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Comment by jurassic | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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"

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.

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