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robertAngst

>Philosophy

>Comparative literature

Then gets a job as a Medical Courier.

>Communications and History

Then gets a job as a pizza deliveryman and says "I lost faith in my country"

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I find it very hard to relate to such people. They get a college degree, but never learned critical thinking skills. Maybe the issue is colleges producing low quality students.

I have friends with similar degrees and they found soulless sales jobs.

It seems like a responsibility/thinking problem. These arent your best students, these are bottom barrel.

Who is to blame? Maybe our high school teachers for telling everyone to follow their dreams instead of learning.

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High school counselors for mass-funneling students into university. Corporations for demanding college educations for unskilled labor. Creditors for lending to young-adults predominantly 18-20 years old. Universities for inflating social experience to the detriment of academic quality and increased tuition. Parents for the cultural peer pressure.

Ultimately, I tend to agree with you but I have a hard time criticizing the naive 18-20 year old rather than the multitudes of enablers who allowed this situation to arise. Is it really fair to blame the victim of an elaborate and complex system designed to extract the perfect amount of present and future value from them while leaving them with just enough (or in the extreme case, not enough) to survive?

"I've designed the perfect device. It can extract just enough usable meat from a cow while still keeping it alive." -Paraphrase of a quote that I can't attribute at this time.

EDIT Actual quote thanks to leetcrew and andygcook: "I invented a device called Burger On The Go, it allows you to obtain 6 regular size hamburger, or 12 sliders, from a horse without killing it."

Pretty sure you’re referencing this quote from Dwight on the Office:

“I invented a device, called Burger on the Go. It allows you to obtain six regular sized hamburgers, or twelve sliders, from a horse without killing the animal. George Foreman is still considering it, Sharper Image is still considering it, SkyMall is still considering it, Hammacher Schlemmer is still considering it. Sears said no.”

No matter how predatory or even fraudulent the lender, in U.S. culture the individual takes the blame in the name of "personal responsibility". After all, if we were to acknowledge that vendors influence consumer choice, uncomfortable ethical questions would arise.

Nobody disputes that people are influenced. But it still comes down the the fundamental right of self determination, which is a pretty core principle in Western Democratic society. It's my right to try to influence you to do something (within reason) and it's your right to do whatever you please.

> High school counselors for mass-funneling students into university.

I agree with this statement. These people plant ideas in the heads of young people which grow and grow due to the influence they have impressionable kids.

Some kid can play a flute so is encouraged to take on unbearable debt to pursue their dream.

HS Counsellors are dangerous.

that is a dwight schrute quote, except it's actually about extracting hamburgers from horses.

> They get a college degree, but never learned critical thinking skills.

Are you seriously suggesting that a degree in philosophy does not teach critical thinking skills?

> These arent your best students, these are bottom barrel.

While I would agree that a degree in comparative literature or history probably isn't as likely to land you a job as a degree in, say, computer science, it doesn't seem fair to assume that those who have fled the country to escape their student debts are automatically dumb losers. Nor do I expect that attitude to inspire a sense of "responsibility" in those who are considering to emigrate.

It seems to me that the so-called "bottom barrel" students would drop out rather than successfully complete a bachelor and then a masters degree.

I think it is too easy to blame students. I dunno how it is in the US but the advice I got in Norway before studying was terrible. When you are 18-19 you don’t know that much about the world. Grownups have to do a lot better job guiding young people.

I studied robotics and AI in Norway assuming if such a study was offered it was because industry needed such skills.

This was 20 years ago before the current AI craze. But there was practically no jobs in this field in Norway. Fortunately I had enough programming to a regular programming job. First by working as a corporate drone at Accenture.

So I was lucky career wise, but that was not due to smart calculated choices. I was wrong about almost everything I did. I chose a study I thought involved building robots when in fact it was mainly about programming them. And almost nobody needed those skills in Norway apart from a company doing recycling and parts of arms industry.

99% of jobs at the time seemed to be some Java server side development, and I had not even learned Java at Uni.

I think the problem is educational institutions want to keep their jobs and students and are thus not entirely honest about how useful the studies they offer really are.

They present a rose tinted reality. Education must to a larger degree respond to the needs of the Labour market and industry.

I blame government for laws that forbid students erasing these loans in bankruptcy, and for backing so many loans and grants in the first place.

If there was an actual market, banks giving loans would do due diligence and provide loans only to majors that would be able to pay back the loan.

Allowing people to default on student loans just makes education more expensive for everyone else. There's plenty of people who looked at their job prospects for the degree before going to college and determined some degrees are bad investments. Why should the rest of us have to shoulder the cost of someone else's poor investment choices?

It won't make tuition more expensive. It makes students loans more expensive and difficult to get, thereby making tuition cheaper.

> Allowing people to default on student loans just makes education more expensive for everyone else.

I don't think we really know that. Making these loans non dischargeable has large systemic effects I think that causes all sorts of other costs to increase. It would certainly make getting loans more difficult, but perhaps total cost of education would go down and make more scholarships available?

We're not talking about just walking away from the student loans, but declaring full-on bankruptcy. That has serious consequences.

It does have consequences, but declaring bankruptcy right after college is probably a good idea (on an individual level) right after college if one has sizeable debts and bankruptcy discharges the debts. College grads tend to have little assets under their names to seize and are several years away from needing to use their credit score to get a mortgage.

Loan issuers would simply require a cosigner with sizeable assets to seize. Tada! Now no one from a poor upbringing can be the first person in their family to attend college. You have created a permanent underclass.

> Why should the rest of us have to ..

You don't have to do anything. But some things might in your best interests. It's on you to figure that out, or someone else will figure it out for you.

Guess they should have bought btc with those student loans, eh? /s

Anything is better than putting money into internet magic... except for a psychology degree :)

The key word in the title of this article is "Americans". All over the world there are students making stupid decisions to study subjects that will prove useless to them in the future; only in America does it routinely lead to tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars of debt.

The students may be clueless, but the lenders know exactly what they're doing.

> They get a college degree, but never learned critical thinking skills

Hard to imagine anyone getting a philosophy degree and not being able to think critically. Especially from a decent accredited school.

> Maybe the issue is colleges producing low quality students.

You mean low quality graduates or alumni.

> These arent your best students, these are bottom barrel.

You know what they call a medical student who graduates with a C average? Doctor. Just because they aren't the top of the class doesn't mean they should be delivering pizzas for a living.

> Who is to blame? Maybe our high school teachers for telling everyone to follow their dreams instead of learning.

Are you seriously saying philosophy or comparative literature or communication and history students aren't learning?

I have degrees in computer science, philosophy and math and I learned lot as a philosophy student. Of course the computer science degree is what got me my jobs, but that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything in philosophy.

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