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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

There's a simple solution, the Feds should cutoff loans for schools that don't get their students jobs. The government are the only ones that are able to accurately calculate which schools are completely worthless. In fact they should take it one step further and advertise to the whole world what percentage of students get jobs in their studied field and the average starting salary. That would finally put some market pressure on schools to do their damn job and teach useful skills.

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I think this is well intentioned but would be absolutely disastrous if implemented; it would give large employers de-facto control over what we are allowed to teach in higher education and encourage short sighted investment in current careers at the expense of cutting edge fields. Nevermind the substantial arguments that an education should be more than vocational training, and that job placement in many majors is more a function of the candidate and not their degree; predicting the careers of tomorrow is a hard task best not left in the hands of government bureaucrats or even large corporation's hr departments.

Agreed. Part of the problem is that vocational training is largely a rip-off, and the vocational institutes often demand prices to rival academic institutions. It seems like there is a market for accredited vocational institutes with a more rigorous curriculum (and standards) at a more affordable price. Community colleges are the closest thing to this right now that I'm aware of. Online education is still struggling for validity, and I believe simply does not provide enough structure to push a large number of people through even if these problems are somehow resolved. Is there some middle ground that employers would actually value?

> schools to do their damn job and teach useful skills

That may be the purpose of the loans, but it is not necessarily the purpose of universities.

Depends on your definition of "purpose". The purpose of the DMV is not necessarily to enable people to drive, but they are the ones who do the test and hand out the piece of plastic, so we're kind of splitting hairs.

> splitting hairs

No we’re not! The framing of higher education as a career enabler with positive ROI is the #1 bit of propaganda that has justified and reframed how tuition is evaluated and is directly responsible for the steady and insane yearly tuition hike since the 1980s.

Fighting for the essence and purpose of higher education is therefore not trivial but in fact paramount.

The fact that we are having this conversation in a thread suggesting that the federal government enforce universities as job mills is, I trust, enough evidence to make my point.

For a more in-depth treatment of this topic, see "Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media" on Salon: http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behi...

How is that propaganda? People with degrees make more money. The fact that universities had other goals doesn't mean their effects on graduates' earnings are any less real.

Are you saying we should lie to high school students about what does and does not lead to a high-paying job?

No, GP is saying that the value (societal or individual) of higher education may be orthogonal to the change in job pay of the person educated. The framing of the conversation as being around job pay rates has consequences.

There are real economic effects that happen when new frames of reference / paradigms / conventional wisdom take hold. Think about the ridiculous 2003-2008 house price run-up and how it was concomitant with a mass change from seeing housing as a cost to seeing it as "investment". Positive feedback loop, that. Maybe the same idea here with higher ed.

You're confusing an organization's stated purpose with its actual purpose.

Whether you or I like it or not, higher education IS a career enabler. No matter how this came to be, it's currently reality. People are willing to go into six figures of debt BECAUSE they believe it is a career enabler. Companies filter out non-college-grads because they believe it is a career enabler. Therefore, it is a career enabler.

It doesn't really matter what higher education's stated purpose is...Its actual purpose (in the real world, the one we live in) is to enable careers.

There's an even simpler solution -- fire the middle managers that are the largest driver of increases to college tuition[1], raise taxes, and provide higher education at low or no cost the same way the rest of the wealthy, industrialized world does. This is a solved problem everywhere else and we should be embarassed in the U.S. that the system we have persists.

[1]http://blogs.wgbh.org/on-campus/2014/2/6/growth-nonacademic-...

Must the value of an education be purely the salary you can get afterwards? The true roots of liberal arts (which used to include everything from astronomy to mathematics to botany) lie in creating a well-rounded, educated, sophisticated person. We can't all study STEM, and we as a society shouldn't demand that.

Not everyone wants or needs to get a well-rounded liberal arts education. The problem is that undergraduate degrees are more and more a prerequisite for getting any job, so there's pressure to make it easy for poorer people to earn a degree. Towards that end we have loans, grants, scholarships, subsidized city colleges and state universities...

I am afraid you are wrong there. It’s a myth that the reason we have public funding of higher education is to help people get nice jobs.

We have public funding of higher education because a better educated populace is a better democracy and a better public.

It's an intrinsic value.

