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Comment by tway_GdBRwW | Hacker News Reader

> Universities will have to start focusing on ROI.

In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt.

The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduation something happens which prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you.

And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.

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I would imagine in Europe they select more carefully the students whom will go to College. Here in the US we've told students that everyone must go to College. We now have too many people in College and many of them aren't going to be successful once they are in. It's not sustainable. In many of our public universities, the graduation rate is well below 50%

> I would imagine in Europe they select more carefully the students whom will go to College. Here in the US we've told students that everyone must go to College

You imagine wrong. Pretty much everyone goes to university in most and European countries. Even in wildly tourist dependent places, a degree in tourism is a normal thing for a young person to pursue before going to work at hotels/restaurants.

It's actually less than half for the EU as a whole - https://erudera.com/news/statistics-show-41-of-eu-youngsters...

The absurdly low numbers for Romania and Hungary make me think that people leaving to study abroad fall through the cracks in these stats.

If those students/graduates move to other European countries (which they mostly do), they'll be counted in their destination country, evening things out.

Where did you get the idea most Europeans get a degree?

> If those students/graduates move to other European countries (which they mostly do), they'll be counted in their destination country, evening things out

If they move to the Netherlands, the NL will only count what % of its citizens have degrees, not everyone else (because many may go back or move elsewhere after finishing their studies, you can't count them easily alongside the rest of your population; students are usually counted as some sort of temporary resident, if counted at all). And then there's also the UK which is a top study destination for Eastern Europeans.

> Where did you get the idea most Europeans get a degree

I come from one EU country, live in another, have friends from all over the EU, have visited as a student and now working adult. Most young people pursue degrees, even in forestry or tourism or whatever topic. Of course some will fail getting them, but 30% of under 30s is absurdly low for stats to be reliable.

In Switzerland, it‘s only about 15%. The others most often do an apprenticeship: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/apprenticeship-system/...

It‘s a pretty efficient (and quite unique) system. People learn to do their job at a normal company and attend school for usually two days a week. And they can still switch to the university track later without starting from the beginning.

Wow interesting! Swiss have also one of the highst gpd per capita. And the university EthZ beats most of other European universities.

The thing you mentioned is not unique to Swiss Germany had it as well. But I think still you have there more people who study...

Data says otherwise though.

Only three European countries are above the US in tertiary education rate: Ireland, UK and Luxembourg.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1227287/share-of-people-...

> Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduation something happens which prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you.

That's why the article's saying you should be able to declare bankruptcy.

> And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.

Teaching is relatively well paid and there are huge numbers of jobs. It's highly likely that a teacher could repay loans. There are plenty of degrees far less capable of providing employment than teaching.

Teaching as in school teachers? In the US? Not even close to being well paid.

I think most people would agree with me in saying the European model sounds pretty swell compared to forcing people into declaring bankruptcy because of economic/personal factors potentially out of their control, while also inserting an incredible amount of volatility into the entire university system that would make long term institutional planning much less possible.

And in the US, bankruptcy doesn't help with the student debt, so if the majority of your debt is student loans, there's really nothing that can be done other than die to get rid of them. And I'm 100% certain that if the student loan - industrial complex could saddle relatives and kids with that debt after death, they'd sure go after that too.

Many will agree, but that's part of the reason why the US has a 50% higher GDP with 30% lower population. Focusing on well-beeing, fun and experience comes at a price.

GDP that's concentrated in the top few % of the population.

The fact that despite 50% higher GPD and 30% less population there's still rampant homelessness is damning enough.

> The fact that despite 50% higher GPD and 30% less population there's still rampant homelessness is damning enough.

You can't solve all of that through GDP. There are social and drug and mental health issues that seem to not present to nearly the same extent.

The U.S. GDP per capita is behind Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, and these countries are known for low cost and excellent education.

