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No Tuition, but You Pay a Percentage of Your Income (if You Find a Job) (nytimes.com)
What if there were a way to eliminate student debt? No, really. Student debt reached a new height last year -- a whopping $1.5 trillion. A typical student borrower will have $22,000 in debt by graduation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Now, Silicon Valley is backing a novel idea that proposes to rewrite the economics of getting an education.
From a report: The concept is deceptively simple: Instead of charging students tuition -- which often requires them to take out thousands of dollars in loans -- students go to school for free and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation, but only if they get a job with a good salary. The idea, known as an Income Share Agreement, or I.S.A., has been experimented with and talked about for years. But what's happening at Lambda School, an online learning start-up founded in 2017 with the backing of Y Combinator, has captivated venture capitalists.
On Tuesday, Lambda will receive $30 million in funding led by one of Peter Thiel's disciples, Geoff Lewis, the founder of Bedrock, along with additional funds from Google Ventures; GGV Capital; Vy Capital; Y Combinator; and the actor-investor Ashton Kutcher, among others. The new funding round values the school at $150 million. The investments will be used to turn Lambda, which has focused on subjects like coding and data science, into a multidisciplinary school offering half-year programs in professions where there is significant hiring demand, like nursing and cybersecurity. It's an expansion that could be a precursor to Lambda becoming a full-scale university.
On Tuesday, Lambda will receive $30 million in funding led by one of Peter Thiel's disciples, Geoff Lewis, the founder of Bedrock, along with additional funds from Google Ventures; GGV Capital; Vy Capital; Y Combinator; and the actor-investor Ashton Kutcher, among others. The new funding round values the school at $150 million. The investments will be used to turn Lambda, which has focused on subjects like coding and data science, into a multidisciplinary school offering half-year programs in professions where there is significant hiring demand, like nursing and cybersecurity. It's an expansion that could be a precursor to Lambda becoming a full-scale university.
"and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation"
That just sounds like slavery with extra steps.
In the 80's when I applied to expensive colleges, some (yale, IIRC) described a very similar financial aid package to me.
How much of that debt is for vocational schooling? That seems to be all that this would address. I wouldn't want it any where near a normal University, for fear it would kill off the less lucrative subjects.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
So basically this is HECS (or whatever they call it now) in Australia....
I flushed DeeDee MegaDooDoo down the drain.
I got my degree from a state university in the 1990s. Didn't get a dime from my family, and borrowed nothing. I earned a one-year academic scholarship, and paid for the other three years with a crappy job as a school custodian. I know costs have gone up, but students are borrowing thousands of dollars just so they can sit on their asses. Get a damn job!
Million dollar salaries and billion dollar campuses.
In every state in the U.S. -- without exception -- the highest paid public employees are:
(a) President of a state university
(b) Head coach of a state university sports team
It is called - taxes.
The idea is a good one, though.
Don't debtors pay a % of their income too?
If we add financial/risk-taking institution into the picture. College still get funded up-front, but risk-taking institution can "buy" the income stream by funding kids that they think will do well in the future, by giving these kids "scholarship' if they choose to accept. The contractual rate, structure will be negotiated.
If you owe someone something (even if it is a percentage of your earnings) that is a debt.
That used "peer instructors"
I love the scam
You already pay a percentage of your income if you have a job. This proposal is a matter of budgeting your taxes to fund education. It's plain and simply that.
In other countries, it is the job of the tax system to let well-earning people due to a free education system pay for the education of the next generation.
That's literally just a student loan with a repayment threshold.
It's how it works in the UK, you get a loan to cover your degree costs and you only start paying it back once you cross the income threshold (£21k at the moment).
Got to love Silicon Valley's continued ability to "invent" things that have already existed for years.
are all costs coved / rolled in to the plan? or is room, books, fees need there own loan?
First, all for profit schools are scams and the student loan industry is a racket worthy of the Mafia.
Second, if venture capitalists are involved, that means that they are gonna want their obscene ROIs. - and that will be at the expense of the consumer.
No-fucking-thank you!
Here are the fields (I mean univ degrees, not trade skills which can also land you good jobs) where you can get employed int hat field:
* Medicine (nursing, docs, p-docs, etc)
* Law
* Engineering and sciences
Here are the ones where you can't:
* Liberal arts
* Gender Studies
* English History
* Etc.
For some areas this might make sense. For others, not so much.
I wanted to call it "The Institute."
I'm glad someone with means is exploring the merits / shortcomings.
Read the fine print.
