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The College-Loan Scandal
Matt Taibbi writes in Rolling Stone about the economics behind college tuition. Interest rates get the headlines and the attention of politicians, but Taibbi says the real culprit is "appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008." He writes,
"For this story, I interviewed people who developed crippling mental and physical conditions, who considered suicide, who had to give up hope of having children, who were forced to leave the country, or who even entered a life of crime because of their student debts. ... Because the underlying cause of all that later-life distress and heartache – the reason they carry such crushing, life-alteringly huge college debt – is that our university-tuition system really is exploitative and unfair, designed primarily to benefit two major actors. First in line are the colleges and universities, and the contractors who build their extravagant athletic complexes, hotel-like dormitories and God knows what other campus embellishments. For these little regional economic empires, the federal student-loan system is essentially a massive and ongoing government subsidy, once funded mostly by emotionally vulnerable parents, but now increasingly paid for in the form of federally backed loans to a political constituency – low- and middle-income students – that has virtually no lobby in Washington. Next up is the government itself. While it's not commonly discussed on the Hill, the government actually stands to make an enormous profit on the president's new federal student-loan system, an estimated $184 billion over 10 years, a boondoggle paid for by hyperinflated tuition costs and fueled by a government-sponsored predatory-lending program that makes even the most ruthless private credit-card company seem like a "Save the Panda" charity. Why is this happening? The answer lies in a sociopathic marriage of private-sector greed and government force that will make you shake your head in wonder at the way modern America sucks blood out of its young."
the scales will tip... right? won't they?
I won't be alive when they do, but my kids will and God help them.
enough said
Universities have no real incentive to lower prices. Why should they? They can foist costs onto a third party.
Also, their costs keep going up - healthcare, salaries, maintenance. Their cost structure is basically fixed. The only way they can cover those is by raising tuition.
This isn't a new problem. This is a structural problem that's been pointed out many times. Why is this news?
Any union shop has the same issues.
... out of its young, out of its old, out of its middle-aged, out of foreigners. Business as usual.
I went back to school during the economic downturn, figuring a bad job market was a good time to get a degree. Wanted to finish out the bachelor's, but even with a mere year and a half at an extremely inexpensive private religious college with a full-tuition scholarship, I grew a quick distrust for the way financial system would impact my future after school. Ended up calling it at the end of a two-year.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The more they try to make college "affordable" via loans, scholarships, etc. the more the colleges and universities will raise their prices until it is just barely affordable by all participants. They want to maximize their income -- as any business does. On the other hand, if we were to cut off student loans and scholarships you can bet that the prices would plummet and they'd stop building fancy buildings named after themselves. (Some universities have exercise areas that are reminiscent of spas and exclusive health resorts than a university.) It is amazing that our parents and grandparents were able to do things like send men to the moon without plush padded seating and nicely carpeted hallways at their universities. Even so, they could still afford to get an education.
Aren't health care costs a closer comparison? Both cases of vulnerable people being taken advantage of on a large scale.
Education in Japan, Work in USA, and wife from France. That's the formula for happy and well played life.
The states have been cutting funding to higher education for years. Costs for running a university are only getting higher. Either the university cuts programs and services or raise tuition.
"They called me at work, sometimes two to three times a day, doing all the stuff they aren't supposed to do: threats, et cetera," says 41-year-old Shawn FitzGerald, who owes $300 a month and says he expects to be paying off education loans into his sixties. "They told the receptionist at my job that I was in legal trouble...."
"I have been told I made the wrong decision going to college, as well as being told I was a failure, an idiot and a mooch," says Larissa, a young woman from a blue-collar town outside Chicago. "I've had ex-boyfriends that I never even lived with contacted by collection agents, my childhood friend's distant relatives contacted by them, as well as distant relatives of my own...."
See here:
Fair Debt Collections Practices Act.
When a collector breaks the law, seek legal representation. Yes, people have sued collectors and won for this kind of abusive behavior.
Hey OPAMA, you wanna get the country out of it's slump? Forgive student loan debt. That'll do more to boost the economy than your silly bail-outs.
I've watched tuition at my local state university go from $150/credit hour to $350/credit hour in 8 years. I have friends graduating with engineering degrees that have 30k in debt from a STATE SCHOOL. This isn't an Ivy League school, but a state university. How does that compute? And the whole time, the school itself is hiring more Administration people and getting rid of, or driving off, many of the professors.
Tuition continues to skyrocket, yet they close more sections for classes every semester. How are you going to sit there and tell me that "tuition needs another hike this semester", and "oh by the way, we're only teaching Kinematics in the Spring now, so you'll have to wait till next year. Sorry."
For lack of a better way to put it, it's horseshit.
“I’ve been frustrated that those making hiring decisions can’t see a little further. In some formats, especially in IT, the 4 year process doesn’t work for some, especially those who have learning disabilities, “The older college system is not for all, and some people learn better on their own. It’s an antiquated system, especially in IT.”
“Schools that are based around 2 years of intensive, hands-on IT training are much better equipped than those spending on English or composition classes. That’s how you can be more flexible and keep up with the industry. Even awarding badges would make the system more relevant.”
I read about this all the time and wonder to myself, "Who is their right mind goes 100k in debt for school?".
Students need to take some responsibility here. You may:
* Have to go to community college for the first two years
* Have to live with mommy and daddy for a few years
* Have 6 roommates
* Have a job (yes I am aware that isn't as easy as it sounds)
* Wait a few years to attend college so you can save money
* Join the military so you can get the GI Bill
* GO TO A CHEAPER IN STATE SCHOOL!
Yes college is expensive but a lot of the time what I see is students wanting their cake and eat it too.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
This article, like many others, misses an important point. Even if colleges hold their total expenditures to the rate of inflation, state support has been declining dramatically over the past decades. As a consequences students are picking up a greater share of the total expenditures through tuition. Clearly that will result in tuition rising at a rate faster than inflation.
If you want to attack wasteful college expenditures, which is a worthwhile topic, you must focus on total expenditures per unit of size (student, degree, credit hour, whatever). Looking at only the part of the expenditure financed by tuition is highly misleading. Unless we're talking about for-profit colleges. Those are sucking the lifeblood out of college-bound youth. Just look at the per degree debt levels of college loans that go to for-profits. "Among all bachelor's degree recipients, median debt was about $7,960 at public four-year institutions, $17,040 at private not-for-profit four-year institutions, and $31,190 at for-profit institutions." [http://www.asa.org/policy/resources/stats/]
America will continue to fall until the only way to earn a living is by being a corporate shark a la Gordon Gecko. Such people lead livestyles that are just as extreme as a basement-dwelling geek in terms of balance - the problem is, society needs harmony and a large middle class in order to prosper.
Don't restrict sharky people, you just need to make sure that the infrastructure of society is kept safe under the wing of *proper* and *positive* government. I understand if that sounds like an impossibility to North Americans but it really isn't. The path to get there might be gruelling though.
And we wonder why the social services sector is suffering? I interviewed students for an article a few years back and a few of them admitted they wouldn't be able to do what they wanted due to the high costs: couldn't be teachers, couldn't be social workers, wouldn't have the time to volunteer and give back and open up the centers they wanted. When I was 18 a private loan company told me I could take $50,000 a year if I needed. A year! Of course, why wouldn't they? Give away as much money as they possibly can while current laws make it impossible to ever have that debt forgiven. Going to make $25,000 a year after college? Here, take $100,000, then struggle the rest of your life with no recourse because you were an idiot at 18. Sad really.
Some things are still there just to keep old departments relevant.
I had a solid 6 years worth of state school tuition/costs in the bank by the time my daughter was 6. Now that I've still got 7 years to go, we're hovering between 4 and 5 years worth. I feel like there should be some way to invest in colleges, 'cause I'm certainly not getting that kind of ROI in the market!
*Yes - you can pre-pay for college in some states. As crazy as all get out - if you want to pre-buy 4 years of State school in Virginia for a 12 year old it will cost you MORE than if you buy it for a 16 year old. Even they know that the system is fucked.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Part of this has to do with the subsidies they add to tuition. I remember when I was in school, tuition was about $2000 per semester. One semester, they decided to jack up tuition by $400. Most of that $400 was earmarked for subsidies for lower-income students. I found out during a meeting where the chancellor announced the change that 40% of our overall tuition went to subsidies. 40%! At which point I asked:
"So you're increasing tuition to help students who can't afford tuition, because we keep raising tuition to help students who can't afford tuition?"
They just kind of shrugged that question off.
For all the belly aching, there is some truth to this.
I did most of this, and my parents even were able to chip in to help with my education
Cars don't cost that much. Teenagers don't buy houses. The decision-makers here are people who aren't even old (or mature) enough to drink - are completely impulsive - have no life-experience and less of a tangible "long-term" outlook - and they're actually *pressured* (by society, parents, high-school guidance counselors, etc) to go with the BEST school they can [at any cost].
What can possibly go wrong??
As a recent college graduate (liberal arts, natch) I graduated with a little under 18k in debt despite working my way through college. Why? Because the real estate investors have caught on that there's a gold rush bonanza going on where college students are. Rents within 5 miles of campus are nearly triple anywhere else in the state. After college it took nearly two years to find a steady job (what, IT without a STEM degree in the space industry? -- anything's possible). I remember getting a call from my school's alumni association asking for a donation: I laughed for a solid minute, told the stunned student my story and wished her a pleasant day. Both of my supposedly federally-subsidized student loans were sold by the federal government to private industry, one without even telling me (I only found out when a collector called me a year later to ask why I wasn't paying them back).
I'm not even a horror story. I may not be able to even afford a car with my monthly bills and buying a house is a joke I'll be telling when I'm 40, but there are people out there who are graduating with $30,000 or more in loans with absolutely no chance of getting a job in this economy (here's a hint, all the people who didn't graduate college that year are still looking for jobs) who are expected to be paying for massive government spending in the next 20 years (Medicare expansion, Social Security, the F-35, foreign military interventions) who simply will not be contributing to our economy. The "Millenials" are hopelessly fucked, and the country is just now waking up to the fact that they have utterly failed the generation that's supposed to pull their asses out of the fire. The US will change dramatically once my generation gets into power, and not in a good way. No money, no jobs, no patriotism, no country.
Also, their costs keep going up - healthcare, salaries, maintenance....
