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How'd we get here? We hyped up college: It is your goal in life to go to send your kids to college. Everybody has to go to college. If you don't go to colle

How'd we get here? We hyped up college: It is your goal in life to go to send your kids to college. Everybody has to go to college. If you don't go to college you will fail. Nobody talked about college as an investment: College isn't just another step in life. It is an investment. $75K for college makes sense if you will get a degree that enables you to get an income of $120K. It does not make sense to invest $75K in a degree that might get you an income of $40K. We didn't tie the loan to the degree being obtained: Do we need workers with this degree? Is there a glut of people with this degree? Etc.

bsder 10y ago
> We didn't tie the loan to the degree being obtained: Do we need workers with this degree? Is there a glut of people with this degree? That's what being able to discharge a loan via bankruptcy would do. Unfortunately, when they redid bankruptcy laws so you couldn't discharge student loans that way, the current situation became practically inevitable.
- cloverich 10y ago
  I'd love to see more discussion on this. On the one hand -- allow bankruptcy and this problem literally can't exist. Further, with the rule in hand, endless tuition increases seem inevitable (because its easy to take out larger loans). But on the other, without that rule, loans to lower income individuals wouldn't happen, and discrimination would be practically inevitable. (this is how I believe the arguments on either side go).
  - blisterpeanuts 10y ago
    You can't allow bankruptcy because there's no collateral to these loans, only the vague promise that the borrower will use their degree to make a good income some day. For example, home mortgages are breakable because the bank gets the house. What does the bank get when you break your Sallie Mae loan? Zero. Only the government would lend money knowing the borrower might never pay it back. They might as well be honest and just subsidize tuition, in that case.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > You can't allow bankruptcy because there's no collateral to these loans Unsecured loans are often dischargeable in bankruptcy (even student loans are, though its harder than most other unsecured loans.) The idea that only secured loans can be discharged in bankruptcy is false. > Only the government would lend money knowing the borrower might never pay it back. Obviously false, as private insitutions do issue unsecured credit that is dischargeable in bankruptcy.
      - seiferteric 10y ago
        Sure, but then the interest rates on student loans would by necessity be much higher.
  - jasode 10y ago
    >allow bankruptcy and this problem literally can't exist. You're just creating a different problem. Back when school loans could be discharged, a new doctor could declare bankruptcy immediately after medical school to wipe out the $200k in student debt. Well, if you allow that "moral hazard", it means the price (a.k.a. interest rates) for those loans must increase to account for the increase in defaults and worthless loans. It means poorer people can't go to school because the interest rates loans are too high. Tweak the economic game and you get a different problem instead of solving all problems. The doctor/lawyer/engineer wipes out the school loans but the banks can't take back the "education" in the graduates' brains. The graduates go on to earn a living and the banks get nothing. In other words, it's an unsecured loan. There are other unsecured loans that can be discharged such as credit cards. But their interest rates of 22% reflect the higher risks of nonpayment and no significant recovery of money when liquidating debtor's assets in bankruptcy court. Student loans are 6% instead of 22% interest rate[1][2]. They don't have to so high because they can't be discharged (easily) and they are guaranteed by the government. [1]https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/about/announcements/interest-rate https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/about/announcements/interest-ra... [2]http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-interest-rates http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-interest-rat...
    - dalke 10y ago
      "A different problem" indeed, but ones that most other countries solve by not having an expensive medical program which requires students to acquire $200K of personal debt first. As an extreme case, Cuba uses "medical diplomacy" to train foreign students to be doctors, including students from the US who want to work in poor and rural areas in the US and don't want to be $100K+ in debt.
    - iofj 10y ago
      > Student loans are 6% instead of 22% interest rate[1][2]. They don't have to so high because they can't be discharged and they are guaranteed by the government. Maybe we should allow people to sell themselves and their future families into eternal servitude for loans ? We could have 1% student loans ! Hurray ! This is effectively slavery, and it should be illegal.
carsongross 10y ago
We also started offering effectively unlimited loans for college, guaranteed them and made them bankruptcy-proof. As with housing, irresponsible loans due to financialization is the root of the issue.
panic 10y ago
And a lot of that hype is based on a misunderstanding of statistics: just because people with degrees get paid more on average doesn't mean you'll get paid more after getting a degree.
rhino369 10y ago
Another problem is that we treat college as this unique experience that must be tailored to the individual. It's so important that you shouldn't even price shop! Just go to the best school you can! People look down on community colleges. They overvalue private schools. They hype up slight differences in quality of education or job placement. Schools compete on amenities and prestige rather than cost. So costs keep going up. The feds shouldn't loan to anyone who doesn't already have 60 credits. And private loans should be dischargible in bankruptcy. Also GradPlus and ParentPlus loans should have caps. The Feds will loan someone going to Columbia Lawschool 90k a year. It's stupid.
- some-guy 10y ago