1. They say you have to pay them 17-20% of your earnings for _ANY_ job, even if you didn't get that through what they taught you.
2. They do their own financing because they're not an accredited institution, so you can't even use that "degree" elsewhere.
3. They were forced to remove "University" and "Professor" from their language, as those terms were not being used correctly.
4. This is just a bootcamp that charges you $20,000 (up front) or $30,000 (through this scheme) for a 30 week MOOC.
5. Even though they have a $50,000 minimum salary before you have to start repaying (which is deferred for several years until you are at that point), they don't adjust for cost of living. Someone in California or New York (where they hold their schools) will make that and still be below the poverty line.
6. Their success stories are suspect. There was one guy who they claimed landed a full-stack developer position, without also pointing out he had a bachelor's degree, and he had participated in a year-long bootcamp before doing this one.
Seems very reasonable to me.
At first I thought it was % of income FOR LIFE, which seemed incredibly fucked up.
student athlete scholarship should have the same thing! with funds being used to help others pay for school.
Oh wait, it looks EXACTLY LIKE THE METHOD THE UK USES for its student loans repayments. In the UK you're charged a max fee for tuition and the student loans company gives you a student loan to cover that and maintenance which is calculated so there are limits that people can get. You repay the student loan once you start earning over £480 and it is deducted from your pay at a rate of 9% of everything over the £480. After 30 years anything unpaid is written off.
More info here: https://www.gov.uk/repaying-yo...
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This is well intentioned, but misguided. Here's why:
We already have a problem with too many students going into low market value degrees and too few into high market value degrees. This is partially because there are many low market value degrees that are easier to earn. If you charge a fraction of future income, you are charging lower (or no) tuition for degrees that have low market value. And you are charging higher tuition for degree that have high market value.
People respond to incentives. This scheme incentivizes even more students to choose low value degrees and fewer to choose high value degrees; further exacerbating the problem. Instead we should focus on getting more students into fields that have low unemployment and high wages and to curb the number of graduates in fields with poor job prospects.
This is not to say that labor market outcomes are the only justification for a higher education. But let's face reality: most students cannot afford to pursue a degree purely for its intrinsic value. Such luxury is reserved for the aristocracy.
also will cut costs / high book costs / junk classes / etc.
I don't think the overpriced private schools should be a part of this, they'll just jack their rates even more.
17% of your salary for 2 years, if you get paid over $50,000.
0 if you get less than $50,000.
(pause if you get fired)
Math:
17% of 50,000 is $8,500. That means you only pay $17,000 for your degree.
(It also means you're only making $41,500, so you're better off negotiating a salary at $49,999.)
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
This is debt servitude. Those people have to pay whether or not they get a job in their field. Go to school for CS, end up a UPS guy, still pay a percent of your wages. I really started to dislike Y Combinator when I saw such a supposedly "woke" outfit was investing in these debt farm for-profit colleges. These are for-profit colleges with no admissions standards, and although they may be accredited, they mainly target low income black and hispanic students. For-profit veterinary colleges have been doing this forever. Now they are pushing into tech. Student will take out huge debts thinking "hey, it doesn't matter I only have to pay if I get a job". Yeah, and when you finally end up working at Walmart, guess what, those 50 grand are still coming out of your paycheck.
I live in a third world country and earn less than the US average salary. I *still* have my own house (no bank debt), $50k cash in a safety deposit box and $10k in the house. How can you not pay $22k off?
But they are required to pay 17 percent of their salary to Lambda for two years if they get a job that pays more than $50,000... Payments are capped at $30,000
The article doesn't say what tuition costs are, but considering a "decent" private school is about $30-50K a year and state schools ar about 17K a year around here, it seems like a not terrible deal, if Lambda is accredited, and ends with a 4 year bachelors degree.
If it's a 2 year diploma mill arrangement, maybe not quite as good, but probably still a better deal with no interest accrued on a loan.
I flushed DeeDee MegaDooDoo down the drain.
Through the HECS program you go to uni and for each semester you accumulate a standard debt for the degree type, which means the cost is subsidised.
Once you have a job earning above a minimum you pay the debt back through an increased income tax rate. You also get bonuses for paying it back early.
Some private unis have limited numbers of HECS students, most public unis reserve a certain number of places for full fee students. Most places at the major universities are eligible for HECS students. If you miss out on a HECS placement based on academic performance, you have the option of a full fee placement at the private unis.
