Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education | Hacker News Reader

Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

wsj.com

358 pointsPretzelFisch814 comments

Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school.

Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we'd hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed the tables had a bachelors in mining science. The both of them came in well below what I earned, had no healthcare and no retirement. I remember having a few too many boilermakers one night and I asked why he was serving grease monkey clowns like us instead of working on flowers. Javon just said theres no work, and the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway. He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.

That scared the hell out of me. You could waste a hundred grand on something I always thought made people into millionaires and still wind up serving suds to a drunk in a blue jumper covered in soot from a runaway 2 stroke who thinks you "invent flowers." I woke up the next morning with a hangover and anxiety.

> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.

This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery.

There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it's the same reason we have bankruptcy laws. None of those reasons somehow go away just because it's a student loan -- on the contrary, an 18-year-old thinking they're buying a ticket to a better life is far more vulnerable than the vast majority of people who will ever be seeking a loan.

All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.

> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.

The reason they aren't dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral? They only guarantee they get that it will be paid back is the fact that it can't be discharged.

Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be discharged at bankruptcy.

That being said, I actually think that's a good thing, because it would force colleges to charge reasonable tuition rates and also offer scholarships if they want to get the best students.

But barring shifting to a European model of college funding, I don't see the US allowing dischargeable loans, nor do I think they should, because the reality of it is that colleges won't reduce their rates nor increase their scholarships, they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.

Colleges should be shaking in their boots for the next generation, because there's going to be a whole generation of parents that suffered terrible college debt they couldn't pay off and will likely be telling their children it's just not worth it (as opposed to the previous generation that had cheap college and a great economy and pressured all their children to go for that 'guaranteed better life').

I made it through relatively okay because STEM and some scholarships, but I'm not even sure I'll recommend my children go to college. Especially with online courses (not talking about college, just courses) becoming more viable and useful.

I definitely won't for some pursuits, like art. I'd rather they live at home with me for four years, doing self-study and putting their art out there online and developing a following rather than spend $200,000+ on college that will likely not result in anything afterwards (hell, as a semi-professional game designer myself, I'd happily work with them to get their art into published games).

> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy,

I thought so too. This always made me so angry. Last time I posted a rant about that here someone urged me to read the REPAYE Act, and it completely changed my mind.

Under REPAYE, students get income based repayment, even down to $0 payments if you're anywhere near poverty level. After a certain number of years of repayment, the government just pays off your entire balance.

This solves the same problems bankruptcy is designed to solve without ruining people's credit. It also prevents doctors from declaring bankruptcy right after medschool -- I'm honestly unsure whether that was a real or just anecdotal problem, but income based repayment for a fixed term seems like a better way to let people escape debt while still expecting them to pay what they can.

>This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery.

It's because one generation ago, college was a great way to access a pretty good life for most people, and was affordable on an average person's income.

>All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.

Why would anyone lend money to someone with zero credit history, zero income, zero collateral, zero prospects of repaying the loan for at least 4+ years, and has the ability to immediately declare bankruptcy as soon as it comes time to start paying you back? What would the free market interest rate be on that type of loan?

Allowing loans to discharged is nothing but a band-aid on a broken system. We need to work to make college cheaper. Building the entire system around loans is the problem, not one specific feature of those loans.

The government will give out a loan to students for basically any reason, as long as their family doesn't make too much money. Think about the insanity of that kind of investment practice. No "business plan", no estimates of ROI, no collateral, little to no grade submissions. It's a bad way to invest.

If a student is going to get a loan, what I think the government and banks should do is require them to file a proposal explaining how they plan to recoup the cost of their education using real, hard market data. If you want to become a archaeological historian, you need to research what sorts archaeology jobs are in your neighborhood and what they will make.

> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely

There's also the jubilee[1] concept when it comes to debt, property rights and slavery. It's interesting that even in ancient times, both debt and property were recognized as forms of power and control similar to slavery.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)

> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it's the same reason we have bankruptcy laws.

The Catholic Church condemns usury as intrinsically evil because, in the words of Aquinas, usury is to "sell what does not exist". [1]

Aquinas observed that some goods are consumed by their very use, such as food or drink. Allowing someone to use such a good is equivalent to transferring the ownership. You cannot "rent" a sandwich or allow someone to "borrow" a bottle of wine, at least not if they intend to eat or drink it. Once the ownership is transferred, you have no basis to charge for its use.

He argued that money was an example of such a good. The only way to use money is to spend it, and it is consumed by that use. Therefore, loaning money at interest is an attempt to "rent" money that you no longer own, which is unjust.

Today, there is much greater access to profitable investment opportunities. It is even possible to obtain a guaranteed rate of return on money through CDs and GICs. It is therefore licit to reflect this in the "price" of money that is lent, but this is not usury. The Church cannot change her definitive teachings of faith and morals; usury has always been and will always be a grave sin. [2]

[1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3078.htm

[2] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15235c.htm

> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely;

It's sad that most cultures understood the danger and fragility that debt brings, and yet we've all somehow how forgotten it. We even have terms like "good debt".

That colleges still get to win when their students graduate into economic destitution is a moral hazard of American society that we will inevitably look back upon as a great stain on history. I think a lot of people agree there. While I don't argue it would solve the entirety of the problem, I think a great first step would be to change the financial product itself. The code academy's tuition deferment until employment model seems a lot more sane than what we currently have. If every educational institution had to take this approach, would we still see the same kind of bureaucratic overreach, feudal approach to tenure, and debt slavery that we currently see? I'd love to know.

While I think things could be a lot better, I like how college loans work over here in The Netherlands.

Regardless of whether they're a 'golden ticket' or not (times are changing?), the student loan is something one doesn't have to worry about too much. Not only is/was a big part of it considered a 'gift' (up to half when I was studying, depending on my parents' income), but the entirety of the loan left over is low-interest and has no real demands.

Basically, you're asked to pay off x amount per month based on the total loan, but if x amount exceeds 10% percent of your income, you can ask to pay (potentially much) less. If you don't make any money, you pay off nothing.

My income is rather irregular, but for close to a decade I've been paying off the amount suggested. It's partly laziness, and partly a desire to be a good citizen that makes me not bother to ask to pay less based on my income. Anecdotally I know many people like myself who basically pay more back than they strictly have to.

All in all I suspect the system not only works well, but ultimately is a net benefit to the entire country. A well-educated individual over here makes 10x times that of a low-wage workers, and the taxes are significantly higher too. While it could take 20+ years to pay off the student debt, much of it is probably paid off in increased taxes in the interim.

Also I imagine the student debt not being a sword of damocles has a not insignificant effect on our general state of wellbeing and a reduced number of heart attacks, burnouts, and the like.

I appreciate this perspective. So many people have no sympathy towards young people, who have been told their whole life that college is the path success.

> Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery.

Well yeah, because us "adults" don't wanna pay the state and local taxes necessary to keep public universities affordable.

> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it's the same reason we have bankruptcy laws.

I don't think the case has been made for this, unless the reason is "things started that way and developed from there", with "that way" and "there" referring to two different things in the two different examples.

Brotherhood of Kings has an interesting discussion of an ancient Mesopotamian moneylender, whose documents are preserved today. He became very rich by making loans without charging interest.

It worked because if you defaulted on a loan, the moneylender took title to everything you owned. This could be worth more than the value of the loan. (Indeed, for moneylending to be profitable on these terms, you must be able to recover more than the value of the loan.)

So the system at the time didn't charge interest, but it would have completely fallen apart if it had also allowed for bankruptcy.

That's because it is a ticket to the good life if you are of average intelligence, average ability, average connections, and average parents. Or, more specifically, it is a ticket to a less bad life.

Not everyone can go into trades. Not everyone should go into trades. If you are an average person, and you're not working trades, and you don't have a college degree, you're going to be capped out at waiting tables and flipping burgers.

At least these masters-degree holders can apply for crappy low-end office jobs. You actually get evenings and weekends off with most of those, and you're unlikely to get a chef screaming at you while you're holding a pot of hot oil.

Personally still owing some debt(that was pretty much wasted since I didn't finish school, my own fault) debt was handed out easily/same with credit cards. I think it's a great opportunity if you use it right(follow through in my case). I didn't understand money though at that time, wasted it/killed my credit score. I was lucky though I have federal loans and they do a pay as you earn type plan where you can pay nothing if you don't make enough granted it still builds interest. Overall my debts aren't bad since I had some grants/went into engineering/physics not a doctor or lawyer. I at least made it into software so if my life continues to pan out I will get out of debt within two years at best.

But yeah, at that time though(in school) I was really scared because I was not doing well in school and I was like "how will I pay this back"...

I have this evolving metaphor of the US as a financially overextended household or business.

We've lived large since WWII. Bought new cars every few years, built the suburbs, provided quality education to a lot of people, etc. Is it all that surprising that people want to "go back" to this? For many people in the US, it was GREAT.

But it's all been at great cost. The '60s through the '90s were a time of huge debt accumulation at every level of society, from the US Treasury borrowing, to state and local governments underfunding their pensions, even down to households, with ballooning credit card balances and ever-greater levels of mortgage debt.

Now we get to pay for it. Partly that means higher taxes, so we can finally properly fund social security and medicare, and repay the literal trillions of dollars we just borrowed in the past few weeks. Partly taking better care of the environment, which let's be honest, is going to cost a ton of money.

It also means some hard choices about what we aren't going to pay for anymore. An entitlement that one should be able to study pretty much anything, for four years, with world-class experts, as a national birthright -- maybe something we can't afford? In my view, we need to start being a bit -- not a lot, just a little more -- economic and practical in how we think about education. Maybe night school or Khan Academy is a better place to study medieval history, or divinity, or any number of wholesome, life-enhancing subjects, than a four-year liberal arts college. Maybe more people should think a little harder about how their investments -- let's face it, that's what they are -- into education, will transform into marketable skills. And maybe the government should stop subsidizing all this, so that colleges will trim down what it costs so that it's actually affordable.

We can fix this, it's just going to take a while, and a lot of long, slow, not particularly newsworthy or sexy, adjustments.

Or just fix the incredibly high fees. In many European countries (not the UK) public education is incredibly affordable, in some like Germany and Denmark even free. It's a choice to make fees so high, it's not really necessary for the product. What do US universities spend their money on? Admin, sport stadiums and famous professors that then barely teach because what makes them famous is their research.

You'd go cheaper traveling to Europe, studying for three years at a German or Danish university, learning the language as a bonus, and come back afterwards with no debt. Some even have English courses.

>All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan. They were at some period of time, which allowed colleges intentionally bankrupt students and get paid by the government. Universities and colleges are cancer of education, we have opportunity to naturally get rid of them, at least in their current form.

> Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life".

That's called "marketing".

> Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life"

It is still true, based on statistics of college graduate vs non-college graduates, that going to college brings much better odds in your favor to get a "good life". As usual, it's about odds, nothing is guaranteed in life.

The thing that gets me, is why can’t that student loan be tax deducted?

If I pay $20k in taxes, then take that money to pay off the student loan first.

I don’t care about tax revenue to the government. And the federal government has the power to just print new money to pay off all their old debts anyways, like they are doing now, so they don’t really need my tax money.

> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.

Because if that was the case no one would lend them money, and there wouldn't be any student loans.

Also there is a repayment system where you only are required to pay a percentage of your income above the poverty line..

those loans shouldn't be allowed in the first place. There should be some kind of cap on the loans in the first place. Perhaps, create a ceiling of something manageable say 5k. At that point, colleges will have no choice but to start cutting costs and make college more affordable.

> This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system.

I think the shameful thing is how college is such a waste of time for most folks. I think the money would be better spent traveling and learning on your own for a small fraction of the cost.

Why do so many people need to go to college? Especially before they even know what life is really like. Couldn't they work a year or two and then decide to go to college?

> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy

That'll just make loans even more expensive for everyone else.

no need for lobbying, apparently:

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/797330613/myth-busted-turns-o...

This is a 15 year experiment signed by gw jr. and cheerleaded by biden. It is debt slavery to turn college kids into conservatives. On the other eND of the spectrum was no child left behind to makes kids dumber and conservative. Trump is a direct result.

One party stood vehemently, unmoving, in 2005 to change the law in order to make it more difficult for student loans to be subject to bankruptcy, based on false pretences. And quite literally no one cared. There's no political will to make student loans more easily dischargeable, even merely repealing the 2005 law. Just like there's no political will to consider education a right, let alone higher education. In the U.S. education is a product you buy, rich people get more and better versions of it.

But as it turns out, an infinitesimal number of students even try to have these loans discharged.

For the average college graduate, college is still a pretty good investment. I could write lots of comments about people without a college degree that live crappy lives and have trouble finding good paying jobs, and people with college degrees that live well and make a lot of money.

My prediction is that we'll see changes in the US system. The problem you're pointing out is the risk. Universities are the ones that IMO should be taking on the risk. If you graduate 3000 students a year, most will do okay and some won't, and that would be no big deal if college cost $800 a year. I predict that over the next couple decades we'll move to a system where you pay for college out of your earnings.

This would clean up another issue (not pointing any fingers with this). Colleges would nudge students into careers with better prospects. If they'd get paid less from students in certain majors, there'd be fewer of those majors. I could even see a system where "you're on your own" if you major in certain limited prospect fields. Universities that align their interests with those of the students will be the ones that thrive.

Disclosure: Professor for many years

>For the average college graduate, college is still a pretty good investment

Evidence doesn't seem to bear this out.

"The college income premium—the extra income earned by a family headed by a college graduate over an otherwise similar family without a bachelor’s degree—remains positive but has declined for recent graduates. The college wealth premium (extra wealth) has declined more noticeably among all cohorts born after 1940. Among non-Hispanic white family heads born in the 1980s, the college wealth premium is at a historic low; among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero [emphasis added]. Using variables available for the first time in the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that controlling for the education of one’s parents reduces our estimates of college and postgraduate income and wealth premiums by 8 to 18 percent. Controlling also for measures of a respondent’s financial acumen—which may be partly innate—, our estimates of the value added by college and a postgraduate degree fall by 30 to 60 percent. Taken together, our results suggest that college and post-graduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment. We explore a variety of explanations and conclude that falling college wealth premiums may be due to the luck of when you were born, financial liberalization and the rising cost of higher education."

particularly noteworthy: "[...]among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero[...]"

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/is...

No college is going to advocate for taking future income from students over government backed loans or a traditional loan. The former translates to less immediate income. Colleges had little reason to raise tuition since 2000 except for money, I don't see them suddenly moving to forward-thinking strategies.

It's hard to pick an economically viable major. There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition. People tend to think Science = STEM = Guaranteed Job, but that is not the case. Lots of sciences don't make much money, especially the ones driven by passion. Others are highly geographically dependent, so mining engineers might have a median salary of $80k after five years, but 80% of those people live in a handful of rural states.

Also, a lot can change in the four to seven years it takes to complete school. A recession can drive a large of people into "safe" majors, like accounting, making it more difficult for new graduates to onboard. And other fields can shrink or disappear almost entirely within that time period.

That being said, these people didn't have to settle for serving drinks in a bar. They could have searched employment in tangentially-related fields or learned some more technical skills. They could have also relocated. Maybe those were not options for whatever reason, but in general, those are things successful people do. Because the job market is going to change wildly during the 40+ years you'll be employed.

One way in the US to help pick an economically viable major is to use the BLS Occupational Outlook...

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/mobile/home.htm

It gives estimates of salary and future demand for pretty much all occupations. Recommend this to your children to help them understand how their major selection could impact their future career.

You make it sound more complicated than it is.

Good grades and a degree in Math/CS/Statistics/Physics/Engineering (or Business/Finance/Economics in a top uni) = high paying job.

Life sciences pay much less unless you are ready to pursue a PhD or MD, in such case the numbers are somewhat comparable.

A person who pursued biochemistry bachelor as a terminal degree or studied English literature has all information to know the opportunity costs of their decisions.

That being said, these people didn't have to settle for serving drinks in a bar.

I'm familiar with a certain materials science startup in England that lost out on a round of funding in the dotcom bust and went bankrupt soon after. The chief chemist, a very capable man, went back to his native country in the Former Eastern Bloc and worked in a shipyard for a couple of years. It was that bad.

Colleges should not even offer loans for non-viable majors.

Picking a major should not be like Indiana Jones picking which grail to drink from.

>There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition

That may be the case, but speaking as a recent young person, the vast majority of college students I met did no actual research regarding the employability of their majors.

It's also a disservice to group soft and hard sciences together under STEM - because you end up with millions of children who can't hack it in math, but they hear that psychology or sociology are STEM and therefore a meal ticket, and end up taking out loans for a worthless degree simply because they had it drilled in their heads that they needed to go to college and major in something "useful".

College, and the push to send everyone to it, makes much more sense when you view College as both an economic proposition, and a part of social class.

The economic aspect has been well covered here, but the social class has not. Social classes are a set of shared values, habits, and beliefs that help cluster people together into a sense of shared social membership. It is completely distinct from economic class, with some of the “lower” classes regularly having more income and net worth than the “upper” social classes.

In America, a large portion of the push to send everyone to college has been a push for the supremacy of middle class norms and values over working class norms and values via college. College is literally an indoctrination process into the middle social class, it’s where you learn the norms and values of that class and socialize exclusively with other members of said class.

As you’ve discovered, social class and economic class are not one and the same, and you yourself as a member of the working class actually make significantly more money than members of the middle class who went to college but did not reap any economic benefits from the process.

Reminds me of this other reference [1] to college being finishing school for the upper classes

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/

our bartender Javon had a masters in biology

That's de-risking, de-skilling and outsourcing. Back then, in the last century, the US and Europe had a functioning chemical industry. Unfortunately, information technology took off, and investment banking discovered that returns are better with Facebook than in Pharma, consequently that's where the jobs are now. Also, mergers & acquisitions took off in the same time. Why invest in research when you can buy up someone else's research? Industry research does not exist any longer in the sciences. The sciences are not a good proposition any longer if you want to make a living.

You don't have to create and improve in a world you have little to no competition with high barrier to entry established. You can keep repackaging the same things without risk and work on perceptive value of people.

Why innovate and create when I can live like a king just playing our economic, governmental, and social systems like a fiddle? We're not quite that bad yet but we're already headed down the path in that direction.

> investment banking discovered that returns are better with Facebook than in Pharma, consequently that's where the jobs are now.

Considering how many drugs are basically miracles of statistics rather than science: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/7950612/Five-out-of-...

The financialization of the economy is more a US/UK thing than the rest of Europe.

Lots of chemical industry here, etc.

Yep, financialisation black hole. Cratering living standards, partially hidden by printing ever bigger numbers next to people's house prices and ignoring that they have no retirement savings.

Many of the "industries" beloved by this site are showing they are only viable on top of a backbone of "real" jobs like industry and manufacturing.

No N95 mask manufacturers, but we can write how sad we are about this on facebook. And the media won't tell us the root cause, so nothing is learned.

I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining.

This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has been a consistent secret weapon of mine: they're often written off as unproductive, but it's not difficult to turn someone that smart into a solid engineer with a few months of guidance, as long as they're willing to learn. In specific domains, a subset of their actual skills are a good fit (they tend to be great at math), but it just signifies an unfortunate and fairly significant misallocation of resources.

Physics PhD student here. Yeah, we're all playing the lottery for the dream of a life studying the universe.

It's the exact analogue of how serious student athletes throw away their whole undergrad education for a shot at a pro career, usually to end up injured and useless a couple years later.

Most STEM PhDs (and especially in the hard sciences) are funded from mostly government sources. It’s seen as the country making an investment in top talent.

Nobody (who is any good) in the USA pays money for a STEM PhD. You get paid to do these degrees, albeit not a lot but a lot better than paying yourself!

"AV" being audio/visual, anti-virus, else?

PhDs though are never self-funded, so almost entirely the loan is from undergrad.

I'm a physics grad student finishing up a PhD, would you have some time/be willing to chat about industry jobs? Email is in bio.

I guess Javon never learned about second order effects in college.

> the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway

You start in the same situation, but with the room for advancement in a skilled field, you have the opportunity to either pursue growth in your role, or leverage those skills into a related but more lucrative career. Avoiding dead ends is much more important than your velocity, assuming you have enough time to let things play out.

I used to tell my friend this and she was positive she'd never earn more than $50K CAD/year, and always said I was overpaid as a developer making ~$70K/year at the time. These days she has advanced far more than I have, and she'll continue to. Even as a developer with no education or particularly special skills, your ceiling in Canada isn't all that high. I'm the epitome of a 1xer though, so I can't speak for everyone. I can earn around $90k, but she's earning $120k now – that only took about 7 years for a 240% increase. Having an education can be a huge asset to your career, and she couldn't have her career without hers.

In addition to just frightening people away from attending college, we could do some real things to make the skilled trades attractive to more people:

1. Real workplace safety laws with real enforcement

2. Better health care

3. Better safety net, including retirement

4. Stronger unions

5. Free continuous retraining

From time to time, I hire tradespeople to work around my house -- roofing, tree service, installing a sliding door, new Internet service, a new furnace, etc. One thing I've noticed is that the guys who are my age -- mid 50's -- are hobbling and broken. Many of them work for smaller businesses, as independent contractors, or in situations where they are conveniently "exempt" from things like health care, unemployment, etc.

At the smaller businesses where they work, regulatory enforcement is probably minimal to nonexistent. I would guess that abuse of wage and overtime laws is probably rampant.

Much of the work is seasonal.

Much of it is at the mercy of the construction cycle.

Many of the trades are in businesses that are largely family owned, which puts non family members at a severe disadvantage at finding jobs and advancing beyond the entry level.

So, don't just cite some anecdotes, or throw starting wages around, but take a deep look into what the working class deals with in the US, and start making changes.

I think this idea that white collar jobs require college is generally wrong.

The core of the issue is that colleges produce degrees instead of people capable of doing specific jobs. If you want education for education's sake this is fine and great. But most of us don't have the money for that and need college to give us the specific skills needed for an in demand job. That's what needs to change, colleges need to prepare people for real jobs. Or be replaced by trade schools for white collar jobs or apprenticeships.

The main problem with apprenticeships is that you have to pay them and they don't produce enough work for their cost in most industries.

I thought getting a degree in computer science was my ticket out of poverty and the lower class blue-collar work that has perpetuated my family for generations.

Boy was I wrong.

Opportunity and pure luck have to be at your back for the kind of generational change I sought. End up on the wrong side of either one of those and you too might not end up where you expect.

Nowadays, I wish I had learned a trade. Sure the work is hard, but those skills are always in demand. Houses will always need electrical or plumbing, but not everybody needs someone who can design an emulator or make an interpreter.

Actual boilermaker here.

Can confirm: earn more than my university educated age group; no education debt; have home and mortgage that I don’t struggle to pay; still have plenty of work during the down turn.

Have often thought about living on rice n lentils n going to university to get a degree, but this whole pandemic mess has made me realise: well and truly fuck that for a joke.

It's all a betting game. Go to trade school and get a decent job making good money but have little upwards mobility other than opening your own business. Or go to university and hope you pick a worthwhile major and get a great job out of school where you have a lot of upward mobility. University is risky but if you can pick something like electrical engineering and end up at a top firm, you are probably set for life. I've got friends with university degrees that have done very well for themselves and those that just couldn't find a job in that field so now they work in retail. Some of them did everything right but just couldn't find high-paying work (computer science), others choose majors that fit their passions but don't have any immediate real world use (english).

I think some people have huge expectations for what their degree will get them that just aren't reasonable. I picked a engineering major that would pay big but also fit my passion, got the job I wanted, and have constant work lined up for me for the next 5 years. I got very lucky at the university betting game. If I hadn't gotten into college or decided to drop out when I had to take an semester off due to grades, I probably would have decided to try trade school.

People aka the New Oil must have skills, not knowledge. This narrative has been coming out of the woodwork recently. Like, lumberjacks over dendrologists all the way.

If we translate this motto from the newspeak, it would be this: the New Oil must flow smoothly without asking uncomfortable questions about the piping.

The other replies are interesting and insightful, so I wanted to add a little anecdata here.

> some massive college bills

In the late 1980s I started a Computer Science program at Cal Poly Pomona https://www.cpp.edu/ If memory serves, my tuition for a quarterly full load was less than $300. That's not per credit, that was for as many classes as I wanted. Books added up to a bit less.

Working at Jack in the Box and later McDonalds, I was making minimum wage which was I believe $4.25/hour. Assuming I kept 70% of that after taxes it took me about 185 hours to pay my combined tuition and books, which comes out to about 19 hours a week over the 10 week quarter.

And I did, in fact, work about 20 hours a week.

This doesn't include housing, but it was also fairly affordable. I believe another 10 hours a week could have covered some basic shared rent. I had a place to live for free, fortunately.

EDIT: I haven't done any math for how this would look today, but I'm pretty sure it's not quite so friendly.

At CSU Long Beach, tuition is about 7k per year. We hire our student assistants at 13/hr, so they can make around 8 or 9k year in salary. Not nearly as cheap when I went, we paid around 2k a year for tuition. So if you are willing to go to a state school, you can come out with relatively small amounts of debt. Now if you go to a really nice private University and live on campus, all bets are off.

In California, at least, it used to be that(still may be, but my data is a couple years old) you could get about 2 years of your prerequisites done at a community college and then use that to funnel into the Cal-State schools.

That was a significantly cheaper option for most students. And the classes tended to be smaller and, often, much better quality.

