So, in other words, you are critical of the rape culture debate and you also think women’s studies is an unproductive degree?
Maybe not, but I think we all agree that they should be getting an education. How exactly do we reconcile this?
We do cap student loans - the federal ones. (Private loans I think should be between parties to arrange). The most you can borrow as an independent student for your undergrad education is $57,500. Which is a lot of money, but not a LOT of money. (And that’s if your a independent student, dependent students can only get $31k.)
It seems like most parents are undereducated about the cost of education - and that doesn’t help
:dubious:
So, I was watching John Oliver on student debt - he said >30% of the $1 trillion debt is held by the for-profits, which only have 12% of the enrollment, is that accurate?
He also said something like 25+% of the budget is spent on marketing vs 10% on teaching staff (I presume, from context, he meant of the for-profits, specifically) Does that also seem accurate?
This sounds plausible. Most for-profits are basically a scam for transferring student loan funds in to their bank accounts, preying on non-college savvy students and intense marketing.
They are protected by powerful political allies who preach the value of “privatization” while lining their pockets with taxpayer money.
Norway has about 6,900 million barrels of proven oil reserves in a country with a population of only 5.1 million. This gives a ratio of about 1,352 barrels / person.
The US, on the other hand, has about 30,500 million barrels of proven oil reserves in a country with a population of 320 million. This gives a ratio of about 95 barrels / person.
In order for the US to be as oil-rich as Norway on a per-person basis, it would need to have about 432,941 million barrels of proven reserves, slightly less than a third of the entire world’s supply.
The 26th most profitable company in the world is Statoil, the Norwegian oil & gas company, which is 67% owned by the Norwegian government.
So, if the US had a third of the world’s oil and then nationalized the asset, formed one of the largest companies in the world and then sold that oil and then kept the profits as part of the governemnt revenues and used that to pay for college, that would be super easy.
That’s great if you can get a good job because you picked a good college program. If you’re stuck working for minimum wage because you chose theater, good luck telling the bill collectors on the phone to stop harassing your boss to garnish your wages, even though they’re not supposed to be able to do that when you work part time for MW. Good luck having an understanding enough boss not to fire you the first, second, third, or fourth time that happens.
Good luck getting a cell phone, car, apartment or utilities when your credit says you’re in default on a $60k loan. “Deferred”, okay. Try explaining the difference to the guy who turns on your water.
Then try getting a decent job without any of those things, and with the threat of bill collectors harassing your boss the second they find out you’re employed.
These aren’t scare tactics. It’s reality for people I personally know, and probably thousands of others across the country. The problem isn’t that young professionals have more debt than they used to. The problem is that we’re making homeless people out of middle class college graduates.
Then the real people that you know should go in their loan provider’s website and sign up for income based repayment. It takes about 10 minutes and requires faxing a single form once a year. They will take your income, subtract 150% of the poverty line, and then charge 10 or 15 percent of that, depending on when you became a borrower. If you are making minimum wage, that probably works out to nothing or a token payment. In 25 years (or 10 years if you work for government or nonprofits) the loan will be dismissed.
Of course if you just don’t pay the loans, rather than choosing from on of the 7 repayment plans, they will start using collection agencies and your credit will suffer, which I am guessing is what happened to your friends. Why aren’t your friends using the many real, actual, repayment methods available to them?
I don’t think lenders look at deferred student loans in the same way as, say, a late credit payment. People routinely defer loans when they are in grad school. I had no problem getting a phone, apartment, utilities, etc. Again, it sounds to me like your friends are defaulting, which is bonehead stupid and not at all necessary.
The loan services know that these loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, so they have no reason to get aggressive on people who indicate they intend to pay and make a good faith effort to do so.
I think we need to distinguish between two types of students. The first type gets a degree in order to get a job in order to make enough money to do the type of stuff they want to do after the job. The second have a passion for something learning related. The first are probably fine in a community college, assuming they can get it together to survive two more years of effective high school without a lot of peer pressure. It is wrong for the second set. They will find classes to take, things to do, and connections to make that aren’t available at a community college.
Community college is, counterintuitively, associated with poorer prospects for high-achieving low-income college students.
These students often benefit from being immersed in an academic environment, and away from family and peers that may be a negative influence on their studies. It’s hard to finish community college when you are pressured by your family to provide income and childcare for your siblings, and when your friends are seemingly getting ahead working and partying without the pressures of studying. It’s also disappointing when they expect a rigorous academic environment where they will finally be challenged, and instead they get grade 13.
In general, high-achieving low-income students benefit from going to the most rigorous university they can get admitted to.