  Coming from the "investment" perspective later in life (got my CS degree at age 26, I'm 29 now), Community College was a no-brainer. A lot of the Ivy League folks at my current coding job are "surprised" that I started at a CC. I went transferred to a UC, and the CC classes were smaller, the teachers were of better quality, and they were more accessible whenever I needed help. But no, we sell college as the entire "package" -- Getting laid in the dorms, doing MDMA, getting away from your parents for the first time, etc. This "package" has added costs.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  I used to look down on community colleges until I realized all the super hot J-1 visa holders that would take obligatory bullshit courses at them. Eye opener right there, I like limited competition.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Well, the interesting thing is that for many middle-income students, the best school they can go to is also the cheapest. A lot of top schools give very, very generous need-based aid. College is a very interesting market where it is capitalist for the wealthy and for second tier and below (and indeed, is more capitalist the lower the quality of the education, as you get to for-profit schools), but is basically entirely socialist for the bulk of the student body at elite schools.
  - 10y ago
dominotw 10y ago
>We hyped up college: It is your goal in life to go to send your kids to college. Everybody has to go to college. I've seen many of my friends spend all their income on house/rent just to live in a good school district. There is no way they are going to let their kids not go to college, they have already created a narrative, a spiral for their kids, no way a kid can escape college at this point. Sunken cost bias. They spend thousand of dollars on all kinds of things like swimming, piano, ballet, science clubs, coding clubs, robotic clubs, social work club ect. All gears towards making their Stanford application look good. There is no stopping now, wheels are already in motion, full speed ahead. Kid's view of his life is a hero who lives up to expectations, against all odds. Each test is a battle that must be won. He has been raised on a constant diet of praises for his 'good work', his mind conditioned to keep the praises coming at all costs. The narrative has been set, love is love of success, fear is fear of failure.
- superuser2 10y ago
  The tech community is sort of unique in refusing to acknowledge any meaningful difference in the quality of education and research taking place at different institutions. It may be imprudent to set up your child's life according to "all educations in a given field are created equal" if their interest turns out to be in a field that doesn't agree.
  - dominotw 10y ago
    >if their interest turns out to be in a field that doesn't agree. I always wondered how 'interests' come into being. Would love to read more about this if anyone has pointers.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - analog31 10y ago
      Some of my parents' interests rubbed off on me. I think it was because they treated those interests as things with inherent value, even if that value was just pure enjoyment, rather than as hoops to jump through en route to a lucrative career. A lot of my interests were due to what I might call peer pressure of the good kind, i.e., they were things that my friends talked about at school, such as music, electronics, and computers. The only thing I can suggest is to surround your kids with interesting things and interesting people. We're fortunate to live in a neighborhood where you can't swing a cat without hitting someone with an interesting occupation, ranging from academics to artists and musicians.
wvenable 10y ago
I agree with this but there is a much more subtle problem now. Because there are so many people with degrees, you need a degree to get a decent job. If you don't have a degree, your resume is just filtered away.
- jhallenworld 10y ago
  Yes demand is way up: http://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollment-and-projections-in-public-and-private-institutions/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollm... Basically there are not enough well paying middle-class jobs due to productivity gains, automation, globalization, and working women.
- SilasX 10y ago
  Which people then use as further evidence of the need to go to college, and of the social return to having a more educated workforce, and therefore to further increase public subsides to help people get more degrees. The great circle of lost purpose.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
wtvanhest 10y ago
This comment is slightly off topic... One thing that really bothers me are the tax rules applied to different types of interest. For people that buy a home, they can write off 100% of the interest. For someone with $100k in grad loans and a high salary, but living in an expensive city, they can only right off $3k in interest. Why does the person 'investing' in their education not able to get the same tax benefit as the person buying a home to enjoy? This tax inequity disproportionately favors the wealthy.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  Because even before we decided that everybody must attend college, we decided that everybody must own a house.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  (1) Student loans are subsidized. (2) $3k goes a long way, considering the low rates due to #1. Sure, it may not be the interest for all 100k, but jeez, don't do that.
  - wtvanhest 10y ago
    (1) Student loans on undergrad are subsidize, most grad loans are not. Many law students have over $200,000 in loans, most of which exceed 7% interest. Medical loans are up there too. (2) "don't do that." For many professionals it makes sense to pull out $100k in loans to rapidly increase their income / move jobs etc. Just because it goes a long way does not mean it is sufficient. I am speaking to the inequity of the situation, which IMO is really terrible.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      Yes, I was thinking of undergrad.
- Mz 10y ago
  I owned a 3 bedroom house in Kansas that didn't qualify for any write off, but I benefitted from writing off my student loan interest (and it was never $3k). So, these numbers are not some one-size-fits-all situation. Trying to make policies that work equally well for a wide variety of situations is nigh impossible.
matwood 10y ago
