Student debt is haunting Americans from graduation to retirement
cnn.com
cnn.com
The institutions should be held liable for this debt, not the tax payer, and our government should not guarantee or subsidize these loans. Higher education is important in our society, but the situation we're in now is a complete disaster.
18-year olds taking on huge debt for useless degrees that can't be bankrupted, what could possibly go wrong?
A lot of the institutions are government entities, taxpayer sponsored public universitites.
It's analogous to suing police departments for police brutality: it's not the police officers who end up paying (police officers don't have millions of dollars to pay out) but rather the taxpayers of the cities.
This seems fair to me. Many universities have tremendous endowments and should be in a position to offer financing to their students. The extent of government subsidy could be no tax on the interest gained from the loans they write.
It seems like the paradise papers at large and especially the connection to higher ed have been largely forgotten and maybe never fully acknowledged in the mainstream.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/universi...
This is exactly why every time my university comes calling for donations, I decline. Sorry, but I'm not making a donation that you'll use to rebuild a stadium when you're setting your students up to graduate with six-figure debt. Figure your priorities out, whether you want to educate students or play tone-deaf real estate developer.
There's a lot of articles out there about what endowments are and the restrictions on how they can be used, e.g. https://www.case.org/resources/debunking-5-myths-about-endow...
Ideally everyone can go to college and the costs are manageable and the counselors there help people understand what their degrees might be worth to them at the end of the process.
Nearly 70% of Canadians 24-35 have a post-secondary degree and is considered the most educated nation in the world. For comparison, only 51% of Americans and 37% of Germans have the same. The trend is the same when expanding out to the entire population.
What net good is found in Canada that is not seen in the USA and especially Germany to the same degree? It is not economic. Canada is quite poor, comparatively. It does not appear to be political. Germany is considered much more democratic than Canada (Canada beats the USA, granted). It does not appear to be in, say, happiness. Canada is unhappier than both Germany and the USA. Cost of living? Haha. Don't even try to talk to Canadians about that. You will make them cry. Maybe health? Canada does seem to be more healthy than the other two. But is still not as healthy as many other countries that are less educated, so I'm not sure we're actually seeing any correlation there. I'm not sure there is correlation, let alone causation, in any of these cases.
So what is it? Let's say we implement your plan. What measures are we using to ensure that it is and remains a net good?
> I don't think it should require debt at all.
Indeed, it shouldn't. The idea that it requires debt is built on a false premise.
The utility of college can only be useful after you have established a clear goal and need to engage in research to achieve your desired result. Young people who haven't yet contributed anything to the world lack that. Interestingly, it turns out that those who are truly ready for college and those who have already saved up for college by way of productive efforts on the way to finding a meaningful goal are the same set. The reality is that debt isn't needed if college is to be used for the role it claims to serve.
But, let's be honest, the only reason most people go to college is to access a curated dating market. Here, there is something to be said about the people being 18 years old and not 45. Now, you might argue that should produce a net good (more children being born), but the data shows that is not the case[1]. In fact, once people get the uninhibited college sex (with protection) out of their system, it seems they are less likely to have children.
[1] In fairness, there is the perspective that fewer children born domestically with more immigration is the greater good. But at the same time these nations will only accept top immigrants, not any old random Joe who wants to emigrate, which is quite bad for the countries losing those people. As such, I am not sure this take is being honest.
Anyway, what I noticed is that most of my classmates simply weren't equipped to study or pass these classes. It wasn't for a lack of skills: they went through the motions as they were taught. It was a problem of maturity. I was approaching these classes as a way to gain valuable knowledge. To them, it was a means to a nebulous end (obtain a degree). Their maladaptive behaviors, which got them through public school, were simply not scaling for harder subjects.
I got As, often perfect scores, on my tests. This is because I studied and did the work. I wanted to be there, and I wanted to excel, because I needed that knowledge. Credit hours were some silly "degree points" metric I didn't care about, because I didn't really care about getting a degree at that point. I was paying out of pocket to be there. I wasn't racking up debt or burning through a grant / scholarship to be there.
Empathy is another thing that gets stronger as our prefrontal cortexes mature. Our mirror neurons deepen as we get older. So, I took pity on these folks. It wasn't really their fault. From my perspective, they went to college too soon. They should've taken a decade off to grow up, like I did. I organized study groups for these classes. To sweeten the pot, I made it a rule that for every 30 minutes of hard work doing board problems, there was 30 minutes of socializing and venting. Then, rule 2 was that everyone did board problems, and new people were up first. I won't go into more detail, but everyone who attended the study groups started getting As on their tests. The results and the social aspect made these study groups popular. Pretty soon, most of the class was in these groups, and that made it very easy to work with the professor to get classroom time instead of schlepping to the college library or the public library for a meeting room.
Although these classes were requirements for engineers and medical doctors, most of the folks who I stayed in contact with eventually changed majors / declared different majors, dropped out, or got unrelated jobs after graduation. I also saw this as a problem with maturity. I knew exactly what I was doing when I started these classes. These kids were burning money to try to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. Eh... that's a broken system. Kids shouldn't be saddled with debt nor should they have to make a decision about what they want to do for the rest of their lives before their prefrontal contexes have finished forming.
While I am aware of the research on neurological development I think some people are too ready to use that as an excuse for immature behavior. When Horatio Nelson was 19 he was already the commanding officer of a warship, leading men in combat and doing a pretty good job of it. And I don't believe he was really unique; many young people are capable of taking on adult responsibilities when necessity thrusts it upon them.
If true, asking people to make potentially catastrophic life-changing decisions prior to then is risky for them and predatory by the person asking.
And if we follow that reasoning, we have to reconsider many things we allow/ask sub-24yo's to do and provide them a way to prove they are able to make those decisions.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/02/11/the-ris...
This is not to say that college is causal here, but it is a variable and at least one you can control.
The problem is that everyone wants to go to a nice college and live the dream. Nobody wants to do 2 years free at community college and then transfer to a state school even though the outcomes would be nearly identical as if you went to some high-end private university (ivy not withstanding). This is an entitlement problem, and the universities are exploiting it.
The point was that everyone graduating high school in the 1990s and onward were constantly fed this idea that you graduate high school and then do your four years (even if that requires racking up a ton of debt) that you'd live a successful, productive life making enough money to at least be comfortable. The averages are proving this to not only to not be true, but that debt incursion is causing major drags on the entire economy.
Incursion of debt without a plan of payoff is ignorant. No bank would ever lend money to you for a business if your business plan didn't contain sufficient enough detail of how you planned to pay them back. Working while in school (and thereby avoiding debt) is IMO the best solution to those who want to attend college but may not be able to get full-ride scholarships and aren't financially well off.
To be fair, many (if not most) university systems do not make this easy. Night classes are generally hard to come by, there are tons of fees that non-traditional students don't see benefit from, many coursework plans are so rigid to the point where pre-reqs will derail schooling for semesters at a time, etc.
But that's the thing. You can't control it. Colleges aren't admitting you with that crippling mental disability you were born with no matter how much you wish it to be so. You aren't likely even going to be allowed to graduate from high school. And guess what? The economy won't put much value on you either for the same reason the schools don't want you.
