No because the person who got the loans and the person who saved instead were presented with the same tradeoff, money vs degree. Both chose the degree. The only people who should feel aggrieved about free college are those who would have gone if it had been free, and the people who are actually paying for it.
The college student has received a great benefit already, their degree. They valued it more than the tens of thousands they took out in loans. For most of them it was a good deal, why should they get an additional benefit?
Most people don’t go to college and manage to survive. Those that go and graduate receive a diploma which helps them get a better job. For people who don’t get a diploma or get one that is not worth what they paid for it, they made a bad decision.
Spending 50 grand on hookers and blow is not an investment, usually. A college degree is. If college is a good investment, there is no need to reward people who have made it, if it is not a good investment then we should be discouraging people from going.
How does going to college make people productive and economically engaged? The purpose of college is to show potential employers who the smartest and most conscientious people are. Some people learn things to help them be productive, but most don’t.
For most people college is a giant sorting mechanism. If you lower the barrier to entry and let more people in to college you have just made the sorting mechanism less efficient. Thus people need more degrees to send the same signal. At some point graduate school will become what college is now. Then you are taking people out of the workforce for 6-8 years instead of the current 4. That is the opposite of having a productive workforce, not to mention all the money wasted on additional people in college.
One issue with that is, part of what makes a degree maarketable is supply and demand. If we incentivize certain degrees, would we increase the supply to where there’s no longer a demand for them?
On the original question, it’s my understanding that many of the people complaining about the unfairness of current folks getting their debt forgiven are older folks who long since paid off their student debt.
Specifically, older folks who paid a fifth as much for tuition. Yet, oddly, you don’t find them complaining that they underpaid, and remarkably few of them are demanding that they be charged the additional amount to make up the difference now, after the fact.
Prices change. It’s “unfair” when that happens. Inflation is definitely “unfair”. Lots of things are “unfair”. But when people are conspicuously only complaining when this unfairness benefits others, that’s “full of shit”.
Regarding the alternate question of whether reducing the absurd price of college would alter incentivization in a bad way, I can only observer that attempts to deliberately incentivize or de-incentivize one thing or another often have unanticipated and often negative externalities.
In large part, the job market already does that. There’s a good reason that STEM graduates come out and make good (great?) salaries with bachelors degrees, and other academia-only or teaching-only masters degree holders do not.
The catch is that what if someone decides in high school that they want to be a computer engineer, and gets to college and finds out that they REALLY like poultry science? (for the sake of argument, let’s say that computer engineering is in high demand, and poultry science is of moderate demand)
Do we yank that guy’s loans? Do we jack up his interest rate? What about the low-income student who has the potential to be the next Louis Leakey or Abraham Maslow? Do we deny them loans because they’re not in a “marketable degree” field?
I think maybe there ought to be some limits- for example, I disagree with the idea that student loans should be funding multi-hundred-thousand dollar liberal arts degrees at expensive private institutions. I mean, there’s no reason someone should be taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars for English degrees at say… Baylor, if they can go down the road to A&M or UT for considerably less. It’s risk mitigation I’d say, unless someone can prove that getting their English degree at Baylor sets them up considerably better for a career in English than A&M or UT does.
If you took that from the Mercedes example, you didn’t understand it.
My point was that you can still get that free Kia. But you want your Mercedes paid off instead.
We currently do have tax credits toward educational expenses. I’d have no problem with this, but it probably would end up costing the taxpayer more than paying off loans.
It seems a bit roundabout, and I have some concerns for how it would effect those who do not make enough money to pay federal taxes, but this seems a reasonable way to work towards the goal of having productive and economically engaged citizens.
Again with the art degree slams. You know who wrote the Avenger’s movies? It wasn’t a person with a STEM degree. The idea that only STEM is worthwhile and productive, and that anything else is a waste that will leave you working a MW job is a rather harmful stereotype, IMHO. It certainly seems to blind those who hold it to the reality that most degrees have a job waiting for them.
