No Tuition, but You Pay a Percentage of Your Income if You Find a Job

I also have difficulty seeing the first benefit you list as being a benefit. I don't have a problem with people pursuing degrees in fields that aren't big money makers, but I also don't know that the government should be in the business of incentivising people to study in these fields.

On the other hand, there is societal benefit to these fields being pursued in general. And the market economy may not adequately pay for the benefits it receives. As a society we wouldn't want everyone to major in poetry, though.

Was this with room and board? FWIW, there are many college degrees in the USA that are in the $7k/yr range, and many of then were around $20k total prior to the last round of state-level austerity in the USA.

Getting a US college degree for under $20k is still very possible if you a) commute and b) do the first two years at a community college (typically closer to $2k/yr, or $18k-$21k for 2 years cc + 2 years state college).

With a bit more public subsidy (or differently targeted subsidy), many US colleges could be well within the $20k USD range for commuting students. And some courses of study already are.

The system looks good on paper. It reminds me of a type of public housing offered that allows you to give 30% of gross wages. Many people stop working completely and get welfare/assistance (to qualify you need to be working or getting a regular cheque) or delay raises, etc because the less you make the less you pay. The more you make the more taxes you pay so it creates a situation where the harder you work the less you make unless you can get a huge pay increase and leave. It creates a trap.. there is a huge fear of leaving because you will never get back in.

I like the free if you qualify German model but even that has problems.

As a student you give your tax number to the university, and then the loan repayments are handled by the tax system when you do your regular annual tax return.

There is also a contingency plan for students who come from families with a household income of R600,000(USD 43,000) per annum.

It’s not about the payment structure alone, it’s about a school that is incentivized to make its students successful. IBR is just taxpayers swallowing the bill when schools fail.

I don't see why this is an issue at all. If the college claims that "finding the high-income person you will marry" is one of the reasons to attend that college, then they should please return to the 1950s (or earlier!). If they DON'T, then the repayment should be based on the individual's income, regardless of their spouse's income.

Does this mean that a college risks getting paid very little by a graduate who ends up becoming a stay-at-home spouse? Sure, but that's part of the risk. A 4-year college wishing to introduce such a program can always take a less-than-complete approach and still charge some minimal tuition up front (presumably in exchange for a smaller slice of "lifetime" earnings).

Also: advocating for keeping the old system by saying this new way is not different is the least Hacker News things I’ve ever heard. The student loan crisis is an existential crisis for America. More schools should adopt the Lambda School approach, America would be much better off.

The current model is no different to unscrupulous bankers selling loans to Wall Street or Fannie Mae: they just lure students to the school helping them fill out student aid and loans and then give them subpar educations with curriculum being taught like it has been for years but they don’t care to change or innovate because the school has already been paid by an entity — the US education department who has deep pockets.

There are significant numbers showing the loan servicers engaged in fraud to prevent the forgiveness. One of the major loopholes is on an annual basis when income documents are due, the loan servicers would take extended periods to “review” the income docs and place the loans in forbearance for a month. Then when forgiveness time came they were denied for not having made payments (through no fault of their own) for 120 consecutive months essentially resetting the clock every year.

Not to mention at any given point these programs can be axed, which I’m sure they will be if there were ever a significant portion of the population who would actually qualify for the forgiveness.

So you very possibly could pay Lambda School $0.

tl;dr; on that is you borrow a certain amount (that you choose, but is capped by the program). In exchange, you pledge a certain percentage of your income every month for a certain number of months (5-10 years generally) [0]. The maximum amount you'll repay is capped at 2.5x the loan amount (i.e. if you borrow $10k, you'll repay a max of $25k).

Practically speaking, the gist of the program is that it's good for students with middle income career outlooks, but terrible for students with high income career outlooks (i.e. talented CS majors) since you'll end up paying more than a traditional loan.

[0]: The percentage pledged varies by the loaned amount and major. The number of months seemingly only varies by major. You can play with the calculator here: https://compare.vemo.com/

Purdue's program: https://www.purdue.edu/backaboiler/index.php

You could try checking course requirements. Every college I'm aware of requires that students take classes in a variety of subjects outside their major before they can graduate.

The biggest performance dilemma I noticed upon entering college is basic literacy. I saw most people reading at a 9th grade level, which is average for most Americans, and struggle to write a 2 page paper. That 2 page paper was hardly competent once written.

The problem was so pronounced that in order to be awarded graduation of a bachelor's degree you had to take and pass a writing competency test at any time during your undergraduate education.

In the real world, as a software developer, the biggest barrier I see to the success of many developers is basic literacy. I see so many people who cannot communicate at a professional level. They struggle to reason about the problems they encounter and struggle further to put their thoughts into words that a make sense to an outside party.

Most developers I have ever worked with spend their entire careers struggling with a variety of concerns that ultimately (when you remove the bullshit and excuses) boil down to struggles of basic code literacy. I suspect we have all encountered this when everything is an argument of code style, spaces vs tabs, OOP vs functional, and so forth. Code literacy is the difference between thinking in terms of algebra (instructions) versus thinking in terms of calculus (process). When you are literate you form visions of what you want and simply build the vision accordingly.

As somebody who rewrote their personal application from scratch last year (about 40,000 lines of code with minimal boilerplate) while also working for two separate employers and having a spouse and kids I really don't have patience for people who fill their time with literacy bullshit. As somebody currently deployed with the time military to a conflict zone this is the thing I dread most about returning to the corporate world.

Holy shit people. Pick up a damn book and read. How you communicate will influence how you write code.

1) what evidence would convince you?

