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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn't get the memo and took on huge debts to join them. This could be said of a lot of elite, expensive, liberal art degree programs..

The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil. Just absolutely ruining peoples lives.

An interesting idea I saw was the idea of making schools have skin in the game on these degree programs by requiring them to back some percent of the debt of these federal loans. I'd imagine admissions criteria, prices and career outcomes would adjust accordingly.

Also a question of when personal responsibility comes into play, I mean sure we can side with the 18 year olds making bad financial decisions taking on debt for a BA degree. But by the time you are 22.. 24...26 and going for these six-figure MA/PHD tracks .. cmon.

Lastly - the idea that the professors in these programs were basically failed in making themselves careers in the fields themselves is not entirely shocking. Even in many STEM universities/programs, teaching is not very career outcome focus.

My personal experience was that professors cared about research first, PHD track students second, and career track BS degree students.. somewhere a few more notches down.

We all coach/develop people into molds of ourselves, and professors have a hard time looking beyond turning students into more professors. Obviously this does not scale..

View on HN

Part of the issue is that there is no mechanism to discourage universities from doing this. With the state underwriting student debt without limit, and universities effectively gatekeeping the path towards middle class employment, there is effectively no social or financial mechanism to push back on them.

Heck, there is a huge amount of social pressure pushing 18 year old kids to do this. They can’t possibly know better, but the adults encouraging such reckless behavior really should not be doing this.

Right this is why I like the idea (that will never happen) of having schools being on the hook to backstop some % of federal loans on their degrees. May quickly change how many kids they allow to get $300K in debt for useless degrees.

What about loan companies, who definitely issued the loans, being on the hook? It's a lot simpler and it follows the chain of moral responsibility.

Note: All it takes is changing the law back to the way it was before - debts forgiven in an ordinary bankruptcy.

Student loans would evaporate. Full time students have no income or collateral, since the degree and knowledge and skills cant be taken away and sold to recover losses.

All this would do is ensure that higher education is utterly inaccessible for anyone not rich enough to pay cash.

Student loans would evaporate.

Good!

Let education be paid for by grants and the student own income, most grants. Plus force the universities to make their tuition cost effective.

Edit: However many years ago, public universities charged a fairly nominal tuition and survived for many doing that (financed by their respective US states). These public universities today have massively expanded their costs, primarily based on capital spending and follow the model of private universities.

Here's an article in Fortune from 1957 arguing college is too cheap. Seems like it was really taken to heart: https://fortune.com/2013/05/05/colleges-are-too-cheap-fortun...

> massively expanded their costs

While I attended college, tuition costs almost doubled, but since haven't increased much per year. It wasn't massive increased spending, it was the state cutting off basically all finding. There's certainly fat to be cut, but the admin costs are mostly imposed on high.

Every student would with good cause declare bankruptcy immediately upon graduation, because they have debt and no assets and no job. I get where you're coming from, but this is not a workable solution.

As someone with a relative currently going through bankruptcy, I can assure you that every student would not go through this process. It is incredibly difficult, intensive, and horrible process that takes years. It is not pleasant and I think that the idea that it would be utilized in this way by students is totally coming from a place of ignorance of what modern bankruptcy actually entails.

I totally understand that this is an unpleasant and long process, but I think you in turn come from a place of ignorance about what it means to live the best years of your life under hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt. It eats at you, every time you spend money, for decades. It's soul-crushing.

I know people who would GLADLY throw away two years of their life in bankruptcy proceedings if it means they could be free of their crushing student debt.

It didn’t happen that way until many, many years after student loans started to be a thing.

Some enterprising law students figuring out they could get a loan to learn how to get out of the loan - and end up with a very valuable degree out of it that could not be repossessed - and by the time they needed good credit, it would be off their records.

It took awhile for word to get out, and then they banned getting out of student loans.

So blame the lawyer (students) I guess?

The issue is that then you gatekeep higher education to the wealthy. What's more likely? Harvard reducing tuition because underprivileged kids aren't able to attend and can't get loans. Or Harvard keeping the same tuition and only admitting the wealthy people that are able to pay it (of which there are plenty).

Harvard reducing tuition because underprivileged kids aren't able to attend and can't get loans.

Harvard in particular is so wealthy it always charges tuition based on ability to pay. The poor who go to Harvard pay nothing. But, of course, the poor seldom go to Harvard because they aren't admitted.

Just saying. There are mid-range school where, all else being equal, your scenario might be true. But those school depend on those same lower income students and, well, I'd be in favor of them buckling and charging less.

Driving education policy based off anything Harvard is doing is a mistake. Pay attention to state schools only, that’s what policy should be tailored for.

Ivys are basically majority privileged kids already anyway. There was a stat that 1% of Americans go to Private High School but 40% of Ivy admittance is from Private High Schools. Add to that: the % who go to elite selective public HS in systems like NY, the large number of full-freight paying foreign students who represent their local elite and legacy admissions..

