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College debt is a good investment if you learn things and graduate, but too many colleges are failing to educate students and too many students end up dropping out with debt and no degree

I teach college and will also add that there are a large number of students who have no business being there. They aren't prepared, don't know why they're in college, don't have the skills (and frequently disposition) to succeed, and only go because parents / teachers told them they should. Many are poorly served by sitting quietly and doing abstract symbol manipulation; they'd be better served by schools of shorter duration that teach practical skills.

This is pretty obvious to anyone teaching at non-elite schools.

At one of my former universities we had a glut of professors who were tenured, teaching courses no one wanted, or needed. The only way to keep these classes filled was to require students to take the classes, and if that didn't work, to require labs on classes that traditionally did not have, or need, a lab, and then make the professors teach those. That worked until the foreign student glut. Now that same university (George Mason fyi) has to dramatically increase the number of senseless labs so they can provide graduate teaching assistants jobs to the foreign students. It's more like a shell game than an actual education. Serious question: Does Research Methods in Psychology really need a four hour lab???

Out of curiosity, what sorts of skills/etc would you want to see for students to succeed in college, that they don't have now?

Not the poster to whom you posed the question, but in my experience as a prof

* Self discipline

* Study skills/how to study

* Motivation for learning, not just getting credentials.

Often kids have lots of motivation for learning but classes can really take the fun out of it. They add friction by poorly presenting the material (I prefer a well formed book or document over chalkboard scribbles and ambiguous powerpoint slides), competition, deadlines (read: mastery learning), or failing to connect the material to applications.

For all of theses reasons, I learn way more on my own than I do in my classes. Many of my peers do the same.

Not the one downvoting you, but I think that what is needed for college is the drive to learn despite these issues that you raise. We've all had teachers like that. Sometimes a prof can add brilliant insight; sometimes you are better off following along in the book and not bother taking notes except in the margin; and sometimes (rarely, hopefully) you are better off skipping class and reading, perhaps from a text different than the one assigned.

The class is important for giving you an organization of the material that helps to solidify your foundation for future learning, and also to hold you accountable for the pace. This doesn't work for everybody, admittedly; but often it is an intellectual maturity thing, and by making ourselves go through it we are much better off in our fourth year than our first.

Well if learning despite these issues, despite the added friction, is what college is for, I wish they told me that when I signed up. Intentionally adding friction while also claiming that formal education itself is supposed to lubricate learning are rather antithetical aims.

The keeping of pace and lectures are not intentionally there to add difficulty or responsibility, they are there for vestiges of an era from when the lecture and class model was invented, before we even had the printing press. They exist now mainly for logistical convenience and because people think they can find reasons for why we should keep them around and why they are the best pedagogical transmission method for most students. They are not. They really suck. It has long since been determined that most people can only even hold their attention on something for ~15-20min (hence the length of TED talks).

If the material was organized in a cohesive series of books, then you could just read those, and classes would mainly be for projects. There is a reason Sal Khan and Elon Musk both skipped nearly all of their lectures in college and both advocate for education to be massively overhauled.

You should be able to just study on your own and periodically show up for proctored exams, and take them as many times as you need to in order to reach true understanding. And you should be able to take such exams without having to pay for lectures.

I don't think people are intentionally adding friction, it just sometimes gets that way.

Most people would be completely lost studying on their own. They exist, however. But if most people could do it they would. And you are correct also about lectures lasting longer than most peoples' attention span. But they stem from a time when college wasn't for most people.

There is literally nothing wrong with studying the humanities. I am amazed at how many brilliant engineers skip history and literature and become predictable consumerist cogs because "that's how the world works" as far as they've ever known.

Time was you'd go to college, get a job, and get trained while you work. Of course I'm not saying a rocket scientist opening should cater equally to the engineer and the artist, but we have become so addicted to pedigree that we forget how differently things can be done when we don't expect a new CS graduate to build a mobile API on their first day.

>>Time was you'd go to college, get a job, and get trained while you work.

You got trained while you worked because most people stayed at the same company from the day they started until the day they retired. So it was easy for companies to justify investing time and money into training: barring unusual circumstances, they expected that person to remain an employee for a long time.

Nowadays though, job-hopping is the norm. If the company cannot expect you to stay for longer than X years, they're going to adjust their hiring practices to make sure new hires are "safe", i.e. have degrees from prestigious colleges. Of course that still doesn't guarantee they will have the necessary skills from the get-go, but if things don't work out the hiring manager can at least cover his/her own ass by saying, "well, he/she was a <prestigious college> graduate..."

Absolutely. Seriously this cannot be stressed enough: there is a huuuuge amount of influence in the decision-making process, whether it's choosing a vendor or hiring an employee, that ultimately goes back to someone preemptively covering their ass.

When I tried an Ed-tech startup in college, our biggest barrier was that nobody wanted to sign off on an untested product in case it went wrong and they got the blame.

> There is literally nothing wrong with studying the humanities.

There's a lot wrong with going deeply into debt to study the humanities, though - especially when you wind up surprised that you can't make enough of a living to pay off your loans.

I literally never said anything remotely close to this irrelevant straw man argument. Maybe if you'd studied the humanities you would've learned to read between the lines ;)

The original article was about student debt.

Four comments upthread from this one, eastbayjake said, "(2) Everyone can benefit from learning new things -- even (or perhaps especially) a liberal arts education -- but many students are attending college to get a credential and land a good job." Your reply to that comment triggered my comment.

Maybe I've had enough humanities to know to look at surrounding context ;-)

The opposite is just as bad.

If all you learn is history and literature and nothing about how the world around you works - aka science and math - your deficiencies are just in other areas.

If something is "well rounded," it has shape in all directions.

I would argue that a study of history which neglects "the physics" is hardly an education of history at all.

World War 1 would not have been the same without machine guns and chemical weapons. How was it that these manufacturing processes scaled up to meet the needs of major national warfare? What was it about mustard gas that made it such an effective tool? Why was it not used more widely? Why was it used just as much as it was? Why use that and not a different kind of gas? How did they acquire the resources for, process, and send this deadly substance miles and miles to the front lines where it could be used without erupting and killing one's own troops?

To truly understand these kinds of questions, a scholar must take into account the entire scope of history, not just the narrative. History is everything.

> We should be clearer about what we want institutions of higher learning to teach: life's big questions or job skills?

This used to be easy to answer. The first is a university and the second is a trade school or apprenticeship. However, the latter has fallen out of favor (for some reason?), and universities are having to pick up both roles. I don't think this is the right answer, but it's the only one that seems to have political / financial support. Interestingly, software rediscovered "trade school light" in the form of coding bootcamps.

> If lawmakers wanted to help the student debt crisis, a great start would be making student loan payments tax-deductible ... instead of just having student loan interest be tax-deductible.

Tuition is deductible. So you effectively deduct the principle payments the year you pay tuition. It makes perfect sense for only the interest to be deductible the second time around.

Tuition is only deductible up to $4000 per year. Which would be reasonable if that were remotely close to what any college (outside of a few notable, laudable exceptions) are charging.

Which would be included in the "up to a certain total" that I elided from the original quote.

The problems with student debt are (a) it is not affected by bankruptcy and (b) the Federal government guarantees it, either via the pre-2010 program or the subsequent direct loan program.

The result is that colleges and universities do not experience meaningful declining rates of acceptance (demand) when they raise their prices.

One alternative would be to stop government support of loans entirely. That would tend to re-price college at a level closer to its actual value.

Another alternative would be to nationalize higher education.

What about rolling back the disastrous 2005 bankruptcy "reform" legislation?

I mean, in terms of political viability, that'd be just as viable as the two options you mentioned...