Subprime loans for college hiding in plain sight
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Community college is the answer regardless of what your degree aspirations are.
You will end up saving half of not more of the tuition and boarding expenses compared to spending all four years at a major university, and you get excellent instructors at the most critical time of higher education.
Instructors at major universities for 100-200 classes are usually assistants, not professionals. And you STILL end up with a diploma from a Major university.
You like football games? Put on team colors and pay for a ticket. Most big schools make you pay now, anyway.
You want to go to parties? Then take a year off and have a blast. Get it out of your system. Then go to school.
Here is a link to the list of community colleges in the US:
(I transferred from another university, not from community college, so I do have a point of comparison.)
If you have ambition and have the potential to get into a nice school, then going to community college is ackin to shooting yourself in the foot. Sure, you can still have a nice career afterwards, but you're cutting yourself from many more opportunities you would have had otherwise.
"excellent instructors" depends purely on luck wherever you end up to, and pretending they are automatically better in CC is deception. Most importantly, how bright are your classmates is the #1 thing that drives higher achievement in my experience, as the learning material is all over the internet anyway.
I would like to add that in the sort of signalling game that higher education is, making "rational" bets such as "taking a year to get partying out of your system" is very much inferior to just doing what is deemed socially acceptable (which is partying while in college).
Perhaps we can guess they meant to - but it ain't what they said.
> You will end up saving half of not more of the tuition and boarding expenses compared to spending all four years at a major university...
> And you STILL end up with a diploma from a Major university.
Big universities (and the above) oversell the importance of connections made at school. Yes, connections matter, but how often do the connections from freshman or sophomore year matter? Many students don't even know what major they will graduate with during that time, and the best connections are those within your field.
Wherever you ended up to, how do you know it would have been better going to a community college?
The data is obviously highly biaised but when you look at top researchers, what % went to CC vs what % to top undergraduate programs?
PS: I say this because I personally know people who went to top institutions lamenting that they should have went another way for some of the reasons you mentioned, and yet they all have landed nice positions wherever they wanted to go.
Right, it is biased. You need a control - two similar people with similar backgrounds. People going to CC are usually not doing so by choice.
I think that ultimately, some people are going to be successful regardless of the path they take. Universities attempt to capture the recognition for where their attendees end up, but I think that has more to do with the attendees than the universities.
I, on the other hand, had loads of group projects in my freshman and sophomore years; and as most of us were used to being the top of our class and having to "carry" other team members who weren't invested, we all had a refreshing realization that, "Hey cool -- everyone here is both smart and motivated!"
Don't know how different that would have been at community college, but I certainly benefitted from having smart and motivated classmates my first two years of university.
> Yes, connections matter, but how often do the connections from freshman or sophomore year matter?
The people I met in my hall at the dorm freshman year constituted the core of my friendship group throughout the rest of university; and I'm still in contact with a large number of them. I'd say a larger than average number of that group went on to advanced degrees like PhD or law degrees. Influence matters.
Would I have gotten a PhD myself if I had started at community college? Maybe, maybe not: hard to tell. But I am glad that I went all four years. (That said, I only graduated with a single four-digit student loan; those two years would certainly not have been worth a six-digit loan.)
That's a very strange way to say "I disagree with this advise."
There is a whole genre of « internet advice » (such that: don’t go to college, study a trade, community college is better than regular college) that are repeated by people for many reasons (such as personal cope, political agenda) that don’t include what’s best for the listener.
That's just called "advice". The internet just makes bad advice globally addressable.
Further, some states in the US have great CC -> 4 year programs. California comes to mind. Graduate from a Cal CC and you're guaranteed admission to UC. A lot of kids in the bay go to Berkeley to finish their 4 year.
The excellent instructor thing isn't a joke either. You really don't need a top PhD student to teach you Calc 1 + 2 (assuming you're doing a STEM track). It's really just about getting the reps in. You're going to be a bit weak on proofs + theory, but you'll be solid on the basics.
The bright classmates thing is a bit real, but you have to find your motivation anywhere.
I just said that going this unconventional path was more than often strictly inferior (in the sense: if you were able to transfer to Harvard you would have had also good opportunities anyway) than going the mainstream way.
If you come from a low income household and get accepted to an Ivy+, odds are you'll get a full ride (my own case), so calling OP's post "completely unfounded" is completely unfounded.
They're super picky about who they take, but they do take a few transfer students each year.
I know, for example, many employers aren't exclusively looking for Ivys or even higher-end universities either.
CC is a great way to skip the BS and get straight to the point.
If you enroll in a 4-year school after CC you can get the BS. ;-)
I dropped out of school during middle school. I didn't like school.
Google raised me, the internet raised me, I found education my own way by just looking for examples to mimic. Books, internet, and people to talk to. I retired at 30.
Where there is a will, there is a way. The modern academic system is just a factory.
When I screened resumes, I didn't look at where someone went to school, I looked at what projects they had under their belt and what they had 'obsessions' about.
If you put time in, you will become skillful.
If you put time in, and you don't like what you're doing, you'll probably have a less than good time doing it.
If you put time in, and you like what you are doing to the extent you are obsessed about it, you'll probably not even realize you're working or getting paid.
A year off "to party" is iffy advice, but "a year off to get high school out of your system," i.e. a "gap year," is really good advice.
I walked out of high school a depressed mess, and instead of slowing down and dealing with that, I let my parents pressure me into rolling that straight into college. Five years later, still pointlessly studying anything that sounded interesting, no degree in sight, sinking deeper into depression… it wasn't until I finally flamed out and put my life back together that I could even think about career. I wasn't even aware that the disciplines I would eventually find interesting even existed until after college.
I still rank going straight into college as the biggest mistake of my life.
Also I disagree about partying better later on in life. Getting shitfaced with your friends at 20 any day of the week, hardly sleeping, and then not feeling a thing the next day and going to class is an experience you cannot replicate later in life. The last thing I want to do at 30 is have more than 2-3 drinks and get less than 8 hours of sleep when I have work the next day. The party atmosphere changes - the experiences get nicer and the food is better, but that raw youthful naivety and energy cannot be replicated, when you don't really care about anything but just having a good time and the environment/peripherals don't matter at all
Community college requires more discipline. There’s isn’t as much fun extra cuticular activities, you’re often paying out of pocket and you’re home so there’s lots of distractions.
If you can make it through that, you’ll do well at a university.
Don't go to college before you have a sense of what you are interested in learning.
This may not apply to many HN readers, but a lot of young people show up at college quite aimless, and this is not a great way to spend valuable tuition.
You don't need to have your life course charted out, but you will likely be at a disadvantage if you aren't intensely curious about some things and eager to learn more about them when you start buying credits.
I agree that community college is worth considering, but it's unlikely that community college will give you much direction you aren't developing yourself.
The advice I give is a modification of the 'luck surface area' analogy: the more exposure you get to people who are engaged in professional disciplines, the greater the chance you will encounter traits and circumstances that interest and/or inspire you and open figurative and literal doors to your future.
I live in a country where college is paid by the taxpers, and college students get a bunch of advantages (student work, food coupons, cheap stuff, access to student resources, gyms etc.).
We have a bunch of students who have to decide on what to study at age 18, and a bunch of them are just "i'm bad at math, what doesn't have a lot of math?" and totally disregard other factors (mostly, employment opportunities), so after ~5 years, they get their masters in ancient greek and philosphy and then complain that there are no jobs for "educated young people".
On one hand, they knew that there were no jobs in that field when they filled out the application forms, on the other hand, the taxpayers paid for 5 years of a useless college, then they learned something that has zero added value in their eventual workplace, and then they still complain.
TLDR: "interested in learning" sure, but with consideration of "are there jobs in that field?"
fwiw my nieces ignored my advice and are liberal arts majors at private colleges in the US but at least they have close to full-ride scholarships.
May I ask which country? Whenever I look at education stats for a taxpayer college funded system versus the US, there are tradeoffs made, such as less of the population getting college degrees through stricter (taxpayer desired) requirements. I'm curious if your country has a solution that's better on some Pareto frontier of education funding methods.
It sucks that kids have to choose a major right out of high school now (if not before). I have an AA in undecided. When I went to community college (90's) I took art, computer programming, music production, and scuba diving. It was awesome. And it made deciding on a major for my BA much easier.
If you think you know find out what, if any, the “weed out” classes are. I thought I wanted to be a dentist but organic chemistry kicked my ass (ok, took more effort than I cared to give it at the time). It was a wake up that if I didn’t have the grit to get through that, I probably was setting myself up for failure.
First, many students have a home life not conductive to study, or outright hostile. Traditional four year college provides a place where most things taken care of so you can focus on your studies. There are often enormous opportunities to find new friends that are much closer to your mental capabilities and career aspirations.