Maybe this is a get off my lawn thing, or I'm just old. I graduated undergrad in Dec. '99. My parents and grandparents always told me college was an investment. It was not some place to go party or experience, it was a place to get an education and hopefully lead to a better job. When I started, doctor/lawyer was the obvious pushed path (I was pre-med for 2 semesters). If I had come home with some clearly bad major I would have been smacked in the head. When I switched to CS, I had to convince my parents it was a good move because they were not particularly tech savvy. Maybe it is because I grew up with very little, but college was never a 'do what you love' or 'go for the experience'. It was 100% about making sure that I didn't have scrape together change to put gas in the car or buy some food ever again. I just so happened to be extremely lucky, because I love programming, computers and technology.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  Of course, now, law is still an obvious pushed path and also a horrible investment.
  - matwood 10y ago
    Things change of course. Older lawyers I know are doing and have done fine. I do not know many younger lawyers, but the ones I know are doing oil and gas, and have done very well for themselves. One of the best developers I work with has a law degree :)
- superuser2 10y ago
  Problem is, in the 60s/70s/80s, you really could go get a humanities degree for the experience at a state flagship school, and you could reasonably pay for the whole thing with a part-time minimum wage job. At current prices, perhaps the job-training-investment view is the only reasonable one to take, but we'd like to know why the prices have risen so much and see if we can't knock them back down so that the experiential-rite-of-passage approach becomes not-insane again.
cylinder 10y ago
You're over thinking it. Germans hype higher education and they don't have this issue. We flooded the market with virtually unlimited credit and didn't regulate prices. You don't even need Intro to Economics to know this would happen.
fefifofu 10y ago
I'm not from US and it's always weird to watch NFL on TV and hear the pro players introduce themselves and their college: "Peyton Manning, Tennessee".
- KevinEldon 10y ago
  College football is a huge institution and money maker. 100k attendees to college football games in the South Eastern US is a norm. It's like a minor league for the NFL. Most of the schools represented are excellent, but not necessarily academically better for general education or undergrad work.... Although being an alum in the region can be helpful in firming work.
- jpindar 10y ago
  The NFL doesn't require a college degree - it's just that playing college football is by far the best way to learn how to play professional football and to get noticed by the NFL teams. Most college players don't go on to be successful in the NFL, but for those who do, college was a very good investment.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Is it even an investment? I thought most college football players were there on scholarships. Or has TV warped my view?
    - jpindar 10y ago
      Oh, right. Most of them are on scholarships. But not all, at least not for their freshman year.
dalke 10y ago
> "Nobody talked about college as an investment" To the contrary, college as an personal investment has been the driving force behind the increase in price for American universities for decades. Here's a 1976 newspaper article on the topic, which suggests that the analysis of college as an investment wasn't new even then: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=110&dat=19761113&id=R_dOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=40sDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2536,3815822&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=110&dat=19761113&id=R... and people both pro- and against an emphasis on getting a college education used "investment" to argue their point. Here's a 2002 article where a higher-education advocate asserts that while not all students may view college as an investment, "I'm sure parents do." https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=266&dat=20020718&id=RPcrAAAAIBAJ&sjid=FG0FAAAAIBAJ&pg=1154,1572678&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=266&dat=20020718&id=R... . This is a far cry from "nobody talked about college as an investment." Here's a 1988 article on the high price of college, where a college president says "It became clear that young people were seeing college as an investment and that price was less important as a result" - https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19880323&id=5k0yAAAAIBAJ&sjid=QOYFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1742,5779715&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19880323&id=... That last shows the connection I proposed in my first paragraph. My belief is that an increasing focus on "college as investment" will mean the price of college will rise until it's just under the expected increase in lifetime income. Also, if this is a real investment, then multiple people should be allowed to invest, and not just the student. If companies want to hire college-trained chemists, they should be funding colleges for that, or funding employees or giving scholarships to get a college education. Otherwise it comes across as pushing training costs from the company onto the student, yes? The 1976 article argues that college-educated people are also more informed citizens and more likely to use non-violent solutions for a problem. Is that not a useful investment that the community itself should invest in, even if there is a glut of people with a mathematics degree? If so, this isn't really raising taxes as a cost, but investing in the future of the community, yes? Yet it always seems in these debates that only the teenager is considered competent enough to make the correct investment decision on taking on what may be decades of personal debt.
scarface74 10y ago
Spending $75K on college doesn't make sense for $120K a year. Any degree that is in demand enough to earn 120K a year you could probably get from going to a state school a lot cheaper. You could probably stay at home, go to Jr college and transfer.
nikdaheratik 10y ago
The State University systems also got defunded in a major way all across the country. I took the less expensive in-state option before the latest rounds of cuts and still ended up with $20K or so. If I had went today, there's a chance it would have been closer to $30K or more, and it hasn't been that long. And how can we know what will be needed 5-10 years in the future? Granted, there are some that are long-shots for ever being worth borrowing for, but even professional degrees like Law have taken a major downturn that no one predicted.