Well, according to a quick look, anthropology is a growing field, with about 400,000people in it.
We can incentivize, sure. Companies that really need STEM students can put out marketing material that says that they are hiring, and at what rate. Companies that need liberal arts majors can do the same. That’s incentives.
But using the power of the government and its funding isn’t incentivizing, it is mandating. If you (you are the govt in this instance) say that you will pay for a STEM degree but not a gender studies degree, then do the companies that need gender studies majors not have a legitimate grievance?
I doubt that, but we can de-incentivize certain degrees to the point where there is a shortage of them.
But there are not so many people that are able to save for college these days. Basically, what you are implementing is a system where only those who can afford to go to college can do so. Meaning that only the wealthy get to send their kids to higher education.
If your parents were poor, and you really want to go to college so that your kids will have a better life, and they say, “Nope, sorry, got to pay up front.” then how do you break out of that cycle.
Lets say your parents are not poor, but that they demand that you conform to their ideals as to who you are for them to pay for your college. Now, I’ll agree that that is their right, they don’t have to pay for their kids college if he won’t stop being gay. But I do not think that it is in society’s best interests to also bar him from bettering himself academically.
And whatever proposal you have in mind should be something that someone of average capabilities and means can do. If you only have a way out for those who are exceptional in some way, then you are not breaking the cycle of poverty, only exploiting it.
Because education should be a public good. I’m not sure why you ask this over and over. If you don’t think that we should have public education, then that’s fine, that’s your stance. But if we should have public education, why are we cutting it off early?
The pay rate for those that do not go to college low, and going down. It was true 20 years ago that you could eke out a living without a diploma, and 20 years before that you could even thrive with just a GED. But that is not today’s world anymore.
How about someone who does graduate from a STEM program, but does so in the bottom quarter of their class, so they don’t have all that great a job prospects. Did they make a bad decision? If so, how do we make sure that no one is ever in the bottom quarter of a class?
I’m not sure how to take this. Are you actually saying that college has no value to the student? That most don’t learn anything at all during their stay.
Huh, you know, it was decades ago, but you may have explained what my problem was with college. I was there to learn, others were there to try to show off.
Going to college gives people the ability to get a better job. Whether you think that is because they get pieces of paper that they can barely read, or because they actually learn things that will make them more useful to the employer is irrelevant. Not being saddled with debt makes them economically engaged, where they will be buying houses, cars, and other things that are hindered when half your pay goes to the bank.
Could it actually be that in our increasingly complex world, that that increased education is actually necessary to perform the tasks that employers will be asking of you?
Go back 100 or so years, and a 5th grade education was pushing Ivory Tower status. We have public education so that we have productive workers. As the needs of businesses increased, the minimum educational requirements increased as well. This is simply the same progression. The only difference in it that I can see is that this part of a student’s education takes place after they have turned 18.
If you lower the barrier to entry, then more people are able to become productive and economically engaged citizens. You seem to think that there is a static number of jobs, and that we need to find a way to sort them to save HR some trouble.
This is also a problem that is getting worse. If we were looking at it, and tuition rates were going down, staying steady, or even matching inflation, then we could consider it a known problem baked into the cost of society. However, tuition is not staying steady, nor merely keeping up with inflation. It vastly outpaces inflation. So, even if you don’t think that this is a problem now, then next year or next decade or next generation, it will be a problem that even you cannot ignore, and at that point it will be even harder to fix, with even more stakeholders to feel aggrieved.
Do you think that anything at all should be done about this problem? If so, what is that?
I’m not a comic book movie fan, so I could care less. And that’s only one guy with an arts degree. And there was only one Einstein. Look, we’ve got to Pareto where we spend our money, and someone with an arts degree isn’t going to know what I mean by that.
Economics is a liberal art and a social science. As a person with an English degree who teaches economics, I know what it is.