Second, universities have a wealth of opportunities that a community college simply lacks. For those who are motivated, there is research in all fields, which a student can help with. There are all sorts of work study programs, etc. If you're after work experience relevant to one's career, or a way to explore various careers, a university is really hard to beat. However, just because there is opportunity, does not mean every student is prepared. Professors want prepared students.
Third, most state universities have smaller class sizes for their honor students. If you are not honors student, it still is not hard to find out which paths are less full. For example, a 100 level socioscience survey that fulfills one's core requisite for computer science might also be filled with a 200 level class (having no prereq) in a more specialized class, such as pre-hispanic mesoamérica. You may have to work harder, but you'll also learn more.
Finally, doors of most professors are open. You just have to step though it. This personalized attention and direction are crucial to education. Most students simply do not know to do this, and hence miss the most important aspect of the process. Professors love to help when they meet a student who is driven to learn. By the time you graduate, you should have a half dozen professors who know you well enough that they will write a letter of recommendation. Those personalizes letters are the ticket that open doors, to grants, further study, or to their professional colleagues in industry.
You also don’t seem to mention anything about networking. The best friends I’ve had come from freshman year in college when everyone is in the same boat and more willing to make friends. 2 years in, it’s a lot harder to break into established groups.
At the end of the day, if all you want is a degree and need to save money, the two years at community college followed by two years as a university is definitely the way to go but it’s not optimal imo.
She probably has as many friends from her original college, which she attended for just one year — the crucial freshman year.
I'm not saying it's worth tens of thousands of dollars to network with other students, but if this is where lifelong friendships then it's worth considering the specifics.
Also, many students qualify for significant need/merit financial aid. For me, attending the #1 rated liberal arts college was only modestly more expensive than attending a UC, with in-state tuition. And need-based scholarships have only gotten more generous in the last couple decades, since I went to school. IIRC all the top schools cover your full costs if your family income is below $125k or so.
The problem with college is it's too expensive. The government has done nothing to make it cheaper. Their backing and forgiveness of student loans only makes it more expensive.
It's infuriating. All the government needs to do is literally nothing. Just get out of the way!
If the government gets out of the way everywhere, the class system and caste system will be back withing 3 months
People think free market capitalism is the natural - thats just propaganda. Feudalism is natural, thats why it existed for 10 thousand years.
It's just the best investment we could make. We wouldn't have to worry that anyone's potential got wasted if everyone could easily go to college, and people could switch careers more easily. It would just raise the general competence level of the population and probably instantly start lowering crime. Skilled people without crippling debt. We should do socialized healthcare and make them healthy, too.
Consider phrasing it differently.
A class system is the defining feature of feudalism - if you are born into a class and may never escape, and if higher classes have more legal priviliges than you do, thats no longer capitalism we know and love/hate/tolerate.
The class system is already there. Not everybody can go to Harvard or all the elite colleges. So what are you talking about exactly? If the government wants poor people to go to college, then the government needs to give scholarships to these people, not loans that can't be done away through bankruptcy, let's the banks take all the risks, that's their job.
The states do pay for education, but during and after the 08 recession (and generally during the 70s-90s too), they have cut funding for higher ed, to put more into k-12 and tax cuts:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m...
Cuts in state support are balanced by tuition increases; expenses on a per-student basis are not up anywhere near what tuition has increased by.
Additionally, net tuition at 4-year publics actually paid by students has been almost flat or down over the last 15 years (see Figure CP-9 in #10), with net tuition plus room/board up slightly, due to increases in rent not fully controlled by colleges (same figure).
The same applies at private non-profits, flat to negative net tuition, and a moderate increase in tuition+room/board (Figure CP-10 in #1).
The answer is very clear. When states cut funding per FTE student, tuition rises to compensate. When state funding is flat or slightly up, tuition stays level (Figure CP-11A in #1).
All citations from #1, the best data source I know of for college tuition pricing data: https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/trends-college-p...
If you want to look at it on the expenditures side, which should balance with revenue for non-profits, that data is here, and also shows moderate increases in spending: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_334.10.a...
Imagine if you couldn't get a loan from a third party, where the university lets you owe it the fees, but you cannot borrow the money from some student loans company or the government.
Then the university would figure out which people it thought would be likely to pay back the money, and which are perhaps worthwhile to fund without monetary reward. And the uni would be well placed to make such decisions.
If the money comes from a third party, the uni gets the money regardless and doesn't need to care. The lender can't be defaulted on, and so they don't care either.
This is exactly the problem. The government guarantees "student loans" made by 3rd parties. Tuition costs have seen huge inflation over the last 25 years, second only to medical costs in the U.S.
I also don't think students realize simple things like... Since money is fungible, that $5 coffee is also being paid for by the loan. They're really borrowing to pay for their lifestyle as well and don't think about that.
Not since 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Care_and_Education_Reco...
https://www.studentloanplanner.com/parent-plus-double-consol...
Gen Z seems to be much, much more aware of this issue and as a result the number of STEM majors in colleges have exploded. Although it does also seem like the rigor has gone down acutely.
I'm getting my second bachelors in Computer Science now, my first was in Chemical Engineering 12 years earlier. The amount of rampant cheating and seeming inability for the schools to "fail" a student is completely foreign to me compared to my first degree, which took me 8 years to achieve across three schools, so I definitely got a somewhat decent sample of school cultures.
Isn’t the US in the middle of multiple drug crises (opioids, meth) and a mental health crisis?
I agree there's a lot of value which could be provided -- but someone still needs to employ those talented individuals and provide them with the infrastructure necessary to facilitate them doing "their job".
IMO the better solution would be some limited forgiveness for current borrowers, then shoring up/restoring funding for state/public universities, undercutting pricing at privates
Jesus people, if you’re argument is that “but mortgages have collateral” then at least address why 20% of someone’s discretionary income over 20 years for federal loans or your lifetime income via non-dischargeability for private loans doesn’t count.
I don’t give two shits about the financial solvency of the lender, if you have to repo the house the system has failed. Throwing a massive amount of money to someone who’s probably on their second big boy job ever betting 15/30 years of income stability to pay it off is insane.
But I’m from Scandinavia so I do think 10% of income is a great way to pay for college. Have the government collect it and cut out the bank!
Student loans are a wild financial product when you stop to think about it, a loan with no collateral, given to someone who often times has no credit, and enforced through it not being dischargeable in bankruptcy.
We can still think of what we wish the rules had been in the begging or what to do after unsustainable housing price increases cause Mad Max anyway.
So does raising interest rates - see 2008. Look at the fed funds rate spike which set it off (not to say there weren't other problems to make it worse). Also look watch the housing market right now.
Housing as a percent of income has been fairly constant for 50 years (there was a recent HN link on this). Lower interest rates mean you can borrow more dollars at the same monthly payment. This combined with an overall decrease in rates since 1980 have fueled the housing market.
Long terms loans just mean building equity takes a long time, and people who sell within 5 years really don't have any (it will maybe cover moving costs). The problems with interest rates changing and putting people under water are really a problem of people not having equity in their home. Reducing the length of the loans will reduce that problem significantly.
Ultimately the price of housing is determined by supply, not interest rates, and supply is still historically low.
In Sweden, once your mortgage is below 50% of the of the purchasing price you don't have to pay it off and you're free to just pay the interest in perpetuity.
Two other common ones not true of this comment are using a very young but non-throwaway account with very low karma, and are not responding to any criticism in the replies - true at the time of my comment but I suspect that will change.
Yes, but so what? That doesn't make it wrong.
2) I tend to push for extremes, so the base point seems more reasonable, but yes that was not needed or good to put in.
>> 3) Wildly outside the commenter's area of competency.
That stings a little, but you're not wrong. That doesn't make my reasoning wrong - see some of my replies to others, and feel free to argue against the reasoning.
Pay attention when you get a mortgage. It goes like this:
1) what is your monthly income?
2) what are your monthly expenses?
3) calculate: this is how much we think you can afford to pay per month
4) back calculate: this is how much we will approve you to borrow.
5) Typical money available determines house prices.
The key here is that #4 means housing prices are hugely influenced by interest rates, and also the length of the loan. Housing as a percent of income is actually fairly constant because they'll everyone wants to get you for as much as they can, but the bank balances that against risk of default so there is a limit.
That's my rant. Reducing the length will cause people to build equity faster and will reduce volatility and the dangers of things like interest rate hikes.
I've done quite a bit of modeling for predictive house pricing and investment questions, so I am very aware of how mortgages, math, and housing markets worth. As far back as around 2001 I was writing pricing algorithms for companies that needed it (look at my resume), and I've done a lot since then. So I'm pretty clear on how they work.
>5) Typical money available determines house prices.
No, house prices are indifferent to what one buyer can afford; they are determined by the entire market of buyers AND sellers. If a seller doesn't want to sell at price X, they will not. If a buyer doesn't want to pay Y, they will not. If a buyer cannot afford price Z, they cannot buy that house.
After your step 4, the buyer knows how much they can afford, and looks at houses already at that price.
>Reducing the length will cause people to build equity faster and will reduce volatility and the dangers of things like interest rate hikes
Over 85% of mortgages are fixed interest rates, so interest rate hikes are not that much of a problem. People can use them to their advantage if they understand the pros and cons, but the vast majority will never be affected.
People have a fixed amount of monthly income they can use to pay a mortgage, so the amount they can borrow is completely predicated on that - their ability to make payments. If they are forced to get short loans, they will only be able to buy lower priced houses, and will miss out on traditional housing stock growth. A 100k investment returns half what a 200k investment does.
Also, many people will be priced out of mortgages completely since cutting loan lengths in half roughly cuts affordable house prices in half.
Finally, even if one can afford monthly payments on a 15 year mortgage, it's still better economically to get a 30 year mortgage and make the payments as if you had a 15 year, except only pay the minimal amount on the actual mortgage and pay the rest into an investment. After 15 years, you will be better off in almost all cases (check the math, last time I poked at it I would be $60k on a $300k house doing this).
As to reducing volatility, if you can just afford a 15 year mortgage for a given house, then you are at more risk since you're not saving cash (as investments) for problems. If you instead turn that into a 30 year, cutting your payments down, and save the excess, you will have cash you can use in case of problems. So this is another benefit to getting a longer loan - you can truly make yourself more resistant to problems and volatility.
A third factor is fixed rate mortgages means the cost of your mortgage goes down over the length of time due to inflation: your income goes up, your mortgage goes down. Inflation gives benefits to borrowers (mortgage holders included) at the cost to lenders (banks).
So, if you check the math, buying a bigger house (up to the limit of what you can spend) and getting a longer term loan historically has resulted in more, not less equity. Model it out and check the math yourself.
Colleges will become affordable again.
The idea of banks having a risk free loans never really made sense to me...
They do not since 2010:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Care_and_Education_Reco...
> Ending the process of the federal government giving subsidies to private banks to give out federally insured loans. Instead loans will be administered directly by the Department of Education.[23]
Making loans higher interest to handle increased risk, making it even harder for someone to pay for college.
Private universities might have no incentive for change for obvious reasons left as an exercise to the reader, but it would in the interest of the government to support innovation in this area, instead of try to patch a loan mechanism that is only feeding the beast.
for the majority who do it for income reasons, ideally it would be designed to not take you more than say, 8 years to pay off, given the median income for the major and area.
this alone would resolve most of the issues. there is value in someone majoring in English. issue is the median English major, given their inclinations are unlikely to make as much as the median, say, Economics major, in a given area.
these disparities would ideally and should be reflected in the cost.
the result would be:
1. when you apply to college you should apply to a major and that should be part of your application
2. different majors should cost different amounts of money
3. acceptance rates should differ based on major
4. classes of different types should cost different amounts of money beyond some gratuity (say, 8 classes).
A not insignificant number of college students have no hope of majoring in STEM even if all of the economics are screaming at them, which they are.
The acceptance difference isn’t really that great, either. Not sure what property valuations have to do with anything.
For example at all of the ivy leagues there’s no significant difference in tuition for major nor is there really a substantial difference in acceptance rate. Some, like Columbia have different schools, but even within them majors, and prospects, differ.
I taught at a university where students were given a math placement exam before being assigned their freshman courses. Getting into Calculus and passing it with a good grade was a sorting hat for what major you could study.
Fees proportional to pay sounds like an income tax.
California for example has proposition 13 which fixes the tax. Are kids in California less prepared? New Hampshire has higher property tax rates than Massachusetts- are they doing better? Etc.
Even if it were true, the most expensive schools are private and so property taxes still would have little relevance to the discussion at hand.
So why would somebody pursue a limiting career in servant worker degrees of any type? Computer Science isn’t entrepreneur lessons - it’s vocational school with a higher price tag and we all know it. Pretending a BS in CS is harder to get than a BA in Philosophy is laughably sus.
In the UK for example criminal barristers have been striking due to low pay (sometimes effectively under minimum wage)
Then in the US we have evidence of declining salaries https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/median-us-lawyer... and over supply of lawyers https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/law_firm_leaders_rep...
It's not really a surprise if you tell people that profession x pays universally well long enough, more people will go there than are required, unless the demand for the profession keeps expanding.
Making minimum payments always increases the length. How do you define your pay off?
For the record [1], in recent years around 58% of bachelor's degree holders incurred debt, with the median at $23,000. If you want to pay over 8 years this is around $3k per year, which should be completely doable for anyone with a bachelors degree over an 8 year span (over 8 years the average person will make far more per year than starting wages).
[1] https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-d...
This, to me, is the buried lede. This is worse than payday lending, and it's being perpetrated by our government upon desperate parents.
All health care costs in the US are going up. The US government has to pay HMO corporation profits, Americans have to pay higher drug prices unlike other countries. The government can continue paying current Medicare rates, or it can hand more money to health companies if it wants to. As the government is still handing extra money to health companies apparently no one thinks it is a problem as of yet.
The typical conservative plan is to abolish SS and replace it with private savings. We tried that. It didn't work. Low income earners don't always have the capacity to save at the levels required to avoid destitution in old age or disability.
Not everybody will be able to retiree on their personal savings. Many of those people will get that way through no fault of their own. Some people just have bad luck. They get injured and disabled. They have extenuating family circumstances. They might just be stuck in a dead-end, minimum wage job.
Working young people have to take care of non-working old people. That’s true in a Bangladeshi village and that’s true in America. There’s no policy knob you can turn to make that fundamental dynamic go away.
Both are controlled by policies enshrined into law by congress.
One of the things that can and has been done to control expenses is raising the retirement age.
There's a lot of elder-care that is fundamentally non-scalable and non-automatable. But there's also a lot that is. Policy can both incentivize development of / investment in the latter and paying people competitive wage and benefits to step up and work the former.
Meanwhile, with productivity per person higher than it's ever been thanks to general industrial and service automation, there should be more GDP than ever free to invest in such social programs.
> There’s no policy knob you can turn to make that fundamental dynamic go away.
Are all the productivity increases in the past century completely meaningless?
To take the most facile, direct example possible, if all the fast food jobs are automated, can't we train those people to take care of the elderly? Not medically, but as orderlies and other employees in nursing homes?
Based on the change in prices for long term care and skilled nursing facilities, the productivity increases due to automation/outsourcing have not offset supply and demand in labor for elder/disabled care.
It is highly undesirable work, plus medical advances keep people alive longer and longer who need assistance to live. Even during my life, the past 30+ years, these jobs were almost always done by immigrants because they were willing to accept low wages. It is not something an American with options is going to opt for without higher pay.
The increased productivity from the economy. The money is there. It's obvious it's there because we produce way more than ever before with far fewer workers.
I'm talking about productive capacity in the economy, not cash in a vault. It exists. Instead of battering workers with higher taxes, try taxing companies more directly. They're the ones benefiting the most from productivity increases. Tax land value, since real estate prices also benefit from productivity increases in rich metro areas.
> That money is currently being spent on or invested in other things
If you pay care workers more money, they will also spend or invest it. It's not just stacks of dollar bills going into a furnace.
The money is out there. The wealth generated by all that increased productivity is just being captured by a small group of ultra-wealthy.
We could "easily" tax those massive accumulations of wealth to fund societal needs. We only need to convince all the temporarily embarrassed millionaires that doing so is in their own best interest.
Or, tax income over $130k.
Or, reduce payments.
Like I said, the plan only goes bankrupt if we allow it.
Or, tax income over $130k.
Or, reduce payments.
Like I said, the plan only goes bankrupt if we allow it.
Income over $130k is heavily taxed at 24%. Retirement age can only be increased so many times before retirement is effectively gone for the lower class - I think I've heard the statistic that the majority of Americans will only ever collect on three social security checks.
However, I would bet pretty strongly that one of those constraints won’t hold - probably the amount paid out to each person will be lowered, although the tax percentage could also increase.
The social security program is separate from the federal budget [0], and that's why you see it as a separate tax on your paycheck (if you're American). Every dollar you pay into it, goes into a trust fund, whose sole asset is US Government bonds.
Social security can go bankrupt if the US defaults on it's debt, which although almost unthinkable (see Russia as a recent example of paying bonds despite being under heavy sanctions, and having to pay them in another currency) comes up every few years [1].
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-miller-socialsecur... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/16/biden-signs-debt-ceiling-inc...
The problem is many millennials and Gen Z have already given up on social security, do not believe in it in the future, and will not vote to keep a dead or dieing SS program alive when they themselves had abandoned it long ago. And once they hit critical mass the SS can actually die without voters to backup it up and along with it all the terrible old precedences of that program will disappear. That will leave a huge hole for retirement funds, but it also means a new program can be implimented into its place, something like a basic income that has become more popular or just another social security model that has different specifics and rules.