I saw something similar a couple of decades ago when I was living in Austin and working at a well-known game development house. There was a Chinese restaurant close to the office, a really good one. We ate there all the time, enough to get to know a couple of the waiters pretty well. One of them, a guy by the name of Bruce, was especially friendly and professional. He always remembered us, spoke perfect English, never let our drinks run dry. We'd ask to be seated in Bruce's section when we saw he was working. He always got big tips.

One day he mentioned that he had an MSEE degree from a university back home in China. Cue record scratch.

That was a deeply unsettling revelation, since a couple of us were EE dropouts ourselves. How'd I drop out of school and end up with my dream job, while Bruce finished his master's program and ended up serving Szechuan shrimp? WTF was up with that? What if, in my next life, I'm the one who gets hosed like this?

I didn't wake up the next day with a hangover or anxiety -- not with the ego that it took to run in that crowd -- but I certainly had a new perspective on things. If people think that even a STEM degree is going to be an automatic ticket to ride through the good life, there's some massive disillusionment coming.

And I don't think it's going to matter whether you're from China or the US or anywhere else. Not in the long run.

I don't understand how people can spend 4 years pursuing a major and never spend 5 minutes googling job prospects and salaries for their major.

Thanks for your story. I had a similar moment after college myself. I graduated into the recession of the early 90s, in San Diego, which had been hit very hard by defense cutbacks. Almost everyone I knew worked service jobs, and even those were hard to get at times. The only people getting decent jobs - by which, I mean jobs that build careers, I'm not talking about pay - were engineers and a few finance/accounting related majors. Humanities majors who moved (to Washington DC, New York, to a lesser extent San Francisco or Los Angeles) fared better.

I agree that "STEM" alone won't get you a good job, and some of the bio majors were not doing a whole lot better than the humanities majors. But overall, STEM was a vastly better place to be, especially the more "numeric" fields - by that, I mean the various majors that require the common two year sequence of math from calculus through linear algebra and differential equations as a prerequisite to whatever upper division specialization happens. Even there, some are better than others in terms of jobs, but they all fared vastly better.

Humanities majors from very elite schools tend to weather a recession ok, but otherwise, I think that one advantage to being a STEM major (with the caveat I described above) is that you're less likely to be permanently knocked out of the game by a bad stretch, especially in the beginning. There's a real risk to getting sidelined, and I worry about the young people graduating right now. For instance, my employer has done a hiring moratorium for a year, and there may be layoffs. This, especially if it goes on for a few years, is unusually devastating to the long term career prospects of people just starting out.

My suspicion is that there is a huge difference between graduating as a humanities major in a recession vs boom. If you graduate in better times, you lock in a few good career building years. You may stagnate, you may even be unemployed for long enough that it knocks you off the path for a bit, but you have something to build on. If you graduate when nobody is hiring, and you float around for a few years, by the time things pick up, employers are either hiring the people who have some experience, or going back to recent grads for entry level hiring. That definitely happened to a lot of people I know who graduated in the early 90s in SoCal.

I suspect that humanities majors from very elite colleges, as well as STEM majors in very in demand fields from a broader range of colleges, are less likely to be locked out in a bad market, and more likely to be recruited back in when things improve. This is a bit of a guess, though I think it is supported by some research.

> My suspicion is that there is a huge difference between graduating as a humanities major in a recession vs boom.

Drop the "humanities major"--it's true even for STEM majors as well. There's a pretty consistent career track from college to junior to senior positions, and if you fall off that track, it is quite hard to get back in again. There are very few majors for which demand is high enough to let you get back on the track, certainly not all of STEM.

I felt pretty much the same, during my last post-doc. I had a friend who rebuilt power plant equipment. He got to work on very cool stuff, and he made very good money.

I did a straight chemistry BS and basically a biochemistry PhD, so I remain largely ignorant of the humanities. But I did learn to write clearly (if not artfully) and I learned very well how to learn. In my experience, that's what's most important. Facts get dated quickly, and now they're findable online. But how to learn, that's essential.

But then, this was some decades ago. My BS cost about $20K, and the PhD was "free". Indeed, "worked" as a research assistant during grad school. The salary was very low (albeit tax-free) but it was enough for rent and food.

The topics people learn in US colleges are about identity politics, affirmative action and safe spaces. Since those skills are hard to monetize outside of politics and academic beaurocracy, the same people have a hard time earning their living.

And it's different for me. I came a poor household in India and guess what? I couldn't even afford a good trade school even if I really wanted to.

Most of my education was in government school and later I cleared IIT and studied there for nearly free.

After completion education, I got offer from foreign countries and traveled whole world just by bouncing from one company to another.

Yea, I'd have loved to stay near my family and become a machinist but my family couldn't even afford a "drill press".

Meanwhile, at i had access to do many equipments that I didn't even know about for free at my institute.

What is the job you do where somebody thinks you make flowers?

Botanist

Nimbius, the way that you write is remarkably effective. Makes me want to crack open my old Steinbeck novels. Please keep writing.

it goes further up. Luckily I was an only child to a single-worker-family midlevel government employee that rode the interest cliff and was willing to spend gobs of money for my (quite good) college, and I went for a technical grad program that pays you sub-minimum-wage (but no educational debt!) to do 100 hours a week in a lab for seven years, so I had no debt -- but I quit my postdoc to drive for lyft for a year and a half, and I made more money and had less stress driving for lyft (yes, after expenses) than I did in my postdoc. Everyone thought I was crazy. Well, maybe I was, but I wasn't the only postdoc that had quit and was driving for lyft full-time.

Thanks for sharing. Out of curiosity, how did you wind up on Hacker News?

What is happening with this make for movie story ^ So much here ^ :D

You write very well, it flows in a way that reminds me of Bukowski.

your comment reads like bukowski

was just going to say—I'd read your book.

It may pay the same but building experience today would net him a better job in the future.

the reason those people can't get jobs isn't because they're not smart. It's because there simply aren't enough jobs that require that, and waaaayyy too many people running around with that education and those degrees.

I love this anecdote.

I enjoyed your writing style. Thank you.

While I do not want to be rude, statistically speaking, those with tertiary education still do better on average than those without. It's true that there's outliers and that underemployment is a persistent problem (especially in our over-educated society), but getting tertiary education might still be a better choice than a trade school, depending on your situation.

Nothing is without risk and you should inform yourself about your job prospects beforehand though. Not every major will pay and some will only pay to a select few. One should put much thought into major choice (or whether they should go to university at all) - it's one of the more impactful choices in people's lives.

I wish I could be more sympathetic to the college industrial complex, but they've been treat us poorly for years. Yes, I know it's our fault for demanding gold plated educational experiences and then going into crazy debt to finance it. But who wants to blame himself/herself?

The job can be done better for much less. Indeed, it used to be much cheaper in the past when the dorms weren't so fancy and there were a bazillion deans waltzing around trying to look essential. The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let's give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans and we'll get back to something sustainable and affordable.

>The job can be done better for much less.

First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't work for some people, but charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd.

Education needs to acknowledge a couple things. 1) Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic. That's an overstatement, and a more documentary style edit of the best lectures is more realistic. The point is, there should be a collaborative way for lecturers around the country to contribute to a shared curriculum, and a group of people editing out redundancy. The amount of people in the country delivering roughly the same speeches is astounding. An open and shared processes for editing would allow for competing edits to exist simultaneously, a la forks and branches. 2) School needs to flip a bit and focus on the parts that need more individual attention. Discussions, Labs etc. Using physical space limitations in lecturers to create scarcity benefits only the schools. Anybody who has been in a 300 person lecture knows how little question and answer interaction there is with most professors, during the lecture. 3) a large portion of the value of school is networking. who you meet, who your environment is and who you absorb. is that the actual thing being sold, elitism? how do you fix that, when the product being sold is club membership under the guise of education? it's a way to manufacture class/caste divides there otherwise wouldnt be, or that would be even more nepotistic. its very much a "i had to do it to get in the club, so the next generation should too."

tldr: "school" is an artificially scarce elite caste membership. just because you pay the membership fee, doesnt mean you actually make the club, but getting in the lobby is a prereq to full membership. make school about education.

I remember when MIT first started publishing their lectures online. I would watch them for my chemistry and physics classes and was astounded by the fact that the lectures were basically identical. Ivy league schools had this mystique around them and I always wondered what it would be like to be there instead of a community college. Turns out, the difference is absolutely not in the lectures or tests. At least, for freshman-level courses.

I think we are slowly getting here though. The number of credible online degree programs has exploded in recent years. Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business.

> Charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd.

I went to a small college where most lectures had fewer than ~20 students (if that), so I realize this doesn't scale as well to 100-person lecture halls.

But, I got a lot out of the interaction in my college lectures. I almost always sat in the front† where it was easy to ask and answer questions, which I did a lot. Less obviously, professors could and did react to my facial expressions of confusion/understanding/curiosity as they went. Well, I don't know that it was specifically my facial expressions, but there was definitely an interaction going on between us even when only the professor was speaking.

I can't say if that's worth the inefficiency of small-ish, in-person classes, but it certainly helped me.

---

† College: the one place where the best seats are also the easiest to get. Fine by me—I took advantage.

I've spent a fair amount of time and energy working and researching in this area. I'd agree with most of what you are saying. To point #1 I worked on a project that had almost the exact same design you mention (collaborate, git versioned edits of learning modules, etc.) - the biggest problem is the mounds and mounds of red tape and regulation that stifle any truly innovative solution. There are some movements for high school materials that are tackling parts of the problem (see: https://www.ck12.org/student/, https://www.khanacademy.org/), but it definitely needs to be on a much larger and national scale and extended to universities. I think, most all undergraduate courses could be done this way. If someone with enough leverage could ever push it through it would virtually completely remove textbook, materials, and lecture costs from the system and if done right, provide a treasure store of knowledge.

To #2 This is already a technique in education research its called flipped classrooms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom).

To #3, I'm sure there are organizational structures you could implement that would augment every students network - there's a lot of stuff from management science you could try out.

Overall though I found it extremely frustrating trying to innovate in education because you really need to be able to implement radical changes but there are so many regulations at every level that you have to creep forward, hoping for minor incremental improvements when what you need is complete system overhauls. This was extremely frustrating for me.

Collage is not expensive due to lectures because they don’t actually cost that much.

Let’s say your average class size is 20 people at a good school and a professor costs the school 200k including benefits per year. Assuming a student takes 18 credit hours and a teacher teaches 12 credit hours that balances out to ~15k per year. But, more than 2/3 of what a teacher spends their time on is outside the lecture such as grading assignments etc. So, removing lectures only saves ~5k per year.

Sure the physical room adds a little, but the average teacher is also far less expensive at most schools.

> Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Let's assume that there is one "best" lecture for a given topic. I think then effort could be spent with smaller study groups where students can have direct access to people who can help them understand the concepts. There is little reason to have so many other different takes unless they add to the universal body of knowledge.

>> The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let's give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans

This is where the education industry can learn from the law schools. They are certainly ivory towers, but part of that tradition is that law school deans still ussually teach. My first year contracts prof was also the school dean. Law school deans remain largely 'first among many' rather than a separate profession, the 'professional administrators'.

Law schools are the worst offenders in the education industry. Only a small percentage of law students end up at big law where the salaries can support the debt load, but almost everyone leaves law school with a mountain of debt.

> part of that tradition is that law school deans still ussually teach

At my Uni, the administrators taught bullshit courses on personal development et cetera.

Law schools have a unique culture. Teaching requirements are a product of their "first among equals" attitude, not a cause. Porting the mechanism without the culture is unlikely to solve the problem.

What I dont understand about US law school is that you can't start directly as your first degree like every other country.

Agreed, sadly the demand is still there. It's so easy to get huge loans and as a result, there is no downward pressure on price. My tiny college had 5 full-time staff for "residence life", plus a dean of that department. Totally unnecessary.

The problem is the loans. I have a funny feeling if loans were capped at say, 10k/year, colleges might all the sudden charge 11k/year to attend instead of 30k...

My anctedot... My daughter at college has three academic advisors; a general advisor, honors advisor, and her chosen major advisor. Geeesh.

How exactly is it "so easy to get huge loans" for college? My kid needs that, but we see only $5500 available for the first year.

Did you instead mean loans that the parent takes on, perhaps as cosigner?

I'm seeing nothing beyond $5500 that can be obtained by a student.

How many students? As residence is basically a hotel with 4000-10,000 students, so 6 people seems low if anything.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how 15K+ in tuition a year is acceptable.

No sympathy here for the college industry.

> I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how 15K+ in tuition a year is acceptable.

I believe people who support such things think as follows:

1. $15k a year tuition for 4 years is a great deal if it turns you into a banker or programmer with a $150,000 a year salary and a 40-year career. Indeed, it would be unjust for a garbage man's taxes to be paying for a stockbroker's education.

2. Majoring in poetry might not be such a clearly great decision, but if you're on the left politically, banning poetry is anti-intellectual; and if you're on the right market demand is its own justification.

> I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how 15K+ in tuition a year is acceptable.

