiment in this thread that the only value provided by education is the contribution to career (e.g. that loans should only be provided for financially viable courses, that studying arts is as useful to one's career as studying finger painting, etc).
This just seems so wrong.
Optimising for vocational training means you're effectively tuning out the abstract arts and sciences and... oh, the humanities. These fields don't usually/directly translate into a financial success, but they broaden our perspective and deepen our experience. And in doing so provide the tools and language to more effectively analyse and engage with human culture.
And to a certain extent, "true" art is antithetical to capitalism, in a similar way that "true" journalism is antithetical to surveillance (honesty/transparency vs main-stream popularity), and I'd argue equally as important. For that reason these fields absolutely should be subsidised, otherwise art becomes about marketing, journalism becomes about propaganda, and science becomes about start-ups...
Fact 1: Education in the US is very expensive, in large part because the ready availability of loans removes most downwards pressure on prices.
Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back.
Fact 3: If you loan people money without expecting people to pay it back, then it's not a loan, it's a grant.
Fact 4: If you offer grants to high school graduates to take non-economically values classes, a lot of them will do so. This pushes up the cost of the education, and pushes down the wages graduates will make, excerbating the problem.
> For that reason these fields absolutely should be subsidised
Perhaps. But in which case by how much, by whom, and in what fashion? Because offhand offering free arts degrees sounds like one of the worst possible ways you could subsidise art as a field, and one of the best ways you can cause a lot of harm to young people while enriching the existing education institutions and not really advancing art at all.
Mind you...
> otherwise art becomes about marketing, journalism becomes about propaganda, and science becomes about start-ups...
Artists, journalists, and scientists have always had to earn a living. To the best of my knowledge, there was no "golden age". We've never subsidized artists (or scientists, or journalists) in the way you say we should; the future you're afraid of "becoming" is our present and past.
It is as likely that tying a university degree as the minimum pre-requisite for a decently paying career is driving the price upwards. Increased competition for desirable placements is the classic limited supply high demand scenario.
The problem isn't the availability of loans which are just a side effect but the focus of education as a gate to future success.
BTW from ancient times up until the last couple of centuries, patronage was often the primary income source for artists and scientists, the rich and powerful would subsidize them, offer sinecures to allow them to create, and the patron would get to show how wealthy and sophisticated they were.
> Increased competition for desirable placements is the classic limited supply high demand scenario.
I would suggest that if you believe the issue facing the US higher education system is a limited supply of places, you may not understand the US higher education system. In fact, if you look globally you'll find that the countries with low tuition are the ones who ruthlessly control the number of places.
In the US in particular you'll note that we went from around 45% of high school grads enrolling in college in 1970, to 70% enrolling in 2010, even as tuition climbed far faster than inflation. If 70% of all high school grads represents a "limited supply", what do you think the demand is?
(The number of places at elite schools is limited. It's actually not hard to explain why Harvard is expensive; the question is why everywhere else is too.)
> patronage
That was my point; I took skwosh to be arguing against a system where the wealthy purchased art/science/journalism for their own ends; my point is that this is the system we've always had: Private individuals (and latterly, corporations) being patrons of the arts, publishing newspapers, and funding scientific investigation. I believe skwosh was suggesting we move to a system where society as a whole should fund such things via taxation; I was pointing out that we've never had that.
You misunderstand the point about limited "places" (or at least the point I believe is intended).
For sake of argument, assume 90% of jobs out there are "bad jobs"--no prospect of real wage growth, declining stability, decreasing benefits--and the remaining 10% of jobs are "good jobs" (with some wage growth, stability, and benefits).
Assume also that it is widely believed that in general, to have a chance at landing a "good job" you need at least an undergraduate degree (necessary, not sufficient!).
In such a situation, will you not see everyone throw as many resources as they can into getting their kids a better chance of making it into one of those good jobs?
There's a lot you can quibble with but that's the "limited places" of significance, with demand for university education a byproduct of that more fundamental demand (for better positioning vis-a-vis the "good jobs").
This is thus more of a race to establish relative position vis-a-vis other entrants, so IMHO looking at tournament theory (etc.) is helpful for understanding the overall dynamics.
> In such a situation, will you not see everyone throw as many resources as they can into getting their kids a better chance of making it into one of those good jobs?
Absolutely, but the resources you can throw at it is strongly dependent on the availability of loans. Hence why we have $1.3 trillion in aggregate debt.
Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.
That sounds like a very nice world to live in. It also doesn't sound much like our world. It's certainly not how any country on Earth operates.
One day, I hope and imagine, we will live in a post-scarcity world, and then yes, that sounds like a great plan for organizing society.
> rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.
Perhaps we should wait to relax that focus once we've actually solved the problem. If you look around, you'll notice employment, especially among people 18-29, is a real challenge, while government finances and pensions are grossly underfunded.
It's the old hierarchy of needs thing; self-actualization is at the top of the pyramid not only because it's the most important, but because it relies on all the others being fulfilled in order to be an acheivable goal.
"That sounds like a very nice world to live in. It also doesn't sound much like our world. It's certainly not how any country on Earth operates."
We've had a system not a million miles different from the one described in Ireland since the 70's/80's. There are grants for school uniforms and books for those that cant afford them, the cost of a college degree is not exorbitant and is again covered by a grant for those that cant afford it (I went to college with several guys who were on the grant) There's always the focus on getting a job, for obvious reasons, but there are plenty of people who go back and re skill with a 2nd degree.
In Denmark students have since 1970 and actually dating back to the 50's had the right to SU (Statens Uddannelsesstøtte = government support programmes) in form of government grants and government subsidized loans for any students studying on a government approved list of mostly government subsidized secondary and higher education. Hope that triggers some anti-big gov't folks over there.
It is extremely unlikely that a post-scarcity world will ever occur without, say, a collective global work project. There is no financial incentive for private capital to initiate it. Just like the Internet (in its current form) would have never occurred without government funding.
The technology to bring about a post-scarcity world mostly exists, and we could get there very quickly (maybe 5-10 years). But, how do you convince the upper classes (who control the capital) to support it? How do you temper the common idea that 'the lazy people' will just do nothing all day? (like that's a bad thing)
"But, how do you convince the upper classes (who control the capital) to support it?"
This is a red herring. It's easy to assuming that such an enormous undertaking can be solved by "tax the rich". It doesn't work that way. There isn't enough money in the top 1% of the United States to pay for such a program. Inevitably a UBI would be paid for by the middle class, the meaty part of the bell curve.
This means people who took on debt loads to become a doctor, lawyer, whatever, and have worked hard to pay it down (and probably still are paying it down). $250k/yr sounds like a lot, but when you're paying back $400k worth of loans, it's really not as exorbitant as it sounds to many people -- especially if these same people are trying to buy a house, save for their kids' college, etc.
This seems more optimistic than I usually hear. Do you mind going into what you mean by "post-scarcity" and how we'd achieve it? Does it just mean a living UBI, or is there tech/infrastructure (extensive solar, e.g.) to be developed/built out as well?
Our current global scientific and engineering output is staggering, and it is continuously accelerating. If there was a global 'manhattan project' focused on this, then it would happen.
Global economic output is $80 trillion. There are 100s of millions of scientists, engineers, programmers, technicians in the world. Aside from the ideological complexities, which are probably intractable, it seems like it would be pretty easy to me.
What would it really take to provide basic housing, food, water, clothing, energy, and medicines to 7 billion people? Robotic automation, free / cheap energy, and access to natural resources.
we bulldoze away houses, we throw away food. meanwhile, people are homeless and hungry. Clearly we already live in a society of overproduction.
The difference is that the owners of the capital aren't willing to lose on their investments, and it's cheaper to bulldoze and throw away than to give it away or provide work maintaining the communities that these properties exist in/on.
People can do whatever they want to their property, no?
Do you personally allow homeless people into your house?
Problems you mentioned are real and tough, but the objections are very simplistic. Its very easy to demand others to do something, and distance yourself away.
appealing to individualism won't solve systemic problems. I don't have to house syrian refugee immigrants in my home personally to realize that europe has an ethical problem by refusing them and treating them the way they have been.
There is a long and historical precedent for demanding that people with excess amounts of capital owe a greater portion than those who own relatively little. There are material differences between the capitalists and all the rest of us, and those allow us to demand specific concessions from them.
That sounds great, but there's no free lunch and when you ask people to pay (a lot) for something, you're going to get their opinion.
Here's mine. I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies. One ultimately builds enough value to support existence, one is primarily done for enjoyment. Education for the former can and should pay for itself over the long haul, so we're discussing who pays for hobby education.
Personally, I don't want to pay for other people's hobbies. I've volunteered to teach people some of mine, spending hundreds of hours with educational groups. But, I can't imagine forcing taxpayers to pay for university education in these things.
I'm sorry but, insinuating that humanities and arts are "hobby educations" is pretty rude and smacks of superiority complex.
Look at the achievements that have stood the test of time and become valuable to us as a species. It's a pretty beautiful blending of scientific achievement and artistic achievement. If this system can't encourage both, let's not go to war with the arts, let's make the system that we invented, support the things that are important to us.
Beyond that, from my perspective, more of my tax dollars will go towards issues and causes that I am personally conflicted with than ones that I agree with. The college loan issue will never compete with the size and scope of something like the military. So it's beautiful that you would be personally affronted by this use of tax dollars but: welcome to the club, est. 1776
Don't apologize for personal attacks, just refrain from them.
Any argument made by starting with calling someone rude or accusing them of having a superiority complex, can only be made better by instead empathizing with rather than dismissing opposing viewpoints.
What's even worse is patronizing a mis-characterization of someone's statement.
> I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies.
This indeed is a rough characterization of life. At no point does shaftoe insinuate humanities and arts are 'hobby educations'. Rather it seems to me a simply capitalistic view that anything humans do well can be done for money, at which point we call it a job. Certainly that also includes artists and philosophers. Or another way to think about it, to be truly great at something you must spend the majority of your life doing it, at which point it probably also needs to pay the bills.
People should only be investing 5-figure sums of taxpayer's dollars to learn what they expect will be lifelong skills that will significantly increase their lifetime earning potential. In almost all cases, this is not Art History class.
Telling someone that their humanities education was all a hobby is a much greater insult than calling someone out, so I'll let the universe sort out who was the true meanie-head here lmao.
They are valuable. Myself and most of my colleagues make 6 figure+ with arts degrees. Journalism, Visual Arts, etc. On top of that, most of them manage engineers, or lead their projects. And the engineers who work with them would never be so naive as to insult their work or their education in the way that the individuals in this thread do.
Why don't you tell me how much you have donated to "the arts" before you demand that everyone else does so.