If underprivileged kids represent anything above about 5% at Ivy's I would be shocked. One stat from Boston Globe was that only 3% of Harvard comes from the US bottom 20% economically.

The Ivys do more to perpetuate the existing power dynamic than they do to raise anyone up. They are far too small and far too nepotistic to do otherwise.

If you want to raise the middle/bottom up, you need to look at the large state university systems which are orders of magnitude larger.

Good thing there is a whole market of ranging degrees of education quality and price distributed a cross the US...

Also there are lots and lots of programs state and private to fund low income higher Ed. It is not a dichotomy.

>> Student loans would evaporate.

Good. When I got my degree, almost nobody had student loans. The kids from lower middle income and below tried for scholarships, Pell grants, and even had jobs that slowed them down due to fewer hours available for school. Tuition was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Oh, and a couple years taking transferable courses at community college was a thing too.

If you want to help the poor, then do that but dont corrupt the system the way it has been the last 25 years. Now everyone is screwed.

Not sure I understand this sentiment.

I went to a good university, majored in history, took out 100k in debt totally for said degree, and have been working as a programmer ever since.

Why does my outcome feel so rare? I think 100k was a fair enough price. (25k per year including food and a room).

If you got the same degree for 10k (what it used to cost inflation adjusted), why would that not be better for everyone?

Every professor or co-professor I know gets paid peanuts, gets poor support, and gets waaaay too many students. These folks are at Yale, Princeton, etc. It’s a scam and the money disappears into the machine with little accountability and a ton of hand waving.

How would it be possible for 4 years of education to cost just $10,000? The cost of my food for 4 years is higher than that alone.

My tuition was around $15,000 per year. You are more than welcome to investigate where that disappears to (presumably not all to staff salary), but requiring me to pay $100,000 upfront would have killed my career before it ever started-- unless of course you convince employers that a degree isn't needed.

It used to be possible (albeit required significant work, but it was not 20 hrs a day of work + school - more like 6-8) to literally work your way through a 4 year degree while working a minimum wage job - including using that job to rent a room or an apartment somewhere, or live in a dorm.

$15k for tuition alone (not counting books/materials/food, room and board) obviously makes that impossible.

It isn’t going into teaching staff. It goes into administrators salaries, bloated programs/overhead in sports, recruiting program costs, fees for housing, fees for food, and ever larger endowments that somehow never trickle down - among other things.

For what is being taught 99% of the time, the economies of scale make $2500/yr for tuition perfectly doable in a typical undergrad environment - if anyone wanted to. And it is done all the time in Europe, for instance.

If you’re taking out a loan to cover all your living costs + tuition than obviously that is going to be more expensive than tuition alone. In Europe where school tuition is covered, there are also separate programs to cover student living costs - which are also not super high generally. My ex-gf got her physics degree from a well known university in Spain, and they paid her $500 per month or week (forget) to cover living costs at the time I believe which was more than enough.

She wasn’t eating imported caviar, but students in general have always been able to get by (and have fun/a social life) without big expenses.

Because inflation adjusted it used to be a few grand a year. It’s not like college is 10x better than it was in the 1960s or 1970s.

What if we put a time limit on it? Say that student loans can be discharged in bankruptcy only 10 years after graduation?

Then few students would want to stay poor for ten years just to get rid of loans. But lenders would also have incentive to not back very poor career paths.

Then private loan terms would change to a max of 10 years, thereby increasing the monthly costs due to accelerated payback.

> All this would do is ensure that higher education is utterly inaccessible for anyone not rich enough to pay cash.

Which would cause significant negative price pressure on that education.

It might even make it affordable (cash wise) for many people like it used to be. Wouldn’t that be scary?

Which would put obscene pressure on the legislatures to re-fund the education systems they’ve been purposefully defunding for a while. Arguably this is good.

I wouldn't want my alma mater funded entirely by the state. They went on a real estate and related spending binge while I was in school. Some of my friends worked at the alumnus center, spending all their hours calling up alumni begging for donations.

Meanwhile, really useful classes that students wanted and professors wanted to teach didn't exist, because the school wouldn't fund the extra class time.

In short, out of all the school's top priorities, the students were nowhere to be found. Change that, and maybe I'll change my mind too.

I doubt the state would fund the university without oversight and forcing them to show 'value for money'.

> What about loan companies, who definitely issued the loans, being on the hook?

These days almost all student loans (90+% of the dollar amount) are being issued by the feds.

>> What about loan companies, who definitely issued the loans, being on the hook?

> These days almost all student loans (90+% of the dollar amount) are being issued by the feds.

Well that makes it easy. Forgive those loans and then stop issuing them. Force the universities to come up with reasonable programs with reasonable tuition. Universities have gone from institutions of learning to scams exploiting students and low-paid lecturers alike.

> forgive those loans

And what about the people who have already paid off their federally backed loans via their own hard work? They seem to get the short end of the stick in this case.

> Forgive those loans and then stop issuing them

Yes! I would not want to see these loans forgiven if they didn't also stop them at the same time.