Past that, I know people with arts degrees that are very successful and people with STEM degrees that are working low wage jobs, because their abysmal people skills make them unemployable. Correlation isn’t causation. Liberal arts degrees can be rigorous . I took mine very seriously, and I learned a ton. I will conceded that they are often easier to bullshit through with a C, and so attract slackers. But have two scales where one is funded and the other isn’t and all those slackers will find their way to the easiest funded option, and that will be the joke degree.
Furthermore, there are tons of jobs out there for creative types. Shit is so much more designed and produced than it was 20 years ago. Grocery stores have aesthetics now. Someone is getting paid to do all that.
Finally, we kinda need a lot of teachers. It’s already a job where the ROI doesn’t justify the college degree. You want to make that harder?
Cite? I think most folks complaining that debt forgiveness is unfair are very much making “apples vs apples” comparisons. When retroactive rebates are proposed, it’s with a schedule that diminishes very rapidly with age.
Let’s say we manage to get universal healthcare. Overnight, people go from paying hundreds each month in premiums and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars for services not covered by their insurer to paying a few extra hundred in payroll taxes each year and never having to worry about medical costs. What about the good responsible people who managed to pay off their medical debt the day before UHC becomes effective? Are those people entitled to reimbursement? If we write those people a check, what’s to stop people from asking for a refund for their premium payments? At some point, we just need to accept that the unfairness of a policy will be mitigated by the improvements that flow from that policy and keep it moving.
Touche, but we have to either have central management (not good) or no management (let nature take its course). So, do we incentivize useful degrees for all/some/none, or keep hands off. Or maybe we follow the German pattern, and identify non-college potential early on an steer them away from University. That seems like a human rights violation to me.
So is my English degree useless? I have a good career, make good money, provide a needed service. Who the fuck is going to teach school or design grocery stores in your model?
My model is hands-off, so in my model, the people who earn English degrees without sucking at the government’s teat is going to do that. The people who earn STEM degrees without sucking at the government’s teat are going to build things.
It’s other models that I have objection to. But I guess with your English degree, you weren’t able to parse that? What a wasted degree, in your case.
The issue shouldn’t be with the degrees themselves. There’s nothing so inherently superior about a STEM degree, save marketability in today’s job market versus liberal arts.
In some ways, liberal arts better prepares people for success- you get a more well-rounded education in many ways, even if it’s much more generalist and non-technical. Similarly, most STEM degrees are hyper-specific, and prepare students for work in a single field, or at best, a set of closely related fields.
The real issue is that the student loan system was set up in an era of widespread state-level subsidies and/or tuition caps for in-state tuition, and that for the vast majority of students, there was a real likelihood that they could go to their local state school, get loans, and study whatever they wanted without incurring crushing debt.
For the most part, the subsidies are now gone or very diminished, so that students are bearing a larger share of the cost of their education, and often that’s more than they can handle once they get out, if they’re not very prudent about what they study and what job they get once they’re finished.
I think it’s important to distinguish between the incorrect claim made by some that a humanities degree is worthless (without value) and the correct claim that it is worth less (of less value). You are absolutely correct that humanities degrees are valuable. But it is also dramatically demonstrably correct that STEM degrees are on average more valuable in the market.
The harder the science, the less amenable to bullshit it is. You can’t bullshit an equation. You can’t bullshit a compiler. You are either right, or wrong. Code either works to spec or it does not.
I find it really hard to believe that this will be the case.
It is demonstrably not true in graduate studies. Graduate programs in STEM fields are generally funded, while those in other fields are generally not. But the slackers have somehow resisted the easy-street to PhDs in hydrodynamics, astrophysics, or cryptography.
There are other ways to pay for college, loans, plans that require a percentage of income. There are other ways to break out of poverty than college, such as skilled trades, apprenticeships, small businesses. Furthermore you are just assuming that the because those with college degrees are unlikely to be poor that the degree is the reason and not other reasons.
They are not barred from academics, they just have to pay for it themselves.
Someone of average capabilities should not be going to college. If a diploma means you are normal then it has less meaning. The fewer people have a credential the less it means.
