College Unaffordable Even in Higher Income Brackets
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Here's a possible solution also from personal experience: I went to high school in Texas and about 70% of the top students went to University of Texas at Austin because a) very good school (top 10 in CS) b) at least at the time, you got in automatically by being in the top 8% of your class, which isn't that hard in huge Texas schools c) not cheap but not $40k a year.
Most parents realized this was a likely outcome for the kids early on (or pretty much expected them to go there) and started to save up money since their child was born. The result was the most unstressful college application process I've seen!
Of course, not everyone lives in a state where the flagship public college is a top 10 in CS and many other majors, nor can everyone save up 18 years before the kid goes to college, but some can make it happen.
While I understand your point, I take some issue with:
> the middle and higher income brackets (middle and upper middle suburban class) is the bracket that is hurt the most by college costs
Your points are all well made, but I'd argue that being lower class you're entirely dependent on financial aid and tuition subsidies if you get them at all. In the middle and upper middle class your fear (from anecdotal first hand experience) isn't if you'll go to college (which is a huge indicator today of whether or not you'll be better than your parents -- education), but where you'll go to college. I know a lot of peers who went to state or safety schools because of cost. I don't know a lot of peers whose family is in that same tax bracket that just didn't go to college. I do know many friends who couldn't feasibly go to college at all, and it's stripped their career growth and job opportunities. Not trying to argue, just facilitate discussion by voicing a dissenting opinion.
At least back home in Texas though, you can go to cheap community college and transfer to UT Austin or another UT campus. Two years is definitely better than four.
Recently UMass started to take Computer Science seriously, gave it its own school and is accepting a lot more students. I went to an alumn event last year and the enrollment numbers of the last 10 years shows hockey stick growth.
We'll see if these moves improve or dilute the brand.
In hindsight going to UMass for CS was a good decision, but back then my world was small and didn't know all of my options.
I am shifting in the opinion that we need to start funneling more money in to our public urban commuter schools. Wayne State, University of Memphis, Towson University, University of Cincinnati, etc... Honestly, The amount of public money that goes to private universities in this country is disgusting. Also the effects of Economic Agglomeration are well known.
I had to google for an article I remember reading a while ago but apparently over half of UT grads come from families that make over $100k+. It's not as bad as I thought but UT Austin has a much higher representation of (upper) middle class kids than lower class kids.
https://www.texasobserver.org/are-texas-public-universities-... http://www.dailytexanonline.com/2015/10/14/ut-unspoken-low-i...
What you said makes sense. If your family makes over $100k in Texas, you can definitely pay for most if not all your kid's college after FAFSA/any scholarships.
For instance, I got in to Cal Poly, which ranks very high on many lists for Engineering, and it cost me (a California citizen) $1400 a quarter.
I also attended the local CC, and prices there were even cheaper, something like $18 a credit. The books were more expensive than the class. It was a pretty common thing among my (upper middle class) high school classmates for people to attend a CC for 2 years, then transfer to a prestigious UC. They'd have to pay that UC-level fee for two years, but the first 2 years of college were affordable enough for people to put themselves through school.
Suffice to say, I went local and things worked out in the end. I calculated that now, with a top job, I would have broken even in about two years. The only open question is if it will impact my future career prospects.
But I don't see going here as being drastically worse than a better school. I've gotten interviews at a bunch of places, and every summer I have classmates that intern at highly competitive companies like Google/MS/Amazon/Palantir. I don't know some of what I'm missing because I'm not at Harvard or MIT but I don't know how my school would be a negative at most places.
Honestly I'd be surprised if there are radical differences in how prepared you are for industry coming out of undergrad from Harvard, MIT, or an average state school because tech is much more of a meritocracy than a lot of other career paths, and because their undergrad programs are notably underwhelming (while their graduate programs are phenomenal).
I think recruiters see top-tier college graduates as one of two things. Either they come from a good school so they must know their stuff so they must be able to pass (making the recruiter's ROI more secure) or they come from a good school so they know how to play the acceptance game, and their pedigree alone will legitimize our program by association (our internship program hosted 3 MIT students, 5 Stanford students, etc etc). I don't agree with either of these metrics, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were common thoughts among recruiters.
> I don't know some of what I'm missing because I'm not at Harvard or MIT but I don't know how my school would be a negative at most places.
I think if you were in a field other than tech or were relying on your academics alone you'd notice how easy it is to get that first phone interview. As is, I don't think it ultimately makes much of a difference. Also, your alma mater creates your post-graduate immediate network. Getting in touch with a "fellow" Stanford graduate is probably more valuable than your average state school graduate depending on the industry. However, I believe that if you were to do research at these top-tier places you'd notice a huge boost from being at a university that gets huge endowments and talented professors. That's the one other exception (to me).
Note: I don't mean that Stanford students are smarter or more capable than state school students, only that the association of getting into a high pedigree high cost school probably means your peers are well connected and/or wealthy. Maybe that's not a fair assumption.
> A top tier college will get you out in front of more employers...
...when you don't have anything more impressive than your college choice on your resume.
Harvard students will always beat out comparable state school students to get that Microsoft phone interview. But they won't always beat out the student who ran a full-scale web app after sophomore year to help students plan courses if they don't have comparable experience. Another thing I love about tech is as many strings as you can pull to get that initial phone interview, you're on your own from there. In my experience I've done general website applications and called up friends of friends and once you're staring at a whiteboard it makes no difference who you know or where you came from.
The two part related problem to this is a recruiting one. If you use a resume as a litmus test for "smart programmers" as opposed to those faking it, you're undoubtably going to get a bunch of people who went to the best possible schools. This also means you wind up with a lot of candidates who had the means to go to really good schools. Maybe there's someone just as smart at your local state school who couldn't afford CMU who would bring a completely different mindset and style of thinking, but you'll never find them.
Yes, and that's exactly what happens at the most desirable companies.
>Maybe there's someone just as smart at your local state school who couldn't afford CMU who would bring a completely different mindset and style of thinking, but you'll never find them.
If you're really a stand-out, IQ-wise, you can go to the top tier schools even if you have no money. The people who get screwed are the people who are pretty smart but not exceptionally so.
More to the point, the thing everyone in a top-10 school has in common is that they're really good at looking good on paper. It says near nothing about what they'll contribute on a team, how they'll function with other people, or base programming skill. My only point is that if a company seeks diversity, they should seek it in all avenues.