For context, I give 8% of my humble income to charities that feed the hungry and care for the sick. Is my dollar better spent funding a play that few will ever wish to see?
What? I'm not forcing anyone to do so nor even asking them to.
As far as I'm aware, none of us are allowed to pick and choose what our taxes go to or else I probably would give more to the arts than, say, the military.
No. It's not. I'm not trying to be rude here but I don't know why you keep making arguments for me. I never said that nor the last thing you think I was saying.
All I said was "hey maybe you're right there isn't a tangible value in terms of money in and money out but perhaps there are other, more-difficult-to-track reasons why the arts are important."
Basic income I think is going to have to happen at some point in our lifetime. There are just simply not enough jobs.
Please stop saying 'free' tuition. It's not free, it is just not paid by the student. Keep in mind that many states already have just this setup for in state students to use lottery money.
Basic income is my one hope from the next 4-8 years (because socially, we are screwed)
Much like with Obama, Trump and the Republicans are going to learn what is and isn't possible for the POTUS. And while there are many factors in the election, a significant chunk of the votes were poor whites who are traditionally opposed to social programs.
So on the off chance we build more factories, they are going to be modern (automated), dispelling that myth.
Which should set the stage for the Dems (or even the Republicans, but I doubt it) to pivot back toward being "the poor people's party" and finally get to push some of those social programs.
And the only one that really makes sense (at least, to me) is some form of basic income/guaranteed minimum income.
I am still sceptical that we'll see the real thing in our lifetimes, but I do think we can start down that path sooner than later.
It's also the mode of operation for ages 5-18, with a nation wide avg of 12K / year in spending per student. So that 160k-ish in spending is downright American, but spending 1/4-1/2 of it on college is a give-away, socialism, the very demise of lady liberty
The scope of someone going to college for say 40 years (from 20-60, for sake of argument) is a lot different than saying 4 years of education should maybe be an institutionalized cost. If you figure:
1. At 12K/year, base education runs a cost of 156K
2. At 20K/year, college education for 4 years runs 80K
3. At 20K/year, college education for 40 years runs 800K
Then what we're saying is 80K represents 50% of the educational costs we're all comfortable with sinking into base education. But letting someone never work and just go to college for free for 40 years would cost over 400% of the base educational costs. That seems like a totally different scale of issue to me. We're also probably hitting diminishing returns over what 4 years would prepare someone for, and I don't think the audience is that large. Most people want to go to college to get skills to then contribute something to society, whether or not today's economy specifically values what they want to contribute.
> Then what we're saying is 80K represents 50% of the educational costs we're all comfortable with sinking into base education.
You're making assumptions that we're all comfortable with paying for 12 years of education. I think the majority of that is a waste of time (and by extension money).
> Most people want to go to college to get skills to then contribute something to society, whether or not today's economy specifically values what they want to contribute.
Sure but I don't want to pay for that either. If people didn't get hand outs that hide the true price of college (i.e. government backed loans), the price of college would come down drastically. It's artificially inflated to match amount of money a student can expect to beg / borrow.
If there was going to be any type of "college for all", the only approach I'd advocate would be free education that was provided by the government itself (i.e. community colleges). At least that would have a downward pressure on tuitions at private institutions that would suddenly have to price compete against it. Anything else will just increase the problem further.
Sorry to lump you in, caveat that statement in whatever way makes you feel comfortable. Hopefully we can agree that at least as far as level of discussion goes, much more is made of college costs than of childhood education costs. I found to be a little absurd given the financial numbers involved (every kid goes through primary education, even if college is free it'll never rise to the level of every kid utilizing it, etc.)
> Sure but I don't want to pay for that either
I left a comment in another thread, but the amount of shit that is in the budget leaves every American with a feeling of "I don't want to pay for that". The DoD budget alone clocks in at over 8x the projected cost of free college education, very few people talk with vitriol about the hand-outs we're creating for the myriad of people that make up that apparatus.
> It's artificially inflated to match amount of money a student can expect to beg / borrow
I'm not as well read here as I'd like to be, but I have a hard time understanding how this is going to be such a magic fix. Professors aren't going to be too keen to take a pay cut here, and state universities aren't exactly making out like gangbusters right now. Is the idea that we'd have less students and less professors? What's the economic impact of seeing those jobs, and the dependent jobs in school communities, eliminated?
> Sorry to lump you in, caveat that statement in whatever way makes you feel comfortable. Hopefully we can agree that at least as far as level of discussion goes, much more is made of college costs than of childhood education costs. I found to be a little absurd given the financial numbers involved (every kid goes through primary education, even if college is free it'll never rise to the level of every kid utilizing it, etc.)
The big difference is that childhood education costs are primarily borne locally. Most, if not all, comes from local real estate taxes. If I pay those taxes I can reap the results (via my children attended a school I pay fore) ir I can vote with my wallet and live somewhere else that has lower taxes (and by extension lower quality education). Either way it's up to me.
> I left a comment in another thread, but the amount of shit that is in the budget leaves every American with a feeling of "I don't want to pay for that". The DoD budget alone clocks in at over 8x the projected cost of free college education, very few people talk with vitriol about the hand-outs we're creating for the myriad of people that make up that apparatus.
Saying, "He gets his daisy cutter so I want my free college!" is a fools argument. Just because there's other crap in the budget doesn't mean we should increase it further with more crap. It's just a different pile.
> I'm not as well read here as I'd like to be, but I have a hard time understanding how this is going to be such a magic fix. Professors aren't going to be too keen to take a pay cut here, and state universities aren't exactly making out like gangbusters right now.
I'm sure you'll find plenty of professors willing to teach for less. I don't even think they're a significant part of most budgets anyway but I doubt it'd be a problem.
> Is the idea that we'd have less students and less professors?
No the idea is to remove the artificial upward pressure on prices by having people pay for the education they want to receive.
> What's the economic impact of seeing those jobs, and the dependent jobs in school communities, eliminated?
They're being artificially inflated and maintaining a college loan bubble to keep them employed is asinine. Nobody has a right to a government subsidized job.
Plus it'd be better than the economic impact of trillions of dollars of student loan guarantees or the weight of those loans on our youth. College graduates with $160-200K of debt are common nowadays, even for in-state schools. That's a mortgage payment and they don't even have a roof over their heads to show for it!
People always want more. I've met plenty of people who had enough inheritance / other random windfall to just get by who still went to college and careers. If those who get it by random chance or family act as such, why should we assume that those who would get it from Basic Income would be any different?
You do realize that you met those people who did get that random windfall because they were working, not because they just took the money and ran, right?
Sure you might have met 20 of them. How many haven't you met because you're busy working instead of being where those folks hang out while they're not working?
Because self-actualization is a human need and for a lot of people education is a means for that. Because some of us enjoy creating things that are of value to others. Because life is more than survival, basically.
Are we talking about UBI, or about education? Because if it's UBI, what I mentioned was just one of the mechanisms by which it could work. But I honestly don't know if it would. I suspect it would, but we can't know without more research and tests. Human behaviour is too complex to model a priori.
> Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.
Scarcity is a thing in the real world. We are nowhere near a point where we can produce more than is necessary for everyone to have everything they want at every point in their lifetime. Assuming that's even possible as there are things that are naturally limited. I mean, under the everything is free to everyone model, how do you determine who gets to live in the house on the cliff overlooking the ocean and who gets to live inland surrounded by tract housing?
Terrible, dystopian idea. You know education can't be "free", right? Unless you want to enslave educators and force them to work for nothing. In reality, the middle class will have half their income seized to subsidize the dependent class, being worked to the bone in mega corporations. Meanwhile, the elite will reap all the profits and pour them into more social control programs. Result of basic income will be a culture of demoralized serfs, totally dependent on a feudal corporate state for their survival.
> Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.
Incorrect. This will foster a culture of inferiority because not everyone is equal. No matter what you do, the lower class will be jealous of the upper class and will always demand for more.
Money and education is solved? What about universal access to entertainment? Universal food? Universal housing?
By this line of argument, its not "incorrect" its just a wall to keep to separate ones of the others. Just because theres always a demand doesnt mean satisfying demands wouldnt make peope happier or better.
Really all I'm talking about is not defunding/sidelining Arts etc "because it's not financially viable".
The idea is really to provide a well rounded education, (giving students a broader perspective on the world, a stronger vocabulary for expressing ideas, etc), as opposed to a purely career focused one. I think it would be detrimental to culture and society in general if everyone was groomed from high-school to only ever consider the safe, paved, career footpath.
This may take the form of allowing for more electives in vocational courses, encouragement to take double degrees, or eliminating barriers for later study (letting people change their minds, or even just reskilling when the robots take over).
What I was meant by "subsidisation" is just the "somewhat" free education that exists in some places today, but has been more prevalent/widespread in the past. And while prioritising vocational degrees is fine to some extent, crippling participation in the Arts by making those qualifications prohibitively expensive (by not providing loans) is a bad idea imo.
Part of it is just a shift in mentality. When we viewed education as a net benefit to society that society was willing to pay for, there was a natural downward pressure on the cost of education since the public was shouldering most of the burden to educate people. Once we shifted to the mindset where an education was valued based on how much extra money the recipient could make during his/her lifetime, that downward pressure went away and market forces took over. Suddenly it was acceptable to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education because that shift in mentality meant that people would pay that much.
The result is our current educational system, where costs have ballooned and administrative and facilities costs dwarf the spending on actual education. I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was an excellent article that traced beginning of our rapidly increasing education costs to the era when Reagan was governor of California and he pushed that shift in mindset. The whole system and all the problems we're experiencing suddenly make perfect sense when you view it from that perspective.
I'd personally like to see a hybrid approach. We should identify a core curriculum that leads to a well-educated populace. Things like statistics and formal logic that make it much harder to manipulate people the way that our current politicians and media do. It should be free to study that curriculum. Anything beyond that, including vocational training, could be market based and lenders should consider the likelihood of repayment when loaning money for tuition.
I agree of course - a society with at least some understanding of statistics, logic, anthropology (of media), etc is essential to a healthy democracy.
It would be great to see political/cultural literacy taken more seriously, but the trend as you point out has been in the opposite direction (and has been/will be for some time).
Being burdened with debt and not having the choice to pursue further education are the real problems, and can hopefully be solved in a way other than restricting access to those fields.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in this thread... it's pretty cynical (but not uncommon) to suggest that one's primary value to society is what they contribute economically (or otherwise validated economically).
I'm lucky that the situation is a bit more optimistic here in Australia...
> statistics, logic, anthropology (of media), etc is essential to a healthy democracy
Thomas Jefferson said something similar:
An ignorant people can never remain a free people.
> one's primary value to society is what they contribute economically
There's an excellent video [1] of former Supreme Court Justice David Souter (if only we could get judicial nominations of this quality these days from either party, let alone Republicans) where he makes the point that lack of civics education is the largest problem in America today. I think he'd argue that one's primary value to society is being an informed citizen who votes and properly holds the government to account, which doesn't mean simply voting for the opposite party every 8 years because you're dissatisfied with life.
Especially after an election where it's so clear that many people are not being responsible citizens, either not voting or voting ignorantly, I with you in wondering why more people in this thread can't understand the value to society of a well-educated populace, regardless of how that education provides an economic benefit.
> Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back
But for the vast majority of jobs people don't care what degree you have! In technology yes you often want someone with a particular degree. But if you're hiring a civil servant, a advertising executive, a business consultant, or any one of hundreds of other jobs, you can have any degree you like.
I have friends with theology degrees who work in business and earn more than I do in technology with my CS PhD. The companies that hire them value having people with a very wide range of academic backgrounds.
> I have friends with theology degrees who work in business and earn more than I do in technology with my CS PhD. The companies that hire them value having people with a very wide range of academic backgrounds.
That has nothing to do with their degree and everything with their ability. They would probably still get hired without the degree.
Degrees only really matter in formal subjects, if you're, say, studying to become a doctor. Attending a good university is not about the degree, it's about the network.
There is a lot of study on the idea that the main value of education is not what you actually learn but much more signal that you are dedicated, motivated and have the ability to learn.
There is a huge argument going on right now about how much of the value is signal vs actual knowledge you need for the job. There is a lot of evidence that suggest that signal is a huge part of the value.
Network does not really apply as a expiation because the effect appears even when transition to a place that you have no relationship with it.
> There is a lot of study on the idea that the main value of education is not what you actually learn but much more signal that you are dedicated, motivated and have the ability to learn.
A signal, I can agree with that. But isn't that only because someone is unable to signal that (s)he can be a valuable asset in other ways? The type of person to only rely on their degree is probably a person that isn't creative enough to find more effective ways to market themself.
I think education is great and learning new things is massively important in life. I just personally don't believe in the degree fetish that a lot of people have. Just look at the quality of the average graduate in a lot of universities and/or colleges in the US and Europe.
To me, at best, a degree is an inefficient way to differentiate yourself from a group of similar people with similar skills. Maybe not a bad thing if you're at the start of your career. But at worst, it has zero additional value.
I basically agree with you, but there is just a lot of people that don't. In IT you can get pretty far, without a degree. I did so, and I am very happy with that choice.
I don't see that working for a lot of other people I know.
I think the US is approaching numbers where you might really be better of without a degree in a increasing number of fields.
Most places will not take your resume seriously if you don't have a degree attached. Startups tend to be more lenient sometimes, but Big Corp. isn't going to touch you without a degree, nor will you have a promotion path without one.
It's the reality of the situation, and until there's a significant change in attitude, not having "a" degree is going to hurt your career prospects unless you're a wildly successful entrepreneur or have great connections/independently wealthy.
Why should the provide anything if the argument is true.
If anything this argument would suggest that you should have a private system of education and the government should spend all this money on research grants for things that are interesting, and/or useful.
As I said, their companies value diverse academic backgrounds. Not no academic background.
Let's look at some real jobs, outside the technology industry.
The UK civil service: "you need, or expect to have, a 2:2 degree in any subject or higher".
UK NHS project management role just requires "a degree" (the NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world).
Goldman Sachs graduate analyst "open to final year undergraduate and graduate level students from any field of study".
That's the reality. They don't care what degree, they just care about a degree. So if you're passionate about art history, get a degree in it. Almost nobody cares.
I’m not saying you’re not right, I just think it’s ridiculous. I've met plenty of people with various degrees (BS, MS, Phd) who are stupid as a rock, and I’ve met plenty without a degree who are well rounded individuals / smart as hell / can get the job done. That’s even outside of tech. In the end it really comes down to the individual.
Also, as an ability metric it’s an outdated one, and personally I would never pass on an employee just because (s)he doesn’t have a degree. Having a degree doesn't even mean someone will make a good employee. Results are infinitely more important than credentials. Most people just can't get stuff done.
I know this is tangential, but after working in engineering for the last 6 years its absolutely mind blowing how much this is a factor. Smart, likable, normal people who just never get any real, meaningful work done seems to be the complete norm. Hiring people (not a position i'm presently in) is an absolutely terrifying prospect to me, because I can't figure out any real way to separate the former from the latter.
> That has nothing to do with their degree and everything with their ability. They would probably still get hired without the degree.
You would think that, and it would logically seem to work that way. But in practice, it often doesn't.
A lot of employers are lazy, and use "has a degree" as a filter to cut down their applicants. And since there are so many applicants in nearly every field, it doesn't hurt the employer much. The biggest value in many degrees is literally just the ability to truthfully claim "I hold a degree", regardless of the field.
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To improve that, we'd need to get employers to drop fake requirements from their job listings. But since there's (typically) only benefits to them for inflating their requirements, I don't think it's likely employers will willingly drop that requirement.
Variable interest levels for different courses of study commensurate with default or late payment likelihood. Required post-graduate government service for those who struggle but are ready to sacrifice. Critical demand area bonuses. There are practical ways to measure and respond to these problems.
You really don't need to pay tuition to gain a rich education in art and humanities and sciences if you want one. There are resources aplenty - buy a book!
I'd even go so far as to say the majority of college grads learned almost nothing during college, and the few who did would, after a few years of maturity, pick up a book of their own free will and enrich themselves.
I think the costs of university (huge amounts of debt and enormous human and physical resources put into holding lectures in giant buildings that need to be maintained and heated, the social divide created between those who got to hang out among the privileged for 4 years and those who couldn't) generally outweighs the hypothetical benefits you mention that some people might gain during college. Except perhaps for a few fields (like medicine, or dramatical arts, or music) where you can't just pick up a textbook and learn it all.
You could say that about anything though, and I'm sure many in engineering do (about everything from design patterns to category theory...).
The value added by quality in-person tuition shouldn't be underrated though, not to mention access to equipment, studios, and like minds...
Working and communicating in person is a hugely effective catalyst for productivity, creative evolution, etc. Artistic and scientific development is often accelerated by human interaction, which is why art movements and scientific advancements tend to cluster around communities (vs individuals).
Parent has a good point - there are very few specializations which cannot be learned with dedication and internet connection. Human interaction/team efforts for example are important, but in almost all cases you are under-trained coming from uni to real world and soon you'll pick it up in real life.
There are bad/mediocre universities/colleges, which don't give you almost nothing on top of what is currently available in few clicks. Most people out there graduate on those. I know, since I am one of them. All useful stuff I know now I learned on my own, either during studies (a bit) or working (most of it).
The only good reason why I don't regret university is campus life - but if you don't have a need for party-style episode in your life and human interaction in that style, then universities/colleges are not the best place to spend 5 of your most creative years. Unless also hunting for future contacts in elite places, but that's another topic.
> Working and communicating in person is a hugely effective catalyst for productivity, creative evolution, etc. Artistic and scientific development is often accelerated by human interaction, which is why art movements and scientific advancements tend to cluster around communities (vs individuals).
Sounds like Google, and they don't charge tuition.
Just reading a book is a not an effective way to learn, and the value of university is not that they make you read a bunch of books. The real value comes from interaction around that material with researchers and fellow students and being 'forced' to engage with that material to solve problems and doing your own research, as well as the feedback you get on that work.
Now I'll certainly agree that the cost of a University education in the US is much too high, and there are probably more efficient ways to get the same educational benefits, but to say that you can replace Universities with books is simply disingenuous.
"Just buying a book" is not a way for anyone to learn anything serious. There is a negligible fraction of actual autodidacts in this world, and they are not even usually the best and the brightest -- just a weird curiosity.
Go pick up a graduate mathematics textbook (or even an undergraduate one, I'll be generous) of your choice and try to learn from it without help from an instructor. I'll wait. Best case scenario, you will believe you understand it until you come into contact with someone who actually does and be horribly embarrassed. Or perhaps so self-satisfied with your ability to surpass everyone in the universe at understanding mathematics quickly and without help or discussion that you won't be able to even grasp the fact that you don't understand it. I've seen both first hand.
English and Philosophy (especially Philosophy) are exactly the same. You cannot learn philosophy from only reading textbooks. It's where you start, not where you finish. It's the bare minimum. It's what you should have done before you even show up to the class, at which point you begin learning nearly everything there is to learn about the subject.
Almost everyone learns a GREAT deal in college. Some people do learn so little they aren't even capable of understanding what it is they were /supposed/ to learn, and post on tech message boards about how college is a waste of time.
And, if you live in the US, patronize one of our great public libraries. If you're in New York or Boston, just walk in. If you're elsewhere you can borrow via interlibrary loan.
When it comes to student loans though, they should be given on someone's potential ability to actually pay them back, which is dependent on future career prospects.
I'm not against Arts or offering scholarships/grants for them. What I'm against is allowing a person to take out $160,000 of debt at 6% interest for an education that will land them a job as an administrative assistant. They will most likely carry that debt for the majority of their adult life.
It's bad for society to allow 18 year old kids that have a poor grasp of long term consequences to shackle themselves with such a financial burden. None have had long term full time jobs to appreciate how difficult it will be to pay back that much money.
Part of the problem here is that the terms/interest is so crippling that they can't take out another $160K debt to "pivot" into something more financially practical.
Further, I think having the availability/flexibility of studying multiple degrees can be immensely useful/rewarding. Particularly as industries get more advanced/sophisticated (and others get automated/downscaled), I wouldn't be surprised if there's a cultural shift towards continuous reeducation (at least, as much is financially practical/possible).
In home and auto loans, the asset purchased acts as collateral. Business loans, especially for small businesses, are difficult to get. If it were easier, I'm sure we'd have a problem similar to the student loan situation.
The collateral is a claim on future earnings, isn't it? In the UK, the student loans company gets back 9% of your salary post graduation and you cannot legally opt out until the loan is repaid provided you earn over a minimum threshold.
You can't squeeze blood from a rock. Sure, you can say 'hey let's garnish this guy's McD wages for the next 25 years' - but the collection costs are almost as much as you can get your hands on. Just not worth it. Well, only at very high interest rates, so that the good ones make up for the bad ones.
I'm not suggesting collateralized student loans, I agree that's difficult without a durable good. I'm suggesting a similar risk-based approach for determining the size of the loan. This would cut down on the number of people who have $200k in student loans and a MFA which generates no income.