Current social security is relying heavily on population rising or at the least not falling, but even that is very questionable at this point and could end up being the nails in its coffin.
Good.
Let's be brutally honest and ask who's really to blame for this.
I think Gen Z is against a government riddled with incompetent clowns that mismanage SS. Until all of those idiots are gone, Gen Z doesn't care.
I recommend a refresher on “literal slavery.”
The people who designed SS to be funded out of payroll taxes instead of corporate taxes, buybacks, and dividends. No seriously, hear me out.
As the economy became more efficient, fewer and fewer highly-paid workers are needed to work in it. This leads to overall lower SS tax per head being collected as the economy becomes more productive. What you really want is for the growth of the economy to be captured in supporting seniors - so tax the indicators of that growth.
Unfortunately they had real, political reasons for setting it up that way. Funding it with payroll taxes was the only way to get the bill passed, and ensure it wouldn't be gutted. (I'm paraphrasing from books I've read). And the people who paid into the program would feel morally entitled to receive benefits, and thus would always support the program.
Once Millennials are the majority getting the benefits, they should feel free to refuse them and shut down the program.
Everyone but the boomers has had a 401k for most of their working lives, and comparing 401k payout to social security, the "trust fund" looks like it has a terrible ROI.
The federal government should use the power of the purse. A public school can only receive public funds if tuition and fees for US residents is $5,000 per year or less for 30 credit hours. Additionally, private schools should not be eligible for public funds at all. Or, if people are just way too upset about this, private schools are eligible for a max of $5,000 per student per year.
There, I’ve solved the actual problem of infinite runaway costs.
If you proposed funding colleges with taxpayer funds and reducing tuition costs, it gets reflected in the budget today, and you get attacked for causing higher taxes.
If you proposed giving out loans, then you can even sell it as lowering taxes because the government now owns an asset that will earn a return.
Same story with deferred compensation like pensions and retire healthcare for government employees. Reduce cash expense now, fudge the numbers for future expenses to make it seem less expensive, promise lower taxes, and win elections. The current voters will mostly only care about today’s costs.
* Massive Inflation
* Misappropriation of funds and miss selling of the overall product
* Regressive taxation
* Short termism
* High costs to the state and students, low funding for institutions
It's just a huge mess and a terrible system for everyone.
You only have to pay 5% of your disposable income to your student debt. These parents with parent plus loans are going to be fine with that
In fact that’s a loophole that some are talking about that by will make college very cheap for middle class parents at the right life stage. Parents take out a big loan for their kids and then retire so their income becomes very low and the 5% payment becomes almost nothing and then after 10-20 years the remaining balance is totally forgiven
Nobody under 40 came up with this godforsaken system.
It also creates boom-and-bust cycles. I graduated with a degree in physics, just as the Cold War collapsed and mandatory retirement for professors was outlawed. There was an absolute glut of physicists all looking for jobs at once.
We should not subsidize it at schools trying to play the rankings game with artificially small cohort sizes and commensurate high costs to the taxpayer for no additional payoff.
Why should we subsidize it at all? Because it's a public good.
I certainly do not believe in the slightest that humanities graduates can “critically evaluate public policy” any better than, say, STEM graduates. In fact, they’re probably worse. They were the ones pushing Marxism on Americans back in the day and similar insanities today, like eg. demonizing and defunding the police. I believe that it makes them negative externality.
Now, you may of course disagree. But the point is that there is no agreement that they are a public good.
They are better at evaluating certain types of policies than STEM graduates.
I've met a lot of engineers who are incapable of understanding what a social construct is, or the societal consequences of hate speech, or who don't know what market failure is, or who are totally ignorant of the history of slavery and the indigenous genocide, who don't know anything about international relations, or various other things which are just child's play for humanities graduates which all have deep relevance to certain policies. This shows me that a polity with just STEM graduates and tradespeople is a polity that can't function properly. Without humanities education (whether self-education or otherwise), the only response to Biden talking about "white supremacy" in his speech is pitchforks and fascism, because voters miss the reasons why Biden would make such an utterance. The only response to a carbon tax is pitchforks, because they don't even understand what a market failure is. The only response to transgender protection is pitchforks, because they don't even know what a social construct is. STEM graduates don't know what they don't know, and they label their blind spots as negative externalities out of a combination of supreme arrogance (primarily), ignorance and confusion.
Policy evaluation isn't really the main point. The antidote to populism is the point.
> demonizing and defunding the police.
The topic of police demonstrates my point. It's only people from a humanities background that showed an interest in critiquing the police, and they were the ones running the studies on policing going back decades. The STEM folks had zero interest. They'd rather ignore the situation rather than study and address it. That's why society can't function with just STEM graduates. They don't know what they don't know.
> But the point is that there is no agreement that they are a public good.
I understand that fascists and nationalists and right-wingers are against humanities education because it provides an antidote to their toxic ideology. And that's about 30% of the population against it by default. Argumentum ad populum. That doesn't detract from the correctness of what I'm saying.
The word “properly” does a lot of work here. In context of the previous sentences, it most straightforwardly means “it cannot function according to the left-wing likings”. And I very much agree with this: if humanities department (as they currently exists) were actually calling the shots, the society would indeed “function properly”, i.e. it would be left wing in all its policies. However, nobody then should be surprised that the right wingers most certainly do not consider funding humanities departments to be public goods: they believe that what these departments promote is in fact the opposite of good.
The rest of your comment is some sort of weird attempt to convince me that the society ran only by STEM grads would actually not be good, which is not the view I ever espoused: note how I added “say, STEM graduates”, which clearly implies that they are just an example. I hope that you do not actually have a humanities degree, otherwise you should ask them for you money back!
> I understand that fascists and nationalists and right-wingers are against humanities education because it provides an antidote to their toxic ideology.
I guess it’s easy to assume that your opponents are just wrong and “toxic” in everything they say, but if you make them understand that a reasoned discussion with you is impossible, given how you dismiss it all a priori, they might come to a conclusion that the only way to achieve their goals is, as Clausewitz said, politics by other means. This is an extremely dangerous way to proceed, and I think you should not be so convinced about your side’s invincibility. The society is negotiated peace, and you’d better work to make future negotiations possible.
Further, neoclassical economics is typically considered a centre-right or at least neoliberal paradigm and is taught to all econ students. The way of addressing market failure that I mentioned (e.g carbon tax) is actually a right wing preferred response to climate change. It's only the hard right which doesn't understand this and opposes a carbon tax. Perfect example of the need for liberal arts. The educated old-school fiscal conservatives know better. Because they are educated in these topics.
International relations which can inform non-pacifist intervention is taught by the liberal arts. At least this domain is not tied to the left-right spectrum in any way. It's simply informing foreign policy. It's pretty valuable to have voters who know foreign policy, left or right!
The solution, going by your opinion that no left-wing boosting thing should be funded, is clearly not to defund climatology, medicine, sociology, history, economics and international relations. You don't stop agitation for change. You just get uninformed agitation like the Bolsheviks. A smart left that is capable of picking and choosing what to change is a necessity, because their moral impulse to drive needed change in the face of perceived unfairness isn't going away by removing their education.
"I guess it’s easy to assume that your opponents are just wrong and “toxic” in everything they say"
I consider myself to be center-right economically, in favor of lower taxes and lean regulation and smaller entitlements, so my comment is about the anti-intellectual reactionary right. I can see eye to eye with non-science denying anti-authoritarians individualists (which is to mean non-nationalists, for example, because nationalism is a collectivist morality) on both the left and the right.
Why then education and knowledge boosted right wing policy as recently as 15 years ago? As recently as 20 years ago, college graduates were something like 50% more likely to identify as republican than democrat. How could that be?
> change happens to be advocated for by the left most of the time
Yes, and that change is often very much a bad thing, and the “experts” advocating for it are very much wrong. Consider, for example, the transgender issue you brought up. In UK and Sweden, for example, “experts” on transgender care for past few years have advocated similar policies to the ones advocated for by “experts” in US today. In past few months, however, “experts” in both countries had a big turnaround there, and now very much advocate against policies promoted in US (eg. against puberty blockers, surgeries for minors etc). Regardless of which “experts” are right, the others are wrong. If ours are wrong, they are doing indeed criminal damage to children. Who will oppose them? Same point can be made about COVID “experts”, or, to a lesser degree, climate change policy.
That’s the problem with experts: if people notice they are full of shit (and you often don’t even need a lot of expertise for that, when policy proposals are completely incoherent, like “keep churches closed but strip clubs open”), the whole notion that education is a public good really stops being so convincing, and for good reason too.
> You don't stop agitation for change. You just get uninformed agitation like the Bolsheviks.
So I should keep funding humanities, otherwise they’ll start murderous revolution? I, uh, remain unconvinced.