Assuming the political impetus is there to stop issuing them. I'm sure there's the will to forgive those loans, though, which will probably just end up being a blank check from the feds to universities.

> I'm sure there's the will to forgive those loans, though

There's pretty clearly not, not even in the dominant wing of the Democratic Party, despite people—mostly in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—expending a lot of effort to try to build it. It's possible there might be in the future, even perhaps the near future, though having a plan to prevent the problem from recurring and tying it in with the forgiveness makes that a lot more likely.

Student loan forgiveness is a mainstream topic. Biden is supporting cancelling $10,000 of federal student loan debt per person. On the other hand eliminating student loans, or even a segment of student loans (as GGP suggested) is not something you will see proposed outside of Reason Magazine or a Ron Paul newsletter. Any possible reform you could make will inevitably reduce the amount of income taken in by academia, a notoriously politically active bunch. So I foresee only indefinite band-aid solutions going forward.

I'd be skeptical of that stat, almost all of my loans 10 years ago were private ( although I'm sure there is a federal backstop )

This change occurred in 2010:

> Prior to 2010, Federal loans included 1) direct loans originated and funded directly by the United States Department of Education and 2) loans originated and funded by private investors and guaranteed by the federal government. Guaranteed loans were eliminated in 2010 through the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act and replaced with direct loans because of a belief that guaranteed loans benefited private student loan companies at taxpayers expense, but did not reduce costs for students.

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

> Most student loans — about 92%, according to a June 2020 report by MeasureOne, an academic data firm — are owned by the U.S. Department of Education.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude...

The MeasureOne link: https://www.measureone.com/resources

This. Its their job to calculate risk, and bet on it. Let them and let em set the interest rate accordingly. This would also solve the ever inflating tuition costs and cause schools to be competitive. In general it would curb academic tomfoolery.

Weird what happens when the government assumes liability. Everyone wants to blame the banks for '08, and they have some fault but it was all enabled by federal encouragement and liability. At least in the private sector the companies live and die by their decisions and the banks were held accountable /s.

BestBuy isn't on the hook if I buy $20k of stuff on my credit card and can't pay it back. The bank that gave me the card is on the hook.

We don't blame BestBuy for having prices that are too high, or not educating shoppers that their quantum dot TV's will be obsolete and valueless in a few years.

The main problem is that not only is the government subsidizing the loan, but they're never dischargeable in bankruptcy.

The banks are the ones that truly have no skin in the game. Universities at least need to be able to point to graduation rates and successful graduates of their programs, the quality of their internship opportunities and career services department. Not that they're worth $250k/student, but the universities at least have some vague reputational stake in this that will impact their ability to recruit more students. For a little while when someone google's the quality of Columbia's program they may see these posts. The more these issues come out, the bigger the impact on schools.

Banks on the other hand? They won't lose money, business, reputation, prospective employees... Nothing.

There's programming bootcamps that basically take a fraction of the graduate's income for a few years instead of charging tuition. But since they optimize for quick employability, and not necessarily a more depth/breadth oriented curriculum as is common in traditional higher education, they have relatively superficial curriculums and thus they don't have the greatest of reputations among companies looking for brainpower rather than fad cookie cutters. Incentives are hard.

I worked for a company that hired a few from these. We weren't expecting them to know everything, but to have the drive, determination and perhaps a bit of natural skill in understanding programming.

They were easily the best junior developers we had hired, and all have done quite well in their careers.

Perhaps we just got lucky?

I've worked with one, hired right before I joined, I became lead 6 months later. He would ask for help and then when I gave him things to do or lookup he would just fail, and would subtly try and get others to do it for him. Total mooch. Multiple meetings and attempts about it. Couldn't fire him. Had him on a plan immediately after being lead. It was so bad at one point I had his desk moved to be next to mine and I had to tell him he can talk to me but stop interrupting other seniors. Eventually that became work in whatever you want so long as you don't need anyone. He sat there for 3 months and did nothing before he was finally payed off. Parent company transfered him to his own department essentially and then "restructured" it.

He had a mech engineer background, two years out of engineering school went to code camp.

Ceo was an idiot and payed him 90k starting which was a lot more than one of the other seniors who was an self taught English grad. He worked his ass of an was performing as a senior. Ceo stiffed him on the raise, he didn't know any better until he found out code campers salary and was gone in two weeks.

My director left shortly after and so did I. They haven't kept a lead for more than 6 months since, that was 3 years ago... Sorry I digress.

There's something to be said for the drive of someone who has had to strive to get where they are versus those who take it for granted.

Bear Stearns had a hiring mantra of not liking MBAs and instead hiring PSDs: "Poor, smart and had a deep desire to be rich" :-)

How did that work out for them?

We’ve had some outstanding juniors hired from bootcamps, self motivation is powerful.

