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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

This is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that everyone should be able to afford to go to college and private institutions need to foot the bill for the costs. We as a society prioritized availability of college education over costs. In order to get both you would likely have to change to some income percentage based repayment system instead of traditional loan repayments and that probably wouldn't be possible unless the government is heavily involved.

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Half of all college students don't finish their 4-year degree in 5 years, and it's not due to cost. Even countries like France, Netherlands, etc which have lower costs for college, place you in a track when you're in your freshman year of high school. This track determines if you're going to college, a trade, or somewhere in between, and it's hard to switch from lower to higher tracks. College should not be a goal for 100% of the population like we have now, there should be a greater push for trades like chefs, electricians, HVAC technicians, plumbers, woodworking, metal working, glass blowing. You're an apprentice, you get paid a livable wage, and you have 0 student loans.

You're describing a caste system, except instead of having your life determined by your lineage it's determined by some standardized tests given when you are 14 years old. It might work for some societies but that flies so directly against the "American Dream" that it will never work here.

In reality it isn't as limiting as you think in the Netherlands. You get different levels of education based on previous school results, but after finishing "mid level" highschool you can continue and take the last two years of "upper level" highschool if it turns out you developed more and are now a better learner at 17 than you were at 14. In total that takes only 1 year extra, because "upper level" is a year longer by default.

Same in college vs university, you can continue from the lower level program into a masters degree as long as you pass the acceptance test or have the required grades.

> Even countries like France, Netherlands, etc which have lower costs for college, place you in a track when you're in your freshman year of high school.

Imagine trying to do this in the US. I wonder to what extent colleges are free in places where there is stricter criteria to get into college.

We also need to consider modernizing our "trade" skill list.

Based on the success of bootcamps etc.... I do wonder if software engineering would be better as a trade skill rather than university

>Based on the success of bootcamps etc.... I do wonder if software engineering would be better as a trade skill rather than university

There's plenty of data plumbers (myself included) who are writing a check a month to pay for skills they don't use but a lot of them don't have degrees in the first place. That blurry line between corporate IT and software development is where people would probably benefit most from trade programs.

Edit: Apparently a lot of people took offense at this comment and I'm not sure why. Please explain.

College was dirt cheap before student loans became non-dischargeable and the government started backing them.

I looked for tuition costs over time, but didn't find much online. I did find Stanford tuition data going back about 100 years. Here's a graph of the log of Stanford tuition over time [1]. The log of tuition has grown pretty much linearly.

There doesn't seem to be much difference between how it grew before government backed loans and after them. Somewhere I've got a spreadsheet where I compared the growth rate to the inflation rate. I can't find that right now, but if I remember correctly the tuition growth rate was about twice the inflation rate.

It would be interesting to get this kind of data for a variety of schools, but I couldn't find it.

[1] https://imgur.com/fXnjDNn

College was also dirt cheap in an entirely different era where people could earn a living even with menial labour and where the average purchasing power was higher.

Trying to correlate the two and say it's because of government loans is just plain ignorant. Or are government loans also to explain why people can't save money, or afford rent, or survive off of a single 40h job etc.

The government is already heavily involved and we already have that system: https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans/in...

Debt as an investment is fine. If you are investing in your future with your education, okay, but that requires the education be practical. It must have a value greater than its cost. That is not true for most education and thus we are not investing in our future as a society with this debt.

I'd rather the debt we incur as a society be spent on infrastructure and engineers than wicker baskets. Wicker baskets don't last very long. Roads and bridges do. Engineers do.

Sure, but once you bring financial value into the equation it starts limiting access. Not everyone can be an engineering major. Not everyone even belongs at college in the first place. But we as a society want everyone who wants to go to college to be able to afford it (at least initially). That is not compatible with a profit minded view of that education being a sound financial investment for each individual student.

This doesn't mesh with my perspective of education. Universities are non-profits for a reason. yes, there are profit minded University of Phoenix's but that is not the historical norm and they are the worst offenders.

Not everyone should go to college. We shouldn't enable everyone to go to college. If you shouldn't go to college, going to college won't change that. You'll struggle and fail out or get a worthless degree because it's the only one you can pass enough classes to get.

We have trade schools. We have apprenticeships and on the job training. Lots of folks for home those paths are better, are turned off to them by social pressure, not logic. I've taken welding classes and vehicle maintenance classes and they have shown themselves to be valuable assets to me. I can connect steel at the atomic level. I can keep my vehicles safe for me and my family and friends.

There's no one-size-fits all approach to human evolution and we need all of us. Maybe I'm idealistic.

We need to stop doing stuff that only makes sense to the banks. They are entirely self-interested and provide negative value back to society. We are squandering our futures to the fat cats.

Okay - can anyone actually cite me even a class, let alone a degree, that has the word wicker baskets in them? If not, stop using this straw-man term.

Dude it is a satirical term to symbolize low value programs. It isn’t supposed to be taken literally.

Teachers generate less value (see:income, GDP) than engineers.

We should abolish teaching degrees and just teach software engineering at college.

We probably should. I bet it's easier to teach a STEM grad how to teach (in a professional training program after college) than to teach a professional 'teacher' how to do math.

What are you basing that on?

My sister is a 3rd-grade teacher and I'm not sure I would be equipped to handle 30 children without lots of training. Teaching someone how to teach 3rd-grade math is not that difficult. Teaching someone to start building positive learning habits with 8-9-year-olds sounds incredibly complicated.

I might be reading into your post too much but it seems like you think STEM grads are superior to non-stem grads. I don't buy that. STEM grads have a specialty that is in demand in the labor market. It doesn't make STEM grads better then non-STEM grads.

You may be right about elementary school teachers, I'm thinking more about high school STEM teachers specifically. Although the grade school teachers in my city seem to struggle even with fractions [0].

Only one of my high school math teachers seemed to have any idea what math was about (not just regurgitating formulas, but deriving them and proving them from a set of axioms and only then using those formulas to solve free-form real-world problems).

My High School CS teacher was a geography teacher who just read one chapter ahead in the CS textbook and had no idea what he was talking about.

Being good at teaching seems kind of useless when you don't know anything to teach.

[0] https://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2016/05/13/for...

Well, the real question is marginal value - if we taught more software engineers, they might not bring in much income or create much GDP.

If you're asserting that teachers are as valuable as software engineers to society, then the question becomes: why doesn't society compensate them accordingly?

Given the hard core attempt to subvert eduction going on in the public schools, maybe. At least with software you’ll have logic, math, and history. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/dqd6ca/activist...

You should take a moment and read that individuals post. It is well researched. Just because it’s from r/conspiracy doesn’t mean you should skip it.

It’s a metaphor for a degree that does not generate an income. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_basket_weaving

Regarding income-based repayment, I think Purdue was experimenting with this, and may still be. I haven't heard of any significant government involvement in that program.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/04/1...

I didn't know that, thanks for passing it along. The reason I think the government needs to be involved is because this isn't going to be financially viable for every student at every college and therefore private banks won't want to participate. Purdue seems to have found a way around that by funding the program themselves but I wonder if that self funding is scalable.

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