"Do I even need to mention which segments of our population rely on student loans the most, and thus are getting screwed the most by the student loan crisis? Hint: It's not the happy white suburban family of 4."
Actually, according to the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044424690457757...), the upper-middle class has seen the sharpest jump in student debt since 2007. Households with less income have an easier time finding student aid and those in the upper class can more readily afford the rising costs. This puts the upper-middle class in a kind of purgatory for financial aid.
+1 I made it through college with hardly any debt because my family's income wasn't high enough to warrant loans (instead of straight up aid) until I was a senior. However, I have a friend whose family makes more money than mine, but also has a sibling in school so they have a lot more debt.
If a private college wants to give financial aid to a student who is poor, that is its business and it gets to define what 'poor' means for its purposes.
Kids from households making $200,000/yr may not be Maybach rich, but they don't need Pell Grants. and I certainly wouldn't describe their state as "purgatory" just because they aren't getting handouts.
The basis for giving this kind of handout (which I understand along with the general opposition to any handouts) is to improve class mobility and give poor kids a chance (after all, they did not choose to be born to the 'wrong' family). What reason is there for people with plenty of money to get that sort of handout? This I don't understand.
There are serious problems with the for-profit university model (like the University Of Phoenix) as outlined in this article.
I think it's worth pointing out that these businesses are aware that they may have a problem, and have stepped up their political giving massively to protect their interests. Mostly, to Republican candidates, and especially to Mitt Romney. [1]
Allowing lenders (or providing greater incentive for them) to modulate rates on loans based on (a) the institution attended, (b) the major chosen, and (c) individual performance metrics, e.g. GPA, would be a solid step towards resolving education debt insolvency.
This could be achieved by switching government subsidies from loan guarantees to payment-share plans by which the government pays a portion of each payment but ceases to do so in case of default. These loans should be absolvable in bankruptcy - an immature decision made in one's adolescence shouldn't be a lifelong burden. Thus, the credit risk is retained by the lender while financial impact lessened on the student.
Unpopular as measures radically increasing costs on liberal arts majors may be, the present situation is a clear example of artificially locked markets producing inefficient outcomes.
I was just about to suggest the same thing. The degree seems like a very important piece of information to a creditor making a decision. If I know that 60% of students of a particular degree will default within 4 years, why would I continue to loan that money out? If it's impossible for them to get out of it, that'd be good enough a reason.
It seems that most of my engineering friends have a very existentialist perspective on it: the person is entirely responsible for the actions they take. If they got themselves into debt, then they should figure out how to get themselves out of debt.
That's valid. The student wasn't forced to go study art history, but they were lied to by a lot of people, including their parents and society, which are two difficult groups to ignore. I think it's good that we're airing out some of college's dirty laundry--it needs to be known that if you go study art history, there may be a greater than 50% chance that you will be jobless or working as a waiter or waitress. I had this debate with someone last weekend where I made the same argument, and she got very defensive. It's hard to get specific and criticize certain degrees without being offensive to somebody because people feel they need to defend their choices. I later found out she studied art history, she was a waitress, and she had just quit her job. To her credit, she probably didn't realize her job options were grim when she chose to do that. If this issue is spoken about publicly, it should at the very least make the decision easier for people. Every graduating senior in high school should hear both sides of the story and fully understand they can't arbitrarily pick any degree and expect the same results.
I see that ending really badly. We have seen that schools have no price pressure, so the standard price for school will end up being "50% or more of your future earnings."
You must have price pressure on schools. Even more money at even more onerous terms to the students will just exacerbate the problem.
The current bankruptcy rules wrt student loans came out of some experience with different rules. (For example, speciality MDs had some cute hacks to dump their undergrad loans, which were very old by the time they had money.)
How does your knowledge of those rules and that experience inform your proposed policy?
It's not a financial problem (well it is), it's a cultural problem. American culture just doesn't value education and learning in general.
Isaac Asimov articulated this very well:
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
I don't buy it. We have a culture that rewards everyone going to college, even if they'd be better off not going to college. And your explanation for this is that we don't value education? I'd argue the exact opposite. We value education too much.
