The federal government need to force these universities to take the risk and loan out money directly.
1) Have universities foot the bill, not the tax payer (shocking, I know). A literal refund.
2) Institute an audit every 5 years on their price to success rate on a per major basis. Have them refund north of 50% of the tuition if overpriced.
Cool, now run your little game.
This is literally a consumer protection issue and this industry has hid far too long under the veils of sanctity of “but tis’ but education, maaaaan”.
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Like many have already mentioned, the federal loans going toward these costs are essentially like donating to a charity that you will never get actionable data on. Did the money go to the right place? Did it work? No? Okay, stop donating to that charity, as nice as it feels to be charitable.
If a charity doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, doesn’t matter how great it sounds. Even a charity named Education.
The inadvertent economics education that came later was not the university’s doing and they take no credit nor blame for it.
Again, this is a consumer affairs issue. These universities are doing false advertising, period.
At scale this has been a failure through and through.
Shoutout out the ultimate technical school of all, MIT.
How? Who knows. Guess they know the right people.
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From my own experience, I will add that educational requirements are almost financial. You need it to be free, educationally. The same way you need money to be free.
But back on point, don’t add swindlers collecting a check on that trek, certainly not on loan, certainly not beyond affordability.
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You make this money and you are free to spend how you spend. You learn this, and you are free to learn how you learn.
Psychosocial.
That the money was spent responsibly, for some definition of responsibly. Probably this doesn't mean the sort of abuses detailed in the article.
> If a student goes to university and gets a degree in medieval French literature and then serves coffee for life as a job, the university did its job iff the student demonstrated a level of mastery of medieval French literature.
I'm unconvinced that it would be good to disband humanities departments, or to ban non-STEM degree programs and/or degrees that don't involve training for a specific career path. Last I checked, even MIT has a humanities school (though it seems to be combined with art and social sciences.)
Our society seems to have enough react programmers and could probably use more medievalists, as well as other humanities grads - people who understand the human condition, have some sense and understanding of history, know how to exercise critical thinking skills, and can read and write well. These are skills that could serve someone well in a variety of jobs.
[Moreover, as more jobs (including supposedly highly skilled tech jobs) are automated out of existence, many of us are likely to end up in low-paying service jobs - at least until the robots take those as well.]
I know people hate this, but I also think it would be reasonable if you weren't eligible to receive federal student loans until you had filed your own taxes without being anyone's dependent, or been out of high school for 2 years, or _something_. What if we still agreed that federal programs can help make college accessible and affordable -- but we should want students to have some perspective on what they want their life to look like, and what it will mean to pay off a giant pile of debt over years, and what kind of education might give them a chance at balancing those concerns.
The federal government already has the bureaucracy for this in say the DCAA (https://www.dcaa.mil/).
I would very much like any universities accepting student loans to be audited and publish audited financial statements detailing where the money goes.
However, the cynical reality is that university is as much about signalling competence relative to the rest of the population as it is about learning. Fun fact: Stanford's computer science program is not accredited. The department explained that it's a mountain of paperwork to get accredited and it wouldn't benefit Stanford at all because it's already so prestigious.
The question is whether accreditation from an engineering org is worth the limits they place on your curriculum. Stanford EE and CS and Cal EECS all say no, they’d rather give their grads more flexibility than have them jump through ABET hoops.
The expected value of the degree, the cost of the degree program, chance of graduation, chance of employment, student risk factors (grades, attendance), etc. are important, yet not considered.
When pricing is artificially kept independent of the underlying risk model, it leads to the kind of huge distortion we see today.
All of this is immediately obvious, of course. But the counter argument has weight too -- that putting risk into the equation isn't equitable. Poor and underserved students won't receive the same access.
A healthy medium might be to allow federal loans to continue for only programs with an expected value in four years that exceeds that of the degree program cost plus loan interest plus double the cost of living. Basically, just STEM, nursing, radiology, etc. at mostly community colleges and state universities. If you want an art school history major, you need a real loan.
So "Basically, STEM or STEM-adjacent"? (depending how consider nursing)
> The expected value of the degree
To society or the individual? Calculated how?
> If you want an art school history major, you need a real loan.