Your idea that the kid with Down Syndrome will see his symptoms go away if only he manages to attain a college degree as poorly analyzed data suggests is a fun idea, and one I wish were true, but that's not how things actually work in the real world.
Only if you are already economically valuable might colleges accept you into their hallowed halls. Of course, that questions: If you are already economically valuable, why not delay college until you have reaped some economic rewards to pay for it? It is not like there is a rush for a college education. I expect there will still be colleges to attend when you are in retirement.
Of course, when you get right down to why people attend college, it is for the curated dating pool (even if they don't like to admit it). Yes, there is somewhat of a rush to find dating partners while you are still comparatively young. For sure, dating in your 80s isn't quite the same. But then that questions why dating requires such a high cost? Surely there is a better, more cost-reasonable, way?
The debt situation isn't sustainable. But "go to college to earn more money" continues to be largely true.
edit - fixed a typo
One needs to discern between mostly useless degrees and degrees that almost guarantee a life in the upper class.
Slicing and dicing the data and making informed policies choices needs to be done, but a blanket statement that college is dumb is, well, dumb.
Is correlation causation?
If you look at 2-year degrees vs no degree, the lifetime payoff is still hundreds of thousands.
Yes. I'd have a lot more compassion about the debt forgiveness if they were enacting some plan to FIX the problem at the same time.
The problem is that typically the very same people who are opposed to debt forgiveness are also opposed government-sponsored higher education that's free for students, like higher school and earlier; likewise, the very same people who are in favor of debt forgiveness also advocate government-sponsored higher education.
I don't think there is a fix as long as higher education is treated like a luxury good. And if that's society's choice, so be it, but then I don't want to hear another word about so-called "meritocracy" when it's pay-to-play.
I considered the alternative in my second paragraph. You didn't respond to that point. How do you reconcile meritocracy with pay-to-play?
An idea solution would more closely connect the buyer (student) to the consequences of their decision (both good and bad) while holding the seller (university) accountable for the quality of their product/service.
Until you can address all three, there's no solution just pandering after the fact.
> I considered the alternative in my second paragraph. You didn't respond to that point. How do you reconcile meritocracy with pay-to-play?
Because it wasn't worth responding to. Most meritocracy has pieces that are pay to play. Maybe it shouldn't but acting like it doesn't is foolish.
The more interesting question is: How many students get a net benefit - financially, socially, etc - from college?
If you're just going to be dismissive, why did you respond at all?
> Most meritocracy has pieces that are pay to play
Which other "pieces" come with a lifetime of debt?
> The more interesting question is: How many students get a net benefit - financially, socially, etc - from college?
Why is that more interesting?
I didn't initially and chose to focus on the productive bit. You demanded a response.
From a policy perspective, the question we should be asking is "how much does society benefit from college graduates?"
If there's a net benefit to people attending college, then society should be funding it, as it's essentially "making a profit".
I also agree that changes to the funding model need to address the spiraling costs of attendance. But, I also believe much of that spiral is due to the funding model (near unlimited government backing and lack of dischargeability for the borrower).
Health care and higher education have moved hard the other direction.
No clue if privatization would work here - not pitching that - but the current solution has failed us and the "make it free" mantra doesn't work as long as the price is spiraling out of control.
How so? I have no option to get public health care that I'm aware of; it's actually hard to imagine getting health care without being forced to pay a premium to a private company.
And since you pay a fraction of the actual costs of the service for the public plans, the government subsidizes the rest.
The government is rarely the service provider for most of what they "provide" - roads are built by construction firms, medical care is mostly private doctors (the VA and HHS has some), the TSA is replaced by private firms in some places, and even nuclear missiles are manufactured by companies.
That's a deliberate policy choice. It doesn't have to be that way, but our politicians tend to be corrupted by campaign contributions and lucrative post-political jobs or (inclusive or) free-market ideologues who demand contractor bidding for any government services.
That's a theory.
But as a former Fed, let me propose a different hypothesis: The people who want to do good work, want to grow, and want to push to the next level (whatever that is), don't go into government. Or if they do, they don't stay.
But don't believe me: if you know any US veterans, ask them about their experiences with the VA. Ask them if they've ever gone when it wasn't the only option.
In general, we give a lot of lip service to "supporting the troops", but mostly society doesn't give a crap about them after they come home. The only time this was different was during the World Wars period, where a large % of the male population was drafted. Veterans had political power then. Now that our military itself has been largely privatized and made up of volunteers, often themselves looking for financial opportunities, veterans are largely forgotten, except to make oneself feel good by "thanking them for their service". But if they're, say, permanently disabled from wounds? Welp, tough luck.
The other veterans in my area (that I know and talk to) also seem to have good experiences with our VA healthcare. Just chipping in to say that while there is a lot to criticize about the VA, there are things to praise too.
To be clear, I am not taking an extremist position here. There is value in having an educated populace and students should have some coursework in a broad range of liberal arts subjects. But for college majors we have to be more pragmatic at both an individual and social policy level.
Maybe we should advocate for some personal responsibility as well. Institutions may have offered dead end programs, banks may have financed it, but many individuals took out these loans quite thoughtlessly.
Sorry, I don't play with devil's advocates.
If this is your actual view, then just admit it, and don't pretend to hide behind an imaginary devil.
Are you expecting me to explain the field of political science to you in a Hacker News comment?
gets popcorn
But, like, sincerely, first they read some Plato/Aristotle/Machiavelli/etc, second learn about mercantilism's failures, third about modern coopetition in light of the multigenerational UN stalemates, fourth about the Laffer curve, and then what do they do and produce? Specially, someone with a terminal BA in Political Science without an MBA or law school or connections? I am totally ignorant here.
(2-3 well-crafted sentences is all that most compelling ideas really need. Plenty of space in an HN comment. It's not Twitter.)
Poli Sci is - perhaps not surprisingly - a lot like law where there are pretty good jobs you can get that the degree prepares you decently well for even at the undergrad level. The problem is there are 10 applicants for every one of those jobs, so they come with long hours and subsistence wages. It is objectively a "dumb" thing to do to bank that you'll be one of the minority who gets a job and you'll survive the grind long enough to make a decent living.
So there can be systemic issues where we make it way too easy for people who don't really care about politics, or gender, or contemporary French literature, to get a degree in that which is by almost all definitions a worthless piece of paper. And there can also be lack of personal responsibility on the part of that person when they've graduated a decade prior, have never gotten a job relevant to their degree, and think their debt should be forgiven because it's hard to pay it back.
I don't know about that. I think our electorate could use a lot more political science education. In any case, your statement takes for granted the student loan system. Would the world want for lack of polisci graduates if there were no student loans?
> It's pretty high on the list of "I have no idea what to study but I need a degree" choices, as evidenced by me gravitating toward it after successively eliminating basically everything else
That's just your personal anecdote. My personal ancedote is that I also got a degree in political science, and it was because I was genuinely interested in political science.
> It is objectively a "dumb" thing to do to bank that you'll be one of the minority who gets a job and you'll survive the grind long enough to make a decent living.
