You know, that whole idea that a college degree will let you make a million dollars more in your lifetime is a major fallacy.
To be honest, its a statistic that throws anyone who just went to high school into the same hole and that hole can go pretty deep. Yes, some people with just high school have the brains and ambition to go far but most of them, well thats the best they can or ever want to accomplish.
Whereas if you went so far as to get a BA in darn near anything, even underwater basket weaving, shows you do have some brains, drive, and ambition. So clearly a college educated person is usually a bit above average society anyways.
Lately from what I’m getting from seeing my sons history homework, I can say they are really dropping down the work level needed in high school. In fact many class periods are spent just watching movies. For example, they spent 3 classes watching the movie “War Horse” to learn about WW1. I know other history classes where they watched the entire movie “Patton” or the complete “Roots” series.
But HS history could be a LOT harder and closer to college if they wanted it to be.
I was an English major, too. I did NOT spend most of my time reading nonsensical essays by literary critics. I read a dozens and dozens of great works. I don’t know where you went to school, but if the critical essays you read were all fatuous and nonsensical, something’s amiss.
And let me say that I would also not have been as well off if I’d just read all those books on my own. All but one of my profs gave me insights I’d never have had on my own. The one exception was a Chaucer prof who refused to lecture or answer questions. (We were supposed to lead each other, he said.) How he kept his job, I don’t know, but it renewed my appreciation for every other English prof I had.
The idea that only vocational majors are worthwhile is false. My dad majored in English at Harvard; it was a solid background for his JD degree and successful career on the bench. I had fulfilling careers in social service and teaching with my English major. Furthermore, my life has been richer and better because of it. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
I remember from previous threads that you don’t have much regard for public schools, period. May I suggest you review the course curriculum and meet with your son’s teacher? I’d be very surprised if the unit on WWI was comprised solely of watching War Horse with no reading, no discussion, no projects on the war in itself. I can’t think of a state’s social studies benchmarks that would be met that way. And if your son’s teacher isn’t following the curriculum and common assessments, I’m sure the school principle would like to know about it.
If you think that family business can’t be breakneck, or that “since it’s a family business they have to let you in”, you apparently don’t know anybody who has a family business.
“Just”? 1) My furniture got me into a line of work where I make more than a US Senator, despite living in a country whose average salaries are much lower than the US’s. 2) Why are you equating going to college with going into debt? And 3) would training that limits one’s options by overfocusing be a better investment? Because the initial question was this, not whether the financing of the US school system is fucked up.
If its a state university, yes. Because the state appoints regents and regents oversee the university - including the financial aspects. If the state appoints regents with the goal of making sure tuition stays low (while professors get competitive salaries) then the administration can’t just raise salaries.
My daughter got a 5 on the AP US History course. You don’t get that watching movies. It was a college level History course, with papers and tests. And she can get college credit for it.
Now my son took non-AP History - and that wasn’t college level, but they didn’t watch movies. You might have wanted to raise your kids somewhere where education is valued.
One of the things high schools have done much more of than what was available to me is coursework that has differing levels of difficulty. But providing that takes funding. There has to be coursework for the kid who is somewhat below average in intelligence, who works a job and doesn’t have a lot of time for homework, and who just wants a diploma - and there ARE jobs for those kids when they get out. And there has to be coursework that prepares a kid for college. And there is even coursework that provides a college level experience (and credit) in high schools.
Oh they have tests and things over historical facts. I just wanted to state that they did watch “War Horse” which to me, seems like a alot of classroom time that could have been better spent on things you mention like readings and projects. Again, not all high schools are the same and I’ve seen worse where it seems like they were constantly watching movies.
Ok, small rant of mine. My experience is that many high school history teachers are hired, not for their background in history or other subjects, not because they give a hard, challenging course, but because they can coach some sport like basketball.
Yep, my daughter has enough college credits to enter college as a Junior. A friends daughter will get her AA degree before her high school diploma. It isn’t what I want for her - she’s entering as a Freshman at a school that will only take a maximum of a semester’s worth - a small private liberal arts college that we are paying for out of our college funds - no loans - because I value the experience and can afford it - it meant crappier cars, fewer vacations, a kitchen that I would have loved to redo a decade ago, and carpet that needs to be replaced - as well as having two working parents instead of having one of us stay home.
You can get a decent high school education if you want it in most communities. You can even get a start on college in high school in most communities. But you have to want it and be ready for it - something not every high school student is.
