9 ms·

Okay, but how does that translate into policy? Fact 1: Education in the US is very expensive, in large part because the ready availability of loans removes mo

by Lazare 10y ago

Okay, but how does that translate into policy? Fact 1: Education in the US is very expensive, in large part because the ready availability of loans removes most downwards pressure on prices. Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back. Fact 3: If you loan people money without expecting people to pay it back, then it's not a loan, it's a grant. Fact 4: If you offer grants to high school graduates to take non-economically values classes, a lot of them will do so. This pushes up the cost of the education, and pushes down the wages graduates will make, excerbating the problem. > For that reason these fields absolutely should be subsidised Perhaps. But in which case by how much, by whom, and in what fashion? Because offhand offering free arts degrees sounds like one of the worst possible ways you could subsidise art as a field, and one of the best ways you can cause a lot of harm to young people while enriching the existing education institutions and not really advancing art at all. Mind you... > otherwise art becomes about marketing, journalism becomes about propaganda, and science becomes about start-ups... Artists, journalists, and scientists have always had to earn a living. To the best of my knowledge, there was no "golden age". We've never subsidized artists (or scientists, or journalists) in the way you say we should; the future you're afraid of "becoming" is our present and past.

skwosh 10y ago
If I was designing policy? Really all I'm talking about is not defunding/sidelining Arts etc "because it's not financially viable". The idea is really to provide a well rounded education, (giving students a broader perspective on the world, a stronger vocabulary for expressing ideas, etc), as opposed to a purely career focused one. I think it would be detrimental to culture and society in general if everyone was groomed from high-school to only ever consider the safe, paved, career footpath. This may take the form of allowing for more electives in vocational courses, encouragement to take double degrees, or eliminating barriers for later study (letting people change their minds, or even just reskilling when the robots take over). What I was meant by "subsidisation" is just the "somewhat" free education that exists in some places today, but has been more prevalent/widespread in the past. And while prioritising vocational degrees is fine to some extent, crippling participation in the Arts by making those qualifications prohibitively expensive (by not providing loans) is a bad idea imo.
- curun1r 10y ago
  Part of it is just a shift in mentality. When we viewed education as a net benefit to society that society was willing to pay for, there was a natural downward pressure on the cost of education since the public was shouldering most of the burden to educate people. Once we shifted to the mindset where an education was valued based on how much extra money the recipient could make during his/her lifetime, that downward pressure went away and market forces took over. Suddenly it was acceptable to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education because that shift in mentality meant that people would pay that much. The result is our current educational system, where costs have ballooned and administrative and facilities costs dwarf the spending on actual education. I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was an excellent article that traced beginning of our rapidly increasing education costs to the era when Reagan was governor of California and he pushed that shift in mindset. The whole system and all the problems we're experiencing suddenly make perfect sense when you view it from that perspective. I'd personally like to see a hybrid approach. We should identify a core curriculum that leads to a well-educated populace. Things like statistics and formal logic that make it much harder to manipulate people the way that our current politicians and media do. It should be free to study that curriculum. Anything beyond that, including vocational training, could be market based and lenders should consider the likelihood of repayment when loaning money for tuition.
  - skwosh 10y ago
    I agree of course - a society with at least some understanding of statistics, logic, anthropology (of media), etc is essential to a healthy democracy. It would be great to see political/cultural literacy taken more seriously, but the trend as you point out has been in the opposite direction (and has been/will be for some time). Being burdened with debt and not having the choice to pursue further education are the real problems, and can hopefully be solved in a way other than restricting access to those fields. Meanwhile, elsewhere in this thread... it's pretty cynical (but not uncommon) to suggest that one's primary value to society is what they contribute economically (or otherwise validated economically). I'm lucky that the situation is a bit more optimistic here in Australia...
JulianMorrison 10y ago
Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.
- chronic6l 10y ago
  > Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now. Incorrect. This will foster a culture of inferiority because not everyone is equal. No matter what you do, the lower class will be jealous of the upper class and will always demand for more. Money and education is solved? What about universal access to entertainment? Universal food? Universal housing?
  - conanbatt 10y ago
    By this line of argument, its not "incorrect" its just a wall to keep to separate ones of the others. Just because theres always a demand doesnt mean satisfying demands wouldnt make peope happier or better.
- shaftoe 10y ago
