The subsidy is the difference between the interest rate you are charged for the loan and the interest rate you would have been charged on the open market without government interference.
Tuition costs have been rising like a rocket... and the school reflects that. The local state college near us has half of the campus under construction. They just built a gorgeous new student union, a state of the art fitness center, and completely modernized their library.
They are competing for students who have access to loans (and therefore, who are comparing on features, not value), so they give everyone the luxury treatment.
At a land grant public university that used to be known just for being cheap and having a good football team.
I am always amazed at the *parents* who will support their children in taking on these loans. I expected 18-year-olds to be inexperienced and unwise, but who tells their child "yes, it sounds like a great idea to go up to your ears in debt to pay for an education that may or may not pan out."
If you remove the federal subsidies, and therefore remove the fact that they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, schools and loan originators will charge what they are actually worth.
Although there are plenty of places that pay above minimum wage. The ubiquitous burger jobs will have you making above minimum wage pretty quickly, actually, not to mention that as a young and probably healthy person you are in great shape to work manual labor somewhere for more than minimum wage and probably overtime.
Work a semester, go to school a semester. Off and on until you're far enough in to get a good co-op job, and then that'll pay for the rest of your tuition.
Or just go join the military and let them pay for everything.
Go test drive the RX-8 before they get rid of them, and you'll understand.
The engine just revs and revs... on the manual it hits something like 10k. But there's no drama like in most cars when you're pushing that hard - the whole thing is smooth as silk.
The guys on top gear described it as though it were running on "heavy cream."
Moreover, the light weight of the engine allows the car to have a perfect 50/50 weight distribution, in a car with four seats. The smaller size also gives them room to put in a wishbone suspension in the front.
Completely honestly, it one of the best feeling cars to drive anywhere close to the price point (and you could get them around $22k new if you hit all the right deals very recently). A lot of that is the suspension, one of the best you can get in a 20k-something car, but the engine just puts a whole otherworldliness to it.
Now, we didn't get one, mostly because of the mileage and because we needed more space. But oh man did we want one. Seriously one of the best driver's cars around.
Actually, the graphs I have seen put Korean cars at roughly the same long term reliability as GM and Chrysler. Which is somewhat worse than Ford, and light-years away from a Toyota or a Honda.
It is amazing how well the import companies are managing to beat American ones even using American workers. At least partially because they build their factories in Tennessee or Kentucky where they don't have to deal with union laws.
And it's all complete pretentious bullshit. My sister is a graduate school architecture student. Her undergrad degree was in theatre/dance. And yet she is the most practical-minded person in her entire class, including the professors.
She had one assignment to build a 4' platform in as simple a form as possible. She went out to the woods, cut off a log, and stood it on its end. The professor thought she was a *genius*.
I had always assumed that architecture was some unique blend of engineering and art.... it always amazes me how much her experience is proving me wrong.
The concept of any magic free will separate from the mechanisms of our mind should have been discarded long ago.
That said, until we come up with a much better description of those mechanisms, it's still a very useful abstraction, on a legal, philosophical, and social level. "Free will" is just the black box of machinery that produces our thoughts and actions. Until we can reliably predict outputs for all inputs, treating it as being independent and unpredictable is about the best we can do.
This is, in fact, one of the strongest arguments for a smaller government - it reduces the damage that corruption can do, and the incentive to create it.
There was a study done a while ago that showed that economic and social progress correlated more highly with the size of government as a percentage of GDP than anything to do with how efficient, well-run, honest, or well-intentioned the government was run.
For my team? Usually a combination of the above. This is, by the way, only the people who make it through the initial "does your resume say you might be qualified" screening. I unfortunately don't have anything to do with that, so I don't know about their rejection rate.
I am looking for basic technical skill, a solid grasp of theoretical concepts, and enough social skills that I feel like you can work with the team. I have rejected people for failing all of these. Usually its for seeming like you weren't paying any attention in your degree classes, but not always. In fact, I turned down one guy who I completely expect to have an incredibly good career in CS somewhere, because I know that he and one of my co-workers would have tried to kill each other within a month. He was a great programmer, really bright guy - but just too awkward to fit in well with the team we have.