Anyone who makes a lot of money relies at some level on those with a university level education. Why should we be giving a tax advantage to someone who employs university-educated people instead of gaining one themselves? The entire point of a progressive tax system is that, regardless of background, if you are making lots of money you are able to pay a larger fraction back to support the society which got you to where you are.
If we start having tax rates which depend on what benefits you have derived from society it will open a very damaging Pandora's box. For example, why shouldn't people who have had the advantage of free medical treatment (e.g. in Europe, Canada etc.) pay higher rates of tax too? How about people who at one point received welfare payments but who have since recovered etc. One of the points of government is that it acts as a single pool that we all pay into and, when we need it, it provides the resources and benefits to help us become, or remain, productive members of society because then we all benefit. Shattering this model will lead to signficant negative consequences e.g. people avoiding healthcare, education etc.
Or, what if, hear me out now, what if colleges stopped the campus beautification arms race, and quit spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new buildings, and then passed the cost savings on to students?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Room and board for an online school? Sure, a very Second Life dorm is provided.
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yeah, so Revature has done this for years, so why is it in the news right now? just a slow news day? another company getting a puff piece? this ISA junk has been Revature's bread and butter for years, and their reputation was so bad they had to rename the company (anyone remember the old name? I can't)... definitely not a good deal, unless it's the only deal you can possibly find
Make Indentured Servitude Great Again.
In the meantime I'll just leave this here...
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and use it to pay for school for everyone anyways, thereby eliminating a bunch of inefficient middlemen...
Don't tell me how much they've raised from investors, as some metric to the viability of a concept; investing is risky by nature. How many expensive failures do we need to see before we understand this concept?
Not that I'm apposed to the idea, necessarily, but I'm not sold that it's any better than our current system. It sounds like a tax on the rich to subsidize the poor ( and poor decision makers who pursue lower-value degrees because "DREAMS" and all ). In essence, it sounds like an abdication of personal responsibility.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I already paid back my tuition for undergrad and grad school. So, yeah, no thanks.
The end goal of this is to nationalize all education, anyway. There is no practical difference between an Income Share Agreement and Socialized Education or "Single Payer Education," as it were.
Except, it will require a HUGE tax increase in the beginning to pay for, since the first layer of the pyramid is hardest to build. But, once it gets rolling, it'll be a "too big to fail" entitlement just like Socialist Security and Medicareless.
So, just cut to the chase and pass an additional 10% income tax for socialist indoctrination. AOC can run the whole thing from her ivory tower in New York.
Education (in America) is free for grades k-12, but then astronomically expensive after that, depending on your career choice?? Seems like it's beneficial for society to grant free education. This bit about paying a percentage of your income back, to pay for college seems like a shitty way to tax people that get an education, so why not just come up with a tax that we all pay for all of our free education? This would be a federal sales tax, in my mind.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
It's an online school, so no room and no meal plan. Basically a really expensive way to read books and watch the free course videos released by actual universities.
Even worse, the school does 1/2 year programs, meaning they must be providing their own certifications instead of actual degrees. If you're giving away a % of your pay for just 6 months of study that you can do at your library, you're an idiot. There's no way you're learning advanced concepts* in only 1/2 year if you have no prior knowledge in a subject area. If you do have prior knowledge, then you already know enough to teach yourself more.
*Look at any job descriptions for what they claim to be teaching. You won't be hired after only going through 101 level coursework.
What will actually happen is the school will farm you out to some contractor company which gives you just enough work to hit the payback requirements, then they'll dump you (or you quit for horrible working conditions) and you'll still be required to keep paying. That's what similar short-term education companies have been doing in order to legally advertise their high placement rates. There's also the possibility of the fine print staying something like you have to maintain A+ grades else you get a fee of XYZ and your % increases by K amount. If you quit the job you'll have to pay the expected amount of money directly. Etc...
There are no pros to this. Government loans already have hardship (no job) exceptions and extensions. If you can't get a government loan, you should reconsider your current choices, expectations, life style, and assume you'll have discrimination issues when looking for a job. Thus adjust your goals appropriately.
I'm sure they would love this plan. Here is a thought for the top 20 tech companies, stop discriminating based on degrees, diversity, and racism in favor of asians and young people and go back to focusing on actual skills and on the job training. You can pay some money by simply not paying people more for having degrees or only counting degrees more realistically as being maybe 1/2 years of experience.