How about students pay for college with a state-brokered income share agreement? As in, for every year of university, a student pledges to pay that university .25% of their annual income, for life. The government could easily facilitate this via the income tax process. This would eliminate the issue of student loan debt, and finally put the incentives of our universities in line with the students they're supposed to serve. I imagine we'd see a lot fewer frivolous degrees once it was in the universities interest to actually equip their students for financial success. The way things are, I doubt these institutions care. They get paid either way!

How many kids are currently induced into that situation per year?

Many.

I can think of a dozen people who got schnookered into 3+2 business/mba programs. They graduated with $150k in the hole (this was in 2000) and ended up in retail banking or working for the government in some civil service job that required 15 accounting credits.

The classic example of this phenomenon is art majors, who are basically unemployable in a “job” outside of teaching, and those job openings are usually cyclical.

Many means many things. It could be a few hundred annually and someone might still call that "many."

I'm dubious that many art majors wind up $300k in debt. Undergrad doesn't cost that much.

If your parents are wealthy enough to not qualify for need based aid, but not enough to be rich, your $50k tuition + $30k NYC living situation adds up quick.

Ok, so we've got $320k debt for NYU grads. They're at around 6.5k students graduating each year. I don't know what portion have "useless" majors paid entirely by debt. Let's say half. That's probably one of the worst offenders, but let's imagine there are around 10 more schools in a similar situation. Ok, 30k students out of around 4 million students graduating college each year in the US ... that's a tad less than 1%.

More than I thought, and enough to call "many", but perhaps still an acceptable level.

Tie the ability for a student to take out a loan to go to a particular school to the ability for its graduated students to pay back said loans. Put simply, incoming Colombia film students can only borrow money Colombia film graduates have paid back.

Schools that have always graduated successful people with valuable degrees will prosper, and schools which prey upon idealistic young people will quickly find themselves only able to entertain rich dumb kids.

It's an indirect solution which will fix future and past wrongs, without giving any University the right to sue. It doesn't impose any unreasonable burden on institutions, other than the most reasonable one, that they're giving young people educations that actually have value.

One key thing to recognize is that terminal masters programs like this are different from the bachelor's degrees and the PhD programs. They are generally smaller, and are very much run as cash cows for the departments.

Moreover, they will accept almost anyone regardless of how well they are prepared. It's not often a faculty decision, as it would be for a PhD.

> They can’t possibly know better.

This seems to be kicking the can down the road a little. College applicants and students absolutely should bear some responsibility in making sure that their programs, degrees, and desired careers are actually feasible and practical in the long-term. Where you're spot-on, though, is that they don't bear all the responsibility.

The big problem, it seems, is that there's no safety-valve for those students who didn't (whether through their own fault or not) get the memo about programs being worthless. In those cases, making other stakeholders (schools, the state) have some skin in the game seems like it'd make the problem solve itself.

Like you said, if the students are the only ones incentivized to have universities give a good education, we're going to have a bad time.

> They can’t possibly know better

C'mon. Google "starting salaries for [my major]"

Let's look at the top result for google for "film and media studies major salary".

- Job Growth (8% writers & authors, 12% producers and directors, 5% advertising and promotions managers)

- Average Salary ($73k writers and authors, 89k producers, 133k advertising and promotion managers)

Sounds pretty good right? the part that's missing is that the placement rate of "Film and Media majors" into these fields.

That doesn't sound like starting salaries. Who starts as an advertising and promotion manager?

The average starting salary for a film and media studies is $22,656 per year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27828557

Now, given 2087 working hours in a year, and $15/hr, that yields an annual pay of $31,305. 50% MORE than a FAM studies college graduate.

All with a few seconds of effort, with a device in everyone's pocket.

Right, the more important stat is if/what the school publishes for - % employed at graduation and average salary. My school had this online in the 90s, though I suspect many hide this now.

Right, if STEM kids could figure this out in the late 90s on dial-up and pay by the minute internet, then 2020s kids with iPhones in their pocket can check this in seconds in between classes and TikToks.

You're discounting the impact of aggressive marketing for these programs in the 2020s vs. virtually zero back in the 1990s.

As well as there being less non degree career options that pay decently, causing many young folks to feel "a degree" is only option.

Part of the issue is that there is no mechanism to discourage universities from doing this.

It's very specifically the loan companies that do this and the universities just sell their stuff. But stopping would be good, yes.

Best disincentive: Debt forgiveness. Forgive those "unforgivable" and people will think twice about ever doing this again.

The vast majority of student loans are originated and backed by the federal government, for most cases there is no "loan company". It's the federal government that these students owe the money to.

Not at these ultra expensive universities. Federal loans cap at high but vaguely reasonable annual limits, to get 200+k of debt from a 4 year degree takes massive loans from private companies. https://lendedu.com/blog/federal-student-loan-limits/

However, the federal limit is still sky high $31,000 for dependent undergraduate students. A loan cap of say 20k/year would dramatically change what goes on at these private collages.

Grad PLUS loans can be as much as tuition.

> The loan limits for Grad PLUS and Parent PLUS Loans also differ from Stafford Loans. There is no annual limit as a set dollar amount, but students or parents may not borrow more than the total cost of attendance, less any other financial aid received.