The difficulty of getting loans for degrees which are less likely to be able to generate significant income might even lead to lower tuition at non-STEM schools (hey, a guy can dream)
Risk for loans is low(er) for material assets (because they can be repo'd), which is why interest on loans for them is so cheap. Education loans are priced 'correctly' by the market (i.e., very expensively), the 'problem' is that people consider them different from material goods because they're the best/only way for social advancement for many/most people (which I don't disagree with, I'm not making some sort of moral statement here, just explaining the mechanics.) So then 'they' (as in, some amorphous group of voters and politicians) want the government to step in, which creates disincentives all around, yadda yadda yadda and then we find ourselves in the situation we're in now.
So, to come back to your question, why don't we treat education loans the same as other loans - because 'society' doesn't think they're the same, for moral/equality/social mobility reasons. It's really as simple as that.
Why? Out of all the things to think are wrong, inability to pick a useless major based on financial status is wrong? As opposed to pollution in East Asia, conflict minerals in our supply chain, or slavery in shrimp fisheries in Thailand?
> These fields don't usually/directly translate into a financial success, but they broaden our perspective and deepen our experience.
Yes. Those are luxuries. For most of history, middle class people couldn't afford to study those fields. Colleges used to have much smaller enrollments. They'd either by A&M schools, used to help train up mechanics and farmers or engineering schools where you need to learn the math to become an engineer. Only a few prestigious ones (Yale, Harvard, etc etc) offered humanities majors, for landed gentry. The kind of people who didn't really have to work for a living.
> And to a certain extent, "true" art is antithetical to capitalism
That is ridiculous. "True" art has to appeal to an audience, and if it appeals, it will sell. You can't just put our art and say "hey, it's true, support me". That's a dangerously naive view of the world.
Yes, those things are also wrong. As are decreasing socioeconomic mobility, racially & religiously motivated violence, lack of code hygiene and unit testing, etc...
If you read my and other responses in this thread, the arts/humanities are far from useless (they just have a less direct economic effect).
Historically important art/music has often been ignored, ridiculed, censored, etc. To suggest that it only has social/cultural value if it appeals to a popular/paying audience is overly simplistic.
I'm not saying there's no overlap between capitalism and art in general, but if they're perfectly aligned then we miss the challenging, obscure, alternative, upsetting, disruptive, etc.
> If you read my and other responses in this thread, the arts/humanities are far from useless (they just have a less direct economic effect).
I never said arts/humanities are useless. I said they are luxuries, and the fact that people are bemoaning that it costs so much money to enter a non-lucrative profession is the very definition of a first world problem.
> Historically important art/music has often been ignored, ridiculed, censored, etc. To suggest that it only has social/cultural value if it appeals to a popular/paying audience is overly simplistic.
It might very well have social/cultural value. If you're not independently wealthy, you'll want it to appeal to a popular and paying audience if you like having food and shelter and toys.
> I'm not saying there's no overlap between capitalism and art in general, but if they're perfectly aligned then we miss the challenging, obscure, alternative, upsetting, disruptive, etc.
They're not perfectly aligned. However, if your "art" doesn't align with a paying audience, be prepared to be a starving artist with huge student loans. Society is not beholden to you to help you self-actualize your life. Get a job that pays money, and then do your obscure art in your spare time.
I agree with the sentiment though, that (in general) an Arts degree (or whatever) alone it's not enough to sustain a career.
I just think it's an important part of a balanced education, and that overall society is better off having more engagement with the arts, language, history, philosophy, cosmology, theoretical physics, category theory, linguistics, anthropology, etc.
As I said elsewhere, prioritising vocational education is fine to some extent, but to do so by crippling participation in the Arts by making those qualifications prohibitively expensive (by not providing loans) is a mistake.
It is a luxury of sorts, but not in the frivolous sense. As I see it, it's not so much a problem of optimising higher education for career payoff, but restructuring/regulating education to make it more accessible (both to encourage participation in a wider range of subjects, and to facilitate career change).
> I never said arts/humanities are useless.
>> inability to pick a useless major
Note that I said the major was useless, not the area of study. Out of all the career areas in the world right now, the one that cares least about credentials seem to be the humanities, unless you want to go into academia (which is a whole new can of worms.)
> but to do so by crippling participation in the Arts by making those qualifications prohibitively expensive (by not providing loans) is a mistake.
No, the point is that these qualifications a) aren't inherently prohibitively expensive (a library card and or a paint set doesn't cost 30k a year) and b) make it easy for you to take out crippling amounts of loans you have very little chance of paying back. Nobody needs these qualifications you speak of.
> There seems to be a strong sentiment in this thread that the only value provided by education is the contribution to career
I don't believe that's the sentiment at all. Few on here will argue against the value of a well-rounded liberal arts education. However, the sentiment is that if an education requires borrowing piles of money, it should lead to employment which can realistically service the loan.
There are still people in the US without access to clean water. In some parts of the country, primary and secondary school education is abysmal.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a question of priorities. Sure, I love the humanities, but the government only has so many tax dollars, and studying Shakespeare in university is not a priority.
I feel like the value of adversity is lost sometimes on HN. We should be especially familiar with it. Earning a high level of income makes life extraordinarily comfortable, to the point where it is easy to become complacent and stop trying to really contribute to society in a meaningful way.
Some times a struggle is not a bad thing. Not to the point where one should be homeless or starving of course, but having everything handed to you (even if you have worked hard in the past) doesn't always result in the best of outcomes.
This sentiment is so bizarre from a European perspective. So the only thing that stops people from getting an education willy nilly is student debt? Or American engineers are all better in some respects than German engineers because of their debt?
What I (as a fellow European who considers the American student loan craze equally bizarre) read into the "struggle" part of nightski's post is that people approach a given education opportunity very differently knowing that it is costing them (or, probably even stronger in most cases: their parents) a lot of money, vs. knowing that it is free. I sure hope that I would have crunched harder during that time knowing that it was a crazy expensive bet and not just the opportunity cost of not entering the workforce early.
What I am not so sure is wether that hard crunch would have actually been better. I suspect that without the more freewheeling approach of European universities, I would have gone even deeper into the pointlessness of learning for the grade instead of learning for the education.
Generally speaking, my impression is that many people wildly overestimate the per-head cost of low intensity university education. Without artificially inflated budgets (driven by the misuse of tuition height as an indicator of academic quality), a few lecture halls, some professors and the usual lower echelons of academia who are basically donating their time for peanuts and the chance to occasionally publish seems to be an absolute bargain compared to other programmes designed for keeping people off the streets.
The reality is that you can get a really good college education for rather cheap in the U.S. if you are smart about it. I could of gone to a local state college for 1/10th the tuition of a private school and received an education at a very similar level.
I just feel that a free for all education system (ala Bernie Sanders) would be detrimental. Having things be somewhat exclusive and require some amount of effort is not necessarily a bad thing. Germany itself imposes exams for example (although I don't know how difficult they actually are personally).
Germany doesn't impose any exams at all. The only limiting factor is that you qualify for university and maybe your grade, if the number of applicants requires it.
There are no exams that need to be passed, no essays need to be written or anything of the sort.
Depending on the course/university there's limited space, of course. The problem is when this "exclusivity" that you mention is purely based on who can pay, that is what's detrimental.
I'm really not sure why you're getting downvotes. If I could go back and change my education path, I'd absolutely go the community college route for two years then complete my education at state college.
Having things be somewhat exclusive and require some amount of effort is not necessarily a bad thing.
Getting into your first choice program at your first choice university often requires a lot of effort, and the people who graduate from those programs are often part of a somewhat exclusive group. It's just that the effort required is entirely on your academic and intellectual qualifications rather than financial and persona connections.
Your comment is the typical lack of perspective I expect from HN. Going to college is extremely stressful. Going to college poor (actually poor) is nearly impossible.
>Going to college poor (actually poor) is nearly impossible.
This is not true. If you are poor (actually poor), there are so many government grants and scholarships for low income students that it's much easier financially than if you are middle class.
If you are middle class, your parents frequently have to give up half a year's salary to help pay. Good luck going to college if you're not a top tier student and your parents refuse to help pay tuition.
>>If you are poor (actually poor), there are so many government grants and scholarships for low income students that it's much easier financially than if you are middle class.
Availability doesn't automatically lead to discoverability or accessibility. Most grants require a ridiculous amount of paperwork and the ability to navigate a complex bureaucracy, which poor families have neither the time nor the skill for. A lot of the parents in poor families work multiple jobs. Some barely speak English.
There may be less poor people in college, but it can be easier for poor people to pay. There is sort of this no man's land where a person (or their family) makes just too much for assistance, but not really enough to pay. My family fell into this area while in college, and I worked 20-30 hours/week on top of a normal 12-15 hour course load. To make up when I took 12 hours, I also went to both summer sessions each year. It was a long 4 years as I had maybe 3-4 weeks out of school each year, and zero time out of work.
This is a case of middle-class complaining how they dont get the same benefits than a poorer-class. It can be unfair, but secondary to the reality that being poor makes college way more difficult even with that help.
Low enrollment is not because of ability to pay tuition for low income. Many poor people don't enroll because they didn't have encouragement from family or they had other obligations (e.g. taking care of family members).
> Earning a high level of income makes life extraordinarily comfortable, to the point where it is easy to become complacent and stop trying to really contribute to society in a meaningful way.
Earning a high level of income in general already signifies that a person is contributing to society in a meaningful way. Their income is reflective of the service provided to others.
All corporations exist to better the lives of people. Their purpose is to earn profit for shareholders (ultimately, people), but how do they accomplish that? Mostly, by making useful goods or selling useful services. A consumer will then buy one of these goods or services because that consumer has decided the value of the good/service to them is greater than the value of the dollars they'd need to pay for it. E.g., If you have decided to buy a car for $10k cash, then you have decided that having the car now is more valuable to you than having $10K USD now. The fact that the car exists and is available for sale has thus enriched your life, by giving you the option to buy it. The car's makers are providing a service to others.
As a result of each purchase, both sides ends up with greater total value than they had before. When people trade, both are better off.
A tremendous income generally comes from delivering tremendous value in the world to others. There are many layers of indirection involved, so it's difficult to see for one's self how one's job (like an office job or financial job) improves the lives of others in the general case, but through trickle-down effects it always does if you follow cause and effect through enough steps.
Or for a clear and notable example, consider the game of Minecraft. It was largely developed by a single individual, Markus Persson aka Notch. He sat down and used his game development skills to produce something marvelous. Many people came along and each decided to pay Markus $X for his game Minecraft, and since over 100 million copies have been sold, Markus became a billionaire. Many people found great enjoyment in the game, and Markus gained a great number of dollars.
In general, tremendous income results from delivering tremendous value. Our society is working correctly and incentivizing the right things if this is the result of ethical business dealing. Sometimes people get rich through scams, fraud, theft, and other shady dealings, but in a society with law and order, this is the exception rather than the rule.
