Comment by shaddi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shaddi | Hacker News Reader

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Come on, there is more to federal college loans than supply/demand distortion. Easily accessible student loans have much further reaching societal and economic implications than "inflating tuition costs", and those should play into the calculus of whether government-sponsored student loans are worthwhile.

This guy's example of Yale's 42 year stint of $33 tuition and so forth is pretty poor, too.

"What has changed? Back in the 1800's there was no Department of Education, no government guaranteed student loans..."

Gee, mainly that there were only a few sons of aristocrats going to the few universities in the country, and all they did there was read Great Books. Today universities are centers for research and have much broader educational missions.

Guess what? Tuition isn't the primary source of income for universities (at least not mine, a Tier I research university). It's /research grants/. Tuition allows you to pay for high-caliber faculty that can bring in huge grants. Schiff misses this point /entirely/. We keep raising tuition so we can offer salaries competitive with our peer institutions and keep getting top-notch faculty (as an out-of-state student at a public university, I'm quite cognizant of these increases).

"If the government didn't guarantee student loans, no one would give them, it'd be too risky."

Completely false. Student loans are some of the least-risky loans to give: the expected income of future doctors, engineers, etc easily justifies the risk of a loan. That's why there is a thriving private market for non-government guaranteed student loans.

Agreed. Comparing the $160 early 1900s Yale tuition that that of today's Yale is a little ridiculous. Yale and the like were the only real universities in the country. It would be better to compare to a public University (assuming we're still talking about someone trying to pay their way through college, that seems to be the place they would be going to). You're not looking at $40k a year, you're looking at ~$7000 (http://www.collegeboard.com/student/pay/add-it-up/4494.html).

And going by his math to pay for it, at 12 hours a day, for 32 days, you're looking at 384 total hours of work to pay for a year's tuition. To pay for a public school in the same number of hours worked, you would have to be making roughly $18 an hour, or a yearly salary of ~$38k (pre-tax, but that's a different issue entirely). Turns out college education is going to be roughly the same cost as it was then, if you're going to a public school.

Yeah, except public schools are subsidized by the government.

> Yale and the like were the only real universities in the country

That is not true. The many colleges originally founded on agricultural science curricula were started from the 1860s onward. Students were middle class. They were very cheap.

We keep raising tuition so we can offer salaries competitive with our peer institutions

And in the meantime, those peer institutions are raising their tuitions to be competitive with you. It's an arms race, and the tuition increases are funding it. And those increases are only possible due to student loans (and tuition grants).

So your argument is circular: if these loans were curtailed to all institutions, then they wouldn't be able to escalate, and you wouldn't be forced to follow suit.

Then maybe universities and research centers should be separated. My tuition should be applied towards the professors who will be teaching me. I'm going there for my own personal progress. If I want to go to a university that's doing the research then I would be willing to pay the extra tuition to go there.

Fortunately for you, these already exist. Just avoid any university that calls itself a "research university". All community colleges and many other schools (notably liberal arts colleges) fall into this non-research category.

Turns out, however, that research and teaching are complementary, so the best faculty and the most gung ho students will often be at the research universities, and that you can often learn more in a research setting than in a classroom.

That would be very hard to separate. There are very few professors who (in my experience) are professors simply because they want to teach students. The vast majority of them see teaching as simply a requirement to do research.

One of the key factors in combining the two is that you are not learning from someone who kind of studied the subject a decade or two previous like you would in high school, you're being taught by someone who is actively research the subject (or a similar subject).

University of Phoenix is open 24 hours a day, go for it.

You're probably being facetious, but I suspect that University of Phoenix and similar programs are, as an idea, higher education done right. My bet is the for-profit colleges will give establishment education a serious run for their money in coming years.

Indeed--private student loans are even available at comparable interest rates to federal loans. The main benefit to the student seems to be in grants, and in subsidized loans where the government subsidizes tuition while you are in school.

> Student loans are some of the least-risky loans to give

You can't shed student loans through bankruptcy, which is another big problem in the same vein driving up costs.

> there is a thriving private market for non-government guaranteed student loans

To my understanding this is not the case. The market is dominated by government backed loans. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm pretty sure "peripheral" is a better choice of word than "thriving".

> Today universities are centers for research and have much broader educational missions.

This really doesn't address the issue. It should cost the same in real dollars to graduate an English major as it did 60 years ago. Realistically, it should cost less due to economies of scale and technology. Instead it's many times as expensive.

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