These aren’t available to undergraduates. Such programs can really screw people over financially, but more often it’s a question of lost earnings and interest on initial loans rather than graduate tuition on it’s own.

Most of these horror stories you hear about students being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt come from people who have graduate degrees in, for example, film from Columbia University.

Yes, but compound interest from deferred payments make undergrad prices more important than a 2 years masters alone.

Let’s assume 40k / year at say 5% interest compounded annually. That’s ~82k for a 2 years masters which is serious money. But tack on a 4 year undergrad at 40k/year with that same 5% interest and your up to ~272k all said which means that 4 year undergrad cost ~190k. Add a gap year and things look even worse.

Not that 40k and 5% are norms, but it shows how costly deferring payments is independent of graduate tuition rates.

Well, that's why these ultra-expensive universities have very generous financial aid packages for their undergraduate programmes (although presumably a large chunk of this aid also comes from the feds). For example, let's look at Columbia's tuition by family income:

$0-30k pays on average $10,245

$30k-48k, $3,409

$48k-75k, $6,864

$75k-110k, $14,421

$110k+, $41,002

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/columbia-university-270...

This falls comfortably below a cap of $31k, or even $20k for students with family income below $110k. But these financial aid packages are for their undergraduates; clearly they are not so generous with their graduate students, presumably because there's no cap to how much those students can borrow. Other Ivy League universities are very similar in this respect.

It seems clear from the WSJ these massive debts are just the balance that comes from graduate degrees:

> Undergraduate students for years have faced ballooning loan balances. But now it is graduate students who are accruing the most onerous debt loads. Unlike undergraduate loans, the federal Grad Plus loan program has no fixed limit on how much grad students can borrow—money that can be used for tuition, fees and living expenses.

> It has become the fastest-growing federal student loan program and charged interest rates as high as 7.9% in recent years.

> The no-limit loans make master’s degrees a gold mine for universities, which have expanded graduate-school offerings since Congress created Grad Plus in 2005. Graduate students are for the first time on track to have borrowed as much as undergraduates in the 2020-21 academic year, federal loan data show.

> “There’s always those 2 a.m. panic attacks where you’re thinking, ‘How the hell am I ever going to pay this off?’ ” said 29-year-old Zack Morrison, of New Jersey, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in film from Columbia in 2018 and praised the quality of the program. His graduate school loan balance now stands at nearly $300,000, including accrued interest. He has been earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year from work as a Hollywood assistant and such side gigs as commercial video production and photography.

> ...

> “As a poor kid and a high-school dropout, there was an attraction to getting an Ivy League master’s degree,” said Mr. Clement, 41. He graduated in 2020 from Columbia, borrowing more than $360,000 in federal loans for the degree. He is casting for an independent film, he said. To pay the bills, he teaches film at a community college and runs an antique shop.

The infographic here is making it clear that the debt for Patrick Clement is just from Columbia; from his website, it appears he went to the University of Kansas for his Bachelors.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/financially-hobbled-for-life-th...

>"to get 200+k of debt from a 4 year degree takes massive loans from private companies"

So we are enabling private investment to profit from bad loans again? Have we learned nothing in 2008?

> Part of the issue is that there is no mechanism to discourage universities from doing this

certainly not a root cause, but am enabling cause is whem student debt changed to not be dischargeable in bankruptcy. there is literally no longer a way to get rid of it.

seems like an obvious false dichotomy. perhaps we look at how much tuition "should" cost (god knows what that means) and make some percentage dischargeable. ~50%?

... and make the issuing university be on the hook for the other 50% that defaults

Allowing easy bankruptcy would clean it up very fast. That’s how it was prior to 2005.

I think we need to acknowledge the utter deluge of marketing material that liberal arts programs and the loan industry that backs them foist on students, pre-college teachers, and parents. It doesn't help that the odds of the teachers from K-12th grade having a liberal arts degree are pretty good as well.

We can try to say that students should educate themselves about the odds, but that's kinda like telling someone sitting in a McDonalds that they should get something healthy.

Even students going on to MA/PhD programs have a good chunk of sunk cost fallacy goading them on. No one entered these degrees without honestly wanting to make a go of it, but when they pop out the other end with 120k in debt, no idea how to pay it and a ~10% job placement rate - deferring for another 4 years and getting more credentials sounds pretty appealing.

> I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn't get the memo and took on huge debts to join them. This could be said of a lot of elite, expensive, liberal art degree programs

There's a pretty good book that explores that phenomenon and what happens when people don't "get the memo": Paying For The Party: How College Maintains Inequality, by Elizabeth A. Armstrong (https://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequa...).