For our team, I'm looking for high social functioning nerds - people who are in CS because they enjoy it, but aren't terrified at the idea of having to give a presentation, either. And people who don't take themselves too seriously and can take a joke.
Essentially, are they trained enough to be useful immediately, smart enough that I'm sure they can learn what we'll teach them, and socially functioning enough that at the end of the work day I'll want to go grab dinner with them as friends rather than wanting to strangle them.
I hear that a lot. As a relative non-interventionist, though, I'm perfectly happy to allocate spending toward threats that might actually be able to take over our country, rather that ones that can only kill themselves and a few other people every decade. The less our military is built around occupying countries and putting down civilian resistance, the better.
Umm.. engineering is one of the best college majors for return on investment relative to loan cost. About the only ones that are better are law and medical, and both of those take on a much higher risk.
The failure rate for business majors is significantly higher than engineers, even if the possible top rewards are higher.
That said, as someone who interviews entry level software engineers, I'll say only roughly 1/3 of the grads we talk to are people I would ever want to work with.
And we should both admit that the class caps were in no way set by child development studies and in every way set by bargaining with the teacher's unions.
Teachers strongly prefer small classes because they make teaching easier, and can lead to better outcomes. Unions strongly prefer it because it doubles their membership.
I'm just saying that given that schools have had class sizes in the 25-30 range for years and were still functional (if not perhaps optimal), we should be careful how strongly we read the results of these studies. There is a tradeoff to be made between money spent and education achieved. The US has doubled education spending in the last ten years while achieving only marginal improvements in results.
My father-in-law is an amateur pilot who recently explained the scale of this problem to me. It boggles the mind. He said that just in his once a month-or-so flights, he would make back the cost of the ipad over the course of a year, easily.
Every plane has to have the maps and approaches for every airport on their route. But it's more than that. They also need all of the maps for every airport near their route, in case they have to do an emergency landing.
There are a lot of little airports and lots of different approaches. The stack of charts for just the state of Ohio is at least a very thick binder. And, then if you want to fly a little farther on a trip, you get to buy all of those charts, too.
But that's now where it gets complicated. These charts are updated monthly. And the updates are distributed as a "diff" - just the ones that have changed. So you have to go through your binder and replace every single page that's different. And sometimes you find out it was just a temporary change, and it's already changed back.
It's really a big mess for an amateur pilot to take care of. The commercial airlines pay big money just to keep all of their charts in order every month... even though the vast majority of them are never even looked at by the pilots.
So, provided that the battery life is good enough, this is a huge weight/headache/cost reducer for the airlines.
Also, in many states (I do not know specifically about Texas) teachers are being cut, but class sizes are at an incredibly low number. My mother only had 15 kids in her class. When she started teaching a fifteen years ago the number was 30.
I'm not saying 15 or 30 is the "correct" number, just that any changes now are the reversal of a very long trend of hiring more and more teachers to handle the same number of children, not some immediately plunge into the abyss.
I understand this argument, but I'm not sure I entirely accept it. Text messages are free if you consider them as a rider on voice messaging. However, give that texting is as much of a use of cell phones as voice messaging is, we should rather divide the cost of the infrastructure between the uses.
It isn't the cost to send a message, it is the cost to build the towers and connections to begin with.
That said, the rate is still ridiculous. It's just not as ridiculous as the "they get the text line for free" or "cost per KB" analysis makes it seem.
It is entirely possible (and legal) for congress to pass a law treating things differently on the idiot. That doesn't make it good law, but if it isn't unconstitutional, just stupid, that isn't for the judge to decide.
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Finland has the advantage of being populated mostly by Finns.
The subsidy is the difference between the interest rate you are charged for the loan and the interest rate you would have been charged on the open market without government interference.
Have you been to a college campus recently?
Tuition costs have been rising like a rocket... and the school reflects that. The local state college near us has half of the campus under construction. They just built a gorgeous new student union, a state of the art fitness center, and completely modernized their library.
They are competing for students who have access to loans (and therefore, who are comparing on features, not value), so they give everyone the luxury treatment.
At a land grant public university that used to be known just for being cheap and having a good football team.