Probably. The people who go without paying are pretty desirable from the university's point of view.
>This is also ignoring the fact that Ivies and other top-tier universities are overwhelming homogenous.
I'm not a worshiper of diversity for its own sake. The benefits seem pretty theoretical, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest homogeneous populations function better.
>More to the point, the thing everyone in a top-10 school has in common is that they're really good at looking good on paper.
Being able to do things well on paper is pretty important in 21st century US. It's also important to hire people who can figure out what your customers (internal and external) want and put it on paper in a way that will make the sale.
>It says near nothing about what they'll contribute on a team, how they'll function with other people, or base programming skill.
That's all true. The problem is we don't really have any way to get a good picture that kind of stuff outside of hiring everyone and culling the ones we don't want. Pretty much every applicant to an ivy league school lists a nonprofit on their application these days, and 99% of them are bullshit.
>My only point is that if a company seeks diversity, they should seek it in all avenues.
I suppose, if that's your goal. Were I running a company I'd be mostly focused on profitability.
It's my belief that if you take 10 similar people and give them a problem to solve, they'll all solve it the same way. Whereas if you take 10 different people and give them a problem to solve, they'll each individually be challenged to think differently and question their assumptions. If I ran a company I'd prefer the latter, because intuition tells me it will lead to the best answers (people questioning their opinions means thinking through whether they're as well founded as they hope, and teases out the problems with those opinions).
I think this innovation goes hand in hand with profitability. I'm not saying I wouldn't pick the creative driven innovative Harvard grad every time -- I'm saying I'd pick the creative driven innovative community college grad every time over the Harvard grad with the same background as everyone else in the company.
> Being able to do things well on paper is pretty important in 21st century US.
Except when it comes time to actually do work, it's not. The overlap in relevant skills between convincing people you're a good engineer and being a good engineer is very small. One is mostly about leveraging your background and social engineering, the other is about how you solve problems. While one could argue that being good on paper is good indicator of drive, I'd counter that a candidate with drive but without skills is less preferable than a candidate with skills.
That's the problem with being middle-class. Anybody who really cares will abandon you for those who need it more. -- Mr. Bergstrom
The kid that graduated 2nd in the class had trouble getting a scholarship. He was afraid he wouldn't go to college because his family didn't have funds and despite his best efforts, he hadn't saved up enough money himself. He worked part-time through high school. I think he was barely above the cut-off for the need-based scholarships, and found the merit-based few and far between. He did find out in May our senior year that he finally found a full scholarship - at the same low-cost, in-town option I was going to.
The athletes, though, they had scholarships pretty early.
It hurts for everyone, and even the local choice isn't a good one. Even if folks that make it through can do well enough. I didn't stay in college (so few regrets on my end, I like my life), but the friend did rather well.
Whatever I lost by not being a candidate to work at Google, etc I gained in flexibility. I was able to buy a home at 23, wasn't burdened by loan payments and have done pretty well.
My cousins went to Ivy League schools and did the medicine and investment banking route. They did everything "right", but are buried in debt and sound pretty miserable. To each his own.
For example.
For many prospective college students, the trades might be a much more lucrative option. Using the example of plumbing, the average plumber earns $53,820 per year with the employer paying the apprentice a wage and training. (This money is for expert plumber. When adjusted to experience etc. it is around $20k per year without any student loan debt.)
Now consider a college degree
Petroleum engineering has an average starting salary of $93,500 while animal science has an average starting salary of $32,700. This breaks down for a monthly salary for the petroleum engineer of $7,761.67 versus a person working in animal science with a monthly salary of $2,725.
While Petroleum engineer can very well pay the debt without much issues I fail to see how the Animal Science girl will be able to pay her debt.
The opposite happens too—I know a lot of working class kids who didn't bother with even applying to college because it was unheard of in their communities. They went straight to work in trades and such.
PS: Petroleum Engineering is seasonal and not that good of a career choice as it depends too much on oil prices. I lived in Houston, an oil city. Many of my peers who did Petroleum Eng are out of work or with way lower salaries than advertised. Also, if you go to a state school you can graduate with little or no debt!
I have friends who would be mechanics, Peace Corps volunteers, electricians, or plumbers if they hadn't instead gone to a private 4-year institution, pressured to attend the best schools possible because they did well in high school. The permanent solution for this is either adjusted student loans or free community colleges, or some combination of the two. People on the opposite side of this issue I've talked to have often expressed concern that the bachelor's degree will basically become devalued if everyone has access. My response is always "it already IS devalued, but hardly anyone has access". It's near impossible to get a job in a desirable field without a college degree and relevant experience, but it's also prohibitively expensive to get a degree. Where will the 22 year olds with $100,000 worth of debt working at McDonald's going to be in 30-50 years? I have friends who in their early 20s are recognizing it's worth accruing more debt at even higher education in hopes of getting a job that will make the investment worth it.
> Unless we make college affordable for people of all financial means, opportunity through higher education will be a false promise.
But this is half of it, right? Plenty of people who walk out of colleges with no debt still can't find a job because the market is changing so much. As today's jobs move towards automation, I think most here can agree that current careers will change forever (frequently on HN the conversation steers towards more technological jobs). What I don't frequently see posted here is that automation will free up creative jobs where going to college is a necessary path. Writers exposed to other young writers can become inspired for life, especially given the opportunities. This turned into sort of a soapbox and is mostly anecdotal, but I think most would agree a national conversation needs to be had about this.
The idea that this stigma exists is mostly a conservative pundit talking point used to justify cutting education budgets. If you look at labor market data, it's unsubstantiated. And if you visit middle America, you'll find plenty of people with disdain for college degrees.
The United States doesn't have an over-abundance of people with tertiary degrees.
The USA in the bottom half of the developed-world pack for 25-34 year olds, less than half of whom obtained ANY form of post-highschool education -- including community college.
More importantly, many high-growth fields are also high-tech and require tertiary education or exceptional self-teaching.
The problem isn't an over-supply of college educated workers. Rather, the problem is an unwillingness to subsidize tertiary education together with the misconception that college without accompanying training in employable skills is a worthwhile investment.
There are really only 5-6 countries who have significantly higher tertiary attainment than the US. US is definitely not bottom half of the developed-world pack for 25-34 year olds.
Huge swaths of the medical profession (MDs, BSNs, PAs, DOs, Pharm.D.'s, ...)
Non-BSN nurses and expert tradesmen and craftsmen (tertiary == post-secondary, which includes community college!!!)