That might be true of liberal arts, but I don't know about film school. USC's was the first American film school and opened in the 1920s. NYU, Columbia, and Cal Arts followed in the 60s. Everything else came later than that. These aren't prestigious past times for the nobility. They're relatively new things. Film degrees don't have much prestige associated with them any way. Schools can certainly try to argue they make a difference, but the vast majority of successful filmmakers don't have film degrees. It's not like you go apply to direct a film and the studio gives a crap about your education. It's completely driven by portfolio and nepotism, and the only possible advantage a school can offer is helping you make that first film to build the portfolio, but if they don't even do that like this guy said, and you have to self-fund your film on top of paying for tuition, well, it's hard to see what value they can even claim to offer.

I don't want to dismiss this guy's tweet thread or anything. He definitely seems to be saying Columbia tried to market the program as giving you a better chance, but students have to know becoming any kind of artist at all, filmmaker included, is purely a lottery. There's at most a few hundred people in the world at a time making any real money doing it. Schools can't just pretend that isn't the case.

For what it's worth, I think it's a disastrous career choice either way, unless you're relying on nepotism and your parents were famous actors or directors. I had a girlfriend 20 years ago going through Rutgers' MFA program, and she realized some of her dream for a little while, being a working producer for a cartoon studio and even moving to LA for a few years, but burned out eventually from every place she ever worked going out of business and moved back to Jersey and opened a bakery. My best friend from college actually did not study film, but did succeed in becoming a Hollywood writer and even won an Emmy a few years ago. It didn't make any difference. He's even poorer and in more debt than my ex who owns a bakery now. Even "success" in the art world doesn't mean you won't be begging for table scraps for the rest of your life. Hundreds of people work on any given project, but even if a project is wildly successful, wins a ton of awards, and makes a billion dollars, maybe five actors, the director, and possibly the head writer if that isn't also the director, actually see any of that money. The rest goes to the studio.

The way I've viewed it for a long time is that they're a spin of the roulette wheel for wealthy young adults. You expect to lose, but there's a slim chance you'll win big, and even if you don't, you've not lost that much, relatively speaking, and may be able to keep playing. The problem emerges when the player is unwittingly risking more than they can afford to lose.

That’s exactly right. I work in film and TV, and there are great, high-paid jobs in those fields… if you win the equivalent of a professional lottery. Unfortunately these MFA programs are (of course) not transparent about that. And, unfortunately, the people who can pay to play tend to already be pretty well off.

Totally agree.

To a degree, many of these 'prestige' degrees amount to a kind of version of "become the next president of the USA and if you don't, you can become a volunteer part-time mayor of a small town"

If they sold it like this, people would see the odds in this lie. Very few people in the US will become president of the USA. And while filmmakers are somewhat more abundant, it cannot accommodate as many as there are enthusiastic pupils, so they end up doing other things like massage therapist when thigs don't work out but they now have a mountain of debt.

There are many more degrees like that. Ironically, when there is some slack in demand for something like EEs, suddenly people abandon that track en-masse. But these liberal arts degrees don't seem to suffer the same attrition they actually deserve.

The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil. Just absolutely ruining peoples lives.

Indeed. The only question is, do you crush their dream now or later? Is more evil to crush their dream now without debt or later with debt?

And the kids? What are the odd they are know and would prefer a fun youth to an ordinary career? If we're talking a world where global warming looks like doom?

Global warming is a real thing but there are no plausible scenarios where it will affect quality of life of current 20 year olds in US in a meaningful way in their lifetime. If Miami get flooded they can just move a bit inland. With that debt they won’t own waterfront property anyway.

And to your question - much better to crush dreams earlier like they do it in Europe.

I disagree. I live in the western U.S. and climate change is already a real and present part of life here. Wildfires are a more prevalent threat due to many factors, and climate change is a leading driver. Consistent drought is challenging water rights and allocation - most notably with with Colorado River Compact. More common heat waves threaten agriculture stability in the Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and Great Plains. These are all things that are happening now, and are projected to get worse.

On a more country wide scale, we can expect foreign migration to the U.S. to increase. Sure, some folks can migrate inwards from the coastal U.S., but what will people in coastal El Salvador or Guatemala do?

None of that is going to meaningfully impact a typically mobile, non-property owning, ‘wanders to find a job’ 20 something. If anything it opens up new opportunities for them in the chaos.

What percentage of the population of 20 somethings fall into the category of "mobile, non-property owning, wanders to find a job"? 1-5%? And you don't think that peripatetic workers will have to deal with the political and societal implications of climate change? What will the impacts be when California and Arizona decide between allocating water for urban areas or agriculture? What happens when the Columbia Plateau is too hot for sustained crop yields? Those workers can't just travel somewhere entirely removed from those realities.

Even ignoring the absurd reduction to a small proportion of 20 somethings, the original comment was about 20 somethings in general, not just a hypothetocal mobile workforce. The majority of 20 somethings will not be able to load up their $40k sprinter van and head for greener pastures.

We’re in a thread talking about college students, of which almost all of which are moving to go to these schools. It’s that percentage. And a whole lot more than 5% of American 20 somethings move for jobs or school away from home during this time.

It’s literally the most flexible and already mobile portion of the population, and the segment most trying to establish itself (while having some useful skills). They are the ones who are most capable and who will benefit the most from disruption.