In all, the fact of the matter is that trust in institutions and in media is steadily falling down, and this makes me happy, because I don’t believe they deserved much of this for last 30 years or so, and what trust their predecessors have earned, they are working very hard at squandering. On their carcasses, new life will grow once again.
The trans treatment issue and covid response issue is just like any other intersection of academic study and public policy. You balance the pros and cons based on the empirical evidence. Sometimes policy makers may get that balance wrong one way or the other. Treatment may lead to life-destroying outcomes X percent of the time, but lack of treatment can lead to life destroying outcomes (e.g empirically increased chance of suicide) Y percent of the time. Lockdowns are a trade off between your freedom of movement and the freedom of old people to not die. It's not an easy issue, because you've got the incomplete and evolving science on the one hand, and public morality on the other, combined with a dash of administrative incompetence. So you shouldn't presume that getting the balance wrong in one direction is criminality but getting it wrong in the other (thereby increasing suicides) isn't, or that there's any better alternative that involves uneducated people making such decisions.
"So I should keep funding humanities, otherwise they’ll start murderous revolution?"
That's nice positive externalities to have, but not once have I seen any evidence that the average humanities graduate possesses those qualities you claim they have.
IOW, it's a nice thing to have, but what makes you think that it comes from a humanities degree?
Nobody should pay for it directly. It should be virtually free to go to college, the way it is everywhere else in the developed world. It should be that way because it's single most obvious investment and high-returning investment any country can make in its future.
If you are going to invest into something, it should be good investment that gives returns. An Useless degree clearly do not give enough returns not even to pay for itself.
Whatever your particular country's failures are might be unfortunate, but they don't counteract the track record of success here. It might be worth considering whether both of our countries would do well to change, rather than presuming that your country's failure will also be mine's.
You're assuming that individuals capture the entirety of the value they generate for society (and that they do so exclusively in the form of income), which is essentially never the case.
If so, we're already agreeing in principle and just disagreeing where the line is.
Having come from a liberal arts program: excellence there is a strong predictor for general workforce competence, including in technical fields (like I am now). I studied 18th century German philosophy, and now I work on compilers. But even this shouldn't be a necessary justification: developing our understanding of history, society, and the human condition is sufficient in itself.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-50-most-expensive-colle...
[1]: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/stony-brook-suny-2838/p...
Me getting a STEM education will pay me back quickly. Thus I can afford to pay for it.
Society probably need someone to do those other things as well, which don't pay as much. So therefore we should pay for it.
It's largely the process of developing and practicing critical analysis and how to effectively communicate it.
Yes, most humanities degrees involve a lot of writing about things written, but it's wrong (and patronizing) to say that the takeaway from the degree is merely the ability to read and write.
Effective communication is a thing a lot of STEM students have a deficit in, to boot. It's not a coincidence that they're the ones often brandishing the humanities as wasted effort.
Merit based scholarships and/or government grants for university humanities departments is a far better way of ensuring we get the most bang per dollar subsidized.
This is such a weird perspective. Look at any modern business. A lot of employees will have studied something in humanities. There are valuable skills (particularly writing and communication) that are learned in these degrees that might not be seen as valuable by your average techie.
The problem is not "useless degrees" (they're all useful, regardless of what you may think of them), the problem is insane cost of education.
Depends on the business and the degree. They may be valuable, but they are not 500k usd valuable.
>(particularly writing and communication)
You should learn that in grade school.
(The rest of the comment is ridiculous -- it should be obvious that there is much more to learn about writing or communication than just what can be taught in grade school.)
Are those skills valuable enough to warrant a 500k usd loan? clearly not, or else they should have no problem repaying it.
With regards to value: do you actually want to live in a society where the sole metric for human worth is one's predicted salary? That sounds miserable.
I wish we'd normalize furthering your education later in life after establishing a career and having more funds to do so. It should be less about advancing your career and more about improving and expanding oneself anytime in adulthood.
Yes: even 30k in debt can be crippling, and there is a complex of macroeconomic pressures (like liberal arts jobs concentrating in HCOL areas) that make getting out from under that debt much more difficult than it otherwise would be.
That being said, the solution is not to disincentivize people from getting liberal arts degrees. It's to just make college cheaper, the way every other developed nation does, and to ensure ample non-undergraduate career paths for anybody who is merely going to college because they're told "it's the thing to do."
> I wish we'd normalize furthering your education later in life after establishing a career and having more funds to do so.
I agree completely!
Have you ever actually heard of someone who amassed $500K in student debt to get an undergraduate degree?
I’m sure people get in to that much debt, but it’s going to be rare. The largest number I’ve known of personally is $320k from undergrad, law school, and an MIS.
Sad how fake info is the top thread at HN. In particular Columbia will never make you take out loans: https://cc-seas.financialaid.columbia.edu/how/aid/works.
The kind of people who would get zero aid from Columbia would be very unlikely to be taking out loans to begin with.
Do you really think it’s reasonable to expect eleven year olds to write and communicate at the same level as a fully grown adult?
Minimum page requirements are often the bulk of your grade in non stem. If you wrote the minimum pages, followed the style guide given to you, used mostly correct English, and followed citation guides. You will get a passing grade. It encourages finding a bunch of sources that back up your point ad nauseam, and paraphrase them repeatedly.
I am sure that you have watched a teacher grade 50+ 10 page papers in the span of a week and heard their rational behind each grade though. Having graded some of those papers when being a TA, its all about the rubric, not the content, and most of the rubric is stuff like "Did they follow formatting rules? Did they hit page requirement? Did they have correct citations? Did they follow citation format?" Because not having a space in the wrong place during their works cited page is super important, but writing utter nonsense? Eh. Stuff like "the content" is sometimes low as 10 points on the paper. Usually about 20.
I was hoping that DEI would be more about inclusivity toward majors and not merely about one’s genealogical expressivity.
I think this, and it's something I factor into my hiring decisions.
Just like nearly any corporate initiative, DEI is about what corporations can do to appease their critics, and right now that largely means gender and ethnic background.
Other forms of diversity, based on career path, religion, ideology, or even nationality, are not considered priorities.
And if businesses didn't require 4 year degrees for jobs that don't need them, they wouldn't.
We literally gatekeep careers based on your ability to finish a 4+ year $10k+ degree program, and then you actually get the job and essentially nothing you learned was useful.
The number of coworkers i've met with degrees outside their career is basically the majority (as i work outside of STEM), and their skills mostly correlate to how well they were trained on the job. There's PLENTY that never needed college, or that college didnt change jack about their poor skill set (in fact reinforced it).
The people I know who are making the most are doctors/lawyers (and thats a whole OTHER story), and then right after that are the trades (mostly union workers) who never went to college.
I'd much rather see a proper focus on the public education we already have (and varies WILDLY in quality depending on where you are) than basically saying "well we're going to require you to go to school until you're 18, and then we're going to say that no matter how well you excelled there you're only worth minimum wage unless you force yourself through college, and then get a job where you're useless until they finish the on the job training."
A large majority of the economy is based on jobs that just do not require a 4 year degree (MAYBE 2, but even then it should just be a credit requirement). I'm all for better educating the populace, but accomplishing this by just kneecapping those with life circumstances that make a 4 year degree difficult isn't helping.
We won't see widespread de-escalation of credentials until there are labor shortages, at which point it's no longer in anyone's interest to keep potential workers sidelined in school.
It's hard to shake off the bias that a post-secondary graduate would be more likely to be a quick learner than a high school graduate even if in reality they're effectively the same
In terms of learning “critical thinking”, it’s just selection bias.
Most smart people go to college and people misattribute the intelligence as somehow being a product of the college. No, it’s not.
Obviously students will learn how to game the system and pass all the essays/tests over their 4 years.
That doesn’t imply that they’re more useful for society or better placed for their futures.
It just means that they know what words/phrases to use to get an A on their paper.
But to you point, I define critical thinking as the ability to analyze and synthesize disparate data in order to form thoughts and opinions which are well founded. When they come to me out of high school, this ability is often completely lacking. When they leave after 4 years, they are being sought after by top companies, forming their own companies, and entering into public service well equipped to meet the demands of their new careers.
No one is graduating from our programs by regurgitating words/phrases. I don't know where you got that perception. That would be descriptive of high school, not a top-ranked university.
That’s quite a take if that’s what you’re saying, and also disproven by the fact that students absolutely differ in ability depending on how much they apply themselves (studying vs partying). Also disproven by the fact our non-traditional students also improve in their abilities in the same way the 18 year olds do, despite being much older.
What you’re saying here essentially is that the entire institution of education, something developed societies universally recognized as a cornerstone of civilization, is entirely without merit. Maybe you should rethink that position?
Critical reading is a skill you can practice. The specifics depend on the field, but there are many common features such as analyzing and comparing texts, interpreting them from various points of view, and putting things in context. In order to practice critical reading, you must learn something deep enough that you start understanding the nuances of the arguments the experts in the field make.