People with a college education are definitely rewarded.
The cultural problem is not that education is not valued, it is more on the lines of that education is often (most of the times) equated to "formal education."
> Why administration had to grow 4x the pace of enrollment is beyond me.
While I won't claim that every single administrative dollar has been well spent, between 1993 and 2007, this would cover things like on campus tech support and IT staff and equipment (email, online registration, transcripts, etc), more broadly available and diverse student support (counseling, LGBT support organizations, ombudsmen, etc), and presumably tutoring services that help the growing fraction of the population in college thrive, rather than simply prep-school graduates. Again, I'm not going to claim that 4x increase relative to enrollment is the right amount, but compared to universities 20 years ago, they are providing more services.
One thing that really bothers me is how much universities are allowed to raise their tuition on existing students. I started college paying about $6k a year in tuition my freshmen year. My senior year cost me $11k. The difference in tuition raises overall probably increased my total loan amount by ~$10k by the time I graduated. This is huge and there is no way students can take this into account when applying for college. I don't know why there are no laws protecting students by requiring fixed tuition rates for students? Universities are notoriously bad for raising rates by thousands a year, which students must take into debt or leave.
*Edit - Ok, the tuition when I first went to college was $20k a year. I had a $14k scholarship, so it was a manageable $6k a year. Now the tuition, 5 years later, is over $27k. That is a 35% increase at about 7% a year. Pretty ridiculous if you ask me, especially for a state school which should be affordable.
The federal government's Medicaid mandate is destroying state education budgets-- Medicaid is literally crowding out state public university education spending.
This report's theory is that if the government stopped pumping so much money into the system, tuitions would cease to rise. It's tricky to answer. There's definitely good reasons for public money in education. But it seems to be hurting for the most part, not helping.
"This is huge and there is no way students can take this into account when applying for college."
"Universities are notoriously bad for raising rates by thousands a year"
These statements conflict. Tuition increases should be taken into account when planning a college education. Some schools have a policy of constant tuition over four years. Students who aren't okay with tuition increases should choose those schools.
I was excited to read this article, because I want to see more attempts to improve education. But then I saw that this is a for-profit education company.
I know there is a place for private educational endeavors in our society. But if you really want to fix education for everyone, you've got to focus on public education. Yes, it's a big ugly political seemingly unchangeable mess. But it's the only system that reaches everyone.
Every generation has a revolution waiting to happen. Improving public education might be the next significant social revolution in the US, but it won't be led by for-profit education companies.
How much failure would it take from the not-for-profit public education system before you'd consider the possibility that it is the very incentive system created by their non-profit status that has a huge hand in the failure?
We've created a system in which the reward for being an excellent teacher is... what, exactly? More paperwork? More friction from the ever-larger administration for not doing the same as everybody else? More frustration with not being allowed to be the good teacher because they have to teach ever harder to the test?
Until you fix the incentive system you're not going to get better teaching, and yeah, that's probably going to involve someone making some money, because it's beyond me how to fix the incentive system in the presence of an open-ended promise to keep the money hose opened and pointed at them no matter how much they fail. I suppose we could always try giving the same people even more money if they just promise to try really, really hard to do something else a couple of times until they give up.
And I am also pretty sure that true 21st century education isn't going to just a tweaked 20th century education. It's going to be something totally different, and the non-profit system simply won't get us there. Why would they? They don't get defunded for using decades-old totally outdated education systems. (In contrast to the decades-old non-outdated parts, which do exist, but are not 100% of the curriculum by any means.) We know that, because that's already the current situation. They've got no reason to move.
Given that neither system is working but both have evidence of having worked historically or in other countries, it would seem premature to assume sans evidence that education must be in the public sector.
Note that non-profit private institutions are not public schools and are highly effective research institutions.
When things aren't working it's a good idea to rethink the base assumptions we are making on faith alone.
I'm not sure that education is the big problem, but it's definitely up there. I think probably the financial climate leading to unemployment/underemployment is a bigger one, but significantly more difficult to fix.
Imagine a world where you can retrain yourself on the order of months, not years, and take on little or no debt to do it. How would that impact unemployment or underemployment?
When Obama stands in front of a bankrupt auto factory in Detroit and says, "We'll retool these factories and retrain these workers to produce wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars!", how do we do it?
People are desperate to answer that question and services like bloc.io, Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy, University Now, etc. are just our best first answers.
Education is more than a big problem: it's the root problem.
Caveat lector: I help run http://devbootcamp.com and the bloc.io guys work out of our offices 2-3 days per week.
Education itself is not the problem. Education is good. Problem is in the fact that to prove education, we need degrees which means we need to come up with outrageous amount of tuition fee to pay. Why do we have an ever rising tuition fee ? Probably because colleges know they can get away with it due to funding/subsidies. Colleges also know that a degree is a major rquirement to even try and get a decent job these days that pays more than minimum wage (outliers are there of course). So it does not matter if they charge 100K for a degree.
but I think that lack of relevant education is the largest contributing factor to unemployment. for example, american manufacturing is actually doing great right now, the problem is that it's become more efficient and can do without labor workers so while the businesses flourish there are less people to employ.
I agree education (and even more particularly, the method and quality of teaching) is a problem, but it's not the same problem as student debt.
As far as I can tell, much of the (debt) problem is caused by bad decision making by clueless parents and teenagers who think they need to send their kid to an Ivy League or think that their child somehow needs to spend 40k a year to go to an in-state school.
Let's be honest. The cost of education is going up, yes. But getting into debt is also bad and a poor choice. Yet nobody is responsible enough to consider it when making college choices, just to whine about it after the fact.
Students do not need to own a television or get cable or even have a video game console. Students probably don't even need a car, definitely don't need smartphones, and at least where I went to school, could probably do just fine without owning a computer, too. Likewise, instead of getting into debt they could go to cheaper community colleges or a whole slew of things.
Instead many college students, regardless of economic background, seem to have smartphones, Macs, and 42" TVs.
When I see someone complaining about college debt, I see somebody who went to an overly expensive school, without a plan, and did whatever they felt like without ever stopping to consider first if they could make a living when they were done. I see a child.
As someone who looked at the big picture when making college decisions and now has no college debt two years out of school, I have no sympathy.
I turned down the University of Chicago (among others) so that I wouldn't be in debt and to hear all the whining about it from entitled feeling kids who didn't make smart decisions makes me angry.
Now I'll agree that you may need to take on some debt to complete college. But if you're taking on more than the cost of a new car, you're doing it wrong.
Don't get me wrong, either. I concur that colleges waste lots of money.
I just graduated with my CS degree this May, and I only took on a total of 20k debt and lived on campus, and that 20k was just the stafford loans that 3 of my scholarships mandated I take in order to qualify. Note, now that I graduated, I already paid off over half that on just reserve funds from summer jobs that I have had dating back to High School.
While I was there, only about 1 in 5 students actually had a full financial aid package. Most of them didn't fill out FAFSAs, or didn't even use subsidized stafford loans - they had direct bank loans from their parents for upwards of $60k a year.
In my opinion, the people of the 22ed century will look back and think we were hilariously dumb. We have instantanous communication of ideas and knowledge via the internet, and our internet speeds are only getting better. If you want to learn something, it is easier than ever to find a community of fellow learners for a subject, find tons of free learning materials on that subject, and buckle down without the financial obligations and classroom environment (which doesn't work for everyone, and you inherently have less engagement there because one teacher can not effectively engage with even just 10 people all the time).
Like the article said, the degree is the problem. But I don't think thats the real problem - moreso the problem than that is the inability for individuals to have ideas and persue them in business ventures, because upstart small business will demand much less degree knowledge from employees (even if they are very skilled) since they draw from a local pool.
You get the degree because you will be applying to massive companies with huge HR that don't want to try to interpret you as a person but want to get a quick diagnostic of if you are capable or not from a one word answer to a 3 word question: Got a degree? If hiring was more based on individual accomplishment and demonstratable knowledge rather than paper, we would all be better off for it by getting off the degree treadmill.