I would say objectively "risky" rather than dumb. It does pay off for some. Would you say the "winners" were dumb? Would you say that professional athletes who are now fabulously wealthy are dumb because it's "dumb" to pursue a career where most people fail?
Yes, anyone who compromises their future on the slim chance of winning the lottery is reasonably considered "dumb".
For the most part, athletes don't have to compromise their future, though. Professional sport networks tend to be good to make sure participants have reasonable backup plans and once someone is identified as having likelihood of making "the big leagues" will be supported financially to a smaller degree while they see if they can make the transition. There is an opportunity cost on those who don't make it, to be sure, but not being as well off as you had hoped you'd be isn't the same as crumbling under crushing debt for the rest of your life.
Maybe it is not perfect in every circumstance, but generally there is an effort to protect athlete hopefuls from running their lives exactly to protect those who are "dumb". Colleges, on the other hand, couldn't care less – "Just give me the money!"
18-year olds make poor life choices all the time, but not all of those choices have repercussions which last 30-50 years.
If corporations and HR wouldn't use these kinds of credentials mindlessly, there wouldn't be quite the unchecked demand that allows universities and colleges to feed off of it, and we wouldn't have all these debates about student debt. I've seen it in practice in administration at large companies, making certain kinds of degrees required for positions that absolutely do not require them, even of people currently working very successfully in those positions (i.e., they have to go get a degree to maintain a position they already have), because HR basically decides it will make the company look good, and the management gets a monetary bonus for implementing it successfully as policy.
Debtholders get a lot of criticism on HN, but I usually feel very differently in these discussions. I have no debt, but it's hard for me to blame people getting masters in religious studies when they see people will other bullshit masters degrees in administrative positions basically because HR has decided a masters degree in something, anything, is required for administration. It's also absurd that we can see the value in a manifest self-taught computer science or math skillset but then somehow imagine that someone getting a degree in philosophy means they can't also have those skills.
There's probably a lot more that could be said about a general problem in our society, of using weak metrics and algorithms as if they were precise, substituting poor measures for the thing itself. We have these neverending debates about whether the test score, or degree, or whatever, is a valid indicator of skill or not, as if that's the actual problem; it's never that these things aren't valid indicators of something, it's how much of an indicator they are and whether we should rely on them so heavily. It feels like it comes up everywhere: educational debt, medical regulation, everything.
Reading stories of earlier times are really sobering to me. I'm sure there's a certain amount of survivorship bias in the stories themselves, but it never ceases to amaze me how often people would actually apprentice in positions, or actually work themselves up the ladder, or just show up at places and get jobs. That still happens today but it's like we can't function without a rubber stamp that has the flimsiest of basis to it. It feels like admittance and hiring decisions are basically nonsense in a lot of places, so rather than fix it we just play pretend with these proxies.
Keep going down the root-cause trail. Corporations would not be using "college education" to filter for people who are literate, numerate, and can accomplish basic tasks if high schools were graduating people with that baseline. But K-12 education is not doing its job, and a high school diploma is no longer a reliable sign that someone can even function as an adult.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-degree-job-requirement/
More importantly, one of the only legally acceptable ways. Most other filtering mechanisms that you can possibly think of open you wide for a discrimination lawsuit.
Which is problematic because an increasing number of people are attaining degrees, making it an increasingly useless filtering mechanism. We've recently started allowing DEI to try and fill the void, but I'm not sure that scales.
I can think of no scenario where letting these idiots manage financing for 18-year-olds ends well.
That‘s the one and only mistake here and for societies sake, it would probably be best to forbid this. If someone wants to take a loan for a useless degree, they are not mentally fit to do so.
Isn't this just "dealer financing" but for college degrees? It's predatory in autos and real estate. Why is it a better fit for education?
There is a sizable plurality of Millennials who just see themselves as financially screwed. Kids? Nah. House? Possibly attainable before 2022, but not anymore. Retirement? Get real.
Economies need workers and un-concentrated capital to grow. We're not making enough babies, and we're sending more of the capital up the ladder to people who already have it and just don't want to spend it.
We're transferring value from the future to pay for the costs of now, because the people of wealth (who are almost always older) now don't want to pay for it.
This is having kids or equity in a property that one lives in. And it's not just the underwater basket weavers.
They did take a vacation though, for about four years. Sometimes more.
Divide that out by the next fifty years of life and you get 4 x 250 / 50 = 20 vacation days per year.
Plus, based on the time value of money, those "taken in advance" vacation days are arguably worth more than the ones years from now.
I'll be honest. I have no sympathy for liberal arts majors that are saddled with debt and cannot find meaningful work that leverages their education.
They made a bad bet and they’re going to pay the price for it. Being deceived on the expected outcome doesn’t automatically allow passing the financial responsibility to tax payers. If there’s actual fraud, let them sue the institutions.
Maybe they can find a new generation of liberal arts majors and continue the Ponzi scheme.
For example, we have the PSLF for borrowers who work in service careers. Maybe we don't need blanket loan forgives, but should simplify and beef-up PSLF.
And in parallel, we should be reforming the funding system for college so we don't have to keep addressing this problem.
We do not want people to continue wasting their time in college. That itself is a huge drag on society. There needs to be some kind of 'punishment' to scare off future would-be students. "Oh, go on have your fun in your youth and we will all help you pay for it later" doesn't exactly send the right message.
PSLF isn't really loan forgiveness in the traditional sense. It is an employer providing compensation to workers for a quality that is deemed beneficial to the work being done. All employers are free to do this, and do so where such a benefit is recognized.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how the program works... isn't it a federal program that forgives the loans of public sector and (some) non-profit workers after 10 years of employment and payments? To my knowledge, it's not funded by the various government agencies or non-profits, but by the federal government.
PLSF is indeed a great example. It has well defined terms and people arguably know what they're getting into when they sign up for public service employment (with the intention to defer their loans).
I'm pretty strongly opposed to anything new though. The only thing I might get behind is a uniform policy that simply hands out cash to everybody regardless of incomes or loan status. If people have loans, don't even give them the cash, just pay off that slice of their loans. If there's no loans, they get the cash. No income games either. The only possible qualifications would be whether you're employed (which means the IRS already has a tax id).
If we're going to make all of us poorer through inflation by printing money, might as well distribute it fairly. At least in that situation the kid that went to trade school and doesn't have loan debt gets the cash.
Trade schools aren't free either. For example, WyoTech's 6-month welding program is $28,000. My local community college has a one-year welding program and per semester estimated cost of $10,000, so $20k total. You certainly shouldn't be able to run up $30k+ in loans on these programs, but people are definitely borrowing money to pay for them.
As for new programs, we should try to avoid the sunk-cost fallacy. What's better for society? Loan forgiveness or not? But, I definitely agree that we should avoid moral hazards by fixing the funding of higher ed as part of any package (otherwise we get to revisit the problem in another generation).
We should do more to increase low-income housing availability in certain areas, but that's largely a separate issue.
"Meritocracy" was always a dystopian fiction, but the disconnect between even "good worker" and "stable, good income" is so severed that we watch as thousands of our tech compatriots are laid off after record profits, and I have to wonder how deep the cuts have to come before we the slightest inkling of class consciousness takes root.