Engineers
Lawyers, clerks, etc.
Accountants
Actuaries
Industrial scientists and their surrounding support structure
Lots of mid- and uppoer-level management in every sector (many of these roles really do require a tertiary or higher command of statistics and other skills)
Educators
The whole army of support roles that require an excellent command of written language (good communicators are hard to find, and more often than not have tertiary degrees... those English majors really do often actually learn how to very write well)
Even software engineers. I know it's an unpopular opinion round these parts, but the huge majority of excellent software engineers have a tertiary education in CS or a related field (Math, physics, etc.).
Could all this stuff be taught without a four+ year degree(s)? Some of it could. Most of it couldn't -- not well, at least.
In short, employers hire these people because it's either impossible or very difficult to find people who are ready to work in these roles (or, in rare cases, are even legally permitted to do so) straight out of high school.
if these advanced degrees possess such importance to their respective fields that employers will refuse to hire anyone who hasn't attained them, that simply means that the employers have outsourced a large portion of their on-the-job training to public education. This is troubling, as why should my [insert some other college degree] subsidize companies of lawyers, accountants, actuaries?
And if the above is true, the signalling theory also holds -- by an applicant showing up with the degree, they demonstrate that they've taken significant steps to increase their attractiveness and employability to the employer. It's a competitive advantage. And that competitive advantage is eroded if a large fraction of the population also attains the same degree.
Sorry for the snark then, I've edited my comment.
> that employers will refuse to hire anyone who hasn't attained them
FWIW I think that's different from what you asked -- refusing to hire people without degrees is different from hiring people with degrees, and is also different from hiring people because they have degrees.
It's possible that an employer hires only people with degrees and also doesn't discriminate on the basis of the degree. In fact, I'd say that's more likely than not for most technical positions. The mere fact pf the matter is that most people learn technical skills in tertiary educational programs.
> that simply means that the employers have outsourced a large portion of their on-the-job training to public education
This is unavoidable. Learning to read, write, do basic mat, basic science, etc. are all crucial skills that job readiness programs need to build on top of.
Mind you, there are also a lot of other reasons we as a society might want to subsidize education and even particular types of education. E.g., a lot of people argue that health care costs should be addressed on the supply side as well as the demand side.
> And if the above is true, the signalling theory also holds
You go astray here because you assume that education doesn't actually impart real and useful skills that directly benefit the employer. In most cases, the degree is more than a mere signal.
edit: apologies for typos; commuting.
So, public education. In some countries (e.g. Germany) this is actually funded by industries as a bloc contributing to education in their fields, to reduce the free-rider problem while still allowing market signals to operate, but that's still a quasi-public system.
The benefits of hiring these people by the financial and the pharma sector should be obvious.
Tertiary typically means post-secondary. Secondary typically means US high school or equivalent. (from wiki: " The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers.[1]")
So the electrician with a CC degree has a tertiary education. Of course, so does the Ph.D.
Hopefully that clarifies the magnitude of the fact that fewer than 1/2 of young Americans obtained a tertiary degree...
Notably, if the field doesn't objectively require a very high level of domain-specific knowledge, but rather a general baseline command of a broad topic, eg. software development?
Lots of fields that aren't so selective also require a tertiary (= post-highscool) education of some form. Most notably, a huge swath of jobs in health care that involve patient contact.
> Notably, if the field doesn't objectively require a very high level of domain-specific knowledge, but rather a general baseline command of a broad topic, eg. software development?
It's of course possible to become a competent software developer without a tertiary education. I know, I did it (programming job offers right out of high school).
But it's not common, and the secondary education system in the USA isn't set up to enable that sort of thing at scale. IMO it should, but it doesn't, and subidizing tertiary education is far more likely to succeed, and at lower cost, than such a drastic reform to such a huge sprawling institution.
The requirement for "BA or equivalent" in so many situations isn't because that position requires four years of advanced study; it's because four years of advanced study usually means a candidate can at least express themselves well in writing, think critically and do long division.
My personal feeling is we should give everyone a diploma, but list some sort of grade level attainment. If nothing else, it would help universities place students into the remedial classes they sometimes need.
It's that there's jobs like credit analyst which require a degree to obtain, which absolutely, do not, at all, require a degree.
It's mostly the latter that is so insane to me, and the solution isn't for kids to recognise they don't need the degree. Because if employers ask for one, even though it's stupid, they have little choice but to accept the system. (and no, not everyone can just start their own company and beat the system).
I have friends who have credit analyst jobs, they're literally on the phone contacting clients to pay back their debt if they forgot, and propose a payback plan if they have issues paying. That's about it. The title is one where you expect an undergrad degree and employers require one most of the time, but by age 16 most people have the competencies, safe for the deep voice and calm professional phone demeanour, to do this job.
And that scares me most. These degrees cost $30-50k, and they're useless, yet required. That really has to change.
The key point is this:
A degree should be a proxy for competence and skills particular to the job. i.e. you studied marketing, so let's hire you for a marketing job because you've got the skills.
But what a degree really is to employers, is a proxy for ambition, young-urban-professional normalcy, perhaps some level of a proxy for ethnicity or at least congeniality (oh, this employee will be like me, has a wife, kids, normal life, is dependable, not volatile etc), a proxy for a person valuing the long-term etc. i.e., oh you studied marketing, let's hire you for an unrelated job requiring no skills, because this degree is an easy first-order way to filter out the type of people we don't want to hire.
And that's bs, because it treats education as a giant money-wasting institution for employers to weed out those who aren't keen on following the system, or who see through it. That's NOT what education should be about and it's a travesty. Almost all my peers who went to uni didn't give a rats ass about learning as part of their formal uni education, it was simply not a part of their decision making process for university. Despite that, they're all curious, interesting individuals, who learn in their own time about their particular interests. That's really sad.
And that concerns me. Students choosing to pursue a skilled career over plumbing is another concern, but not nearly as significant for me (and in some cases not a concern at all).
He created a foundation "that rewards people with a passion to get trained for skilled jobs that actually exist": http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/
That's the problem, not the solution. College should be for everyone. There's no reason why a person who becomes a plumber or peace corps volunteer or electrician can't also go to college and learn those things, among other topics.
In 2015, only 33% of American adults had a college degree [0]. American adults are not over-educated, they're just over-charged for their education.
[0]https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
The push for more and more college is a huge wealth transfer from the middle and lower-middle class to the upper-middle class professorial caste.
Hanlon begs that we consider the possibility that a pedestrian understanding of basic statistics and market forces are the more likely culprit for public perception.
Aside, you've also picked the wrong boogeyman.
Outside of the elite institutions, where the .01% of rock-star professors MAYBE make as much as a typical software developer at a top software firm, professors come in nowhere near upper-middle class. At typical institutions, they make mid-5 figures, have no upward mobility in their professions, and are a favorite target for pot shots and threats of funding cuts because everyone loves to hate them. In all, it's a pretty unappealing job outside of the social capital with traditional types and the carrot of tenure (which isn't nearly as permanent as it's often perceived).
The financial industry and university managers that are benefiting from peddling of useless college degrees, not professors.
And how is the financial industry benefitting from the peddling of useless college degrees? Private student loans only account for 8% of student loan debt (the federal government holds the rest).
That makes about as much sense as throwing the C-suite of a manufacturing company into the "laborer caste". Administrators these days mostly aren't former professors and have very different jobs.
> Here are the salaries of professors at George Mason
First and most important, GMU falls into that "elite" class I mentioned earlier. It's atypical; as an R1 institutions, their professors are paid on average far better than professors at the huge majority of higher ed institutions in the US.
Outside of places like GMU, professors make closer to mid five figures. Again, we don't have to speculate. Use Google if you don't believe me.
Even then, you'll notice my point still stands -- the reporting you linked to just completely tops out around the typical base salary of top tech firms. If professors are benefiting, they aren't exactly getting rich.
> The payroll is dominated by professors
1. "Dominated" is a bit of a stretch. The page you link lists 4,043 employees, and other GMU data states there are 1,263 full-time instructors (which will include non-professors, BTW).
2. GMU has an atypically small student:teacher ratio.
3. It doesn't follow that professors benefiting the most from this growth.
4. At a place like GA, professors are also typically bringing in more money into the university in the form of grants.
> And how is the financial industry benefitting from the peddling of useless college degrees?
> Private student loans only account for 8% of student loan debt
So "only" 80,000,000,000. Not to mention handling endowments, etc.
How much do you want to bet there are 0.01%ers who made their wealth off of higher ed? Because those people almost surely exist, and sure as hell weren't professors...
I didn't say they were rich. I said they were upper middle class. The average salary for a full professor in the U.S. is $135,000: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/08/aaup-survey-f.... Median personal income in that age bracket is about $40-50k.
My point is that academic jobs are generally well-paying and secure, and they're paid-for by kids taking out huge debt to keep the whole show going. And the show keeps going because we tell fairy tales about the importance of a college education.
> How much do you want to bet there are 0.01%ers who made their wealth off of higher ed? Because those people almost surely exist, and sure as hell weren't professors...
First, a few people getting rich isn't as big of a concern as tens of thousands of moderately expensive people on payroll. The vast majority of the $500 billion spent on higher education each year isn't going to financiers. It's going to faculty, facilities, etc. Second, the financiers wouldn't be getting rich either if we went back to only sending 10% of the population to college.
That is a completely wrong assumption for the United States. 66% of faculty positions today are non-tenure track, also known as adjunct or contingent faculty (source: http://agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-workforc...). Median salary for adjunct faculty is $31k a year (source: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Adjunct_Professor/Sa...)
GMU is R1.
R1 unis compensate faculty unusually well compared to other institutions, regardless of other social prestige indicators. R1-level compensation is not typical of US universities, period.
> The average salary for a full professor in the U.S. is $135,000
You've grossly mis-interpreted this data.
Notice that the data breaks down salaries by the type of institution (phd-granding, masters-granding, bachelor-only) .
The average for a full professor is far closer to $91,935 because the vast majority of faculty/instructors in the US work at non-Ph.D. granting institutions.
Many professors never become full professors or become full professors very late in their career (55+).
According to your data, the average for an Associate Professor is $70,334 - 88,306, which is a better comparison because most professors are not full professors for most of their career (especially at non-R1 schools, where budgets often trump professional competence considerations in terms of full professorship appointments).
Also, many full-time instructional staff aren't professors. Instructors make average or below-average salaries (your data says $45-$57 average).
> Median personal income in that age bracket is about $40-50k
Unless we adjust for the fact that all professors have bachelors degrees, then we add 10-20k depending on your data source.
So typical professors 10-20k above average and typical instructors make maybe a few k extra or below average.
Oh, and note that this is all the upper tier of the tertiary education system. Instructors at community colleges are often doing so as a second job or scraping by on less than their students make in their first positions -- far more akin to high school teachers in terms of social status and earning power than anything else. Damn leeches...
Upper middle class indeed... eye roll
> a few people getting rich isn't as big of a concern as tens of thousands of moderately expensive people on payroll.
It is a bigger concern because it's needless waste.
We could slash instructors/professor's wages if we want to re-create our shitty secondary education system at the college level. But other than that, professors/instructors are the singular necessary input for providing higher education. Loan servicing is not necessary for providing education.
> The average for a full professor is far closer to $91,935 because the vast majority of faculty/instructors in the US work at non-Ph.D. granting institutions.
Okay, fair point. But schools that don't grant a doctoral degree are also the cheapest institutions (elite liberal arts colleges aside)--the ones where students aren't taking out huge student loan debt to attend. So those aren't really the target of my ire.
> It is a bigger concern because it's needless waste.
You're fixated on some people getting rich when the real problem is that we spend $500 billion a year on giving kids higher education that very few of them actually need. That's the big waste.
If we cut our higher-education spending by 1/3, we could cut a $10,000 check each year to every single kid in poverty. If we cut it by 2/3, we could additionally pay for health insurance for every uninsured American.
We're forgoing game changing improvements in quality of life so that a bunch of 18-22 year olds can waste time learning things they'll forget the minute they graduate.
> We could slash instructors/professor's wages if we want to re-create our shitty secondary education system at the college level. But other than that, professors/instructors are the singular necessary input for providing higher education. Loan servicing is not necessary for providing education.
My argument isn't that "professors are paid too much." It's that we have too much higher education. Higher education is intrinsically expensive: as you say, professors are necessary input, they get paid above average wages, and we're not automating them away anytime soon. Consequently, we shouldn't encourage millions of kids each year to take on huge amounts of debt to get an education that's worthless.
Well, okay.
> It's that we have too much higher education.