What do you mean about 30% lower population? How is that relevant? You’re quoting a per-capita stat, the population was already factored out. And you’re comparing a single country to 27 countries. Makes zero sense.

Be careful what you wish for. The majority of my fellow engineering graduates would not have gotten an engineering degree in Germany.

They would have flunked the first year - a weed out year - and then been forced into a technical diploma program and not be allowed to call themselves engineers.

My friend who went to the German school said they have a target of flunking half the students that first year. Funds are limited and shape how many can graduate.

> "Teaching is relatively well paid"

Compared to what? In the US, teachers are absolutely underpaid relative to their similarly-educated and -skilled peers in other professions.

You forgot to mention teachers in the US are also overworked.

Sure -- though that's almost just two ways of describing the same thing. If teachers were paid $500k, few would describe them as overworked, and if they only had to work 4-hour days (with current salaries and benefits), they might be fairly compensated.

Compared to degrees that could struggle on average to pay back a loan, e.g. a degree in the humanities.

Not to be argumentative (really ), but that's borderline nonsensical; you're comparing a profession to a broad category of educational attainment. Teachers typically have a degree in the humanities. What other profession is so commonly viewed as underpaid?

> In Europe, they have a simpler system

Europe does NOT have an education system!

The ~50 different European countries all have their own systems, with huge differences between them.

In the USA, the government also pays for education. That’s part of the problem, in fact. Since the loan to the college is always paid for by the government, the college is effectively handed a blank check. Said check, now filled in with an arbitrarily high amount, is handed to the student as a bill to pay back to the government. The same is done in your system, in fact, except that the entire country suffers that burden, regardless of if that degree actually amounts to any meaningful contribution.

>In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt.

That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education?

>And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.

Sounds like the solution is to raise teacher pay, which would also have the added benefit of retaining teachers after they graduate. Giving teachers cheap training but paying them poorly seems worse than the status quo because you end up shoveling money into training teachers that'd end up dropping out anyways.

A country's which population is educated, usually bodes well, unless it's an authoritative govt one, in which case dumbing down the population is the way (from the govt POV, at least)

> That's all well and good for the student, but what about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education?

We can say the same thing about K-12 education -- it's just something we choose to fund collectively, because that's the kind of society we want to be.

But also, progressive taxation means that the rich fund it more than the poor. So the general idea is that if law school and medical school are expensive to provide but result in vastly higher salaries, then it gets paid for in the end out of those lawyers' and doctors' taxes. Not the taxes from average Americans.

Progressive taxation isn’t even necessary. If someone makes $10,000 and is taxed 10%, they give up $1,000. And if someone makes $10,000,000 then they give up $1,000,000.

> Progressive taxation isn’t even necessary

It isn’t necessary, no, and in fact a flat super simple tax code would probably result in more tax revenue. However, since politicians like the power of the tax code, and because the wealthy like a complex tax code for all the loopholes, and since ordinary people like the idea of those wealthier than them paying more tax as a percentage of their income, then we’re never going to get a simple tax code.

But it’s not the same as K-12. I can’t send my kids to an expensive private boarding school and expect taxes to pay for it.

And absolutely the same logic can and should apply for universities - there can be private exclusive institutions, but the majority should be affordable and mostly paid for by taxes.

This already is the case. 75% of student debt is private universities and colleges.

If you get into Stanford but can't afford it, a loan seems like a good idea, but in reality the loan eligibility should consider the degree and future earning potential (along the same lines of how banks qualify other types of loans).

If we simply cancel student debt or remove private colleges' ability to charge a market rate the result will be no more private colleges (similar to other countries with fully publicly funded education). In these countries you typically have a national exam that determines where you go, or you have to lottery in to a school if it isn't in your district.

>We can say the same thing about K-12 education -- it's just something we choose to fund collectively, because that's the kind of society we want to be.

But in K-12 education, the taxpayer/state has strong control over what's taught. In the last few years there's some latitude by the students, but nothing close the panoply of programs offered by universities. If education is state funded, but only for programs with proven ROI (eg. STEM), I'd be fine with that.

