Student Loans Need to Be Reformed ASAP | Hacker News Reader

Student Loans Need to Be Reformed ASAP

innovationnation.blog

25 pointsgsibble32 comments

> And it only hit her just then after spending all that money that she had to find a way to pay it back on that low of a salary.

I wonder what the trade offs would be if people had 2 years of work experience after high school but before entering college.

Obviously, it would harm some people who would be delayed in their education (e.g. areas where there is a minimum of skill that isn’t gained in high school like medicine) but would also not cause as much harm to others (like software where some entry-level jobs wouldn’t really require a college education).

I think at the very least it would allow students to consider what major they want to pursue, and also help give them both world experience and a larger bank account/fallback.

I knew quite a few people who went into “undeclared engineering” or simply “undeclared” and wasted more of their years of university trying to find something that they wanted to do. It would have been much better if they had had the opportunity to explore that in a job, and get paid for it.

You may be able to slightly compare it to countries that have forced military enlistment like Israel, although that may also not be an apples to apples comparison due to them typically learning or focusing on some specific field.

Lost me when argumentation structure turned out to be

1. It's expensive

2. 17 year olds think they don't have a choice

3. This student got a masters just to be a social worker, bad choice

4. If you squint, you can say it is gov't enforced indentured servitude[1]

5. Actually, this is true: just look how the government is rushing to unsuspend suspended student loan payments (?!?!? it's been 3 years!)

From there, it devolves further: it's never been possible to evaluate the credit of a 17 year old, there wasn't some switch off doing credit checks in 2004: I was there.

It makes 0 sense that doing something that is already done would help anyone, and most damningly: it would cause a dystopia the author would take further issue with.

Can you imagine how irate they'd be at a system where a 17 year old needs to commit to a career path in order to even get money to go to college in the first place? With enforcement mechanisms so the bank can force you back on the approved path if you start drifting into other interests?

[1] I get, agree with, and and am sympathetic to the analogy...but it's not indentured servitude in any sense that's useful for making an argument. Let's say college was free. You could use the same argument to say _having a job to sustain yourself_ is indentured servitude.

It seems to me that the main purpose of having a college degree is signaling that you're not too stupid and too lazy, although it depends on what degree you got, in which college and which country. Of course you're supposed to have learnt something while you were there, but for the vast majority of my peers, what they learned about physics, electronics and control theory while pursuing our computer engineering degree, was mostly useless. All my acquaintances ended up working as software developers, and I know only one who writes firmware and needed to have some electronics knowledge.

So I don't get why many companies still require a degree for software developers. Some of my best colleagues don't have college degrees. Companies could use IQ tests to filter out stupid people and then proceed with a regular interview for those who passed the IQ test. Lazy people are very few in my experience and they would get filtered afterwards, but companies could just pay people less for the first few months to compensate. Maybe they could apply the process I described just to applicants without degrees.

Society needs knowledgeable people that aren't software developers too.

Also, CS isn't about programming; it's a branch of applied mathematics. It's the difference between science and engineering. Though in truth, many programmers are to software engineers as electricians are to electrical engineers.

I think a lot of what you're speaking to is the result of people undervaluing liberal arts degrees.

I work in a technical role, but I have a liberal arts degree. Liberal arts helped me learn how to think, learn new things, synthesize different things into a coherent argument, and more. People ask how I RCA problems so quickly. It's because I'm used to taking a set of facts from pile A, another from pile B, etc. and bring it together to a cogent argument.

Meanwhile I'm interviewing people with CS degrees who can't even explain the difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption.

I think some of this (not being able to tell crypto types apart) is the emphasis on specialization. I helped with some intro infosec courses years back, and these were smart students but they had not much exposure or understanding of basic CLI tools. They had interacted with Windows with a mouse for their entire life, so using a prompt was something new and strange. Most picked it up, but it took a bit of time.

In my experience (granted, I'm in a research lab, so there's likely a bias compared to regular industry), CS/CE are somewhat unique in that way. Most CS/CE people don't have to touch most of what they've studied, as a CE I took classes on lasers, radio, convex optimization, quantum computing, op amps etc but haven't had to use the detailed knowledge from the classes at all. Many professors even commented in the classes themselves that most of the content was not likely to matter in industry.

My most useful classes have been math as they gave me the fundamentals to pick up enough of other fields to work with them. To the point that I often joke that I got an applied math degree rather than computer engineering.

But, in comparison, the physics, EE, mechanical engineering etc people I work with frequently use the stuff they learned from school.

I mean speak for yourself I guess, I learned a ton of programming fundamentals in pursuit of my CS degree and that laid the foundation directly for my career in web engineering.

I entered the job market already experienced with the tools, languages, and then-popular libraries and frameworks - I learned exponentially more on the job, of course, but that learning was built my college education. It would have been a struggle to get right to work without it.

The same is true for me, but I could have learned those things without going to college and without wasting time studying subjects that have never been useful in my work.

Yeah I know I could have, but to be honest, outside of a classroom setting, and perhaps especially lacking enthusiastic peers to engage with and co-operate with - I am really not confident that I could have done a better job learning on my own terms in 4 years than I did at college.

I suppose, one nuance might be - I wasn't 'just going to college to get a degree' - I was there specifically to learn skills that would make me hireable. It helped that I liked the subject matter, undoubtedly.

Also that I had to borrow all the money to pay for it myself.

The solution is obvious: Allow bankruptcy to erase student loan debt.