I think the biggest problem with higher education today is the fact that colleges aren't the one issuing the student loans. If a student enters the workforce and can't find a job to pay back their loan, the colleges aren't the ones on the hook; the students are, and eventually, the taxpayers. I understand that government-backed loans are a way to try to make higher education available to more people but all this easy money has resulted in a huge cash grab by for profit institutions who frankly could care less whether or not their graduates actually pay the loans back. Couple that with the almost religious belief that a college education is the only way to achieve the American dream and you have a recipe for the exact disaster we're flying head first into today.
I don't think there's a private solution to this problem. If we look to functional educational systems (example: germany), we see that other countries are often much better at matching people up with careers that match their talents (or lack thereof). Instead, we have colleges that will take whoever can pay over whoever might be the brightest academically. The people who can pay aren't necessarily the sharpest crayon in the box, and the people who can't might be the next cure for [insert x here].
State universities at the very least should be tuition free so as to not completely fuck over students from dysfunctional families who won't help/families that can't afford it. Of course, it would also be wiser to raise entrance standards and somehow figure out how to stop the ridiculous GPA inflation that goes on in the liberal arts fields. STEM still pays relatively well, but that's because our standards haven't dropped; unfortunately, many requirements for maintaining a scholarship fail to take choice of major into account when setting a minimum GPA.
Anyone can get a liberal arts degree if they have enough (or can borrow enough) money, which is why it means shit nowadays as a measure of IQ.
I am at a state university, and there's a couple of issues that people here aren't really aware of.
University funding comes from three sources: tuition, state funds and research grants (federal or industrial). The last two have been steadily declining, so that leaves tuition as an ever more important source of funds. The university is building new dormitories to get new paying bodies. It doesn't matter just how damn incapable the students are, what counts is that they pay. You can't encourage anyone to drop their chosen degree, if you do you might have to apologize to the chair and the parents.
Again, funds are scarce, and the administration tries to hive off teaching of introductory courses to adjuncts. It takes anyone a year or two to learn the ropes, then people leave because working conditions here are poor, the classes are too large and the workload too heavy. No one is concerned about the revolving door for introductory courses. Besides, you have to have an excellent command of the subject matter to be able to teach a beginners' class, you just cannot put a bottom-of-the-barrel type in front of an introductory course and expect the students to do well.
Again, it's the undergraduates that pay, and they money goes primarily into teaching facilities. Meanwhile the research space is neglected. There is no money to replace the fifty year old rotting tiles in my office, everything goes to provide a nice environment to the dear undergrad kids.
Someone might notice that mathematics and computing are peculiar in that there is not much capital equipment or education needed to be productive. One can be a decent programmer with a bachelor's degree and grow into software engineering. But consider the physical sciences, biology, chemistry physics. To produce any results one needs capital equipment and a PhD. No one goes anywhere far in biology even with a Masters.
Startup mania. I'd love to join a startup in my field. Try that with a sick wife. Can't afford it.
I feel like this is just swapping degrees for certifications. In this case the certification is just saying you completed training with so and so (so and so being bloc.io). Either way, everybody's just chasing paper and maybe learning something in the process.
EDIT: What I meant by certification was more abstract. On a resume, saying you completed tutelage with an individual or a group (and have achievements to go along with them) is pretty similar to completing certification that implies knowledge attained prior to completing the certification...the disfunctional nature of certifications, degrees, and mentor-based systems notwithstanding. People market themselves with this stuff, no matter what precisely it is, or where they got it from.
Maybe we need to start outsourcing our education to China and India. We can send our kids to India for their undergraduate degrees and then they can come back here to get their post-graduate degrees.
Move towards knowledge certification instead of a degree that states you completed your degree. Bar Exam, MCSE, Board Certifications, etc. If you have the drive and capacity to learn without attending college then you should be rewarded only having to take a certification exam.