This seems well-covered in other threads. I'll just say two things:
1. A secondary education from a typical US high school is woefully insufficient for most well-paying jobs in the USA, and this is only likely to become more true over time.
2. Employers are on balance unwilling to invest in educating and training workers.
The argument about what to do is one we should perhaps have, and has been had in other threads, but it is most important to realize the need for something beyond high school.
No, it's always other people's kids who shouldn't go to college. Is that because there is 'too much higher education' or because they know that if everyone has that level of education, it's more difficult for their kid to succeed easily?
How many of these "there's too much higher education" folks can be heard calling Americans 'stupid' for not knowing x-y-z, 'foolish' for not investing in a/b/c or falling into this cultural or financial pitfall or another?
"Stupid people" are the only group in America that it's politically correct to make fun of, yet, rayiner wants people to be less educated. Why might that be?
Could it be that those who already have financial success due to their education -- much of which was bought and paid for by relatives and taxpayers -- don't want to lose their easy success and their cultural punching bags?
What other benefit is a population unexposed to the topics of higher education? That has never been made clear to me.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics disagrees [0], As do the hiring managers at even lower level positions [1]
[0]http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm [1]http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/09/09/report-employ...
And the BLS didn't measure those qualities, they measured earnings and unemployment. I suppose it's a waste of time if you don't value money or being employed.
Since 3 out of 4 adults reported that money is the primary cause of stress in their lives [0]...it seems that doing the thing that makes it less likely to be unemployed might not be a waste of time after all.
[0]http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-biggest-cause-of-stress-in-a...
My highschool was mostly in the lower/lower-middle class range with upper-middle in honor's programs. Multiple times per year, they gave presentations about the absolute, unwavering importance of a college education with money rather than success as the reason to go. Just about every student I've talked to who actually went through it is absolutely miserable - especially those who went to a university rather than the local community college. The only people who didn't have this issue were the honor's students, who either received scholarships or had money already. I seriously question the judgement, noise and in some ways, misery caused by those presentations.
Every time career comes up with my family and old classmates, I'm still looked down on for not having a degree... Even though I'm objectively more successful than the people telling me to go to college..
The culture around college necessity is incredibly frustrating. To make matters worse, when the subject comes up, many people say things like "Not going to college worked for you, but it tends not to for everybody else and it worked for me blah blah." It doesn't ever, every push the conversation forward. It's a weird, frustrating form of survivor-bias.
> The culture around college necessity is incredibly frustrating. To make matters worse, when the subject comes up, many people say things like "Not going to college worked for you, but it tends not to for everybody else and it worked for me blah blah." It doesn't ever, every push the conversation forward. It's a weird, frustrating form of survivor-bias.
That it's you who's showing survivor-bias. The data as far as I'm aware of it, does indeed confirm, that a college degree is a net financial benefit, despite of course obvious substantial anecdotal evidence to the contrary that every person is familiar with (my friend xyz got a degree and he's doing shitty). I'm purely talking historically, and financially.
Even today I'm seeing a job market where you can't get a traineeship in most companies without a master's degree, as silly as that may be.
Also I want to stress that tech is very, very much an exception. A field where more than most, you can get access to jobs on the basis of your work, not your work in school. I feel HN underappreciates the difference with the rest of the population.
In terms of happiness, fulfilment etc, I can't speak on that.
Also, I can't speak on how this'll develop in next generations, e.g. for those going to college today or later this decade, but I suspect like most that there'll be a big paradigm shift making college way less appealing.
At the end of the day, the benefits of college can be seen as an arbitrage opportunity in the market. i.e., spend X money for education, get Y (which is > X) benefits in income in return. And like any arbitrage opportunity, X will increase in cost and Y will decrease, as more people are drawn to the opportunity, until it largely fades. (or worse, temporarily flips around due to oversupply, like we've seen in some industries, e.g. MBAs at various times, or lawyers recently).
Or software engineers in the near future, given the hockey-stick growth in enrollments...
which brings up another important benefit of a high-quality tertiary education: when done right, it reduces the barrier to entry for a variety of professions in a variety of industries.
If the bubble exists and bursts tomorrow, people who went to university and obtained an education in both CS and in something else will have an alternative to temporary unemployment. Those who went directly into industry jobs out of high school are less likely to have a broad set of skills and knowledge to fall back on.
The benefit is not only to the individual -- countries with adaptable work forces have adaptable economies; countries with work forces that are trained exclusively for this decade's cog factories (the engine plants of mom's world are the app dev shops of today) will lag behind when global demand for cogs dies off and widgets become the new lexus of growth and prosperity.
I would love to see these conversations move towards discussion on happiness, fulfillment, etc of college. The lack of discussion is 95% of my frustration in these subjects and almost always leads towards the economic value of college, while ignoring the individual. College is ultimately supposed to help get access to a happier life through comfort, stability, etc, but my generation overall is very unlikely to get that with the state of their loans. It's really sad.
We estimated the expenses for future children and the picture was not pretty. Then we factored in higher education, assuming costs rise at the same rate as the last 30 years - roughly our lifetimes - and concluded that by the time our future kids are at college age, they will likely be paying for most of it themselves, with debt they may hold their entire lives.
So we aren't having any.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I am not simply saying that I am forgoing children because their college costs would be too high, I'm saying EVERYTHING is too expensive, and college in 20-30 years, assuming current rates, will be forbiddingly so.
(I didn't go.)
Having kids is obviously a deeply personal decision and don't think I'm second-guessing you, but college funding is probably not a dispositive concern.
My wife has "significant debt" from college and medical school (roughly 200k) that she will pay off over 20 to 30 years (or whatever it is). However she earns a good salary for what she does. As a result the cost of the education is similar to a cost of doing business. When I met her I had to loan her a few thousand dollars so she could make her rent (when she had just graduated and got her first job out of school). Now she does fine. Even with the loans. She choose the profession and was lucky to be able to graduate keeping in mind economic realities.
Her ex husband on the other hand has debt from going to law school but was not able to land (for various reasons) a good job which allows him to pay off his debt (he is now living with his parents).
Saying college is expensive (ok it is) is like saying buying a house with a 30 year mortgage is expensive. It depends on the details. Having to take out a loan to pay for something (college or a house) that you will use over a lifetime isn't really that outrageous. What is is not making the proper career choices or having some bad luck so that you can't pay back the money you have borrowed.
There are ways to achieve good outcomes in the current system, but that is not the same as systemically maximizing good outcomes for society at large.