No one is saying different.
What they are saying is that the tuition has far outpaced those increases.
It's one thing if tuition and other "fees" increased the same rate as those costs, but at their current obscene rate?!? There's MUCH more going on than keeping up with increased costs!
That's what is outraging everyone.
The problem is that the loans are government guaranteed, so there's little to no risk for the lender and makes for easily available college funding. Which means the tuition no longer has as much market forces to keep the prices reasonable, and thus go up.
You want to get tuition costs back down? Stop backing these loans, and put the risk back on those making them. Once there is a definite risk of falling enrollment, you will start to see some real downward direction of tuition costs. Since banks don't want to lose money, they may also be a whole lot less likely to lend money for some of the private universities that produce graduates with no job opportunities (and thus creating a public liability of a student with a worthless degree).
I think this is yet another case of the "Law of Unintended Consequences" where the government tries to do something to help, and ends up causing another problem.
I'm paying for college for two of my kids now and a third will be starting in a year. Trust me it makes no sense in terms of the increases and fees that colleges and universities charge. My latest annoyance with all of this are the techniques that the book publishers and the colleges are using to keep you going into the bookstore: One time use access cards for accessing online tests or other material, effectively negating the value of a used book.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Here's a reality check:
40 years ago you could reasonably go to school and pay for your tuition and fees by working a manual summer job. There are no jobs out there which pay a year's tuition in 3 months for untrained labor, or anything close to it today. Heck, the average starting ANNUAL salary is less than tuition/room/board for a year at practically any private university today.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
More proof the government is always harmful. So the idea started out, hey lets make student loans so people without financial resources can go to college! The private sector does not make such loans because lets face people with no assets and mostly no credit history are no credit worthy. You need at least one of those things nominally. The private sector is right about this default rate on such loans would be so high as to make rates unfordable; there is no market.
So along comes government which can make it impossible to discharge the debt to offer loans. Sounds okay, but now you got all kinds of money running around being directed in terms of spending by people ( the young students ) who don't appreciate how hard $20K really is to come by for most us and is likely to be in their future. What they know is they don't have to think about it right now; so what does another few hundred dollars a semester matter they will likely decide.
So the schools start competing on well anything because more students is more dollars. If you are a for profit the motive is obvious, if you are non profit you reinvest get bigger and more prestigious. Ego wins every time. Rooms get bigger, mess halls get Michelin ratings, etc. The system evolves to suck up all the money.
Because college is "Accessible", though still not really "affordable" to everyone a degree becomes a requirement to sweep the floors or sell cars, so everyone must get one or be forever marginalized.
Leaving students to spend their entire young lives, and most productive periods in debt services rather than grown their personal wealth, and be forever marginalized. Why? because dear old Uncle Sam decided to muck around where he does not belong.
Its almost like someone *wants* everyone in debt...
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
we can put more funding in to Community Colleges and make so that any other college MUST take the credits in full.
Here is one link:
http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2012/08/jackson-said-to-run-up-college-debt-so-students-wlll-vote-democratic.html
this has been well known for nearly 3 years but it doesnt really get much coverege because, well, yeah its the same on a number of levels but disasterously worse.
School loans cant be absolved through bankruptcy, they'll take them from any form of income you earn. this 'perpetuity' makes them attractive to investors because its "foolproof" and acceptable by the plutocracy because it ensures that even if you get a good education, your position results in nothing more than endentured servitude to the state in the hopes of one day living the american dream after those loans get paid off. politicians like the idea because it boosts school enrollment and kids think the whole thing is swell until they realize no ones hiring.
the most telling sign is the recent snafu about the student loan rate, which was tossed about without much bickering at all despite the fact that both sides of the house mortally detest the other. a deal was reached quickly for a number of reasons, not the least of which include another round of occupy protests but this time perhaps with violence and property damage that isnt fabricated by the news. We are by all indications keeping the ship afloat and trying not to draw too much attention to the flaming lido deck. Im not sure when its going to happen, but expect some serious shit to hit the fan when investors realize how dangerous it is to insist millions of people shuffle around with thousands in permanent debt. the fear isnt that some day the markets will crash, its that some day the kid with the biology masters working at dennys is going to pick up a molotov.
Good people go to bed earlier.
We should put the onus on the universities, to certify that if the student completes the degree he/she is seeking, there is at least some reasonable chance the loan will be paid back. They universities should disclose the mean and median starting salaries of the majors they are offering. Like the home loans used to have some basic rules like, "not more than 27% of gross for mortgage, not more than 34% for all loan payments, 20% down". Similar easy to grasp metrics should be made available.
But in a free market economy, if some people want to shoot themselves in their foot, there is nothing to stop them. But at least we someone should be telling them, they have a gun in their hand pointing to their feet and if they squeeze the trigger they will get hurt. Instead we are incentivising the bullet peddlers .
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The real problem, as this article outlines, is lots of government money flowing into colleges to prop up these mad levels of tuition.
Governments are lowering funding for higher education because they are out of money. Having government pour more money into colleges that are spending to excess is called ENABLING, not solving.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Even Community Colleges are boosting tuition and adding dubious fees.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://www.kjonline.com/opinion/editorials/transferring-college-credits-should-be-easierunnecessary-roadblocks-set-up-between-community-colleges-university-system_2013-08-11.html
some schools force you to live of dorms at high costs.
Now, that's for private, non-profit schools. Public schools it has jumped substantially, but not for any nefarious reason: it's what happens when the state legislature looks for easy cuts in the budget and axes higher ed first. When I went to William and Mary back in the mid-80s, 34.7% of the budget was covered by the state. It's 12.8% now, but they're still expected to offer everything they did before (and more) as well as give discounts to in-state students. That money can come only from two places: tuition and endowment.
Endowment is an entire 'nother subject. You might have noticed a serious drop in the stock market a few years back? We (and many other schools) run a three year trailing average on endowment draw, so that's still hurting badly. Oh, and you can't get bonds or other securities with yields higher than a percent or two these days.. Couple the two and your endowment income has cratered as well.
Can we cut budgets? Sure: I started here six years ago in IT and my budget is 20% less than was when I joined. Software vendors don't care: my SPSS licensing costs have tripled in those 3 years for example, and everyone else wants their 5% a year bump. And I'm at a healthy school: I've been at ones that aren't and it's worse.
The real abuse IMHO is the loan industry. We've somehow gotten this idea that it's ok to put yourself into debt for the rest of your life for a degree. (And that debt, unlike every other kind can't ever be vacated by bankruptcy) Nobody should take out $100k of debt for any degree, and the feds shouldn't back it, much like they shouldn't back flood insurance for people who want to live on barrier islands. That may mean you don't get your dream school. Maybe it means 2 years of community college before residential. There are plenty of ways to get an education- shop for them just like you would for an phone
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
States want to give less money to state schools. Well, when there's less coming in from taxes they can either cut services, or raise prices. "Do more with less," is a line from uninformed PHBs and politicians, it just doesn't work that way. Many universities have done both, cut some services, and raised rates.
Get real. Just look at other nations and how they handle their education systems. It is precisely because there is so much profit motive involved that things are the worst anywhere in the [first] world. And the patterns are plain for all to see. It's not a "free market" compatible situation. What do I mean by that?
Simple. We talk about supply and demand as key factors in the free market. But in cases where there is unlimited demand there is massive exploitation by business unless regulation is present. Take power for example. Most states understand that power has unlimited demand and that utilities must be regulated. California and Texas went with deregulation ostensibly to increase competition and lower prices while increasing quality -- free market thought. What happened? The highest energy prices in the nation. And medical costs are another example. The system grew from a pay the provider system where multiple providers can compete for your business into one where consumers pay using "someone else's money." (The insurance system) Once medical insurance became a virtual requirement for having access to healthcare, competition all but disapepared and prices went crazy. And consumers didn't care because they paid seemingly reasonable monthy costs for something only a small percentage of people were using. (Paying for something they MIGHT need under terms which they don't understand instead of simply paying for something in exchange for something.)
The problem is that free market capitalism can never exist in its purest form because human corruption will always creep in with every form of bait and switch imaginable. They are actively redefining words, terms and expressions so people don't get what they think they are paying for. ("Unlimited"? Really?) And the same free-market people are lobbying and standing in line for their government subsidies all day long while complaining they want government out of their lives.
So you can go on trolling with your right-wing nonsense because it doesn't work any better than left-wing nonsense. Everything has practical limits in one direction or another and those limits should be defined at the point where peoples' worst natures are activated and massive exploitation begins to occur. And it's precisely the goal of preventing massive harm and exploitation which government should exist for. Obviously, this means business lobbies should be forbidden but that can't happen without a massive revolution so I wouldn't look for it to happen. But the next best thing is for people to wake up and start caring about what goes on in government at all levels. These days, most corruption is done in plain sight. People just have to look and care about it.
The college I graduated with over 10 years ago posted annual 2014 tuition of $3333 x 4 years that is only 13,333. This doesn't include room and board. Yes, that is a reasonable amount of money(I lost more than this amount on paper with the 2008 housing value crash). But it isn't the life of being in the poor house that the media makes it out to be. I worked my way through school and didn't have much help from relatives. It isn't quite the party as having a free ride is, but it is still entirely doable in this day in age. I know there are a lot of universities out there that are charging 50k+ for a 4 year education. The school I went to was ranked in the top 50 of engineering schools in the US. I know I know not the top 10 but I'll live. Today's teens need to buck up, make wise decisions and be told that absolutely nothing is the end of the world until you die. If you are of sound mind and have the work ethic you have a solid chance to do whatever you want to do in life.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
There is a simple way to effectively limit student loan debt, and that is to ensure that loans are based on realistic estimates of how much a student can pay back. Kind of like every other type of loan. However, because this is so simple and obvious, it will never actually be implemented.
If you limit the amount loaned to, say 10% of average expected annual income over the 10 years after graduation (based on actual surveys of past students in similar programs, expected unemployment rates, etc), then you wind up in a situation where both schools and students are constrained by reality. Schools would be forced to bring fees back down to realistic levels, and you wouldn't have to worry about theatre majors paying down $100,000 in debt while working at Starbucks.
get rid of the no bankruptcy rule. Also income based cut costs as well all you can with your high cost fill with skills gaps 4 year bs/ba is Starbucks then they can take what is left from my income after taxes and other stuff.
Community college is also having it's costs raises year after year.
And as for a job, it's be nice if they would let you work and go to school. Best you can do is some blue collar one which depending where you work they might switch your hours week to week.
Can't come into work because you got class? Well there is a line of people here who are unemployed and also not going to school that can work that shift; so are still not able to come in?
In state schools aren't necessarily cheap. California's estimate is $30k/year.
http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/paying-for-uc/cost/
Plenty of students go into that much debt, and have ZERO alternative - other than changing their preferred course of study.
One such example...just try and get through medical school for less than $100K. You can't even do it for double that amount.
that can force them to tech real skills and have them have to compete with non degree people who can learn the same skills with out college and it will kill off a lot of the joke majors.
I know I've read analyses from economists that have focused on tuition and student loans as basically a feedback loop, with student loan amounts and tuition ratcheting up at equal paces.
While I understand the link between university administrators and student loans, I hadn't thought of the link between building contractors and student loans. Obviously administrators stand to gain from bigger budgets, since it means more responsibility and higher salaries (or moves to new jobs to demonstrate how they can grow programs...)
It's a great political story because contractors and building trades unions are a major political force and might actually be capable of working both sides, getting legislatures to encourage universities to expand and encouraging legislatures to increase student loans.
Personally, I'm shocked at the scale and amount of new buildings at the University of Minnesota,relative to when I went there in 1985. When I was student there I think I could count on one hand the number of buildings that had been built on campus in the previous 20 years and it seems like there are more than double the number of 20 year or less old buildings now.
school loan need to be fee and late fee free and have low interest rates.
I think your suggestions are good, but I think it's wrong-headed to blame the students for 'not taking responsibility.
This is a systemic problem. We have a bunch of 18 year-olds with relatively little life experience, and we keep telling them that going to a good college will make them rich someday. We give them the impression that taking out massive amounts of student loan is a wise move. This message comes from parents and teachers and politicians and the media, and you can't blame a bunch of kids for believing it.
We need to take a good hard look at how we're treating education. Is college a place where kids can receive a good general education, or are they vocational schools? Are we promoting education for the good of our society, or do we think it's a privilege for rich people that should be denied to the poor because they haven't earned it? Is the purpose of college to educate our young adults, or to entertain them with frat parties and amateur minor-league sports teams?
Vocational Training is being ignored is most parts of the U.S.
Not all kids are suitable for college, or even want to go. Most schools place kids on the college track.
A kid who can graduate from high school with an ASE certification is immediately employable as a mechanic. A kid who completes an apprenticeship can work as an electrician/plumber/HVAC/framer/flagger/heavy equipment operator, etc., anywhere. Most of those earn good money. I have friends who are an electrician, plumber and diesel mechanic and have friends who are a psychiatrist, chiropractor, ER nurse, teacher, etc. Guess who is is in debt and who is not... Heck, one of the guys with a 'vocation' has a side business buying yachts from the east coast and selling them on the west coast. 100K a year from that alone.
At my old high school the metal shops and auto shops (from 25 years ago) are no longer used by those departments. The programs have been cancelled (with many others). What is in their place? Day care for children of the students. That is a SHAME!
Procrastination; I'll think of a sig tomorrow.
It needs apprenticeships and more non degree trade like schools.
let's 4 years of pure class room theroy based schooling does not work for some fields.
California and Texas went with deregulation ostensibly to increase competition and lower prices while increasing quality -- free market thought. What happened? The highest energy prices in the nation.
When the last piece of Texas deregulation went into effect in 2011 (allowing charges up to $3000 per MWh from what is normally $50 to $75 per MWh), the VERY NEXT DAY there was rolling black outs and charges of $3000 per MWh. (echoes of Enron)
This is the same state cutting billions from state universities and public schools. The only things that get funded are private entities like the quarter billion state funds for F1 racing. That made Bernie Ecclestone very happy.
Right, because there's no point in learning anything that won't increase your earning potential.
This.
1. I went to a state school in Ohio which offered me a scholarship for athletics during undergrad. We paid very little.
2. I delayed grad school until I found a company that would pay for my education. I left that company with about 5 classes remaining but only had to end up paying $5200 total for a $28,000+ education.
3. This is being compared to the home loan situation. People were doing things that were stupid then too such as buying homes beyond their means, not educating themselves about the types of loans they were obtaining, etc. This is no different.
Do not go to a school you cannot afford and most definitely don't go into a major which will not provide you with a working wage afterward.
I read about this all the time and wonder to myself, "Who is their right mind goes 100k in debt for school?".
From Collegedata.com:
In its most recent survey of college pricing, the College Board reports that a "moderate" college budget for an in-state public college for the 2012–2013 academic year averaged $22,261. A moderate budget at a private college averaged $43,289.
OK. A little math here: A "moderate" cost for 4 years at a state school (not counting inflation, which makes this a joke really): $89,000. "Moderate" cost for 4 years at a private college: $173,000. So who goes into 100K kind of debt for school? It looks like pretty much everyone who doesn't have family resources to fall back on.
Just sort out free education and decent accomodation for everyone. It just isn't difficult to do these days.
You paying? Because despite your breezy assertions to the contrary, that's a lot of money and resources for a society to pony up for people who can get all that on their own.
A lot of employers get this. I've never had trouble from my employers that caused such conflicts.
Ah -- the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again!
This is exactly what classical, supply-and-demand economics would predict.
Most of us understand why the government can't just print more money. The price of everything would just go up.
This is exactly the same scenario. The only difference is that in this case, the government is printing a special kind of money -- money that can only be used for one thing. It is no surprise when then price of that thing just goes up accordingly.
Subsidies (i.e., cheap loans) increase demand. Increased demand causes the price to rise.
Consider:
* The US massively subsidizes education. The price of education rises far beyond the rate of inflation.
* The US massively subsidizes housing. The price of housing rises far beyond the rate of education.
* The US massively subsidizes health care. The price of health care rises far beyond the rate of inflation. (Except, of course, the kinds of health care -- like cosmetic surgery -- that do not typically get subsidized. Costs in these areas have plummeted.)
I don't pretend to have an answer to this dilemma. The only really clear thing is that the laws of supply and demand aren't *statutory* laws, that can just be altered with a pen and a lot of hand-waving. They are fundamental natural laws, and well-intentioned attempts to manipulate markets (from student loans to price-control regimes) almost always trigger equal and opposite consequences.
The real shame is that important issues like these are so easily demagogued. Even though the system is clearly broken, no politician in his right mind would ever propose changing it. "Look!" people would scream. "He hates education! And poor people!"
"Adminstrative Costs are the problem."
Well, no, they're not. They're a SYMPTOM of the problem, that is causing many people to confuse cause and effect.
It's not "Rising administrative costs cause universities to charge more."
It's "Increased demand, propelled by government subsidization of costs (i.e., cheap loans), allows universities to raise prices to the point where they can afford to spend lavishly."
lllll AJ
It costs money to teach classes, and professors have to get paid. Ironically I can see teaching being cheaper for major universities, since they can offload some of the work onto graduate students, who are cheaper than professors. (I'm not criticizing the practice; I was a very happy graduate teaching assistant for many years, and I think GTA's can do a fine job.)
I see complaints of a lot of sources of cost - high professor salaries, declining state support, etc. I work in a major State University and I see rising costs associated with bureaucracy associated with government. State funding comes with the requirement for tons of paperwork - research funds, paperwork and people to process it. Loans, paperwork and people to process it. Federal funds - more paperwork, more people. We have numerous offices of senior people who oversee reporting programs. These programs serve the government masters, not the needs of the student . . . While each additional paperwork requirement seems "useful" the weight of many sheets of paper becomes heavy fast.
Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Which is in a different universe from where students are today.
Go back to school at 3x the cost and then spend a year sending out resumes before you presume to lecture today's grads. Why is there's always some dude who starts up with their "back in myyyyy day" crap when costs have exploded since they graduated when Clinton was still president.
Universities have no incentive to lower prices for a couple reasons:
1) Government Intervention. Government loans mean that anyone with any type of credit can get loans to cover most of their tuition. Therefore it is "affordable" to pay ridiculous amounts of money for education.
2) Society has pushed the myth that one MUST be college educated no matter where they are headed in life to have any real career. This is patently false, especially in the trade industry.
3) Higher priced education is considered "better" by society, by and large.
4) People buying the crap that you need to be "well rounded" in your college education, which is an excuse for Universities to make students take all kinds of worthless courses (thus paying more) for their degree.
To fix the problem, government needs to start weening out their involvement, so that Universities have to charge less or face a lack of business. Students need to start considering whether they really need 4-5 years of education to go into tribal drumming music. Alternate trade schools need to pop up which give people only the education they need for their career choice. Finally, and this is already happening to a large extent, businesses need to stop putting so much stock in big name universities, and university degrees in general. There would also be pressure for educators to put together shorter, better degree tracts if the loan rates one could get were directly tied to ones likelihood of getting a paying career (and thus being able to pay back the loan in a reasonable time)...you know, the way loans work in most other parts of the market.
This isn't just Universities raising tuition because they can, but I do agree that costs can go down with enough incentives. All labor based industries (education, health care, etc) have had their costs greatly beat inflation unless the industry significantly benefits from automation. But colleges have very little incentive to embrace automation because the government will keep raising Stafford loan limits and semi-guarantee private student loans through the bankruptcy code.
If this assistance was reduced, Universities would find ways to cut costs and compete just like other industries. More undergraduate classes would have lectures online with in class time meant more for tutoring. More TAs could be used. More 2-year degrees could be created for careers that don't really need a full bachelor's degree.
Government assistance should still be part of the process because an educated workforce is definitely in the country's best interest. But I really think their financial involvement could be significantly diminished.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Right, because there's no point in learning anything that won't increase your earning potential.
Let's put it a couple of different ways. First, can students collectively afford to borrow for this $40k per year education that doesn't help their earning potential? The whole story is about the problems of heavily indebted former students.
Second, why burn that much when you can spend considerably less and get most of the education you want?
Government investment in post-secondary education has declined significantly in my lifetime. Kinda makes you wonder what the government expects from its citizens, as far as contributions to the GDP, if the majority cannot afford to acquire the skills required for employment beyond the service industry.
