Hacker News Reader

> Again, I don't know the solution. Regulate the number of graduates within a certain degree field?

Stop providing loan guarantees for all students regardless of the marketability of the degree they've chosen?

And make loans dischargeable like any other loan.

I've been through bankruptcy over decade ago and I'm still paying on a useless ITT tech degree... Wish I had known better when I was younger. Well, technically I'm paying, I have paid off very little. This is the first year I'll be breaking 2x poverty.

Exactly. If the burden of collecting the debt is on the loaner, they will do a better job of enforcing who gets a loan (which is traditionally the job of the loaner anyway). Student loans get handed out like candy and now we have a continuously-compounding problem of growing tuitions and debt.

If bankruptcy could fix student loans, then the ones giving out loans would be a lot more careful, schools would stop wasting hundreds of millions on new buildings that that are 80% empty, and we wouldn't have a large segment of the middle class population in indentured servitude.

Seems pretty simple to me.

This is the root of the problem. Anyone can get a degree regardless of aptitude. Loans will pay your way in, the school will do everything in their power to stop you from flunking out.

We have to take a lien on loans for cars that in some cases are much less money than school loans.

Maybe make schools take some brunt of the loans. If they feel so strongly that their degree is worth it, its like they should back you as an investment.

Several schools are investing in their students, using the Income Share Agreement (ISA) format. Students do not pay any upfront tuition, the school takes care of it. Then, students only pay when they find a job with a % of their income. Alternative education[1] but also more traditional college are offering this[2][3].

[1] https://www.inc.com/salvador-rodriguez/long-term-coding-scho... [2] http://time.com/money/4568213/income-share-agreements-colleg... [3] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/07/21/i...

Yup. Mortgage lenders do their own valuations on houses. Student loans companies should too. You'll see a rapid decline in shitty degrees. Goodbye Art History.

> Stop providing loan guarantees

Full stop.

Need-based public aid (whether it's the recipients financial need or societies workforce need, or both) should be grants, and there should be broad opportunities for public civilian service that provides service-based grants not based on specific need, too. The former should have payoff considerations, the latter should not.

Colleges which accept government funding or government-backed student loans should be required to publish employment and salary data for their graduates. For example, what percentage of alumni have found full-time employment in their degree field within 6 months of graduation? That way students would have a more realistic picture of their prospects and could make informed decisions.

Teacher friends of mine talk to me about how their job is next to impossible. The curriculum in the schools is basically perpetually 12 years behind, students today are just now being taught stuff that the market is now responding to but the fundamentals that are needed for those skills should have been introduced years prior.

Educators are effectively trying to project 12 years out and try and guess what the market will demand so that they can provide the minimum skills necessary to provide a modicum of middle-class life.

This sounds like a gross exaggeration. Twelve years out? Are first-graders being taught the latest framework or something? Except that maybe it shouldn't stretch out for twelve years, pre-college education is learning the fundamentals that do not depend on the job market. The fundamentals haven't changed in hundreds of years.

> pre-college education is learning the fundamentals that do not depend on the job market.

That's the problem, though. Some companies, and many parents and students, no longer see it as that. They see secondary school as a place to train their future employees. And, because parents so often have to work multiple jobs, kids often come out knowing nothing about finance, so they complain about having to take classes like Algebra II.

To be honest, I feel like a lot of the problem could be solved if companies would actually go back to investing in employees. They want their employees to come fully-trained nowadays, and then don't really care about keeping them or their development. It pushes everything off onto the schools, which is also why so many feel like they have to attend university.

The solution is to cut K-12 to K-8, and teach modern college courses in 9-12 instead of wasting time there to "prepare." Dual-track 9-12 so that one track is the equivalent of full college, and another is the equivalent of vocational school/community college. College can be what graduate school is now, and graduate school can go back to being genuinely faculty-track.

As a student who SUFFERED through K-12, was an awful C-D student, I agree 100% with this overall idea.

I went from a D high school to a straight A student in college. I found the freedom to choose to study what I am interested in ( Computer Science ) extremely liberating. I found the respect shown by the faculty to the students refreshing compared to my high-school. I found that being able to leave, take a nap, and then come back for my next class much more tolerable. I found that not being locked in a building for 9 hours a day freed up time to actually study and get your homework done.

Basically, I discovered what everyone else already knew: Current schooling is intended to keep kids in child-jail while their parents are working. Most schools do not have the resources to cater to bored gifted students, so we are cast aside with the understanding that "we'll be fine" while sitting through remedial classes where we have to read out loud because some of the students in the classroom are illiterate.

People claim college is a waste of time? HA. HIGH SCHOOL is four years of my life WASTED that I will never get back.

Let students set their own pace for education. Have them take responsibility for their own lives and future at a younger age. Let the children out of child jail.

I think this would fix high-schools but not college. This is a great idea though. It'd fix the no child left behind and become more of a, if you want college great we'll help you there. If college isn't for you, also great we'll help you there too.

I'm not super convinced that the economic hardships many Americans experience is mainly because of what major they chose in college. I would think a larger factor is that many people can't afford a degree at all. Most Americans never get one. And a lot of people that do go to college start their adult life with tons of student debt. Shouldn't we focus on those things rather than potentially regulating what major people choose?

I think this is also part of the problem. Why do they need a degree? I have seen many jobs that have a degree to enter barrier which don't need them. All of a sudden you reduce the debt of your workforce while opening up to a whole new group of candidates. I can think of a handful of coworkers who did not need degrees at all. Just a H.S. Education would have been overkill in some cases.

I'd like to go back to a system where we look at what the job actually requires, and set the level there. Then educate people to that level. In this way we aren't allowing colleges to tell us what level we need to educate people to, but instead letting it become a hybrid.

The required education for your basic job should be free. But I also don't want to write a blank check for people to go to college for the college experience. I don't think that's necessary.

There is a lot of potential work that needs to be done. The market is not providing the capital for it, but the need is apparent and you have an educated labor force surplus. It is logical, moral and efficient to put that educated labor surplus to good use. It is stupid to throw that potential away, just because it does not enrich a few bankers and their wealthy shareholders. What about the rest of America?

This is talked about by Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies...

The idea of there being too many jobs that require degrees (but really don't utilize them) is touched on, and the proposed solution is for positions to not be allowed to ask for degree status. Instead, they would have to test for aptitude. The whole article is worth a read.

In the UK we are going to solve this by letting everybody get a degree, there is a move to allow apprentices to become graduates. Add in the fact that shops are offering apprenticeships for 'sandwich artists' and you can see where it is all going.