When the state pays, what matters is the ROI to the state. There is a need for teachers, social workers, and people familiar with various cultures, but the market will never pay them well.

Public funding models often have incentives for delivering the degrees the state wants. For example, there could be field-specific quotas for degrees. The university gets paid for each degree up to the quota, but not for exceeding the quota. That can have interesting effects in fields that are popular but in low demand. For example, the acceptance rate to psychology can be as low as 2-3%.

Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduation something happens which prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you.

And if you’re a nurse or a police officer or a teacher or a lawyer and you lose your license under specious circumstances, it really sucks to be you.

It’s not much better for the taxpayers to be lighting money on fire. Also, the students still pay for it in the most precious currency there is—-time.

Credentialism is pernicious regardless.

Simpler isn’t always preferable: note that the key feature from the consumer perspective in that system is

> you pay no matter what

Meaning if it’s assumed “despite learning little, you still will be able to pay for it”, there’s no longer any motive force towards quality, as your payment is assured. Incentives on taxpayers thereafter who want to minimize their tax burden would therefore be optimizing primarily toward cheapness of the educational process, rather than efficacy and quality of the education which outbound students received.

A vigorous market for education, would suggest you would likely get a variety of nodes along a “costliness to quality” options frontier.

> there’s no longer any motive force towards quality, as your payment is assured

There are many excellent European universities, including ones which have been around for centuries, telling me there are ways to handle your concerns.

> A vigorous market for education

How's that Corinthian Colleges degree working out? Costly and no quality. And exactly the life-crippling outcome we should expect in a 'vigorous market'.

This is non-responsive to my point. Pointing out that paid universities like Corinthian in a grossly distorted market predictably are not very competitive offerings, or that good offerings can nevertheless still exist in heavily distorted markets, both fail to address that

> Current educational incentives caused by how payment is handled in these all-pay systems mean there is very little or no pressure exerted towards promoting an educational arms race towards quality, rather than minimizing cost to service that education.

In a more competitive market, yes, I believe you'd both likely see better European offerings, as well as substantially more compelling American paid offerings than the current batch of cash grab for-profit universities. They exist in their current form almost exclusively because financial lenders in the US have no incentive not to issue loans to students - even if the program is bogus, they are guaranteed re-payment.

This is a commonality shared between both current European offerings (via taxation guaranteeing repayment), and American alternatives (via guaranteed load repayment).

'In a more competitive market' sounds like an article of faith, akin to the No True Scotsman, where there's no definition of what is competitive enough until it meets the proponents' sniff test.

What would a sufficiently competitive market entail? Has it ever existed?

Would it look like modern US K-12 systems where commercial schools prioritize the most profitable students and leave the others to the public schools? Where good marketing beats good education?

How would it not be "heavily distorted" by impositions like Title 9 and other civil rights requirements? By government requirements on the school in order to receive state and federal money? By accreditation requirements?

>has it ever existed?

This question being written as singular suggests to me you’re conflating some combination of education as a concept, education in America, and education in Europe. I see this as muddled thinking, they each have their own issues and their own timetables over which issues can and do exist.

Education history in Europe is actually decently hyperlocal and pretty path dependent for each country during the 19th and 20th century. Talking about it as a monolith is challenging, but there’s a pretty consistent pattern in societies with all-pay taxation-paid schooling that it has clear incentive structures that a school, having been “paid up front“, is not incentivized to put in the work to provide a high quality education, and as the financier of that education is the taxpayer, the pressure is primarily to keep costs low.

As for America, you don’t need much faith to believe that in the US instituting dischargeability would dramatically improve competition and quality in these spaces and the market for education - so yes, this market used to be substantially more competitive and used to exist. Since the 1970s when these laws were passed, student debt and tuition costs have skyrocketed, low quality for-profit university creation skyrocketed, and people have been hobbled with debt for degrees many are never going to pay back. Dischargeability reduces this greatly - it causes financiers to create motive pressure on education to not be a fiscal vampire preying on its students and equip them with meaningful trades and socially useful knowledge.