Once enough schools go belly up people can just start listing those institutions on their resumes. Since the school is close there won't be an easy way to verify. (Just kidding of course)
The adverse effects of a warming atmosphere is a more existential problem, and I would argue that it is for this reason that it is a more fundamental one. Education is irreelevant if food supplies are increasingly scarce.
While I strongly support educational reform, I should point out that it is not just higher education, it's also high school, middle school, elementary school, kindergarten, and daycare. Every single aspect of the entire educational system down to the time spent on kids when they're too young to speak properly is broken. Consequently, fixing this is not as simple as having an online university, but I agree that the solution is very likely to be some sort of private, for-profit company, simply because that's the only feasible catalyst.
I'm somewhat curious to know how big of a problem (and what forms it takes) this is around the world—if people could share what this looks like from where they are, I'd be tremendously interested.
> Once you default on a student loan, you'll be hounded for life: student loan debt is the absolute worst kind of debt you can have, as it is not absolvable by bankruptcy.
I've always wondered two things about this.
1. How is that even legal? I thought the whole point of bankruptcy was to raise a big flag that says "I can no longer pay my debts", and they go away. Why is student loan debt different?
2. Why do American students tolerate it? Look what happened in Quebec when they tried to raise tuition even a little.
1) Congress passed a law after a lot of lobbying. The reasoning was that when a student graduates they have substantial debt and no assets, so every student would just declare bankruptcy the day after graduating and wouldn't have to pay back the providers.
2. Why do American students tolerate it? Look what happened in Quebec when they tried to raise tuition even a little.
Just look at this thread: Americans are so incredibly enamored to market fundamentalism that they often can't see public policy when it's punching them in the nose.
Yes, education is our generation's (18-30) problem.
Schools are lousy and degrade basic skills, as well as degrading deep cultural literacy and history. Idiots are held as heros. College costs are skyrocketing and dysfunctional buildings are being built by the colleges. The list of problems could go on... reams of paper have been spent documenting them.
Yes, there's a problem. I argue the essence of the problem is the deification of money.
There's another fix: Hire these graduates into the public sector or a random non-profit, let them make income-based payments, and then forgive their loans after 10 years, regardless of how much they've paid back. The taxpayers pick up the rest.
[+] [-] Kaedon|13 years ago|reply
Actually, according to the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044424690457757...), the upper-middle class has seen the sharpest jump in student debt since 2007. Households with less income have an easier time finding student aid and those in the upper class can more readily afford the rising costs. This puts the upper-middle class in a kind of purgatory for financial aid.
[+] [-] griffindy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slurgfest|13 years ago|reply
Kids from households making $200,000/yr may not be Maybach rich, but they don't need Pell Grants. and I certainly wouldn't describe their state as "purgatory" just because they aren't getting handouts.
The basis for giving this kind of handout (which I understand along with the general opposition to any handouts) is to improve class mobility and give poor kids a chance (after all, they did not choose to be born to the 'wrong' family). What reason is there for people with plenty of money to get that sort of handout? This I don't understand.
[+] [-] natrius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanibash|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patdennis|13 years ago|reply
I think it's worth pointing out that these businesses are aware that they may have a problem, and have stepped up their political giving massively to protect their interests. Mostly, to Republican candidates, and especially to Mitt Romney. [1]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/us/politics/mitt-romney-of...
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|13 years ago|reply
This could be achieved by switching government subsidies from loan guarantees to payment-share plans by which the government pays a portion of each payment but ceases to do so in case of default. These loans should be absolvable in bankruptcy - an immature decision made in one's adolescence shouldn't be a lifelong burden. Thus, the credit risk is retained by the lender while financial impact lessened on the student.
Unpopular as measures radically increasing costs on liberal arts majors may be, the present situation is a clear example of artificially locked markets producing inefficient outcomes.
[+] [-] jmtame|13 years ago|reply
It seems that most of my engineering friends have a very existentialist perspective on it: the person is entirely responsible for the actions they take. If they got themselves into debt, then they should figure out how to get themselves out of debt.