It’s the folks too young to have useful (job) skills or capital, or who are already established in a place, or who are physically frail/getting more so, that will be the most put out and hurt by these changes.

And the human race will survive, as terrible as it will be. Compared to the world wars, the expected impacts are likely to be relatively mild - albeit more widely spread.

Global warming is a real thing but there are no plausible scenarios where it will affect quality of life of current 20 year olds in US in a meaningful way in their lifetime.

It's extremely hard to determine cause but 100s of people just died in the heatwave in Oregon, Washington and Canada. Here in California, unbearalbe heat and noxious smoke seem like they'll be with us a third of the years (it's started now where I am and went to October last year). Doyle, Ca was destroyed a couple days ago. It's a pretty small place I hear and towns destroyed last year were also are small.

All this may be coincidence but it's coincidence that makes people think (well, the jet stream slowing is what creates extreme heat and cold aside from average temperature increase, so well, telling people "no problem isn't credible to me, an oldster even less likely to see further futures).

These are all things impacting property owners (aka not 20 somethings with massive college debt), folks in rural areas (also unlikely to be 20 somethings with massive college debt), and old people (same).

It’s not that these things aren’t happening, it’s just unlikely to concretely cause problems for this demographic.

> will affect quality of life of current 20 year olds in US in a meaningful way in their lifetime. If Miami get flooded they can just move a bit inland

If Miami get flooded it won't be the only place flooded, the housing crisis alone will bankrupt the country.

Now, without doubt. If you allow them to take on debt then you lessen the need for industry to create onboarding positions.

And the world would be no worse off if only rich children with trust funds got degrees in film, Russian literature, or art history. And if the Government stopped propping up college loan programs, tuitions for practical degrees would drop like a rock.

Requiring the universities the back some, or all, of student debt would get rid of a lot of wasteful programs, majors, and hopefully, professors. My university, large non-elite state school, was overloaded with tenured professors who taught courses for majors that would not lead to most of their graduates.

> The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil. Just absolutely ruining peoples lives.

50% agree, and I'm not in the US (UK) so our experience (and reality) may differ.

But are 'upscale [up-market?] universities marketing', or are governments and people with votes deciding that everyone needs a university education (because people with degrees have higher income and correlation is synonymous with causation) and when 'everyone' inherently isn't interested in.. 'traditional' subjects, we end up with this? Vocational degrees not even leading to the vocation.

I think theres a fallacy that US education is just universally debut induced indentured servitude level expensive.

Fancy schools, and popular out of state universities are expensive. So is paying for room&board in NYC & Boston because you "had to go to school there". You do not need to go to somewhere costing $75k/year and pay full sticker price.

There are plenty of community colleges, in-state (dorm or commute), etc that you can match your aptitude, parental savings and future income prospects towards.

My parents did well enough that I wasn't going to get any need based money, and I was like top 5% of my HS class.. but I didn't stretch and apply to Ivys, MITs, etc. My wife came from a similar background and was actually #1 in her class but likewise took a similar path.

I applied to ~5 good state unis & competitive but not ultra selective engineering institutes, where I either was going to get favorable in-state tuition or merit based scholarship money to take me well below sticker price.

I always worked during high school so I had an idea of income & savings. I also had a concept of how much my loans were going to cost me as I started paying interest payments after my first year, and saw how it stacked up over time.

My dad went to a technical school for an associates degree first because he thought he'd end up being drafted so why bother, and then ended up living at home and working while getting his bachelors.

Some of this is education as high end brand consumerism.

My personal experience was that professors cared about research first, PHD track students second, and career track BS degree students.. somewhere a few more notches down

I know little about film school, but in many research-based departments, there's a very practical motive for this. PhD track students work in your lab, and you are listed as an author on their papers. Basically, they help accomplish the first goal.

> mean sure we can side with the 18 year olds making bad financial decisions taking on debt for a BA degree. But by the time you are 22.. 24...26 and going for these six-figure MA/PHD tracks .. cmon.

Person doesn’t find meaningful employment after step 1, it is natural to assume (and universities push too) that a higher degree is the differentiator.

Sure but we also can't discount that some just enjoy being in school perpetually.

I had a dorm roommate who did go on to do very well in the end, but spent another 8 years getting a PHD.. anyway I'll always remember a couple years into my career we were having drinks and he said to me something to the effect of liking continuing his education due to the the lack of responsibility.

I have a neighbor who is 10+ years into getting a PHD in liberal arts. He gets a lot of feelings of prestige from being associated with very well regarded universities and he has no career intention when he finishes due to being funded.

However I think of all the BA/MA students for the classes he is the lecturer for and what debt they have taken on to go on their own fruitless journey. They aren't all funded the same ..

There just shouldn't be loans for these degrees. At all.

If student loans were discharchable in bankruptcy there likely wouldn’t.

"I mean sure we can side with the 18 year olds making bad financial decisions taking on debt for a BA degree"

Lets call it what it is: institutionalised debt bondage. Non dischargeable debt is a mind-boggling violation of liberty.

