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The whole point of the loan is to buy time; you don't want to wait for when you have savings to purchase the degree, you want to do it now. If you are not doing it for the job, then why the loan, what's the rush?
If knowledge and prestige is all that matters, then don't take the loan, take the scenic route, get your degree slowly as and when you have the time and money, and one day you will have something to look back at.
But if you are doing it so you can start earning as soon as possible, when you are still young and energetic... then you are doing it for the job, and in that case the degree better be financially worth it.
You have the right to a degree in XYZ... you should NOT have the right to a taxpayer backed grant/aid/loan/whatever to gain said degree unless you're on a reasonable path to become a tax payer yourself as soon as you are done with the degree.
Check the marketing literature for any college and you will find that is not true.
The only people doing degrees for knowledge and prestige are the filthy rich and while they may make up a significant percentage of students at the top 5 schools, they make up a tiny percentage of all college students.
The last point is where I end up aswell though and I think no matter how you look at it colleges are doing a disservice to young people and taxpayers pushing worthless degrees backed by government loans that they (the colleges) don't have to worry about repaying.
I actually had the opposite takeaway. The last university literature booklets I saw were all about the experience, the facilities, the sports, the events, and the fun. I don’t even remember if they included content about getting a job at the end.
Whether you are going to Trade school to become a Plumber, or Med school to become a Doctor; in both cases there is the study part (that may or may not issue a degree also) and then there is the certification part, and that certification part is what's important for the job and thus directly linked to it. You studied medicine but your certification is specifically for Cardiology, so THAT's you career path. Please stop looking at kidneys, you are disturbing the Nephrologist.
But ordinary college degrees NOT linked to certification, just have the study part... and there is NO direct linkage with a job.
An English degree can be done just for the sake of it, or to become a Teacher, or to become a Journalist or Author or whatever.
The degree itself isn't linking itself to one single career or closely related group of careers; they may waggle their eyes and pose innuendoes, but unless there is a specific certification, they are open ended, and that's deliberate by choice.
They WANT it to be open-ended because then the responsibility isn't on them. Oh you did Chemistry? Look at ALL the career options you have! We are just here to broaden your mind with the wonderful world of chemicals!
You might have the potential to become a chemist or pharmacists or a lab tech or who knows even a famous researcher; look at this example of XYZ who become world renowned in lithography machine lubrication who studied chemistry at this very institution! Or look at ABC, they now work at NASA, wouldn't YOU like to be an astronaut-chemist doing stuff on the ISS? Go forth, the world is your oyster!
The possibilities are limitless, and therefore the degree is NOT about the job, it's just about the education. Whether you end up as a chemistry teacher or a drug dealer in like Walter White is up to you.
And thus it's your duty to research, what job options do you feel are possible for you after the degree? and is a loan worth it for you?
Compare that with career-specific certifications, and there you have exact data of how many jobs are in demand and more importantly you KNOW you will be locked to a certain path and thus you (and the loan giver) can plan accordingly.
Sorry if this reply was a bit of a ramble, but I hope I was able to clarify what I meant.
I already wrote it quite some times on HN: at least in Germany, where university is rather cheap, the situation is typically different:
- The really rich kids will typically have a "career on rails", for example because of family connections. They thus often consider getting the university degree as an annoying obstacle on their way towards a certain career.
- If you, on the other hand, don't come from a wealthy background, you better are very idealistic with respect to your chosen degree course (with the only typical constraint that it will not be not be some "useless degree" (including what is called in German "Orchideenfächer" (i.e. small, obscure degree courses for which there is often no real job market))). If you are not in deep love with the subject that you study, family and friends will likely "suggest" that you should drop out of university and get a form of tertiary education that is a better fit for you, such as Fachhochschule, Berufsakademie (both offer a much more applied tertiary education than universities do) or Ausbildung (vocational training).
TLDR: In Germany, typically not the rich kids get a university degree for their seek of knowledge (the rich kid rather often consider attending university as an annoying obstacle on their certain career), but rather the smart, idealistic kids from a less well-off family background.
I think we are past the age where the folks who went to higher education were scholars in pursuit of some higher truth and a broad elevation of themselves. The percentage of people who care about that is very low.
As college became "a universal must." Nearly 40 percent of US adults have a bachelor's degree or higher, and obviously 40% of any population aren't inherently scholars.
So yes college today is primarily either "something people just do" (I believe this is the attitude that leads to proliferation of obvious worthless degrees) or at best "a way to get a better job."
An obvious internet-era reality is that a true scholar can find access to knowledge and like-minded peers outside the universe much more easily.
The best school which I attended divided classes between academic and social --- the latter were attended with one's age peers (so homeroom, social studies, PE, &c.) while the former were attended at one's ability level (with a cap of four years through 4th grade, so I was in 4th grade but taking 8th grade science, English, and history classes) and for older students, some teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby college, so it was possible to take college courses while still in high school --- it was even possible to earn a college degree (or even multiple degrees) at high school graduation.
There was also a trade school track for students so inclined.
I would also argue society is better if its people are more educated.
I completely agree that the more knowledgeable a society is the better off it is, but if the education industry is allowed to prop itself up with the widespread belief that more years of education necessarily result in a better-off population, you get the military-industrial-style propagation of institutions, loans, debt, and wasted time that we're familiar with today.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61998.Doorways_in_the_Sa...
Like, how specifically has our society gotten better since High School became universal and college became the norm?
Superior education is the ladder towards self-sufficiency because that's what the labor market does, it requires you to hold a degree. Now, you may be right that the degree by itself doesn't guarantee it but you are ignoring that the students don't have any choice to do so. So your solution actually punishes the students rather than fix the labor market inflated requirement values. Fix the labor market and suddenly education doesn't have to be financed to allow youngsters be able to look after themselves.
I disagree. The primary purpose of the college degree is the job. If you don't need a job (which derives from the signaling factor of the degree == the prestige), you can just study the same material and gain the knowledge by yourself without getting a degree.
Studying in a university has the advantage of learning from experts and being surrounded by people that are also learning from experts. This has significant advantages.
I retired last year after a career as a software engineer for several decades, 99.99% self-taught. I'm not unique. I've known many others who did the same.
> Studying in a university has the advantage of learning from experts
Whether they are experts is something I highly doubt when thinking about all the graduates I interviewed and worked with over the years. In my experience, the better software engineers came from the self-taught route.
> being surrounded by people that are also learning from experts
Homogenized learning produces likewise results; the quality of the result is highly subjective and debatable.
Anything that spills over from that can be jobs, industry, innovations and all that.
If that were the goal then universities would have like 300 students. This function just doesn't require that many people.
Most companies are not interested in applying the trove of knowledge that graduates have even for the company's own economic advantage.
I agree, I think the purpose of college is supposed to teach students how to learn and the importance of commitment to lifelong self-learning. The output quality of graduates the past two or three decades suggests to me that doesn't seem to actually happen very much.
No, you don't.
I think there is a middle ground: If knowledge (and prestige) is what matters, you avoid taking a loan. But even if you take no or a very small loan, it does not mean that you can afford to go the scenic route and get the degree slowly.
https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation...
Back in the Russian empire a person could buy themselves out of serfdom if they could come up with the money… which was difficult for obvious reasons.
And this feels like a modern reincarnation of the system.
It’s categorised as ‘ Unfree Labour’
The private sector does fund some loans but I think the current program just needs re-working. Forgiving all these loans is a no-go so this measure is a step in the right direction. I'd like them to lock down the interest rate to 2% + inflation next. The government does need to incentivize a certain degree of higher education for innovation.
Precisely my point! Tax-payers/Voters (effectively the same thing) get to decide how much indulgence they want to give.
In Australia you are happy to extend the base, but in the US it seems they are reducing the base, and thus they are limiting options.
Some countries limit the indulgence not by limiting access to loans/aid, but by limiting available seats in university instead.
Ultimately it's up to the paying party how much risk they want to tolerate.
Other countries where University and Education are rights or are provided via better taxpayer systems don’t understand the pure chaos the US system is.
We (Russia) have so called "free higher education" but it doesn't mean anyone can get a degree for free. There is a limited number of budget-funded places, and only students with better scores are accepted. For top universities like ITMO, you need to have 100/100 points on 3 subjects + 10 extra points for scientific activity to get "free" education. Otherwise, pay money.
Furthermore, within that government-funded quota almost half of places are reserved for olympiad winners and participants of a military operation, so the number of available places is even lower.
Of course, if you do not want to study computer science in a top university, the bar is much lower and you do not need to have the top scores. But then you will be working some job nobody wants for a low salary.
Furthermore, the government now puts a limit to number of paid places in cities like Moscow and Saint-Petersburg because they do not like that young people move to large cities to get an IT profession instead of studying in the college in their small city to work in the factory for a low salary.
I wonder what is the reality of "free education" in other countries. Can you get an IT, AI-related degree in a top university for free.
Here in Denmark, part of the organized labor movements was also a focus on the duty of the worker to acquire new skills. That reframing of an education, of something you should be grateful for receiving, towards something you had a duty to continually pursue, is extremely important to how education is seen and practiced.
We've lost a lot of that philosophical backing, but that's one of the cool things of organizations. Even years after we've forgot why we've organized education like this, the gears continue to turn. I do think we're in the middle of a pretty frighting turn away from it, but hopefully we can fix that in time.
While this may have been true in the past, this is no longer the case, and it has not been the case for at least a decade and change now, at least in the US.
If you are intelligent and self-motivated to learn in-demand skills, and you can demonstrate those skills, and adapt well to a corporate environment, there is a path for you even without a degree. Yes, not every door is open to you, but that doesn't mean all the good doors are closed.
