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I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn'

I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn't get the memo and took on huge debts to join them. This could be said of a lot of elite, expensive, liberal art degree programs.. The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil. Just absolutely ruining peoples lives. An interesting idea I saw was the idea of making schools have skin in the game on these degree programs by requiring them to back some percent of the debt of these federal loans. I'd imagine admissions criteria, prices and career outcomes would adjust accordingly. Also a question of when personal responsibility comes into play, I mean sure we can side with the 18 year olds making bad financial decisions taking on debt for a BA degree. But by the time you are 22.. 24...26 and going for these six-figure MA/PHD tracks .. cmon. Lastly - the idea that the professors in these programs were basically failed in making themselves careers in the fields themselves is not entirely shocking. Even in many STEM universities/programs, teaching is not very career outcome focus. My personal experience was that professors cared about research first, PHD track students second, and career track BS degree students.. somewhere a few more notches down. We all coach/develop people into molds of ourselves, and professors have a hard time looking beyond turning students into more professors. Obviously this does not scale..

ashtonkem 5y ago
Part of the issue is that there is no mechanism to discourage universities from doing this. With the state underwriting student debt without limit, and universities effectively gatekeeping the path towards middle class employment, there is effectively no social or financial mechanism to push back on them. Heck, there is a huge amount of social pressure pushing 18 year old kids to do this. They can’t possibly know better, but the adults encouraging such reckless behavior really should not be doing this.
- secabeen 5y ago
  One key thing to recognize is that terminal masters programs like this are different from the bachelor's degrees and the PhD programs. They are generally smaller, and are very much run as cash cows for the departments.
  - clcaev 5y ago
    Moreover, they will accept almost anyone regardless of how well they are prepared. It's not often a faculty decision, as it would be for a PhD.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  Right this is why I like the idea (that will never happen) of having schools being on the hook to backstop some % of federal loans on their degrees. May quickly change how many kids they allow to get $300K in debt for useless degrees.
  - xapata 5y ago
    How many kids are currently induced into that situation per year?
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      Many. I can think of a dozen people who got schnookered into 3+2 business/mba programs. They graduated with $150k in the hole (this was in 2000) and ended up in retail banking or working for the government in some civil service job that required 15 accounting credits. The classic example of this phenomenon is art majors, who are basically unemployable in a “job” outside of teaching, and those job openings are usually cyclical.
      - xapata 5y ago
        Many means many things. It could be a few hundred annually and someone might still call that "many." I'm dubious that many art majors wind up $300k in debt. Undergrad doesn't cost that much.
        Spooky23 5y ago
        If your parents are wealthy enough to not qualify for need based aid, but not enough to be rich, your $50k tuition + $30k NYC living situation adds up quick.
        xapata 5y ago
        Ok, so we've got $320k debt for NYU grads. They're at around 6.5k students graduating each year. I don't know what portion have "useless" majors paid entirely by debt. Let's say half. That's probably one of the worst offenders, but let's imagine there are around 10 more schools in a similar situation. Ok, 30k students out of around 4 million students graduating college each year in the US ... that's a tad less than 1%. More than I thought, and enough to call "many", but perhaps still an acceptable level.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Part of the issue is that there is no mechanism to discourage universities from doing this. It's very specifically the loan companies that do this and the universities just sell their stuff. But stopping would be good, yes. Best disincentive: Debt forgiveness. Forgive those "unforgivable" and people will think twice about ever doing this again.
  - KoftaBob 5y ago
    The vast majority of student loans are originated and backed by the federal government, for most cases there is no "loan company". It's the federal government that these students owe the money to.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Not at these ultra expensive universities. Federal loans cap at high but vaguely reasonable annual limits, to get 200+k of debt from a 4 year degree takes massive loans from private companies. https://lendedu.com/blog/federal-student-loan-limits/ https://lendedu.com/blog/federal-student-loan-limits/ However, the federal limit is still sky high $31,000 for dependent undergraduate students. A loan cap of say 20k/year would dramatically change what goes on at these private collages.
      - mannerheim 5y ago
        Grad PLUS loans can be as much as tuition. > The loan limits for Grad PLUS and Parent PLUS Loans also differ from Stafford Loans. There is no annual limit as a set dollar amount, but students or parents may not borrow more than the total cost of attendance, less any other financial aid received.
