Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> The debt stems from institutional loans the company issued to students

The article makes it sound as though these weren't government loans. Are students of that institution able to tap government loans?

Bootcamps often post misleading statistics about placement numbers [0]. Will they be subject to the same fraud allegations? I would think misleading statistics are pretty much par for the course for nearly all form of sales. I generally apply by the principal of "never ask your barber if you need a haircut". These seem kind of fraud allegations seem to be arbitrarily enforced and politically motivated.

[0] https://medium.com/@abinoda/coding-bootcamp-placement-rates-...

View on HN

There’s a big difference between misleading statistics and lies. If you boast a high placement rate because your program is sort of mediocre but you’re extremely selective in who you accept, well, caveat emptor. If you boast a high placement rate because you just made up nice-looking numbers, that’s fraud, and it should be.

Or don't forget about the boot camps which boast high placement rates because they hire the students that don't find outside roles to continue teaching until they find a better outside role. I find that practice deceptive especially because they are paying well under the rate they are advertising the student should earn upon graduation.

The value of a college degree has changed whether you get the degree from an Ivy League School or a diploma mill. All colleges are basically false advertising at this point. The settlement will make some politicians feel good, but the reality is the entire system needs to be overhauled.

I would dispute this, if only using personal experience. The value of my degree from CMU has paid itself back multiple times over in terms of doors opened.

Your statement feels like too broad of a brush. In my view, there’s a huge fat tail of non-value add schools that are only surviving because of this perception, but the narrow bulb of the elite schools maintains that value if only due to networking and social proof.

Did you study engineering at CMU and literally design a system that opens doors?

That would be awesome.

"We here believe that the most important thing a college can do is lift its students up and open doors for them here at the Central Minnesota School of automatic door and elevator repair. Keeping you cool under pressure is the job of our sister school, the Minnesota Institution of Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning."

Agreed, the value issue has many sides- school and degree are important factors. If we didn't have gov't subsidized loans that can't be discharged through bankruptcy the system would have naturally figured this out already.

Unless you can point to a rather significant shift in the last three years, that is utter nonsense.

Ref: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/14/this-...

Also, whatever the feelings of politicians, I'm pretty sure _the people whose debt was canceled_ have a feeling or two on the matter, too.

Not surprised Ivy Leaguers make more money, but that wasn't really my point. The value of a degree is going down while the cost is going up. This is true for all schools. Why I applaud going after fraud, we need to be focusing on the bigger issue that the university system at large is unsustainable.

I'd be curious to see some data on whether or not people graduating from Harvard today make as much as people graduating 20 years ago. My guess is Harvard grads today probably make less because there are more college grads nowadays than 20 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com