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Comment by skh | Hacker News Reader

I teach at a community college. Increasingly we are becoming a business and we now actively recruit people who realistically can’t get a college degree. Due to lower per student funding by the government we rely on tuition and need to market and recruit. We have become like a smarmy for profit. It’s a bad trend for society.

This semester before classes started we had seminars on helping students dealing with food insecurity and housing security. The whole time I’m wondering why are we asking students who are hungry or homeless to take on unforgivable debt to pay for tuition. The system is rotten.

The standards have eroded. Increasingly I see barely literate people being passed through the system. I pass people who don’t deserve to pass because I’m hounded by administration on the importance of having a high passing rate. I need a job so....

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> Increasingly I see barely literate people being passed through the system. I pass people who don’t deserve to pass because I’m hounded by administration on the importance of having a high passing rate.

This is exactly how higher education works in many 3rd world countries, including where I come from (and America have a president to match now). Except that student loan industry is not a thing there yet. Many people do obliterate their savings or sell their land and other assets to send their kids to school. Instead of paying back loans, many also pay huge amount of bribes to place their kids in better (government) jobs.

Haha. I’ve been saying this on American forums for a while now, and this comparison doesn’t seem to ring the alarm bells it should.

And same for my home country (which may well be your home country). We have all of the same, except the student loan industry, which sounds like some kafkaesque version of indentured slavery.

> hounded by administration on the importance of having a high passing rate

Clearly we shouldn't enroll some students in the first place, but this just adds fuel to the fire. The growth of administrators who do nothing but keep the machine moving and growing with no thought as to what direction the machine should take is just as big of a problem.

You mean politicians?

As I understand it, your colleges and schools must adhere to certain standards or risk having funding losses or being axed.

Managers follow incentives too.

> Managers follow incentives too.

As long as we're all just following orders it's fine then eh?

I would be surprised if even a majority of the administrative bloat comes from regulatory compliance.

This sounds very similar to sub-prime lending behavior that occurred before the recent recession. I don't expect a different outcome this time, if the behavior continues.

The article paints a pretty bleak picture. My nieces (well, their parents) didn't have enough money to pay for a 4-year college. Instead of taking out student loans one decided not to go to college and the other one decided to join the Army for GI Bill benefits. The one in the Army has been having anxiety issues and they've started her on the path to medical discharge, which she is fighting.

It's really a shame that something we tell young adults is so necessary leads many of them to financial ruin or being a poorly paid servant to the government for years. My guess is that many of them will get sick of it and choose not to go, and the industry will have to adapt to employees with no higher education.

> It's really a shame that something we tell young adults is so necessary leads

We tell them it's necessary because it is for most people. The decades of data made this an indisputable fact: people with college degrees earned higher salaries, had better jobs, enjoyed much lower unemployment rates, and were generally better off than their under-educated peers.

The problem is not that we push people to attend college, the problem is entirely the cost of education.

The decades of data only make sense when you consider that a very small percentage of the population was attending college. Of course they were highly paid; they were rare.

If everybody has a college degree, then those skills aren’t rare and you won’t get paid highly for them. Salary is about how hard you are to replace, not how good/qualified you are.

The problem definitely is that we push people to college. You don’t need a college degree for 90% of the jobs out there and we’ve completely watered down what a college degree is because we wanted everyone to have one.

> If everybody has a college degree, then those skills aren’t rare and you won’t get paid highly for them. Salary is about how hard you are to replace, not how good/qualified you are.

I disagree. Your model only works under the assumption that the economy can only have so many jobs. If the US graduated 10x as many engineers from 1990 until now, the economy would be much larger than it is today. Which means that salaries may even be higher because despite a 10x increase in workforce, the demand for them may have increase by 15x.

This is an easily observable situation. Regions with concentrations of talent tend to have much higher salaries for such people than regions where that talent is scarce.

> Your model only works under the assumption that the economy can only have so many jobs

No, the argument only assumes that the number of jobs won't increase in proportion to the number of college degrees, which is obviously true.

This is happening across all college school systems across all states. Kids are graduating who are functionally illiterate, or just quitting, and being burdened with massive student loan debt that mostly pays for school administrative costs and not professor salaries.

From last year, but I compiled some objective metrics of higher education standards eroding: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...

Nicely written. Thank you for the link.

Thank you for sharing.

I agree, this is a rotten system.

Come to California. Good CC system. We don't tolerate that nonsense.

My response is a quote from this article [1].

Although community colleges can decide on their own how to address hunger, California’s community college system offers on-campus training for faculty and staff so they can help students qualify for food stamps, according to Colleen Ganley, who works in the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.

[1] https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/articl...

The tuition is free though.

I see your point now. I thought your nonsense comment referred to having teachers be engaged in the fight against food insecurity.

So, people are basically paying a stupidity tax. The same tax they essentially pay in many, many other circuimstances, out of their own bad judgements and lack of information.

At the same time, everybody seems to agree that a merit-based society is a good thing. That your intelligence, ability to make good life choices and decisions, and stick to them, should give you success. And at the same time, most of the people measure success not in absolute terms, but in relative, social ones, comparing peers. So, aren't stupidity taxes, in all of it's shapes and forms, an essential part of merit-based society?

This is a broken window economic fallacy. Meritocratic sorting is a good thing but at a cost of 100k and years of peoples lives its probably quite harmful. Just like its far better that the window is never broken, its far better for society if the people didnt waste this time and money.

It's more of an ignorance tax. And I for one am glad there are laws, regulations, and other non-market tools protecting me from hazards like sloppy construction, poisoned water, and preventable diseases.

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