        Retric 5y ago
        These aren’t available to undergraduates. Such programs can really screw people over financially, but more often it’s a question of lost earnings and interest on initial loans rather than graduate tuition on it’s own.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > They can’t possibly know better C'mon. Google "starting salaries for [my major]"
  - steveBK123 5y ago
    Right, if STEM kids could figure this out in the late 90s on dial-up and pay by the minute internet, then 2020s kids with iPhones in their pocket can check this in seconds in between classes and TikToks.
    - airstrike 5y ago
      You're discounting the impact of aggressive marketing for these programs in the 2020s vs. virtually zero back in the 1990s.
      - gedy 5y ago
        As well as there being less non degree career options that pay decently, causing many young folks to feel "a degree" is only option.
  - lumost 5y ago
    Let's look at the top result for google for "film and media studies major salary". - Job Growth (8% writers & authors, 12% producers and directors, 5% advertising and promotions managers) - Average Salary ($73k writers and authors, 89k producers, 133k advertising and promotion managers) Sounds pretty good right? the part that's missing is that the placement rate of "Film and Media majors" into these fields.
    - steveBK123 5y ago
      Right, the more important stat is if/what the school publishes for - % employed at graduation and average salary. My school had this online in the 90s, though I suspect many hide this now.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
- kryogen1c 5y ago
  > Part of the issue is that there is no mechanism to discourage universities from doing this certainly not a root cause, but am enabling cause is whem student debt changed to not be dischargeable in bankruptcy. there is literally no longer a way to get rid of it. seems like an obvious false dichotomy. perhaps we look at how much tuition "should" cost (god knows what that means) and make some percentage dischargeable. ~50%?
  - clcaev 5y ago
    ... and make the issuing university be on the hook for the other 50% that defaults
- khawkins 5y ago
  Tie the ability for a student to take out a loan to go to a particular school to the ability for its graduated students to pay back said loans. Put simply, incoming Colombia film students can only borrow money Colombia film graduates have paid back. Schools that have always graduated successful people with valuable degrees will prosper, and schools which prey upon idealistic young people will quickly find themselves only able to entertain rich dumb kids. It's an indirect solution which will fix future and past wrongs, without giving any University the right to sue. It doesn't impose any unreasonable burden on institutions, other than the most reasonable one, that they're giving young people educations that actually have value.
- gameman144 5y ago
  > They can’t possibly know better. This seems to be kicking the can down the road a little. College applicants and students absolutely should bear some responsibility in making sure that their programs, degrees, and desired careers are actually feasible and practical in the long-term. Where you're spot-on, though, is that they don't bear all the responsibility. The big problem, it seems, is that there's no safety-valve for those students who didn't (whether through their own fault or not) get the memo about programs being worthless. In those cases, making other stakeholders (schools, the state) have some skin in the game seems like it'd make the problem solve itself. Like you said, if the students are the only ones incentivized to have universities give a good education, we're going to have a bad time.
- dd36 5y ago
  Allowing easy bankruptcy would clean it up very fast. That’s how it was prior to 2005.
alisonkisk 5y ago
The best college teachers are he really grad students / postdocs with social skills / the personality for teaching. They are still fresh on the material, energetic, and know some of the applications.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  And haven’t had their hope and will ground down by the academic system yet.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  Exactly, my best "professors" were not, technically "professors".. a few were basically grad students, but the best were paid instructors who came from industry to teach. I'm sure perversely they were also the worst paid & treated.
  - tmp538394722 5y ago
    Exactly my experience. Often the professors held us undergraduates in open contempt. One in particular said straight up on the first day, “I do not like teaching. I am required to do this in order to do the research I want to do.” I guess I at least appreciated his candor, it gave me insight to what many of the other professors felt but never said out loud. …and actually he was in the better half of instructors (there was an admittedly low bar with a few excellent standouts).
    - steveBK123 5y ago
      Exactly. The joke was our department also paired us with a faculty advisor. When I met with him and mentioned my intended career track, his immediate response was to go talk to the career center. That was it, he was done with me.
  - qmmmur 5y ago
    Categorically the field I work in industry have no idea how to teach. They are good at what they do for work but not at engendering any kind of critical thinking of self learning in students.
underseacables 5y ago
Requiring the universities the back some, or all, of student debt would get rid of a lot of wasteful programs, majors, and hopefully, professors. My university, large non-elite state school, was overloaded with tenured professors who taught courses for majors that would not lead to most of their graduates.
joe_the_user 5y ago
The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil. Just absolutely ruining peoples lives. Indeed. The only question is, do you crush their dream now or later? Is more evil to crush their dream now without debt or later with debt? And the kids? What are the odd they are know and would prefer a fun youth to an ordinary career? If we're talking a world where global warming looks like doom?