Also stop encouraging churn. Cycling people out every six months means you have more options with more skillsets but those skillsets came at the expense of learning on the job at the last place and those people will spend the next six months learning on the job at your workplace. The difference between that and just training your damn people (possibly even by having this cycle into tangent positions within your company so people have different jobs every six months) is that when you train your people they are still around with whatever knowledge would have otherwise been lost, they have job security and some basis for loyalty especially if you give raises to existing staff to match equivalent experience level for incoming hires.
The school would determine what you need to get trained in, as their ROI depends on students maximizing their 20% donations. High-paying jobs are the ones students will be trained for - creating an excess of workers in such positions, thereby lowering wages for high-skilled jobs, which is the eventual payoff that Peter Thiel seeks. Fuck that guy.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Stop being around the problem; costly school. All that is being done is shifting the slave ownership to universities.
So if I run up 20 or 30K$ in debt for my liberal arts degree and the only job I have available is as a barista, I still have to pay?
On the other hand, with my software engineering degree in hand, I go to work for a startup. And agree to take minimum wage (not a "good salary") plus an equity stake a few years down the road.
Have gnu, will travel.
Apply it to STEM only subjects. ... an hour when it is gone. Maybe 2, after dinner.
Specifically, in that S bracket, hard sciences. None of this social science bullshit that all the retards go in to just to say they have a degree in vaginas or whatever other bullshit social science courses have come out over the years.
And don't give me that STEAM shit. I've got too much of a headache right now.
I'll happily debate you on that in
Also, we do something like this in Scotland. Student Loans here are only repayable once you pass and get a minimum threshold income. I have one sitting at 3300 British Dollarydoos waiting to become nothing.
Be sure to take in to consideration your loan repayments when looking for jobs, houses and any other large financial decisions! (let's face it, most won't, idiots are the reason this needs to be done due to the debt spiralling out of control)
To be honest, I would be more than happy to continue paying it to retirement. Help others get in to education and all that junk. Just as long as it isn't being used for retard-degrees and something of actual substance.
I'm not attacking all social sciences in general, just all the bullshit degrees. Studying social interactions is still quite an interesting topic, but all the bullshit ones have watered it down so hard, like fucking gender studies.
Shifting who pays it doesn't resolve the problem: The unregulated predatory lending system. is like feeding an ever hungry beast.
What does this say about the many people who fall for the 'free internship' scam? They don't even have a right to start working off their debts immediately.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If this was implemented, you'd either see a whole bunch of degrees stop being offered, or they'd only allow certain degrees to make use of this plan.
Also.... does anyone remember when companies paid for training?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The current student loan framework is just like a company issuing bonds to finance expansion. The proposed scheme would be exactly like issuing stock. The university gets equity in you, and you pay them a dividend that represents their fraction of your earnings.
This is very close the agreement indentured servants had. It's just another form of debt bondage.
I have this other, radical idea. How about everyone pays a percentage of their income, and we use that to make education free, or very low cost? We could fund it by not bombing people for a few decades.
Naw, too radical. Bringing back indentured servitude is of course mainstream and normal.
Why give students large student loans for degree's that typically don't provide enough income to pay them off? Most loans are provided based on how likely you are to pay them back. This is called a credit score, and we should create a score based on types of degree's and what they are worth. I know people who racked up over a 100 grand in loans for a worthless degree that eventually they now work in a factory because it pays more. Imagine how much more their worth would be today, if they simply just got a job and skipped a worthless college degree, that gave them no real valuable skills and lots of debt.
Australia has had a scheme like this since the late 80s called HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme) run by the Australian government
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Australia#Introduction_of_HECS
that's a bit off topic, but I'm fed up with seeing politicians gutting public institutions.
No less than Joe Biden is going around telling folks we should means test Social Security to keep it solvent (instead of just raising the limit on how much can be taxed due to inflation). He's being clever about it too, saying the "rich don't need SSI". Next it'll be the "Well to do" and then the "working class" and finally the program gets shut down and they pocket the money I paid in.
I don't know what's worse, the fact that they think they can sneak this past us or the fact that Joe Biden just did...
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Only $22k??? That is nothing.
The average car costs more than that. And people pay that off in 5 years.
Give me a break.
How about not charging an arm and a leg for college in loser states like New York?
IN florida, universities are better and cost WAY less. AND the florida govt can pay 100% tuition for many students.
It's called a student loan.
All that ever happens is you get a student loan that - on average - never gets paid off, so the universities still charge fees anyway.
What you do is pay people's tuition, but only if they're actually progressing and keeping up and not failing their tests. Or what, in my day, was called a "grant".