I've been on hiring committees where I interviewed Ivy League CS grads for SWE positions who couldn't do leetcode easies, tasks like defanging an IP address, in a language of their choice, with clear instructions, active guidance from me, and permission to search the web for syntax (but not solutions), and an entire hour to solve it.
As a means of delivering credible social proof of competency, legacy admissions and grade inflation have all but ruined college degrees.
We live in era where essentially all recorded human knowledge is available for free, instantaneously, 24/7, from a device that fits in your pocket and works from just about anywhere, and this has been the case for my entire career. As of more recently, $20/mo gets you a personal 1:1 tutor that knows more than every college professor you've ever seen combined, is available to you 24/7, never judges you for stupid questions, never gets tired of re-explaining concepts to you that you're struggling with, will write a study plan / syllabus perfectly tailored to your existing knowledge and schedule, complete with links to reading material, generate interactive quizzes and tests for you, etc.
College as a means of delivering information is about 30 years out of date at this point, and college as a means of delivering a tailored education is now about 4 years out of date.
In the words of Peter Gregory, college has become a cruel joke on the poor and middle class.
Our Constitution doesn’t guarantee free university degrees in “underwater basketweaving” or “following your dreams” for everyone.
But we also have a way to do it. Any US state that wants to guarantee loans for, or even subsidize, such degrees, is welcome to do so, with state money, not federal money.
It is ideologically inconvenient, because the whole premiss is that gender roles depend.
Just avoid universities completely, we seen during covid how useless they are!
This was an intentionally ironic use of poor grammar in a statement against organized education, right? Hopefully?
There are no college graduates I've interviewed in the last two decades, whose quality of output suggests to me college is something the tax payer should be on the hook for.
You know that technically, people are allowed to have fun and not strive to be a billionaire, right? Its everyones right to pick a path they want, and enjoy, and if they end up providing a service with it, or just contributing to art or science, thats good for humanity and for society.
In fact, this works, if you look at capitalist countries with social support systems, free universities (or very cheap), and so on.
> unless you're on a reasonable path to become a tax payer yourself as soon as you are done with the degree
Obviously everyone should make some money for themselves and pay taxes, but you're acting like the system falls apart if a couple ten thousand art students decide to live a bit more frugally and instead add to the local culture.
It's embarrassing that we are all part of the same species. Life can be so fantastic when your society accepts that you can just go study whatever you want, and then take a job in that field (or not). Individual success doesn't need to be measured ONLY by your contribution to the tax pool.
If you tax the rich and a couple large companies, spend a little less on harassing poor countries, your entire society can lean back and live a significantly better life. Instead you focus on reducing culture, removing any fun that isn't AI driven corporate data gathering slop, denying poor people health care, denying poor people an education, and leaning back and saying "well, they should try harder to contribute to society".
It’s hard out there and I have some non-college educated family who also struggled in life wondering why we should pour money into degrees people can’t pay off when they received no help themselves.
Money is just a social construct and the amount of tax dollars spent on classes in progressive tea pot clay handcraft is minuscule.
Non-tech academics were more or lessed forced into getting degrees by the job market.
There were no choice involved on part on the victims of a systematic issue, which is, gatekeeping access to middleclass jobs by the parents' bank account size with usury lending as some sort of pressure release valve.
Not only that but the higher ed industry has abused the hell out of this program. I'm close to people who were studying degrees they will never come close to paying and now they're $100k+ in the hole. The reality is that degree shouldn't have been available to them.
However if you want me the taxpayer to pay for the fun it needs to be a good investment for me. Otherwise I want to use my money to have fun myself.
Only under 0.4% of the total yearly graduates receives a subsidized state art degree
Wow, what horseshit.
Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated while their brains are still maximally plastic, and society get maximal value out of the education? Is there no value in handing over our knowledge to the new generation BEFORE they act without it? Is there no value in knowing something the "free labor market" has not priced in?
Rights are something we grant each other. If we see a value in an educated public, we can grant each other the right to get an education. There are no "rights" in nature, so the statement "you don't have the right" is meaningless in matters of politics, where the whole point of the discussion is to figure out if you should "have the right".
Your inner world must be a dead hellscape if you believe that the only things that exist are "prestige", arbitrary "knowledge", or a job.
This is what the public school system is for. Post-secondary education was not meant to be for everyone. But the world has changed and universities and colleges only service as the gate-keepers to degrees and diplomas that every employer now has required to get a job (regardless of whether that education is needed for the actual job). It's not that young people passionate about learning as much as they can in a given field don't exist, its that university is not about them anymore.
Eh, I’ve often thought that going to college would’ve been much better after a few years of building software in the workforce. I didn’t understand the “why” of going into a lot of the subjects I studied, they didn’t have much real experience to attach to in my brain, and retention was worse.