So only rich people are allowed to be educated in the humanities unless you're willing to get what will be a very expensive and likely cost-prohibitive private loan? This seems like a step backwards.
> A healthy medium might be to allow federal loans to continue for only programs with an expected value in four years that exceeds that of the degree program cost plus loan interest plus double the cost of living
So basically only engineers? This wouldn't apply to anyone getting a graduate degree or even most other professions. A mathematician from MIT entering academia wouldn't meet this calculation. Neither would almost all physicians, even if you ignore years spent in residency, unless they're moving somewhere with a very low COL.
Respectfully, as someone with a humanities undergraduate and two graduate STEM degrees, I find your proposition incredibly shortsighted and fails to consider the individual and societal value of non-STEM degrees beyond direct salary.
I would argue my undergraduate degree has provided me far more value, financial and otherwise, than either of my other degrees.
It’s a pricing issue.
If we don’t agree it’s a pricing issue, then let’s pay everyone the same salary regardless of profession. There’s ideological value in everything, but we’re talking business here.
The colleges CHARGE you something. They don’t gift you anything out of virtue. So talk money.
I’d be willing to even accept a Nicotine warning label of sorts that colleges tell an English major at the start (and the parents).
“hazardous warning label: hey, we are going to charge you 15k a year for this. you won’t likely make more than X in the real world with this degree. You cool with it? No refunds.”
All undergraduate degrees in the US have a pricing issue. I don't believe anyone should be paying 30-60k/year for one.
> There’s ideological value in everything, but we’re talking business here.
No, we're talking about university education which should not be a business. I don't consider an undergraduate degree training for a specific job, that's what technical colleges are for. If you want to argue we shouldn't subsidize university in general I could understand that but think it's a bad idea.
I don't agree that STEM degrees are inherently more valuable than the humanities from a general education perspective which is what I view undergraduate degrees as.
If we treat it as a business we should only subsidize courses essential for the workplace. Why am I subsidizing a web developer or a physician taking undergraduate calculus and physics? Having worked as both I have needed neither.
> “hazardous warning label: hey, we are going to charge you 15k a year for this. you won’t likely make more than X in the real world with this degree. You cool with it? No refunds.”
I think it's common knowledge that STEM graduates earn more, this was the case when I was in high school during the 2000s.
Money and loans are involved, people pay, and people get paid. If we go even further on the money part, many consider it an investment.
Anyways. Perhaps we should make the core liberal arts courses free of charge, and then create a pricing model for professional courses where the pricing model is more realistic about what is being offered, for what price, where the question truly becomes “is this worth it?”. That way we can finally separate the holiness of a core education away from specialized professional paths.
I find the skills I developed in my English degree have been very useful during my medical training and practice and has been commented on by my teachers during this journey. It’s certainly a better use of resources and time than a pre-med curriculum that gets repeated in the first 2 years of medical school anyway.
> What is it that humanities majors learn that can't be learned for free, or maybe a few buck on Amazon?
This statement is more easily applied to some STEM fields. Why pay for a CS degree when you can learn everything online for free?
> fine art, media, journalism or literature
And for these you also don't even need a degree, so why pay for them out of my taxes? Universities are a money grab.
You don't even have to think hard about it. The market prices it accordingly.
Market wages.
Students pay a maximum of N% of their income over Y years and anything above this is forgiven. The university has any forgiven amounts deducted from their actual cash payments for future student loans.
Another option available to public schools is that you can use tax as a mechanism for collecting that money.
Nobody is smart enough to write a regulation that can't be gamed.
In general (going back to basic cybernetics/control theory), it’s better to regulate outcomes (what you actually want) rather than inputs, unless you’re sure you have the correct model of the system. So it’s much better to make collages share the risk, rather than the government footing the risk and instituting regulations and processes.
I'm not sure that I would call this micromanaging.
https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...
https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-in-califor...
Many regulations work fine - not regulating is what is breaking civilization down all the world and economy right now.
But who is the Feynman of college administration? I can think of about five famous university presidents, and I'm not sure the innovations of any were that positive: Eliot and Conant at Harvard: Gilman at Johns Hopkins; Hutchins at Chicago; Kerr at California. In a purely economic view, the publicity garnered by a couple of them was a gain for their schools, I guess.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-free-college-a-good-id...