NYU Neatly Embodies Everything Wrong With Higher Education in America

I went to NYU. I credit it with developing a lot of the skills that have gotten me to where I am today. This comes with a very clear understanding that my degree, while not directly related to what I do for a living, is still hugely useful in my day-to-day life.

I have a substantial amount of debt; most college kids do, anyhow. I credit NYU with giving me the opportunity to leave rural Pennsylvania and helping me into a salary bracket five times higher than my parents ever were in. For me, the cost of 3 years (after scholarships) bought this opportunity.

NYU isn't a "luxurious four year vacation." It's one of the higher ranked schools in America. It has professors who are leaders in their fields. It is rigorous and challenging.

Eh... Maybe at the undergraduate level. NYU has some extremely strong graduate programs and surely most grad students there are not rich vacationers.

I happened to receive a very generous grant to attend to offset my tuition. So do many others.

As someone who went to college in a small college town (a 3-college town, even) with no semblance of events, museums, and non-academic "intellectual stuff" to be found anywhere... Wut.

I'd have killed, even as an engineering major, to have access to all of the above. I'd have killed to balance out 4 years of mindlessly pounding of head against books with some semblance of creativity and culture.

I left college culturally stunted and have spent a lot of time crawling out of that dark hole, I wish it upon no one else. It's an endemic problem in our field to belittle the arts, or to regard the total abandonment of the arts as some sort of ascetic virtue. To be clear, there should be no pride in spending 4 years of your life in an academic dungeon and eschewing museums, music, and "intellectual stuff".

Throwing would-be engineers into an arena where there are constantly exposed to non-engineering things and non-engineering people is probably the best thing you can do to engineering education.

NYU's Courant Institute is the top ranked applied math program in the States...

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

I am not from a rich family. No one in my family earned a college degree before me and they immigrated to the States with little to nothing. They were smart enough to start saving early for my education so I wouldn't have to pay a dime, but despite that, I still have loans. Thankfully I'm well on my way to paying them off, and early, because of the skills and the network I think I could have only built at NYU and NYC at large. I have the job I have because I went to NYU.

It's true that this is not the ideal place to become a hermit and focus on maximizing your GPA. I argue that higher education is far more involved than your studies - it's about exposing yourself to new experiences, honing your social senses and building a strong network, among other soft skills that are not summarized by your transcript. There are few better places in the world to do so than in NYC and specifically within NYU as a college student.

Lastly, going through NYU was not a vacation. I was very aware - as well as everyone else I knew was as well - that NYU was a ridiculously expensive place to be going to: nearly a quarter of a million dollars for an education with everything accounted for. If I screwed this up, all that money would be wasted, so study up. Not only that, study up, but resist the weakness to indulge in the "distractions" of the city and let your grades suffer.

In short, to say that NYU students are all rich kids is overgeneralizing, to think that studying in college is your one priority is myopic, and to call an NYU experience a "vacation" is just insulting. Have a little faith.

My younger brother just graduated from NYU Stern undergraduate and he says the experiences he's had were invaluable. School was not easy by any means, he was encouraged to travel and experience business in other parts of the world, was heavily involved in student government and the community, and is going to start a job here in NYC. He might not have been able to have such a rewarding 4 years had he gone elsewhere.

He pulled loans and will be paying them back, too. And he thinks it's still worth it. And I agree.

It's progressive, there's a safety net, and it is, for the time being, solvent (government makes 30-50% profit on each dollar lent). Yes, people with great credit who would end up paying less under a standard 10 year repayment at say 5% end up subsidizing those who graduate without getting a decent job, but I think that's uniquely justifiable in this context, because everyone involved is turning to the student loans as a way to better their economic situation (after all, nothing stops you from paying in cash or getting a private loan at 5% if you can qualify for one).

I think if you added a cap in there instead of going up to full cost of attendance, to force schools to moderate their tuitions, it would be nearly perfect.

Those out to study degrees that don't offer great employment opportunities will be offered more expensive loans which will curb demand for such degrees which will depress the cost of the degrees. It will also make sure that fewer people will go to a party college and study an easy degree (or, at least, that those that do aren't subsidised by tax-payer underwritten credit).

Extra bonus: All those companies that clamour for STEM grads have a very simple avenue for putting their money where their mouths are: Simply go out and underwrite some cheap loans. (And no, indentured servitude is still illegal - companies underwriting student debt shouldn't be allowed to change the terms of the loan if the student comes to work for them).

And then we make it 20%, and then 30%, and then extend it out to 15 years, and then . . .

We've been putting people into debt they cannot escape to go to college while telling them they "need" to go to college. Given the history, the end result of any kind of "we take a portion of your income" plan will be to make it ever more efficient for the colleges to capture 99% of the lifetime earning difference between a high-school grad and a college grad.

We need price pressure on the cost of education.

There are dozens of legitimate ratings of colleges and universities and NYU rarely ranks at the top academically (except their research staff, which I know can be exceptional). That won't stop kids from paying $40k/yr from going there so they can party it up in the Village for 4 years.

And for those students whose parents credit would justify a 60k loan, how many of those couldn't also get an 80k loan, on student loan terms (rates and repayment schedules)? I think all you'd do there is make it increasingly harder for parents of college-age children to get any further credit and draw down their consumption as college prices continued to grow. (Surely they'll rank co-signing Junior's college loans as more important than a cottage or condo in the sunshine belt.)

I think the bigger problem is that the degree and institution aren't considered in the loan process. I don't know how you'd even begin to structure an objective analysis, but it seems fundamentally wrong that the government will guarantee an 80k loan today for a degree that cost 60k yesterday, even though the market for that degree hasn't moved and the program itself is largely undifferentiated from what it was yesterday, let alone from competing universities charging 40k or less for substantially the same program.

Perhaps there could be another way of doing it - perhaps only allowing a threshold for the loan? If you cap the subsidy to average in-state tuition plus expenses, you will go a long way to solving the problem too.

Two additional points: 1) Conde Nast gives loans to editors and higher ups. [1] [2] 2) Having worked with some of the "all star" professors in varying capacities (and getting a glimpse, however small, of the bargaining process) a lot of other universities are often trying to poach research professors from NYU. Housing, which is a hugely hard "thing" to solve in NYC, is a large bargaining chip.