You also have not had to compete with people able to work anytime, begging for hours, all in a climate of 20%+ youth unemployment.
Actually, yes, I have. It turns out being reliable beats having a more flexible schedule.
All the responsibility is being shuffled onto the students. That's the problem.
Someone who wants to go to a good law school, and double that for medical. Your unspoken implication is that only the well off have any business going into such high-end professions, thus starting a veritable caste system.
Is that a bug, or a feature for you? Don't bother with the "I put myself through school working part time in the 90's" that some helpful person posts in any of these discussions, when costs have doubled a few times since then.
Anyone who's been exposed to universities at the faculty or administrative level, as an outsider, can see that the system is a nightmare of waste. I was brought on during a supposed hiring freeze to teach a non-essential course at a university in my area; I was taking over for a friend who was no longer free. By the end of that same semester they had begun major construction on campus. At about the same time one of the professors approached me about buying new computers for the class. It blew my mind that this guy was suggesting top of the line Mac Pros and an all new suite of software to replace what we had been using. What we already had was more than adequate and fairly current, and that's not to mention that the school already gave most, if not all students a Macbook of their own. T
Money is no object at these universities. It reminds me of the healthcare system where the solution to every financial problem is to simply raise rates. They've got to have the latest and greatest of everything regardless of whether it provides any real value. Unfortunately, there's budgetary control is nonexistent; it's literally a free-for-all.
If the university administration gets it in their heads to focus on athletics then you're really screwed. They'll hire some high profile individual, at massive expense, to bolster their athletic program. That entails further spending all with the goal of having one good year to get the university on the map. The hope there is obviously to attract more students, even if it comes at the expense of academic quality.
The problem here also is that no one is identifying and addressing the problem. Americans are far too comfortable with getting into debt. So they'll take out these massive loans, and the money the parents "save" by not paying for school goes to spoiling the student with a shiny new car and generous housing. Most people seem to believe that the solution to the problem is to make getting loans even easier.
The stat I heard several years ago is if the price of milk had risen at the same rate as college tuition we'd be paying $40 for a gallon. The economics are seriously screwed up but I see no evidence that the bubble is going to burst. The same school I taught at has seen a continued construction boom. I have no idea what's going on anymore, but new buildings are going up all over campus.
But the really screwed up thing here is that they do nothing at all for the community they reside in. It's a giant money sink that skips right over the surrounding communities. Unfortunately, because these schools grease the right pockets they get to operate with impunity. It's those neighboring communities who suffer the consequences.
Then don't go to that school.
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I said, "some" of the responsibility. Parents certainly also bear some as do the colleges who are very much ripping people off.
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I bought three years of prepaid tuition for my son and daughter in the early 2000's, about four years before the first one went to college. I liquidated investments in an UGMA fund to do so, reasoning that the prepaid plan would appreciate at the rate of tuition inflation.
Tuition was frozen in Maryland that year, and didn't increase at all until the first child graduated.
And to make things worse, the UGMA was mostly stock, and partially stock in ... Apple.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
will need some kind of cap or the loan interest can make it end less.
federal loans pay be paid off as a 10% income tax for no longer than 20 years. Either paid off early or canceled at the end of the term. A pertentage is not as burdensome as a fixed amount. Unfortunately this only applies to recent loans originated through federal programs. They need make it retroactive for all educational loans.
Problem 0: Not enough students are going to college
Solution 0: Add state and federally funded grants / loans to incentivize students to attend
Problem 1: Too many students are overcrowding our Universities
Solution 1: Increase admission standards to appear more "selective" and thus become more desirable so we can charge more
Problem 2: College is too expensive
Solution 2: Increase the availability of loans to everyone to help them offset the increased cost
Problem 3: None of our students are able to get jobs in their field now that they have graduated
Solution 3: ???
Problem 4: College students are coming out college with too many loans
Solution 4: ???
Well, the alternative is to have only a High School diploma. Unless you're a super self-starter that's going to make his own business from the ground up, that High School diploma is not going to get you very far.
I read the internet for the articles.
The issue with course articulation has nothing to do with accreditation. Second there is nothing stopping a private university from entering an articulation agreement with other schools other than the private schools not wanting students to leave. In addition there is nothing to make private schools want to have an agreement because without one they require the students to spend more money taking classes.. That being said articulation between state schools is not all it is cracked up to be.. Here in NC there is an agreement between schools on what is taken, and you can transfer an ass of x to a general ed requirements fulfilled, but in general it is severly lacking. If I take calc 1 at UNC Pembroke NC State is not likely to take it as calc 1 credit.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
How do you know a liberal arts degree will get you nowhere?
Look at the biographies of Nobel laureates in science. Many of them started in the liberal arts. For example, Eric Kandell started out studying literature.
Look at the biographies of any successful people.
Ever met an unemployed aerospace engineer?
Especially with graduate school students who returned after being in the work force, there's an issue where students take out loans just to cover basic cost of living expenses. An undergrad is happy with living in a 1 bedroom loft and eating ramen every other day. Someone who went to work after undergrad and got used to a regular paycheck and all the perks that come with it: got married, started a family, bought a house - they will have to take out extra loans simply to maintain their lifestyle. Not every field has night classes that allow someone to work full time (IT is kind of lucky in this respect.) So the person finishing up her PhD while juggling a husband and a kid is going to have to quit her job or drop hours, or go on assistanceship from the school (if one is even available) and take out loans to make up for the missing income.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Well actually, I never bothered finishing college. I found it useless for my chosen career. That is not to say I don't understand the benefit thereof. Some of my suggestions still apply. Want to go to a good law school? Cool. Make sure your grades are good enough to get at least some scholarships or defer until you serve 4 in the military so you can get a huge chunk paid for by the GI Bill.
Or...
MAYBE, just MAYBE you don't get to be a lawyer.
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I'm not talking about sciences, I'm talking about degrees like Gender Studies, Arts, etc.
You dont need to pay a University $40k to tell you how to paint. You could take that $40k and spend it a lot more wisely practicing your talents yourself.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
GO TO A CHEAPER IN STATE PUBLIC SCHOOL!
Recently completed my degree from one. No loans, no grants. (And scholastically, it wasn't easy.)
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
There's more than enough resources to go around. Just sort out free education and decent accomodation for everyone. It just isn't difficult to do these days. Productivity has largely tripled since the 70's, think about it!
But then where would the billionaires find large enough monetary flows to let them skim off enough money to buy megayatchs and private islands?
There was a day when a College education was affordable, and an enterprising student could work their way through college on a part time job. Then the government got involved providing federally guaranteed student loans. This enabled colleges to start raising tuition, because now students could finance their way through college. Today, any college that doesn't raise their tuition is simply leaving money on the table - they'd be fools not to raise rates. The horse has left the barn, and the race is on. There is no upper limit now to what colleges can charge for tuition because the loans are guaranteed.
Now, the political side of this is that conservatives never wanted the government involved in the first place, because government involvement always distorts the market (which is exactly what has happened). Progressives called the conservatives heartless because they wanted to deny education to the poor and underprivileged. Somehow this argument always seems to work - we want life easier today and never think about the consequences. (Progressives and conservatives exist in both parties, don't let anyone fool you into thinking this is a democrat/republican thing.)
Now we have the consequences: Tuition rates that are skyrocketing and it is now near impossible to go through college without taking on obscene levels of debt. Those who decried government involvement in the first place, would like to see government get out of the student loan business. The reaction is obvious: "You are anti-education! You are not for the poor and underprivileged!"
And so here we are, the way to stop it is to collapse the 'Government-Educational-Complex' - shouldn't be hard. The actual value of a college education is rapidly approaching nil, yet people are paying more and more for it. Government is always happy to enslave you to the debt, because then you'll always vote for the party who promises keeping rates low and/or forgiving your student loan debt. If that isn't slavery, I don't know what is.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Isn't giving someone a loan for a degree that you *know* won't earn them enough to pay it back an act of bad faith, or at least as equally foolish as taking the loan in the first place? Why should the public, via the government, subsidize foolish loan practices?
Eliminate the government subsidies, and suddenly the banks will start caring about what degree you want and what aptitude you show for it before handing you a check.
I already figured out the "college industrial complex" long before the term was even coined. The overcrowded classrooms, lack of sufficient parking, ridiculously overpriced textbooks, and all other factors made it blatantly obvious. But what really made me lose my temper was the university's refusal to acknowledge and do anything about its broken online testing system. I was taking classes that required students to complete quizzes, tests, and final exams all via the college website. Almost everything was true/false and multiple-choice. We were permitted to see our quiz results when they were finished and which questions we got right and wrong, and also view our submitted answers. As the semester went by, I realized that their testing system was literally changing the answers that I had selected to wrong answers! Whats more, it was also counting correct answers as incorrect! Nearly every quiz I had taken had been brought down from a A to a B, a B to a C, and in one case an A to a D. Clearly their testing system didn't work correctly, and keep in mind this is the same system that we took our tests and final exams on, which usually counted towards 60% of our final average. For the tests and final exams, we were NOT permitted to see our submitted answers and NOT permitted to see which questions were counted as correct and incorrect. So I complained to all the respective departments and faculty, the dean, and they all just gave me the run around! Nobody wanted to make any attempt to fix the problem or even acknowledge that their system was broken. They were just going to keep on using it. I was furious. And then it occurred to me that by lowering everyone's test scores, they fail more students, who in turn will have spend more money re-taking the classes making second attempts to move closer to their goal of graduating. It even screwed people who could have otherwise made the deans list. When I think of all the thousands of students who poured their time and money into attending that university only to get ripped off systematically I was almost ready to file a lawsuit. But I was a poor broke powerless college student who really couldn't do much of anything to put a stop to it. I eventually graduated, but I've never gone back. Lived and learned.
For this story, I interviewed people who developed crippling mental and physical conditions, who considered suicide, who had to give up hope of having children, who were forced to leave the country, or who even entered a life of crime because of their student debts
it'd be a much stronger statement if he was interviewing responsible people who looked at the tuition costs and made the tough decision not to attend. am i supposed to feel bad for people who spent way, way more money than they had then did things like skip the country to avoid paying back their loans, or turn to a life a crime?
* Have to go to community college for the first two years
This assumes CC offers the necessary courses, and that the destination accepts credits from the former.