If some level of education is a public good then it does not follow that every level of education is a public good. What is clear is that it is a private good, in that it benefits the person getting it, much more than everyone else. Simple fairness is that those who receive the benefit should pay for the cost.
The reason that is not today’s world is that as more people achieve each credential those credentials mean less. In a world where only the top 20% of intelligent people get a high school degree having one means alot. In a world where 50% of people have a college degree having one means little. In a world where 50% of the people have a Phd from Harvard, it becomes the entry level requirement.
If being in the bottom of a class means no job prospects then too many people are in the class.
People learn alot in college, I know I did. If you want to know about Native American religion, the history of psychotherapy, themes in the poetry of Milton, or the book Viper’s Tangles, then getting the same degree as I did would be great. None of that made me a better worker.
From a strictly economic point of view it does not matter if they are sending the money to the bank for a mortgage or to repay a student loan.
Go back 100 or so years, and a 5th grade education was pushing Ivory Tower status. We have public education so that we have productive workers. As the needs of businesses increased, the minimum educational requirements increased as well. This is simply the same progression. The only difference in it that I can see is that this part of a student’s education takes place after they have turned 18.
If you lower the barrier to entry, then more people are able to become productive and economically engaged citizens. You seem to think that there is a static number of jobs, and that we need to find a way to sort them to save HR some trouble.
This is also a problem that is getting worse. If we were looking at it, and tuition rates were going down, staying steady, or even matching inflation, then we could consider it a known problem baked into the cost of society. However, tuition is not staying steady, nor merely keeping up with inflation. It vastly outpaces inflation. So, even if you don’t think that this is a problem now, then next year or next decade or next generation, it will be a problem that even you cannot ignore, and at that point it will be even harder to fix, with even more stakeholders to feel aggrieved.
Do you think that anything at all should be done about this problem? If so, what is that?
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If you look at the curriculum of high schools 100 years ago, they are more advanced than most colleges today. It is a credential treadmill, the more people get a credential the less it means so there needs to be a higher credential, and eventually what was only for the elite becomes the minimum requirement. A college degree has gone from something only intellectuals have to the minimum requirement for a good job. It becomes more valuable so greedy college administrators raise the price. The solution is not to switch who pays. The only solution to a treadmill where you have to run faster to stay in the same place is to get off the treadmill.
These two sections appear to be arguing opposing positions.
The first one is arguing that higher education actually makes people more productive by teaching them skills for the modern world. We should subsidize it and all be better off. The second one is arguing that higher education is primarily credentialism, and that subsidizing it is a waste that will not make society better off.
Misplaced the quote tag. The first part of that should have been a part of the quote I was responding to in the second part.
[Obama]Let me be clear[/Obama], subsidizing higher education is a waste that will make society worse off.
I spent three decades working at public universities, and I never saw a “greedy administrator.” What I did see was a consistent downward trajectory in the level of state funding. We were constantly dealing with budget cuts, recissions, hiring freezes, lost positions, deferred maintenance, etc. Over the course of my career, “state-supported” universities essentially became “state-sponsored.” The money to run a university has to come from somewhere. If the state won’t hold up its end of the deal for whatever reason, then the alternatives are raising tuition, hitting up donors, and hollowing out the school by cutting programs and personnel and allowing buildings to deteriorate.
I can’t speak to what goes on at private universities, but when I went to conferences and talked about our budget woes with colleagues, the people from private schools would stare at me uncomprehendingly or say dumb things like “Why don’t you just ask for more money?”
I don’t have a solution for any of this, but I agree that the paradigm of “everyone must go to college” has to change. I hate to say that, because I strongly believe that it is a public good to have an educated, enlightened citizenry.
Over the past 30 years state and local funding of higher education has gone from 63.1 billion dollars a year to 86 billion dollars a year adjusted for inflation.
If you didn’t see any greedy administrators you may not have been looking hard. The number of college administrators doubled from 1987 to 2015 and their salaries have gone up as well.