2) when you consider that education is a social policy, and is designed with the purpose of delivering benefit at scale, does that change your opinion? (That is, when you consider that it's meant to shift the median student's outcome more than that of the p99 student)

College education is hugely overrated, and especially by using bad reasons like that

Spare me the hyperboles, using the "well rounded" adjective makes no sense except for objects that are supposed to be round.

College is essential if you are in a regulated profession and/or is it too expensive (or impossible) to learn it yourself (like medicine, other engineerings, law, etc)

For other areas? Not so much

I think that this is a viable model for professions where high paying jobs are available aplenty. How are you planning to scale with this narrow model? Also what is your competitive advantage? I am trying to figure out the valuation as an investor.

In the current system, students are the customers, in your new systems, students are the products.

How will you ensure that your private interest are aligned with individuals, and society needs ? You are currently avoiding that issue by targeting high demand/high paying jobs but on a larger scale those issue will arise

You can easily scale the number of classrooms by 2x but it isn't as easy to 2x the starting salary of your graduates.

The worry here is that you will over-focus on how to market/brand yourself to capture the salary of as many people transitioning to tech as possible, rather than helping individuals maximize their potential.

This philosophy operates under the assumption that colleges should be beholden to an economic system that values individuals solely for their ability to grow existing capital.

It's a recipe for cultural stagnation.

Where do we develop entirely new modes of thought and expression [and potential new sources of wealth] if we deprioritize every activity other than those that optimize for the growth of existing wealth?

Supporting the continued interest in the historical, artistic, cultural, literary and philosophical development of mankind and likewise supporting the preservation of these fields shouldn't be seen as 'catering to those types'. If you'd like to live in a world devoid of art, culture, and history, but efficient, logical, and completely determined to the apex, be my guest; it sounds like tons of fun.

If these systems are to be adopted nationwide they'll have to figure out a reasonable way to fund studying the humanities for more than just 'a handfull[sic] of true scholars'. Traditions and whole fields of disciplines don't live and die off the progress of a few geniuses--they are worldwide human endeavors sustained by a complex of economic, political, and pedagogical interests. Maybe that means this sort of model is only fit for 'trades', but eliminating support for the humanities wholesale wouldn't work.

[0] https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/compare/tables/?state=...

The agreement lasts up ton5 years. If you haven’t paid back at the end of 5 years it goes away and you owe nothing.

You can also pay upfront, but most students don’t have enough cash to do so.

A lot of the criticism of Lambda School seems like unfairly comparing some ideal of education with their model, rather than comparing the current reality, which is colleges that frequently leave people in $30k + worth of student debt with no guarantee of a job afterwards, and that's before we talk about the years you sink into it. Then there are the learn to code bootcamps which seem to be garbage in general.

I'd be willing to bet for most of us, paying 17% of our income (once we made $50k) a year, for two years, is a vastly preferable to whatever we've paid.

If the housing market is any example of what happens when entry is eased (low % rates, etc), we are looking at student loans being a lot higher than they are now.

In Denmark (where I'm from), there is a system where education is free. There are private schools, but to my knowledge no private universities. Your entry ticket to a university is your grade from high-school. You actually get some money while studying. You can still chose to do a studen loan on top of that, but typically people come out of university with maximum $20k in debt most way less.

I have many friends that are absolutely brilliant and successful, who would probably not have been able to afford a university degree.

One thing is what that does to the crazy debt many people get in other countries, but think about what it does for low-income areas, immigrant and integration and general inequality of a population.

By all means, Denmark is not perfect. But I think we nailed it with access to education.

And yes. Our tax pressure is pretty high. But surprisingly not that much higher than for example California and NY.

Martin

"Public education and taxes" (1) means everyone pays into the system and then people can enroll without any additional payment (or maybe with diminished additional payment).

You could also have publicly insured student loans (2), where the student pays tuition with a loan and then if they later default on the loan then the public eats the cost.

But this system (3) is neither. In this system, you get your degree and then you start paying for it when your income is enough to afford it. Importantly, if you never attain that level of income, the _University_ eats the cost.

System 2 can lead to ever-ballooning college costs concurrent with gluts of worthless degrees, because universities are incentivized to enroll as many students as they can at as high a tuition rate as they can - they always get paid.

In system 3, the university only gets paid if the student's degree turns out to be marketable. It (hopefully) keeps costs down in a way the (1 & 2) cannot. On the other hand, this could be terrible news for departments that issue degrees in literature, anthropology, etc.

The government needed to become involved to make education affordable to students without wealthy parents. If the market was going to take care of that by itself, it would have happened before the government got involved.

And the school is not incentivized to sell worthless degrees because it won't get paid when it does.

There is a key difference. With public education, the excess cost of the education is born equally by ALL taxpayers. With education that is funded by a percentage of future income rather than a fixed up-front cost, that is born only by the graduates. It means that those not fortunate enough to attend college (or not interested) are not expected to subsidize the students, and it also means that students can choose from a range of different qualities (and costs) of school.

Also the original article spoke at length about aligning the incentives of the school and the student. If you believe (I do not) that the only or most important role of a school is to prepare the student for a more lucrative job, then this alignment of incentives is a significant value of its own.

If universities had that tuition plan they would be bankrupt.

The reason we're having this conversation in the first place is precisely the "funding increases" they've been experiencing. If this isn't enough "funding increase" for them: https://rpreschern.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/college-tuiti... then I'd have to suggest "funding" is not their problem. What they'd look like with "solid funding increases" is pretty much what you're seeing right now.

If Lambda School begins to suck and isn't educating engineers to competency, they go out of business quickly. Voluntary vs involuntary funding is an incredibly important difference.