* Have to live with mommy and daddy for a few years
This assumes that mommy and daddy will take you, and are located somewhere you can live/work
* Have 6 roommates
Try to find a place with 6 reliable roomates that's conducive to good studying
* Have a job (yes I am aware that isn't as easy as it sounds)
Not only difficult to find a job, but how about finding one that works with your student hours
* Wait a few years to attend college so you can save money
While trying to get by on a minimum-wage job that basically lets you save nada
* Join the military so you can get the GI Bill
And die in some godforsaken desert, that way you never have to worry about education.
* GO TO A CHEAPER IN STATE SCHOOL!
Assumes there is such a school that offers quality for price, and will land you a job.
How about this. How about we stop treating education and student loans as the next great cash-cow bubble. How about we all take responsibility for the future by offering those who can demonstrate good learning (attendance/grades) a good education... instead of leaving students scrimping for the few scholarships that aren't related to a religious/ethnic/sports/etc affiliation. There was a day where the US and Canada were well respected for their innovation and intelligence, now we're just selling ourselves out. Education is an investment that can pay back for the whole country.
I know a commercial artist who was making $80,000 a year designing textbooks. The publishing industry is a big industry, and there are lots of people like that.
How many people do you know who were making $80,000 or more?
And what do you know about art? Did you ever hear of the Bauhaus? Is there an engineer or designer who didn't hear of the Bauhaus? I wouldn't want to drive on a bridge he built.
If it's from the Rolling Stone, I'm not interested.
Why? Matt Taibbi is one of the greatest (and few) journalists alive today.
You being butthurt about what the magazine puts on their cover doesn't change that fact.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Two points.
First, those terms would be illegal if they were on anything but student loans in the U.S. Civilized countries recognize bankruptcy, they don't pat themselves on the back for only having indentured debt servitude instead of debt slavery.
Secondly, think for a minute about how that impacts the economy, both locally and nationally.That only $300 is money going OUT of your local economy, that's not being spent on good and services - instead it's going to a (non-local) bank, where it's velocity will be much lower. (And that's assuming it doesn't end up supporting speculation that raises the price of basic goods like fuel and food.)
There are a fixed number of desirable universities in this country. Increasing the supply of money for a limited supply of goods is called demand-push inflation and explains why education costs have been able to rise at multiples of the prevailing inflation rate of the economy. It's the same reason housing prices were able to rise at multiples of the inflation rate during the housing boom.
Higher salaries are the main motivation for going into hock to attend a HOW MUCH!? school, instead of an affordable alternative. As long as this might work, people will still take that gamble. If we stop rewarding students for throwing their money away, costs might adjust.
How often do interviewers say things like "So, you graduated from NYU? You're from Illinois. You spent 200 grand on a degree instead of going to an in-state public school? What're ya, stupid or something?"
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
It was 2002 to 2007.
In the past SIX years, the economy has collapsed (and it's going to go back in recession next year - or worse depending on what the new Fed chairman does), States' budgets have been decimated, and job opportunities have been declining for every profession - ESPECIALLY for college age people.
Things ARE much different now.
In other words, you had it EASY.
Free market works well when you take care of BOTH supply AND demand.
Yes, and how much of him getting that job was due to having that BA vs how good his portfolio was? It'd be a safe bet to say it was the latter.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
My son has a private rental apartment that he shares with another student. He could live in a dorm, but:
The dorms cost a lot more.
In a dorm, he would have to share a room (and the shared room would be smaller than the room that he has for himself alone).
Many of the dorms are further from the campus than his apartment.
The dorms are such a bad deal. I assume that there is a large profit margin involved.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Learning things that won't increase your earning potential is fine. Learning things that won't increase your earning potential and then bitching about the debt you incurred from those supposed learnings on the fucking interwebs is not fine. It's beyond lame.
As a graduate TA in the Spring 2013 semester at a [Major American University] who will be teaching a course at a [Large Community College] in the Fall 2013 semester, I can assure you I made more money per course as a graduate TA than I am currently as a community college instructor.
Take that for what it is.... a sample size of '1' isn't helpful, I know.
You don't need night hours to take courses. If your employer is a decent one, they'd allow you to take time off for classes and make it up during the other part of the week. And last I checked, you didn't have to complete the curricula in the time allotted - just because the full time PhD takes 1 year doesn't mean you can't do half time and do it over 2 years.
Doing so with an employer that understands and allows you to make up work (so you do your 40 hours a week) can mean the only drop you have is that of free time. Of course, no one said it would be easy. And most employers do allow it - they get the same work, just understand you need some flexibility.
And there's always the option of saving up for your education as well - If you know it's going to cost $50K to do your PhD, then save up the $50k. It will take a lot of scrimping and saving, but it also means that you'll be debt-free, and having sacrificed, might decide that the PhD wasn't really that beneficial upon reflection. (It then means you have $50k to go into a college fund for your kid, or retirement savings).
It's amazing how perspective changes once you've done the hard work of saving up and realizing you won't get a huge ROI from that PhD, than to do the PhD, go into debt, then find out it wasn't useful anyhow.
We need to migrate the vast majority of career-oriented jobs towards a trade school model by training people to become licensed for their profession. Network admins, nurses, and other experience-focused professions are already setup as certificate and/or licensed careers, so it's not really that big of a leap. I look back on my college experience and think just how useless so much of that stuff was when it came to making me better at my chosen career.
As much as we bitch about cable companies forcing us to pay for 130 channels that we don't watch, just so we have access to the 3 we do, we don't seem to mind when colleges and universities are doing the exact same thing.
Unlimited demand meaning that the need for it would exist at all prices. The whole point of supply and demand is that as the price goes up, the demand drops. The demand for energy would not drop it's just that people wouldn't be able to afford it. The same is true of medical care.
Not only is all the responsibility put on the students, but they're the ones least able to be responsible. After all, they're freaking 18-25 years old. These are the stupidest years of life. And absolutely everyone they're supposed to trust, their parents, their teachers, their guidance counselor, their government, their future employers tell them "YOU MUST GO TO COLLEGE OR YOU WILL BE A FAILURE FOREVER." What the hell do people expect them to do?
And for so many necessary and supposedly "good" careers, a degree is mandatory. Good luck getting a job as a civil engineer without a civil engineering degree. Want to be a doctor? You kind of have to have that medical degree. "Life experience" doesn't count on an application to the hospital.
And even then, with the never-ending recession, even those with the degrees can't get full time work. I have a friend who finished dental school 2 years ago. Has her DDS, is good at what she does, $330,000 in debt, and can't get full-time work AS A DENTIST. When dentists can't get work, there is some shit seriously fucked up.
I thank my lucky stars I graduated in 2002 before this stuff got insane. But I honestly don't know what advice I'd give to a 17 year old today. Unless they can code. Otherwise? Probably trade school. Be a plumber. Trim carpentry is good, too.
But damn if that doesn't suck. I thought we were gonna be in the future now. Everybody would be building skyscrapers and curing cancer and designing space shuttles. But nope. Your options are join the military and go shoot brown people for oil, be a laborer, or saddle yourself with $100,000 in debt and be a barista. The future blows.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
If you borrowed it, you should have to pay it back. It doesn't make any sense to allow people out from under their debts that they made the conscious decision to borrow. If you don't understand the total costs, how the lending and repayment processes work, or if you don't have any solid plans for living with that debt, you shouldn't be borrowing it. Period. I don't care if it's a mortgage, a car loan, a school loan, or even your neighbor's tools. Your borrowing choices and the repayments from those choices should always be your own responsibility.
Nevermind we tell them they're worthless unless they go to college (what you want to flip burgers your whole life?) and just say "oh well it pays for itself", and our schooling system doesn't teach how repayment processes work, what a promissory note is, how to choose a degree that will be in demand in 5 years (serious lol at this one), or how to find random part time jobs besides McD (crap pay) that can help you pay your way through college.
No, rather, they're supposed to just fabricate or synthesize that information for themselves out of thin air (if they could do that, they would be an entrepreneur and wouldn't need college).
Once again, when one is out of balance, it takes regulation to reign things in. For example, in the case of digital content, there is an unlimited supply. It requires the force of government to enforce limits in the form of penalties when the limits are exceeded. (The content distributor sets the limits, but the government enforces.) In the case of unlimited demand, there are many. Energy products/services, medical care, water, air just to name a few. They are what we consider to be fundamental needs for survival in this world. This is already recognized by most government as there is almost always a utilities commission to regulate utilities. We don't, however, have a medical care commission to regulate the costs of medical care and since insurance companies have established and become the system, trying to undo the damage seems to be pretty impossible despite the numerous examples we have in other nations. And hilariously, people STILL believe the myth that the US healthcare system is better than any other even if it is more expensive. That's bullshit. I've seen some extremely attrocious things in the US medical systems not the least of which is the veterans medical system and those often frequented by people who cannot afford to pay anything. Even those who operate on insurance payments are pretty crappy a lot of the time failing to properly diagnose and treat people and all. It comes down to the money and the greed of those who would deny quality care to those who don't have excessive funding. And it isn't the doctors who are most motivated by the money, it's the administrators who make so many critical decisions based on costs and profits. These motives have no place in an environment which requires a Hippocratic oath to enter that line of work.
Believe it or not, most people don't care to be super rich. They just want to get by comfortably and not have to worry about things. It is only a select few sick and greedy individuals who ruin everything they control.
What is the difference between having a company pay for it and having the government foot the bill?
In the end it is neither the company nor government that actually pays.
It turned out to be a bad investment for the company but if the government paid for it there would have been a return on investment.
University has never and will never be a job training program. Their goal should be to educate their students.
Teach a kid a skill and he can do only what he was taught. Educate a kid and they can advance far past any specific skills they might pick up along the way.
Eg:
1. Create businesses based on hiring talented people who've NOT got costly degrees, paying them less (since their Educ costs would be less = living- + Internet-costs + time).
2. Create -testing- businesses (which offer genuinely challenging/meaningful "Degree Equivalency" certifications, but no courses)
etc.
Neither. High school is the place to receive a good general education, college is the place to learn about a specific subject area. That our colleges have to provide a general education speaks volumes about our high schools.
