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Education is important. Access to education is important. But our current system of giving out student loans with no regard to if the student will ever have a r

Education is important. Access to education is important. But our current system of giving out student loans with no regard to if the student will ever have a realistic ability to repay borders on predatory. If we can't do anything to solve that portion of the problem, we should at least restrict the mandatory fees that are tacked on for non instructional purposes. No student should have to pay for decades to prop up with school's sports ambitions. For every Alabama that makes a profit off of sports, there are dozens of Georgia States that impose ridiculous mandatory fees on students to balance the budget of the athletics department. Athletics are easy to pick on because they're the most visible but most schools have a whole list of these non instructional fees that students must pay, in most cases, go into debt to pay or be denied access to education. After removing the mandatory fees, also limit how much of the tuition can be used for non instructional purposes. Every institution has overhead that must exist to keep things operational but there must be a limit to how much or we're once again either denying access to education or condemning students to an overwhelming debt burden. Instruction of course isn't the only mission of most universities. Research is important. Extension is important. There are many worthwhile activities universities engage in that should continue but not at the expense of access to instruction. edit: spacing

Shivetya 8y ago
People have been fine with Medicade/Medicare spelling out costs for services and such they should be willing to accept the same in higher education to obtain a Federally backed loan. Schools will trip over themselves to offer degree programs to meet Federal Assistance requirements. Each degree, each course credit leading to that degree, should all be subject to review on a periodic basis to insure that the needs of the country as a whole are being supported. Colleges which fall outside the loan guarantees will obviously find methods to insure students can attend, by steering endowment funds and sponsorships.
- iguy 8y ago
  > each course credit ... should all be subject to review on a periodic basis ... needs of the country This sounds horrifying. You want every change of a course to go via some central bureaucracy for approval? This bureaucracy will be staffed by ideologically neutral disinterested angels, regardless of which party is in power? I think there's a much more free-market solution here. Cap student loan payments at 15% of taxable income, written off after 20 years. Then they can never be a crushing burden, and lenders will become very picky about who (and for what course, and where) they make loans to. And 17-year-olds will be presented with highly relevant individualised information about the likely outcomes of different options. And it'll also create some jobs for the coming glut of machine-learning people, to make these predictions...
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    The predictable outcome will be a glut of professionals with high-prospect degrees which will actually drive wages down in those fields, while useful-but-low-prospect careers - nursing, the arts, teaching - will continue to be underfunded and underpaid. There's already more than enough "ideologically neutral disinterested" distortion of social value created by so-called free markets everywhere else in the economy. If free markets were going to solve university education they'd have done it by now - just as they've been promising to for decades now.
    - iguy 8y ago
      Nurses might be a good benchmark for setting this up -- google says "Registered Nurses made a median salary of $70,000" which sounds to me like they'd be a decent bet. Training lots of people in currently high-wage jobs would be precisely the point -- those high wages are the signal that the economy could use more of them. If there are professions which can't be funded this way (which means that right now, those employed in them never pay off their debt) which we would like to subsidise, then let's do that directly, give out music scholarships etc. The "so-called free market" in education is responding to incentives we are providing it, which are really terrible.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
      > If free markets were going to solve university education they'd have done it by now - just as they've been promising to for decades now. The market in university education is not free, though. There are significant distortions induced by the various loan and scholarship policies enforced at both the federal and state level. Has "the free market" been promising to solve university education? Is such a thing even an entity capable of making a promise? As far as I can tell, it's totally uninterested in doing so. Most reputable educational institutions are not for profit. The for profit ones seem almost entirely taken with the problem of bilking students and taxpayers by providing shoddy goods at outrageous prices and exploiting the student loan regime and ignorant customers. The university education system and the free market are, as far as I can tell, basically uninvolved with one another. FWIW, I don't think the free market would solve university education either, for entirely foreseeable reasons. In a completely free market, universities and lenders would bet on the affluent, and the poor would be left out in the cold to an even greater extent than they currently are. But on the other hand, it's hard to blame the free market for the current state of affairs.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  > Schools will trip over themselves to offer degree programs to meet Federal Assistance requirements. Each degree, each course credit leading to that degree, should all be subject to review on a periodic basis to insure that the needs of the country as a whole are being supported. Central planning of education? Do you really want such control ceded to a handful of unelected bureaucrats? The Medicare/Medicaid system's costs have risen by leaps and bounds every year since their inception. That is not a model one would want to emulate for lowering education costs.
wtvanhest 8y ago
If we are being honest, sports and minor non-instructional costs are minor vs the cost of small classrooms and professors. We need to vastly cut costs and sports and non-instructional costs wont move the needle.