Well, no, of course not. Us older people with wealth have strongly advocated for decades that they not take on the debt. Of those who thought they knew better, why would we want to pay for their stupidity?
But if we agree that we should pay for stupidity because that's the nice thing to do, why stop at college? What about the dumb kid who bought a Ferrari he can't afford? Are we going to pay for that too? Logically we should. There is no difference.
~60% of the population (in the USA) have not attended college. Why not let them reap the rewards of their choices?
An education in a worthless degree is more like the Ferrari - except you can at least drive the Ferrari.
Where is the return coming from? There was once a theory that labour income with a degree attached would rise, but that didn't happen. Incomes have held quite stagnant. We've known that for many decades by now. Why do you think we've been dissuading people for the last many decades to not take on the debt? Because there is no return!
In fact, the best way to estimate the return on an investment is to look at the asset sale price as buyers will pay some multiple of the yearly return. How much do you think you can sell a degree for on the used market? I'm guessing no more than nothing. Quite possibly you'd have to pay the buyer to take it off your hands. Clearly there is no retained investable value there.
Which should be really troubling when you take on debt for it. If you can't resell the asset to get you out of debt, that's a scary proposition. At least the used Ferrari is still probably worth approximately what you paid for it, allowing you to get out if need be.
> A Ferrari isn't.
If you have a Ferrari you can almost certainly start making money with a YouTube channel. People eat that kind of thing up. If that's not your cup of tea, you can rent it out. People will pay a healthy premium to be able to rent a unique car like that. There are all kinds of ways to make money with a Ferrari. There is real, tangible value there.
As such, Ferraris carry a decent resale value.
Anyone who attended college a couple decades ago benefited heavily from a subsidized system and now refused to pay it backward. There is a reason these people have been classified as a selfish generation and this is merely one aspect of it.
What mental gymnastics allowed people to reap the rewards of cheap education and casually condemn anyone who follows that same path to economic ruin.
Keep in mind this is uniquely an American problem with uniquely American excuses.
Old enough that the data was already abundantly clear that it wasn't worth the amount being charged. The only justification was for access to the dating pool college offers, which may have been worth something, but not debt-inducing amounts. With Tinder competing on much the same ground these days, it suggests that it isn't worth any more than maybe $50 per month, tops.
> Did you attend college
No, of course not. The numbers didn't make any sense. Had I attended college, I no doubt would have ended up like my friends who did: Struggling financially.
Why should I bail them out? They had their fun in their 20s while I was busy building wealth. I would like to have my fun now. But you want me to sacrifice again so that they can continue to have fun?
> Anyone who attended college a couple decades ago benefited heavily from a subsidized system
Those who attended college a couple of decades ago are the millennials (the group referred to in the original comment). Have we already forgotten that millennials are well into their 40s now? How does this fit into the conversation, exactly? I'm not sure I quite understand the applicability.
Instead of begging people not to go to school, maybe we should be rolling prices back to what they were when I went, inflation adjusted.
Even if college were well and truly free, the opportunity cost of spending your time in college is still on the order of around a million dollars these days. That's a lot of bread to justify.
I can believe it, but that doesn't really tell us anything and I suspect you are being cagy here on purpose.
The bulk of the cost of college isn't the out of pocket expense, it is the opportunity cost. Your time focused on college is time you are not doing something else. Thanks to the properties of compound interest, your time is most valuable when you are young. By a huge margin. So any time not spent making money when you are young can become financially devastating rather quickly.
So, yes, obviously you needed to be paid way more just to begin to break even. You wouldn't be able to afford to take the job otherwise. But to break even isn't worth it from an economic point of view – especially given the high risk involved; you could have just as easily ended up unable to find a job. Sure, maybe you gained something out of the experience as a hobby, and there is certainly something to be said about that, but is really beyond the topic at hand.
I mean, if you went to college when you were in your 50s, then okay. In that case, being paid way more has the potential to start to trump the cost of time lost, but when going to college in your 50s you are, again, not exactly in tune with the topic at hand.
The United States is chock full of examples of people who worked through their college years and are dead broke. So I don't think "skipping college equals a million bucks" is a conclusion that's remotely close to a sure bet, especially if college is offering valuable advanced training.
(Edit: college now costs a goddam fortune compared to when I went--that changes the calculus.)
Absolutely. We can go down that road and all the problems that exist there, of which there are plenty, but for the sake of the discussion taking place here, those lower levels of schooling are mandatory (under threat of government force!), so for all intents and purposes you don't get to choose.
College, on the other hand, is entirely your choice. Opportunity cost is significant here because you can, without persecution, do something else with that time.
> The United States is chock full of examples of people who worked through their college years and are dead broke.
And? You can't meaningfully compare yourself to other people - only the other choices you can make.
There are no guarantees in life, sure. Shit happens. Hell, plenty of people have attained their master's degree and then discovered a love of cooking and went on to be low-wage cooks at a restaurant. Such is life. But in terms of high probability outcomes, you pursuing a certain career path that pays "way more" was no doubt on the expected horizon, but at the same time so was pursuing some other career during those college hours and investing the proceeds at an expected rate of return. The latter serves as a good benchmark as it is an opportunity virtually everyone has available to them. Of course, individuals can do even better in many cases.
Because there's generally societal safeguards that prevent an 18 year old from taking on crushing amount of debt that they cannot pay back, and even if they do, bankruptcy is an option.
The real issue isn't that we let a bunch of people take on debt that they shouldn't have, the issue is we let them do it and the government ensures the loans in as many ways as it can, most importantly excluding it from bankruptcy. It dramatically reduces the risk to the lender for giving out a student loan, so they'll give them to just about anyone for any degree at any college, even if the career prospects for someone at that school are not favorable.
We already bend over backwards to ensure the loans get offered in the first place given how stupid they are, and now we have to pay them back too?
Colleges are not stupid. They will adjust their prices to soak up whatever money is available to them.
It definitely needs to. The whole thing hinges on some tenuous idea of "social good" that I'm not sure has ever been proven. Heck, the title of most educated nation goes back and forth between Russia and Canada. Russia especially does not stand out as some utopia of "social good" – if anything, it is surely towards the bottom of the list. And Canada spends most of its day wishing it were the USA. Not exactly strong markers of "social good" success.
If there were an "economic good", then these loans would be also unnecessary. Lenders would be lining up down the street to give you a loan on the basis of a percentage of your future income without any political incentive. But leaders aren't stupid. They know you will never turn the degree into anything. The data about that is abundantly clear.
This is a lie, and I feel that you know it is. I graduated high school in 2009. There was tremendous pressure on students to be ready for a college degree. You were told it was absolutely necessary to compete in the new globalized economy. AP classes were offered so that you could transfer credits on entry-level coursework. SAT and ACT prep were offered by the school district. There were college spirit days and college fairs. There were signing days for athletic scholarships.
You'll find most Millennials will recall much of the same if they came from a middle-class-or-above area. Of course, being middle class doesn't mean you can pay for college without debt. That's why they took it on.
The idea of entering the trades was an afterthought to the point where there was a vocational center 20 miles away that serviced an entire suburban county's worth of high school students.