- dfadsadsf 5y ago
  Global warming is a real thing but there are no plausible scenarios where it will affect quality of life of current 20 year olds in US in a meaningful way in their lifetime. If Miami get flooded they can just move a bit inland. With that debt they won’t own waterfront property anyway. And to your question - much better to crush dreams earlier like they do it in Europe.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Global warming is a real thing but there are no plausible scenarios where it will affect quality of life of current 20 year olds in US in a meaningful way in their lifetime. It's extremely hard to determine cause but 100s of people just died in the heatwave in Oregon, Washington and Canada. Here in California, unbearalbe heat and noxious smoke seem like they'll be with us a third of the years (it's started now where I am and went to October last year). Doyle, Ca was destroyed a couple days ago. It's a pretty small place I hear and towns destroyed last year were also are small. All this may be coincidence but it's coincidence that makes people think (well, the jet stream slowing is what creates extreme heat and cold aside from average temperature increase, so well, telling people "no problem isn't credible to me, an oldster even less likely to see further futures).
    - lazide 5y ago
      These are all things impacting property owners (aka not 20 somethings with massive college debt), folks in rural areas (also unlikely to be 20 somethings with massive college debt), and old people (same). It’s not that these things aren’t happening, it’s just unlikely to concretely cause problems for this demographic.
OJFord 5y ago
> The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil. Just absolutely ruining peoples lives. 50% agree, and I'm not in the US (UK) so our experience (and reality) may differ. But are 'upscale [up-market?] universities marketing', or are governments and people with votes deciding that everyone needs a university education (because people with degrees have higher income and correlation is synonymous with causation) and when 'everyone' inherently isn't interested in.. 'traditional' subjects, we end up with this? Vocational degrees not even leading to the vocation.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  I think theres a fallacy that US education is just universally debut induced indentured servitude level expensive. Fancy schools, and popular out of state universities are expensive. So is paying for room&board in NYC & Boston because you "had to go to school there". You do not need to go to somewhere costing $75k/year and pay full sticker price. There are plenty of community colleges, in-state (dorm or commute), etc that you can match your aptitude, parental savings and future income prospects towards. My parents did well enough that I wasn't going to get any need based money, and I was like top 5% of my HS class.. but I didn't stretch and apply to Ivys, MITs, etc. My wife came from a similar background and was actually #1 in her class but likewise took a similar path. I applied to ~5 good state unis & competitive but not ultra selective engineering institutes, where I either was going to get favorable in-state tuition or merit based scholarship money to take me well below sticker price. I always worked during high school so I had an idea of income & savings. I also had a concept of how much my loans were going to cost me as I started paying interest payments after my first year, and saw how it stacked up over time. My dad went to a technical school for an associates degree first because he thought he'd end up being drafted so why bother, and then ended up living at home and working while getting his bachelors. Some of this is education as high end brand consumerism.
fourtrees 5y ago
The way I've viewed it for a long time is that they're a spin of the roulette wheel for wealthy young adults. You expect to lose, but there's a slim chance you'll win big, and even if you don't, you've not lost that much, relatively speaking, and may be able to keep playing. The problem emerges when the player is unwittingly risking more than they can afford to lose.
- burgessaccount 5y ago
  That’s exactly right. I work in film and TV, and there are great, high-paid jobs in those fields… if you win the equivalent of a professional lottery. Unfortunately these MFA programs are (of course) not transparent about that. And, unfortunately, the people who can pay to play tend to already be pretty well off.
wmf 5y ago
There just shouldn't be loans for these degrees. At all.
- seiferteric 5y ago
  If student loans were discharchable in bankruptcy there likely wouldn’t.
nathanvanfleet 5y ago
I really hope your comment made you feel all big and smart!
harikb 5y ago
> mean sure we can side with the 18 year olds making bad financial decisions taking on debt for a BA degree. But by the time you are 22.. 24...26 and going for these six-figure MA/PHD tracks .. cmon. Person doesn’t find meaningful employment after step 1, it is natural to assume (and universities push too) that a higher degree is the differentiator.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  Sure but we also can't discount that some just enjoy being in school perpetually. I had a dorm roommate who did go on to do very well in the end, but spent another 8 years getting a PHD.. anyway I'll always remember a couple years into my career we were having drinks and he said to me something to the effect of liking continuing his education due to the the lack of responsibility. I have a neighbor who is 10+ years into getting a PHD in liberal arts. He gets a lot of feelings of prestige from being associated with very well regarded universities and he has no career intention when he finishes due to being funded. However I think of all the BA/MA students for the classes he is the lecturer for and what debt they have taken on to go on their own fruitless journey. They aren't all funded the same ..
