Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I’m convinced you can’t fix the education problem in the US until you can fix the demand side as well. Where I live in Maryland, you can do two years at the local community college (which is excellent) for $8,000 in tuition and fees (total), before finishing up at a four year-college. Very few people take advantage of the opportunity.

Why are people clamoring for free college when they’re not using the cheaper options that are already available? Say we had free tuition at public colleges. Would we be able to get rid of federal student loans in that case? Or would people just turn their nose up at public colleges, and demand the government pay tuition for private schools? There is something psychologically messed up on the demand side.

View on HN

I also do not understand this. For example, Arizona community colleges (2 years) are $2,400 while Arizona state universities are $10k.

People are deciding to spend more money elsewhere. They have been convinced that to have a successful career and life they must be in a certain program at a specific university. And for those that wish to be academics or working as a part of the 1% at the cutting edge of their field - sure, it makes a lot of sense.

AZ parent just put a child through the public schools K-12 and then graduated U of AZ engineering BS without debt anecdotage:

The local CC is a disaster for teaching anything to do with that cursed label "STEM": math end-game beginning calculus is almost non-existent, other math classes focus on "business math"[1] and subjects such as real english skills or heaven forbid a foreign language are just barely rudimentary, which you can discover on your own by looking at the course availabilities, readily available online. Sure, you can get a nursing education, or law enforcement, but you can barely get any preparation at all for UA technical coursework. Some manage it anyway of course; when I was in the graduate math program at ASU in Tempe, the first PhD awarded in years started with beginning 1st year Algebra.

[1] "business math" I hardly understand myself, I really felt bad for the students. It makes no sense at all as a curriculum. But it does supply something for a market demand.

I suspect you know better than I do. 10 years ago I took a lot of the busy-work classes at GCC. And yeah, the education is not great. "Business math" and their persistent description of integrals as "the area under the curve" is infuriating. That said, STEM seems to be one of the programs where state universities are more appropriate in terms of earnings-to-cost benefit.

I'm from Chicago, have you been to one of our community colleges. They're not that great. I know, I went to one for a year before transferring to a more renowned college. Not to mention if you don't think the people around you in a community college setting are largely responsible adults optimizing their career/life paths, you are also wrong, these are well-known things that affect the quality and consumption of your education.

Because most people who study are looking to use their qualification to further their careers, and hiring tends to be very reputation based. It's that demand that would need to change.

If you do 2 years at a community college, then 2 years at University of Maryland, your degree just says “University of Maryland”. There’s no reason to break it out on your resume either.

Anecdotally, it seems like the people I know who went the community college route ended up finishing their degrees at more prestigious universities than they would have if they went straight to a 4 year school.

People are reasonably worried about the difficulty of changing schools mid-stream and whether they'll be able to pick up smoothly at the more prestigious school or be at an academic or social disadvantage relative to those who did their whole degree there. Also, these choices are faced primarily by young people who have no college experience and often little life experience in things like fiscal management. Meanwhile students are bombarded endorsements for the idea of being accepted to a prestigious university, whereas announcing that 'you're going to start community college!' is equivalent to signaling that you will be spending two years on an uncompetitive track.

I think it's disingenuous to ignore these differences, or to assume that employers will necessarily take the broader view. I am not asserting that the approach you describe cannot work out very well for some individuals.

What "broader view" is there for employers to take? The parent comment is correct: if you do 2 years at community college and then 2 years at UMD, you're going to have a UMD degree. There's nothing for the employer to have an opinion about.

If it were that simple nobody would spend money on joining fraternities or sororities because one's social affiliations aren't written on the degree.

Which, ironically, works in your favor in Virginia (USA). In Virginia if you get your associates through a community college then public institutions, like Virginia Tech or University of Virginia, cannot deny you entry if you want to get your undergrad degree. And there's no resume requirement to list where you got your Associates later on.

> Where I live in Maryland, you can do two years at the local community college (which is excellent) for $8,000 in tuition and fees, before finishing up at a four year-college.