bsder 10y ago

> We didn't tie the loan to the degree being obtained: Do we need workers with this degree? Is there a glut of people with this degree? That's what being able to discharge a loan via bankruptcy would do. Unfortunately, when they redid bankruptcy laws so you couldn't discharge student loans that way, the current situation became practically inevitable.

cloverich 10y ago
I'd love to see more discussion on this. On the one hand -- allow bankruptcy and this problem literally can't exist. Further, with the rule in hand, endless tuition increases seem inevitable (because its easy to take out larger loans). But on the other, without that rule, loans to lower income individuals wouldn't happen, and discrimination would be practically inevitable. (this is how I believe the arguments on either side go).
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  You can't allow bankruptcy because there's no collateral to these loans, only the vague promise that the borrower will use their degree to make a good income some day. For example, home mortgages are breakable because the bank gets the house. What does the bank get when you break your Sallie Mae loan? Zero. Only the government would lend money knowing the borrower might never pay it back. They might as well be honest and just subsidize tuition, in that case.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > You can't allow bankruptcy because there's no collateral to these loans Unsecured loans are often dischargeable in bankruptcy (even student loans are, though its harder than most other unsecured loans.) The idea that only secured loans can be discharged in bankruptcy is false. > Only the government would lend money knowing the borrower might never pay it back. Obviously false, as private insitutions do issue unsecured credit that is dischargeable in bankruptcy.
    - seiferteric 10y ago
      Sure, but then the interest rates on student loans would by necessity be much higher.
- jasode 10y ago
  >allow bankruptcy and this problem literally can't exist. You're just creating a different problem. Back when school loans could be discharged, a new doctor could declare bankruptcy immediately after medical school to wipe out the $200k in student debt. Well, if you allow that "moral hazard", it means the price (a.k.a. interest rates) for those loans must increase to account for the increase in defaults and worthless loans. It means poorer people can't go to school because the interest rates loans are too high. Tweak the economic game and you get a different problem instead of solving all problems. The doctor/lawyer/engineer wipes out the school loans but the banks can't take back the "education" in the graduates' brains. The graduates go on to earn a living and the banks get nothing. In other words, it's an unsecured loan. There are other unsecured loans that can be discharged such as credit cards. But their interest rates of 22% reflect the higher risks of nonpayment and no significant recovery of money when liquidating debtor's assets in bankruptcy court. Student loans are 6% instead of 22% interest rate[1][2]. They don't have to so high because they can't be discharged (easily) and they are guaranteed by the government. [1]https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/about/announcements/interest-rate https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/about/announcements/interest-ra... [2]http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-interest-rates http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-interest-rat...
  - dalke 10y ago
    "A different problem" indeed, but ones that most other countries solve by not having an expensive medical program which requires students to acquire $200K of personal debt first. As an extreme case, Cuba uses "medical diplomacy" to train foreign students to be doctors, including students from the US who want to work in poor and rural areas in the US and don't want to be $100K+ in debt.
  - iofj 10y ago
    > Student loans are 6% instead of 22% interest rate[1][2]. They don't have to so high because they can't be discharged and they are guaranteed by the government. Maybe we should allow people to sell themselves and their future families into eternal servitude for loans ? We could have 1% student loans ! Hurray ! This is effectively slavery, and it should be illegal.