I think the most efficient way to do that is to go back to giving significant direct funding to public university systems so they can offer low to no tuition education options. This puts competitive pressure on private universities and would have an overall downward effect on tuitions.
Well a good start might be simply avoiding majors that you know will go nowhere, don't you think? Like music, art and certain liberal arts. Even when I went to school it was known to be hard to get a job in those fields. But yet people still choose them and tried to "follow their passion". My passion was to learn something where I could earn a living. And I am having plenty of fun doing that.
Of course you can't predict the future. But you can certainly improve your chances by giving some thought to what is not a good choice and hasn't ever really been.
It would do far more good to first get tuition costs under control and then maybe use the direct funding path as a way where influence on public universities could be had. However, I think society ends up stronger if there's something of a firewall preventing politicians from putting too many specific policy requirements attached to that funding.
With remunerative degrees, you can at least make the argument that selective schools gate selective employers, and so expensive colleges can be a necessity. But it's harder to make that argument for music or art.
The question isn't whether you should study art. It's how much of a premium you should pay to study it at an elite school.
In any case, you seem to be narrowing the domain more and more here, from "education is difficult for people to afford", to "education is difficult for artists to afford", to "education is difficult for artists who went to elite schools to afford."
The article, on the other hand, is saying that even if you do make enough to get by, it's still hard to pay for school.
Put yourself in the mind of a 16 year old (I'm a parent to one, so I might have an easier or a harder time doing that). Kids mostly have no idea at all what their career is, but they're all attuned to the admissions/status game.
I'm not narrowing the argument, so much as I'm trying to support the argument that fewer kids should take on large debt (and stress!) getting into elite colleges; more should go to lower-tier or even community colleges until they have a better idea what they want to do, and then transfer to the Right School when they can make an informed decision.
Again, I might have an idiosyncratic view of this, since I didn't really go to college at all (I went for a single summer semester when I was 19).
What you seem to be saying is that only the rich and well-off should pursue those fields, while the poor and middle class keep their heads down to "earn a living."
Can't you see how that policy will impact your life negatively? I would hate to live in that world. Wouldn't you?
Hemingway did not spring to life a great writer. He might have only completed high school, but high school was enough to get him a reporting job at age 18, and it was a reporting job that sent him to Paris, where he found Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F Scott Fitzgerald. I would call that an education.
The original point I tried to make was this: by expecting all poor and middle-class kids to spend their formative years preparing for practical, low-risk careers -- at the expense of their artistic "passions" -- we are depriving ourselves of their creative output.
Things were different 100 years ago. If Hemingway didn't go to college, it was because he didn't need to. He was lucky enough to live at a time when you could work as a journalist at age 18 having no greater qualifications than a high school diploma and a few articles published in the school newspaper.
What would Hemingway do today? Following gist's advice, he would go to college and study computer science or biomedical engineering. Or maybe he would substitute San Fransisco for Paris, and instead of A Farewell To Arms we would have another social-some-shit to add to the cannon of timeless iPhone apps.
But study journalism or English literature with a view towards becoming a reporter or (gasp) a fiction writer? Out of the question. You know those majors won't go anywhere. You need to earn a living.
...isn't the real failure right here, in the constant infantilizing of our young? Shouldn't we be expecting our society to produce semi-capable adults when they come of age? It's not like people have to be so unworldly at the tender age of 18.
http://roppskyline.pbworks.com/w/page/6550634/Growing%20up%2...
Great saying (I think Israeli) - "the army is a system built by geniuses to control idiots". Because they generally recruit 18-20-year-olds, and yes, 18-20-year-olds are idiots. So the institution puts them through the kind of regimentation that the Spartans did to exert some kind of control.
That's a variation on a line from Herman Wouk's World War II novel The Caine Mutiny, in which one character says that the Navy is a system designed by geniuses for execution by idiots.
I heard the phrase from my mom (Israeli, grew up in the 60s-70s). Not sure the saying is widely adopted in Israel or just she or someone agree knew read the book; apparently it rang true with people's experiences :-P
I strongly suspect that if you took the exact same amount of money as is spent on education today, financed it using either public debt or taxation or some mix, and direct funded more education through public universities, education would run more efficiently, and society and businesses would benefit economically more than individually loading people down with educational debt.
https://www.admission.ucla.edu/prospect/budget.htm
Depending on circumstances $25k to $52k for next year with a 10% increase over the next three to four years...
http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table...
Do we want to filter who goes to a top-tier university by those who are able to spend money there or by how well they perform? Doesn't society benefit the most if we are able to send the highest performers to the best universities without unrelated financial criteria knocking them out? And before someone points out financial aid - many potential people may self-disqualify before even getting to the point of applying.
Even if people can afford it, charging that $100k takes away capital that a bright recent graduate might have been able acces to bootstrap a startup. I think across multiple facets, there are a large economic costs we pay by charging high tuitions to students.
Is it ideal? Far from it. But it's also not an insurmountable obstacle for most who are qualified to attend. The public education systems fails lower-income students long, long before they get to university level.
1: The ex husband is a great example of how someone can go into tremendous debt that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy and still come out with nothing.
2: The rapidly increasing price of higher education compounds the risk of making the wrong choice. A mistake that could tail you for decades could instead be with you to the grave.
My point is sure the game has gotten tougher but just because it is doesn't mean you blame the game you just outwork the other person.
Sounds like a race to the bottom in the ever decreasing marginal productivity of labor in 21st century capitalism.
Of the system requires you be a bad parent, it is not sustainable.
Lawyers were misled by a lot of law schools, and their tuition skyrocketed. With automation impacting some aspects of that field, demand has dropped, and so several classes worth of students have been screwed.
I'm not familiar with the medical field, but in theory the same thing could happen there.
Nobody can see the future, so barring that, for many, taking on that level of extreme debt does not make sense.
Generally a good idea to be skeptical of what someone selling you something is saying, right? I question whether any of these people who went to law school did much research or thinking (or if their counselors at schools did) in advance of such a major decision.
Other professions not so much. It would be hard to imagine for most people that a good deal of work in law wouldn't even happen in courts. Stuff like documentation and range of other things are hard to see while you are picking the course.
That is credit creation right there. It allows the pulling forward of demand to capture labour over a lifetime for credit creators (not intermediaries) - the banks.
Until we tackle money creation housing and college, two essentials - that's why they lend into them - will always reflect the total potential income over a person's working life.