Fresh STEM graduates tend to have worse critical reading skills than arts/humanities graduates, because they never had the chance to practice it. On the other hand, advancing to true senior positions often requires similar skills, and many learn them later in the life.
I'd be curious to see evidence that STEM majors actually have worse critical reading skills. Or is it a subjective ranking you've derived?
STEM degrees are essential for modern society, humanities degrees are pure luxury that could be replaced by just reading the course syllabus for free and discussing online or with local groups
As for the cost of education, that could be fixed overnight by allowing loans to be discharged. Colleges would instantly stop providing most humanities courses because they know the students won't be able to repay them because they provide no real world value
And that's before we consider the intangible nature of "real world value." Very few of us want to live in a world where value is a pure function of expected production.
Whether or not the thing we call "universities" continues to exist into the indefinite future is not of particular concern to me.
The primary thing I'm concerning myself with in this conversation is the recurrent and myopic belief among the HN commentariat that everything, especially anything that isn't STEM, needs to fit into the bottom line of some profit structure to be worth any of society's time and effort.
we are talking way more fundamental things here. If all of society suddenly had a ton of humanity major knowledge but no farming knowledge, society dies.
The government is only able to subsidize a luxury like humanities majors because all the other basic needs are taken care of by the miracles of technology created by engineers and physicists. Otherwise, everybody would still be doing subsistence farming to survive and wouldn't have time for the humanities anyway. You can't fake productivity and economic output, it all comes down to technology
How about a severe and widening disconnect between the people paying for the loans, the people guaranteeing the loans, and the measurable value received by the recipient?
Going into debt for a humanities degree is akin to consumer credit. The individual is free to take on that debt, but it is by no means an investment.
I do not think people should weight the intangible value of the degree that they are going 50k in debt for. Doing so will lead to the current student debt crisis.
Humanities teach you that life isn't a ROI thing.
The world is perfect. Those students and society are getting their monies worth in intangible benefits.
One could possibly acquire that particular knowledge for free.
Also, life may not be a ROI thing, but being heavily indebted is still misery. Do the teachers whose salaries depend on their students being heavily indebted teach that, or do they prefer not to talk about this issue? Or the administrators?
I would call it a material (and painful) lesson on conflicts of interest.
closing implies the government does it by force, my point is that things that provide value- whether economic or more abstract, will be fine without government subsidizing it. Research labs have proven ROI and benefits for society, humanity majors no so much. If humanities majors had so much value companies would be paying for them or other nations governments would be recruiting these debt ridden students and poaching them to benefit their own country
Like I said, people can learn anything humanities related by reading free resources online. No need to rack up massive amounts of debt to do that
The fact you have to make a value judgement of it being "reprehensible" and act like without humanities majors we'll be "a world where value is a pure function of expected production" is a sign of a weak argument. It's a very common argument style I see of people stuck in the past with rose-tinted views of what college is about
They do, all the time: as journalists, economists, political dissidents and, most saliently in this context, programmers. It turns out that obtaining a well-rounded education means that those who can program (or perform other technical roles) do so better than their purely technical counterparts!
You can learn anything online, with enough effort, discipline, and engagement from others. Lots of people try to learn programming (not Computer Science, just the technical aspect of programming) online each year, and I'd wager that the overwhelming majority fair. It turns out that the classroom environment is conducive to learning in ways that self-directed online learning is not!
Yes, it is a value judgment. It is one I stand by: it is reprehensible to eliminate sources of value in our society just because we don't have an instrument capable of measuring them. One wonders how many fewer adolescents and young adults would be inspired to study aerospace should Tom Wolfe have been told to study it instead of writing The Right Stuff; one also wonders whether we'd even be having this conversation over the Internet were it not for a bunch of "worthless" philosophizing in Viennese cafes over the nature of mathematical structure.
Your basic point is that education is worthless. What do you propose as a substitute? And please explain also why it is better at the scale of a society?
Given your view on the ease of effective writing, it is fair to expect that your answer is well structured at the level of the entire essay, the paragraph, and the sentence. Your reply should also include appropriate historical references demonstrating your points.
If you cannot meet that standard, then by your own argument you have proved yourself wrong.
The scope of writing for effective communication and writing software are very different, but I do also agree with this. SE and CS degrees aren't for writing software though.
I think specialized education has far fewer benefits than most people think. Basic language and mathematical skills are a good baseline, but expecting to teach the whole population advanced algebra for instance, does not seem productive. It's why people question what they were taught in school.
> If you cannot meet that standard, then by your own argument you have proved yourself wrong
Funny you say that, since I have always had good English without trying and my communication skills have been commented on by a number of different people I've worked with so my perspective on this is somewhat biased.
I want to first give you full credit for an honest and thoughtful debate, in the true spirit of HN. You have my respect.
Second, I fully believe that you have exceptional talent in communication.
That bias, however, is the issue. You do it naturally. You also point out that this is exceptional. What do we do with the 90% of the population who are not exceptionally gifted? Maybe they would benefit from a structured approach which trains them on the skills which come to you naturally?
Same for many other things. The best programmers I've known all were really good without the Uni education. And the structured education of a good masters program brought them to a new level.
Danger! sports analogy. You can't play in the majors without a great deal of natural talent. But the people with talent ANSD specialized training ("intentional practice", "good coaching", or however else you want to phrase "education") are going to dominate.
Respectfully, there has also been a multi-decade large scale concerted attack by big business and the US Republican party with the explicit aim of getting people to question education and teachers.
And please make the distinction between what was taught and what was learned. If you go back and look at what the teachers had on the curriculum you might be surprised.
suggests that effective writing could be a social good, and that apparently it does not come naturally.
In my experience tech people value communication and clarity as much and maybe even more than your average person. Try to write code that would be unintelligible to your colleagues. You are not going to get praised for that.
> The problem is not "useless degrees" (they're all useful, regardless of what you may think of them), the problem is insane cost of education.
Absolutely useless. It is ridiculous to think that it should require 14+ years of schooling to learn to communicate.
That's true, as someone working in tech I admit, I am illiterate. I cannot read or write. My communication is very poor. I normally just scream until someone from HR brings me more snackies.
they use it as an IQ filter, nothing more.
What's the deception here? Was the government going around saying how much money you could earn from a humanities degree? Statistics about earning potential degrees of degrees were available for decades. Caveat emptor.
I'm not sure what the exact messaging your school told, but I imagine it's something to the effect of "degree holders earn x% more than non-degree holders on average", which is a true statement. The "on average" part might not been stressed, but anyone with rudimentary knowledge of how the labor market works (ie. some jobs pay more than other jobs) should be able to figure out that earning potential by degree varies.
The educational system utterly fails at equipping every graduate with the knowledge and skills to succeed in the modern economy in the 14 years they have already. Why are we giving them four more years of everyone’s life and hundreds of billions of dollars more money?
It's been a long time, but if I recall correctly, funding and rankings were partially determined by the number of high school graduates continuing on to college. There was constant pressure to take the right classes and participate in the right activities to meet college admissions requirements. The messaging came from administrators, teachers and counselors.
Exactly, that's the scam. Requiring a 'Tax' that you pay the college that is nothing but a useless piece of paper, that makes you lose years and enslave you in debt.
Obama 2015:
"the single most important way to get ahead is not just to get a high school education, you’ve got to get some higher education. That’s why all of you are here."
"But you’re also here, now more than ever, because a college degree is the surest ticket to the middle class. It is the key to getting a good job that pays a good income -- and to provide you the security where even if you don't have the same job for 30 years, you're so adaptable and you have a skill set and the capacity to learn new skills, it ensures you're always employable."
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/0...
Then why do people with college degrees need bailing out?
Just allow the debt to be discharged conditionally. That’s in my mind the cleanest and fairest way to deal with this issue.
No, it is not clean and fair to allow someone who spent 4 years getting a degree that will put them ahead of the non-degree-citizens and then force the non-degree-citizens to subsidize it.
It is nothing more than theft.
Which would eliminate about 93% of his audience
https://hbr.org/2019/10/americans-need-to-get-over-their-fea....
Who got deceived here? If you were told that the government would be guaranteeing loans, then it follows that they're potentially on the hook if the loan goes bad. That's not something that's hidden, it's literally part of the definition of what guaranteeing loans mean.
>Furthermore, the colleges continuously raise prices because they know they will get the money, regardless, if the student defaults.
That sounds more like unintended consequences than deception.
The deception is in the belief itself, and the government has a tremendous power to shatter it, yet they choose not to.
Right, if you are going to take on tonnes of debt, it should probably before for a degree that has a reasonable chance of repaying the debt.
> colleges offered useless degrees to people that do not need them except for vanity [..]
Not useless, but it is difficult to get a profitable career in this subject areas.
> This is one of the biggest scams in history.