throwaway984393 5y ago
"The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil." But also kinda Darwinism at work? Ask 100 random strangers to clean a loaded gun while staring down its barrel. You'll probably get at least 5 people to do it. Student debt isn't even that evil.
lumost 5y ago
I think we need to acknowledge the utter deluge of marketing material that liberal arts programs and the loan industry that backs them foist on students, pre-college teachers, and parents. It doesn't help that the odds of the teachers from K-12th grade having a liberal arts degree are pretty good as well. We can try to say that students should educate themselves about the odds, but that's kinda like telling someone sitting in a McDonalds that they should get something healthy. Even students going on to MA/PhD programs have a good chunk of sunk cost fallacy goading them on. No one entered these degrees without honestly wanting to make a go of it, but when they pop out the other end with 120k in debt, no idea how to pay it and a ~10% job placement rate - deferring for another 4 years and getting more credentials sounds pretty appealing.
nonameiguess 5y ago
That might be true of liberal arts, but I don't know about film school. USC's was the first American film school and opened in the 1920s. NYU, Columbia, and Cal Arts followed in the 60s. Everything else came later than that. These aren't prestigious past times for the nobility. They're relatively new things. Film degrees don't have much prestige associated with them any way. Schools can certainly try to argue they make a difference, but the vast majority of successful filmmakers don't have film degrees. It's not like you go apply to direct a film and the studio gives a crap about your education. It's completely driven by portfolio and nepotism, and the only possible advantage a school can offer is helping you make that first film to build the portfolio, but if they don't even do that like this guy said, and you have to self-fund your film on top of paying for tuition, well, it's hard to see what value they can even claim to offer. I don't want to dismiss this guy's tweet thread or anything. He definitely seems to be saying Columbia tried to market the program as giving you a better chance, but students have to know becoming any kind of artist at all, filmmaker included, is purely a lottery. There's at most a few hundred people in the world at a time making any real money doing it. Schools can't just pretend that isn't the case. For what it's worth, I think it's a disastrous career choice either way, unless you're relying on nepotism and your parents were famous actors or directors. I had a girlfriend 20 years ago going through Rutgers' MFA program, and she realized some of her dream for a little while, being a working producer for a cartoon studio and even moving to LA for a few years, but burned out eventually from every place she ever worked going out of business and moved back to Jersey and opened a bakery. My best friend from college actually did not study film, but did succeed in becoming a Hollywood writer and even won an Emmy a few years ago. It didn't make any difference. He's even poorer and in more debt than my ex who owns a bakery now. Even "success" in the art world doesn't mean you won't be begging for table scraps for the rest of your life. Hundreds of people work on any given project, but even if a project is wildly successful, wins a ton of awards, and makes a billion dollars, maybe five actors, the director, and possibly the head writer if that isn't also the director, actually see any of that money. The rest goes to the studio.
quanticle 5y ago
> I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn't get the memo and took on huge debts to join them. This could be said of a lot of elite, expensive, liberal art degree programs There's a pretty good book that explores that phenomenon and what happens when people don't "get the memo": Paying For The Party: How College Maintains Inequality, by Elizabeth A. Armstrong (https://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequality/dp/0674088026/ https://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequa...).
mc32 5y ago
Totally agree. To a degree, many of these 'prestige' degrees amount to a kind of version of "become the next president of the USA and if you don't, you can become a volunteer part-time mayor of a small town" If they sold it like this, people would see the odds in this lie. Very few people in the US will become president of the USA. And while filmmakers are somewhat more abundant, it cannot accommodate as many as there are enthusiastic pupils, so they end up doing other things like massage therapist when thigs don't work out but they now have a mountain of debt. There are many more degrees like that. Ironically, when there is some slack in demand for something like EEs, suddenly people abandon that track en-masse. But these liberal arts degrees don't seem to suffer the same attrition they actually deserve.