That's valid. The student wasn't forced to go study art history, but they were lied to by a lot of people, including their parents and society, which are two difficult groups to ignore. I think it's good that we're airing out some of college's dirty laundry--it needs to be known that if you go study art history, there may be a greater than 50% chance that you will be jobless or working as a waiter or waitress. I had this debate with someone last weekend where I made the same argument, and she got very defensive. It's hard to get specific and criticize certain degrees without being offensive to somebody because people feel they need to defend their choices. I later found out she studied art history, she was a waitress, and she had just quit her job. To her credit, she probably didn't realize her job options were grim when she chose to do that. If this issue is spoken about publicly, it should at the very least make the decision easier for people. Every graduating senior in high school should hear both sides of the story and fully understand they can't arbitrarily pick any degree and expect the same results.
[+] [-] danielweber|13 years ago|reply
I see that ending really badly. We have seen that schools have no price pressure, so the standard price for school will end up being "50% or more of your future earnings."
You must have price pressure on schools. Even more money at even more onerous terms to the students will just exacerbate the problem.
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|13 years ago|reply
http://www.tgslc.org/pdf/tamu_default_study.pdf
I don't think modulating loan rates based on whether you're a Liberal Arts major will really solve the problem, and I also think it's also unfair.
* These numbers are percentages of students who entered repayment of their loans between 1997 and 1999 and defaulted by 2003.
[+] [-] anamax|13 years ago|reply
The current bankruptcy rules wrt student loans came out of some experience with different rules. (For example, speciality MDs had some cute hacks to dump their undergrad loans, which were very old by the time they had money.)
How does your knowledge of those rules and that experience inform your proposed policy?
[+] [-] trafficlight|13 years ago|reply
Isaac Asimov articulated this very well:
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
[+] [-] j_baker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vrishabh|13 years ago|reply
The cultural problem is not that education is not valued, it is more on the lines of that education is often (most of the times) equated to "formal education."
[+] [-] rflrob|13 years ago|reply
While I won't claim that every single administrative dollar has been well spent, between 1993 and 2007, this would cover things like on campus tech support and IT staff and equipment (email, online registration, transcripts, etc), more broadly available and diverse student support (counseling, LGBT support organizations, ombudsmen, etc), and presumably tutoring services that help the growing fraction of the population in college thrive, rather than simply prep-school graduates. Again, I'm not going to claim that 4x increase relative to enrollment is the right amount, but compared to universities 20 years ago, they are providing more services.
[+] [-] onitica|13 years ago|reply
*Edit - Ok, the tuition when I first went to college was $20k a year. I had a $14k scholarship, so it was a manageable $6k a year. Now the tuition, 5 years later, is over $27k. That is a 35% increase at about 7% a year. Pretty ridiculous if you ask me, especially for a state school which should be affordable.
[+] [-] newbie12|13 years ago|reply
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/medicaid...
[+] [-] hanibash|13 years ago|reply
[University bloat report](http://goldwaterinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Administra...)
[+] [-] natrius|13 years ago|reply
"Universities are notoriously bad for raising rates by thousands a year"
These statements conflict. Tuition increases should be taken into account when planning a college education. Some schools have a policy of constant tuition over four years. Students who aren't okay with tuition increases should choose those schools.
[+] [-] japhyr|13 years ago|reply
I know there is a place for private educational endeavors in our society. But if you really want to fix education for everyone, you've got to focus on public education. Yes, it's a big ugly political seemingly unchangeable mess. But it's the only system that reaches everyone.
Every generation has a revolution waiting to happen. Improving public education might be the next significant social revolution in the US, but it won't be led by for-profit education companies.
[+] [-] jerf|13 years ago|reply
We've created a system in which the reward for being an excellent teacher is... what, exactly? More paperwork? More friction from the ever-larger administration for not doing the same as everybody else? More frustration with not being allowed to be the good teacher because they have to teach ever harder to the test?
Until you fix the incentive system you're not going to get better teaching, and yeah, that's probably going to involve someone making some money, because it's beyond me how to fix the incentive system in the presence of an open-ended promise to keep the money hose opened and pointed at them no matter how much they fail. I suppose we could always try giving the same people even more money if they just promise to try really, really hard to do something else a couple of times until they give up.