- briandear 8y ago
  For many schools, sports are a profit center. Texas A&M for example, makes several hundred million per year from their sports. Schools like NYU with their insane tuition doesn’t even have big sports, yet it’s one of the most expensive schools around.
  - votepaunchy 8y ago
    > Texas A&M for example, makes several hundred million per year from their sports. A few schools earn direct profits of about $10 million per year from their athletic budgets. Texas A&M's increased revenue is related to stadium renovations. http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/# http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/#
- zanny 8y ago
  The fact that many universities have tenured masters of their domain still having to, even with as many grad students as can fill a lecture hall, oversee 100 level courses that would fit in better at middle school than university is ridiculous. Good professors are an extremely expensive thing to have, and students of merit deserve time with such masters that maximizes knowledge transfer. That almost always means not having regimented, graded curriculum taught by lecture from one singular book, but that is how almost all university courses operate. Any time a professor repeats themself or is forced to do something mechanical or routine is a failure of the system to take advantage of their ability.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    I don't know what your experience was like in undergrad, but at the state school I went to, the 100-level "intro to this major" type courses were actually quite challenging. none of the individual pieces were that complicated, but the breadth of material and pace were simply too much for most high school students, let alone middle school. I also dispute your claim that 100-level courses should just be assigned to grad students. of course any grad student should have a firm grasp of the intro material, but intro courses aren't _just_ about learning tools and building blocks for understanding advanced material. they are a department's first opportunity to get students excited about their discipline and get them to start thinking about how all the little pieces fit into a larger perspective. simply throwing grad students at these important courses is a great disservice, imo. to be fair, the current practice of shoving 200+ students into a huge lecture hall is not much better, no matter how good the instructor.
agumonkey 8y ago
I can observe a dillution of education systems. It used to be stricter with clear benefits for every party: Students that got in would go through a dense cursur and be viewed as higher intellect for the work market. With years (at least in France) there was a desire to make everybody get a higher education degree, but often by relaxing barriers of entry. You get more students but less good ones, the market is saturated by mild masters degree, not enough jobs, they trickle down (sic) and cause degree inflation (post office summer positions required 2-3 years diplomas, not rare to see a 5y college student working there). At the same time what used to be a simple way to absorb people's need for a job is a bit comatose, simpler hands on jobs (which value was seen as less at the era of Master's degree or nothing) were nice to let people find a salary without much hassle. I remember a tv host saying he went to Paris without anything and got a job by almost knocking at the first door he saw..
systematical 8y ago
Education is important, but I sometimes wonder if there is a whole lot of correlation does not equal causation going on here. What I mean is, statistics say those with a four year or higher degree earn more than those without. A correlation. But you might say that those who are predisposed with the aptitude for higher earning power are more likely to pursue a higher degree in the first place. It's this thought, that makes me wonder if government backed higher education is worth the money. I'm inclined to support government backed higher education, but I do think this is an important question to ask when determining specific policy. I'd think we'd only want to pay for STEM degrees where students were able to maintain a certain GPA. With that said, yes, the system is predatory. It's disgusting the amount of interest I paid for ten years to these loan sharks.
- zanny 8y ago
  I feel like so many of the incentives in modern society are rigged to approach the "problem" of what to do with your people from the wrong end. You put them through public school to... train them to work in factories. Because that is the original and persistent intent of what a high school education leaves you capable of. You then siphon them into university then because... they need the means to live, and the only way to get it is with specialized skills. Like with many things the original functions of what these programs were meant to achieve (creating a capable working class for regimented jobs of the era) have been totally lent to obsolescence but the systems remain as if nothing changed. Not even STEM justifies the cost of university. We could be collectively saving absurd amounts of time and money if 14 year olds were electing to pursue a STEM career and simply shadowed professionals for 4-8 years and learned through first hand experience while reading books and doing online regimented lecture learning about the subjects on their own or in collaborative groups of their peers. You wouldn't need extravagant institutions costing absurd amounts of upkeep to maintain just to fail to produce capable scientists and mathematicians because they graduate with often only a rote understanding of ten+ year outdated domain knowledge and no experience practically applying any of it.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    Agree. This is an option today if you home school your child.
loosetypes 8y ago
> .. current system of giving out student loans with no regard to if the student will ever have a realistic ability to repay borders on predatory. This morning my university sent me an email about a `Summer Funds & FAFSA Workshop` to `receive guided 2019-2020 FAFSA filing help.` In their words: `an open lab session to help you complete the FAFSA .` Schools seem of the opinion that the money is already theirs; If they could file it without the students they would. Just because it's systemic doesn't it's not predatory. With admins focused on the money and teachers focused on research, how are universities any more than glorified testing centers?

Shivetya 8y ago

People have been fine with Medicade/Medicare spelling out costs for services and such they should be willing to accept the same in higher education to obtain a Federally backed loan. Schools will trip over themselves to offer degree programs to meet Federal Assistance requirements. Each degree, each course credit leading to that degree, should all be subject to review on a periodic basis to insure that the needs of the country as a whole are being supported. Colleges which fall outside the loan guarantees will obviously find methods to insure students can attend, by steering endowment funds and sponsorships.

iguy 8y ago
> each course credit ... should all be subject to review on a periodic basis ... needs of the country This sounds horrifying. You want every change of a course to go via some central bureaucracy for approval? This bureaucracy will be staffed by ideologically neutral disinterested angels, regardless of which party is in power? I think there's a much more free-market solution here. Cap student loan payments at 15% of taxable income, written off after 20 years. Then they can never be a crushing burden, and lenders will become very picky about who (and for what course, and where) they make loans to. And 17-year-olds will be presented with highly relevant individualised information about the likely outcomes of different options. And it'll also create some jobs for the coming glut of machine-learning people, to make these predictions...
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  The predictable outcome will be a glut of professionals with high-prospect degrees which will actually drive wages down in those fields, while useful-but-low-prospect careers - nursing, the arts, teaching - will continue to be underfunded and underpaid. There's already more than enough "ideologically neutral disinterested" distortion of social value created by so-called free markets everywhere else in the economy. If free markets were going to solve university education they'd have done it by now - just as they've been promising to for decades now.
  - iguy 8y ago
    Nurses might be a good benchmark for setting this up -- google says "Registered Nurses made a median salary of $70,000" which sounds to me like they'd be a decent bet. Training lots of people in currently high-wage jobs would be precisely the point -- those high wages are the signal that the economy could use more of them. If there are professions which can't be funded this way (which means that right now, those employed in them never pay off their debt) which we would like to subsidise, then let's do that directly, give out music scholarships etc. The "so-called free market" in education is responding to incentives we are providing it, which are really terrible.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    > If free markets were going to solve university education they'd have done it by now - just as they've been promising to for decades now. The market in university education is not free, though. There are significant distortions induced by the various loan and scholarship policies enforced at both the federal and state level. Has "the free market" been promising to solve university education? Is such a thing even an entity capable of making a promise? As far as I can tell, it's totally uninterested in doing so. Most reputable educational institutions are not for profit. The for profit ones seem almost entirely taken with the problem of bilking students and taxpayers by providing shoddy goods at outrageous prices and exploiting the student loan regime and ignorant customers. The university education system and the free market are, as far as I can tell, basically uninvolved with one another. FWIW, I don't think the free market would solve university education either, for entirely foreseeable reasons. In a completely free market, universities and lenders would bet on the affluent, and the poor would be left out in the cold to an even greater extent than they currently are. But on the other hand, it's hard to blame the free market for the current state of affairs.
skookumchuck 8y ago
> Schools will trip over themselves to offer degree programs to meet Federal Assistance requirements. Each degree, each course credit leading to that degree, should all be subject to review on a periodic basis to insure that the needs of the country as a whole are being supported. Central planning of education? Do you really want such control ceded to a handful of unelected bureaucrats? The Medicare/Medicaid system's costs have risen by leaps and bounds every year since their inception. That is not a model one would want to emulate for lowering education costs.

wtvanhest 8y ago

If we are being honest, sports and minor non-instructional costs are minor vs the cost of small classrooms and professors. We need to vastly cut costs and sports and non-instructional costs wont move the needle.

briandear 8y ago
For many schools, sports are a profit center. Texas A&M for example, makes several hundred million per year from their sports. Schools like NYU with their insane tuition doesn’t even have big sports, yet it’s one of the most expensive schools around.
- votepaunchy 8y ago
  > Texas A&M for example, makes several hundred million per year from their sports. A few schools earn direct profits of about $10 million per year from their athletic budgets. Texas A&M's increased revenue is related to stadium renovations. http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/# http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/#
zanny 8y ago
The fact that many universities have tenured masters of their domain still having to, even with as many grad students as can fill a lecture hall, oversee 100 level courses that would fit in better at middle school than university is ridiculous. Good professors are an extremely expensive thing to have, and students of merit deserve time with such masters that maximizes knowledge transfer. That almost always means not having regimented, graded curriculum taught by lecture from one singular book, but that is how almost all university courses operate. Any time a professor repeats themself or is forced to do something mechanical or routine is a failure of the system to take advantage of their ability.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  I don't know what your experience was like in undergrad, but at the state school I went to, the 100-level "intro to this major" type courses were actually quite challenging. none of the individual pieces were that complicated, but the breadth of material and pace were simply too much for most high school students, let alone middle school. I also dispute your claim that 100-level courses should just be assigned to grad students. of course any grad student should have a firm grasp of the intro material, but intro courses aren't _just_ about learning tools and building blocks for understanding advanced material. they are a department's first opportunity to get students excited about their discipline and get them to start thinking about how all the little pieces fit into a larger perspective. simply throwing grad students at these important courses is a great disservice, imo. to be fair, the current practice of shoving 200+ students into a huge lecture hall is not much better, no matter how good the instructor.

agumonkey 8y ago

I can observe a dillution of education systems. It used to be stricter with clear benefits for every party: Students that got in would go through a dense cursur and be viewed as higher intellect for the work market. With years (at least in France) there was a desire to make everybody get a higher education degree, but often by relaxing barriers of entry. You get more students but less good ones, the market is saturated by mild masters degree, not enough jobs, they trickle down (sic) and cause degree inflation (post office summer positions required 2-3 years diplomas, not rare to see a 5y college student working there). At the same time what used to be a simple way to absorb people's need for a job is a bit comatose, simpler hands on jobs (which value was seen as less at the era of Master's degree or nothing) were nice to let people find a salary without much hassle. I remember a tv host saying he went to Paris without anything and got a job by almost knocking at the first door he saw..

systematical 8y ago

Education is important, but I sometimes wonder if there is a whole lot of correlation does not equal causation going on here. What I mean is, statistics say those with a four year or higher degree earn more than those without. A correlation. But you might say that those who are predisposed with the aptitude for higher earning power are more likely to pursue a higher degree in the first place. It's this thought, that makes me wonder if government backed higher education is worth the money. I'm inclined to support government backed higher education, but I do think this is an important question to ask when determining specific policy. I'd think we'd only want to pay for STEM degrees where students were able to maintain a certain GPA. With that said, yes, the system is predatory. It's disgusting the amount of interest I paid for ten years to these loan sharks.

zanny 8y ago
I feel like so many of the incentives in modern society are rigged to approach the "problem" of what to do with your people from the wrong end. You put them through public school to... train them to work in factories. Because that is the original and persistent intent of what a high school education leaves you capable of. You then siphon them into university then because... they need the means to live, and the only way to get it is with specialized skills. Like with many things the original functions of what these programs were meant to achieve (creating a capable working class for regimented jobs of the era) have been totally lent to obsolescence but the systems remain as if nothing changed. Not even STEM justifies the cost of university. We could be collectively saving absurd amounts of time and money if 14 year olds were electing to pursue a STEM career and simply shadowed professionals for 4-8 years and learned through first hand experience while reading books and doing online regimented lecture learning about the subjects on their own or in collaborative groups of their peers. You wouldn't need extravagant institutions costing absurd amounts of upkeep to maintain just to fail to produce capable scientists and mathematicians because they graduate with often only a rote understanding of ten+ year outdated domain knowledge and no experience practically applying any of it.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Agree. This is an option today if you home school your child.

loosetypes 8y ago

> .. current system of giving out student loans with no regard to if the student will ever have a realistic ability to repay borders on predatory. This morning my university sent me an email about a `Summer Funds & FAFSA Workshop` to `receive guided 2019-2020 FAFSA filing help.` In their words: `an open lab session to help you complete the FAFSA .` Schools seem of the opinion that the money is already theirs; If they could file it without the students they would. Just because it's systemic doesn't it's not predatory. With admins focused on the money and teachers focused on research, how are universities any more than glorified testing centers?