Also, it'd be nice if the OP would label their graphs. I'm not seeing any titles or figure legends, just lines saying $T goes up and to the right over decades.

Yes, declare personal bankruptcy at 22 when you have nothing.

What’s the downside?

Maybe the government should get out of the loan business and we can go back to complaining that people can’t afford college.

People will have to choose cheaper colleges.

You can’t get financing for 7 years, or if you can it’s at rates that will cost you more over your lifetime than just paying for school.

It will also make financial institutions actually assign appropriate risk to the loans, and schools will be forced to correct tuition. Right now schools can charge whatever they want because the only associated risk to banks is death.

An income based repayment system (e.g. max 10-15% or something like that), low interest rates and a cap on max tuition wouldn’t be that terrible?

It is a good solution because those loans would just go away, no bank in their right mind will provide an unsecured loan to a 20 year old with zero assets.

I'm not sure restricting higher-ed to the ultra rich is the panacea you think it might be. Because what you are doing is creating a system where only the rich, or the upper-middle class (who can cosign or take out loans on behalf of their kids) get educated.

The whole purpose of these programs is to put advanced education into the sphere of people in more difficult circumstances.

Do you think colleges will just keep tuition at $60,000 and shrink student population by 95%?

Of course not, they’ll lower tuition or come up with their own loans.

Easy money just makes things more expensive - education, housing, healthcare, whatever.

Well, I don't think that the student population will shrink by 95%; there are still lots of people who can get loans who think it's worth investing in their kids. And while there are a few higher-ed for-profits out there, most Universities and Colleges are not making profits of any kind. Some big ones might have general endowments, but most schools run break-even -- where would they get money to float loans? A big part of why higher ed jacked up tuition was because State and Federal spending was cut; I'm sure they'd be overjoyed to get better base funding and cut tuition across the board.

Colleges don’t have a monopoly on education. Thanks to the internet, learning is more accessible to people than ever.

While I agree with this in principle, I think many/most employers are looking for some kind of accredited proof. Even certifications can be gamed, so completing even a short program still does have value.

It's strange that student loan dollars should be considered somehow different from other dollars.

People need to start seeing a college degree for what it actually is...it's an investment. Just like in the stock market you're taking a gamble that it will pay off eventually, and just like with any other investment, you should really do some research to see if it's a good investment.

Some college degrees will easily pay for themselves over their lifetime, such as most STEM degrees, JDs, MDs, and a few others. Some are extremely unlikely to become a good investment...sociology, philosophy, gender studies, medieval French poetry, Art history, you get the idea.

I think what would help is if students were informed upon selecting their degree what the typical earning potential is for that degree.

The other major thing that needs to change is all of these jobs that needlessly require a college degree.

> But what’s the value of a degree if everyone has one?

Um, education? What's the value of a high school diploma if everyone has one?

If college is nothing beyond a financial investment, as the author seems to portray, then the government should not be involved at all. But there's a lot more to it. Arguably, society is better off if more people are educated. This is why we publicly finance education through high school. But after that there's a arbitrary cutoff.

> We should ask ourselves…why are we lending $250,000 to someone who makes $52,000 a year?

We should ask ourselves…why are we charging $250,000 to someone who makes $52,000 a year?

Funny how universities charge the same tuition, regardless of major. Nobody seems to question this painful fact. Should we simply abolish every profession that isn't lucrative?

> There’s a reason they are sprinting to restart payments after Covid. This is a huge money maker for the US.

Sprinting? The Biden administration has repeatedly postponed the restart of payments. Who are "they" exactly? Congressional Republicans demanded that payments restart now, as a condition of not defaulting on the debt of the United States government, a high stakes game of chicken.

> Reducing the number of college graduates will make employers not make it such a simple gatekeeper.

That's a very questionable prediction.

The value of education to some isn't knowledge, it's how that contributes to your ability to do or get a job, and that is sad. Having a well-rounded and whole person isn't seen as valuable, when it actually really is.

The author seems to yearn for yesteryear, when having "a degree" gave you a leg up on getting a job. But, when you finish high school, you often aren't capable of doing a job out of the gate either. Before, employers would train employees and give them a leg up. Nowadays, employers expect workers to have a good amount of understanding before even starting -- so a 2 year program of some sort.

I do think that there have been both state and federal cuts to higher ed, which have shifted things so that tuition is a much higher % of the pie for learning institutions then in the past.

The easy thing would be to boost those payments again, or give grants/"forgiveness" to those in challenging circumstances.

Educating the next generation is a public good. Can anyone explain to me why free education from grade 1 to 12 is a good idea, but after that it’s bad?

I think it’s more the day care aspect of school that is important so that adults can work. Once they are 18 the day care is no longer important. A very small percentage of the population actually care if kids learned geometry or read Chaucer.

1) Day care is much cheaper than teachers.

2) Schools generally don't keep kids for the entire workday, so younger kids need additional day care anyway.

3) The government generally doesn't subsidize day care.

4) High school kids don't need day care.

So no, public education is not about day care.

Community college is very affordable across (most/all of) America, and I understand also in many European countries.

Some states (New York state is an example) are trying to provide a 4-yr college degree for free under certain income-based conditions[1].

[1] https://www.ny.gov/programs/tuition-free-degree-program-exce...

Absolutely. If the US government looks at the old loans as being predatory and unfair, why do they continue to make new ones with essentially the same terms and structure? The simplest way to reform the system is to shut down the new loans immediately.

Then they would have one less issue to use as a talking point during elections.

Stop calling them "loans." Loans get bankruptcy relief.

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