My town currently spends about $12,635 per pupil for public schools. Other towns in the state spend over $20k. Compared to that, $15k tuition seems right in line.

There’s a bit of a rat race in colleges posturing to get ahead of each other always, and that takes capital investment and the recourse to raise funds ends up being tuition.

These things and reputations take years and tons of willpower and planning, so the risk of falling behind is immense.

Gotta pay for those basketball and football programs somehow. (Yes, SOME athletics programs are net positive - most are not)

$15k/yr is not expensive. That's about the same as K-12. Most schools are $30-$60k/yr

15k in just tuition does not seem outrageous. Suppose a year is 30 weeks, and you spend 10 hours a week in classes (not even counting the other benefits that college/a college campus may offer), thats about 50 dollars/hr you're spending for lecture. For some classes/fields it's clearly a much better deal. But 40k+ in tuition? Yea agreed, that's pretty outrageous.

$15k is a great price, must private universities are far more than that. And public state universities, if you are paying out of state tuition.

maybe the dept of education should stipulate that 80% of college operating budgets be direct teaching/research costs, lest their fed loan largess be taken away. and progressively tax endowments, particularly targeting above a threshold of $100K/student or something like that.

currently, the incentives are such that greedy people can just milk all the unrestrained cash flow coming into what should be a non-profit-oriented institution.

Honestly, those endowments are part of why some schools like my alma mater are able to offer a no-loan commitment for need-based aid. Now, those calculations are still awfully rough on many middle class families, they tend to overestimate family contributions, but they're still really helpful for a lot of students.

Which of these expenses do you think they should eliminate?

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...

If you want a book that will further erode sympathy towards colleges, try Paying For the Party https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz...

No, it's led by the other end.

Funding is created for college places. Enough to "educate" 30% of people. People start to go.

Employers for very basic jobs notice that 50% of applicants have degrees. They stipulate on their next job advertisement "degree required".

The bar has been raised. You now cannot get an interview without a degree in many jobs.

You have to get a degree. The financiers start to loan more and more for this now essential ticket.

Universities start charging more. Student's entire working lives are financialised, as the debt will take a lifetime to repay.

University is not set by the cost to deliver, it's set by the available credit.

Same for housing.

But hey keep on focusing on your "right to free speech" that every single other nation has but without a brutal police force that Europeans look upon with horror.

A couple of points: not all colleges are created the same. Many state schools, particularly top-tier ones offer fantastic educations at an excellent price-point. They are a good value, and will remain so. Along with need-based aid and scholarships, they are amazing vehicles to reduce generational inequality (look at UCLA for example). I can only speak to the engineering (not software) side of things, but from lab work to project-based design classes, I gained skills, knowledge and experience from well-trained instructors in a way that I think would be very difficult to begin to replicate in a remote experience.

Many, if not most students, can't learn effectively by themselves through online videos alone. Structure, assessments and regular interaction with teaching staff have real, measurable value.

Finally, the social networks that universities provide students and alumni are valuable. We're social beings. These networks open students to possibilities and careers they may not have considered. Of course, there are negatives to this as well.

Universities remain economic engines, particularly across wide swaths of semi-rural parts of the country. They create dynamic flows of people, ideas and capital that are undeniably important.

I would personally consider the education I received in UC Berkeley when I was there studying CS, excellent. It was very challenging (in a way, it's impossible to exaggerate this), I found tons of help from TAs, my peers, professors were experts in their fields, labs were very useful to make me experience "real life" stuff and discussions were very useful to learn "theory" side of things, both of these occurring in the same class. I had a lot of research opportunities, and "hand-on" engineering opportunities.

The only problem I can think of right now, it was occasionally hard to get the class you want; but with a few strategies it was manageable to get all the classes you want.

I hear a lot of people who criticize college being "4 years of fun". I don't doubt this is the case for most people, but this cannot be further than my own experience (and my friends in Berkeley who studied some STEM field). When you have endless stream of homeworks, projects, midterms and often-times you need to make decisions so that you minimize the penalty you can get by spending too little time on a HW (as opposed to maximizing your grade), there was simply not enough time to socialize. Obviously there were many people who socialized and partied but their GPAs were low. Also obviously, there were people who socialized and partied also had high grades, but they were very brilliant and were probably 0.1% of the class. Most of us mere mortal souls spent weeks in library studying and perfecting ourselves.

We can have endless discussions about importance (or lack thereof) universities, but given the correct setting, and correct motivation, they can be incredibly good tools.

When I came to Berkeley my family was piss poor and I was a 1st generation college student. Fast-forward 3 years (I graduated in 3 years as opposed to 4) I found a 6 figure job doing what I love every day, programming. I think that's a very good deal.

Controversial claim ahead: I think this discussion about universities' importance is uniquely American. I think we're simply discussing the wrong thing. Instead of questioning whether college is important for X, Y, we should be discussing how we can make every single American go to college. Yes this would mean having public universities where Americans can go without any cost, European style.

I just don't agree we should be discussing how every American can go to college.

I am a drop out. I really had no business ever going to college in the first place.

I love what I do now but I had to figure things out on my own.

Free college would have just been more free party time for me. You can run it a 1000 times and every time I am partying.

What we need to do is make sure people like you don't put off college because it becomes too pricey.

I also think I would have figured things out sooner if I would not have been pushed so hard by all these signals as a young man that college was a given.

> I think we're simply discussing the wrong thing. Instead of questioning whether college is important for X, Y, we should be discussing how we can make every single American go to college.

Or we could help most people learn valuable skills in their first 13 years of schooling, so the only people who need/want to go to college are those who will actually benefit.

I saw a submission in /newest last night about how one of the actual purposes of American K-12 education is 'childcare': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23027408

"Like pretty much every everything about schooling in the US ever, it assumes that what schools do – and all that schools do – is educate. [...] The fact of the matter is our primary school system is state-subsidized childcare for the vast majority of parents who cannot afford to raise their own children in our ghastly economy. That's been the case for the last 40-plus years. This isn't new, and if it's news to you, o reader, it's only because nobody much in the US has wanted to admit this evidence of the US economy being terrifyingly more broken than we Americans are prepared to confront."

While I appreciate that public schools are supposed to serve the interests of the public, the standard factory school model isn't doing anyone any favors.

The United States' College/University system is a much more valuable institution than the K-12 as commonly exists today.

The only reform really needed for K-12 is to transform it into an institution that exists to help children figure out what they're good at, and provide the resources to help them learn what they want to learn.

That sounds like masochism. I went to a decent public school, worked hard sometimes, partied whenever, and yet I work for the same kind of company as you. A good 25% of my class ended up the same way.

If your goal is to make money, then I don't think hard work matters nearly as much as figuring out the social aspect of how to fit in with working professionals.

That's true. My point was college isn't necessarily 4 years of chilling and partying for everyone, which is weirdly how everyone I talk about seems to frame this debate. Some of my elders don't even believe college wasn't 7/24 frat parties, ideological indoctrination and protesting.

EDIT: Also, to be clear, masochism was part of the problem. In college I thought I wanted to be a professor so I was working hard for grad school so I can get into a good PhD program. I was also doing a lot of research. Then I realized I liked being an engineer, and I don't have money to go to PhD. I DEFINITELY didn't need a near 4.0 GPA and taking ALL the hardest CS/engineering/math classes to get a six figures job.

I agree, as a Tier-1 dev. I went to a Tier-1 university and wouldn’t discount universities in Tiers 1-2 for the research, lectures, and resources they provide, in addition to the serendipitous environment where you will bump into other top-talent people.

Below Tier 2 I would support online learning to an extent, but having regular lectures and group work is important to keep an 18 year old on track. Universities need to instead cut superfluous spending on sports programs, new buildings, and layers of administration.

This would only solidify the strangle,hold, tier 1 colleges have on education and job outcomes

> the social networks that universities provide students and alumni are valuable

Colleges say this, but does anybody ever really find it to be the case? I suppose if you went to Harvard or Princeton this might be true, but as a representative of the other 90%, I've never interacted with anybody I went to school with (including a year abroad, a four-year degree, and a master's degree) in any way.

===== UNIVERSITY AND ITS SOCIAL BENEFIT: my experience ======

I'm a Dutch person who went to both universities in Amsterdam.

I know people who now work at:

- McKinsey

- Google

- Adyen (not anymore)

- The Dutch television

- The biggest Dutch bank

Don't get me wrong. It's hard to get a job that I want, because apparently I can't get a job at those great companies (prepping hardcore for Google at the moment, so who knows). And I'm not utilizing my network in the right way. But I do get to get a glimpse inside some of them.

Besides that, I have met a person who helped me a shit ton financially, spiritually and intellectually. I've done the same for him (though less financially, unfortunately, but if the roles were reversed, I'd have done what he did). While he never went to a big name company, it definitely helped (more than anything else really).

Did I count on it? No. Did I meet him during the first day of uni? Actually, seven days prior to the first day of uni (1 week non-stop partying first).

So there's that.

===== THE UNIVERSITY EXPERIENCE =====

Also, I've experienced more or less everything a university has to offer, doing 2 bachelors and 2 masters + extracurriculars + student societies help with that.

In a big way it did mature me a lot. I was different than most though, in the sense that I always did multiple studies and things at once. I wasn't beholdened to one "student identity". I was never a psychology or CS student, I was always both or more.

In all fairness, high school was simply a prison. University felt more like a city, anything was possible. And more or less everything did come true.

Here's a small selection:

- Horrible education

- The best spiritual lessons that any other person could ever teach me. The course was called: meditation and psychology, and it was a 75:25 mix of theology (Buddhism during the centuries, emphasizing meditation) and psychology/cognitive science of meditation. Before this course I had issues with meditation. After this course, I knew how to deal with all of them despite that they were never directly addressed.

- The most epic parties,

- And some pretty boring ones

- Easy yet super interesting lessons, one was about the supply chain of a video game

- Hard lessons that weren't useful and simply wasted time

- Education that made me believe I was too stupid, only to persevere and realize that, to my surprise, there is no such thing. There is only perserverance, for my situation anyway. That was really empowering. What's currently less empowering is that potential employees don't seem to understand this.

- Fickle friendships

- Deep friendships

- Shallow loves

- 3+ year relationships

- Lots of wasted opportunity costs

- Amazing synergies that proppeled my education and job prospects (currently definitely not though)

Don't get me started on my 5 theses. To close, it was everything: epic, painful, mundane, joyful, sad, enriching, numbing, stimulating. I can keep on going, I'll stop.

-----------------

For anyone who's interested, here's how they went:

- One master thesis was written in a weekend, published nominated for best paper award.

- Another master thesis took 6 months and completely failed (I'm not the best at qualitative research)

- My computer science thesis was the culmination of all my theses and it showed. It took a bit longer than normal and I had an attitude with academic references across the whole spectrum of science and philosophy (not that I know that much, I'm simply more T-shaped than most academics)

- One bachelor thesis that was absolute horrible to do, we were basically unpaid labor. I wrote the thesis itself in 5 days, and was done with it.

- My first bachelor thesis, that was an absolute blessing. In hindsight: a perfect thesis experience. It took 3 months (as it should) and I got an amazing result (I analyzed 12 million tweets and hypothesized that 70% to 95% must be positive, I was right with 84.5%). The algorithm was simple but benchmarked very well against sophisticated ones. It was awesome.

I think it's time to decouple education from all of the other things tied to colleges. When I studied abroad in Australia, things like the gym or meal plans were available, but not "bundled in" to your tuition. The idea of tying competitive sports teams to a university would be laughable.

We need to remove all of the "excess" stuff from higher education and get back to the core of education and research. Sure, things like football might be net profitable (for some schools), but lacrosse, baseball, swimming, gymnastics and all of that are not and students shouldn't be paying for that.

This is essential. The state university my partner attended and worked at became, over the years, more similar to a theme park or all-inclusive resort than an educational institution. They were involved in everything from student banking, fast-food franchises, high-end gyms, suites instead of dorms, and on it went. Not saying these things have no place, just that it shouldn't be part of the university.

There are schools without all those things. They are just not the ones students choose to attend.

And that's the problem. Malcolm Gladwell has a great podcast about this focusing on Bowdoin college. Bowdoin (apparently) spends a lot of money on luxuries like great food for the dorms, etc.

As a result, the rich kids who can afford it naturally prefer to go to Bowdoin. Now, the school becomes more prestigious because of the rich kids... it's a place to go to meet other rich kids, which builds valuable connections that ultimately help your career. Meanwhile, schools that prioritize financial aid over things like gyms and food go down in the rankings and become less desirable.

Now, this is all fair game in my opinion. The schools are basically turning into country clubs of a sort and I think country clubs have a right to exist in America. BUT... I don't want to see them subsidized by the rest of us. If you are a school and you want to receive state/federal money directly or via student loans and you want to maintain your non-profit status... scale down the amenities.

At the very least, I don't want tax breaks going to subsidize (mostly) rich kids' gyms.

No, especially not football. At my college the football team is essentially a separate corporation. The college gets nothing from the arrangement. In fact they have to rent parking from the football folk.

Fat deal were made to coaches over the years, until its all pork-barrel dealing and nothing left for the school. The students can't even go to games, the ticket prices are a semester's tuition.

Pre-1990 I read this quote from a college president: "College administration boils down to sex for the students, football for the alumni, and parking for the faculty."

The great Clark Kerr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Kerr

Given the similarity of your description to my own alma mater, I can virtually guarantee that that football program is self-sufficient, and probably raises your university's profile. They couldn't charge that much for tickets otherwise. So I don't really see the harm.

I've volunteered at a summer youth leadership camp held at a local state university since 1998. In the last 10 years the host university has undertaken massive construction of more "luxury appointed" dorms, recreational complexes, a huge basketball arena, and upscale dining halls. The justification was that it was necessary to do these things to compete with other colleges. I can't say that I've followed the cost of their tuition and fees, but given the amount of money spent on construction I can't imagine the curve is flat.

Students will actually pay for those things though and they are willing to pay a premium.

My alma mater is concerned about having to run online classes next semester as they usually pay for many of the costs with the residence money...

I won't dispute that students will pay. I think it is predatory, though, on the part of the colleges.

I'd argue students, by and large, don't have the maturity to make such consequential financial decisions (taking on loans representing multiple years of their future gross income that can't be discharged in bankruptcy). The average young person just hasn't had the duration of life experience to think on a 10+ year horizon. (Arguably a shortcoming of humanity in general.)

While we’re eliminating non-revenue sports teams can we also drop theater groups, singing groups and school newspapers.

I went to Purdue. At Purdue, athletics and student housing/dining are entirely separate divisions from the academic side of the university. Each of those divisions is required to be self supporting without needing aid from tuition dollars.

That being said, a mandatory part of tuition is funding for the student gym. I think it came out to be something like $100/student/semester which I'd consider reasonable.

Any individual cost looks justifiable. But they add up. And ultimately, students pay for many of them. With a gym, especially, you can make it optional and charge students who want it. That's the model in many other countries. Similarly, the school newspaper, political clubs, other student activities all get funded from somewhere.

I always found the US model of colleges so outlandishly short-sighted. Problems of non-bankruptcy and wage slavery are just the very apparent outcomes that you would have a system like this.

"Free" education is the only thing that separates us from a dystopian society of social immobility. And hence people in US defend it.

I came from poor background and the fact that Uni education is free allowed me to, first of all, receive it, and also take risks that I wouldn't be able to do if I had to repay a 100k+ loan. These kinds of risks are what in essence allow social class movement, otherwise, we are talking about more comfortable wage-slavery.

On the other hand, belief in higher education wanes, people question if degrees like philosophy are "useful" (whatever that means) and then question why voters have no critical thinking to decide their own future.

I would love to see if there is historical data supporting my intuitive belief that free access to higher education made significant differences in the advancement of otherwise similar nations. USA is throwing its education down the drain and the decay is already visible.

I grew up in the States and live in the Netherlands now. I can see this truth, but the Americans don't understand.

I want to take citizenship in a couple years... my family doesn't understand. The cultural rot is obvious to me. I hope simply that the country survives without violent conflict. It seems like it would have had to be saved ten years ago.

It's very interesting how the world comes rotating,

In ancient India, Education is considered as sacred and given utmost important.

Basic Ideology is that student who have dedicated his life to studies shouldn't suffer to learn. So education is free.

Basically university's are publicly funded and students also do other small works as compensation.

For food, students used to go and beg (One needs to stand with a bowl infront of someone's house, people will come and feed them).

Even though whole culture is destroyed due to colonization. Sadhus/Rishis continue to do it even now.

I don't think anyone has to take a 100k loan to pay for college in the US. There are many many many colleges that are cheaper than that and there's a HUGE variety in financial aid that can make college free.

The 100k is over 4 years and tends to be mostly from "room and board" costs rather than the actual cost of credits. So the courses might be 10k a year and housing is 15k, for example.

College isn't as appealing as it once was. In order to participate in the economy, we need a well-paying job. We're told to get a well-paying job, we need a good degree. To get a good degree, many of us have to go into debt. We finish college with a good degree but are saddled with thousands of dollars of debt (sometimes tens of thousands). And this college debt doesn't go away if we go bankrupt. It will always follow us. So, while we're trying to pay back our debt for a good degree for a dream to live well in this life, we also have to pay for our housing, to live, to eat, etc. It makes it so hard to save up for a house or anything permanent. Everything always seems precarious because it is. We're precarious. What's the point of a college degree if we're going to be in debt while working after getting the degree? Might as well skip the whole college part.

>thousands of dollars of debt (sometimes tens of thousands)

I'd almost venture to say "tens of thousands of dollars of debt (sometimes hundreds of thousands)"

> What's the point of a college degree if we're going to be in debt while working after getting the degree? Might as well skip the whole college part.

A bachelor's degree serves as a barrier of entry for many roles outside of IT. Historically the pay gap between the jobs you can get without, and what you make after clearing this barrier, made up for the initial investment rather quick. Now that there are diminishing returns on that investment, you need to optimize on a case by case basis. Does your chosen profession allow other paths to high paying jobs? Can you get the degree with less investment using less costly credit hours (community college first, then state university)? Is the peer group and the resulting network formed after attending college valuable enough to boost your career 5 years later? There are not that many well paying jobs accessible without a degree, I think cost optimization is worth it in the long run instead of not going to college at all.

I think the level of economic anxiety (precariousness) people have is one of the biggest mental health risks in the US. It lowers people's ability to perform cognitive tasks and results in more bad decisions.

I think in state tuition at a public university is often still a very good deal w/o nearly the debt profile.

in states with good public universities, the best value is 2 years at a good community college, then 2 years at the state school. even 2 years at a good state university is getting ridiculously expensive ($60K+).

From others experience it's 2 years at good community college and 2.5-3 years at the good state university. I've yet to see state college take all the credits from a transfer.

admittedly i don't have first-hand experience in this, but my understanding from friends & family here in CA is that limiting time at a state university to 2 years (and sometimes less) is entirely possible, with some planning.

the confounding factor for young adults, i suppose, is that it's hard to be certain enough about future interests amid all the possibilities not yet forgone to stay the course without (understandable) alteration (i changed course a few times in college myself).

What state schools are $60k+ for 2 years for in-state residents?

Berkeley was my guess for an expensive in-state tuition rate and they're $38k for 2 years.

Unless you're including housing/food/etc.

UIUC is 25k a year just tuition and fees. Expensive college town room & board plus opportunity cost of education instead of working easily gets you to 30k a year.

https://admissions.illinois.edu/invest/tuition "Following are our estimated expenses for 2020-2021. Illinois Resident Tuition & Fees: $16,862-$21,956"

Holy shit it's that expensive now?? Graduated from there about 15 years ago and it was maybe 8-10k a year..

yes, total cost, as that's the truer measure.

Certainly not an option for everyone, but a ton of people in my state school class still lived at home. A good percentage could have lived at home but chose not to.

It's also hard for me to include housing because you'd need housing no matter what path in life you choose.

It’s too bad college has become so transactional. Not judging — there’s a lot of wealth inequality in the world, and the vast majority of people don’t have the luxury.

But there’s another aspect to college — the friendships, the discovery, finding interests, finding yourself.

These aspects have gone to the wayside, because for the majority of people there’s just not enough money to justify this. It feels similar to the cuts to art and music in lower schools - “what good are those programs for getting a job?”

You are still way better off with college than without. It’s not as good a deal as it used to be but it’s still the best deal available.

I'm not so sure. I would probably choose a vocational apprenticeship over a B.A. in Sociology from State U.

How many people with a vocational degree make >100k? Not many. The path to higher income is paved with credentials if they make sense or not.

A B.A. in Sociology isn't a good comparison to vocational apprenticeships. A better one would be a B.E in some kind of engineering.

I agree with you, but that wasn't the claim that I was replying to.

I think it depends on what you're doing. If you want to be an artist or a writer, maybe community college would be a better deal.

On the other hand, if you want to be an engineer then it's pretty important to go to a reputable institution - at least in the field I work in.

The fairly recent law that you cannot bankruptcy out of a college load caused all this.

- Lenders are willing to lend to anyone knowing they will HAVE to pay.

- Colleges over-inflated costs, way beyond inflation

- It balanced out to this shit.

In the past, colleges had to be careful, and so did lenders, because lots of people just didn't go to college due to cost. So they had to sell their worth.

Well.. the problem is how can lenders "be careful" when loaning to an 18 year old, which we can call an adult all we want but an 18 year old on their way to college is basically a grown child with no money.

So how can a lender protect themselves? Make a parent with enough money co-sign? Then you are essentially systematically not giving loans to poor people.. and only giving "loans" to kids with parents who have money.

Anyway I do think it's a complicated problem.. we want to be able to give loans to basically anyone so they can go to school; but if they are loaning to people who by definition have no assets how can a lender protect itself without essentially discriminating against the poor?

I think it is not that complicated. In any case, there should be risk management involved. If you have a parent with enough money, make them co-sign.

If you come from a not so wealthy background, then you only get a loan for a program that has a higher earnings potential than what you put in. I mean come on, Williams College, the supposedly best liberal arts school in the country has a "median" graduating salary of 58k, and this number does not include the possibility that you could graduate with a major no one wants to hire. 1 year of cost of just tuition and room and boarding is 74k. This does not include other costs like health insurance, books, and other equipment, extra living costs. You add this up, you can easily run up the bill to 400k. You seriously think a person should be able to get this loan to graduate in "Arabic Studies"? I mean I am sorry that people come from a poor background (me included), but taking out that 400k loan without any checks and balances seems irresponsible.

Well, I think part of the solution is to require schools to provide an option for payments to be a fixed percentage of wages after graduation for a set number of years. Everyone's interests are then aligned, and the school now has to bear some of the risks, and also gains some potential upside if their students regularly command high wages. It's obviously not that simple, but schools like Purdue (Back a Boiler) have working systems in place.

Right, it's a weird situation, where lenders don't want someone going into bankruptcy right out of college when they have nothing to lose. But preventing loans from being discharged in bankruptchy has created the perverse dynamic where it's made the cost of college very inelastic and almost predatory.

Also, the best thing (for banks) is that since the borrower can't discharge the loans in bankruptcy, the banks have the borrower's entire working life to garnish wages and levy penalties.

This is remarkably similar to the subprime bubble (in part instigated by a federal policy to encourage homeownership).

It's amazing how few people recognize this. Unintended consequences of government policy in both cases. "Everyone deserves a home" said GW back in the early 2000s. We've now seen the exact same thing play out in the education system. Of course as soon as the government gets in the business of providing/guaranteeing loans, the cost of tuition skyrockets. Why wouldn't they raise prices?

Not all colleges are the same. For example, at the UW-Madison, over half the students leave with do debt at all. There is a Bucky tuition promise so that any low-income person will have college paid for in entirety.

All of the negative comments on here treat "college" as if it is one unified thing, when in fact the experiences across institutions (both educationally, as well as financially) are quite different.

All of that said, to those who say "free college": try telling that to a person in the middle of the state, who has never been to Madison, has never had a kid go to Madison, and who has to pay their tax dollars to support the University. It is a hard sell. Sure, it'd be great if people were willing to support colleges so that they were free. But the taxpayers, by and large, aren't.

It's very interesting how the world comes rotating,

In ancient India, Education is considered as sacred and given utmost important.

Basic Ideology is that student who have dedicated his life to studies shouldn't suffer to learn. So education is free.

Basically university's are publicly funded and students also do other small works as compensation.

For food, students used to go and beg (One needs to stand with a bowl infront of someone's house, people will come and feed them).

Even though whole culture is destroyed due to colonization. Sadhus/Rishis continue to do it even now.

> try telling that to a person in the middle of the state, who has never been to Madison, has never had a kid go to Madison, and who has to pay their tax dollars to support the University. It is a hard sell.

Everyone wins some and loses some with government spending. But overall as a collective group, the idea is that the group is better off (e.g. a more educated population produces greater amounts of valuable work which raises the standard of living for everyone, etc.).

Rural regions get their fair share of wins.

E.g., the massive amount of money that is redirected from productive cities into relatively unproductive rural counties, many of which subsist on jobs that would not exist without superfluous military bases, over-incarceration, massive farm subsidies, or, yes, branch campuses of state university systems. This happens at the state level too. Many of our state’s rural school districts are almost entirely funded by redistributed taxes. Because their local populations won’t even pass no-tax-increase no-debt-load-increase bond issues to fix roofs.

Hopefully work from home will take off and rural communities/states will find a way to become more productive.

A fair share of wins seems to describe the elite coastal cities as well.

Essential workers are not the people running Facebook to sell likes, it's the people picking and moving food to you.