And I am also pretty sure that true 21st century education isn't going to just a tweaked 20th century education. It's going to be something totally different, and the non-profit system simply won't get us there. Why would they? They don't get defunded for using decades-old totally outdated education systems. (In contrast to the decades-old non-outdated parts, which do exist, but are not 100% of the curriculum by any means.) We know that, because that's already the current situation. They've got no reason to move.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|13 years ago|reply
Note that non-profit private institutions are not public schools and are highly effective research institutions.
When things aren't working it's a good idea to rethink the base assumptions we are making on faith alone.
[+] [-] nicholassmith|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfarmer|13 years ago|reply
When Obama stands in front of a bankrupt auto factory in Detroit and says, "We'll retool these factories and retrain these workers to produce wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars!", how do we do it?
People are desperate to answer that question and services like bloc.io, Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy, University Now, etc. are just our best first answers.
Education is more than a big problem: it's the root problem.
Caveat lector: I help run http://devbootcamp.com and the bloc.io guys work out of our offices 2-3 days per week.
[+] [-] codegeek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choxi|13 years ago|reply
source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/10/144978487/the-tues...
[+] [-] armored_mammal|13 years ago|reply
As far as I can tell, much of the (debt) problem is caused by bad decision making by clueless parents and teenagers who think they need to send their kid to an Ivy League or think that their child somehow needs to spend 40k a year to go to an in-state school.
Let's be honest. The cost of education is going up, yes. But getting into debt is also bad and a poor choice. Yet nobody is responsible enough to consider it when making college choices, just to whine about it after the fact.
Students do not need to own a television or get cable or even have a video game console. Students probably don't even need a car, definitely don't need smartphones, and at least where I went to school, could probably do just fine without owning a computer, too. Likewise, instead of getting into debt they could go to cheaper community colleges or a whole slew of things.
Instead many college students, regardless of economic background, seem to have smartphones, Macs, and 42" TVs.
When I see someone complaining about college debt, I see somebody who went to an overly expensive school, without a plan, and did whatever they felt like without ever stopping to consider first if they could make a living when they were done. I see a child.
As someone who looked at the big picture when making college decisions and now has no college debt two years out of school, I have no sympathy.
I turned down the University of Chicago (among others) so that I wouldn't be in debt and to hear all the whining about it from entitled feeling kids who didn't make smart decisions makes me angry.
Now I'll agree that you may need to take on some debt to complete college. But if you're taking on more than the cost of a new car, you're doing it wrong.
Don't get me wrong, either. I concur that colleges waste lots of money.
[+] [-] zanny|13 years ago|reply
While I was there, only about 1 in 5 students actually had a full financial aid package. Most of them didn't fill out FAFSAs, or didn't even use subsidized stafford loans - they had direct bank loans from their parents for upwards of $60k a year.
In my opinion, the people of the 22ed century will look back and think we were hilariously dumb. We have instantanous communication of ideas and knowledge via the internet, and our internet speeds are only getting better. If you want to learn something, it is easier than ever to find a community of fellow learners for a subject, find tons of free learning materials on that subject, and buckle down without the financial obligations and classroom environment (which doesn't work for everyone, and you inherently have less engagement there because one teacher can not effectively engage with even just 10 people all the time).
Like the article said, the degree is the problem. But I don't think thats the real problem - moreso the problem than that is the inability for individuals to have ideas and persue them in business ventures, because upstart small business will demand much less degree knowledge from employees (even if they are very skilled) since they draw from a local pool.
You get the degree because you will be applying to massive companies with huge HR that don't want to try to interpret you as a person but want to get a quick diagnostic of if you are capable or not from a one word answer to a 3 word question: Got a degree? If hiring was more based on individual accomplishment and demonstratable knowledge rather than paper, we would all be better off for it by getting off the degree treadmill.