Yes, I think exactly those things. Further, I think there are a lot of courses offered at many campuses that are mostly useless, and a lot of academic work is utter nonsense. It’s not just women’s studies. That was just the first obvious example that popped into my head while I was writing my first post.
Also, almost every day I can read about someone in the academic world doing something stupid that seems designed to alienate the public. Just a few days ago, a student group at UC Irvine passed a resolution demanding that the American flag be removed from a particular building, citing reasons such as “The American flag has been flown in instances of colonialism and imperialism” and “freedom of speech, in a space that aims to be as inclusive as possible, can be interpreted as hate speech”. That group of students was overruled by a higher group of the student council, who voted that the flag could stay. But it’s not over yet. A thousands students and dozens of professors have launched a petition demanding that the original ban on the flag be enforced.
So the word from these folks at UC Irvine amounts to a huge middle finger directed at the American people. Yet at the same time, they want those same American taxpayers to send them more and more money. The more stupid things that campus groups do, the more it will alienate the voters, and the less inclined those voters will feel towards sending more money to the universities. This is obvious. Only an academic at a prestigious university could possibly fail to see it.
“Academic Feminism Useless, says Guy Who Thinks Rape is Trivial and Women Treated Mostly Equally Outside Saudi Arabia and Nigeria.”
I read about plenty of stupid statements and, in some cases, immoral and criminal acts, committed by members of the Catholic Church. I’m sure you’ll agree that the Church as a whole should be shut down as a result of the acts of those few people.
I want to point out that these repayment plans only work for federal loans, and not even all of them.
Right now I’m on repayment plans for most of my student loans except one, my school-associated Perkins loan. This is because they’re stuck in the dark ages and getting a referral requires stuff that is difficult for me to achieve being out of the country. Luckily, my payment is quite reasonable and maneageable, considering what I have to pay on the other two loans (which are under repayment programs).
In a recession, STEM, manufacturing and IT need to be emphasized.
I worked my way thru college as a security guard, working 16-40 hours a week, at up to double minimum wage (for the more “dangerous” armed positions) and left college with $2500 in loans. Bought a used pickup truck. But that was then.
Well, and that’s the thing- we make jokes out of “Community College” but it’s a great place to:
Find out if college is right for you, and if so what’s your major.
Get those pre-reqs out of the way cheaply and also staying at home.
If higher ed is not your thing, maybe some respected (para)professions such as nursing, law enforcement, para-legal etc is . You can make a good living and be highly respected (including self-respect) as a Nurse. Lots of jobs there too.
What I think we should get rid of is the first two years of “college” and replace it entirely with Community College. No more paying thru the nose to go to a prestigious University for two years then finding that you hate it.
Yeah. I mean, come on, Norway is an exception. Germany however, does manage to have a limited form of free college, so it’s a better example.
I agree, and well said. Personally I’ve always identified with the second type, but regardless, it’s a huge mistake to think of universities as only training grounds for jobs. Some courses, majors, and to an extent some entire faculties are geared that way, but universities fundamentally remain what they have always been since the founding of the universitas magistrorum et scholarium: repositories of knowledge and the means of advancing it, and as such one of the most important foundations of progress across the whole spectrum of science and society. So it’s amusing to watch some of the usual suspects from the right trashing academia as they always do. Apparently conservative “traditionalism” means regressing to the medieval dark ages.
A few thoughts on the subject of administrative costs and salaries, as there are many complex issues here. I certainly don’t claim to know all of them, but an important element here is how jobs are classified, as the distinctions between academic staff in the sense of faculty, administrative staff, and other kinds of support staff are not always clear and may vary between institutions. ISTM that there is a real lack of consistent reporting. “Administrative staff” often means a lot more than just traditional administrators and might include a wide range of technical and academic support positions.
It’s easy to dismiss non-teaching positions as wasteful overhead but that’s just as frivolous as dismissing the functions of government as wasteful, and for exactly the same reason: until you start digging into the details, it’s hard to appreciate the vast range of essential functions that are being provided. Another issue is that this so-called “administrative overhead” is amazingly variable between institutions – the ratio of non-academic to academic salary budgets can vary from more than 2 to less than 0.5. A third factor is that increasing complexities of technologies like IT and others, regulatory compliance, and other factors have made university administration more complex than ever.
As far as the OP is concerned, student loans are essential until and unless there is extensive public funding of universities as there is in most of Europe. It’s one or the other, since few students are so wealthy that they can pay their tuition out of pocket. I don’t understand why it’s even a question.
Yeah, right, so that students can graduate five years later in a completely different economy. And because universities are really just vocational schools. :rolleyes: