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College costs are, IMO, entirely because student loans removed the need for colleges to compete on price. Regardless of cost and value, students could get loans

College costs are, IMO, entirely because student loans removed the need for colleges to compete on price. Regardless of cost and value, students could get loans to cover it. So in order to compete, institutions branched out into what's basically bling, with sports being a salient example. There's also a fundamental economic pressure from non-education productivity. It takes just as many man-hours to teach a class, but those man-hours would go further growing potatos or making widgets. I have a suspicion that the problem can't be supplied out of. Not everyone can have the nicest house in the neighborhood, no matter how many nice houses you build. It wasn't that long ago that high-school education or the equivalent was something that set you apart and ahead. Now it's just kind of an assumed requirement. I'm afraid that making an undergraduate degree ubiquitous would make a master's degree the new bachelor's. In some fields, this is already happening.

stinkytaco 10y ago
That's a fair enough point. You simply keep raising the bar for how much education people need. But I don't think that's a problem of job seeking or education, but of the economy in general. There are simply fewer things for people to do. I'm no Marxist, but it does seem glaringly obvious to me that since the industrial revolution we have made more things with machines, requiring fewer people. For a while increased consumerism meant we could re-purpose people into making new stuff, and when that was automated we could shuffle them into service jobs, but there's a cap on that. Increasingly, only the most qualified people will be able to do the fewer and fewer things there are to do. That's why college is so important. There's no chance without it. But I do think the supply can be solved. I think "everyone gets loans" oversimplify the issue because most institutions are state run, there isn't really much competition in the free-market sense of the word. Because the government controls the bulk of higher education in the US, we are in a better position to solve this problem than any other discussed. Part of it is to start supporting it again. Return grant programs and create real financial aid so people who need money can get it and people who don't aren't forced to take it.

stinkytaco 10y ago

That's a fair enough point. You simply keep raising the bar for how much education people need. But I don't think that's a problem of job seeking or education, but of the economy in general. There are simply fewer things for people to do. I'm no Marxist, but it does seem glaringly obvious to me that since the industrial revolution we have made more things with machines, requiring fewer people. For a while increased consumerism meant we could re-purpose people into making new stuff, and when that was automated we could shuffle them into service jobs, but there's a cap on that. Increasingly, only the most qualified people will be able to do the fewer and fewer things there are to do. That's why college is so important. There's no chance without it. But I do think the supply can be solved. I think "everyone gets loans" oversimplify the issue because most institutions are state run, there isn't really much competition in the free-market sense of the word. Because the government controls the bulk of higher education in the US, we are in a better position to solve this problem than any other discussed. Part of it is to start supporting it again. Return grant programs and create real financial aid so people who need money can get it and people who don't aren't forced to take it.