Not even remotely close, unfortunately. Tax is way worse. Your employer gets tax, you then get tax, anything your buy is taxed, if you don't spend it before you die you get taxed, if you try to leave it to somebody you get taxed, if you try to save money the government uses inflation to slowly tax it away from you.
The next biggest scams are likely debt traps (checkout who owns the largest amount of debt of poorer nations right now and how they got there), followed by crypto (which is a glorified pyramid scheme - prove me wrong).
It is not wrong, but as long as it replaces the far, far worse pyramid scheme that is Fiat, I'm fine with it. But we digress :)
Not even, really. Average student loan debt for new graduates (Bachelors) with loans last year was $28K. Even for someone with a humanities degree, that's far from an insurmountable debt to pay over 10 years. It's obviously higher for people getting graduate degrees, law degrees, medical school, etc., but so is their compensation. The stories you hear about people racking up $200K in debt to get a Bachelors in Art History range from extreme outliers to basically memes. I support reform, but there's so much misinformation in this space it's ridiculous. A one time debt forgiveness isn't even "reform" IMO, as we're going to be right back where we started in a few years.
Which is a fine sentiment; the problem is that it makes no sense for people to be going deeply into debt to become well-rounded citizens. If you're gonna end up with tens of thousands of dollars in the hole at the end of an education, at the start of your adult life, then yes, it's reasonable to need that education to reliably produce economic dividends.
Like, just think of all the other things that can help people become more well-rounded or better citizens, like community service, or international travel. Once you have the list in your head, think to yourself: how many of these would you recommend that young adults spend years of full-time labor in, and go into major debt to pursue?
I'll turn this around on its head: if we recognize the civic and social benefits of having a well-rounded population, then we ought to treat the current rash of students who knowingly go into debt for their degrees as performing a remarkably selfless act.
Like so many problems in the US, this one is entirely self-inflicted: you can get a liberal arts degree for virtually nothing in much of the rest of the developed world. This hasn't caused crises anywhere else, and hasn't caused students to flock away from technical programs (which are also civically necessary). None of this has to be the way that it is.
From an individual perspective, people should not be willingly going into large debt for poor or relatively uncertain financial prospects.
I don't disagree, but I want to highlight some factors that (IMO) at least partially absolve people who do take that route:
* We do a really pitiful job of teaching financial literacy in the US, especially below the undergraduate level. I suspect that many people see 30K debt after college and think that they can subtract that directly from their salary over a course of years, without factoring in taxes, interest above the principal, etc.
* At a societal level, we avoid crushing peoples' dreams: we all know that we can't each be this century's defining investigative journalist, art critic, &c., and yet we (socially) also understand that we can't get those successes unless lots of people strive towards those goals. Maybe this points to a fundamental error in how we value labor, but that's probably an even harder problem to solve for Americans than restructuring college tuition.
https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/28362...
Since politicians don't want to repeal the Clinton-era law, the logical choices for many students will be to skip college or to leave USA for college overseas. We are really harming our children with this debt.
At the time Biden served in the (GOP-controlled) Senate, and not on the relevant committees there.
Do you have evidence that Biden specifically was involved in negotiating about this? Or do you just mean that, insofar as he was a member of the Senate, he “helped” by voting for a ~250 page bill that passed 96–1?
"he used his leadership role to limit the ability of other Democrats who had concerns and who wanted the bill softened"
"Senator Biden supports legislation that will fall hardest on women,” she wrote. “Why? The answer will have to come from him … He is a zealous advocate on behalf of one of his biggest contributors – the financial services industry.” -- E Warren in 2005
This 2005 bill would have passed with or without Biden. If you want someone to blame, this ~200 page bill was written by Chuck Grassley (R) and sponsored by 10 GOP senators and two Democratic senators (Biden is not on that list). The House version was written by Rep. Sensenbrenner (R) and sponsored by 80 GOP members and 8 Democratic members. Then it was signed by George W. Bush (R). This is exactly the kind of bill you can expect when the GOP gets unified control of the congress and presidency. https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/senate-bill/256
It’s fair to criticize Biden for voting for this bill, especially in the context of the Democratic primary – Elizabeth Warren is much more aggressively pro-borrower, and in this case Biden was actually on the Judiciary Committee where this bill was debated so could have conceivably have spent his political capital making a big stink and trying (unsuccessfully) to sink it – but even then this article is pretty exaggerated / out of context: 2019 clickbait trying to attract views by speculatively scaremongering about intra-party differences.
It is ridiculous to say “Clinton changed this”.
Edit to add: If someone wants to see this changed, make sure the Democratic party maintains control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections and then start lobbying GOP Senators. Getting to 60 votes on a bill to help “woke college grads” is going to be an uphill fight in the current political climate.
“‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”
applies to so many things in the US.
Americans’ absolute refusal to even attempt to learn anything from comparable countries abroad is pathological at this point.
Degree attainment is much lower than the U.S. for much of the rest of the world[1] (usually from more restrictive admissions, from my understanding). Also, from talking to people in other countries, universities over there are often much simpler and don't resemble the 4-year summer camp that schools in the U.S. do (studying in a lot of other countries is probably closer to studying in American night school). I'd say it's a good model to consider, but many would oppose it because it's so different from the typical American college experience.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
A real fix for the student loan crisis would be to make a national competency test instead of using a bachelor's degree gauge competence. Then get rid of government backed student loans.
My time in college could have been halved if I could have not taken a bunch of the classes that added no value to my education. Honestly, it's shameful how bad those Gen Ed classes are. They exist to check a box.
And I'd be pretty upset to pay for someone else to get a liberal arts degree, especially when it doesn't contribute anything and could have been gotten for free if the person took some initiative.
When I talk to people with STEM degrees who are around my age, it frequently comes out that their “gen ed” classes were pathetically easy. They generally feel some kind of mild resentment around this, since they’re (1) paying for a degree, and (2) generally intelligent people who can handle a more challenging class.
But there’s a reason it’s that way, one that I experienced firsthand when CS students popped into my philosophy courses thinking they’d be easy: they frequently performed miserably and were suddenly at risk of having their CS progression slowed by a non-major requirement.
In other words: many schools have thrown up their hands and (tacitly) admitted defeat on STEM students, funneling them through no-fail liberal arts requirements rather than actually challenging them (where they might fail, slow down their STEM degree, and complain about all the irrelevant coursework they have to do even more). And that hasn’t worked so well either: instead of keeping STEM students happy, it’s produced a generation of undergraduates who think their kid-glove treatment is what liberal arts is actually like.
One of the reasons they are easy is because they are intro courses at the doorway of an entire field of study that is not lacking in depth or complexity. Intro to CS is also very easy (this is a variable, this is an if statement, this is a while loop), but that doesn’t mean the 400 level OS or AI course is a walk in the park. The same goes for philosophy, physics, biology, chemistry, history, or any other subject you perhaps thought was a joke. The ease of the 100 level course is so it doesn’t scare you away entirely, not because the field is intrinsically easy.
Many students will take that gen ed course and then switch into that major because they found the topic fascinating. You took it and found it dull, which actually did add value to your education because it reaffirmed your choice of your major. Some people aren’t so lucky and pick a career they hate, only to find something they love much later in life.
Anyway, this idea that opencourseware is equivalent to a university education is not true in my experience. From my perspective, learning is a multiplayer activity. My students learn best when they are helping each other, doing group projects, teaching eachother things they’ve just learned, and going through the college experience as a cohort. University isn’t just about the facts in the book or the curriculum. I think if that were true, the University system would have been obviated long ago by open courseware. But that has t happened and it won’t because open courseware is just a projection of a university education, not the full thing.
Would be interesting to see data on though.
My anecdotal sense is that STEM is significantly more expensive. Here are some factors:
1) Salaries for STEM faculty are higher than non-STEM, due to competition from the private sector.
2) STEM education often requires additional lab courses, with their own dedicated staff, space, and equipment.
3) Non-Stem additional instruction (discussion sections, etc.) is taught by non-STEM grad students, who are much less expensive than even STEM grads.
Also STEM classes are much larger, with many state school having more than 50% of their students declare a STEM major of some form.
Kinda like a microcosm for society.
Humanities/sociologies: $4400 to $6200 depending on subject.
STEM: $6200 to $9200
Above rates are for Danish students. Universities gets paid more for exchange students.
source: https://ufm.dk/uddannelse/institutioner-og-drift/okonomi/til...
a) Universities in Denmark have no sports teams, facilities or similar. Sport is something you do in your spare time in facilities that the city provides and you do sport with people doing all kinds of other education.
b) Universities have no dorms (there is a single exception to this). Dorms are independent "self-owned companies" which houses students from many different schools/unis.
c) No real prestige in impressive buildings. Students don't choose uni by how impressive buildings etc are.
As the state pays for the education, it has a huge incentive to keep costs low.