Since it was right after the financial crisis, if you weren't going to college or going into a vocational program, you were going into the military. I'd say more people out of my high school class went into the military than vocational programs. They were trained, given a job for six months, and discharged because there was a massive pool of people, nationally, who wanted to join the military since they had no place else to go.
> Of those who thought they knew better, why would we want to pay for their stupidity?
See above.
> But if we agree that we should pay for stupidity because that's the nice thing to do, why stop at college? What about the dumb kid who bought a Ferrari he can't afford? Are we going to pay for that too? Logically we should. There is no difference.
This is comically obtuse. No one ever centered a state's high school curriculum around the idea of convincing a kid to buy a Ferrari. No one ever told the kid he'd be a nobody with no future earnings potential if he didn't buy a Ferrari. That's exactly what Millennials were told between 1995 and 2010. The Ferrari doesn't get exempted from bankruptcy because "you kept the skills you learned" from owning it. I'd much rather be in debt from owning a Ferrari than with a student loan.
> ~60% of the population (in the USA) have not attended college. Why not let them reap the rewards of their choices?
There are no rewards to having a large chunk of your population so indebted that they don't engage in the life milestones that allow the economy to grow for the next 20 years. That guy who was so smart as to avoid that liberal arts degree by going to trade school to learn how to be an electrician? He needs new housing and commercial buildings to work on if he'd like to earn a living and create more economic value than he consumes. If no one's building houses to start a family, and no one's building new businesses because the population isn't there to support it, he's just as screwed as everyone else.
You're angry at the wrong people.
Yes, I lived it. I felt the pressure too. I even remember having to endure a phone call with an adult family friend who was practically crying because I wasn't going to college. That was painfully uncomfortable, and illustrative of just how stupid it was getting.
But I can also do math... Facts and logic supersede any attempts to pull at heartstrings.
Perhaps the bigger question is: Why are we accepting students into college if they can't do basic math? College should not be a replacement for a failed elementary school experience, surely?
> if you weren't going to college or going into a vocational program, you were going into the military.
I'm not sure this stands up. The majority of people in that cohort did not attend college during that time. Nor did the equivalent cohort before and not today either. You seem to be living in a bubble.
Yeah, maybe a small group of people were banished from their parents wings and would have otherwise been left the streets if they weren't able to secure student loans to cover the cost of rent, but this can't be any meaningful chunk of the population. Especially when you consider that college students, statistically, come from the wealthiest families.
Furthermore, the recovery from that economic decline is considered to have taken only two years from crash to full recovery. One wouldn't have needed to rack up that much debt at a budget school before they were able to get back on their feet.
> There are no rewards to having a large chunk of your population so indebted that they don't engage in the life milestones that allow the economy to grow for the next 20 years.
Right, so free up mortgage debt, then. It's not great either, but I think we can at least agree that we want people to keep on having homes. We don't want people to continue to waste their time in college. If you perversely send the message that it's okay to waste that time because someone else will pay for it, people will keep on doing it. Bad actions need consequences.
> You're angry at the wrong people.
No, the problem is clearly those who didn't do the math. Even after I warned them[1]! This outcome was painfully obvious even in the 90s. But, okay, explain to me why my sacrifice in skipping out on the fun of college in order to build wealth should come with even more sacrifice so that those who chose fun get to keep on having fun? When is my time to have fun? Why do you want to punish me for doing the 'right' thing?
[1] I'm not famous, so fair enough that doesn't go so far, but it was also talked about quite a bit in the mainstream media by the time the turn of the century came around. I was hardly the only person able to do the math. Some people just didn't want to listen, or thought they knew better.
Given your exceptional mathematical abilities, you'll probably appreciate that the median lifetime earnings are $655k more for men with a bachelor's degree than those who only have a high school diploma when controlled for other factors[0]. Of course, that doesn't come all at once, and that only equals a 3/2 in the average American city + maybe one kid.
>I'm not sure this stands up. The majority of people in that cohort did not attend college during that time. Nor did the equivalent cohort before and not today either. You seem to be living in a bubble. Yeah, maybe a small group of people were banished from their parents wings and would have otherwise been left the streets if they weren't able to secure student loans to cover the cost of rent, but this can't be any meaningful chunk of the population. Especially when you consider that college students, statistically, come from the wealthiest families. Furthermore, the recovery from that economic decline is considered to have taken only two years from crash to full recovery. One wouldn't have needed to rack up that much debt at a budget school before they were able to get back on their feet.
This is a view of college attendance that is stuck in 1965. Degree attainment is now far less concentrated in the upper class. Roughly four-in-ten Millennials have a bachelor's degree or higher [1]. This doesn't include those with either an associate's degree or those who didn't finish their degree, so it might not be inaccurate to say that over half of Millennials set foot in a college classroom for a course they paid for. Also, if they're from the wealthiest families, why are they having to take out student loans?
I'm happy for the people who saw the effects of the financial crash end in two years, but $20 says they weren't fresh out of high school.
>Right, so free up mortgage debt, then. It's not great either, but I think we can at least agree that we want people to keep on having homes. We don't want people to continue to waste their time in college. If you perversely send the message that it's okay to waste that time because someone else will pay for it, people will keep on doing it. Bad actions need consequences.
It's not within the Federal government's jurisdiction to relieve a major tranche of mortgage debt. I can't find a statistic for how much of it is publicly held but most mortgages in the United States are held by non-governmental institutions like banks and credit unions. Student loan debt is another story; ~92% of student loan debt in the United States is paid to the federal government.[2] Recent attempts to renegotiate or forgive these loans have been in accordance with requirements on how much of the loan has been paid, among other things. In effect, the US government, with President Biden as its bank president, is willing to renegotiate the terms of student loans it created.
>No, the problem is clearly those who didn't do the math. Even after I warned them[1]! This outcome was painfully obvious even in the 90s. But, okay, explain to me why my sacrifice in skipping out on the fun of college in order to build wealth should come with even more sacrifice so that those who chose fun get to keep on having fun? When is my time to have fun? Why do you want to punish me for doing the 'right' thing?
You keep talking about the "fun" of college, like it's a four-year vacation. It's not. It's splitting the healthiest, most energetic years of your life between working low-wage jobs and doing a full course load. It's walking around like a zombie because you haven't slept for three days because you have end-of-semester projects to do so you can pass your classes. It's not the National Lampoon movies where it's a constant party house filled with cute girls who want to sleep with you. You made a bet that not pursuing a degree would pay off for you. Congratulations, it did. As I mentioned earlier, statistically, you're an anomaly. Most people who don't advance beyond a high school diploma struggle with their careers. It's completely understandable, given this information and the massive social pressure to get a degree, that young people would take out loans to study. Furthermore, this isn't you being "punished". Well, no more than you already are living in a country that, for the last fifty years, has had its government dominated by an entitled, spendthrift generation that has racked up an insane amount of debt while outright refusing tax increases to pay any of it off.
Sorry, the economics of screwing over 42 million Americans so you can stick it to those who believed in "book lernin" just don't work out.