My son is a trade school kid. He got through high school by the skin of his teeth. He isn’t interested in History or English Literature. But his spot welds are perfect and at sixteen he was hustling on the side moving sheetrock for a contractor. He got an ok high school education, sufficient for his needs and wants at this point in his life. Our issue with him and school was trying to get the school to understand that he didn’t need Calculus (he was on the path to get it as a Senior) - because he’s a smart kid who could have gone to a four year college if he wanted to.
Also that students should be doing a better job of deciding whether to borrow money based on the potential ROI of their degree.
Because student loans are not dischargeable via bankruptcy. Therefore even if the student can’t find a job when he/she graduates, they are still on the hook for the money and the bank gets repaid.
Some have suggested that this should not be the case, that student loans ought to be dischargeable so the student is not necessarily on the hook. If that comes about, then the banks will require a much higher level of assurance that the loans will be repaid. Either some kind of assets, a co-sign from somebody with assets, or no loan.
It can be. It is IMO somewhat less likely to be than a degree in engineering or chemistry or IT or a number of others. The question is, who pays when it isn’t, and what effect will any proposed changes have on the willingness of banks to loan money and of students to borrow it?
I thought that most of the cogent arguments in this thread had pretty much demolished the ridiculous idea that the worth of a degree can only be evaluated in monetary terms. Yet you not only revive this tattered zombie with mercenary terms like “ROI”, but you somehow deem it appropriate to bring banks into the argument, as if banks were somehow key players in the educational process.
Banks don’t give a crap about anything except money and profits, and as you point out yourself, they have no interest whatsoever in whether our youth get educated and whether our future generations create a better society. I don’t fault banks for that – it isn’t their job, but it means that they are therefore of no relevance whatsoever to policy discussions. They’re just a passive source of money that can be tapped by relevant players with a legitimate stake in public policy, most notably governments, through such measures as loan guarantees.
Neither the value of education nor the future of our society are numbers that show up on accounting balance sheets. Those who think they do seem to inhabit some twilight zone where extremist conservatives and Marxist central planners share the same Orwellian values, namely that the worth of a society can be measured solely by commercial figures, like the number of tractors it produces each day.
Why? You get a degree in English, you go to law school or you go be a teacher. If you go be a teacher and you want to increase your income, you become a principal or counselor. There are some other things you can do–real estate, technical writing, public relations, human resources–that are a little less defined. This is basically the *exact same set of options *the kid with a Chemistry degree has, except they can go to med school instead of law school.
Less than 3% of college graduates major in English. There’s not a glut of unemployable English majors out there. In my personal experience, there were very few that did not have a concrete idea of what they wanted to do, and how they were going to get there. The people I know who went to college and then utterly failed to ever use their degree and remain unemployed all majored in things they vaguely thought of as “practical” (business, communications, international affairs) and then never did anything in those fields except go to classes and learn as little as possible.
Banks are a critical part of education - because very few people get a college education without loans. Because of the way the bankruptcy laws were rewritten, student loans aren’t discharged in bankruptcy - making them fairly low risk for a bank to write - even when they are funding an education at a place with a really low graduation rate and a very high default rate (for profit schools tend to top these lists - not four year liberal arts colleges - although I’ve been picking on NYU and it does have one of the highest default rates in the country.) Taking out $20k for college (undergraduate loans of this type don’t tend to be the six figure loans you hear about) to not graduate and have them hanging over your head is not helping anyone.
In the U.S., the way we currently do higher education, you need to be able to afford it - and that is a question of both time and money. On the money side, banks are critical. There are other ways to afford college - scholarships. getting a bunch of college credits in high school, going part time and working (especially if you can find an employer who does tuition reimbursement), having a parent who works at the college sometimes gets you free tuition, and then there is the good old fashioned your parents or grandparents pay for it. But the reality is that most people will need some loans.
Arguably, colleges that focus on getting students into in demand careers with decent salaries would help with income disparity - where ending up in debt for a liberal arts degree in Anthropology makes it more difficult. Personally, I think that the liberal arts degree in Anthro is fine - if the debt load is reasonable (i.e. you didn’t pay $50k a year all in loans - but instead leave with $20k total in debt - that’s a car worth of debt, and you’ll pay that off over the course of a few years).
Another issue in play is that there are careers in demand where the salaries aren’t really sufficient to justify a loan. Teachers. Social Workers. Ag school. - Graphic design was mentioned. Game design. You could have a university that focuses on those specific career goals, but you might as well major in Underwater Basketweaving in many states instead of Education.