I think Waterloo’s mix of school and working is a pretty solid way to tackle this.
We dont disagree at all here. I attended a university that did project based learning, where each semester was organized around a single semester long group project. That worked wonderfully well for me, and I enjoyed the more freeform learning environment immensly. Those connections you describe is exactly what I could feel forming as I tried to apply what I learned to my project.
There's plenty of room too for what we call "profession schools" that do placement in the workforce. I don't think that fits everyone, but it's not a "worse" kind of schooling at all, and some people really like it. It's honestly quite difficult to accomodate on the workplace side, but if structured well, it's great.
I'm not against post teens/20s education either. I'm honestly for all kinds of education.
"I want my taxes to..." is a generally a bad start, because the point of taxes is it doesn't matter what an individual taxpayers wants to happen to them. Most taxpayers want the taxes to not be spent the way they will be. That is why they are taxes. If people had an actual choice then in all likelihood they wouldn't pay them.
I want all my nation’s taxes to contribute to a more-educated populace and I’m willing to vote to effect this.
(For bachelors degrees): Each year, they will calculate the median earnings 4 years after graduation of graduates of every (Institution, CIP code) tuple. (CIP Code: 6 digit code that identifies a "program"; there are ~2,000).
Then they calculate the median earnings of high school grads in that Institution's state across all jobs.
If the high school grads earn more than the bachelors degree grads for 2 out of the past 3 years, the Feds won't offer student loans for that (Institution, CIP code) tuple.
Incidentally, the IRS already supplies this data in aggregated form to the US Dept. of Ed.
Check it out here: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
Here is MIT: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166683-Massachusetts...
Wait, no it's not. It's how economic planning always worked. It's summed up by the saying "The generals are always preparing to fight the last war." The university near my house is just putting the finishing touches on a building to house the new Data Science program, that was started a few years ago.
Anecdote: My kids were in the regional youth orchestra, and every year at the last concert of the season, the program included a bio of every graduating senior, including their future plans. The hottest major was computer science, followed by biochemistry and engineering. These kids knew exactly which majors the economic planners would have chosen for them.
But I agree. Student loans were a band-aid on a system that could have just as effectively subsidized college education directly.
If this is a fair question to ask students, then it is a fair question to ask the schools as well. They are the ones charging enormous amounts of money to students for this.
This doesn’t prevent people from learning to paint or play the clarinet. It prevents students from taking out enormous loans for it.
It's easy to make the argument:
"If we invest $1M in education, we will have $10M in additional future economic output, $4M in future taxes, and $20M less in law enforcement / criminal prosecution / jail fees. It improves global competitiveness."
That's a no-brainer. Education is a very high ROI investment for a country. Like infrastructure spending or industrial policy, it's about cold, hard economics.
One step more complex -- but equally high ROI -- is towards having a functioning democracy. That's economics, but a bit more squishy.
Investing in the arts, humanities, and music is a good thing as well. However, that's a very different bucket of money. I wouldn't lump it in with the former two.
I do get that not all education should be purely for economic reasons, but as an autodidact I feel that "learning for the sake of learning" does not need to come with the prices that people are paying for degrees.
I personally would want to see it with greater student participation/testing. The US education has been watered down to be so easy specifically because failing reduces LTV of a student. They want to just crank out degrees to as many people as they can. I personally think we need to figure out the healthy balance of education we need, because college for all isn’t it. Then just pay for them to learn at a high expectation level. Private schools will still exist to pump out full price degrees and that’s fine too.
According to Reddit [1] it was to discourage students from immediately declaring bankruptcy upon graduation.
I don't see why they couldn't have put a time limit on it though, if that was the reason. Say you can't declare bankruptcy for 7 years after you leave school.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StudentLoans/comments/ufejjg/why_ca...
It's obvious that bankruptcy costs the lender, but how that cost gets absorbed is very important here. A mortgage or a car loan are secured debts, where the lender can repossess and sell the collateral, to pay off most or all of the losses if the borrow defaults on the loan. A student loan is an unsecured debt, so any defaults have to come out of the interest of the rest of the borrowers serviced by that loan program.
The more borrowers default on their payments, the higher the interest rate is needed to cover the write-downs. Without any protections against defaulting, interest rates would have to be near those of credit cards, while limiting when student loans can be discharged limits how much needs to be written down, which keeps interest rates lower.
Higher interest rates would not only make student loans cost more, it would also reduce their availability and increase the default rate, which could create positive feedback, causing the rates to increase significantly faster than inflation. Combine that with incentivization for college attendance already causing tuition itself to increase significantly faster than inflation, which itself makes student loans increasingly necessary, allowing student loans to be discharged during bankruptcy could have compounding effects on the fragile system that currently props up college attendance rates.