  That sounds great, but there's no free lunch and when you ask people to pay (a lot) for something, you're going to get their opinion. Here's mine. I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies. One ultimately builds enough value to support existence, one is primarily done for enjoyment. Education for the former can and should pay for itself over the long haul, so we're discussing who pays for hobby education. Personally, I don't want to pay for other people's hobbies. I've volunteered to teach people some of mine, spending hundreds of hours with educational groups. But, I can't imagine forcing taxpayers to pay for university education in these things.
chrisseaton 10y ago
> Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back But for the vast majority of jobs people don't care what degree you have! In technology yes you often want someone with a particular degree. But if you're hiring a civil servant, a advertising executive, a business consultant, or any one of hundreds of other jobs, you can have any degree you like. I have friends with theology degrees who work in business and earn more than I do in technology with my CS PhD. The companies that hire them value having people with a very wide range of academic backgrounds.
- charlesdm 10y ago
  And that is obviously ridiculous. > I have friends with theology degrees who work in business and earn more than I do in technology with my CS PhD. The companies that hire them value having people with a very wide range of academic backgrounds. That has nothing to do with their degree and everything with their ability. They would probably still get hired without the degree. Degrees only really matter in formal subjects, if you're, say, studying to become a doctor. Attending a good university is not about the degree, it's about the network.
  - chrisseaton 10y ago
    I don't think they would get hired anyway. As I said, their companies value diverse academic backgrounds. Not no academic background. Let's look at some real jobs, outside the technology industry. The UK civil service: "you need, or expect to have, a 2:2 degree in any subject or higher". UK NHS project management role just requires "a degree" (the NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world). Goldman Sachs graduate analyst "open to final year undergraduate and graduate level students from any field of study". That's the reality. They don't care what degree, they just care about a degree. So if you're passionate about art history, get a degree in it. Almost nobody cares.
    - charlesdm 10y ago
      I’m not saying you’re not right, I just think it’s ridiculous. I've met plenty of people with various degrees (BS, MS, Phd) who are stupid as a rock, and I’ve met plenty without a degree who are well rounded individuals / smart as hell / can get the job done. That’s even outside of tech. In the end it really comes down to the individual. Also, as an ability metric it’s an outdated one, and personally I would never pass on an employee just because (s)he doesn’t have a degree. Having a degree doesn't even mean someone will make a good employee. Results are infinitely more important than credentials. Most people just can't get stuff done.
cheiVia0 10y ago
Education should be free.
huxley 10y ago
Those aren't facts, they are premises It is as likely that tying a university degree as the minimum pre-requisite for a decently paying career is driving the price upwards. Increased competition for desirable placements is the classic limited supply high demand scenario. The problem isn't the availability of loans which are just a side effect but the focus of education as a gate to future success. BTW from ancient times up until the last couple of centuries, patronage was often the primary income source for artists and scientists, the rich and powerful would subsidize them, offer sinecures to allow them to create, and the patron would get to show how wealthy and sophisticated they were. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts
- AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
  The first three are definitely facts about the US higher educational system.
- Lazare 10y ago
  Alright. Can you dispute them though? > Increased competition for desirable placements is the classic limited supply high demand scenario. I would suggest that if you believe the issue facing the US higher education system is a limited supply of places, you may not understand the US higher education system. In fact, if you look globally you'll find that the countries with low tuition are the ones who ruthlessly control the number of places. In the US in particular you'll note that we went from around 45% of high school grads enrolling in college in 1970, to 70% enrolling in 2010, even as tuition climbed far faster than inflation. If 70% of all high school grads represents a "limited supply", what do you think the demand is? (The number of places at elite schools is limited. It's actually not hard to explain why Harvard is expensive; the question is why everywhere else is too.) > patronage That was my point; I took skwosh to be arguing against a system where the wealthy purchased art/science/journalism for their own ends; my point is that this is the system we've always had: Private individuals (and latterly, corporations) being patrons of the arts, publishing newspapers, and funding scientific investigation. I believe skwosh was suggesting we move to a system where society as a whole should fund such things via taxation; I was pointing out that we've never had that.
lr4444lr 10y ago
Variable interest levels for different courses of study commensurate with default or late payment likelihood. Required post-graduate government service for those who struggle but are ready to sacrifice. Critical demand area bonuses. There are practical ways to measure and respond to these problems.