That has long been the romantic ideal, but it no longer matches the reality in a hypercompetitive, filter-laden job market and economy:

https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruitin...

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21646985-americ...

If that were the case, why can't you get federal aid as a non-degree seeking student? Do I need credentials to contribute to a better democracy?

I can only imagine that limiting loans and aid to the pursuit of an accredited degree makes the difference between financing a lifestyle and financing something that is guaranteed worthwhile (if we believe accreditation).

Something must be missing from the US formulation of "better democracy through education."

We spend a huge sum of money on "education" in the US, but the two-party, democratic government we have obtained for ourselves has left a huge fraction of the people dissatisfied and impoverished.

> The problem is that undergraduate degrees are more and more a prerequisite for getting any job

That is dependent on the economic cycle. In boom times employers hire anybody with a pulse, in bust times the glut of resumes for a job opening makes employers choosy. If out of all resumes for a retail associate job one candidate stands out due to his MBA and experience, he will likely get the job. That does not imply, however, that all retail associate positions now require MBAs.

This is about the dollar cost of the college and university education process.

I'm surprised there isn't more discussion here about ways to educate people cheaply and efficiently, more discussion of supply pricing.

It may be a bad deal to obtain the knowledge required for a degree in Anthropology @ $150,000, but maybe it's a great deal to obtain the knowledge required for a degree in Anthropology @ $15,000.

How many schools successfully do the well-rounded bit? How many students care? I had a 1.8 average in general studies and a 3.5 average in math / CS, so there's my bias. And honestly the CS and math was poorly taught most of the time. Not a top 20 school (coulve gone to UT, but that's another story), but still a well regarded school.

Meanwhile, my well-rounded education comes from independent study of this and that and places like HN. I guarantee you that I can identify quality information and know more about government than most of my peers.

>> The true roots of liberal arts (which used to include everything from astronomy to mathematics to botany) lie in creating a well-rounded, educated, sophisticated person.

That's fine so long as you actually want to become the person that liberal arts education strives to create. That archetype is a lovely justification for four years and the student loan equivalent of a 2016 Porsche 911.

The instance or the archetype, on the other hand, is not so nice. If somebody ever called me "sophisticated", I would assume that they were being sarcastic or condescending. If I called someone else "unsophisticated", that would make me look like an elitist jerk.

As for being "well-rounded", liberal arts college education is both redundant and contradictory. It's redundant because we already have K-12 education to "broaden horizons beyond one's comfort zone". It's contradictory because the whole idea of college majors pushes students to be LESS well-rounded in favor of a specialization.

At some point, the student is responsible for getting themselves a job. How do you differentiate between a student who is trying and failing to get a job because they were unprepared for their field vs. one who decided they don't want to be a journalist/biologist/whatever after all and backpacks around Europe for 2 years?

> Feds should cutoff loans for schools that don't get their students jobs

They tried that with for-profit schools, who were quick to report very high levels of employment (omitting under-employment, with gigs such as barista or part-time retail) and setting up temp agencies that hired people to do busywork for six months or so.

If their graduates are able to drive, they already pretty much have a job with Uber, for instance.

> If their graduates are able to drive, they already pretty much have a job with Uber, for instance

So long as they're driving a vehicle that qualifies, in a city where Uber isn't disallowed and the market is a viable one.

I also think there's a simple solution, but entirely different from the one you propose. I wish that k-12 would focus on job prep. Most jobs really don't need specialized degrees - If our public schools were worth a damn there's no reason kids couldn't graduate ready to work. Leave university for highly specialized fields and intellectual pursuits. I think it's a shame that our public school system is failing kids so badly that they can't even get jobs without taking on tremendous personal debt.

Back when I was in HS (1990) our VoTech program taught me the equivalent of an AA in electronics. That program was scrapped; what a shame.

Just make the colleges partially responsible for defaults. Not enough that they won't take chances, but enough that the steer students away from $100000 teaching degrees.

Or perhaps let the free market do what it does best, allocate efficiently.

Yes, because if there's one thing America needs, it's more class stratification.

Kansas is rolling out a website now that shows salaries for different majors at different universities in state.

also i think a lot of it is this kind of stuff[0].

[0]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/everest-college-closure-no-s...

yes absolutely. this is a great idea. loan defaults by school would be an excellent indicator. more upvotes please.

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