That still leaves the question of why the government should incentivize a significant portion of their constituency to be in college, (more than 1 out of every 13 US adults are currently enrolled) but I'll have have leave that question for politicians or maybe even voters.
premature optimization is the root of all evil. Seems like we shouldve actually shown that kids would do that before putting it into law
In American tradition, it was handled with the worst possible compromise that would enrich already monied interests.
OTOH if you're still poor after those years and don't care about consequences of bankrupcy then maybe that's fair enough to wipe out the debt since the education clearly didn't provide value.
This and/or making loans dischargeable in bankruptcy.
Easier to exploit and manipulate.
This step makes it even easier for them
The colleges don't have to prove the degree is worth the price paid for it, only that it is better than nothing. If you go to some Ivy League school and rack up $100K debt, you don't have to show that you will earn enough to pay that back; only show that you make more than if you never went to college.
I didn't go to college to get an engineering degree. I am a born engineer and I wanted very much to learn the craft.
My diploma sits in the basement somewhere. I never put it on the wall.
liberal arts majors who are actually there just to learn
s/learn/be indoctrinated/
Less federal aid means fewer students can afford our insanely expensive educational system. This will pull up the ladder on the younger generations.
We do not teach history or ethics, or much in general to our pipeline welders, but they make bank for their hard labor. Meanwhile our well educated school teachers are paid nearly nothing. Both are needed (although I would argue teachers more so). This is not fundamentally an issue of failing educational institutions (although they may well be lacking), but an issue of societal incentives. The welder is paid by the oil corporation; the teacher by a dwindling percentage of your tax dollars.
We are living in the information age yet we have a crisis of education. We desperately a solution that increases both educational access and quality for everyone regardless of their career path. We need more, better, cheaper education. We need more incentives for an educated populace. This does not achieve that: in fact it aggravates the issue.
Are we sure about this or is federal aid one of the reasons education is so expensive?
Also, if history and philosophy are so important maybe we can come up with a more affordable way to teach them to people those things than university.
The cycle breaks if the university suddenly produces a group of people that cannot contribute in any meaningful way back. In that case it’s totally fair to ask where did we go wrong and how can we fix it and get back on track rather than trying to keep the broken system
Could also look the other way around: if things pay off anyway, why should should tax payers fund it?
Many colleges heavily advertise how it will help your career prospects. Yet when called out on the less than rosy outcomes they retreat to a position of oh it isn't about career at all.
> Most traditional, four-year bachelor programs fare well, with roughly 1% failing the earnings test. When these programs do fail, it's often in areas like theater, music and studio art.
My knee jerk reaction was to suspect some kind of academic purge, but this honestly seems to mostly affect schools that were kinda scammy to begin with.
In practice, I could also see this resulting in people double majoring in art if they were truly passionate
The way student debt is (mis)managed is a different issue.
a more educated populace is a public and civic good on its own terms. Public funding for education is maybe partially for economic returns, but is mostly because education is a necessary part of a functioning democracy and a necessary part of living a good fulfilling life
A better criteria would be, does the increase in salary that the degree program provides allow the student to pay off the cost of the degree in ten years (the length of the standard repayment plan).
It’s not really a big deal if a degree didn’t increase your earnings, provided your school was cheap. If your degree is worthless AND your school was expensive though, the results can be catastrophic.
I don't really see why some no name university can confer a bachelor's in some bullshit field, but the respectable local trade school cannot confer a bachelor's in plumbing. They honestly have more of a right to do so.
That's an accurate name, and only seems pejorative if you see learning a trade as lesser than studying academics.
> name university can confer a bachelor's in some bullshit field, but the respectable local trade school cannot confer a bachelor's in plumbing
This misunderstands what the different kinds of credentials are.
Why should there be a difference in the degree being conferred at all? And if so, why not split off the departments that confer degrees with a low-earning potential and call them "entertainment schools" or something?
Terms have meanings and they matter, even if you don't choose to bother to understand them.
You are asking why there "should" be a difference between a CCNA cert and a Computer Science degree. That difference isn't a "should" thing, it's an "is" thing. They are fundamentally different.
> why not split off the departments that confer degrees with a low-earning potential
Earning potential is unrelated to the distinction between trade certification vs academic degrees.
Both the colleges letting their costs get out of control to the control to open the door to this kind of rule and that the current admin thinks this is what secondary education is about. See if it goes to actually rule implementation or if its just posturing.
Why should the taxpayer fund someone's liberal arts degree, or rather their professor's livelihood? You can think that they should, but that's a question not just "the current administration" is asking.
The recent policy is also reinstating loan limits for graduate studies that were dropped in the 80s: https://www.npr.org/2026/07/01/nx-s1-5876467/student-loans-d...
I'm generally against banning things like smoking and gambling but I am absolutely for putting giant warning labels on those things.
Adults which means anyone over 18 should know the risks and what they are signing up for.