carsongross 10y ago

We also started offering effectively unlimited loans for college, guaranteed them and made them bankruptcy-proof. As with housing, irresponsible loans due to financialization is the root of the issue.

panic 10y ago

And a lot of that hype is based on a misunderstanding of statistics: just because people with degrees get paid more on average doesn't mean you'll get paid more after getting a degree.

rhino369 10y ago

Another problem is that we treat college as this unique experience that must be tailored to the individual. It's so important that you shouldn't even price shop! Just go to the best school you can! People look down on community colleges. They overvalue private schools. They hype up slight differences in quality of education or job placement. Schools compete on amenities and prestige rather than cost. So costs keep going up. The feds shouldn't loan to anyone who doesn't already have 60 credits. And private loans should be dischargible in bankruptcy. Also GradPlus and ParentPlus loans should have caps. The Feds will loan someone going to Columbia Lawschool 90k a year. It's stupid.

some-guy 10y ago
Coming from the "investment" perspective later in life (got my CS degree at age 26, I'm 29 now), Community College was a no-brainer. A lot of the Ivy League folks at my current coding job are "surprised" that I started at a CC. I went transferred to a UC, and the CC classes were smaller, the teachers were of better quality, and they were more accessible whenever I needed help. But no, we sell college as the entire "package" -- Getting laid in the dorms, doing MDMA, getting away from your parents for the first time, etc. This "package" has added costs.
cloudjacker 10y ago
I used to look down on community colleges until I realized all the super hot J-1 visa holders that would take obligatory bullshit courses at them. Eye opener right there, I like limited competition.
nostrademons 10y ago
Well, the interesting thing is that for many middle-income students, the best school they can go to is also the cheapest. A lot of top schools give very, very generous need-based aid. College is a very interesting market where it is capitalist for the wealthy and for second tier and below (and indeed, is more capitalist the lower the quality of the education, as you get to for-profit schools), but is basically entirely socialist for the bulk of the student body at elite schools.
- 10y ago

dominotw 10y ago

>We hyped up college: It is your goal in life to go to send your kids to college. Everybody has to go to college. I've seen many of my friends spend all their income on house/rent just to live in a good school district. There is no way they are going to let their kids not go to college, they have already created a narrative, a spiral for their kids, no way a kid can escape college at this point. Sunken cost bias. They spend thousand of dollars on all kinds of things like swimming, piano, ballet, science clubs, coding clubs, robotic clubs, social work club ect. All gears towards making their Stanford application look good. There is no stopping now, wheels are already in motion, full speed ahead. Kid's view of his life is a hero who lives up to expectations, against all odds. Each test is a battle that must be won. He has been raised on a constant diet of praises for his 'good work', his mind conditioned to keep the praises coming at all costs. The narrative has been set, love is love of success, fear is fear of failure.