[0]https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education... [1]https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millenn... [2]https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics
It is interesting that you didn't point out that the difference is only $170,000 between both men and women with only a high school diploma and those with a college education (but not a degree). 'tis little more than a rounding error. Yet, your conclusion that we need to double down on education? The market clearly doesn't care about education.
What the market does care about, as it relates to college, is two things:
1. Supply management of labour.
2. The product of college research.
I think you can make a reasonable case that #2 is dependent on said education. That is what a bachelors degree is designed to prepare you for, after all. But I see little evidence that all but a tiny fraction of college-bound students have this intention. The vast, vast majority will, once done with their studies, scurry back to the working world and get a job just like they would have otherwise done. This is where the waste is found, and why we have a problem.
While college may be a convenient place to administer a supply management system, it should be apparent to you that this can happen outside of the college system just as well. We can point to all kinds of examples around the world where supply management is done without association with academia. Be careful to not conflate the two.
If you have a realistic plan to leverage #1 or #2, college is a reasonable choice. But as we are talking about reform, #1 is logically separated from the college system, leaving only #2. And that's fine. College doesn't have to disappear. It is a useful institution for a tiny fraction of the population with a particular goal, but to be seen as a place for all is incredibly dubious.
> Degree attainment is now far less concentrated in the upper class.
Wealthiest, not upper class. I mean, think about it. The street term for upper-class is "retiree". While 20-year-old retirees aren't completely unheard of, you're probably thinking of someone who is elderly when I say that word. And for good reason. Indeed, it usually takes a lifetime to amass enough wealth to enter the upper class. And that connotation is quite relevant here as, let's face it, the vast majority of retirees aren't contending with 18 year olds failing to spread their wings. They are far more likely to be concerned with why their 40-year-old children haven't produced grandchildren yet. Upper-class clearly has little relevance here.
In fact, you even said yourself that more than half of the cohort attended college. Something I concede to. I revisited the data soon after posting and it did appear to just eek across the 50% threshold, but it was too late to edit my comment by the time I got back to it. I don't think anyone is under the impression that ~50% of the population are upper class. But these students are still more likely to come from the wealthiest families.
> It's not within the Federal government's jurisdiction to relieve a major tranche of mortgage debt.
And here we just got finished talking about 2009. You know, when the US government relieved a major tranche of mortgage debt to not see the economic downturn spiral into economic collapse. The federal government is just people. If this is what the people want, what is going to stop it? A space alien? It will not come consequence free, but neither will forgiving student loans.
> You keep talking about the "fun" of college, like it's a four-year vacation. It's not.
I don't know, it had better be for that measly $15,000 you stand to gain from it...
Let's look at this another way. If you do realize the full $655k lifetime earnings you spoke of earlier, that's equivalent to approximately $55,000 more earned in your early 20s (compound interest, yo). If, instead, you put all that hard work and energy into a job/second job rather than going to school, you couldn't bring in an additional $13,000 each of the four years? That's not very much money. You are quite right that the typical person who doesn't want to attend college most likely doesn't want to attend college because they don't want to (or can't!) put in that hard work and won't extend the effort into a job either, but for someone who has already accepted the hard work, $655k is really poor capitalization of time.
If we assume you spend 30 hours per week in college-related activities (class time, studying, homework, etc.) over the course of six months each year, that means $13,000 is only $18 per hour away. Just barely above minimum wage in an increasing number of jurisdictions, and about the price Wendy's will pay for you to flip burgers these days. That's all you think college is worth? That's what your numbers tell us.
Let me reiterate that. All one needs to do is spend 15 additional hours per week working at Wendy's over the course of four years from ages 18-22 to see an increase of $655,000 in lifetime earnings. And that's what you think the future of 40-some-odd million people rests on? Consider me amused.
> Most people who don't advance beyond a high school diploma struggle with their careers.
There is some truth to this, but you have framed it poorly. You make it sound like not advancing beyond a high school diploma is the cause for struggle in the careers, but we know the struggle is what keeps people from advancing in both school and in their career. With ~50% of young people attending college, they've pretty well slurped up everyone who doesn't have such struggles. Therefore, of course most people who don't advance beyond a high school diploma struggle with their careers.
> Furthermore, this isn't you being "punished".
Debatable. Let's remove college from the picture for a minute as people get weirdly emotional about it for some reason (which is telling in its own right, but I digress).
Since you mentioned a vacation, let's go with that instead. So you go on a fun vacation and rack up debt to do it. I too wanted to go on that vacation, but I stayed home because I didn't think I could afford it. You return, and then struggle because you can't bear the debt burden. I end up having to repay it for you. – Not only did I miss out on a vacation I would have enjoyed, I had to pay for yours. How is that not reasonably considered some kind of punishment?
If you are being earnest with us here, I'll get my travel agent on the horn. I'll gladly take a trip on your dime. Something tells me that isn't going to happen, though. Something tells me that you are only on board when you see yourself as the benefactor.
> But she couldn’t find any jobs in her field when she graduated
Why the hell would you expect to find a job in religious studies? If you're interested in that, great. Pay for that education if you can afford it. Don't borrow thousands of dollars for your indulgence and then complain that you owe money. That's how borrowing works. This has been going on for decades now. It has been a long time since getting any degree was some kind of ticket to prosperity. If it ever was.
On the other side of things, why isn't it considered class discrimination to require expensive degrees to work in jobs where high school education is sufficient?
Maybe we should (partially) reframe this is as: there's a widespread problem with long-term planning and financial literacy.
I agree that foolish wishful thinking is blameworthy. But out of love for future generations, maybe we can try to help them be smarter about this stuff.
(My point is simply that this issue should probably be part of any proposed solution.)
I would make my own college decisions slightly differently in retrospect, so I can't put all the blame on a 17 year old. She probably had lots of different advice, some of it contradictory, incomplete or optimistic.
I certainly wasn't educated on the long term consequences of debt when I was that age and I was relatively well off. We are, after all, discussing education. So the person who is striving for an education is being criticized for not being financially educated enough from the start?
I know that somebody is going to get on my case for defending ignorance. But maybe we shouldn't have systems in place that allow millions of people to make the same wrong decision? Fault can lie on both sides.
Maybe the difference here is that she chose to pay for a masters, which is a graduate degree. I think the personal responsibility argument carries more weight at that point.
The real issue is that schools are too expensive. It shouldn't be a mistake that takes a lifetime to pay back if you pursue a degree that "the marketplace" doesn't reward with a six- or seven-figure salary.
Oh there's plenty of blame to go around for sure.
The banks, the schools, the government. Even the businesses supplying the job market with opportunities that over emphasize post secondary.
But at 17 or 18 you're not completely blameless either. You know there are consequences for the decisions you make and that you are ultimately responsible for your own actions. This is taught from grade school.
We don't give large loans to teenagers for any other reason.
Meanwhile teachers, parents, older students, friends and so on say "follow your heart" and it will all work out.
As a young adult? Let's see...
Drinking and driving, unprotected premarital sex, drug use and abuse...there are plenty. These are all decisions that a 17 or 18 year old has to make very regularly and the wrong decision can be very harmful.
To your point though, the decision around this massive student loan racket is the only one I can think of that was / is actively encouraged by so many parents and educators. Like I said, there's plenty of blame to go around. But that doesn't absolve the 17 or 18 year old of blame.