> Earning a high level of income in general already signifies that a person is contributing to society in a meaningful way. Their income is reflective of the service provided to others.
Yeahhh no, income is a laughable measure of one's contribution to society.
Labor is a market as any other, and salary is a function both of the value provided as well as supply vs. demand.
In the Valley, VC-funded technology companies can afford to pay exorbitant salaries but are a gamble as to whether they will provide any net value, as evidenced by their ability or inability to develop a sustainable business.
Other distortions exist like rent-seeking or manufactured demand require serious mental gymnastics to see as a contribution to the world but can support high incomes.
> All corporations exist to better the lives of people. Their purpose is to earn profit for shareholders (ultimately, people), but how do they accomplish that? Mostly, by making useful goods or selling useful services.
Taking a page out of Ayn Rand?
Corporations exist to enrich their owners, which is great; however providing a useful good or service is a sufficient but not necessary condition of doing so.
> Sometimes people get rich through scams, fraud, theft, and other shady dealings, but in a society with law and order, this is the exception rather than the rule.
How about inherited wealth? Large groups of people are excluded from your wonderful vision of society.
I don't understand the hate inherited wealth gets here sometimes. It is the only realistic way to improve your family's lot in life over the generations.
It's not at all compatible with the view that wealth reflects your contribution to society (expressed upthread). Or individualist meritocracy which HN is so fond of.
It's hilarious that the one thing that is consistently down voted on hn is economic orthodoxy.
This is absolutely no different to the anti vaccination movement.
People are simply too lazy and arrogant to listen to what the economics profession has to say, and ignore that fact that the methods, organization and incentives of the economics profession are identical to the rest of academicia.
Which side of economics, the "freshwater" or "saltwater" side? There isn't the kind of consensus in economics that there is in, say, climate change. And economics is much more susceptible to funding-based distortion.
Both freshwater and saltwater would agree with the comment I replied to. freshwater and saltwater econ differ in their approach to macro models. Both sides broadly agree on general equilibrium theory as kind of first order approximation, and the post was a summary of general equilibrium theory.
Which side do you think would disagree or are you just trying to bluff me out with technical terms you don't fully understand?
As to funding, can you point to major sources of funding for academic econ research that would introduce bias?
I totally get you, but then the question is: do you need to get into a "top" and super-expensive college to get a good education in humanities and abstract art and similar?
Because, unless you're rich or get a very good scholarship, I guess that going to that kind of college makes sense only if you plan to pursue a high-paying career.
Backwards. Top colleges have the best need-based financial aid. You rack up enormous debt at average colleges (or by going to a top college when your parents could pay for it but won't).
Look, if you get a full ride at a top school, then obviously you should do it.
Nobody disagrees about that.
That's not the question though. Because apparently students have 1 trillion dollars of debt. So apparently people are NOT receiving full rides to everywhere.
The population we are discuss is this 1 trillion dollars of debt.
Harvard and company are doing massive amounts of needs-based scholarships now. If you are a high-flying middle class person you can probably pay either nothing or very little. They have massive endowments, to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars, they can fund their operation out of the interest.
On the other hand this benefits them as an institution since they can soak those legacy students for every hundred-thousand that daddy is worth and let them coast through on the reputation of those high-flyers.
> These fields don't usually/directly translate into a financial success, but they broaden our perspective and deepen our experience. And in doing so provide the tools and language to more effectively analyse and engage with human culture.
What concrete evidence leads you to think this is true?
As far as evidence goes, more experiential - I've studied visual and sonic arts at a few different universities/colleges (in Australia). Generally, not many found financial success in their chosen field.
The only value provided by education is certainly not contribution to career. The question is should certain types of education be more directly subsidized by taxpayers than others.
The underlying theory of subsidizing tuition is that a college degree increases lifetime earnings, which increases GDP and the tax base, ultimately paying for itself. Generally speaking, investments which do not pay for themselves are considered bad ones.
Taxpayers don't want to make bad investments in subsidizing college education. Clearly this is happening at a massive scale, but I think liberal arts degrees are just the scapegoat. The reality is that $1.3 trillion in mostly unpayable and undischargable debt is a problem much bigger than earning the wrong degree.
With the housing bubble and subsequent crash [1], the truth is that not everyone should have a mortgage, and pushing the homeownership rate above 64% was not sustainable. But college degree rates are on a much longer term and steady rise, and there's not clearly a bubble [2] but maybe I'm looking at the wrong data.
If $1.3 trillion in student debt didn't actually result in significantly more people getting degrees than otherwise would have, then we are talking about a completely failed policy which is merely padding school endowments. Literally nothing to do with choice of degree.
Imagine an alternative policy; making a $1.3 trillion investment in building and endowing 5,000 public universities. Significantly increase the supply of college education to drive down the cost. Would that have worked better?
Where you are wrong is that it's not just about money, it's about accountability.
Smart investing is the same whether the returns are financial or something else (citizenship, etc.): Someone needs to make good decisions about which investments are good and which aren't. If I believed your romantic notion of the humanities reflected reality in the classroom, that would be a great investment. But I don't believe that's true for many students.
Sure, through the lens of "smart investing", an arts degree is a shitty investment, and therefore shouldn't be funded. I just think that's a bit reductive, and that the value provided by those programs can be hard to quantify.
I agree that many students probably gain nothing at all from studying arts, but many do, and become better people, professionals, politicians, etc.
Studying these fields (or communicating with people who have (even watching documentaries)) helps to understand and contextualise the world, and to articulate those (often complex and abstract) ideas.
Of course, many people come away with nothing, and many with only the most superficial understanding, but an educational climate with less participation in the arts, humanities, theoretical sciences, etc would suffer a net reduction in cultural capital, political discourse, etc.
> tuning out the abstract arts and sciences and... oh, the humanities
Kind of ironic you say that, since the humanities programs themselves "tune out" all recognition to Eastern/South American/African art and humanities. I took 3 required "western traditions" classes, and except for a brief study of sumerian/egyptian cultures, the vast majority centered around dead white men.
You're absolutely right! A broader perspective, deeper experience, and the ability to effectively analyze and engage with human culture is immensely valuable. So, how valuable do you think all of those are when measured in terms of dollars and human lifetimes?
I'd go so far as to suggest that learning the tools and language to construct a building, treat cancer, or program a computer all may offer significantly upside for human culture and civilization. This is in potential constract when items in that list are neglected in favor of Roman poetry, post-modern art, or dissecting the rhyming schemes of long-dead authors.
The humanities have their place, but the list of things that broaden our perspectives and deepen our experiences is literally the list of all subjects that can be studied. The humanities have no monopoly on perspective, experience, or reasoning.
Absolutely not, especially now when the mechanisms of compensation have been democratized so well. Beyond that, Andy Warhol (et al) would be amused to learn that real art and capitalism were conceptual enemies. NB: I'm assuming you're using "antithetical" to mean that their successes are inversely proportional.
Not inversely proportional, just somewhat orthogonal, reflecting a (largely) different set of priorities.
Plus I'm not sure that the "mechanisms of compensation have been democratized so well", as you claim. (Which is to say it's all still largely driven by major label interests [1] [2].)
This is another example of the law of unintended consequences.
While the idea of helping people become more educated is obviously beneficial to both individuals and the society as a whole, government loans - which are supposed to "help" - are a huge factor fueling ever-raising costs. The loans, in effect, subsidize the higher-education complex, rather than students.
Many of us have been brainwashed to think that higher education has to cost a lot of money. But it need not: all that great education requires are wise, passionate teachers and a bit of infrastructure: a whiteboard, a few books, and a laptop computer (with a couple of outliers).
We don't need football/hockey teams with coaches paid $3-4M/year. We don't need armies of "Deans of Diversity & Inclusion" (and other phony administrative positions), who make $400K/year, we don't need manicured lawns and Olympics-quality sports facilities (these salaries are from the Univ of California - a state school!)
If a good private university cost < $20K/year and a state university < $10K, we would not have endless discussions wrt who should pay, who should study what, etc.
> But it need not: all that great education requires are wise, passionate teachers and a bit of infrastructure: a whiteboard, a few books, and a laptop computer (with a couple of outliers).
It's funny that a lot of the outliers are the degrees that can actually help you with financial stability later. Universities love humanity courses, exactly for the reasons you point out. It's easy to shoehorn a couple more undergrads into a literature or philosophy class, all you need to do is buy a few more chairs, and the books sort of buy themselves, and you're paying the TAs starvation wages anyways, what's a few more students between friends.
Whereas in a material science lab, you need a rockwell brinell hardness tester. For a computer science lab, you need some heavy iron if you're going to be doing heavy algorithms (might have changed lately, it's been going on 20 years for me). For electrical engineering, you need the CAD workstations with licenses for VHDL programs and the hardware to reprogram FPGAs.
> For a computer science lab, you need some heavy iron if you're going to be doing heavy algorithms
Not for 200 undergrads learning how to bubblesort. For that you need a lab with 50-100 PC's. For grad courses in parallel comp. or AI, you might need a semi-expensive cluster to play around with, but if you want something that just works you could just buy cluster time on AWS, which I'm sure they'd give a discounted academic rate. I'd expect the most expensive thing in a CS lab to be the electricity to power the computers.
Can you imagine a raspberry pi for every student where you just buy a new microSD card for each class and all notes/assignments are stored in the cloud or a gitlab type site for higher-education? That way it's a snap to set up with the exact development environment you need and if you mess something up badly, the T.A. could re-image your sd card and you just grab your assignments from your git.
Indeed there seem few disciplines where you really need much equipment for bachelor's degree study. Even in science where it's nice to be able to do stuff in labs, really you can learn pretty much all of it from books.
> Even in science where it's nice to be able to do stuff in labs, really you can learn pretty much all of it from books.
I think most life/physical sciences mandate a lab requirement. I think you can learn the facts from books, but if you want a job in those fields after you graduate with a bachelor's, you'll be spending most of your time in a lab.
That is only if you're doing stuff on the cutting edge of basic science.
What you learn in lab classes in college is what's important in most industry and academia. Being careful of cross contamination, religiously keeping up your lab notebook, being able to troubleshoot experiments, keeping things documented and repeatable. That's 99.9% of industry research, not coming up with new reactions or processes.
Except its a program that can be managed correctly. The problem was that there were no incentives to do so. My understanding is that loans initially were smaller and helped with the cost of tuition at a time where tuition was more affordable, but still out of reach for many working class families. Now they can pay for all of tuition and the cost of tuition is just pegged to the max loan offer from the government.