[+] [-] dpeck|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknutter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpdoctor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Crake|13 years ago|reply
State universities at the very least should be tuition free so as to not completely fuck over students from dysfunctional families who won't help/families that can't afford it. Of course, it would also be wiser to raise entrance standards and somehow figure out how to stop the ridiculous GPA inflation that goes on in the liberal arts fields. STEM still pays relatively well, but that's because our standards haven't dropped; unfortunately, many requirements for maintaining a scholarship fail to take choice of major into account when setting a minimum GPA.
Anyone can get a liberal arts degree if they have enough (or can borrow enough) money, which is why it means shit nowadays as a measure of IQ.
[+] [-] HarryHirsch|13 years ago|reply
University funding comes from three sources: tuition, state funds and research grants (federal or industrial). The last two have been steadily declining, so that leaves tuition as an ever more important source of funds. The university is building new dormitories to get new paying bodies. It doesn't matter just how damn incapable the students are, what counts is that they pay. You can't encourage anyone to drop their chosen degree, if you do you might have to apologize to the chair and the parents.
Again, funds are scarce, and the administration tries to hive off teaching of introductory courses to adjuncts. It takes anyone a year or two to learn the ropes, then people leave because working conditions here are poor, the classes are too large and the workload too heavy. No one is concerned about the revolving door for introductory courses. Besides, you have to have an excellent command of the subject matter to be able to teach a beginners' class, you just cannot put a bottom-of-the-barrel type in front of an introductory course and expect the students to do well.
Again, it's the undergraduates that pay, and they money goes primarily into teaching facilities. Meanwhile the research space is neglected. There is no money to replace the fifty year old rotting tiles in my office, everything goes to provide a nice environment to the dear undergrad kids.
Someone might notice that mathematics and computing are peculiar in that there is not much capital equipment or education needed to be productive. One can be a decent programmer with a bachelor's degree and grow into software engineering. But consider the physical sciences, biology, chemistry physics. To produce any results one needs capital equipment and a PhD. No one goes anywhere far in biology even with a Masters.
Startup mania. I'd love to join a startup in my field. Try that with a sick wife. Can't afford it.
[+] [-] cantankerous|13 years ago|reply
EDIT: What I meant by certification was more abstract. On a resume, saying you completed tutelage with an individual or a group (and have achievements to go along with them) is pretty similar to completing certification that implies knowledge attained prior to completing the certification...the disfunctional nature of certifications, degrees, and mentor-based systems notwithstanding. People market themselves with this stuff, no matter what precisely it is, or where they got it from.
[+] [-] choxi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DevMonkey|13 years ago|reply
Maybe we need to start outsourcing our education to China and India. We can send our kids to India for their undergraduate degrees and then they can come back here to get their post-graduate degrees.
Move towards knowledge certification instead of a degree that states you completed your degree. Bar Exam, MCSE, Board Certifications, etc. If you have the drive and capacity to learn without attending college then you should be rewarded only having to take a certification exam.
Once enough schools go belly up people can just start listing those institutions on their resumes. Since the school is close there won't be an easy way to verify. (Just kidding of course)
[+] [-] revscat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rimantas|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
[+] [-] blackhole|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waiwai933|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|13 years ago|reply
I've always wondered two things about this.
1. How is that even legal? I thought the whole point of bankruptcy was to raise a big flag that says "I can no longer pay my debts", and they go away. Why is student loan debt different?
2. Why do American students tolerate it? Look what happened in Quebec when they tried to raise tuition even a little.
[+] [-] GFKjunior|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|13 years ago|reply
Just look at this thread: Americans are so incredibly enamored to market fundamentalism that they often can't see public policy when it's punching them in the nose.
[+] [-] pnathan|13 years ago|reply
Schools are lousy and degrade basic skills, as well as degrading deep cultural literacy and history. Idiots are held as heros. College costs are skyrocketing and dysfunctional buildings are being built by the colleges. The list of problems could go on... reams of paper have been spent documenting them.
Yes, there's a problem. I argue the essence of the problem is the deification of money.
[+] [-] twoodfin|13 years ago|reply
Thanks, Congress!
http://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellatio...
[+] [-] natrius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|13 years ago|reply