As someone who has spent most of my adult life in college, I have disagree with the premise. An education is like any other consumer purchase. You need to balance the cost against the value received. One problem is that many people are buying too much education, or the wrong education for them. When spending that kind of money you should not assume that there won't need to be sacrifices outside of the sticker price, or hidden charges as in a new car or house. If you want to have a large family you probably should think twice about getting a phd or a degree in a field with notoriously low pay or employment rates. I managed a decade of college (PhD) and only paid full price for two of those years (junior and senior year of BS) and about half price for another two (community college for freshman and sophomore). The rest I was paid because I picked a field in which graduate research assistants are paid a stipend sufficient to live on (with a roommate).
I knew a lot of kids who didn't even know what they, or their parents, were paying and just assumed they'd be able to make it up in a 6 figure salary upon graduation (I don't even make 6 figures and I live in NJ). I was constantly looking for a way to get my education without bankrupting myself and have managed it so far. The problem is that the salesmen (politicians, college recruiters, arm chair economists) talk about education as though it were a panacea and a guarantee of success. It is a prerequisite in many fields, but by no means a guarantee and people need to be more skeptical when listening to people talk about how an education will improve everything for them. I know a lot of people with a BS in a filed that interested them, but had poor employment rates and are now working in a completely different field and struggling to keep afloat because that education is next to useless for them.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
What are these filler/fluff classes?
I have taken numerous art history, philosophy, literature and sociology courses along side my math, physics and CS courses and none of them were a waste of time. They constantly add to my life in positive ways.
A university is not a job training center.
Do you know that many professors actually pay their own salaries out of research grants?
Any research-heavy university has most of its tenured faculty bringing in far more money than they get paid.
I have taught at the University level and teaching two courses(especially if they are large) is not part-time work. By itself it can be full-time work and then the faculty has committee, research, outreach and advising requirements. If you actually think college professors don't work hard, you live in a fantasy world.
People study art in college because they learn things there. They learn how to create a better portfolio. There are few self-taught artists who make a living.
I know a lot of professional artists. Most of them studied art in school.
Furthermore, a lot of what people learn in art has direct relevance to engineering. A lot of art students become architects.
So are you against bankruptcy in general, or just bankruptcy for student loans? Bankruptcy is an ugly thing but it makes no sense to single out students. What about bankrupt corporations? Should the shareholders have to pay? As long as usury exists, bankruptcy is a necessary evil, unless you want to re-institute debtors prisons or something.
To expand the point, let's say a professor is getting a grant for some research. He figures paying for equipment and students to help will cost $100,000. That is not what he requests, the actual amount is $150,000 because most research universities charge professors about 50% of the needed amount to cover the of the professor, rooms, electricty etc.
Right there, the professor has brought in $50,000 to the university and the amounts I used in this example is pretty low for a typical research project.
Unless you are going to a university that isn't focused on research, your tution dollars are not paying for the professor. It pays for support staff,supplies, electricity, water, maintenance and all the other expenses.
It is laughable when students pull out the "we are paying your salary" card. No, you are not.
The "sticker price" is rarely what students pay. The little box to the right of the $30k/year figure states that roughly 70% of UC students get financial aid averaging about $15k/year, cutting the price of attending a UC in half. I imagine that attending a community/junior college for 2 years, followed by 2 years at a Cal State instead of a UC would be even cheaper still.
also it's waste of time. that can be better filled with hands on learning or even working.
The top 50 salaries at my alma mater (a public state school) are all administrators and athletic coaches, and not one of them makes less than $200K (and some of the athletic coaches are over $500K from the State, plus whatever perks advertisers give them).
The highest paid tenured professor makes about $145K, and most professors make less than a first year MSEE graduate from the same school.
Yes, the demand-push inflation caused by massive government subsidies is the bigger problem, but administrative waste and focus on non-educational activities are significant as well.
No where yet in this conversation have I seen anything about the people failing. According to this website, nearly a third don't make it through to the second year. This leaves them with the debt, but none of the benefit.
In my own experience, many of the people I saw dropping out of tertiary education (in NZ) did so because of external pressures. Everything looked OK on paper and they were encouraged by society and the state to enroll but it only took a little change for things to go wrong. Arguing with your parent and having to leave home, a break up in a relationship and the depression afterwards, pregnancy, abusive families and relationships, losing a part time job, mental health problems (especially in the medical sector, where having a mental health problem can prevent you from ever working in the sector), drug addiction, travel problems ,accidents, crime, racism, sexism, or an argument with a teacher. Some of these people make it a long way through, or try again when they have failed once only to fail again. Then they have the debt, none of the benefits, and usually large dose of depression from failing.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
When I was in Grad School, I heard that
Ohio's state uni's considerd a student to
be an Ohio resident (able, then, to pay a
lower resident's tuition)... after 6 months
of living in Ohio.
For those with a [grand-]parent living in
a land of tuition-free uni's, see if you can
get residency or even [dual-]citizenship,
on that ground.
Join the creative minority & you may find
you have more options than those who
don't think outside the state / country, in
which they were born.
I'm going to a (pretty nice!) community college and it's STILL extremely expensive, and I'm only taking 15 credits this semester. Next year I'm transferring to a state school where I'll live with four other people, and it will STILL be really expensive. I'm hoping to be able to get an on campus job this semester so I can work without it interfering with my studies, but I don't know if I'll be able to get it. Point is, some of us are really trying out best, here, but it's still difficult to afford. I can only hope my degree will end up being worth it, but I think I'll need grad school to make it worth it. There's some more money being spent. I do have to say for any college students reading this, though, that payment plans help a LOT. See if your school has one.
I know the Slashdot crowd leans liberal... so this may come off as a long shot. But this is basic economics...if you make apples more accessible by lowering the price and making them more accessible, more people want them. What happens when more people want them, yet supply is limited... * wait for it * the price goes up! Just replace 'apples' with 'college' and bob's your uncle.
There's feedback between 1 and 2.
Government says, "everyone gets $500 free to spend on college tuition." to encourage more people to go to collage (increase demand) Colleges respond by building more classrooms (but this takes time...) and by raising the price to market clearing levels for the spots they do have.
Since the price keeps going up faster than inflation and the government's response to the rising price is to try to make more money available (whether through direct subsidies, co-signing, or passing laws that prevent default to try and get banks charge lower interest rates), the price is going to continue to rise faster than inflation.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
There is a limited supply of good universities and good professors, there is an extremely high demand, and the entire process is subsidized extensively by tax payers through loans, grants, and other transfers.
Yes, this is just like the housing bubble (and health care): government decides it wants more of something, so it throws tons of taxpayer money at the market and prices rise because everybody is now competing for the same limited resources with more money.
The US has the best higher education system in the world. Others aren't even remotely close. The US is also near the top sending people to university, and has one of the highest percentage of university graduates in the workforce.
The reason US higher education costs are rising so fast is because people are both able and willing to pay it. They are able to pay it because a lot of people are pretty well off, and those who aren't well off are being subsidized by the tax payer. And they are willing to pay so much money because it pays off for them. So you have high demand and lots of money sloshing around, and prices rise.
And for all the belly-aching, $50000-$100000 for a college education is not too much, given how much a good college education advances your career. If you can't recoup that investment, you really shouldn't go to college in the first place.
Good grief, I have never heard such utter and complete nonsense.
PhD in one year? What planet are you from? Try an average of 4 years in STEM and 8 years in humanities. Professional schools are full time jobs, too - law school or vet school expects you to be there from 8AM to 4PM daily and then to go study another 3 hours at night. Master's degrees are doable in one year depending on the program, but not everyone has a decent university in driving distance. I drove an hour each way to get to my classes. (My gamble paid off - $20,000 in loans netted me a $50,000/year job four miles from my house.)
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
The more they try to make college "affordable" via loans, scholarships, etc. the more the colleges and universities will raise their prices until it is just barely affordable by all participants. They want to maximize their income -- as any business does.
Not true--at least, not for all of them. I sat on the finance committee of a top-tier graduate or professional school for three years. Our task was not to maximize income--it was to propose a budget, keeping expenses and the tuition increase low. If our goal had been to maximize income, we could easily have doubled tuition and would still have filled our classrooms.
Could you have the tuition increase lower with more motivation? Sure, you could probably knock 1% off of tuition by implementing some pretty major cutbacks. But even if you knocked off 2% (which would be amazing, and you would make a LOT of enemies), it wouldn't solve the systemic problem. Schools compete for students and faculty by spending money (on anything from scholarships to amazing professors to expensive recycling waste stations), and expenses increase every year. The schools with big endowments (E.g. Princeton, Yale, Williams) effectively never run out of money and can improve forever, and everyone else has to spend to stay competitive with their peer schools.
It's like capitalism, but where the goal is smart and excellent people rather than money.
As a result of this competition, schools generally are delivering more than they were ten or twenty years ago. There are more programs available, there are more amazing opportunities, there is a better program. Not in everything--certainly the quality of a lot of higher education leaves much to be desired--but the program is generally better. I can think of massive improvements at both my undergrad and grad/professional schools that simply did not exist ten years ago, even though they were good schools then. (Both in terms of programs and facilities).
On the other hand, if we were to cut off student loans and scholarships you can bet that the prices would plummet and they'd stop building fancy buildings named after themselves. (Some universities have exercise areas that are reminiscent of spas and exclusive health resorts than a university.) It is amazing that our parents and grandparents were able to do things like send men to the moon without plush padded seating and nicely carpeted hallways at their universities. Even so, they could still afford to get an education.
First, you can't do that--that would be private money you're interfering with. Second, if you cut off government loans--and I am just guessing--the practical effect at the good schools would be an increase in tuition and a corresponding increase in financial aid (i.e. more redistribution from the rich), and at the normal and below-normal schools more people unable to attend (anyone who couldn't qualify for private loans or enough financial aid). Third, if you are paying thirty or forty thousand dollars a year to sit in a classroom, are you sure you want to sit on a $12 chair that hurts after the first half-hour? Fourth, Universities generally name fancy buildings after donors--that's how they pay for part of the building. They don't name them after themselves unless they're idiots, with maybe one or two exceptions. Fifth, yeah, some schools are pretty ridiculous and splurge where they shouldn't and could use better cost accountability--but a hell of a lot of them are working to contain costs every year. It's not like they sit there saying, "How can I ruin Suzie First-Year's Day? Twelve percent tuition increase... mwah-ha-ha..."