I am always amazed at the *parents* who will support their children in taking on these loans. I expected 18-year-olds to be inexperienced and unwise, but who tells their child "yes, it sounds like a great idea to go up to your ears in debt to pay for an education that may or may not pan out."
If you remove the federal subsidies, and therefore remove the fact that they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, schools and loan originators will charge what they are actually worth.
Yes, because nothing says "slave" like voluntarily entering into an agreement where someone gives you a ton of money.
Although there are plenty of places that pay above minimum wage. The ubiquitous burger jobs will have you making above minimum wage pretty quickly, actually, not to mention that as a young and probably healthy person you are in great shape to work manual labor somewhere for more than minimum wage and probably overtime.
Work a semester, go to school a semester. Off and on until you're far enough in to get a good co-op job, and then that'll pay for the rest of your tuition.
Or just go join the military and let them pay for everything.
The idiots in government who decided that to back that loan? Or the idiots who voted them in because who doesn't like "free" stuff?
There's a ton of blame to pass around here. The system is broken, and it needs fixed. But that doesn't absolve the student of being a moron.
Go test drive the RX-8 before they get rid of them, and you'll understand.
The engine just revs and revs... on the manual it hits something like 10k. But there's no drama like in most cars when you're pushing that hard - the whole thing is smooth as silk.
The guys on top gear described it as though it were running on "heavy cream."
Moreover, the light weight of the engine allows the car to have a perfect 50/50 weight distribution, in a car with four seats. The smaller size also gives them room to put in a wishbone suspension in the front.
Completely honestly, it one of the best feeling cars to drive anywhere close to the price point (and you could get them around $22k new if you hit all the right deals very recently). A lot of that is the suspension, one of the best you can get in a 20k-something car, but the engine just puts a whole otherworldliness to it.
Now, we didn't get one, mostly because of the mileage and because we needed more space. But oh man did we want one. Seriously one of the best driver's cars around.
Actually, the graphs I have seen put Korean cars at roughly the same long term reliability as GM and Chrysler. Which is somewhat worse than Ford, and light-years away from a Toyota or a Honda.
It is amazing how well the import companies are managing to beat American ones even using American workers. At least partially because they build their factories in Tennessee or Kentucky where they don't have to deal with union laws.
Yep, women computer scientists were relatively common before the home PC boom.
Personally I blame it on the hobbyist culture.
And it's all complete pretentious bullshit. My sister is a graduate school architecture student. Her undergrad degree was in theatre/dance. And yet she is the most practical-minded person in her entire class, including the professors.
She had one assignment to build a 4' platform in as simple a form as possible. She went out to the woods, cut off a log, and stood it on its end. The professor thought she was a *genius*.
I had always assumed that architecture was some unique blend of engineering and art.... it always amazes me how much her experience is proving me wrong.
The concept of any magic free will separate from the mechanisms of our mind should have been discarded long ago.
That said, until we come up with a much better description of those mechanisms, it's still a very useful abstraction, on a legal, philosophical, and social level. "Free will" is just the black box of machinery that produces our thoughts and actions. Until we can reliably predict outputs for all inputs, treating it as being independent and unpredictable is about the best we can do.
This is, in fact, one of the strongest arguments for a smaller government - it reduces the damage that corruption can do, and the incentive to create it.
There was a study done a while ago that showed that economic and social progress correlated more highly with the size of government as a percentage of GDP than anything to do with how efficient, well-run, honest, or well-intentioned the government was run.
For my team? Usually a combination of the above. This is, by the way, only the people who make it through the initial "does your resume say you might be qualified" screening. I unfortunately don't have anything to do with that, so I don't know about their rejection rate.
I am looking for basic technical skill, a solid grasp of theoretical concepts, and enough social skills that I feel like you can work with the team. I have rejected people for failing all of these. Usually its for seeming like you weren't paying any attention in your degree classes, but not always. In fact, I turned down one guy who I completely expect to have an incredibly good career in CS somewhere, because I know that he and one of my co-workers would have tried to kill each other within a month. He was a great programmer, really bright guy - but just too awkward to fit in well with the team we have.