superuser2 10y ago
The tech community is sort of unique in refusing to acknowledge any meaningful difference in the quality of education and research taking place at different institutions. It may be imprudent to set up your child's life according to "all educations in a given field are created equal" if their interest turns out to be in a field that doesn't agree.
- dominotw 10y ago
  >if their interest turns out to be in a field that doesn't agree. I always wondered how 'interests' come into being. Would love to read more about this if anyone has pointers.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - analog31 10y ago
    Some of my parents' interests rubbed off on me. I think it was because they treated those interests as things with inherent value, even if that value was just pure enjoyment, rather than as hoops to jump through en route to a lucrative career. A lot of my interests were due to what I might call peer pressure of the good kind, i.e., they were things that my friends talked about at school, such as music, electronics, and computers. The only thing I can suggest is to surround your kids with interesting things and interesting people. We're fortunate to live in a neighborhood where you can't swing a cat without hitting someone with an interesting occupation, ranging from academics to artists and musicians.

wvenable 10y ago

I agree with this but there is a much more subtle problem now. Because there are so many people with degrees, you need a degree to get a decent job. If you don't have a degree, your resume is just filtered away.

jhallenworld 10y ago
Yes demand is way up: http://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollment-and-projections-in-public-and-private-institutions/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollm... Basically there are not enough well paying middle-class jobs due to productivity gains, automation, globalization, and working women.
SilasX 10y ago
Which people then use as further evidence of the need to go to college, and of the social return to having a more educated workforce, and therefore to further increase public subsides to help people get more degrees. The great circle of lost purpose.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

wtvanhest 10y ago

This comment is slightly off topic... One thing that really bothers me are the tax rules applied to different types of interest. For people that buy a home, they can write off 100% of the interest. For someone with $100k in grad loans and a high salary, but living in an expensive city, they can only right off $3k in interest. Why does the person 'investing' in their education not able to get the same tax benefit as the person buying a home to enjoy? This tax inequity disproportionately favors the wealthy.

tedunangst 10y ago
Because even before we decided that everybody must attend college, we decided that everybody must own a house.
paulddraper 10y ago
(1) Student loans are subsidized. (2) $3k goes a long way, considering the low rates due to #1. Sure, it may not be the interest for all 100k, but jeez, don't do that.
- wtvanhest 10y ago
  (1) Student loans on undergrad are subsidize, most grad loans are not. Many law students have over $200,000 in loans, most of which exceed 7% interest. Medical loans are up there too. (2) "don't do that." For many professionals it makes sense to pull out $100k in loans to rapidly increase their income / move jobs etc. Just because it goes a long way does not mean it is sufficient. I am speaking to the inequity of the situation, which IMO is really terrible.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    Yes, I was thinking of undergrad.
Mz 10y ago
I owned a 3 bedroom house in Kansas that didn't qualify for any write off, but I benefitted from writing off my student loan interest (and it was never $3k). So, these numbers are not some one-size-fits-all situation. Trying to make policies that work equally well for a wide variety of situations is nigh impossible.

matwood 10y ago

Maybe this is a get off my lawn thing, or I'm just old. I graduated undergrad in Dec. '99. My parents and grandparents always told me college was an investment. It was not some place to go party or experience, it was a place to get an education and hopefully lead to a better job. When I started, doctor/lawyer was the obvious pushed path (I was pre-med for 2 semesters). If I had come home with some clearly bad major I would have been smacked in the head. When I switched to CS, I had to convince my parents it was a good move because they were not particularly tech savvy. Maybe it is because I grew up with very little, but college was never a 'do what you love' or 'go for the experience'. It was 100% about making sure that I didn't have scrape together change to put gas in the car or buy some food ever again. I just so happened to be extremely lucky, because I love programming, computers and technology.