AmericanChopper 5y ago
The solution I’d prefer is to remove federal student aid eligibility from all study programs that don’t result in sufficiently increased earnings for their graduates. There’s lots of arguments to be made about how having lots of history/English/whatever graduates benefits society in some intangible way, and they might have a lot of merit to them. But that’s not the purpose of federal student aid. The purpose is to improve social mobility. It’s not difficult at all to measure which programs achieve that goal, which don’t, and which are in fact harmful to social mobility.
coryrc 5y ago
Limit loans to median first-year earnings of a graduate of the program. Better universities can charge more, no one can go too far into debt.
fortran77 5y ago
> I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn't get the memo and took on huge debts to join them. This could be said of a lot of elite, expensive, liberal art degree programs.. And the world would be no worse off if only rich children with trust funds got degrees in film, Russian literature, or art history. And if the Government stopped propping up college loan programs, tuitions for practical degrees would drop like a rock.
vkou 5y ago
> An interesting idea I saw was the idea of making schools have skin in the game on these degree programs by requiring them to back some percent of the debt of these federal loans. Since little short of death can cause a student loan to be discharged, I don't think that would actually put any skin in the game.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"I mean sure we can side with the 18 year olds making bad financial decisions taking on debt for a BA degree" Lets call it what it is: institutionalised debt bondage. Non dischargeable debt is a mind-boggling violation of liberty. It's creating a class of serfs that will always owe their lord.
rob_c 5y ago
I think there is a disconnect here between different people's expectation and reality. Having been on both sides. I can sympathise. In the UK the responsibility of preparing students for wider world lies with the University. (this is the perspective of many lectures who teach within stem) The departments believe their commitment to teaching is finished after assessing the students ability within their chosen field, that's their job and the universities provide external optional support material which they believe covers everything else. The students that teaching staff spend the most of their time with are doctoral students. Speaking frankly these students have passed a filter to being students willing to work at a problem for hours. This is not a guarantee they're the best, but they are normally the most hardworking. There is a huge expectation that these students teach themselves missing skills and abilities. This is what teaching professors expect from all students. Although it would help if they said that. Some lectures are just plain awful at teaching. Like some Coders make bad managers. Some are doing it because their successful position to pay for their really expensive toys in labs demands it. Imo these lecturers need to be taken aside and disciplined for failing at their job because a single bad lecturer in the wrong topic can do a _lot_ of damage to a department's reputation and functioning... However most lecturers work assuming they're speaking to PhD students mainly because they spend so much other time with them. It's difficult to identify that for 2 hours a week you're speaking to a room of people without the common skillset to be a PhD student. (I'm not spreaking of raw ability and intellect, it's the mindset to focus on a problem for days or weeks until you understand it by yourself) The problem is for UG students that often don't know what skills they're missing to be of most use to outside academia. Being about to identify and work on this is askill in and off its own right. Imo it's much less that staff try to mould students to academia and much more that students who are of the correct mindset find their way there. The expectation is that UG students would identify where they need to work to become more attractive to an employer. And that they will seak extra material out and train for this. (academics are the people who setup how the university works and they follow the academic model amidst everywhere, which, well... works when you understand the unwritten rules) This is different to the expectation that teachers teach you everything you need to be useful. (my background is coming from a state school which was demolished down for failing) I can see how paying huge amounts of money creates an expectation now that the university should prepare you to enter the workforce straight away. It took me until PhD to appreciate this and my grades at UG weren't exceptional but from comparing notes to colleagues over the years this is one of the cultural differences which seems to come from expensive private schools vs state funded local failing "sports specialist" schools. Fighting against this at a institutional level is like shouting at a wall imo so I just make the best effort I can to make a difference with students who cross my path who are falling into the same traps and feeling let down by the uni overall. (my favourite being a lecturer I keep arguing with that is bad at his teaching because I (a native English speaker) need a thesaurus to follow his lecture slides, this does not help meaningfully convey the finger points of data driven physics labs to international students, despite the fact that's how it was taught at Eaton)
ip26 5y ago
My personal experience was that professors cared about research first, PHD track students second, and career track BS degree students.. somewhere a few more notches down I know little about film school, but in many research-based departments, there's a very practical motive for this. PhD track students work in your lab, and you are listed as an author on their papers. Basically, they help accomplish the first goal.

ashtonkem 5y ago

Part of the issue is that there is no mechanism to discourage universities from doing this. With the state underwriting student debt without limit, and universities effectively gatekeeping the path towards middle class employment, there is effectively no social or financial mechanism to push back on them. Heck, there is a huge amount of social pressure pushing 18 year old kids to do this. They can’t possibly know better, but the adults encouraging such reckless behavior really should not be doing this.