My uni tuition was entirely paid for by grant. I had to pay only living expenses (but I lived at home with my parents). If I'd hadn't lived at home, I could claim more money for living expenses but I would have to prove that I didn't have any support or income. I also had the option for a student loan at any time (no payback until earning GBP25,000 or over, and then only a pittance) but I never exercised it. I was in the last year of students being offered a full grant.
Now I have a university degree. 20 years of industry experience. The wages (and thus taxes) to go with it. And no debt (except for a car I bought).
By comparison, all my friends who used their student loans STILL have them and are STILL paying them off... which cripples their life choices even though they got better jobs than they would have without them. All the younger kids have no option but to utilise a student loan and thus start adult life in huge debt.
And the government is some GBP 100 billion in debt now because they were hiding the cost of unpaid student loans on the finances and now they have to include them in the usual accounting manner (because of a lawsuit) and it just shows you that it would have been easier to just give free tuition and some support in the first place, made people have to work to be able to live, and thus stopped the debt thing altogether.
"The Department for Education estimates that 45% of the value of loans to undergraduates will not be repaid. Outstanding loans to students in England totalled more than £100bn this year, with £15bn borrowed last year alone. By 2022-23 annual loans are forecast to rise to £20bn."
It’s “Separate But Equal!”
What a bunch of fucking bullshit. All this would do is allow people to go t o school and maybe not have to pay back the costs. This is NOT a solution to student debt and our bullshit education system. Here’s a better idea.
Remake the compulsory education system. We keep hearing of how you “can’t get a job pumping gas anymore with only a high school diploma.”. Not really true and never was, but why not address the failings of the system, rather than trying to fix other things.
Why not do one or all of the following:
- Make schools year-round. More frequent and less lengthy vacations would mean less time squandered teaching the same things over and over again to kids who forget what they maybe did or didn’t learn the previous 9 months and also previous years.
- Extend high school two years for all students; let them be tested and given options and recommendations based on those choices. skilled-labor track or college track, and if they go college track, those last two years of high school can be used as the first two years of college. This would make the typical bachelor’s degree only two years long, cost half as much up front, make sure students are better prepared and more mature when they arrive, and level the playing field all in one fell swoop.
- You could simultaneously increase the driving age to 18 (for states where it’s 16 or below,) and give kids more time to grow up. At the same time, I would lower the drinking age to 16, or even adopt Germany’s approach which is to consider beer and wine as “Saft”... juice, basically allowing parents to regulate and monitor children’s experience with alcohol, rather than making alcohol something they must learn to cope with on their own with only their drunken peers for guidance. Letting kids get used to that while still having four years at home MIGHT reduce the problem of alcoholism, and co-morbidities.
If it sounds like this is just describing the existing paradigm with community colleges, in a way, you’d be right, except that it would be compulsory, meaning all kids graduating high school would be 20, would be better off and more mature before arriving in college, wouldn’t be seeing alcohol for the first time, alone and with no parental oversight or guidance, and also, they’d all have completed the equivalent of Associate’s degrees before showing up. The rates at which those who ENTER INTO bachelors degree programs stay and complete would undoubtedly skyrocket, stress AND debt would be reduced, and ALL of this could be done with EXISTING infrastructure.
Existing community colleges could be absorbed into existing school districts for the last two years of their new students’ compulsory education; and for parents (for at least the first two years after implementing this idea,) who don’t want their kids living at home, the kids would have the option of joining the military for a couple years, or a non-military civilian equivalent job service. This service could be in the National Parks System, or something like the Peace Corps, or any of one or more jobs programs such as we saw in decades past when the US government was actually functional and not a goddamned fucking corrupt and worse-than-useless fucking joke.
Now this WOULD probably mean a sharp uptick in students attending community colleges, but they could probably increase the size of their staffs to handle the increase in a few ways. Universities would likely have surplus professors who could be persuaded to go help, since that’s where all their students are going to be, and in the meantime, we could start PAYING teachers what they’re worth.
Just my three cents. (I threw in an extra. Inflation.)
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
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Or we could just have the government pay it. That's what the GI Bill did, and it has been determined that the tax revenue generated by having these people pay more in taxes for their entire working lives, as well as being able to fully participate in the economy, recouped the cost of the program seven times over. The economics of that will be different in the 21st century, but we should surely consider the potential gain rather than only considering the cost of providing a free college education, as other advanced countries do.
online learning
start-up
founded in 2017
with the backing of Y Combinator
has captivated venture capitalists
Surely, this will be a great success!
considering how many sheep get degrees in fields that are not in demand or even remotely needed, this should pan out well!