Idk, I think just making student loans dischargable in bankruptcy is enough. Make both sides have skin in the game and you'll find students not able to get loans in situations that they would never get a salary to afford it.
I can tell you that I was picking a choice of major as a recent immigrant and even my fresh off the boat grandma could have easily "poked holes" in my theory if I had chosen to study something stupid.
Wouldn't this punish a huge number of students who struggle academically, by comparing them against better-achievers who simply skipped school?
The two populations being compared are entirely different for a lot of schools. Just because the average student skipping college does better than the average student attending a particular college, that doesn't mean the average one that attended college would've done as well as the average one that skipped.
>> If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college,
Lots of things affect earnings. Obviously education is one of them, but it's not the only one.
Location, economic environment, social status, personal network - all are factors. In other words comparing unequal things leads to unequal results.
For example, a first-generation college attendee gets a solid job working at a non-profit helping others. Someone else in the same town goes straight into Dad's profitable factory as a manager.
Of course those might be outliers. We can use statistics to smooth things. But equally we can use statistics to show anything we want.
Yes, there are lots of really crap colleges. There are colleges that specialize in nonsense degrees in useless subjects. (English Poetry you say? Hah. Poets never made any money...)
But equally there are lots of community colleges, taking in marginal students, giving them opportunities where others won't. Some, maybe most, of those students won't make it. But some will.
The effect of a rule like this is that colleges are forced to game the system. To exclude those who might fail. To reduce social mobility.
A cynic might even suggest this is the real goal of the rule to begin with.
In other words, when trying to measure value outcomes, what time period should one consider?
And does the rule apply at the college level or the program level? If I churn out 100 people in my law school, can I average their prospects with 50 from my Archaeology degree? Or with 50 from my "music in movies" degree?
Why would it not just compare them to the average person who skips school, which can be a combination of better and worse achievers? Is there some part I'm missing where the academically struggling are selectively compared to elite school-skippers?
Oh, we'll just lower requirements for teachers so they don't need a degree...ok [1]
[1] https://www.k12dive.com/news/florida-to-let-veterans-spouses...
of course it would be better to make college free, or give everyone zero interest federal loans that can be paid off with normal taxes and auto deferred until you start making serious money.
humanities should probably by funded with a different program anyway. ask a panel of experts how many graduates we need then offer X scholarships a year that upgrade to a full ride if your family is low income. allocate them with something like a national lottery where school districts nominate some amount of students based on their population.
No education can guarantee you a certain income especially when there is a gap between start and graduation.
Before AI a degree in computer science was an advantage now management thinks is obsolete.
This seems of a way to definance and devalue education
(That was my first thought as well: it's to take "the elites" down a notch.)
Whether public or private it seems that the correct price that all systems asymptotically approach is exactly infinity.
A quick summary: the modern university is really a "multiversity", combining research, trade school, broad "liberal arts" education, and residential coming-of-age in one organization. The author argues this model is finished, and the pieces should be separated. I don't know if the author is correct, but I think the idea that the university is many things is important to recognize for this discussion (and just about every discussion around universities).
This law, in sense, wants to distinguish the trade school and general education parts of the university (though I suspect it more aimed at owning the libs than anything else).
Or, if you use bankruptcy to rid yourself of the loans, you also dismiss any claim of degree related to the bankrupted schools you attended.
That would he a great way to balance bankruptcy with education scams. And yeah, most schools are scammy.
Making art and humanities programs demonstrate some kind of pecuniary benefit is disgusting and myopic. My wife pursued English because she loves writing. She's earned about 0 dollars from that degree because she's home with our kids. And that's OK! Our lives are so much richer because of her degree—as well as the classes I took from the English department. So we should penalize the humanities because it merely makes people better thinkers and doesn't have as high of an ROI as an MBA? Yuck!
(EDIT: the article does mention that this bar is low—so not too bad—but the fact that this is a metric and criteria in the first place opens this up to abuse in the near future.)
I get that it's intended to cut down on ballooning tuition and fees, but *this is not the right way to do that.* (Actually, if we eliminated half the administration, I wonder how much we could cut costs…)
This is the line universities give, knowing full well that the only reason students pay exorbitant tuitions is because bachelor’s degrees are necessary for most salaried jobs in the US. Schools want to have their cake and eat it too. If education isn’t about the money they should have no problem charging lower tuition rather than paying their presidents million dollar salaries.
The reason lecture halls are packed at 7:50am on a Monday is not because students are thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial function, but because Calc 1 is a prerequisite to their engineering degree, which is a prerequisite to their job.
I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers.
I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000, without using a calculator or phoning a friend. He was surprised at how many could not, and it was an easy way to filter out the no hires.
An atrocious way to take public funds and transfer them to private institutions. These kinds of things work so long as our economy is growing, but this kind of extractive behaviour will hurt us if we can't find the next great thing the next time.