No one put in sane cost controls. No one told the universities that federal money wouldn't just increase to their whims. No one told students what its really like in real life to payback a 50k or 100k or even 150+k loan for a 4 year degree. What that means as an opportunity cost compared to cheaper schooling. My relatively modest loan is like making car payments on a decent car everything month... for 20 years. So 4 lower-end Lexus's if you consider interest. Or less to put in retirement.
I have no idea how people with large loans get by. I imagine the recent Obama rules regarding loan repayment as percentage of salary helps with an 20 year payment forgiveness plan. Not sure if the new business friendly administration is going to keep that in place.
I see this sentiment a lot, and I feel like you fundamentally misunderstand what is actually happening at universities. Discounting athletics, which in some places are revenue neutral and can be counted as marketing/local cultural artifact depending on who you talk to, the "wise passionate teachers" you praise so aren't there to teach idiot undergrads. Instead, they're hired to do research with the teaching as essentially a subset of that in most cases. Pure research, especially in a political climate that's increasingly anti-intellectual and anti science, is expensive and that cost gets offloaded to incoming students since the hard requirement for a college degree for many professional jobs creates inelastic demand.
The "phony administrative positions", lawns, and student facilties you dismiss as pork are the school's way of competing for the piles of grant money replacement known as undergrads.
Then further more, prices are already in the ball park of your supposed ideal. An instate student can go to a school like Georgia Tech (ranked 5 or so in engineering nationally depending on the year) for 12k before scholarships, essentially free if they don't piss away their grades. Private top tier schools cost more, but tend to offer more scholarships and grants so that's harder to compare between institutions. It's not that schools are expensive, it's that students are choosing to not go to the inexpensive schools, usually to get out of their state, or to be in an institution that specializes in their major, or go someplace with better student institutions.
US research is what makes our schools the top in the world, and the actual education gained from an undergrad degree isn't the drive for most people. It's the networking, the exposure, and the certification, none of which can be duplicated in a dinky classroom with a whiteboard and an underpaid teacher. Just look at American High Schools if you want to see how that turns out.
> Pure research... is expensive and that cost gets offloaded to incoming students
Do you have evidence for this?
I have never been privy to the financials of a university, college, or even department where tuition money subsidizes research staff, including professors.
> The "phony administrative positions", lawns, and student facilties you dismiss as pork are the school's way of competing for the piles of grant money replacement known as undergrads.
Believe me, we'd see this dynamic regardless of whether your hypothesis re: research funding were true. For evidence, look toward small liberal arts colleges. Most have never received anything more than token amounts of federal grant money, and yet their tuition increases match those of research universities.
>...Georgia Tech...
is an extreme outlier in terms of quality for cost.
Also, that $12k is only tuition. The actual cost, assuming you can't find free room/board in Atlanta, is 2x before interest on inevitable loans.
> the school's way of competing for the piles of grant money replacement known as undergrads.
I say it's a consequence of their windfall profits from 3-5% yearly tuition increases. Most institutions have "use-it-or-lose-it" budgets. Their accountants can only be so clever in finding ways to spend it, lest it pile up and get released on a state budget report. Then everyone would scream "Why does UXY have a $50mil surplus when they just increased tuition!".
If they wanted to actually compete, they would lower prices. Thats what attracts buyers.
> That is a dangerously oversimplified view of how markets work.
Because university is so expensive, we're told that more things matter than just price.
Buyers are obviously attracted to more than low prices, but some buyers are highly price-sensitive. So, we should let them find something that works for them.
>you fundamentally misunderstand what is actually happening at universities
What is actually happening is that in many cases "researchers" chase fame and money, not academic excellence. They have no time to teach "idiot undergrads", as you nicely put it, because they are busy running their consultancies on the side.
[I am in Boston, I see a lot of this first-hand, in "elite" schools in particular]
Alabama pays Nick Saban almost $7M/year. At first blush that seems outrageous. Then we find out that Alabama pulls in nearly $100M/year from football [0]. While not every school is so lucky, most (if not all) that are spending 7 figures on a coach are getting that money back and then some.
Isn't it disingenuous to use an outlier to make a point?
UoA made significantly more money than any other college team (some of which lose money). So using them as an example of why college sports is a net gain rather than a net loss is extremely (and purposely) misleading.
Plus even UoA spent $47 million on arena expansion in 2006 and then $65.6 million on further arena expansion in 2010. So it isn't like the football program doesn't have debt it has to repay the school (and incidentally many arenas are never funded from the programs that they house).
It also provides low-income youth an opportunity to get a college degree, and incentivizes kids from low-income communities to stay off the streets and focus on something productive (like sports).
Collegiate sports teams are effectively the same as student tutors, student RAs, student librarians, or any other school-sponsored jobs that hire students. One could argue that they're even superior at schools like Alabama because they provide even more money to be used on scholarships.
Alabama could take away their football program, but they would 1) take away scholarship money from the 30-50 low-income scholarship athletes, 2) take away money that could be reinvested into buildings, facilities, teachers, or academic scholarships, and 3) reduce alumni donations (because unhappy alumni don't donate), which further reduces the funds available to the school.
It's one thing if a school has sports programs that aren't a net gain for the university. But for the schools where it is, any talk of them removing the funding is absurdly ignorant.
It provides a small number of low-income youth, specifically football players.
Collegiate sports teams are not like other school-sponsored jobs. Student librarians cannot make millions of dollars if they plied their librarian skills on the open market. At least some college football players could. Student librarians don't face high risk of physical injury, disability, or long term health effects as part of their job. College football players do.
Pulling in 100m in revenue to supply 50 scholarships doesn't seem like the right tag line.
Also see below, most college sports revenue does not get pushed back into general academics.
Most alumni donations are to the university's athletic association - that's because those donations comes with the perks that alumni want - seats, being wined and dine, shaking the coach's hand, etc.
Talk of removing funding is absurd because its a system that's been this way for a long time - of course it would seem absurb to change it.
Perhaps there are other ways of making money for the university, which are better aligned with the purpose of academia? One such example is cooperation on research projects with the industry (which actually works pretty well), but I am sure there are other ideas.
This isn't true, most football programs have single digit percentages of their revenue being redirected back to academic programs and most of that is earmarked for scholarships for ...student athletes.[1]
The idea that football programs generate substantial revenue that improves academics for the entire university is not true.
Because if a sports program brings in $100m of revenue and a school has 50k kids, that's only about $2,000 per student. Tack off the sports costs and you're looking at maybe $1,000 extra per student, but instead of offering discounts, they may 1) invest in their trust fund for future growth, 2) pay down their debts to reduce the lifetime interest payments and save money down the road, 3) Roll the money up into more scholarships or 4) invest in infrastructure. None of those things directly lower the immediate cost for other students, but add tangible value to students and the institution.
I believe it started as an unintended consequence, but now it is intentional -- the surprise is long past.
When you have wealth, you want to get maximum benefit out of that wealth. Since wealth is a relative concept, the only way to do so is to widen the gap between those who have wealth and those who don't. You're making your dollars go farther.
If you can drive the cost of college (or anything else) to exorbitant heights, people will be forced to come to you for loans. Then, you own many years of their future.
College is one of the most sinister purchases to do this to, because it is the very mechanism by which someone could possibly break free of being a Havenot.
Add to that students have "suites" with private bedrooms and shared living space. Add to that meal plans with all you can eat Nutella and endless options. That money has to come from somewhere. It used to be old buildings with one block wall room with a set of bunks and two crappy desks. It has become an arms race and the parents have helped this along by indulging their kids. A lot of this debt is the parents paying. You can't get $60K per year of loans for an undergrad degree as the student. Plus you have small liberal arts schools that cost more than Harvard (yeah, I know they need no money) to get a BA in literature and then do what......? Complain you can't get a job?
I had similar requirements for school. Meals ended up costing me ~$10 per. I could get much cheaper food on my own, but that wasn't going to make the university any money.
Where I went to school the student meal plan you were required to buy costed something like $14 per meal, while they provided the same food at the university hospital for something like $4 per meal.
That almost happened at my university the semester after they went big into debt for a new stadium. We're one of the last ones in the state who aren't forcing under clansmen to live in the dorms. They cited things like, "it sill save them money! It will help with inclusion! It will help their GPA!" It was bogus of course. Thankfully the students protested fairly hard and our president sided with the students.
Every time I read articles about student loans in the USA, the options are always presented as either the current state, or free tuition.
Why are interest free student loans never floated as an option? Here in New Zealand, our student loans are provided by the government and are interest free as long as we reside in New Zealand.
It means that people who don't do tertiary education, or who do a trade, don't subsidise those who go to university. It also means that there's a disincentive to go to university if you don't need to, which I think is a good thing, however everyone is able to go to university if they want to/need to, without worrying about how it's being paid for.
Our student loans are also paid off proportional to our income, I think at a rate of around 8% (and no repayments required if you earn less than $19k per year). This means that you only pay what you can, it's essentially another tax, rather than in the USA where you get people struggling to make payments on their student loan.
Obviously, we also have the advantage of cheaper tuition, although it is rising. It costs around NZ$7,000 (~US$5,000) per year to go to university, it's not cheap, but it's not cripplingly expensive.
"Why are interest free student loans never floated as an option?"
Imagine what would happen if the US government made student loans interest free. Who would gain, and who would lose?
(1) Students could afford to take out larger loans (as the repayments would be more affordable with 0% interest vs. 4.66% interest)
(2) As a result of (1) colleges could charge higher tuition fees, without reducing the number of students would could afford to pay
(3) The government would pay interest to the banks (interest that's paid by students under the current system).
Based on what we've seen in the past, increasing access to credit for students mostly benefits colleges. Students end up paying the same monthly payments. Just like how lower interest rates make house prices go up.
This is indeed a sad situation. I'm generally in favour of free-market solutions, but most 18-year-olds don't have sufficient information or ability to act as a rational market participant. So the situation in the UK, where undergraduate education is mostly funded by the government, and prices are centrally capped, seems much better for students.
You're right on the money. In fact, I'd argue that almost no one is smart enough (or wise enough) to only borrow what they really need. I went to college when I was 30. I thought I was smart. I knew that new graduates typically make, maybe, $40K. Yet, I signed up for the full boat...taking every last cent they'd loan me. Consequently, my wife and I are now $250K in debt--and have just bachelor's degrees (plus incomplete master's degrees). Sigh. So much for being so smart.