As for standards and regulations on schools, assuming the public sees fit to fund higher education through government spending, having requirements for a school to receive that government funding seems reasonable, so long as they reflect the desires of the local populace.

Ultimately, all this is a discussion of tradeoffs - I think someone can happily prefer

> everyone gets a free tertiary education paid for by their taxes

I think that it being free and paid-by-all means it’ll have low motive pressure towards quality and therefore be comparably mediocre to free elementary and secondary compulsory education, which even based on your own reckoning seems to be a two-tier system where the public institutions get short shrift - but you seem to care about it being free or less focused on fiscal student outcomes as its own value. It’s a tradeoff.

> but you seem to care about

I care about having actual definitions of what "more competitive market" and "vigorous market for education" means, and gave examples of markets with significant market failures.

Is it even possible to have a vigorous market without strong government oversight?

> define more competitive markets - Is it even possible?

Yes it is, and I am using it in the traditional sense of "Sellers vying to make their offerings more compelling so consumers prefer them to alternatives". A more competitive market has more of the above fighting happening, which can be incentivized in several ways.

Specifically for the US, I already gave a massive truck-sized example of how you can make offerings more competitive: repeal recent 1970s policy changes that make college debt work different than essentially all other debt in being non-dischargeable, and lenders will put pressure by refusing to lend for failschools. This will slash their demand, and survivors will be expected to provide more compelling “when examined actuarially” lifetime student economic outcomes: from the lender’s perspective, the education needs to be expected to at least pay for itself. Schools in a world with dischargeability will therefore make efforts to compete on being able to compellingly show “we are imparting an effective education which equips you to repay what you spent”, and in general will be less able to get away with “we have a strong brand and you’re young and naïve, come study here!”. You can fool an 18 year old, you won’t fool the underwriter.

Specifically for the EU, there’s three approaches I’d like to see considered, the first and last more experimental than the others. It’s a widely agreed upon problem that faculty aren’t incentivized or often even that good at actually teaching, and to a lesser extent they’re also bad at training graduate students, because professorial incentives are to be good at research and grant writing, the thing for which universities pay their salary.

Historically, many universities used a different mode where they kept permanent salaried faculty positions very limited, and rather than charge a tuition, most schools and professors were expected to charge a fee or honorarium they would collect from their individual pupils as the bulk or totality of a professor’s compensation.

We moved away from this because historically teacher compensation was abysmal and we wanted to better support educators in studying - the pendulum swung way too far the other way though, and professors are essentially totally insulated from needing to seriously engage with their student body - they make a salary no matter what and it shows when they teach like it. Returning to a market where teachers’ financial outcomes are at least partially linked to their students explicitly choosing and paying professors chosen fees rather than a tuition which everyone in society pays stochastically, professors are incentivized to competitively vie for being better at training and teaching, because their prosperity and success would be linked to it.

Second, as much criticism as the US model gets for its prices, much of that appears to be driven by administrative bloat and nondischargeability, payment itself is actually really great when dischargeable because it seems prices stay low and this bloat doesn’t happen when it is. It also means a significant fraction of students do try to get into the best school they can and the schools have some incentive to fight to be seen as better - they make their money when students go. The results speak for themselves: something like half to two-thirds of the world’s top 100 universities are all in America.

Last, I’d like to see both European and US models collaborate harder on job and work placement as part of ensuring student success. Colleges being a source of a liberal education without concern for fiscal outcomes can be great, but the pendulum swung too far and these students are essentially thrown out into the world without any expectation of success, because the school no longer has any investment in them. I’d like to see some portion of the fee of education be moved to explicitly garnished wages from placed-into-their-trained field employees - you succeeding would therefore be the university’s success.