It's creating a class of serfs that will always owe their lord.

The solution I’d prefer is to remove federal student aid eligibility from all study programs that don’t result in sufficiently increased earnings for their graduates.

There’s lots of arguments to be made about how having lots of history/English/whatever graduates benefits society in some intangible way, and they might have a lot of merit to them. But that’s not the purpose of federal student aid. The purpose is to improve social mobility. It’s not difficult at all to measure which programs achieve that goal, which don’t, and which are in fact harmful to social mobility.

Limit loans to median first-year earnings of a graduate of the program. Better universities can charge more, no one can go too far into debt.

The best college teachers are he really grad students / postdocs with social skills / the personality for teaching. They are still fresh on the material, energetic, and know some of the applications.

Exactly, my best "professors" were not, technically "professors".. a few were basically grad students, but the best were paid instructors who came from industry to teach. I'm sure perversely they were also the worst paid & treated.

Agreed. I went to a four year University in the U.S. However, I decided to take an accounting course at the the local community college. The “professor” was a tax accountant by day. He taught at night because he wanted some extra money.

I learned more from that “professor” than most of the rest.

Exactly my experience. Often the professors held us undergraduates in open contempt.

One in particular said straight up on the first day, “I do not like teaching. I am required to do this in order to do the research I want to do.”

I guess I at least appreciated his candor, it gave me insight to what many of the other professors felt but never said out loud.

…and actually he was in the better half of instructors (there was an admittedly low bar with a few excellent standouts).

Exactly. The joke was our department also paired us with a faculty advisor. When I met with him and mentioned my intended career track, his immediate response was to go talk to the career center. That was it, he was done with me.

Categorically the field I work in industry have no idea how to teach. They are good at what they do for work but not at engendering any kind of critical thinking of self learning in students.

And haven’t had their hope and will ground down by the academic system yet.

I think there is a disconnect here between different people's expectation and reality.

Having been on both sides. I can sympathise.

In the UK the responsibility of preparing students for wider world lies with the University. (this is the perspective of many lectures who teach within stem)

The departments believe their commitment to teaching is finished after assessing the students ability within their chosen field, that's their job and the universities provide external optional support material which they believe covers everything else.

The students that teaching staff spend the most of their time with are doctoral students. Speaking frankly these students have passed a filter to being students willing to work at a problem for hours. This is not a guarantee they're the best, but they are normally the most hardworking. There is a huge expectation that these students teach themselves missing skills and abilities. This is what teaching professors expect from all students. Although it would help if they said that.

Some lectures are just plain awful at teaching. Like some Coders make bad managers. Some are doing it because their successful position to pay for their really expensive toys in labs demands it. Imo these lecturers need to be taken aside and disciplined for failing at their job because a single bad lecturer in the wrong topic can do a _lot_ of damage to a department's reputation and functioning...

However most lecturers work assuming they're speaking to PhD students mainly because they spend so much other time with them. It's difficult to identify that for 2 hours a week you're speaking to a room of people without the common skillset to be a PhD student. (I'm not spreaking of raw ability and intellect, it's the mindset to focus on a problem for days or weeks until you understand it by yourself)

The problem is for UG students that often don't know what skills they're missing to be of most use to outside academia. Being about to identify and work on this is askill in and off its own right.

Imo it's much less that staff try to mould students to academia and much more that students who are of the correct mindset find their way there.

The expectation is that UG students would identify where they need to work to become more attractive to an employer. And that they will seak extra material out and train for this. (academics are the people who setup how the university works and they follow the academic model amidst everywhere, which, well... works when you understand the unwritten rules)

This is different to the expectation that teachers teach you everything you need to be useful. (my background is coming from a state school which was demolished down for failing)

I can see how paying huge amounts of money creates an expectation now that the university should prepare you to enter the workforce straight away.

It took me until PhD to appreciate this and my grades at UG weren't exceptional but from comparing notes to colleagues over the years this is one of the cultural differences which seems to come from expensive private schools vs state funded local failing "sports specialist" schools.

Fighting against this at a institutional level is like shouting at a wall imo so I just make the best effort I can to make a difference with students who cross my path who are falling into the same traps and feeling let down by the uni overall. (my favourite being a lecturer I keep arguing with that is bad at his teaching because I (a native English speaker) need a thesaurus to follow his lecture slides, this does not help meaningfully convey the finger points of data driven physics labs to international students, despite the fact that's how it was taught at Eaton)

> An interesting idea I saw was the idea of making schools have skin in the game on these degree programs by requiring them to back some percent of the debt of these federal loans.

Since little short of death can cause a student loan to be discharged, I don't think that would actually put any skin in the game.

I really hope your comment made you feel all big and smart!

"The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil."

But also kinda Darwinism at work? Ask 100 random strangers to clean a loaded gun while staring down its barrel. You'll probably get at least 5 people to do it. Student debt isn't even that evil.

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