Basically, I've come to the conclusion that college is not for all. We would be wise to get behind technical schools, and community colleges, and save the university for those pursuing subjects like medicine, science, math, law, etc. At a minimum we should change the paradigm of college--from being an "experience" (parties, socializing, sports), to academics. Getting rid of school sponsored sports would vastly change the perception of college. Plus, we should make it harder to graduate. Require a 3.0, and have controls in place to ensure grades don't inflate to enable everyone to achieve the new minimum. Basically, college should be 100% for learning. Sure, you'll still have friends, go to the occasional party, but on the whole you're only there to learn and do things you couldn't learn or do elsewhere. Right now it's almost day care for 20-somethings. This would also necessitate dropping easy programs and majors. Not that there isn't a place for the arts, but is a four year degree in English or Art History really a good idea?
But yeah, I've noticed the same thing: the more we incentivize people to go to college by way of grants and loans, the more expensive it gets. When was college cheapest? When there was virtually no aid/loans available to anyone, and a much smaller percentage of people went to college.
> But yeah, I've noticed the same thing: the more we incentivize people to go to college by way of grants and loans, the more expensive it gets
But it gets more expensive for those who don't have grants. Maybe that's the problem - too few grants? What if colleges were required by law to enroll one 'free' student per each paying student? It would make it more expensive for paid students, but also will create large pool of bright students to compete for free spots.
> Basically, I've come to the conclusion that college is not for all.
Of course college is not for all. It is not something everyone just "does" because of "jobs". High schoolers and college students feel entitled. The vast majority should not be in college nor do they need a college education. If you are an 18-20 year old and cannot see this, then you sure as hell should not be in college.
Intellectual exploration? Community college is good enough. Parents taking $40K/year loans for tuition/rent for your private or flagship state university? Majoring in humanities? Ha. Go ask those graduates if college was worth it.
Well sure, it's easy to say that in hindsight, but that's not what these students were told growing up.
A generation was told that if they got into university and did well, they'd get much better jobs and be set for life. And it's easy to understand why, because this was true for their parents' generation. Educated employees were in much shorter supply, and thus in a much better position to capture the increased wealth of a booming economy.
Is it any wonder people feel entitled when they were told constantly that they would be rewarded for what they were doing?
One problem, though, is that many students whose loans are becoming problematic were in school during the financial trouble leading up to 2008 and 2009. During that recession, people without degrees had negative growth in jobs (job loss), while college degree-holders dropped nearly to zero, but did not actually go negative. Associate degree-holders were almost half-way between other the two. Of course, it's great to tell students that they should strongly consider the trades or other paths, but the reality is that those careers are less safe in economic downturns.
Just for those who aren't aware, the UK[0] system is kind of a mixture between NZ and US.
Firstly, all loans are provided by the government and they do charge interest. With the current system (for loans since 2012), the interest rate is based on how much you earn - it varies from 1.6% to 4.6%.
The amount you repay is based on how much you earn. If you earn under £21k you don't pay anything. Above that you pay 9% of your income (pre-tax) - if you are an employee it's taken directly from your salary.
Although it's a loan, it isn't typically classed as debt the same as a credit card or mortgage. If you want a mortgage to buy a house, the bank will want to know how much you pay each month, but they won't factor in how much you have left to pay, on the decision to give you a mortgage.
The amount a high education institute can charge is capped at £9,000/year, however a lot of universities charge less, and if you are from a poor background you can usually get a good amount of funding from the government.
After 30 years if you haven't repayed everything, the rest of the loan will be written off.
[0] Scotland is different in that they have no fees for Scottish and EU students, where as students from the rest of the UK have to pay the usual fees.
£9,000/year (11 000 USD) is just above the government-subsidized in-state tuition in most places in the US. If you want to go to a school not in the same state as you (so you lose the government subsidy), you will be paying somewhere between twice and 3x as much. Private universities have a higher advertised price, but are more likely to offer tuition grants based on financial need (at the extreme end, if you are from a destitute family but manage to be admitted to Harvard, you will pay little, if any, tuition).
Yeah this.
I believe a huge reason college education is already so expensive is that so much "easy" money can flow from the government to cover tuition costs through students (and their parents) who don't always understand the long-term consequences of their decisions.
Its only later that the people left holding the bag (graduates) realize that the money is not so easy.
Increased subsidizing of college education will only make the overall costs (whether to students or to the government) rise unless additional controls to reduce tuition are in place.
1 and 2 would happen but 3 would necessitate a decision to consciously subsidize the banks since it can just issue treasury bills itself at a much lower interest rate.
You're forgetting about the other major costs: default risk and loan servicing. Sure, the government might save an amount equal to banks' net profits on student loans, but that could be outweighed by the servicing costs, as the government would need to build a loan servicing operation (and build or install associated software) from scratch.
We could also make college a lot cheaper. Maybe split things back out into "college" and "university" more clearly, and let more people do something other than ship out to a four (or more) year boarding school to have someone more or less through classes that are more or less someone holding your hand through reading a text book that you may neither want nor need to read.
(Yes, the exceptions immediately leap to your mind, I'm sure. But I went to University too, and I remember that I just described an awful lot of courses, even as I too remember the exceptions.)
Universities are valuable, yes, but they acquired that reputation in a time where we weren't shoving everyone through them. It is completely unclear to me that 19th century attitudes about the values of Universities are appropriate to our 21st century reality. If you take a hard-headed business-type look at a university and look at the product it is producing vs. the overhead it requires to produce that cost, not to mention the opportunity cost being foisted off on the students, it's not hard to think that we could pare this down a bit for the vast bulk of students, with the result that they still get the vast majority of benefits and either not having any debt, or having an order of magnitude less of it. Leave those who still need the full experience to it, don't make everyone pay for it.
I have a 7 week old and a 22 month old and am convinced that - outside of certain fields - college will be entirely optional to them. Even now, there are many things that can/should be learned through apprenticeship or online or via other means and that is only going to increase in the next 15+ years.
Please note: I said "college" not education. I believe education will always be vital, no matter what. A piece of paper "proving" it may not be.
Education (or teaching people how to think) will always be important.
Curriculums which attempt to teach and certify specific things will always be of varying degrees of usefulness, but in order for them to become optional their importance to your career will need to be greatly reduced.
That means that entire industries need to learn how to hire people based on what they know and what they can do rather than what someone says they can do.
For close to 10 years, I've been encouraging developers to build portfolios instead of just resumes. Whether that is on Github or sharable project details (don't break NDAs!) or whatever, I don't care.
But we have to be able to talk about our work and show its results whenever possible.
You should study the swiss system. Here everybody goes to school for a minimum of 9 years. Then you have a split into two major groups, those that go on 3 more years of school and then go to university. The other group are doing a apprenticeship/school combo where the school teaches you about the job and some more general stuff. The apprenticeship take 3-4 years depending on the profession, IT, for example, is a 4 year program.
Now the cool thing about this is that if your are motivated to do a little extra you can go for some additional school and that will get you almost the same degree as those that go to school for the full 12 years. This essentially allows you to go into higher education and get your bachelor, sometimes even master.
This has the major benefit at people at the university quite often already have 4 years of job experience. This gives them much more perspective on the theory that you learn. Plus you already earn a little money.
If you don't have the means to go to university full time you can do it part time where your job can actually give you additional credits.
The fascinating thing now is that in Germany about 80% of the kids get a mature (takes 12 years in Switzerland) while in Switzerland its only like 20-30%. So only the people who actually want to university do this. Everybody else jumps into some professional fields right away.
The negative side is that 15 year olds have to pick their jobs, you are usually working by 16/17. Many pick the wrong thing, but fortunately there is a pretty good system in place where you can do something else on faster timeline. They have invested a lot in making the system dynamic, there are all different side paths where you can jump into the other tracks.
> It means that people who don't do tertiary education, or who do a trade, don't subsidise those who go to university.
Well, an interest-free loan is certainly a significant subsidy, as is the direct government support of NZ universities. But I agree this is less subsidy than some European countries where higher education is essentially given away for free.
Even just reducing the interest rate can have a significant impact. I cut my rate from just over 7% to 4.71% and slightly increased my payment, moving my final payment from July 2, 2038 to December 1, 2025 (ignoring any additional payments I make) [1]. Just doing that made attacking my massive loan balance much more manageable.
I don't expect (or want, actually) for my education to be free. I knew I was racking up debt and knew it would have to be paid. Being able to refinance, though, was a huge help.
well, glad I had it for free, there are tons of other financial burdens in life rather than paying education in IT which was nearly obsolete even during studying (i think unis nowadays catched up a bit with current state).
imagine that - graduating and having 0 debt, and not ruining parents in the same time. it's called freedom. but if you feel that you don't want this kind of freedom and perform better under long term pressure, then enjoy your current state.
Well, it's still a subsidy, it's just much less of one than completely free tuition would be. If the Government wasn't loaning that money interest-free, it could in principle reduce its issued bonds by that amount, so the subsidy is the value of the bond rate faced by the NZ Government - plus the present value of the expected defaults.
The idea of linking repayment to income is called an "income-contingent loan". It's a great idea for University tuition, because it reduces the loan to a system for reclaiming a proportion of the private benefits that accrue to the student from the additional education. This removes some of the risk faced by the student that they might put a lot of resources into education but then fail to realise the expected benefits (eg. through serious illness, a broader economic collapse etc).
Kids can't think rationally about debt because their parents and teachers have overinflated the importance of everyone going to college and have actively discouraged critical thinking on these issues.
That's actually a thing now. A significant number of students are going to Germany, getting a subsidized education, and never coming back to the US.
Brain drain is not an overall plus for the US economy. We shouldn't want our best and brightest settling overseas - except insofar as we want to do right by our posterity, and the US education system is obviously not doing right by them.
Many of them can do as I did and go straight from high school to the work force. Others can go into apprenticeships in the skilled trades. Still more to community and vocational colleges to learn business management or accounting.
The fastest growing profession for 4-year college graduates is "HR professional". Come on. You don't need a college degree to be an HR rep, or to be a sales account manager, or to work in a purchasing department. That's something like 60% of the white collar jobs in a typical corporation, which we pretend that you need to spend $150,000 on a Russian Lit degree to competently execute.
> Why can't these kids just think about the debt they're getting into?
Some other people in this thread have mentioned that it's because parents have beaten into kids heads how important college is. That may be in part true, but I think a bigger truth is that people are simply bad with money. College is not the only debt many people have. Look at things like credit card debt[1], and car loans. The populace as a whole makes poor financial decisions every single day, so why would college be any different? At least college can be looked at as a type of investment, unlike that new car or PS4.
>Why can't these kids just think about the debt they're getting into?
When you're 17/18, it's really hard to grasp how hard it will be to pay off the loans. Especially when society tells you that you will be a loser if you don't go. This comes directly from teachers, which have been an authority figure in the child's life up to that point.
Because its pounded into their heads that if they dont go to college then they have no chance at making it successfully in life. So taking on 5-10 years of debt for 40-50 years of success is seen as worth it.
