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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Just like the housing crisis... when are we going to learn that government backed debt is a terrible thing for our nation? Creditors _should_ turn away bad lendees or cap loan limits, or increase your interest rate based on risk factors. Some exmaples of this might be:

* Limiting the amount of money you can be loaned for majors that don't have good job prospects. People should turn to grants for these types of educations

* Increasing your interest rate if you miss class

* Increasing your interest rate for poor grade performance

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I don't think GPA has very much of any effect on lifetime earnings except by being a proxy for IQ and conscientiousness.

Same with missing class, they don't reduce someone's lifetime earnings, they just tell you how conscientious they are.

But extroversion is actually one of biggest contributors to lifetime earnings. Maybe if they miss a party we should increase their interest rate too.

Well the difference between a 3.0 and 4.4 isn't likely much, but a gpa of 1.5 would very much indicate failure to focus

If you control for IQ and conscientiousness then it's probably what classes they took, how motivated are they by school, whether they found a girlfriend they really liked that semester and decided to blow off class, founded a company, decided to teach themselves french.

I mean, exactly

Why shouldn't it cost less for an English or a philosophy degree than an engineering degree? The job prospects are not only worse but so are your lifetime earnings.

Or looking at it another way the English and philosophy majors are subsidizing the cost of an engineering degree.

From a cost perspective it doesn't cost that much more to educate an English major than an engineering major.

I am not sure if that is true. English professors are paid less than Eng ones and does not require expensive lab and equipment.

In all honesty, as a Materials Engineering student at a "learn by doing school", I could easily have done without the expensive lab equipment, but not without the library. I've always thought industry should be supporting the labs and having students perform some relatively basic work for them, for a random example Scanning Electron Microscope sample prep and basic analysis

Edit: not a current student and graduated 10 years ago.

As I understand it, at a lot of schools facilities are supported by industry. To offer a non-engineering example, I was once in a Dunkin Donut-sponsored pastry instruction room at a culinary school.

Yes, see here [1], for example.

[1] http://crookedtimber.org/2013/08/14/humanities-science-is-no...

Not the case in US research universities where science professors bring in large grants from usually the federal government to fund machines and grad students. The university takes an "overhead" cut of these grants of around 50%. So if a grant is $150k then the professor gets 100k to spend and the University gets $50 (and pays for buildings, electricity, admin, etc). Most studies show that the overhead the universities take is a net plus for them over the cost of the services they provide.

English professors make maybe 70% of the salary of an engineering professor. With benefits that's probably closer to 85%. And the cost of faculty is less than half the cost of education. You also have administration, buildings, sports, etc. So that ends up being maybe a 7-8% difference. Plus lab equipment, but the expensive lab equipment is probably mostly paid by research, and the other stuff probably isn't very expensive on a per student basis.

Not true. Engineering students actually use expensive equipment like nuclear reactors and radioisotopes.

How about limiting the cost of tuition? I'm about $80k in debt, and my Alma mater just set up a $75 million student center. How does a luxury cafeteria contribute to the value of a student's education? Universities across the nation are putting an ungodly amount of money into sports stadiums, student centers, luxury dorms, etc. Our federal loan money is going directly to these unnecessary amenities rather than improved education programs. Check out the documentary Ivory Tower [1]. The cost of the education alone isn't that expensive. I'm hoping we will see more reputable online programs like Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science which only costs about $7,000 [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory_Tower_(2014_film) [2] http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/

I think high tuition is a symptom of easy access to credit and a focus on college education. A university education isn't right for many people, yet we're continually pressured to go that route and accept the high cost of tuition as a given.

A lot of what we're taught in higher education isn't particularly relevant to future job success. Does it really matter if I know that bananas likely reduced the need for agriculture in Africa, likely leading to the limited technological advancement in the region? Maybe, if I'm going into history or something, not not if I'm in a technical field.

I think we should put _less_ emphasis on college during high school, have more opportunities to try different fields in high school, and improve students' access to job demand and expected pay figures when choosing a degree. We should also make getting loans less easy and remove rules that prevent bankruptcy from erasing those loans (e.g. no more federal student loans). Ideally, by graduation, a student will either have a marketable certification, apprenticeship, or college level courses completed, and college will take 2-3 years for a bachelor's degree.

Also, let's remove most of the standardized testing. I'm convinced it's more harmful than helpful, especially in primary education.

Or maybe nationalize education, end all for-profit colleges and universities, and just you know, pay for people's educations. Consider it an investment in the future of the country, and a measure to increase social mobility.

Agreed, the private sector would price in these risks, so no bubble.

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