This is true for the majority of students, but not generally true for the top ~1-10% of students who often need all 4 years to compete for slots at top law schools, med schools, phd programs, and employers. And getting into the top 4-5 of any of those things (except maybe phd programs, outside of a few fields like CS) will pay itself back in spades.

I'd be curious to see a study that figures out who thinks they are in that 1%-10% vs. who actually is. I.e., are people just being idiots, or are they over-estimating the trajectory of their early career?

Also, even for the other 90%, the same is true for lots of stuff. Including housing and vehicles. People aren't rational.

Not sure doing the first two at community college impacts post-graduate admissions much?

If an applicant begins his or her undergraduate education at a community college, excels academically, transfers to a four-year institution, and continues an upward trend by maintaining an excellent GPA, scoring well on the MCAT, and demonstrating a proclivity toward patient care and research, their educational path can be seen as an asset.

That explains why a small elite who likely don't need assistance with loans don't avail themselves of community college, but doesn't say much about the general case.

To reiterate, the question I'm asking is: how many people think they're the small elite but are actually the general case?

I.e., how many people are acting irrationally vs. how many people are misjudging their own place in the world?

> who often need all 4 years to compete for slots at top law schools,

You can get into a highly ranked law-school with a high LSAT score and essentially nothing else.

Not all community colleges are excellent. The local community college here is referred to as "the 13th grade". Its cheap but not very good at all.

Free college is an awful idea, honestly. That's not going to fix the problem, and will most likely make it significanly worse.

Why? It works for high school, I don't see how college is any different.

Pass rate for college level for random person is vastly lower than high school.

High school is a guided path, there are choices to be made but everyone comes out of it with a similar set of skills and knowledge. College is self-guided and people can choose the degree they want to pursue.

The problem today is that there are a lot of people who pursue degrees with little regard for the cost and the applicability of the degree they're pursuing. If they do that now, when they have some skin in the game, how will that improve if college is "free". I think you'll see more people getting degrees in fields that have no job market. Sure, they don't have debt (the rest of us will foot the bill), but they have no job prospects either.

The people I see on Facebook and other social media complaining about the cost of college and the job prospects they have all have one thing in common: they bought into the "pursue your passion" lie and came out of college with a degree that they can't use.

> Sure, they don't have debt (the rest of us will foot the bill),

If taxpayers only agree to foot a much smaller bill, universities will be forced to cut all the frivolous stuff and get serious about education. I'm all for taxpayer-funded college but not at the prices these colleges charge at present. You don't see college football and all the other non-educational nonsense in Germany (using that because it's an example of a country with a free college system). "Free" college should pay only for classrooms and labs, professors and TAs - no dorms, meal plans, overpriced textbooks, sports or extra-curricular activities (unless paid for by students or donors), huge admin staff and the rest.

I agree with this, but getting colleges to get rid of their athletic programs is unlikely to happen.

I saw something at one point that said that colleges now are luxurious compared to the colleges of 30/40/50 years ago. The implication there was that once students had easy access to student loans, state schools in particular no longer focused on being cost effective. Anecdotally, I live in a town with a state school (Illinois State), and the apartments that have sprung up on campus over the past 10-15 years are insane compared to what I saw in college. Flat screen TVs in every unit, pools, etc. This is probably the most extreme example, but there are many similar: https://thelodgeonwillow.com

I guess the most prominent counterexample is Germany, which has basically free tuition. They also have different kinds of high schools preparing people for universities or trades, not everyone needs to go to university.

I know that it's worked elsewhere, but that doesn't mean it will work here (without some cultural changes). I'm not saying college shouldn't be free - maybe it should - but I'm saying that the problems we have today with underemployment aren't going to be fixed by free tuition.

We first have to undo decades of treating trades as a lesser class of work, and telling everyone they have to go to college and "follow their passion".

Aren’t employment rates in the U.S. doing pretty well at this point? I think the companies struggling to find people are skilled labor—the likes of which require 4 year degrees for a lot of their positions.

Employment is low, yes. But a lot of people are underemployed - working retail or Starbucks or something, in spite of having a college degree. We don’t have a labor shortage or a job shortage - there are plenty of both. What we have is a mismatch between the skills that people who want jobs have to offer, and the skills that employers require.