Inflation-adjusted costs of educating a student are largely unchanged in the past 30 years; per-student government subsidies are incredibly low compared to 30 years ago, largely due to the increasing number of students enrolling in college.
The US has a very complicated system of multiple, income-based, student loan repayment schemes[1]. 20 to 25 years of repayment based on many factors. It is so complicated the government has created a "Repayment Estimator"[2] to help people choose the best plan. At a glance it looks similar to the New Zealand 8%. Seems like most systems evolve to where they are impossible for a human understand. See tax code, social security, Obamacare, etc.
> Seems like most systems evolve to where they are impossible for a human understand. See tax code, social security, Obamacare, etc.
That's because the US is characterized by a Republican party with wholly obstructionist goals which make the worst possible consessions for those who do wish for an effective social safety net to be in place, effectively being able to say "I told you so" when the watered-down systems inevitably fail.
In countries where those systems are not points of contention they end up working quite well. See the German education system, NHS, and a long list of other programs around the world.
The German system would never mix with American optimism. Germany has a fewer percentage of its students going to university. Kids are aggressively tracked from an early age into seperate tracks, most of which don't lead to college. And German universities aren't luxurious four year vacations like American universities are.
I'd like to propose a different option, one that would actually solve a lot of the current problems in the USA ... before posting a response, please read the 'why' section below.
- The government stops guaranteeing student debt to banks
- Students are allowed to declare bankruptcy and discharge their debt after N number of years, if they can prove that they're financially unable to pay & the market will not bear a salary high enough to service their debt for someone with their degree
- (optionally) The government stops subsidizing student loan interest
Why?
- If banks are liable to lose the capital in the loan, they will have incentive to make sure that the money is being spent wisely. This does mean that they'll no longer give out $100k for a hypothetical finger painting degree.
- It's a societal norm that debt can be discharged in bankruptcy if a person has no assets and no income, and student loans shouldn't be straight-up exception. We have to tighten this up a little bit to make sure people don't go to college, default, and then reap all the benefits ... but disallowing bankruptcy entirely seems extreme. Optionally, we could also consider revoking their degree if they default (rough equivalent of repossession of a physical good).
- College is extremely expensive right now because a flood of guaranteed, subsidize money has created fairly inelastic demand -- many students have little price sensitivity. This drives prices up. If loans are harder to get, smaller, and not subsidized, college prices come down.
The big problem with the American system right now is that we've written the educational institutions a blank check. If suddenly we put even a little economic pressure on the system, costs will come down.
Many of these changes couldn't be made retroactive -- loans were given out under a set of conditions agreed upon by all parties, and these determined the amount of the loans, so they shouldn't be changed. These changes could, however, improve things for future generations.
One last note -- as someone who spent 5 years paying off $100k in student loans, and who now makes enough money that I'd be excluded from the 'free' (AKA 'paid by everyone else') tuition plans for my own kids, I do admit that I'm not real excited about that idea. I would be pretty ticked off if I had to pay for my own tuition, my children's tuition, and also everyone else's kids tuition.
Having a system where you revoke the degree for lack of payment would just create a system where revoked degrees would be equally valuable, since everyone would know they were the same, except for some bank being ripped off.
That's not how it works. The universities have a software system [1] that employers can (and do) check to verify the degree. All they have to do is return "Not a Valid Degree-Holder", just like criminal background checks will return nothing for convictions that have since been pardoned.
You get a printed degree and documentation of attending university when you graduate. All you would have to do is present those and you're as good as having a 'valid degree'.
I don't think you understand how easy it would be to bypass this system, since the actual degree isn't the value, its the knowledge and experience that you gain on the campus. This is akin to repossessing the keys to a car instead of the vehicle itself.
>Why are interest free student loans never floated as an option?
I suspect because then no one could make money. In the current system, they certainly make money. In a "free tuition" state, they'd still make money; it'd just come direct from the government rather than being filtered through the population and economy first.
I paid ~$13,000 a year tuition to study CS in Canada and I don't feel it's hampered my career vs. paying ~$30,000 in the US.
Note that at the same school, Arts programs are much cheaper than STEM (maybe $5,000 a year), in large part because they have much lower perceived economic value.
Are they "interest free" in the Government's use of the phrase, or the real meaning? The UK government calls (or called) them "interest free" because the interest rate is linked to inflation (as long as it's positive!) and of course (/s) your salary always rises with the same measure of inflation, therefore it's "interest free"
The reality is that providing tuition free loans does cost the government -- whatever the opportunity cost of using that money now was. Though you could argue that the externalities of having an educated population outweigh the opportunity cost.
What's the motivation fo recipients of such funds (universities, faculty, staff, facility builders) to reduce their prices? They operate in a quasi-monopolistic environment where system adjusts to absorb larger budgets thrown at them.
As a non-American living here, I think it boils down to social attitudes. Remember, this is a nation of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
The general attitude in the US is more like "Everything is a choice" rather than "The Government should do things that are broadly good for everyone". So anything that gives relief to students as whole will be deeply unpopular, but universities charging exorbitant rates and employers using college degrees as a filter for jobs that don't need them are okay, because it's your choice to get into student debt for a degree, or because it's your choice as an employer to use whatever filter you want.
This attitude is really hard to change because practically anyone in the US who is admired or famous is so because of their wealth. All the parents think that their kid is going to be good enough to go to Harvard and become a millionaire. And that is why they pony up the ridiculous fees that keep their child in facilities that are ridiculously good for some petulant 18-year olds.
They were effectively "Free" in 2003, about 3%, IIRC. In fact, my (subsidized) loans from 2003-2005 currently have interest rates below 2% due to on time payments and auto withdraw.
This is so obviously a scam that I don't see how it can hold up. Tuition has gone to sky high levels, and who is getting that money?
Not the professors, let's get real. They have probably gotten sweet raises, but nowhere near the growth rate of tuition.
The armies of "administrators" are getting huge salaries, but the main point of the whole bubble is that it is a great way to proactively enslave a whole new generation before they even have a chance.
It's so obviously a "sold my soul to the company store" situation that I can't believe everyone doesn't see through it right away.
They see through it. They just know they have no other option. Educators raise rates because they can, students pay the rates because they have to. It's the same problem we have in healthcare.
Until employers start scrutinizing education in terms other than "No degree? No thanks.", then we will continue to have this problem, in my opinion.
> They see through it. They just know they have no other option.
To add to this, administrators know if they don't hire extensively they are likely to be replaced by someone who will. There is no control mechanism. Giving students a small periodic vote in respect of their top administration would go a long way towards ameliorating such corruption.
Many students pay way more than they have to. I graduated from a top-10 public school (in-state) after transferring from community college and my total bill was about $35k. That's not nothing, but also not a ball-and-chain six-figure mark that some people accrue.
There are better options than a lot of people have taken. To me the solution has to involve better financial and career counseling for high school graduates.
Precisely! Visarga is bold enough to speak the obvious truth!
Problem is many, if not most, incoming students are unable to understand the financial ramifications of student loans. This does not bode well for their futures, especially in technical fields.
David Letterman once joked that "The lotto is a tax you pay for not paying attention in math class." One might say the same about college student loans.
As an aside, your lotto comment made me think of expected value (EV) and poker. At some point the pot of a lotto can become large enough where the EV demands you buy a ticket. Taxes I think make this number almost impossible to reach though.
>Not the professors, let's get real. They have probably gotten sweet raises, but nowhere near the growth rate of tuition.
Actually, at most institutions, professors' raises barely match the rate of inflation, and the majority of teaching has been moved onto adjunct faculty who have no job security.
equal parts administrator and the state, since as I understand it the tuition hikes track funding cuts at the government level for higher ed. that is the real killer.
so, do the taxpayers see the money as reduced sales and property tax?
>> since as I understand it the tuition hikes track funding cuts at the government level for higher ed. that is the real killer.
No, that isn't the real killer. That's the educrat line you've been trained to regurgitate. The truth is that higher-ed is getting about the same percent GDP it's been getting since the 70's [1]. The "real killer" is the annual 3.5% above inflation tuition increases [2] that are inflicted to fund an ever growing amount of staff and their gold plated benefits.
>> do the taxpayers see the money as reduced sales and property tax?
Are you kidding? Where is the place where taxpayers are liv'n la Vida Loca in their property tax free la-la land? We're paying out the ass. Some RINO manages to cut a half a percent or maybe just not increase taxes as fast and they shout it from the roof tops; HUGE TAX CUT. OMGWTFBBQ I SAVED YOU 1.003% VOTE FOR MEEE!
Please kid; stop drinking the educrat kool-aid. The only redeeming feature of this crazy ass education bubble is that it isn't growing as fast as the crazy ass health care bubble.
> The truth is that higher-ed is getting about the same percent GDP it's been getting since the 70's
Isn't it true that many more students attend college than was the case in the 1970's? For example, between 2003 and 2013 enrollment increased 20%[1]. US population only increased about 10%.
> inflicted to fund an ever growing amount of staff and their gold plated benefits
Do you have any data to back this up? This has not been my experience in California's State University system. The benefits are ok, comparable to industry, but the pay is awful.
Those universities in the seventies served far fewer students. In case you haven't noticed enrollment is up as a proportion of the population. Funding as a portion of GDP should've matched it as well.
Wishful thinking. Unfortunately, cost savings like this at a state level rarely translate into reduced taxes or greater services, nowadays they get allocated into payouts for the states underfunded pensions.
At this point it is still "worth it" though. Might be in huge debt but you can get a job that you can afford that debt though. Now I personally don't think this is a good environment for a healthy economy, but for many it is still "worth it". It'll crash when it isn't, and I think we're getting close to that.
The problem is it is artificial. It has been manipulated.
It produces an army of people who have to work every day of their lives, which produces tax revenue and a big, growing economy.
Going to college might be a better choice for an individual than not going to college, but the system has been intentionally set up this way to turn the masses into indentured servants. (Originally, it might have been unexpected that student loans would create this bubble ... but now, it's not a surprise, it's a valuable exploitation mechanism).
It's not the optimal approach for our society ... it only serves to help the Haves gain more control over the Have-nots.
This just seems so wrong.
Optimising for vocational training means you're effectively tuning out the abstract arts and sciences and... oh, the humanities. These fields don't usually/directly translate into a financial success, but they broaden our perspective and deepen our experience. And in doing so provide the tools and language to more effectively analyse and engage with human culture.
And to a certain extent, "true" art is antithetical to capitalism, in a similar way that "true" journalism is antithetical to surveillance (honesty/transparency vs main-stream popularity), and I'd argue equally as important. For that reason these fields absolutely should be subsidised, otherwise art becomes about marketing, journalism becomes about propaganda, and science becomes about start-ups...