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Comment by AmVess | Hacker News Reader

The people crying the loudest about loan forgiveness are people who went to expensive colleges and obtained unmarketable degrees.

It is well known that many of these boutique colleges charge a lot of money because they will find people to pay the price. Simply lowering the interest rate on a loan will do nothing to stop this.

Requiring colleges to peg the total cost of an education to what a graduate can earn in that field in one year would be a good step towards reducing pointless degrees and laughably expensive tuition.

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My SO is a physician assistant, which requires a graduate degree. The tuition alone at almost all of the PA programs is >100K and acceptance rates are low (<20%) so most people don't really get to choose where they go. Most of her class graduated with 150-250K in debt with 5-8% interest, they're a year into working at understaffed hospitals and are already burning out.

Quitting and getting a different job is not an option because nothing else will pay them anywhere near enough to cover the $1800-2500/month tuition payments.

I don’t agree with necessarily tying price to value. I don’t want people choosing art history over CS just because it is cheaper.

I do think each major should have something akin to a Nutrition Facts label laying out clear information about the financial outcomes for recent graduates. So people can understand if financing that educational pursuit is likely to be worthwhile.

Why don't you want that? Pricing signals are the way markets communicate. If we obfuscate those signals, problems invariably present themselves. As we are seeing.

Look, if everyone says something that you don't want to hear there are two ways to respond - rationally or by putting your fingers in your ears and going "LAH! LAH! LAH!" as loud as you can.

I know which one I prefer. And if you're answering this post, "LAH LAH LAH LAH"

> I don't want people choosing art history over CS [because of price]

This reasoning right here is why people are stuck in $100k student loans with useless degrees. Sometimes it is more useful for society as a whole to have fewer art history majors and more engineering majors. The overwhelming majority of highly impactful social science research (if it can be called that with the reproducibility issues it has) comes from the top 10 institutions. Everyone else is just getting a degree in barista science.

I’m not sure I like the implicit association here between a job’s income level and some vague metric of “usefulness to society,” to say nothing of the dismissiveness that comes with the “barista science” label.

We shouldn't push people without aptitude and interest in programming into the field. There is already too much bad code out there.

I'm not advocating an increase in art history majors. I'm saying if art history was cheaper, that could send even more people down a path that is financially unrewarding. By pricing degrees according to value, a CS degree becomes relatively more expensive and less attractive to somebody making college decisions with a tight budget in mind.

If you make universities responsible for student income outcomes (by for example making them take loan liability in case of default) that makes them steer students towards the CS degree, not the art history one.

Most (all?) US colleges should have reports detailing their intakes and graduation rates for all majors. Students can also look through BLS and Onet to see prospective wages, industry growth rates, and other information. Resources are there, the issue is that we're expecting 16/17 year old kids to make a multi-year commitment towards a field of study they likely have no real experience in.

There's a ton of complex research out there on nutrition data as well but we still have laws about how that information needs to be presented. The reason we have Nutrition Facts on food packaging is to summarize and present the information in a way that is standardized and quickly scannable. This helps everyone understand what they're buying and (most important) facilitates quick comparison to alternative foods.

A similar presentation of financial outcomes data would go a long way toward saving people from these inescapable student loan black holes.

I had an expensive education, just paid it off last year. We lived with my folks for a year to finally pay it off after 10 years.

Nobody should have to struggle that way. Make college free and forgive the outstanding debt. My $1000/mo made my life extraordinarily expensive…

In the long run, having lower taxes from not paying for other peoples' educations is cheaper for you and for anyone with a useful degree.

I will take the example of my friend. He's at a no name company as a new grad software engineer making $96k. That is, he's working at a position attainable to everyone. That's $8000/mo pre-tax and he lives in a fairly LCoL area. $1000/mo for 5-8 years is peanuts compared to the extra taxes he'd pay for a lifetime under your idea.

If you consider it from the perspective of someone working at FAANG ($200k new grad salary) $1k/mo is even more trivial.

So you want to punish people who get practical degrees? How will this reduce "pointless" degrees? Won't it incentivize you to get them?

By peg, I meant cap. Colleges will still compete on price for better students, so practical degrees will more or less remain the same cost.

What will vanish are $150k degrees that have no or little value in the market.

I sometimes think applying Matt Levine's Certificate of Dumb Investment, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24285305, would be relevant to the massive-graduate-student-loans process.

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