That is exactly why costs are going up. A bank knows when they make the student loan, that it can't be dispensed in bankruptcy. It is a form of modern day slavery. Make those loans subject to bankruptcy and the prices will eventually drop. If not, when you get out of school, many places are happy to give you credit cards. Take them and use those little checks to pay down or pay off the student loans. Those do go away in bankruptcy.
It's not a form of modern-day slavery. Modern-day slavery sucks and is real and terrible and hurts tens of thousands of people in the United States alone every year.
Bankruptcy doesn't really work for student loans because they *are* student loans--the idea is that students are *supposed* to be bankrupt and work their way up to having money, so regular bankruptcy doesn't make a lot of sense for the government to allow. You could do some sort of compromise system, though, making them dischargable based on the number of years someone is out of school--right now there's forgiveness 20 years out without going through bankruptcy on new grad plus loans, for example.
While I agree that lack of price sensitivity (inelastic demand) causes prices to rise in healthcare, I'm not sure I agree completely on the root cause.
Certainly the insurance system greatly contributes to price insensitivity. However, even if everybody just paid a la carte for medical care things would not improve unless consumers actually had the information needed to make rational choices.
For starters, most consumers don't see the first mention of costs until they're out of the hospital. If you purchase a service and only see the price AFTER the service is delivered, then there is NO opportunity to make a price-based decision.
Next, the average person has no idea how essential the service is. The guy wearing the white coat says they'll die if they don't get the service. Are they right? And even if they are right, that just makes pricing an even bigger problem (most would pay ANYTHING if their life was at stake).
There is little opportunity to compare prices. Hospitals don't publish them - and nobody actually pays the list prices anyway. The only people who have any opportunity to compare prices and shop around are insurers, which is why insurers pay LESS than those who pay cash. A common misconception is that you get a discount for paying cash. You do - but the discount is off of a list price that NOBODY pays - the insurers get an even steeper discount.
Often the opportunity to shop around doesn't even exist. Maybe if you need a hip replacement you could call around assuming anybody would even answer your questions. However, if you've had a heart attack you might not even be conscious when treatment decisions are made on your behalf.
The healthcare industry is overpriced for MANY reasons, and insurance is just one of them. Insurance isn't even insurance for the most part - it is just a buyers club for medical services.
Not only is all the responsibility put on the students, but they're the ones least able to be responsible. After all, they're freaking 18-25 years old.
I have a solution to this problem. We given them something to be responsible for, like an education. Then they'll have practice for when they have real problems to deal with. Education is an easy softball pitch compared to what comes next.
Isn't education at any level available for free online?
How about we separate education from qualification?
Where is moderation: -1 False?
Smart US students go and study in Canada, where costs are lower.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Student Loans. They are hitmen who never had the intention of trying to get their money back. They caused me over $100,000 in medical bills. I have barely clawed my way back after homelessness. Their threats do not stop, even against handicapped people who they force into work they cannot do. I will hang myself at a high school to save the children if they do that to me again. I cannot take them doing that again.
Children are tricked into going to college, because they think it is the only thing to do. It's giving the banks a, you don't have to obey any laws, card. I have find no lawyers who will even hear anything passed, "the department of education".
* Join the military so you can get the GI Bill
I sometimes wonder if the entire 'too expensive' academic system of the US is simply not some scheme to get bright kids into the military. I mean in most countries people'd rather plant nails in their feet to avoid being drafted for a one year military service in peace time, so I can't imagine having only options between flipping burgers for life or get an education plus a 10 year vacation in Butfuckistan since your country is forever at war somewhere.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Practically sent my mind into nuclear meltdown to hear english majors with student loans making fun of community college.
I don't know how it works anywhere else but in California going to a CSC gets you guaranteed matriculation into a CSU or even a UC. That means that with my yuba college crap degree I could have gone straight into a four-year school, if I could have afforded it, and they would have had to take me. That was the plan, but I couldn't.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
California has 2 tiers. The UC schools are tier 1, and priced accordingly. The CSU schools, and there are a lot more of them, are highly affordable. A middle class family can easily send 1 child, or several, to community college, followed by 2 years of living at home and going to a public tier 2 school. Or if the kids don't want to live at home, they can get a job or join the military.
As long as Fed has monopoly/hegemony over printing our currency, we all are wage slaves/bonded labor. http://www.lietaer.com/2010/03/the-worgl-experiment/
Casteism
Casteism
The real issue is not tuition has risen 2-3 times the rate of inflation. Inflation has been under reported. think About the price of a house, gas, groceries, health insurance, soda pop (a coke), electricity, eating out, and about everything else has risen drastically over the last ten years. The only thing that has not is wages. The official reported inflation is wrong.
The plan was to suck value out of the parents houses and into the professors pockets. Pure greed by liberal professors. I know a few of them. Absolutely no guilt on their part either.
I graduated from Maryland in 1990. 7 year plan. Seems to me tuition was just $760 back then for full time. I recently was back on campus. When I was there everything was adequate. I had everything I needed. Bathrooms in the Chem building were a time capsule from the 1950s. That's fine, they still worked and looked ok. Nothing cracked or anything like that. Now, it's almost like the Ritz there. Way better than anything available to me and I honestly don't understand how this will help students. Maryland was a tough school, probably still is. No getting around having to learn. It is simply much, much, much more expensive than it has to be. Crazy professors totally out of touch with reality.
Our society has been conditioned to live on credit for the past several generations. Families In 2012, that carried CC debt owed an average of $7,145, down from $9,887 in 2008. This has created an atmosphere where living on credit is considered normal and students are conditioned to just accept taking out loans to cover what ever the cost. It appears that they and those carrying a balance give little thought to the cost of credit, or are completely illiterate where economics are concerned. So we have created a climate where the colleges can keep raising rates as they know they will get paid by naive students taking out loans that are beyond their ability to pay. Yes, I blame the lending institutions and schools for taking advantage of the students, but I also blame a society that has created generations that appear to know nothing about economics. If you can't afford it, you don't do it. What good does a college education do a person when they have to scrimp and save the rest of their lives to pay for it. Instead of a gateway to better living it becomes a millstone around the student's neck, essentially ruining the rest of their life. In many cases they could get a loan with much lower interest to pay it off. Seek help from a financial councilor.
Right, because there's no point in learning anything that won't increase your earning potential.
I have a steady income. I could easily see paying cash to take some courses that I think will personally enrich my life and not have any impact on my earnings. I also take vacations, watch movies, and so on. These are all discretionary expenses.
I would not borrow tens of thousands of dollars to do ANY of those things.
If you're taking a course for enrichment, then use your discretionary budget for doing so. Most 19 year olds have about $200 in that budget. If you're making a capital investment in your life, then you had BETTER consider how it will impact your earnings potential.
I know a commercial artist who was making $80,000 a year designing textbooks. The publishing industry is a big industry, and there are lots of people like that.
I read in the papers about lots of uneducated people who make millions of dollars in the lottery every month. The lottery industry is a big industry, and there are lots of people like that.
So, clearly every 18 year old should go out and borrow $50k and spend it on lottery tickets.
Sure, some people study liberal arts and turn out well. Far more don't. Most aerospace engineers study, well, engineering.
That's a great observation -- that the consumers of medical services never know the prices they are paying. That begs the question of whether or not this has always been the case. I would argue it didn't happen until after the insurance industry effectively took control of medicine as a practice and transforming it into an industry.
I've worked in the graphic arts industry, pasting up magazine pages. I worked for several publishers, and we always had an art department next door. Every magazine and commercial web site you read was designed by a graphic designer. I know lots of graphic artists, most of whom were making a good living before the economic bust. Most working artists don't "paint." There's a lot to learn about art in order to do practical stuff.
If you want something more systematic and authoritative than my personal experiences, look it up in the U.S. Occupational Outlook Handbook http://www.bls.gov/ooh/arts-and-design/home.htm which squares with my first-hand knowledge.
JOB SUMMARY
Art directors are responsible for the visual style and images in magazines, newspapers, product packaging, and movie and television productions. They create the overall design and direct others who develop artwork or layouts.
ENTRY-LEVEL EDUCATION
Bachelor’s degree
2010 MEDIAN PAY
$80,630
Oh, yeah, you may have heard that one of the benefits of going to a good college is to make contacts that will be useful in getting a job.
One of the characteristics of the engineering profession is that it's highly specialized. You learn to design widgets, and if the widget industry booms, you can name your price. If widgets go bust, you might not be able to get a job anywhere in engineering. That's what happened to the aerospace engineers. That's what I heard from the director of the MIT employment office, anyway. I met one former aerospace engineer who went into the real estate market. At least he knew how to fix a leaky faucet. Remember that woman who asked Obama to help her husband get a job? He was a manufacturing engineer. Not a great career after the manufacturing industry moved to China.
I'm not putting down engineering but it's no longer a secure employment.
And I don't like this idea, "It's your own fault you can't pay off your college loans, you chose the wrong major." That's just an excuse for a failed economic system.
You obviously don't know anything about liberal arts. The first think you learn in a liberal arts education is not to go shooting off your mouth when you don't know the facts.
Just like a business, people to have to start with some sort of initial investment before society can get a result as a part of their effort. Sure we can grow a kid, feed him/her and keep them alive, but sorry to say, what good does it do to creating flying cars, spaceships, whatever comes next if we just drop them from a parachute in the middle of New York and expect them to make it and be productive to society. Jobs needed $90,000, Bill Gates was already rich, and if you don't have a lot of money, you will have to borrow from your future to pay for the present. Also it is not like people are telling students that the only way to get a job is to go to college, it is the only way for all but a few who already have an investment. High School diplomas do not impart enough value. Steve Jobs took calligraphy and audited courses to get the knowledge he needed. Bill Gates did not get the programming knowledge he needed by a corporation interested in charity. Where would we be if we were all Jobs and there not enough Wozniaks? Hint: where did Wozniak get his education? Ans: University of California, Berkeley. It would be great one day if one could self-teach all this information, but this is where we are at, we need an investment.
Society use your Sciences
True story: I worked my way through college, because my dad died in my freshman year. One semester I was standing in line to write my tuition check for the courses I was taking, and the guy ahead of me received a check from the school to cover all of his expenses for the coming semester. He was a football player. WTF?
Of course, the school also had a special program set up for athletes, so that they could actually graduate with a B.S.. The "BS" was never more appropriate, and normal students were generally not allowed to sign up for these courses.