Up to you if you'd like to consider that food a win for them and not you.

Even if there are multiple ways to avoid crazy student debt, the existence of crazy student on a society-wide basis produces social and financial distortions that everyone should be worried about.

This is where the continental european model of the university is so much better than the anglo-american one.

Universities should be about coursework and research, that's it. Dorms, dining halls, gyms, social clubs, sports etc. are not part of the university's mission

I went to university in Germany (ME, Stuttgart) my kids are attending public universities in Oregon. I get exactly what you're saying, when I walk across the OSU campus I'm amazed at how beautiful everything is made for the students life. THe flipside is that many labs are underequipped. We have to face the fact that colleges in the US are providing lifestyle at least as much as education. However, when kids and parents pick colleges they decide it's worth it, otherwise everyone would be going to community colleges.

Many, many students choose those schools specifically because of the 'lifestyle' they offer. You are solidly correct.

What everyone seems to be missing in this thread is that those things only exist because people want them. I work for a bare-bones community college. We're less than 1/8th the cost of the closest large state school. And people choose to go there, and pay 8x more than they would at our institution because of dorm life, student life, and club opportunities.

Like it or don't, schools are only responding to what students want. There is obviously bloat in administration at schools - anywhere with a bureaucracy will (in my opinion) have that. But all of the other 'fun' things are because some students made a stink about wanting them.

I've never understood why students would even want the college to be so involved in their student life. Allocate some buildings to the student body, get them to organise themselves and throw a bit of a cash at them. I think that's a good balance. I studied at a university with quite a focus on "college life" and it was nice to feel part of something but we didn't need to organise our social lives.

> I've never understood why students would even want the college to be so involved in their student life.

If I understand the American system, there is pressure from parents as well. The students might not want the college to be so involved in their student life, but many parents would be unwilling to allow their children to attend an institution that is not highly focused on keeping them safe, to the point of treating adults as children. Rules requiring you to live on campus for the first 1–2 years, college-organized sober social activities, mental-health personnel on university staff, etc. is all meant to say “See, parents, your kid is safe with us.”

> highly focused on keeping them safe

This is not the point of the parent post. Extravagant expenditures on dining halls do little for safety. Competitive sports are a net negative for safety.

A large number of european (as well as japanese) cities are very safe. Also, university students are adults.

Does this have anything to do with 21 being a significant age? I understood that from 18 in the U.S. you were legally an adult but there seemed to be a bit of a blurry period up to 21. That seems less of a thing in the UK.

> mental-health personnel on university staff

This has also to do with worker safety. University clinics also act as worker clinics for their own workers.

which is just weird because well, at around the age of 18, most people should be able to handle themselves and they are not children anymore.

I think it's often the parents who are buying into these things. Meal plans and dining halls are so popular because parents think their kids can't possibly cook for themselves or walk 10 minutes to eat out (at least that's my perception in a college city with lots of options to eat out, most of them cheaper & better than meal plan).

Actual college student.

UCSD has a food bank on campus. Here's the math as to why:

Recommended daily dining dollar spend: $19

Breakfast: $3.95, "Bobcat Sandwich" Lunch: $5.25, Hamburger Dinner: $6.95, "Wok Entree"

This adds up to $16.15. That hamburger isn't very filling (between Whopper and Whopper Jr.), especially if you still operate on a teenaged metabolism. Add a fries to it, or do what I did and get a $2 salad from the salad bar. At 39¢ to the ounce, it's a cheaper option to maximize nutrition. Sometimes they have leftover salmon, flaked.

Okay, that's the expensive meal plan. You get five days of those, not seven. This is on the maximum dining dollar plan of $3800. You do not get a discount. One dollar in is one dollar spend.

But you can't afford the full plan. The other option – and you have to pick one, they're mandatory for on campus residents – is "worth" two meals a day, five days. You need to stretch it out.

It's not enough. If you don't do the accounting and budget beforehand, you will run out. If you don't supplement with ramen, you will run out. If you want a snack every now and then, you will run out.

Also, you don't have a kitchen in the residential halls. I hope you have a friend in an apartment or with access to the rare communal kitchens [1], since you otherwise can't cook, and must eat.

Oh, and as of winter quarter 2019, they started using scales to measure everything, down to the last noodle.

Panda Express doesn't do that, by the way. You get filling meals at only a slight premium, though I can't remember the price off the top of my head. The real value option is Subway, which costs $6.99 for the footlong of the day, including tax, and each is good for 1.5-2 meals with more or less balanced nutrition. If you somehow have a stove, a pre-packaged two-pack of Tikka Masala from Costco runs at around $3.50/meal, plus rice, and takes less time than the cross-campus dining hall roundtrip.

Fortunately, for 2019-2020, they increased the maximum package to 5100, which helps those who have financial aid. This doesn't reduce the daily cost, however.

People universally get the lowest dining plan allowed by HDH. It's just cheaper to go to the vendors, even with the invisible on-campus price hike.

[1]: The price of access to a communal res hall kitchen is fire alarms at 3 AM during finals week.

Where I went there was a very strong fear that the students might socialize with people in the town and get influenced by them. The university had a bunch of rules in place to prevent this, they knew who they were selling to.

I disagree with you, however one aspect of the continental European model that I admire is the close integration between post-secondary education and industry. One of my cousins - who studied and now lives in Germany - did his Masters and PhD on the topic of work he was doing while working at <large car manufacturer>, where he still works today.

On the other hand, from my understanding such close integration between advanced degrees and industry is less common in North America - to my disappointment.

I feel like engineering and graduate education are linked in the US too. I've worked for many large companies where staff were also Ph.D students using their work as their thesis. Granted, every one of these companies were European, and I worked in R&D labs. But I suspect this is reasonably common in engineering.

I did graduate work at Fraunhofer in Germany, which straddles academia and industry. It's a model that could be employed more in the US, I think. I work at hp in the US now and we fund a lot of very small projects, effectively paying for some graduate students we like, but nothing at a large scale.

This is not as common as you might think. Some universities do closely collaborate with their regional industry, but the vast majority of master thesis have zero practical application, just like in the US.

It generally depends on where the funding comes from, at least from what I've seen. Chairs or individual projects that are funded by industry generally hand walk graduate students through partner-sponsored topics.

I would like to see a reckoning for the modern college and university model. They have extremely bloated administrative costs due to the moral hazards of public funding, they have accumulated ideologically biased fields that should never have been legitimized (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...), they are increasingly becoming political monocultures that are hostile to any diversity of thought, and they seem archaic when their primary function these days is not to teach (especially at large, well endowed, research universities) but to certify. That is, people mostly attend college to leverage their names as a proxy for economic value on a resume. Could they largely be replaced with testing centers and more focused vocational schools?

All that said, maybe what we need is simply increased competition. Rather than a few, large colleges that absorb lots of students and funding, we need a web of smaller universities that are given greater consideration (and support?) than they are today. However, the current conditions might starve out the smallest colleges or trade schools, and only amplify the hegemony of large colleges.

My kid will be making his college choice in the coming year. As such, he's getting mail from colleges pretty much every day. The mailer from Vanderbilt really struck me as to the wrongheaded thinking of university leaders. On one side was this amazing blurb:

"Vanderbilt financial aid packages DO NOT INCLUDE LOANS. IT'S FREE MONEY....65% of Vanderbilt students received some type of FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE"

Tell me why college pricing makes shopping for a car look simple, even by pre-internet standards.

Revenue maximization by way of price discrimination. Charging $x as the list price but giving 65% of students a big need-based financial aid package is a lot more palatable than saying the price is $x unless you're rich or foreign, in which case it's $x * 3, even if they're functionally equivalent.

We just went through this. The finalist schools -- a big midwest Catholic school and a large NE state university -- offered scholarships or grants between $16k and $21k per year with some caveats such as min 2.0 GPA at one and FAFSA qualifications staying roughly the same over the four year period.

These scholarships/grants brought the per-year cost close to the University of Ottawa international rates, about $41k/year all in. If my senior had been accepted to UMass Amherst, our in-state university, the all-in cost would start at $33k/year (without FAFSA consideration).

The brand-name private colleges around the Northeast US now have all-in sticker prices of $75k-80k. Financial aid in the form of grants or scholarships (not loans) would have to be $35k-40k to make these schools competitive on a cost basis with the examples given above.

> The brand-name private colleges around the Northeast US now have all-in sticker prices of $75k-80k. Financial aid in the form of grants or scholarships (not loans) would have to be $35k-40k to make these schools competitive on a cost basis with the examples given above.

Harvard's financial aid is such that if your income is under $150,000, the max you pay is 15K a year.

Harvard : )

"free money" just screams inflated valuation. it's like credit card companies giving "cash back" so they can take larger fees for themselves. the fees more than cover their costs, so they funnel some of the largess back to the consumer to make sure the gravy train keeps going.

i'd be for having every student leave college with some debt, maybe on a scale of $1K for open-to-all colleges and $10K for the most competitive ones. enough to feel the value proposition, but not enough to laden the futures of those recent graduates.

Over a decade ago when I was applying to schools, Vanderbilt also stood out as the worst experience. Parents were placed in a separate room a told that there only purpose is to pay the bill and the campus tour felt like a ghost town on a sunny Spring Friday

I went to Vanderbilt and graduated in 2013. Their financial aid covered everything up to what FAFSA said my parents could afford- the EFC (expected family contribution) value. Tuition+room/board at the time was $56k, and EFC was $8k, so Vanderbilt covered the full 48k difference with no loans.

Vanderbilt has a very large endowment, and there is a lot of money earmarked for financial aid. I received $30k+ in scholarships that I never personally applied for, and I was able to graduate without loans.

On the flip side, if the EFC is very high and your family cannot afford it, you will have to get loans from another source.

There’s this fairly well known idea in organizations that expenses will tend to rise to fill the available budget. It’s not nefarious, just the natural result of a competitive market - both the market inside the organization, where people want to spend any money that is allocated to them (because why not?), and the market outside the organization, where spending (on fancy dorms, maternity wards, or rock climbing inside the office) is an arms race to attract “the best” students, patients, or tech workers (just to name a few examples).

Again there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. In tech, especially in the Bay Area, it means a lot of us get to live pretty nice lives as our employers have to invest a lot more of their budgets in attracting and retaining a skilled work force.

The problem is when this sort of thing is fueled by subsidies and/or opaque mechanisms. Google can afford to lavish it’s workforce from its own profits, but the average startup these days is burning heaps of investor money on “perks” to compete for talent that aren’t truly necessary.

But that’s private money, and if/when those companies fail, society at large isn’t threatened.

When this same phenomenon happens in public institutions like Universities and Hospitals, where the money is coming from individuals who need these services to thrive, the damage is much greater. In the long run, public subsidy for student loans doesn’t make college available to the masses, so much as it balloons the cost and saddles students with debts. In the long run, the US’ Byzantine “insurance” system for health payments doesn’t spread the cost around so much as it inflates and distorts the costs and changes insurance from a “nice to have” to an increasingly expensive barrier to entry.

The global pandemic didn’t create the problems these institutions have, it’s just exposing them and accelerating the inevitable failure of the unsustainable. It’s going to leave a lot of damage in its wake.

Pessimistically, I expect these institutions to go beg for money from the printer and try to sustain the unsustainable. But my optimistic side sees this as an opportunity for all of us to question the systems around us, and try to fix some of the underlying root causes that made these systems so fragile in the first place.

Once the role of professional college administrator became a thing, then they took over. They're paid more than the faculty now. And they run it like a body shop. To pay for their hyperinflated salaries and padded staff.

I wish I were being pessimistic about this.

Speaking as a college professor, this is true. I started noticing really quickly that there was an implicit expectation that faculty be evaluated on their suitability and/or desire to move into administrative positions. This is fine, but it got mingled with professional administrators brought in from other institutions trained in business administration etc. Our president actually had no experience in higher ed prior to their appointment, it all being in large corporate business, and it was seen as a good thing somehow.

Everything has become very hierarchical, run as a corporation, focused on profit maximization, with those profits going progressively more and more to those higher and higher up the administrative chain.

This seems relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

Two accredited online ones that have interestingly sustainable models, and possible interaction with others, I think:

BYU Pathway Worldwide and associated programs. It requires a Church affiliation but not necessarily membership (I think). I think tuition is much lower, bachelors programs (like IT, business, others) are available, programs excellent, and is also suitable for those who need to first become qualified for entering a university (edit: i.e., learning English which is used in curriculum, and other basic skill), then provides that university. More info is in Wikipedia and I have gathered a bit of info including linking to a news article that explains it well I think, here: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854578440.html .

And: https://www.wgu.edu/ (also mentioned in wikipedia): state aid available from multiple states it seems (per wkp).

I know that standard BYU has the lowest tuition in Utah, lower than any state school, provided you are a tithe-paying member of the Mormon Church [1]. Otherwise they have a higher tuition, similar to the in-state/out-of-state changes for most state schools. Does BYU pathway tuition work the same way?