TheCoelacanth 10y ago
Of course, now, law is still an obvious pushed path and also a horrible investment.
- matwood 10y ago
  Things change of course. Older lawyers I know are doing and have done fine. I do not know many younger lawyers, but the ones I know are doing oil and gas, and have done very well for themselves. One of the best developers I work with has a law degree :)
superuser2 10y ago
Problem is, in the 60s/70s/80s, you really could go get a humanities degree for the experience at a state flagship school, and you could reasonably pay for the whole thing with a part-time minimum wage job. At current prices, perhaps the job-training-investment view is the only reasonable one to take, but we'd like to know why the prices have risen so much and see if we can't knock them back down so that the experiential-rite-of-passage approach becomes not-insane again.

cylinder 10y ago

You're over thinking it. Germans hype higher education and they don't have this issue. We flooded the market with virtually unlimited credit and didn't regulate prices. You don't even need Intro to Economics to know this would happen.

fefifofu 10y ago

I'm not from US and it's always weird to watch NFL on TV and hear the pro players introduce themselves and their college: "Peyton Manning, Tennessee".

KevinEldon 10y ago
College football is a huge institution and money maker. 100k attendees to college football games in the South Eastern US is a norm. It's like a minor league for the NFL. Most of the schools represented are excellent, but not necessarily academically better for general education or undergrad work.... Although being an alum in the region can be helpful in firming work.
jpindar 10y ago
The NFL doesn't require a college degree - it's just that playing college football is by far the best way to learn how to play professional football and to get noticed by the NFL teams. Most college players don't go on to be successful in the NFL, but for those who do, college was a very good investment.
- flukus 10y ago
  Is it even an investment? I thought most college football players were there on scholarships. Or has TV warped my view?
  - jpindar 10y ago
    Oh, right. Most of them are on scholarships. But not all, at least not for their freshman year.

dalke 10y ago

> "Nobody talked about college as an investment" To the contrary, college as an personal investment has been the driving force behind the increase in price for American universities for decades. Here's a 1976 newspaper article on the topic, which suggests that the analysis of college as an investment wasn't new even then: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=110&dat=19761113&id=R_dOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=40sDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2536,3815822&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=110&dat=19761113&id=R... and people both pro- and against an emphasis on getting a college education used "investment" to argue their point. Here's a 2002 article where a higher-education advocate asserts that while not all students may view college as an investment, "I'm sure parents do." https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=266&dat=20020718&id=RPcrAAAAIBAJ&sjid=FG0FAAAAIBAJ&pg=1154,1572678&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=266&dat=20020718&id=R... . This is a far cry from "nobody talked about college as an investment." Here's a 1988 article on the high price of college, where a college president says "It became clear that young people were seeing college as an investment and that price was less important as a result" - https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19880323&id=5k0yAAAAIBAJ&sjid=QOYFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1742,5779715&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19880323&id=... That last shows the connection I proposed in my first paragraph. My belief is that an increasing focus on "college as investment" will mean the price of college will rise until it's just under the expected increase in lifetime income. Also, if this is a real investment, then multiple people should be allowed to invest, and not just the student. If companies want to hire college-trained chemists, they should be funding colleges for that, or funding employees or giving scholarships to get a college education. Otherwise it comes across as pushing training costs from the company onto the student, yes? The 1976 article argues that college-educated people are also more informed citizens and more likely to use non-violent solutions for a problem. Is that not a useful investment that the community itself should invest in, even if there is a glut of people with a mathematics degree? If so, this isn't really raising taxes as a cost, but investing in the future of the community, yes? Yet it always seems in these debates that only the teenager is considered competent enough to make the correct investment decision on taking on what may be decades of personal debt.

scarface74 10y ago

Spending $75K on college doesn't make sense for $120K a year. Any degree that is in demand enough to earn 120K a year you could probably get from going to a state school a lot cheaper. You could probably stay at home, go to Jr college and transfer.

nikdaheratik 10y ago

The State University systems also got defunded in a major way all across the country. I took the less expensive in-state option before the latest rounds of cuts and still ended up with $20K or so. If I had went today, there's a chance it would have been closer to $30K or more, and it hasn't been that long. And how can we know what will be needed 5-10 years in the future? Granted, there are some that are long-shots for ever being worth borrowing for, but even professional degrees like Law have taken a major downturn that no one predicted.