by Lazare 10y ago

skwosh 10y ago

If I was designing policy? Really all I'm talking about is not defunding/sidelining Arts etc "because it's not financially viable". The idea is really to provide a well rounded education, (giving students a broader perspective on the world, a stronger vocabulary for expressing ideas, etc), as opposed to a purely career focused one. I think it would be detrimental to culture and society in general if everyone was groomed from high-school to only ever consider the safe, paved, career footpath. This may take the form of allowing for more electives in vocational courses, encouragement to take double degrees, or eliminating barriers for later study (letting people change their minds, or even just reskilling when the robots take over). What I was meant by "subsidisation" is just the "somewhat" free education that exists in some places today, but has been more prevalent/widespread in the past. And while prioritising vocational degrees is fine to some extent, crippling participation in the Arts by making those qualifications prohibitively expensive (by not providing loans) is a bad idea imo.

curun1r 10y ago
Part of it is just a shift in mentality. When we viewed education as a net benefit to society that society was willing to pay for, there was a natural downward pressure on the cost of education since the public was shouldering most of the burden to educate people. Once we shifted to the mindset where an education was valued based on how much extra money the recipient could make during his/her lifetime, that downward pressure went away and market forces took over. Suddenly it was acceptable to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education because that shift in mentality meant that people would pay that much. The result is our current educational system, where costs have ballooned and administrative and facilities costs dwarf the spending on actual education. I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was an excellent article that traced beginning of our rapidly increasing education costs to the era when Reagan was governor of California and he pushed that shift in mindset. The whole system and all the problems we're experiencing suddenly make perfect sense when you view it from that perspective. I'd personally like to see a hybrid approach. We should identify a core curriculum that leads to a well-educated populace. Things like statistics and formal logic that make it much harder to manipulate people the way that our current politicians and media do. It should be free to study that curriculum. Anything beyond that, including vocational training, could be market based and lenders should consider the likelihood of repayment when loaning money for tuition.
- skwosh 10y ago
  I agree of course - a society with at least some understanding of statistics, logic, anthropology (of media), etc is essential to a healthy democracy. It would be great to see political/cultural literacy taken more seriously, but the trend as you point out has been in the opposite direction (and has been/will be for some time). Being burdened with debt and not having the choice to pursue further education are the real problems, and can hopefully be solved in a way other than restricting access to those fields. Meanwhile, elsewhere in this thread... it's pretty cynical (but not uncommon) to suggest that one's primary value to society is what they contribute economically (or otherwise validated economically). I'm lucky that the situation is a bit more optimistic here in Australia...

JulianMorrison 10y ago

Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.

chronic6l 10y ago
> Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now. Incorrect. This will foster a culture of inferiority because not everyone is equal. No matter what you do, the lower class will be jealous of the upper class and will always demand for more. Money and education is solved? What about universal access to entertainment? Universal food? Universal housing?
- conanbatt 10y ago
  By this line of argument, its not "incorrect" its just a wall to keep to separate ones of the others. Just because theres always a demand doesnt mean satisfying demands wouldnt make peope happier or better.
shaftoe 10y ago
That sounds great, but there's no free lunch and when you ask people to pay (a lot) for something, you're going to get their opinion. Here's mine. I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies. One ultimately builds enough value to support existence, one is primarily done for enjoyment. Education for the former can and should pay for itself over the long haul, so we're discussing who pays for hobby education. Personally, I don't want to pay for other people's hobbies. I've volunteered to teach people some of mine, spending hundreds of hours with educational groups. But, I can't imagine forcing taxpayers to pay for university education in these things.