If we double productivity rentiers will get the same % of your labour. This means everyone will always and forever be under the thumb of usurers.
By design.
For whatever it's worth, the idea that the "American Dream" requires a college education is itself a little weird.
Yes, all those people having to live incognito to avoid collection agencies or even fleeing abroad (http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/23/pf/college/student_loan_fugi...) certainly do not figure it as a concern.
I just can't believe that will happen. The millennial generation has been burned HARD by higher education. I'm guessing the demand for expensive programs loaded with amenities that provide little value will plummet by the time their kids come of age.
I expect huge growth in low-frills low-cost technical programs.
Also, the insane cost of higher education is mainly propped up by easy access to loans that are practically impossible to discharge via bankruptcy. If this ever changes (and there will be a lot of political will to when millennials are the main voter base) expect the price to practically collapse overnight.
But hey, it's worked out okay, even though I've gotten a 0% boost from my alumni "network".
I think you're denying the agency of your future children if things like "college costs" and "climate change" and other macro-level problems are deterring you & your partner from having kids. Let your kids solve those problems! They'll be thinking about the problem differently than an old fogey like you, because they will have grown up in it.
And more generally: rm -rf, you're a smart motherfucker, and you obviously think globally, and the coming generation would benefit from having more of your spawn mixed in with them!!
Doesn't sound like a good reason for not having a child. It's almost literally throwing the baby out with the water. But that's just my opinion of course.
At this rate, things just don't look good for humanity. At the very least I can assume my future kids would be safe with stable jobs and employable skills, which brings me back to higher ed.
Edit: I just wanted to point out that the sticker price is usually not what people pay for college. Grants are very common and so are scholarships of various kinds and sizes. But beyond all that, you can opt-in to this repayment plan https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/higher-education... which caps the amount per year and also the total amount that borrowers will pay for college, based on their income.
The biological window gets smaller by the day. Why bother?
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/309-W-Maple-Ave-Mc-Cracken...
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1063-7th-Ave-S-Clinton-IA-...
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/112-E-James-St-Collinwood-...
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/740-Maple-Ave-Wild-Rose-WI...
(Nothing necessarily explosive, just something like "alternate routes into white-collar well-paid entry-level work will be well-trod at that point, avoiding the need for expensive college or bidding it down.")
But, you're right, it does solve a little less than half the cost. Which is awesome! If you wanted to go to a nice restaurant and could buy a Groupon that would let you get $100 of food for $55, that would be a great deal, despite it not being free.
So yeah, they are cheaper but not all of them necessarily offer the same discount your anecdote provides.
In the end people really only look what you list on your resume - not the first x years, but where you graduated from and how well you did at the end.
2) Opportunities at CC's are limited compared to even non-flagship state universities (no research, etc), although you can of course still get other opportunities at other local universities.
3) You're effectively tied to your state school. I'm lucky that NC has one well-regarded flagship, but not everybody wants to go to their state school anyway. Higher level coursework won't transfer to private universities.
4) My early college program limited what coursework we could take, so I still need 2.5-4 years to graduate with a CS degree from my state school even with significant credit which negates the cost advantage in my case.
5) The peer group can be hit or miss. With that said, there were __many__ very intelligent and hardworking people in my classes.
With all that said, some people can still make the best of it. My school graduated their first Harvard admit this year (but then again, he might have been legacy). We've had 2 Duke admits, 1 Cornell - the rest go to UNC or lower ranked schools like myself.
Doing it again I would have probably gone to my state's boarding school instead.
I'd wager the odds are quite good that life will be a more positive experience in the next 150 years than in the period of "dawn of mankind" - 1900.
Also cost increases are stuff that look good in marketing material to increase desirability of that college over other colleges and that trend will hit a wall. Also there is increasing political movement to get college tuition costs down.
What I get from this is: Either USA is totally screwed up country or you two value your personal lifestyle a lot more than having a child. Child isn't really that expensive since even poor can afford it. Its expensive to have child with expensive lifestyle.
Not everyone works in CS.
Do you know who students meet at college? Other students trying to get jobs and professors who overwhelmingly don't even have ties to professionals in their industry.
Every interview but one I've gotten by going through a process that anyone could go through and it has been my work that has stood out.
That's barring the other multitude of issues associated with moving (child isolation, increased competition, lack of certain infrastructure, new languages, loss of social support network, etc.)
Why must you own property?
https://www.google.com/#q=number+of+people+with+college+degr...
Somewhere between now and then, one of your assumptions may change.
This will cause the value of the education to be transferred away from the student and to the administrators of the institutions. The student will be allowed to keep a small percentage of this value for his/her trouble, a sharecropper of their own education.
With price pressure like this, I suspect online and other forms of post-high-school education will become more and more valuable. Employers will start looking at them with more attention, and definitely certificates of passing serious exams will become (more) valuable.
Of course, these exams certificates are not going to be free, and even the online courses are not going to be free. But they are going (and currently are) massively less expensive than a college, while possibly giving comparable levels of knowledge. (Also, the "buy new books" racket will hopefully be gone with online courses + relatively independent exams.)
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1882010 [2] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...
Much like a diploma from Yale now is not a signal of exceptionally good knowledge but a signal of financial ability and having the right connections, going to any full-time university can become such a signal.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_302.60.as...
It's like you're already severely poisoned but are not yet feeling the effects, and more people around see you and consider the poison for themselves.
But then, that would result in decreasing enrollment rates and hysterics in the headlines about how kids can't afford education, and we can't have that. We've worked ourselves into a corner - by subsidizing education so heavily in pursuit of increased attendance rates, we've driven prices sky-high, and now can't cut those subsidies without hanging some people out to dry.
We'll know that college is truly unaffordable - or at least the college premium reaches the point where it's not worth the cost - when enrollment rates start trending downwards. Until then, it's a giant ball of subsidies and relief programs and reforms and restructurings that work to maintain a system that is empirically affordable, even if it's extremely painful.
At least for me, the relationship you're implying between subsidies and educational costs needs some explanation. If, say, three-quarters of a college's students are having 25-50% of their fees subsidized, what about those subsidies forces the college to raise their fees disproportionately to their costs?
Recent research (http://www.nber.org/chapters/c13711.pdf) bears out subsidy as a cost driver, as well.
(1) the government has created ways to subsidize its cost (2) created a means by which it can be paid for with debt (3) as a society, kids have been brainwashed to believe that college is the only path to prosperity
The OP assertion only holds up in a free market.