For our team, I'm looking for high social functioning nerds - people who are in CS because they enjoy it, but aren't terrified at the idea of having to give a presentation, either. And people who don't take themselves too seriously and can take a joke.
Essentially, are they trained enough to be useful immediately, smart enough that I'm sure they can learn what we'll teach them, and socially functioning enough that at the end of the work day I'll want to go grab dinner with them as friends rather than wanting to strangle them.
I hear that a lot. As a relative non-interventionist, though, I'm perfectly happy to allocate spending toward threats that might actually be able to take over our country, rather that ones that can only kill themselves and a few other people every decade. The less our military is built around occupying countries and putting down civilian resistance, the better.
Not to mention that military spending in Europe and Japan would skyrocket if we did reduce our military.
The US military is the biggest foreign aid program in the world.
Currently you can get all of the maps for a 15$/month (or something similar) subscription as an amateur pilot.
All of the maps are available for free/ the cost of printing. It's the cost of binding, publishing, and managing them that gets ridiculous.
Umm.. engineering is one of the best college majors for return on investment relative to loan cost. About the only ones that are better are law and medical, and both of those take on a much higher risk.
The failure rate for business majors is significantly higher than engineers, even if the possible top rewards are higher.
That said, as someone who interviews entry level software engineers, I'll say only roughly 1/3 of the grads we talk to are people I would ever want to work with.
This event once again proves the truth of my pre-conceived ideology.
*sigh*
Regardless of why, this particular example of government action didn't work. Let's try something else.
And we should both admit that the class caps were in no way set by child development studies and in every way set by bargaining with the teacher's unions.
Teachers strongly prefer small classes because they make teaching easier, and can lead to better outcomes. Unions strongly prefer it because it doubles their membership.
I'm just saying that given that schools have had class sizes in the 25-30 range for years and were still functional (if not perhaps optimal), we should be careful how strongly we read the results of these studies. There is a tradeoff to be made between money spent and education achieved. The US has doubled education spending in the last ten years while achieving only marginal improvements in results.
My father-in-law is an amateur pilot who recently explained the scale of this problem to me. It boggles the mind. He said that just in his once a month-or-so flights, he would make back the cost of the ipad over the course of a year, easily.
Every plane has to have the maps and approaches for every airport on their route. But it's more than that. They also need all of the maps for every airport near their route, in case they have to do an emergency landing.
There are a lot of little airports and lots of different approaches. The stack of charts for just the state of Ohio is at least a very thick binder. And, then if you want to fly a little farther on a trip, you get to buy all of those charts, too.
But that's now where it gets complicated. These charts are updated monthly. And the updates are distributed as a "diff" - just the ones that have changed. So you have to go through your binder and replace every single page that's different. And sometimes you find out it was just a temporary change, and it's already changed back.
It's really a big mess for an amateur pilot to take care of. The commercial airlines pay big money just to keep all of their charts in order every month... even though the vast majority of them are never even looked at by the pilots.
So, provided that the battery life is good enough, this is a huge weight/headache/cost reducer for the airlines.
Also, in many states (I do not know specifically about Texas) teachers are being cut, but class sizes are at an incredibly low number. My mother only had 15 kids in her class. When she started teaching a fifteen years ago the number was 30.
I'm not saying 15 or 30 is the "correct" number, just that any changes now are the reversal of a very long trend of hiring more and more teachers to handle the same number of children, not some immediately plunge into the abyss.
I understand this argument, but I'm not sure I entirely accept it. Text messages are free if you consider them as a rider on voice messaging. However, give that texting is as much of a use of cell phones as voice messaging is, we should rather divide the cost of the infrastructure between the uses.
It isn't the cost to send a message, it is the cost to build the towers and connections to begin with.
That said, the rate is still ridiculous. It's just not as ridiculous as the "they get the text line for free" or "cost per KB" analysis makes it seem.
Why is this more outrageous than offering only unlimited internet access, instead of tiered with data caps?
Or more correctly, the law is an idiot.
It is entirely possible (and legal) for congress to pass a law treating things differently on the idiot. That doesn't make it good law, but if it isn't unconstitutional, just stupid, that isn't for the judge to decide.