The government essentially distorted the market, with colleges reaping all the upside and virtually no downside. If the government wants accessible public education, the easier solution is to fund colleges directly instead of going through a middleman that'll skim a lot before delivering that service (the student loan ecosystem).
Another question that nobody ever seems to ask: why do all degrees charge basically the same tuition, despite the disparate financial outcomes of holding those degrees?
Society needs people in all different fields. It would be awful if we simply abolished the arts, scholarship, and other non-profitable professions entirely. What a barren world that would be! The question is, how can we financially support necessary activities that aren't particularly lucrative?
I think we would get better results by shifting arts funding away from education and towards just paying performers to put on free public events or buying art pieces for exhibition in public spaces. Focus on the results rather than the process, and let the artists find their own paths.
It was pitched to most kids as a panacea for poverty.
Just go, get a degree, and everything will work out. It did for all my Baby Boomer peers who went to college, and it will for you. Don't worry about those loans, you'll definitely be able to pay them back!
Late high school years in the mid 90s, I remember looking into job placement rates that were part of the pitch from higher ed schools. We knew that the purpose was to get a job, not just to go and get any degree and hope for the best. I recall the phrase "a degree in basket weaving" was common. We figured there are degrees that are just garbage. So maybe I was more fortunate in my circumstances. Then again, some people did go for those basket weaving degrees even though they knew they were garbage. I think there was a lot of pressure to do anything but work toward a trade skill and get a job.
We're talking about factors leading to irrational choices about college costs, and the parent comment (correctly) describes one of the factors present in 1990's USA.
Nah, I'm pretty sure the joke that ends in 'The liberal arts major asks, "Would you like fries with that?"' has existed at least since the 1970s-1980s.
[EDIT] The point is not the joke, the point is that, contrary to the parent poster, the public has known for a long, long time that liberal arts degree programs usually didn't lead to high paying jobs for most.
IIRC, some people pitched college as a panacea (some guidance counselors, some well-intended government officials, some parents, etc.), and others made the French-fries quip.
A bank won't extend you a loan to buy a house for more than that house is worth, likewise they won't extend you a $100k loan to buy a Honda Civic because the car is not worth that much. But when it comes to education, it seems that loans are handed out without ever looking at what the borrower intend to use those dollars for.
Granted lending rules will be different than physical assets because you can't exactly value an education like you can a car or a house, but you could totally estimate the value of an underlying education with how much that person expects to make in the job market after college.
So if you want to become a doctor, the bank will extend you a loan of $200k to go to med school, same with a lawyer or engineer where that education has a high probability of landing you a well paying job. But we shouldn't be extending those same loans to folks that do other things, if you want to learn religious studies, the lender should only extend a loan that they think you can reasonably pay back with the job you will with your degree, so a religious studies major may only get $10-20k in loans.
This seems like something that's entirely unsurprising. If your STEM-oriented kid could attend <insert top 5 engineering school here> or your more Ivy-oriented kid could attend an Ivy League school and you could help them make that happen, why wouldn't you?
Not in the literal sense of "make the best rational argument against it" but in the metaphorical sense of "yeah, an enormous number of families will make exactly that choice, even if some opt out".
> My personal experiences highlight the magnitude of the problem. Upon graduation from medical school in 2013, I owed approximately $180,000 in student debt — what might seem an outrageously high number that is actually about $10,000 less than the average for today’s medical school graduates. I scrounged and saved during residency, living in a tiny Chinatown apartment, riding my bicycle to work every day, and sneaking expired patient sandwiches for lunch so that I could make my monthly $700 debt payment. Yet upon completing residency, the amount I owed had, to my disbelief, increased to $188,000 — all my efforts had not been enough to cover even the interest accumulating on my loans.
> I am far from alone. A mentor in residency, several years my senior and making over $200,000 per year, once revealed that she had moved back in with her mother just to get a handle on her student loans. Another colleague had a marriage proposal rejected because of his mortgage-size debt.
EDIT: Do you have data that's not anecdotal and shows that residents/doctors are struggling to pay off that debt?
> The average medical school graduate owes $250,995 in total student loan debt.
> The average medical school graduate owes 4 times as much as the average college graduate
> In 1978, the average medical school debt in the U.S. was $13,500. That’s $53,648 when adjusted for inflation.
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/radiologist... The median radiologist is making $459k. The bottom 10% is still making $344k. So you could finish med school, be the lowest-paid radiologist in your class, and pay off your debt in like 2 years if you wanted.
A less lucrative specialty still makes the debt no big deal. If you're making $250k as a family doctor, you're still living comfortably after making your debt payments.
Debt itself isn’t bad if it’s taken on as an investment.
You have to make allowances for things like starting a family. Otherwise we're not going to have enough people to create the expected economic value in 20 years. That will come with economic and political consequences that no one likes, and of course, the people who earned a retirement off of such short-sighted policy will be either dead or too frail to face the consequences.
If the cost of college or students loans is reducing the population, it’s hard to be too afraid of it.
I'm really skeptical of these types of articles because they don't tell the complete story about their finances and how they're spending money. In 2013 the median rent in Chinatown was ~$600, and the average salary for a resident was $55,000. After taxes that's roughly $3k/month.
For reference, I have a degree in history that I paid (ending in 2014) 30k in 2024 dollars for over the course of six years. Even with current price, that same degree at the same institution would be ~60k over the course of four years. Inflationary and gouging - sure, but still rather affordable.
The current system that perpetuates "college for everyone" along with a governmental debt guarantee to the universities leads to incessant price jacking. No, Boston University is emphatically not worth 63 thousand dollars a year. No state school is worth 30-40k/year.
That's borderline not believable. Somebody should probably take a closer look at where that data comes from. I went through the UC system, filling out the FAFSA every year, and had one parent who _partially_ supported me financially. I had that average amount of debt in two years. This was many years ago, and yes, I did work as well.
>For those who borrow the average debt at graduation is around $18k.
The debt specifically for tuition? What about housing? August to May is 10 months. It's easy to find studios that charge at least 1000/month. Assume rent is 900$. How does that housing cost calculation square with your average debt figure of 18k? If you're not including it, why not?
You’re delusional to claim that state schools “aren’t worth it”. There are cream of the crop state schools.
And if it's just for "an degree", the reality is most HR departments in the US could give two shits about you having anything but an degree.
A lot of this hinges on "worth".
Are you trying to make some kind of purely financial investment and show in an Excel model how it improves the overall financial outcome?
Or are you trying to equip your offspring to maximize their enjoyment in life? I got a lot of education at university that will never show up in a cell in a spreadsheet and I'm forever grateful for that, even though that it that subset had a negative RoI.
Side note: If a student chooses to saddle themself with that level of debt to attend Berkeley, I think that's still a good decision for the vast majority of students who will make that choice.
For folks who don't know, would you be willing to elaborate? Is it a real degree (fully accredited, so you can actually use it?).