The current reality is that that many (not all) humanities majors are societal annoyances with little to show for their education and also have a ton of det.
Society then profits through the resulting efficiency of spherical person transport, with highways replaced by high speed rollways.
The apotheosis of universities achieved, the almost-well-rounded college administrator - rounded enough to round the next batch of students but not round enough to use a rollway himself - celebrates this random process of collisions.
He names the motion of students through this process after his university where it is first developed: the famous Brown University.
I do however completely agree that going into deep debt to do just that is a bad idea, but that's more of a societal problem in the US. Most rich countries heavily subsidize young people's education, including travel and service.
Luxembourg is an example of doing this incredibly well: most young people I met there were really well adjusted, broadly educated, and also quite happy.
I'm from Europe as well, mid 30s, so my friends/peers have no significant college debt. Somehow I grew up with people who all went to art school (mom pushed me in that direction early on) - and all my childhood friends that went to art school are now in entry level/low paid jobs with low job ambitions, limited options in life because of income, no long term relationships, no children.
Subjectively I'm not seeing the "complete people" produced by this system. Compared to my friends that only finished high school they may have more complex opinions, but the reality is they are still in dead end situations - I would not call them any more "complete" personalities. Both end up wasting time on "moms couch" and smoking weed, just discussing different topics.
Life expectancy may have extended (although that's average so it's kind of a moot point I'd argue), but prime age for having children has not.
Having children later on in life not only increases pregnancy risks but also gives you more childbirth defects. Objectively the modern "waste 20s to jump around and party" and "spend your 20s/30s building a career" is leading to a societal collapse.
Perhaps if the US was Germany levels of selective in University admittance and Germany levels of efficient in the administration of the various degree paths, costs in the US would look more like Germany.
There are more options in the US, all those choices have costs that make the US more expensive.
I only ever seen people bring up the cost of university in Europe such as Germany's free system but never the other differences. I'm beginning to think most people only know about the cost difference and don't realize there are many other differences, and by the time someone points out those differences (and how they relate to cost) the person has already formed an opinion which disagrees with the new information and thus choose to ignore it.
How long was the leisure river constructed in the shape of the University's initials? This one is kind of egregious, but most will have an expensive stupid something.
Human capital is a big difference between Germany and the US. My wife attended medical school in Germany. Her year, veterinary was more competitive due to higher demand. If you select for the top n% and demand excellence lots of things are easier and cheaper.
What was the dropout rate from your program?
Lots of money is flushed down the toilet in the US, but the university already got paid so there's not much incentive. Much of the noise around affordability still ensures the university gets paid.
No idea what a leisure river is.
Remedial math (algebra) is often required even for the cohort getting useless degrees. Which program / university would admit this cohort in Germany? In the US everyone who applies will be admitted somewhere. Pushing this cohort through their program adds costs that everyone bears.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
For example of the difference, look at the per capital rate of school students going to university in both countries. It can be a bit messy to compare because you need to break down different routes. University not being the same as trade school which is not the same as apprenticing, though sometimes these will be lumped together in different ways. Last time I looked it up the acceptance criteria to get into university in Germany was stricter than the US. Not necessarily if you are looking at the really good schools, but those often have scholarships that work on a combination of academics and need based, but for a degree in general.
There is also the issue of in state vs out of state in the US, where an out of state can be double or more the price compared to instate. Rarely is out of state a requirement, it is a personal preference and one that costs greatly if the difference isn't covered by a scholarship.
I suspect if the US followed a similar path, we woukd see similar results. I've not heard calls to make US admission more selective or academicly rigorous.
Medicine, Psychology and the like have hard requirements on grades. Sometimes these requirements are so absurd that they are considered unconstitutional. But most things are both for free and easy to get into.
> really well adjusted, broadly educated, and also quite happy
Being obscenely rich helps.
That's partially true. The reality is that most rich countries (That we are talking about) purposefully make young kids stay out of the workforce, unemployable, until their very late 20s pursuing "well rounded people" education that is not useful and leads nowhere but extended unemployment. They have even culturally codified some of this (see: erasmus) This is how they keep unemployment stats low, said countries classified every u-26 as out of the workforce and not looking for work.
In contrast, the US is at least minting some U-21's that end up becoming millionaires, plus by the time most american grads hit their 30's , the majority have a very upward career trajectory, even bought 1-2 large assets.
Meanwhile, their economic peers outside of the US are still at their first job, trying to make ends meet. They could only dream of buying an apt, let alone a house.
You can have differing opinions on what this extended education model provides, whether its more/less useful vs USA, and what it means for social cohesion and peace (by keeping a very large contingent of young kids hooked education freebies). However, it is not up for debate that the limited economic opportunities connected to extended education are severely diminishing the economic prospects of those young kids
Which can be done through online resources, MOOCs, libraries, and using free resources that colleges from such as access to the college library and ability to sit in on guest lectures (the ones that aren't tied to a specific class, they tend to be open to anyone who wants to attend). One will have to miss out on the college experience, especially the parties, but that shouldn't be an issue because it is all about becoming a well rounded citizen, right?
Dropping the sarcasm for a moment, one of the reasons colleges cost so much is because they are investing so heavily in the student experience. How many admins do they pay that aren't related to education (and who make so much more than the professors actually teaching, especially the non-tenured ones). Revamping if not rebuilding buildings that are perfectly fine because they have a dated look. Adding numerous amenities that aren't related to education. Some young adults save quite a lot of money by skipping out on these colleges, at least for the first two years, and going to cheaper ones more focused on just education. Sadly, at least in my experience, there is a correlation between having all the extra experiences and having a higher ranked degree program.
Doesn't/shouldn't this already happen in public school? That sounds like something shilled by higher ed.
This sentiment was true maybe 50-60 years ago but today, college today is purely for career prep. What drives me nuts is seeing jobs where a degree is necessary but required by the company. I took a peek a "non-STEM" jobs on some job board a while back, I basically wanted to answer the question: "what are my career prospects if I majored in PolSci instead of CS".
What drove me crazy is the number of "humanities of other associated major" requirements when the job was something that clearly did not require you knowing any of that, it was just a blanket "need a degree" requirement, what that degree actually entailed be damned.
One thing I noticed is these jobs seemed to ask for degrees more often than tech jobs. Some tech jobs want to see a 4yr degree but I would say the majority are pure merit based (needs X years in this, Y years in that, some experience with Z tech).
TBH that's the root of the problem we have with education. The reason we see so many useless degrees is that they are literally useless, the only purpose is to full-fill a line item on some job applications. Makes me wonder how much more competitive those jobs would be with stem if they didn't require a degree.
You might make less working in a non-STEM field, but your "edge" is that you didn't have to go to college and take on debt. A software engineer may make way more, but they have student loans to pay down. Getting a degree just to show that you have one seems to be a massive waste of time for everyone but those that collect tuition checks.
S/E/M aren't as appreciated.
I don't wish ill on anyone, but hopefully the incoming recession will re-balance the incentives once more, it's crazy to see all this hate addressed at humanities on a website/forum set-up by a guy made "famous" (among the geek "elites") for writing a book called "Hackers and Painters". Must be those crazy high comps, they now allow them to ignore almost anything in life that's related to "painters".
The only standard the college should be held to us complying with false advertising rules and laws. They shouldn’t be allowed to market a degree that can’t get you a job as one that can.
But if this figure includes a dorm, food and utilities, then it makes sense. Otherwise, it's absurd a cost.
Since some STEM fields are well paying, people think argue they aren't as much of a waste of money. But they still suffer from excessive cost (both monetary and time) and the bloat of useless classes that other degrees do.
Edit: as an example, we got from your comment to "you're an insufferable cunt" in 3 hops—and you contributed 2 of them. Obviously that comment was completely beyond the pale, but the more important thing is not to go into such flamewar territories in the first place.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
This follows from the organizing principle of the site:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
In fact, tediously and/or angrily repeating correct things (or things one feels to be correct—a distinction without a difference for internet purposes) is the thing commenters should most avoid on HN. It's the root evil, relative to the mandate of the site.
It may be more important to you, but I don't care. For me, truth is important, and I wrote the truth.
People often use the word "truth" (or "facts") as if it were a sort of trump card, but if you think about it, being true is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for a good comment - I wrote about this recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697044.
There are infinitely many truths—they don't select themselves. People have to do that, and the selection process has to do with their own motivations, not truth.
Once you've selected a truth, there are infinitely many ways to express it—including how/whether you're going to take other people into account, how to encode your emotions in the expression, and so on. These also don't select themselves—you choose them, and again that has to do with your own motivations, not truth.
There is also the question of how perfect your access to the truth is, or to what extent you might be mistaken. Other people have very different ideas about the truth than you do (I don't mean you personally, of course). How lightly or tightly you hold that possibility is super important for conversation and again, has nothing to do with truth per se.
Obviously not.