Companies, by requiring college degrees even for the most mundane tasks, simply turned academia into multiple things at once: it saved them money for training their staff (as the majority of "industry standard" knowledge gets taught there), it offloaded the cost to the prospective employees (remember when we were taught "if you are supposed to pay for your job you're getting scammed"?), and most importantly it offloaded all of the risk too. Got ADHD? Any other mental or physical health issue? You likely won't even pass college. Everyone who passed through college already passed the "filter gates" employers want - can cope with stress, likely has some sort of support network if they can't on their own, and doesn't carry baggage that reduces their ability to work compared with their peers.
Oh, and a nice side thing for companies, requiring college degrees saves them from ADA and other anti-discrimination regulation violations. It's well-known that being Black (or otherwise in a minority) results in markedly lower chances of finishing with a degree, having children results in lower chances, living in poverty results in lower chances, the list goes on and on. Requiring a college degree is a very easy proxy to say "I want a workplace that's as male, white and rich-frat-boy-ish as possible".
I don't personally think that efficiency should be the primary concern of colleges, but it should be a concern, and it just plain hasn't been for ages. And that indulgence has been cloaked in specious, ivory-tower claims about producing well-rounded students. "You can't complain about being require to take a 100-level history course because our job is to turn out renaissance scholars who can debate philosophy at cocktail parties before going to work doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with that."
All the while, those additional credit hours cost students a shitload of money and debt and take focus away from their actual fields of study.
Colleges and universities need a kick up the ass to make them actually give a shit about outcomes for their students. I'm not going to cry that they're getting one.
> All the while, those additional credit hours cost students a shitload of money and debt and take focus away from their actual fields of study.
This is a straw-man. The purpose is not to turn people into renaissance scholars. It's to inculcate appreciation for what makes life worth living. An educated populace is also a requirement for a healthy democracy. Everyone ought to know some history at a minimum.
A lot of my peers fell behind financially after graduation, struggled to find work relevant to their interests, and then concluded that they needed a master’s degree to become competitive. But in many cases the real problem was not that they lacked another credential or the right credential. They were aimless, had no clear professional direction, and were using more school to postpone dealing with that. They got into $200-300k CAD of debt because Canadian universities are built to enroll at scale and no real meaningful filter exists to weed out people who have no business going down this path. [2]
Universities encourage this because they want to have it both ways. They market the degree as a path to professional opportunity, admit at enormous scale, and charge enough to sustain constantly growing faculties (with the majority of those costs being borne by the public ledger). Then, when graduates struggle, they retreat to “education was never about earnings” and “you learned lots of useful soft skills that employers want, it's your fault for not marketing them better.”
An arts degree should at least certify some meaningful level of writing ability, judgment, discipline, and intellectual competence. In my experience, the same credential was awarded to excellent students and to people who could barely construct an argument. Some of the dumbest arguments I heard during my degree were in fourth-year seminar courses.
Anecdotally, most of the international students I knew were very capable and competent, which made sense given how much they were paying to be there (some families went into extreme debt by Global South standards to get them there).
Meanwhile, the domestic admissions system felt largely non-selective and seemed designed around educating as many people as possible. That may be a defensible public policy goal, but it also means the credential itself becomes a pretty weak signal and a lot of people were never there for educational enrichment or to pursue Liberal Arts as a meaningful field, but because their parents made them - and they thought they must have a degree to be successful because people without degrees are surely crude barbarians.
Earnings are a crude metric, but “trust us, they became better thinkers” is not accountability. And funneling underemployed graduates into master’s programs and aimless paths are not a solution.
Arts educations should be gated, not necessarily based on funds, either with difficult trials to prove competency or real life experience. For example, theatre programs should admit people with existing experience in background acting and community theatre. North America can adopt 3 year degrees similar to Europe, make the breadth year optional, and actually weed out the incompetent by the first year if we insist on having zero admission standards amidst rising grade inflation. (NC programs produce credible credential signals despite being open admission).
[1] https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/1896-who-pays-universit...
[2] The sad irony is that pretty much everyone I know (n=5) who took 2+ years between graduating high school and starting post-secondary got jobs or snazzy PhD offers shortly after graduating post-secondary, on top of having to pay nothing for tuition because parental contributions aren't expected for "independent" students for Canadian student aid. I think making more students discover themselves in the real world before letting them do post-secondary could genuinely yield better results in way-finding and independence that's critical for post-grad outcomes.
Trump himself took advantage of this by creating Trump university which was a for-profit degree mill.
All of those “schools” needs to be wiped off the map and hopefully get replaced by schools that show real value.
Government spends all kinds of money that doesn't have an immediate and obvious RoI and often in ways that people are fine with (the military, the massive corruption of the current US executive branch, brutal immigration enforcement). Yet, letting people better their lives in the ways they want to gets people here riled up.