I don't have a ton of experience with Western Governor's, but the fact that unlike many online universities they are nonprofit is a good sign. Of course, whether they have access to quality instructors is an unknown to me.

[1]: https://finserve.byu.edu/students-parents/tuition-fees-deadl...

Good question: if you ask BYU Pathway Worldwide people or browse their site to learn about it, would be a good follow-up post here, to say. :) I am pretty sure I link to them indirectly above (i.e., to a page that has a convenient link to them).

(Edit: from what I have read, I don't think there are different tiers for tuition, but it is all the same. Corrections welcome. I think it is quite low, for any student, so the opportunity including for international students in lower-income countries is significant.)

And for WGU, there were praises of it on this page from former students (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719797 and Ctrl+F for "wgu"), and a relative of mine is planning to attend soon, but I can't say from personal experience. I would certainly hope they do a good job. At the very least, they are accredited and one can use that credential to earn money while continuing to learn well from many available sources (like MIT online courses, unix system documentation, etc :).

Update: FWIW, wkp makes WGU sound good, like here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WGU#Rankings and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WGU#Methodology_and_Rigor .

Any time you make money easily available for a certain good, whether through debt or direct subsidy, the cost of that good is going to increase proportional to the amount of money made available. This is what happened in the housing market and with college tuition.

I'd be willing to bet that if you outlawed student loans (assuming that was possible), you'd see colleges finding all sorts of ways to cut costs without negatively impacting the students.

You would probably end up with a two tiered system of online MOOCs for most and the normal experience for the elite.

> I'd be willing to bet that if you outlawed student loans (assuming that was possible), you'd see colleges finding all sorts of ways to cut costs without negatively impacting the students.

Big optimist you. They'd find all sorts of ways to cut costs without negatively impacting the enrollment, which is the statistic colleges care about (at least indirectly, to the extent that it correlates with tuition).

"Things that can't continue forever will stop."

Education wasn't on a sustainable course anyway (no pun intended). They couldn't keep increasing costs, increasing numbers of students, living off of the work of non-tenure-track instructors who got paid a pittance, and growing the size and cost of the administration. I think that was getting close to the breaking point, even without Covid.

>living off of the work of non-tenure-track instructors who got paid a pittance

This is, in my opinion, the number one problem in higher education right now. Adjunct/associate/part-time faculty are good, many of them are great. But the experience with those people is just not the same as with full-time tenured faculty. When a faculty member is worried about whether or not they'll have a course load next semester, their incentives are vastly different.

This is a system that needs to die.

Source: I have worked in higher education for a couple of decades now. Adjunt/associate/part-time has exploded since 2009-10 or so. It's ridiculous.

I started looking st going back to school starting around mid last year. I picked up my research again in the past month.

All I've done is manage to make myself so much more cynical. Everything I read and learned made it seem like college is nothing more than a pay to play game. I'm not andti-education or anti-intellectual, but I sure as hell do not support whatever the hell is going on in US higher education. I've been tempted to write aboutit, but my particular circumstances are rather unique and it would just come off as an angry rant.

IMO at least in the US college is an education themed social exercise.

Tech companies should take the lead on this. Say loud and clear: we no longer ask about education, and no longer take education into account when hiring, starting today. Devalue the sheepskin.

I get where you're coming from, but honestly I would actually prefer the opposite.

Sometimes, when I'm looking and interviewing for a new job, I really wish we had some sort of standardized, recognized certification that companies could see on my resume and think "OK, this guy knows how to code, we don't need to put him through the BS of a take home, or whiteboarding exercise or whatever". After 15 years in the industry, I'm less and less patient with having to prove myself by explaining how I would find duplicates in 2 arrays or how I would process "very large files" or whatever.

That being said, now we kind of get the worst of both worlds where you need the degree for HR to forward your resume, and you need to dance the "coding interview" anyway.

How else do you propose companies should assess new hires, especially young ones? And while the cost of tuition these days (IMO) outstrips the value of a college education, that’s not to say that value is zero.

The question is rather, how do you think degrees help assess new hires?

1) Programming skills? These are easy to assess with programming exercises. If someone has a degree but can't solve a programming exercise, I won't hire them.

2) Interpersonal skills? But a tech degree doesn't certify those, you need to assess them the hard way anyway.

3) Culture fit? But if you use degrees for that, it's simple discrimination, "let's hire this guy because he's from MIT like us". Not sure why this should be defended.

So in the end, degrees don't seem to help tech hiring in any way. I think tech companies could stop looking at degrees with very little loss.

I'd say the value of the average four year bachelors degree today is less than the value of the average two year trade school, so the value might not be zero but it might as well be.

That being said, I think the assessment problem is real. I'm the founder of a small startup that very few people want to work for (relative to say, Google) and that means I can assess each candidate in careful/unorthodox (time-consuming) ways. Companies at Google scale have to assess thousands of candidates per month (week?) and they have to do it in a way that ensures they're beyond reproach with regard to discrimination.

Having a college degree means you're statistically more likely to know your stuff, period. Correlation or causation isn't material in this case. There would have to be a very good reason for any big company to start ignoring that reality.

Tricky problem. I'd imagine the only solution involves an actual replacement credential. Like a bar exam, but for "private" disciplines. Maybe Neuralink will sort out how to see if you actually have the necessary understandings in your brain.

I did a lot of interviewing of new grads when I worked at a FAANG. I had the luxury of not needing a prior, and I looked at the resume only after conducting the interview and submitting my recommendation. I rarely looked even then. The degree might have helped or hindered your getting through the early part of the funnel, but was irrelevant once you got to me.

https://archive.md/7H1xu

http://archive.is/VX8ms

Shuttered colleges should be turned into hubs for remote knowledge workers. The worst part of remote work is that it's hard to build a community without an office; college campuses are designed around community-building, with great shared spaces, gyms, etc. They also tend to be in beautiful places that are reasonably affordable, at least compared to the expensive coastal cities where many knowledge workers live.

The current financial precarity of colleges and the massive increase in full-time remote workers have created a very interesting set of pre-conditions. If these conditions persist a while past the distancing phase of the virus, the environment could be uniquely perfect for this shift to take place.

My big prediction for education is that a lot of research universities are going to move large lecture halls online (think chem 101, etc) with labs, seminars, and discussions with lower number of slots to abide with moderate social distancing requirements. It provides the primary educational content of lecture, and provides in person opportunities that students desire.

Once we see students and professors like this format compared to either all in person or all online, I think it will stick around. There's clearly a need for both improved efficiencies as well as the desire to have real human interaction, and I suspect this Fall we'll have the golden opportunity to really experiment with it.

We would like this if they made us pay a lot less. Currently we are still paying the same amount in tuition, and some classes just provide a video a week and maybe a trivial assignment. It just feels awful and I dont learn anything from that type of experience.

Well, a lot of college programs are just not worth it. The ones that are (engineering) tend to be four years of sleep-deprivation.

I worked at a private college called Expression right at the end of the first dot com bust.The founder wanted to turn the school into the "Julliard of the digital arts" - and keep the tuition as low as possible. For the first few years it was a really interesting and unique place. To make a long story short, the board of directors weeded the main founder out and moved the school through the accreditation hoops so that students could get massive loans. As a result, the school raised the tuition. The place exploded with students for x number of years. When Obama came to office new laws killed off the loans (and the school). Most of the original staff left and the whole thing was sold to a company named SAE. I always wondered what would have happened if they were never able to get accredited and were forced to stay a small trade school. The aftermath is documented in the eastbay express article below (2015). From reading current reviews, the place never recovered.

https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/sound-arts-fading-out...

Software should be either a trade school or a masters program depending on a student’s level of commitment to the academics involved just like law, medicine, or engineering.

The primary problem with education financing is unrealistic expectations. Do some basic math before paying for any education. If an education loan costs you a certain amount plus interests you need to make a certain amount minus what you would earn without the education to qualify that expenditure. If people currently working in your field aren’t making $150k then why would a $100k loan make any sense? Why waste that kind of money? When you could attend a trade school for $10k that allows you to earn $60k. Blaming the system does not excuse bad personal financial decisions.

When I was picking schools out of high school I found the third cheapest 4 year university in Texas. It was the only school I applied to more than 20 years ago. A 12 hour semester cost $1800 including dorm, tuition, and meal plan. Books and supplies were extra. To me that price made perfect sense because it would take becoming a CEO to justify the expense.

If you go 100k in debt to get a job that pays the same as one you could have only gone 10k in debt for, it's probably because you like doing that better.

Some people would way rather be an elementary school teacher than an electrician and that's fine.

The same argument can be made for gambling and using cocaine. That’s fine, maybe, but if financial slavery is the known output then don’t cry about how expensive it is.

Colleges, like Intellectual Property, impose artificial scarcity on the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in an age where the Internet has allowed us all to publish and discuss like never before. They come from a time when we couldn’t record audio and video and disseminate it so easily. Never mind multimedia, they use heavy textbooks!

There is a concept called “flipping the classroom”, where people can watch the classroom lectures at home at their own pace, and do the homework together in class. And these lockdowns just go to show that people can carry on learning online. They just need a good coach or course.

Lectures are the commodity. Individual attention from tutors and labs is the scarcity.

When even rich Hollywood celebs feel they need to bribe colleges for their kids to get in, we know we have artificial scarcity and an old boys network.

Flipping the classroom is not enough. Here is what we can do to fix the educational situation: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158

One of the things I was curious about was how many people are in school now compared to the 60s and 70s. I had trouble finding a graph or statistics on how many people are in school but https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai... shows that 14.6% of men and 10.1% of women in 1971 had completed 4 years of college.

For 2019, that was 35.4% of women and about 34% of men.

So there are 3 times as many women and 2 times as many men as there were 50 years ago.

And that's for students who have completed 4 years. I would be surprised if the number of students who started and didn't make it to 4 years wasn't also 2-3 times higher than it was back then.

This situation is exposing colleges as the scam that they are. Families are getting indebted up to their eyeballs, thinking are paying for education. In reality the education can be had for free. What they are really paying for is a sorting function, something that could also be had for free with national exams.

> something that could also be had for free with national exams.

That just causes the money to be poured into national exam test prep like in South Korea or China.

Some money maybe, but "the money"? Korean and Chinese families are paying 250K per kid in test prep?

Good! These aren't hard choices - this is the type of prudent spending that happens when you're not guaranteed infinite sums of money from the federal government. Scale back on the insanely bloated administrative staff, lavish facilities, sports stadiums, etc.

State schools are still a relative bargain. I attended around 30 years ago and it was about 5000/year + 4000 room and board. Tuition now is about 16Kyear and room and board is about 13K/year. If tuition is doubling every 20 years, that is about 3.6% growth in cost

The average public university is about 10K for tuition today. I think that is attainable for a middle class family.

Where things are really out of whack is all the loans to attend private schools. A student has no business going to any private school if they have to take out 50-100K in loans per year.

There should be no govt backed loans to private schools and no student loans should be discharged in bankruptcy.

I feel like you can learn quite a bit now with just online material.

YouTube and the algorithm have really forced content creators to improve the quality of the content.

It's going to be tougher for schools to charge 30-50K a year when there are credible alternatives.

I understand that colleges charge the same tuition for online students and in person students, but what's preventing the schools from lowering the cost of online, part-time degrees as a way to increase enrollment? They may have hosting costs, or costs associated with platforms like Coursera, but there's no cost for facilities which should make them able to cut the tuition. The cost of healthcare and education is far too high in the US. IMO Universal means Affordable, Accessible and Abundant (In addition hopefully high quality as well). Education and Healthcare should meet all of those points.

My sense is it's a good idea to separate college as a place where you take classes and can get a degree from college as a lifestyle choice. While living at home and later with a friend, I went to a community college after high school, that my family paid a nominal amount for, and transferred to a UC from there that was entirely covered by Pell/Cal grants until graduation. No debt required.

Had I gone straight to a 4-year from high school, lived at the school, and made it a lifestyle as opposed to someplace I go to take classes, then I likely would have graduated with a significant amount of debt.

The higher education bubble has been building for a long time. It follows a similar trend to the housing bubble: high prices fueled by loans that are too easy to get and too hard to repay.

The current situation is likely going to force a hard reset for the industry. Administrative bloat and other expenses will need to be addressed as colleges get back to basics and focus on delivering education under a more sustainable economic model.

A 10% decline in enrollment (much higher is realistic for many colleges) would devastate the finances of most institutions. These will be an interesting next few years.

2 things that I feel hurt US and probably be why we lose to China.

1) Predatory college loans (which lead to overpriced education)

2) healthcare tied to employers where providers can charge after they provide service months later. Very little transparency and insane markup.

Both are very specific to US, and absurd compared to every other wealthy nation.

Fixing education and healthcare to be reasonable for lower and middle class would do wonders for this country. Currently millions are in perpetual debt due to medical bills and college loans. They won’t start companies and build great things.