chrisseaton 10y ago

> Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back But for the vast majority of jobs people don't care what degree you have! In technology yes you often want someone with a particular degree. But if you're hiring a civil servant, a advertising executive, a business consultant, or any one of hundreds of other jobs, you can have any degree you like. I have friends with theology degrees who work in business and earn more than I do in technology with my CS PhD. The companies that hire them value having people with a very wide range of academic backgrounds.

charlesdm 10y ago
And that is obviously ridiculous. > I have friends with theology degrees who work in business and earn more than I do in technology with my CS PhD. The companies that hire them value having people with a very wide range of academic backgrounds. That has nothing to do with their degree and everything with their ability. They would probably still get hired without the degree. Degrees only really matter in formal subjects, if you're, say, studying to become a doctor. Attending a good university is not about the degree, it's about the network.
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  I don't think they would get hired anyway. As I said, their companies value diverse academic backgrounds. Not no academic background. Let's look at some real jobs, outside the technology industry. The UK civil service: "you need, or expect to have, a 2:2 degree in any subject or higher". UK NHS project management role just requires "a degree" (the NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world). Goldman Sachs graduate analyst "open to final year undergraduate and graduate level students from any field of study". That's the reality. They don't care what degree, they just care about a degree. So if you're passionate about art history, get a degree in it. Almost nobody cares.
  - charlesdm 10y ago
    I’m not saying you’re not right, I just think it’s ridiculous. I've met plenty of people with various degrees (BS, MS, Phd) who are stupid as a rock, and I’ve met plenty without a degree who are well rounded individuals / smart as hell / can get the job done. That’s even outside of tech. In the end it really comes down to the individual. Also, as an ability metric it’s an outdated one, and personally I would never pass on an employee just because (s)he doesn’t have a degree. Having a degree doesn't even mean someone will make a good employee. Results are infinitely more important than credentials. Most people just can't get stuff done.

cheiVia0 10y ago

Education should be free.

huxley 10y ago

Those aren't facts, they are premises It is as likely that tying a university degree as the minimum pre-requisite for a decently paying career is driving the price upwards. Increased competition for desirable placements is the classic limited supply high demand scenario. The problem isn't the availability of loans which are just a side effect but the focus of education as a gate to future success. BTW from ancient times up until the last couple of centuries, patronage was often the primary income source for artists and scientists, the rich and powerful would subsidize them, offer sinecures to allow them to create, and the patron would get to show how wealthy and sophisticated they were. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts

AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
The first three are definitely facts about the US higher educational system.
Lazare 10y ago
Alright. Can you dispute them though? > Increased competition for desirable placements is the classic limited supply high demand scenario. I would suggest that if you believe the issue facing the US higher education system is a limited supply of places, you may not understand the US higher education system. In fact, if you look globally you'll find that the countries with low tuition are the ones who ruthlessly control the number of places. In the US in particular you'll note that we went from around 45% of high school grads enrolling in college in 1970, to 70% enrolling in 2010, even as tuition climbed far faster than inflation. If 70% of all high school grads represents a "limited supply", what do you think the demand is? (The number of places at elite schools is limited. It's actually not hard to explain why Harvard is expensive; the question is why everywhere else is too.) > patronage That was my point; I took skwosh to be arguing against a system where the wealthy purchased art/science/journalism for their own ends; my point is that this is the system we've always had: Private individuals (and latterly, corporations) being patrons of the arts, publishing newspapers, and funding scientific investigation. I believe skwosh was suggesting we move to a system where society as a whole should fund such things via taxation; I was pointing out that we've never had that.

lr4444lr 10y ago

Variable interest levels for different courses of study commensurate with default or late payment likelihood. Required post-graduate government service for those who struggle but are ready to sacrifice. Critical demand area bonuses. There are practical ways to measure and respond to these problems.