Did they just come up with the idea of public schools?
I mean I got a free education and now I pay part of my paycheck for it. This is not revolutionary.
Yes, but this is a special middle-class tax
Many states have certified online colleges for people who work at affordable costs, around 5-6K per year.
Clearly affordable and easy to pay off, and geared at careers needing people.
Western Governours College has degrees in IT/Tech, teaching, healthcare, business and even offer masters degrees.
https://www.wgu.edu/washington...
Job? No way - under the table or go entrepreneur. You get what you pay for. Raise unemployment payments and how long it lasts and you get more people on it. It doesn't have to make sense in the grade scheme of things. People are petty... and predicable.
"Because education is a net benefit to society."
This is a very weak justification for eliminating market forces that supply goods to meet demand.
Almost EVERYTHING worth paying for is a net benefit to society. You could just as easily argue that giving everyone a mobile phone is a net benefit to society.
Should we simply tax all and give everyone everything that is a "net benefit to society"?
Education, like many other important things, is a good. Goods must be produced by people and no one is entitled to the goods produced by another person's labor.
We have gone down the slippery slope of conflating goods with rights. Rights are inherent in our humanity - goods are not rights.
Interesting approach.
The problem I foresee is this: The people who successfully get good jobs and repay their tuition are going to have to overpay. They need to in order to make up for the losses caused by those less successful. This raises a fairness argument: Why should those successful people have to overpay? Did they do something wrong by being successful?
I don't make that argument, I only note that it could be made.
OK then, maybe the solution is to have the taxpayers eat the cost of those who do not achieve employment success. That sounds good. Except, it does raise the issue: If the taxpayer can support less successful student educations, isn't this a lot like subsidizing, or even wholly supporting education through taxpayer dollars? I mean, why not go all-in and simply have tax dollars pay for education?
I still think the real meat of the issue is the cost of post-secondary education though. Universities are virtual oceans of entitlement, playing at being educational institutions while actually wanting to be research institutions. Meanwhile they pay little or no attention to employment success or prospects of their graduates. Indeed what Universities really want for their students is to remain students, gaining advanced degrees and eventually moving on to becoming poorly paid Research Assistants, Associate Professors, Teaching Assistants, etc. A rarified few eventually become full Professors and may gain tenure.
"After 30 years anything unpaid is written off."
Written off or underwritten by the taxpayer? There is a huge difference.
If the loan balance is really written off - what entity takes the loss?
No tuition at all and taxpayers pay for colleges. Since college grads usually earn more, they automatically finance there share of what brought them ahead in society. ... But that wouldn't work, wouldn't it? Because then we'd all be in some downtrodden communist third-world state like Germany. ... Oh, wait, that sounds weird ... errrm ... Nevermind.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Think about it. Incorporate yourself, which will allow you to sell publicly trade-able shares of yourself to investors. Then use the money raised from the ISO to invest in education or a home or other prohibitively expensive purchases.
What's wrong with that?
you could start adopting our horrible, horrible "socialist program", used in northern Europe ;-)
You get tuition for free.
As in: It is in the interest of the whole society to have a well educated population, so everybody contributes through the taxes to pay so anybody can get free education.
Oh, by the way. We actually also pay our students a low basic income while they attend high school and after that for 5 years of university.
It has been like this the last 50 years or so.
In On the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith said that educated labor should cost be payable within 5 years. That way fields which make lots of money will be more expensive than those fields that don't. The price of tuition would be set by what the median graduate (of the past 5 years) is making.
We already have schools like that; they're called trade schools. They give you just enough education to get a specific job. University is supposed to be about more than just job training; it's supposed to be a higher education that makes you a more knowledgeable, well-rounded citizen.
i was briefly in the startup/incubator community and I heard rumblings of this with lines like "the next holy grail is figuring out how to get a piece of people's income forever". the whole thing seemed greedy and disgusting and completely amoral
looks like they've figured out how to package it as "rethinking education" for students' benefit
still gross tho
Actually, some slave were given training in trades like blacksmithing to increase their value.
Does nobody read history any more.
Sold my soul to the company store.
(Caveat: I have lived in places with company stores and know many people who have apprenticed, and have even helped set up apprenticeship programs)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Because it doesn't help alleviate my six figure debt.
student loan bankruptcy needs to come back!
So the banks can force the schools to lower costs.
no student loan bankruptcy = unlimited loans
See subject.