It's very interesting how the world comes rotating,

In ancient India, Education is considered as sacred and given utmost important.

Basic Ideology is that student who have dedicated his life to studies shouldn't suffer to learn. So education is free.

Basically university's are publicly funded and students also do other small works as compensation.

For food, students used to go and beg (One needs to stand with a bowl infront of someone's house, people will come and feed them).

Even though whole culture is destroyed due to colonization. Sadhus/Rishis continue to do it even now.

Burn it all to the ground. This model that saddles unknowing students with debt, while locking in old and crusty professors to their cushy jobs for life, is antiquated and needs to go.

Colleges have been peddling shoddy goods to unsophisticated buyers for years with little or no regulation or oversight.

In fact, the government has propped them up with federal money, loan guarantees, and a feeder school system that conditions their potential customers and funnels them in the doors.

The shoddy goods are degrees that are highly unlikely to be worth what was paid for.

You can't get more unsophisticated than an 18 year old who's been fed a dream about how their life will be awesome if they get into the school of their choice.

I'm currently adjunct faculty in a software engineering program. I have no expectation of future work beyond the end of this semester as my school has announced massive cutbacks across the board. I'm "lucky" in that I don't rely on this for income but it still sucks. The only good thing is, as far as I know, none of my senior students have lost a job offer as a result of the pandemic.

Oh, so expensive private education is only sustainable in a hyper-inflated economy? That's sarcastically unexpected.

I once interviewed for a CD role at a private, vocational certificate college. They do have some IRL locations but primarily online. The director shared that their revenue was about $500m. I didn't take the role, and I was left scarred knowing their revenue is someone elses debt and based on hope.

I'm hoping the crisis will:

- Better develop processes for remote education

- Bring to light the idea that MOOCs are legitimate

- Reduce the shocking amount of waste, privilege to the wealthy, and academic cruft and butt-kissery

Wouldn't it be nice to emerge from all of this with a more level, more accessible, and lower priced collegiate environment?

makes sense: colleges are are entering another recession, and there is already a forecasted drop in enrollment of the wealthiest students, who should have been born during the last recession, that will hit in 2026 and could be as bad as a 15% to 20% drop in enrollment.

All in all, this might not be too bad, if you look at the growth in college expenses over the last few decades, the rise in tuition isn't going to instruction, it's going to administration, and hopefully this downturn will lead to the emergence of mass market cheap credential that are feasible solutions for everyone.

Good to know it might be cheap to get a second degree in a few years.

They should outlaw hiring practices with required college degrees for all but the most regulated careers like doctors, lawyers etc.

To require a BS or BA for a sales job is insane and just creates servitude dynamics for no reason.

They won't be missed. I hope they use this as an opportunity to re-evaluate what exactly they're offering to students for the currently astronomical prices inflated by reckless borrowing.

Like many institutions that are failing during this crisis; this is merely accelerating a reckoning that was probably going to happen one way or another.

This doesn’t make it good or bad; it just is.

Maybe this is a controversial opinion, but why are parent's expected to foot the bill of their children's education? When did this become the expectation?

It's called being spoon fed versus being responsible.

Isn't the real "hard" choice to simply forget about a for-profit educational system and make education a public service instead?

It's very interesting how the world comes rotating,

In ancient India, Education is considered as sacred and given utmost important.

Basic Ideology is that student who have dedicated his life to studies shouldn't suffer to learn. So education is free.

Basically university's are publicly funded and students also do other small works as compensation.

For food, students used to go and beg (One needs to stand with a bowl infront of someone's house, people will come and feed them).

Even though whole culture is destroyed due to colonization. Sadhus/Rishis continue to do it even now.

One of the "hard choices" some colleges are making is removing the requirement for SAT or ACT tests for admission. While a case can be made against certain types of standardized tests, will their admission criteria be made more rigorous in other areas to compensate? Lowering the bar for incoming students could end up reducing both the educational experience at the college and eventually its reputation, making them even more desperate for unqualified students in the future, ad infinitum until it gets bailed out or goes bankrupt.

Colleges are addicted to insane tuition pricing (outpacing inflation for 40 years or more), enabled by excessive student loan debt.

I was often told stories from the Boomer generation of people "working their way through college", holding part time jobs through college to pay for both living expenses and tuition. That is, quite literally, impossible today.

Even GenX attending certain state schools could partially pay for school this way, especially if you had low/free rent, for example living at home.

Can you provide some sources for this? Let's assume minimum wage, calculate average living expenses, hours spent in class and doing HW vs hours working. I know I spent at least 70hrs a week doing school.

It is in a city. I'm working to pay for my living expenses and full-time university currently ongoing -- not really struggling, either. The last few weeks of each semester requires sacrificing some sleep, though.

It's still possible if you go the computer science route and get a few good intern gigs, but the margins are quite tight. It's a far cry from paying for college by selling firewood, like my baby-boomer father did.

The culture of higher education isn't what it used to be. The advancement of knowledge is now secondary to economic growth in a university. Students begin as customers and turn into products by graduation. Universities used to be gatekeepers to better economic opportunities but those opportunities have disappeared. This is a relatively recent phenomenon in that Baby Boomers don't have the student loan obligations that generations following them do. Boomers changed the policies to suit their own financial interests, destroying the opportunities that they benefited by for future generations. Massive student loan debt constrains major life decisions and limits access to credit. It's a lot easier to navigate life when you don't carry inescapable debt burdens. Government refused to limit access to credit and that allowed universities to constantly charge more every year. You can't escape student loan debt as you can business loans by declaring bankruptcy because of a fundamentally flawed logic about what the student loan enabled. Higher education is an economic investment. Yet, when the investment fails, the lenders aren't exposed to the losses -- the borrowers are. This has been a great deal for lenders as they aren't exposed to risk.

Unfortunately, neither a Trump nor Biden administration is going to change anything. It's up to the free market and entrepreneurs to disrupt this exploitative system.

> The advancement of knowledge is now secondary to economic growth in a university.

I will second this just taking from my own experiences.

> Students begin as customers and turn into products by graduation.

To add to this the students' parents have also wedged themselves into the customer category. They are often footing the bill or at least the loan payments and some of the more helicopter-like parents feel entitled to demand universities do more and have more for their precious children.

I'm sorry, but how could someone not have agreed with your statement? Online learning is a major threat to college for many of those reasons.

Online learning isn't a very big threat to colleges because colleges hold a sort of "social monopoly" on credentialling for majority of fields. No one will care about you coursera certificates they want a bachelors degree.

There are too many short-sighted idiots who don't realize that having your neighbors child is the 2nd most important thing to having your own child educated.

"But I didn't have childen! Why should I pay taxes for schools?" is not uncommon. The answer, of course, is that we all benefit from their education, and so it isn't unreasonable for tax money to be spent to help heavily subsidize education.

I'm lucky; I went to college in the early 80s, at a good state school, and it cost about $5000/year ($13K/year in today's dollars). I'm doubly lucky: my parents paid for it, so I left college penniless but without debt. It sickens me to read how much colleges are charging these days, and how even state schools are modeling themselves after for profit schools. When I went to school, most classes were taught by full time professors, many tenured, aided by TAs. Now there are so many "associate professors", i.e., getting paid minimal amounts per course hour taught without benefits. The system is rotten.

Back in the 70s, Texas was awash taxes from oil money. I knew someone who attended UT Austin back then and it was a few hundred dollars per semester, as the state picked up the rest. Conservatives were conservative back then too, but they saw the value in an educated public. Now they feel like schools should be self funding.

I was also lucky. Undergrad funded by my parents. Grad school funded by assistantships with most tuition waved. I got a PhD with zero debt.

My father could pay for college himself back in the 50's and 60's a summer job and with a part time job during the year. His parents were poor and uneducated, yet He got a PhD with no debt.

Now my kids are facing college. The landscape has changed and it is not good. I am very well paid but I make too much money for financial help, but not really enough to pay for 4 years of college for all my kids. I have saved money and have paid off my house, but I don't have another $600K set aside for college. I don't want them getting out of school with debt, so I will make sure they don't do anything stupid with large student loans. But I imagine they will all have to take on some debt.

The sad thing, college is not better (actually worse in the liberal arts -- that is a different discussion) and the inflated costs are insane. The money is not going towards better professors -- I was a professor for 18 years and I didn't see a proportional growth in teaching and research. Almost all of the extra money went into the bureaucracy.

I'm using Blendle, but can't find this story there.

As I understand Blendle, they only offer some stories from their list of publishers. NYT, WSJ, WaPo, LA Times, etc. will pick & choose what they allow Blendle to offer. Top-tier stories will not be shared through Blendle, and will be reserved for direct subscribers.

It makes Blendle less attractive to me.

I'm a developer at a university. We're horrified.

no paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/coronavirus-pushes-college...

There's a whole long discussion to be had on the purpose of education, and it goes back a long ways

TL;DR: skills vs. reasoning.

For oligarchs, especially of public education, it is a skills-manufacturing pipeline for producing an efficient but docile wage-slave workforce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

For themselves, they reserve critical thinking, un-bowdlerized. Yes, an eponym.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler

As Brother Mouzone said in _The Wire_: "You know what the most dangerous thing in America is, right? N-----r with a _library card_."

https://invidio.us/watch?v=bRCyZydgqdc

(Yes, bowdlerized.)

It's the liberal arts vs. the servile arts. "Liberal" because they are liberating, essential to freepersons. It's the undercurrent of virtually all education reform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_mechanicae

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_reform

Today, higher education is virtiually entirely a credentialing, branding, and gatekeeping mechanism. And like all gatekeepers, the higher-education-industrial complex collects rents.

And this goes back a ways. Hardly the first, but: "On the role of Universities and Primary Education as Social Indoctrination: John Stuart Mill via Hans Jensen", from the 1860s:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...

Mind, a college or university experience can be a hugely transformational thing, most especially if the student transgresses the curriculum. In the mid-1980s I shared a campus with some incredibly capable students (several have appeared in HN stories), granted with many who weren't. There were on-campus events, issues, and politics. There were faculty, emeriti, and visiting lecturers who were notable in their fields, including more than a few recognisable names. At least some of whom were patient enough to talk to a clueless undergrad for an hour or so. The arts & lecture series gave access to principle minds and creators. I discovered the on-campus library with a collection in the millions of volumes, part of a multi-campus system numbering in the tens of millions, indexed (though not directly accessible then) via an at-the-time groundbreaking computerised catalogue system -- a preview of DuckDuckGo-like search engines of today. And through the campus computing centre, free use of a shared Unix system, also with multi-campus connectivity, and access not only to such stunning tools as csh, vi, sed, awk, and troff, but email, ftp, and tin.

All of this (and more) has shaped who I am, how I think, and what I value today.

None of this appears in my (mediocre) grades, transcrpts, or degrees. It was a level of access (gatekeepers, remember) largely otherwise impossible at the time. Today's Internet ... makes a significant part of this experience far more generally possible, though there is still a tremendous element of being in the same space with someone, or a group, or access to physical infrastructure, equipment, and environment that online experience can still not match.

And the system in which I'd participated evolved out of a long train of policy decisions, backlashes, many quite political: Thatcher-Reagan conservativism, 1970s eco-awareness and peace movements, 1960s Sputnik-fuelled space-race and nuclear techno-FOMO and -optimism, civil rights, and university expansion, RAND-UCLA Arpanet, 1950s anticommunism, 1940s Vannevar Bush endless frontier government-funded research, early 20th century industrial and energy monopoly funded endowments, late-19th century majors systems, mid-19th century engineering polytechnical schools and land-grant/agricultural policies, the Prussian university model, Enlightenment, the Encyclopaedists, the classical university system, liberal & mechanical arts,the Renaissance and emergence of the university, scholasticism, mediaeval and earlier philosp[hical traditions .... Very little of which I had any knowledge, understanding, or appreciation of at the time.

Universities have to do all this proxying for a good education because they are unable to demonstrate the primary value: making you valuable to society.

If they did, they could simply publish "Median income distribution for graduating students by degree achieved". They currently sell a common lie: that there is a roundedness or completeness to education. This is common wisdom and false.

The only degree that doesn't force a "well rounded" education is aerospace engineering. They start on their major course work right away. How many of those guys are out of work? "Well rounded course work" is just a money sink and wastes two years. Most of the major course work that matter you don't get to until junior and senior years. All you really need are those last two. First two are a waste.

Out of curiosity does the also mean Aerospace engineering degrees are cheaper, or are those 2 years replacwd by even more major work?

that's why a strategy I've heard that helps to reduce cost of higher education is to take as many of the courses that you can at a community college where those credits can transfer over to the university of your choice.

FWIW, my university does do this. The college of engineering here publishes a yearly report that breaks down statistics about the graduating class (post-graduation plans, salary statistics, etc.) for each major.

They would need the value before to do that which isn't exactly easy to gather and prove meaningfully.

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