The whole system needs reworking, because capitalism, but there's no reason the US can't have universal university education, just like there's no reason we can't have universal health care, other than the complete lack of willpower and the complete capitulation to capital.
If you wanted to tackle the problems of education you'd start by improving our failing highschools and then ensuring higher education is free and easily accessible so that the earnings gulf isn't as wide.
Although, unfortunately, I suspect that this will be gamed by things like “this is super unique diploma” and there are no pros on market yet. Rotate that every 5 years and voila. I’m sure that every smart people are already thinking about schemes much more elaborate
When evaluating whether public money is well spent on education it must be more important how valuable it is to the public, not what the price for the work is to the individuals.
I like the "what if these workers stopped today" test:
Pick a profession. For example pick from 'trader', 'dentist', 'cleaner', 'sales person' or 'nurse'. Then imagine that all people in that profession stop working today.
How bad would it be for society? Is it better or worse than some other profession? Compare this to how well-payed the profession is.
I think this is a much better test for value to society than looking at what people get payed.
For example, I think it would be much worse if all nurses stop working than if all bankers stop working. Yet bankers tend to get paid more.
This is not good. This is a transparent political attack on universities and programs perceived as hostile by an administration and political party that has spent the years attacking higher education. "I love the uneducated", indeed. They have attacked science within the government - from the CDC through the EPA. And just last week they were taking down governmental advice on how to conserve energy during a heatwave because they didn't want to support a political opponent who had the audacity to give appropriate advice that matched the federal guidance. If you're taking this action at face value, I have a bridge to sell you. 10 million dollars, you get the Ben Franklin Bridge! I'll mail you a certificate and everything. I digress...
But let's go ahead and look at the merits of the program and what government should be doing in terms of education. Here's the announcement: https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of...
> If a program fails to show at least this modest financial return on investment for its graduates in two out of three consecutive award years, it will lose eligibility to participate in the federal Direct Loan program.
I saw some other comments that seemed to have a misunderstanding here. This 3 year period is about evaluation of the program, not graduates earnings in the 3 years after graduation. The evaluation in any year could be "20 year earnings outlook", for example, but is not specified here. The proposed rule is here: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/earnings-and-accountabilit...
Claude summary of the actual test: "When earnings are measured for an individual cohort:
The Department looks at median earnings in the fourth tax year following program completion (i.e., graduates are given a few years to enter the workforce before their earnings count). Only people who were working (not enrolled in school) during that measurement year are included.
Cohort period / averaging across years:
For small programs, the Department doesn't rely on a single graduating class — it aggregates completers across multiple years into a single "cohort period" to get a large enough sample and to smooth out one anomalous year (e.g., a COVID-affected earnings year) from swinging the result."
But we have a deeper problem here - well, a couple: 1) education is not just about employment and 2) the design of our education system, and how it's funded, is absolutely insane and fucked up for a plethora of reasons. We don't want a culturally bankrupt society. The examples used by the administration are silly (cosmetology, really? I've never heard of a college offering that to begin with). As noted, only 1% of bachelor's programs are worse off than high school anyway. Those philosophy grads actually do really well financially (I'm one of them!), but so do the English majors. The more artsy of the arts are where there's no financial future? Yeah, maybe those need to be cheaper programs. But in reality, it means that rich kids get to study and practice art and the rest of society has to actually work for a living. That's basically how things have been for 2000 years.
Now on to the economics around American universities. The loan issue has been covered elsewhere in the comments. Yes, it's fucking nuts to not allow loans to be discharged, and this has been a huge contributor to the rising costs of education. I may come back after coffee and drop a few other sources here, but maybe some of you can do that instead. But it's not the only contributor: the establishment of a degree as a gate to prevent employment is another. Two more: universities felt the need to compete on lifestyle to woo students (not employment) and finally, the way that bureaucracies tend to continuously grow when they have no natural predators. All of these have contributed to the growing cost of higher education in the US (and I'm sure there's more), but those are the big ones. I think we do need to push on universities. But I think we do that with cheaper universities, with online programs, and with free, federally funded education for fields that are projected to have growth. The total cost to fully fund higher education is about 10% of our yearly military budget: https://educationdata.org/how-much-would-free-college-cost - maybe I'm crazy, but that seems like a great deal to not saddle our best, brightest, and youngest people with a ton of debt.
Unfortunately this rule is going to add more administrative overhead while only eliminating 1% of degree choices. People will still attack the philosophy degrees even if those graduates make far above average income. The administration and anti-education crowd will continue to attack critical thinking, and they'll focus on those majors most likely to create people who oppose them (biology, chemistry, other sciences, humanities, anything outside of business).
To any students out there, do yourself a favor: go to community college, do online courses for a degree and masters, do anything you can to avoid paying $50,000+ a year to a university. The "experience" is just summer camp for almost-adults. Focus on your knowledge. Especially with AI having arrived, make conservative financial decisions.