Of course a degree can be measured in monetary terms - you sacrifice years of income and thousands of tuition dollars to get it. And for many people, its absolutely worth it. Statistically, its likely to pay off in terms of lifetime income. But if you are going into debt for it, and will be burdened by student loans for 20 years, having to put the other parts of life on hold because you can’t afford a mortgage or a car loan - much less kids - with your debt - that’s a problem. If you use your liberal arts degree to make a good income when you are 45 and hitting menopause - and would have liked children, but until then you had student loans and only a marginally better income than no degree - I’m not sure I’d trade a mortgage and kids for a deeper understanding of Freud - much as I value my deeper understanding of Freud.
You thought wrong, not least because no one claims that the worth of a degree is only evaluated by money. See the previous cite of someone with $145K in debt and wonderful experience in water polo. If you don’t think that can be evaluated at least partially in monetary terms, you might want to rethink your commitment to water polo.
:shrugs: This is the kind of rhetoric I often hear from those who want somebody else to pay their bills.
Our disagreement here I think stems from talking about different things – you’re talking about the unfortunate situation that presently exists, and I’m talking about how things could be, should be, and indeed how they actually are in other countries, as proof of their feasibility. I’m not talking about the cases where tuition is free, which is arguably the ideal, but about the more common situation where there is an abundance of government assistance in the form of grants and/or government-backed loans. The point being, banks should be a passive source of funds and should have absolutely no role in educational policy. Government subsidies to public universities also contribute to relatively low tuition costs, but that’s a different discussion.
Additionally, many top institutions (significantly, the ones usually touted as being the most costly) subsidize the majority of their students. Harvard, for instance, makes the following statement:
… approximately 70 percent of our students receive some form of aid, and about 60 percent receive need–based scholarships and pay an average of $12,000 per year. Twenty percent of parents pay nothing. No loans required.
At MIT, the number is slightly lower (though subsidies are measured differently): 56% of MIT undergrads receive MIT scholarships that average $38,871 per student.
I can tell you that in my own undergraduate university education, the role of banks was precisely zero, and my parents were not wealthy. I initially had government grants but when I went outside my deemed province of residence, those became government loans. They may have been government-backed bank loans, but if so it was transparent to me as I have no recollection of ever dealing directly with any bank on student loans.
When I was a student, I did want somebody else to pay my tuition bills, and to a large extent, they (the public) did, through a combination of tuition grants/scholarships and subsidies to universities. Now that I haven’t been a student in more decades than I can remember, and am an old and gray taxpayer, I still feel exactly the same way, because I value education and its role in the future of our society. Or perhaps you can tell us, further to my earlier comments, exactly how many tractors per day a student should be able to produce over his working lifetime at the tractor factory to justify every $1000 paid in tuition.
I don’t know. Why don’t you ask water polo woman who makes $36k a year and owes close to $200k how she feels about her precious society benefiting degree? I bet she’s less enthusiastic than you are.
No one has said, that the degree should only be measured in dollars. But when someone (the student, the taxpayers) is spending upwards of $200k on a degree, the money needs to be a consideration. It’s not like there are only two options available - spend $200k or never go to college and dig a ditch for a living. One could go to a community college, and transfer, or just go to a cheaper school.
There are lots of bright and shinny objects that are nice to have in our society - but we can’t afford them all.
How the world should be is a nice discussion, but we also have to talk about how the world IS.
Very few students will get into a school that has the sort of generous financial aid that Harvard or MIT can offer due to their endowments. That’s a non starter for 99% of college bound students.
You can get government backed student loans, if you qualify for them. You max out at about $23k total 4 years for subsidized loans as an undergrad, and might see another $24k or so in unsubsidized government loans. Past that point, its your savings, or school grants and scholarships, or - for a lot of students - the bank. That’s a total of $14k a year in loans the federal government can give you - which isn’t even sufficient for instate tuition in some states.
And I don’t think we should save banks from themselves. If they give a loan to see a student through a cosmetology school that costs $25k a year for a 2 year program, that’s sort of their problem.
There is certainly truth to that. And, I’m not convinced that the argument in favor of education is undermined by that fact.
From the point of view of investment, that $1M average difference justifies a real investment at some level as the taxes on that $1M is substantial. We all win when kids graduate - even if you totally discount all other benefits of a more educated populace.
From the point of view of American competitiveness, we need more people prepared for a changing job market that is moving toward requiring more education. We can’t afford more workers (like in coal or manufacturing) who are left behind.
From a social safety net stand point, those with less education are more likely to need to rely on our tax dollars. More education is a protection against that.
From a social justice standpoint, we perpetuate the giant generational wealth gap in our society by making education more available to those kids from families that have income to spend on education. We need these people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. But, today education IS the boot straps.