Also, they are not a college. You don't graduate, and you won't get a degree.
This has all the bullshit of school, without the upside of getting a degree. A hard pass.
We have that for tertiary education in Australia already - see https://www.studyassist.gov.au/help-loans/hecs-help
And it works pretty well too in my experience. It's pretty simple and relatively painless. No need to worry about repayments when you can't afford them, or excessive interest rates (they're fixed to inflation levels), but when you earn over the income threshold the debt basically automatically "goes away" (payments automatically deducted from your wages before you see them) over a few short years.
Of course if you don't want to go that way then you don't have too - upfront payment, either out of your own pocket or via a loan of your choice is still an option, but for those not fortunate enough to have won the parental lottery (ie they're not rich) it's perfect.
Australia's model is that you repay your student loan (provided by the government) based on a percentage of your annual income - it's withheld by your employer and paid to the taxman on every paycheck. This has been in place for, oh, decades. And these clowns are getting millions of dollars in funding for a remarkably similar idea in 2019?
How is this protected from bankruptcy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyRichUncle - in the early years they started out with a focus on this "% of income" type of repayment. They eventually switched to regular student loans though.
Education is a fucking RIGHT. Not a goddamned fucking revenue stream. Leave it to fucking 'murkins to fuck over its own electorate in the name of greed, and keep them st00pid. You deserve trump.
Is a way to pay for education through a highly inefficient tax system at higher rates than normal because most of those benefitting aren't paying, only those getting the education.
Why not just raise Federal tax by an extra 1% per bracket, with no deductions permitted?
Then the cost is spread across those who benefit by the amount they benefit. Furthermore, as you've one (pre-existing) collection point not many new ones, you don't have to pay for the overhead.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...all was right with the world because our government realised the benefits to the nation of a highly educated population. Then the Liberals (UK:Tories, US:Republicans) got back into power and started disassembling the free education system because obviously, poor people shouldn't be able to go to university. Fortunately, they couldn't wreck it in one go because the outcry would have seen them tossed from office again. So they started on their usual, death by a thousand cuts process.
When I got to university, we accumulated a debt but it took the form of a loan from the government which accumulated at the government bond rate (iirc) and I was required to start repaying the debt once I was earning more than $40k pa through an additional tax levy. Took about 5 years to pay off.
Such a scheme strikes me as the best approach short of completely free education. Our kids, the nations young, really are our future. The investment is always worth it. We never know where and from who the next big thing will come and just one or two of these pays for the whole investment a hundred times over.
Just do it. It's worth it.
System that already exists in other parts of the world with actual Universities is tested in the US but with fake universities.
Much excite over nothing.
This is how the HECS system in Australia works. It's not novel. It's simple and straightforward.
The government pays for your university tuition and then you pay additional tax each year that you're employed post degree. Interest is charged at CPI so there's no blowing out of the debt if you struggle to find work immediately / spend time in low income occupations. Most people pay it back within 10 years, so you're debt free by your early 30s.
The government funding this system = equal opportunity for entering university = more skilled workers = more tax for the government in the long run through the higher incomes that university educated people earn.
The % of your income that is garnished each year depends on your earning capacity:
Below $51,957 = Nil
$51,957 – $57,729 = 2.0%
$57,730 – $64,306 = 4.0%
$64,307 – $70,881 = 4.5%
$70,882 – $74,607 = 5.0%
$74,608 – $80,197 = 5.5%
$80,198 – $86,855 = 6.0%
$86,856 – $91,425 = 6.5%
$91,426 – $100,613 = 7.0%
$100,614 – $107,213 = 7.5%
$107,214 and above = 8.0%
Pay it back if you wind a job? So people with no plans to ever work can get as much free educations as they want. Makes sense....
because that's how you teach critical thinking to people who don't get math. The rich don't teach these things to their kids because they're rich, they teach them because they know it'll teach them to think critically and make them less likely to be taken advantage of.
The trouble with trying to teach critical thinking with math is there's no value in being 50% right.
and, well, do you really want vast numbers of people with maybe a useful skill but no ability to think critically or, say, recognize a demagogue?
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which, for debts under $100k, is the case (thanks Bush Jr!).
For those who don't know the Southern United States has brought back debtor's prisons. The way it works is the judge orders you to pay and if you can't you're in contempt of court. Off to jail you go, and better hope your family can get the money. If not you can work for 50 cents/hr in the prison's work camps^X^X work programs.
Yes, this is really happening... What drives me nuts is nobody noticed when Credit Card debt became secure debt and debtor's prisons came back...