I’d therefore like to see taxes slashed on education with moves to paid models comparable to how they existed in the US prior to the 70s, reductions in permanent salaried academic positions with in-kind movements of price of tuition from the school at large to being in baked into professorial fees instead, and moving the funding of education from societal fees to a fixed percentage of post-graduation salaries for some fixed time, to incentivize effective job placement.

The common bailiwick that needs to die is that Europeans don’t pay for college - they do, it’s just compulsory, lifelong, and in a way that is not incentivized to produce quality.

I agree that non-dischargeable debt for education was a horrible change, given the predatory response of the colleges and collusion between the increasing power of the administrative class over the university and the capitalists providing debt funding.

However, removing that does not fix the underlying political goal of assuring access to higher education, which Johnson back in 1965 described as "no longer a luxury, but a necessity". https://archive.org/details/4730960.1965.001.umich.edu/page/...

US schools are increasingly extractive because if higher education is indeed necessary then it is economically beneficial for someone to go to college - so long as the result is more profitable than not going to college. If the college charges less than that (or rather, the college + debt industry), then they leave money on the table.

There is little interest in providing quality low-cost education because it is capital intensive, and capitalists want to maximize their profits. As the recent news about rent collusion shows, capital owners will collude to extract more profits.

> the pendulum swung too far

This has been a trope since the 1960s when the right started their culture war against college education as the post-GI bill era meant college was no longer a place primarily for the children of the privileged classes.

That is, be specific - when was the pendulum enough in the other direction that you wouldn't have complained thusly? It seems you like the 1960s, when the right complained about ivory tower academics filling student brains with anti-American nonsense.

> reductions in permanent salaried academic positions

We have that. These are called adjunct professors. "Editorial: U.S. colleges are overusing — and underpaying — adjunct professors" / "The American Assn. of University Professors reports that 70% of faculty are adjunct, most of them without benefits, job security or union representation; they teach more than half of all college courses in the U.S."

They are also poorly paid, exactly as you would expect from an extractive industry.

How low should it be? 20% 10%? But in the 1960s in the era you praise, those numbers were much higher, back when academic positions included significant administrative responsibilities.

If you really want to remove "administrative bloat", remove administrators.

> garnished wages from placed-into-their-trained field employees

Ahh, so you follow the meat widget model of college education. Got a degree in physics but decide to open a chocolate boutique? Sorry, you'll need to pay back your education first.

It costs a lot to go to med school, so those who go often end up in debt, which means they need to get jobs which pay enough to pay back that debt, which means they can't afford to provide medical care to poor communities.

It costs a lot to become a lawyer, which is one of the factors for public defenders are 1) needed, and 2) so overworked.

Besides, we've had similar policies for a long time. I had teachers back in the 1980s whose agreed to debt relief for their teacher education which contingent on being a teacher for enough years.

I've also heard stories about the consequent problems in such a bureaucratized system.

> see both European and US models collaborate harder on job and work placement as part of ensuring student success

There is no "European model". The UK has a very different system than Germany, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_education_system

In Germany: "After passing through any of the above schools, pupils can start a career with an apprenticeship in a Berufsschule ( vocational school). Berufsschule is normally attended twice a week during a two, three, or three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship; the other days are spent working at a company. This is intended to provide a knowledge of theory and practice. The company is obliged to accept the apprentice on its apprenticeship scheme." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany

How is that not exactly what you are asking about?

> The common bailiwick that needs to die is that Europeans don’t pay for college

I'm really tired of people doing the "I'm so clever" comment that "you know that 'free health care' isn't free, right"? That extends to people pointing out that "free college education", and "free K-12 education" and "free school lunches" and "free tampons" and "free condoms" aren't actually free.

Like, duh. It's just name-calling implying I'm ignorant, and therefore you don't need to take me seriously.

Did you know that freeways aren't actually free, but depend on tax funding?

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