If all good education was free there would be no private Universities in Germany. But there are many and they all charge fees.

Also, _not_ all public universities are free.

Typically you pay $200 per semester in enrollment fees (bus ticket to the city included). And while private universities in Germany exists they are absolutely tiny compared to the public ones.

I think it's a great idea. It's always wise to invest in education. The student loans ARE an investment.

The only real problem with the student loans is that they gave them to people without concrete earning potential. They should have only gave out loans to educate people at real institutions (not U. of Phoenix eg) in practical areas like engineering or science. Instead, they gave a lot of loans to people who wouldn't have good employable potential post graduation.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Free college doesn't solve the problem, because the real problem isn't the cost of college, it's people pursuing degrees that aren't useful in the real world.

Ah, I see. So we should have free practical education. Free engineering universities and such, but not free ... let's call them, humanities universities?

I'd be ok with that. If you want a humanities degree, then you have to pay. Maybe those still have student loans, but not big ones.

But we won’t get that. American culture and politics won’t permit it. (I can see the New Yorker articles now.) Not only that, we won’t even get the quota systems for different majors various European countries have. It’ll be underwater basket weaving for everyone, at the public expense.

Perhaps I'm an idealist, but I think we can do it right. We had two tracks in high school. the ones who could go to college stayed in class all day. The others who were slated for blue collar jobs went to trade school for the first half of the day, then took essential classes in the afternoon.

> Perhaps I'm an idealist, but I think we can do it right.

Our politics would never allow dual tracking. (There are many things that Europe does fine, such as public education, and transit, that Europe does just fine, but which we can’t do as well because of cultural differences.)

We have dual tracks now. We are allowing it. You mean at a national level?

What are these "good" degrees, and what are the "bad" degrees? Have you actually looked at data or are you just going off gut feeling here?

It's gut feel, but I've heard a lot of similar stories from people I know.

Good degrees: medical (nursing, nutrition, etc), computer science, most engineering degrees, math.

Bad degrees: most of the liberal arts degrees. English, theatre, journalism etc.

These are broad generalizations, obviously. There are people with "bad" degrees who make a good living. There are people with "good" degrees who are struggling. But when I see people complaining that they have huge amounts of debt and are unemployed or underemployed, it's almost universally people who have the degrees I labeled bad.

Some of the issue seems to be just a general lack of planning - they decide to pursue a degree in X, but don't really have a plan for what kind of job they want. Some of the issue seems to be a stubbornness to accept that maybe the thing they got a degree in (often their "passion" - a concept that needs to die) may not be the thing they build a career on. Someone who got a degree in theatre because they really loved being in plays in high school, for example (an actual example I saw recently in a Humans of New York post). They probably need to accept that theatre is a hobby (at least for them), and pursue a career in something else.

An actual example from someone I know who went through this process with her daughter: The daughter had decided she wanted to go to an out of state school and major in journalism, and then move to some specific city to work when she was done with school. Her mother sat her down and they ran the numbers on what the school would cost vs what her parents could help her with financially, what the average person with a journalism degree makes out of college, and what the cost of living was in the city she wanted to live in was. The numbers didn't add up. The college was expensive and would have left her with lots of debt, the journalism degree didn't leave her with very many choices in terms of careers, and the cost of living in the city she wanted to live in was pretty high. So, they talked it through and the daughter ended up doing two years of community college (much cheaper) before going to a less expensive in-state school, she got a degree in english (yes, I labeled it a bad degree - it's probably not in this case), and opted to live in a cheaper city once she'd graduated (she's still in college). This is the activity that's missing from most college-bound kids lives.

> It's always wise to invest in education.

That’s debatable. Regardless, college involves some education, for some. There is also a lot of partying, drug use, indoctrination, and impractical pursuits. I don’t want to fund that with public dollars, especially since our college graduation rights are already on the higher side relative to our competitor countries. If we were talking about spending public dollars on commuter trade schools, I’d feel more positively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com