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They are the only ones that would fail to see what a scam this is, probably because they aren't old enough yet. Anyone that enters into an agreement of this sort is a flipping idiot.
Because it is bloody socialist, oh communist even.
Strange however that it works quite well in Scandinavia ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Why? University level learning is a waste of time and money at any price.
You can pound sand because my lawyers are getting paid way more than that.
The income share agreement that Purdue University uses does not require any payments from someone making less than $20,000 a year. So there's precedent for something like what lgw is suggesting.
Sweden have had a design simmilar to this but from the state for may years.
You got loans to study (no tuition) and the loans were payed back with a percentage of your ernings (usualy refered to as the academic tax )
if your had loans left when you retired they were forgivven.
The system hs changed a bit the last years so the rate of payback is higher but the basic idea is the same.
This has been a boon for social movement in sweden as it allowed pepole without rich parents to get an edication.
https://www.csn.se/languages/english.html
If the government pays its called taxes
...you really do have a loan balance, they just dont come right out and call it a loan...
Get a job they said....
Pay it back as a percentage of your income over time they said...
I wonder what the interest rate will be?
Sure, you're skipping the loan process, but the end result is the same. Is it really any different to be paying the university vs a lender? You're still just deferring tuition payment until after graduation..
The courses they're offering for these prices are the same online courses everyone else has and for far less money.
There is absolutely no possible way to do a data science degree of value the way they structured their curriculum in 30 weeks. 30 weeks of 8am to 5pm learning is absolutely worthless. For a program that should be focused on the success of their students as they won't make money unless their students graduate, this is a horrible design.
I would seriously recommend instead :
- Review high school math at Khan Academy for free... donate a few bucks to be nice
- Pick up calculus to understand rate of chance from Khan Academy.
- Pick up linear algebra from Khan Academy's pre-calculus course and then the linear algebra course.
- Learn a programming language (pick one, any one, it's just for learning principles), Code Academy, Khan Academy, or a thousand other sites will do.
- Learn programming theory, Khan Academy for a good intro algorithms course, or MIT Open Courseware for a hardcore one.
- Learn a data science language... Julia is hot now, Matlab/Octave is great too.
- Learn differential equations... this is only for people who want to be worth their salary. Khan Academy is good, MIT Open Courseware or Stanford is good too.
This can be done in 30 weeks if you're insanely disciplined. But it takes 18 months for the most experienced developers to become proficient in a programming language... anyone can learn a language in a few minutes, but to say "I actually know this language", someone who already knows 4 or 5 still needs 18 months.
I would also say that it doesn't make sense to do this program, it's all one thing. It doesn't seem to teach anything about anything for which the data set would be applicable, you'd leave with little more of value than stupid cat tricks.
Though, $50,000 i barely more than minimum wage... in fact it's probably considerably less. $15/hr minimum wage is $30,000 a year for 40 hour weeks. But overtime at time and a half would require yield $20,000 more with an average of 17 hours overtime a week. That may sound like a lot of overtime, but it's pretty common for an entry level programmer to work 60 hours a week while proving themselves without overtime pay. So, McDonald's pays more.
Consider also that they're asking for 17% of your wages for two years, so that's $41,500 a year probably taxed at a $50,000 a year bracket. So let's say it's the same as $20 a hour at 40 hour weeks, but you're probably working 60 and given the time and a half thing, it would work out to the same as about $11-$12 an hour if you were flipping burgers instead.
Now, if you received a real university education over a period of 3-4 years with the same deal... that would actually be promising.
This is just another case (like single payer health insurance) of making the productive members of society subsidize the sponges, when the REAL problem is that costs are TOO HIGH. College tuitions have been going up at twice the rate of inflation for several decades because Colleges and Universities have become bloated wasteful cesspools where dysfunctional neurotics, hiding form real life by pretending to be academics, poison our children's minds and ruin their lives with lunatic philosophies.
The REAL way to fix this, is to pay professors a fixed percentage of their students eventual incomes. Within a very few years, the flakes and nuts will be facing starvation, and go get jobs packing boxes at Amazon warehouses, where they make an actual contribution to society. The engineering and computer science profs will be rich. Thus the schools will be liberated from their suffocating burden of useless parasites, and a new golden age of real education will emerge.
How much do I have to repay? How long will I be required to make the monthly payments? Can I work for any company I want? Can I pay in Bitcoin? Do they accept PayPal? Do Tesla's get good gas mileage?