That one experience is probably the single biggest reason why I have never had any interest in continued contact with the school since graduating.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
You're already taking for granted that education is either some form of personal entertainment on par with "watching movies", or else "a capital investment in your life". I understand that those are common ways of viewing it, but I find it bizarrely materialistic.
You're already taking for granted that education is either some form of personal entertainment on par with "watching movies", or else "a capital investment in your life". I understand that those are common ways of viewing it, but I find it bizarrely materialistic.
There are lots of things I'd love to do that I can't afford to do. Going into debt spending tens of thousands of dollars on entertainment, or enrichment, or being a better human, or whatever you want to call it is among them.
Capital investments are easy to justify, because they pay for themselves. If you make 100 widgets a month and sell them at a profit of $50 each, and spending $10k on a machine will let you make 1000 widgets a month and sell them at a profit of $200 each, then regardless of any other argument a $10k loan is something you can easily afford. On the other hand if you sell 100 widgets a month at $50 profit each, then a $10k loan to buy a nice painting for the office is something you have to think about.
I'm not saying that people should only go to college to make more money. I'm saying that if you don't have a good reason to expect to make lots of money in your future career, you should think twice about getting $100k in debt that you cannot ever discharge for any reason whatsoever.
JOB SUMMARY ... Art directors are responsible for the visual style and images in magazines, newspapers, product packaging, and movie and television productions. They create the overall design and direct others who develop artwork or layouts. ...ENTRY-LEVEL EDUCATION ... Bachelor's degree ... 2010 MEDIAN PAY ... $80,630
If you've got what it takes to be a top-notice art director, and a college education is necessary to further that career, then by all means go for it. If you LIKE art directing but don't have what it takes, then don't waste your money.
I discourage people from studying engineering all the time for the same reasons. For the most part if you have what it takes to succeed you'll have scholarships thrown at you left and right anyway so you won't need to get into that much debt.
The issue isn't with the major per se, it is with unrealistic career plans.
And I don't like this idea, "It's your own fault you can't pay off your college loans, you chose the wrong major." That's just an excuse for a failed economic system.
Couldn't agree more with that, and I'm not suggesting that we should be blaming the students. They're just 18-year-old idiots who are following the advice of everybody they learned to trust, just like I did when I was their age. The advice givers are just telling the kids what worked for them, not realizing that the world they grew up in is not the same as the one that exists today.
The solution isn't to saddle kids with loans they can't pay and then punish them for taking them. The solution isn't to issue loans like that in the first place. Make money available based on aptitude, or turn them into scholarships (perhaps accepting such a scholarship results in an extra 10% income tax rate for the next 15 years or something if you want to make it more like a loan).
And by all means change the economic model so that kids don't have such high unemployment rates, or change the model so that you don't need a job to survive.
That's a great observation -- that the consumers of medical services never know the prices they are paying. That begs the question of whether or not this has always been the case. I would argue it didn't happen until after the insurance industry effectively took control of medicine as a practice and transforming it into an industry.
Well, keep in mind that modern medicine is a fairly modern phenomenon to begin with. Before insurance took off hospitals did not have all that much in the way of equipment, and doctors basically could operate out of a bag and some paper notes. It was a whole different world in terms of liability as well, and in terms of outcomes. People didn't die on life support, because there was no life support. There were also a lot more quacks around (insurance probably should be given credit for driving off most of those - they have medical professionals reviewing the charts and they have every incentive to call the police if they think they're paying for unnecessary treatment).
Medical bills just weren't that high in the first place back then. I suspect that people were more aware of what they were paying, since there weren't so many independent contractors/etc involved. However, people still got dragged into hospitals unconscious.
The modern healthcare system has a TON of things that cause prices to go up. You can't just fix one thing and expect anything to change. The whole system needs a bunch of reforms. However, increasing price visibility and uniformity is probably a major step in the right direction.
So let's say for the sake of argument that insurance companies didn't turn medical practice into medical industry. Are you saying that medical advances we see today simply wouldn't happen?
I'm sorry but if that's the case, I heartily disagree with you. Lately, the more the factors of research and production are put into homes of common people, we are seeing more an more "great things" emerge from sources which disprove the "big money only" theory. Certainly the demand brought on by public need was recognized and brought on by industrialists. That can't be disputed. But one of the things the industrialists brought with them is a way to protect their business model by making it more exclusive to them and their kind. Patents. Patents in medicine, I believe, result in more suffering than it helps to resolve. But that's not my point -- just a kind of tragic side-effect. But medical schools, publicly funded medical schools also do research into medical science. So instead of industry, I believe a tiny, tiny portion of our ridiculous defense spending could be placed in the hands of these researchers instead of industrialists to achieve the same results if not better as they wouldn't be quite so exclusive.
Medical practice should not be industry. That's what helps it to be so expensive, out of control and so incredibly dominating.
So let's say for the sake of argument that insurance companies didn't turn medical practice into medical industry. Are you saying that medical advances we see today simply wouldn't happen?
When did I say that?
I just said that modern medicine happened at the same time as medical insurance, so it is hard to know what the cost of modern medical care would be without insurance.
I'm all for increasing spending on public R&D to create treatments that are royalty-free to US patients (or patients in countries that reciprocate or in the 3rd world). However, I doubt that those treatments would be any cheaper - they would just be paid for by taxes instead of patients. I think that is generally an improvement, but I don't for a moment think that the cost of clinical trials is going to be reduced simply by having the government pay for them, unless the government somehow compels doctors to participate in them (most of the clinical trial expense goes to compensating doctors).
Fucker. I expect you to reply to my message. Tell me, why was it okay for me to be trying my best at a minimum wage job, where I couldn't work full hours, and for the Department of Education to start threatening me to work harder. Why was it okay for them to break my fake leg I had because I had cancer when I was 12. Why did they make me lose my medicaid so I couldn't fix it and keep working? WHy did they not take any responsibility. These people don't want money. They want blood.
Answer me answer me poet (8021) . Don't hide like a creep.
And that, right there, is what I was finding bizarre. "Don't get me wrong, I think that education is great and important and all that. I think it should be a really high priority, right up there with visiting the Bahamas and going to see 'Kick-Ass 2'. I mean I love that kind of entertaining shit, or enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it."
Capital investments are easy to justify, because they pay for themselves. If you make 100 widgets a month
First, education is not a widget. Second, you have no way of knowing the return on investment that education will have on your life. And don't respond with some nonsense about, "You *can* calculate the ROI! People who complete a BA are paid an an average of $X over the course of their lifetime more than people who only completed high school." You don't know much much additional money you'll make if you go to college.
I'm saying that if you don't have a good reason to expect to make lots of money in your future career, you should think twice about getting $100k in debt that you cannot ever discharge for any reason whatsoever.
What makes you think that an 18 year-old can predict the amount of money they'll make in their future career? What, is your solution here to have all 18 year-olds saying, "Well, I don't have a proven track record of making massive amounts of money. I may as well give up on myself and quit trying to learn things."
I'm not saying that 18 year-olds should be going $100k in debt. I'm saying you can't blame them for pursuing an education, especially when they have been given every reason to believe it's the smart thing to do. If you want to blame someone, start looking into why college costs $100k.
I'm not really getting what you're disagreeing with.
I simply said that spending money is easy to justify when it is likely to make you money. I didn't say that spending money couldn't be justified when it won't make you money.
If you've read my posts and don't understand what I'm disagreeing with, then it's a symptom of the same problem I'm raising.
True, however....
You're leaving out SS deductions, FICA, SDI, the usual nonsense that's not part of your tax rate but is deducted from your paycheck.
If it's just free market forces, then new colleges would open up to compete for these dollars, forcing education costs back down through competition. Funny how pushers of this meme only want to talk about one side of supply-and-demand.
You mean when top tax brackets were 91%? Because, in part, because the states spent a lot more money on education "back in the day". California looked at the post WWII recession and decided education was the way out - so they built a world-class system of colleges and universities. That doesn't fit in with the tax cutting social darwinist storyline though, so it's left out. As well as countries like Finland where higher education is free to use.
You misspelled "Finland".
American Exceptionalism usually is.
Perhaps my instructors in college were as skilled in explaining comprehension as you are at making your argument then.
I just don't get what you're arguing over. Are there benefits from college beyond earnings potential? Certainly! Should we blame kids for doing what they're told to do by everybody they know? Certainly not! Those were the main points you brought up and I agree with them.
I think the solutions to the college loan problem are simple - stop handing out so many loans, and hand out scholarships instead (based primarily on merit, not need).
If you want personal enrichment, just audit some courses or something. You don't need to complete a full degree program to obtain personal enrichment. The diploma on your wall doesn't make you smarter, either. The only reason people are paying so much for diplomas is that employers don't really care if you're smart, they just want the diploma so the guy hiring you doesn't get fired if you don't turn out well.
Really? By what measure?
Where did he say lower price point? He said their suckers (i.e., students) have more debt.
By just about any measure you'd care to choose.
Like the AC said: what if you don't want to sent overseas to kill brown people defending their villages? What if you don't want to get shot at yourself?
So top careers are limited to the wealthy, setting up a neat little caste system. Your dad was a surgeon and made millions over his career so yeah, you can go to medical school. Your dad was a carpenter and had to save every penny for retirement because his knees were shot before he was 50...the best you can be is a carpenter. When having a bachelors degree is the new high school diploma when applying for jobs, having a decent secondary education is a requirement for having a decent job. Don't bother with the anecdote of how Random Dude became an assistant bank manager with only a GED when we're talking about the population at large in a highly depressed economy.
So like I asked the first time: is this a bug, or a feature for you?
Not when they have 6 other people - who already have degrees and experience and are begging for work so they don't lose their house - beating down the door for the same job. Obushinomics FTW.
That's not the Finnish higher education system, it's about Finnish primary and secondary education. Come on, stop being so stupid.
And even there, the BI article is bogus: nobody knows for certain why Finland's schools are good, and some of the factors the BI seems to favor aren't even necessarily positive.
Of course, there is the bitching about the threats from the Department of Education that caused you 10s of thousands of medical bills, and almost made you hang yourself outside of their Seattle office. You fucking asshole. Thank you for supporting the people who were trying to guarantee I could never pay my loans back.