Even using residency status at a community college for your first two years, and then transfering in to a public state university, still puts the cheapest bachlors degree around here at close to $40k (not including room and board). (And for maybe half of the careers, you can't do this, and it costs even more)
E: Also in your post, 40k, not 40k/year. A lot of these (domestic to the US at least) also assume that you're working part or fulltime through it. Having done it, have to say proto-SRE work and full college load is hell, but a doable hell.
Many careers requiring hard science degrees have dreadful pay.
- teachers and childcare workers
- special education and/or disability workers
- librarians
- social workers, therapists, mental health workers
- cnas, medical billing, and other heathcare admin
- and many more not listed above
People often seem to assume "liberal arts" translates to a fake profession, like "underwater basketweaving" or "economist" or something "silly". And while that's occasionally true, most folks with a Liberal Arts degree are hard-working career-oriented people, who society just pays terribly, arbitrarily, because they can. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education#Modern_...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/03/19/teacher-s...
I kind of get it. The english words "liberal" and "arts" used to mean entirely different things for hundreds of years, and have been redefined into something else only recently (past ~30 years) via common usage.
My degree program was in "Liberal Studies", and my parents consistently assumed it meant "studying how to become a Democrat voter", when in actuality, what it meant was "if you can justify it well, we give you permission to merge two-or-more different degree paths into one"
The university eventually had to rename the program to "Integrative Studies", because too many people simply don't know what "Liberal" means in an traditional academic context, and couldn't shake the modern-political framing of the word.
As for a CNAS or medical biller, those jobs don't even require a bachelor's degree. They can get trained more cheaply in community college.
Low pay in many of those fields you listed is only arbitrary in the sense that much of the funding ultimately comes from governments. Voters are already struggling themselves and seldom vote for tax increases.
What you said used to be true, it's no longer true.
Let me say here I know three chemist undergrads that have been in the industry for 5-8y+: none are happy or over six figures.
I am an ex-biochemist and trust me, PhDs in academia are not making six figures.
There is a divide there between tech and science for sure. Of the maybe 25 or so younger people I worked with in the lab, the ones that did very well moved to tech. The ones that did ok were either from other countries, or their parents paid their way. Very few US people from the lab that stayed in science that had loans, paid off their loan. I can think of one.
Lab work is super underpaid, and you need every degree in order to even get your foot in the door.
Is "lifetime of debt" in the realm of "help make that happen" at this point?
At some point it's less an investment and more a very fancy splurge.
The worst part is that this isn't just some crazy expense revserved for Harvard. Tuition for ASU is 30k out of state. You're paying some 200k for your kid to go to a school reputed (or perhaps, used to be reputed) for its party scene? That's where this really starts to be untenable.
really depends on your state and your college aspects. Not all states are created equal in terms of education.
>where you may have family housing
There's also that. It's probably shifting these days, but commuter students had a reaction of "not getting the full college experience."
social interactions aside, there is some point to be made on how college can be a good preperation for self-preservation without the gaze of the increasing helicopter parenting methodology in your midst. Or simply a way to finally disengage with a bad family dynamic.
And also a location that likely isn't in-state for many people. Living in Arizona to get a better deal, you may as well just jump straight into your local oven.
When I graduated I dumped every penny I had into my student loans against the advice of my parents, peers, and financial advisors. Why? Because I was income rich and had a class of debt with variable rate interest that couldn’t be discharged in bankruptcy.
There is a large % of Americans that can not afford to pay the accumulated interest on their loans every month. Every month the balance of their loan increases.
They are bankrupt.
I don’t think further subsidizing education is going to do anything. We don’t need to pay these loans off for them. We just need to let them declare bankruptcy again and discharge the debt.
Right now, lenders have no incentive to minimize the balance of a loan. They’re nearly guaranteed a return, since the borrower will owe the debt for life. With access to unlimited credit by proxy of student debt, universities have little incentive to reduce tuition.
If you allow borrowers to declare bankruptcy, I’m fairly confident the financial system will properly price in the true value of each degree program over night. They’ll have data on which degree programs from which universities have what placement rates at what salaries. They’ll weigh the expected lifetime return on that loan against the probability of it being discharged in bankruptcy.
For many degree programs, I suspect students won’t be able to find a lender to cover the cost and universities will be forced to get costs back inline with the true expected return on the degree.
I’m not in favor of student loan forgiveness. I just want to bring bank bankruptcy.
I'm all for forgiving existing debt where there's a legal framework to do so. But, this needs to come alongside systemic reforms to how society funds higher education. If we don't make those harder changes, we'll just be stuck revisiting this topic in a generation.
The student who made all the prudent decisions- lived on cheap groceries, while attending a low-cost state school to major in something employable like nursing or accounting now gets saddled with the debt from the student who got a basketweaving degree from a private liberal arts school while ordering UberEats every day.
The government should claw back the money from the universities that overcharged and failed to provide value (as they have done in a few extreme cases against for-profit scam colleges) but it's frustratingly unjust to see people who made frugal decisions be forced to pay for others who didn't.
That's not too say that the universities aren't a big part of the problem.
That's always the case, regardless of whether the debt is paid back later.
With government-sponsored loans, which are most student loans nowadays, the money is disbursed from the tax revenue and goes immediately to the universities and students to pay for tuition and other expenses. After the student leaves college, the loan is paid back slowly over many years. But note, crucially, that the identity of the taxpayers also changes over time. Taxpayers retire and/or die, new taxpayers enter the system, worker incomes change over time, indeed tax rates themselves change over time. It's never the case that individual taxpayer X is directly paid back for their tax money that went towards the disbursement in year YYYY.
It's also worth recognizing that education benefits _everyone_ in society, not only the person being educated.
[1] "Taxes" are hard to quantify, but here's a look at federal income taxes specifically through 2018. Notice that most columns trend to a decrease. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-averag...
Obviously, a levy on college endowments would be a better path, though still bad.
(And if experience is any guide, fresh-out-of-college hires still require a mountain of on-the-job training. The time I've spent showing MsEE's how to use an oscilloscope is absurd.)
Us being increasingly more accepting of diversity hiring has helped somewhat. Now employers can say "To everyone not a gay black woman, thanks for applying, but no thanks." without much legal scrutiny, but that has only come on somewhat recently. 30 years ago when we were at peak "degree required" that would have been as unacceptable as saying the same about straight white men.
Employers have flirted with other filtering mechanisms, like credit score, but when that was gaining traction there was immediately calls to make that illegal[1] too. A degree is the only filter that has been consistently upheld and accepted. Nonsensically, but that's the power of marketing, I suppose.
[1] https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/employer-credit-c...
1 - Everyone says you need to have a degree to succeed
2 - the government guarantees tons of school loans
3 - schools raise prices because loans are so easy to get
4 - many student choose majors that have a negative return
5 - people suffer from student debt, but can't discharge it in bankruptcy
...
Huge economic impact ensues.
It took 5 steps to get here. We only need to change one to change this problem.
What makes this group so different and prone to this problem?
Edit: downvoted for factual information :-/.
That's a lot of money monthly. That's a car payment, or groceries, or a lot other consumption that isn't happening.
And for the average graduate, yeah, it usually works out in the end, but there can definitely be cash-flow problems in the early phases of careers (thinking about teachers and other "service" jobs that require/prefer college but don't pay well).