When I was in high school, my parents had no money for me for College. We were middle class, and my grades weren't competitive enough for me to get a scholarship.
So I did what I thought would work well (in 2002)- I joined the USAF as an enlisted "Computer Programmer". Fortunately, _did_ have a good education, so my ASVAB (military job test to determine what jobs you could be) score was relatively high. Joining as a computer programmer opened up the world to me like I couldn't imagine.
Ultimately, I ended up taking night and weekend classes while in the USAF and finished my bachelor's degree shortly before getting out. Later I would go on to get my Master's with my GI Bill because I didn't want it to go to waste.
I felt honored to serve my country and to contribute how I could and I graduated both undergrad and grad school with zero dollars of debt.
I think more people should consider this option, at least if they have a decent education and good military jobs open to them. Understandably, if someone joins as say, infantry, in the Army, it may not be so easy to go to school (though I have plenty of friends who did and took online classes!)
It's not for everyone, but it's definitely an option.
I remember how terrified I was of my student loans in my day. I also remember how awesome it felt when they got paid off. This has turned into a political topic and whenever that happens logic and facts go out the window in favor of emotion triggering pseudo-statistics.
2. Good luck getting into Stanford.
I then ran through the CSU calculator. The cost is actually doubled for CSUs, which have a lower total cost, but no grant/scholarship programs offered directly through the university financial aid office. My own experience with that environment tells me there are plenty of grant/scholarship options.
If I lived in Alabama, my income wouldn't be relevant. I have no idea what I would make in that part of the country.
What I do know, and what is plainly obvious, is that this topic is fueled by fear mongering.
Tuition costs have risen and will continue to rise. College is a tough financial investment and has been for generations. As somebody who is going through the process in the very near future, I have to look at the reality and not the press snippets and public discourse that arises from them. This particular study completely ignores the availability of scholarships and grants in the private and public sectors. The UC and Stanford calculators I pointed out took that into consideration. The CSU calculator did not.
I wouldn't exactly call them promotional calculators.
Yes, true... which doesn't expand your sample size in any way.
> I could look at other Ivy's, but they would be very similar to Stanford.
You could look at the list of Ivy's and find that Standford is not an Ivy.
You could also look at the list of Ivy's and discover that they are not similar to other Ivy's.
You could also look into how these places calculate your income and discover that your income is very different from the amount that you put into the calculators.
You could also send a kid there and discover that there are lots of costs a simplistic calculator doesn't include.
You could also send a kit there and discover that cost changes from year to year, and usually goes up.
You could also read my previous post and acknowledge that your anecdotal experience which of putting numbers into a calculator is completely irrelevant to the many experiences of people in different parts of the country who actually go to schools and pay for them.
> What I do know, and what is plainly obvious, is that this topic is fueled by fear mongering.
The fact that smart people disagree with you is strong evidence that your assertion is not obvious.
We sell people on the idea that college is The Ticket to a serious career with good pay. It isn't that cut and dried. We really need to stop promoting that idea.
I later returned to school when I had a better idea of what I wanted to do with my life. One of my positive experiences was with community college in California. The in state rates are surprisingly low. I wrapped up my AA and this inspired my husband to start going to college. As a military member, he got 75% of his tuition covered. His out of pocket tuition expenses were substantially less than the cost of textbooks.
The community college system in California is one of its little known strengths. Many four year colleges have agreements in place with community colleges that make it easy to do your first two years cheaply and then transfer to a prestigious four year program. California Virtual Campus is also an amazing resource.
If this were true, we would see one of two things: (1) colleges would be empty and closing their doors, or (2) we'd have an enormous debt bubble.
(1) is obviously false.
(2) is more interesting and, indeed, debt levels may be high. However, in a development that most pieces like this ignore, the federal government now has significant loan repayment forgiveness programs, along with income-sensitive repayment plans.
So no, with huge programs that will wipe student debt clean, I laugh in the face of a headline that asserts that college is "unaffordable even in higher income brackets."
Look here:
https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans/in...
"Most federal student loans are eligible for at least one income-driven repayment plan. If your income is low enough, your payment could be as low as $0 per month."
So $0 a month is unaffordable??
Absolutely, it may be debt you will never pay off. If after several years you don't repay it, it is wiped clean. What a deal.
I had to check this as I had not heard of that before. "Several years" is 25 years under income-based repayment (years before you switched to income-based repayment do not count). The loans are not "wiped clean" - whatever balance is forgiven after 25 years is counted as taxable income, so actually you would be in a worse off position after getting your loans forgiven. Source: http://www.finaid.org/loans/ibrfaq.phtml
All this of course only applies to federal student loans. About half of my wife's loan balances are from private lenders and from what I hear this ratio is common.
It would all be due at once (offhand I don't know what sorts of payment plans IRS has) so it could be worse that way.
The IRS is much more aggressive about collections and will seize your property and garnish your wages:
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
When that 25 year forgiveness kicks in the tax money will be due all at once. Even with a payment plan the IRS collection schedule is 3-5 years. 30% of a lot of fake income is still a ton of money. This "debt forgiveness" will force a lot of people into bankruptcy, which btw does not discharge all tax obligations (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/will-bankruptcy-stop-...)
> So $0 a month is unaffordable??
"If your income is low enough." Read the headline again.
High level - The government pours many billions of dollars into colleges and universities every year, but because the money is disseminated via millions of individual loans to individual students, any buying power (and downward pressure on prices) that the government could provide is effectively eliminated. For a university this is a best case scenario: sell a "necessary" product to millions of individual customers with infinite money.
If instead, the universities could only "sell" to the government, the government would be able to actually demand meaningful concessions in price.
I'm thinking something like:
1. Students -$-> Gov't -$-> Universities (many more sellers than buyers)
Instead of:
2. Gov't -$-> Students -$-> Universities (many more buyers than sellers)
Easy to see how case 1 would keep prices lower in an ideal world...
1) Wait for the bubble to pop and see if prices reach a new equilibrium. 2) Double-down on current solutions, i.e. more subsidies. 3) Impose a head tax on everyone a la Obamacare.
Also, how would a head tax improve the cost of education?
[1]http://college.usatoday.com/2015/08/20/report-federal-aid-ri... [2]https://fee.org/articles/student-loan-subsidies-cause-almost... [3]http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/09/08/student_loans...