secabeen 5y ago
One key thing to recognize is that terminal masters programs like this are different from the bachelor's degrees and the PhD programs. They are generally smaller, and are very much run as cash cows for the departments.
- clcaev 5y ago
  Moreover, they will accept almost anyone regardless of how well they are prepared. It's not often a faculty decision, as it would be for a PhD.
steveBK123 5y ago
Right this is why I like the idea (that will never happen) of having schools being on the hook to backstop some % of federal loans on their degrees. May quickly change how many kids they allow to get $300K in debt for useless degrees.
- xapata 5y ago
  How many kids are currently induced into that situation per year?
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Many. I can think of a dozen people who got schnookered into 3+2 business/mba programs. They graduated with $150k in the hole (this was in 2000) and ended up in retail banking or working for the government in some civil service job that required 15 accounting credits. The classic example of this phenomenon is art majors, who are basically unemployable in a “job” outside of teaching, and those job openings are usually cyclical.
    - xapata 5y ago
      Many means many things. It could be a few hundred annually and someone might still call that "many." I'm dubious that many art majors wind up $300k in debt. Undergrad doesn't cost that much.
      - Spooky23 5y ago
        If your parents are wealthy enough to not qualify for need based aid, but not enough to be rich, your $50k tuition + $30k NYC living situation adds up quick.
        xapata 5y ago
        Ok, so we've got $320k debt for NYU grads. They're at around 6.5k students graduating each year. I don't know what portion have "useless" majors paid entirely by debt. Let's say half. That's probably one of the worst offenders, but let's imagine there are around 10 more schools in a similar situation. Ok, 30k students out of around 4 million students graduating college each year in the US ... that's a tad less than 1%. More than I thought, and enough to call "many", but perhaps still an acceptable level.
joe_the_user 5y ago
Part of the issue is that there is no mechanism to discourage universities from doing this. It's very specifically the loan companies that do this and the universities just sell their stuff. But stopping would be good, yes. Best disincentive: Debt forgiveness. Forgive those "unforgivable" and people will think twice about ever doing this again.
- KoftaBob 5y ago
  The vast majority of student loans are originated and backed by the federal government, for most cases there is no "loan company". It's the federal government that these students owe the money to.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Not at these ultra expensive universities. Federal loans cap at high but vaguely reasonable annual limits, to get 200+k of debt from a 4 year degree takes massive loans from private companies. https://lendedu.com/blog/federal-student-loan-limits/ https://lendedu.com/blog/federal-student-loan-limits/ However, the federal limit is still sky high $31,000 for dependent undergraduate students. A loan cap of say 20k/year would dramatically change what goes on at these private collages.
    - mannerheim 5y ago
      Grad PLUS loans can be as much as tuition. > The loan limits for Grad PLUS and Parent PLUS Loans also differ from Stafford Loans. There is no annual limit as a set dollar amount, but students or parents may not borrow more than the total cost of attendance, less any other financial aid received.
      - Retric 5y ago
        These aren’t available to undergraduates. Such programs can really screw people over financially, but more often it’s a question of lost earnings and interest on initial loans rather than graduate tuition on it’s own.
WalterBright 5y ago
> They can’t possibly know better C'mon. Google "starting salaries for [my major]"
- steveBK123 5y ago
  Right, if STEM kids could figure this out in the late 90s on dial-up and pay by the minute internet, then 2020s kids with iPhones in their pocket can check this in seconds in between classes and TikToks.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    You're discounting the impact of aggressive marketing for these programs in the 2020s vs. virtually zero back in the 1990s.
    - gedy 5y ago
      As well as there being less non degree career options that pay decently, causing many young folks to feel "a degree" is only option.
- lumost 5y ago
  Let's look at the top result for google for "film and media studies major salary". - Job Growth (8% writers & authors, 12% producers and directors, 5% advertising and promotions managers) - Average Salary ($73k writers and authors, 89k producers, 133k advertising and promotion managers) Sounds pretty good right? the part that's missing is that the placement rate of "Film and Media majors" into these fields.
  - steveBK123 5y ago
    Right, the more important stat is if/what the school publishes for - % employed at graduation and average salary. My school had this online in the 90s, though I suspect many hide this now.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
kryogen1c 5y ago
> Part of the issue is that there is no mechanism to discourage universities from doing this certainly not a root cause, but am enabling cause is whem student debt changed to not be dischargeable in bankruptcy. there is literally no longer a way to get rid of it. seems like an obvious false dichotomy. perhaps we look at how much tuition "should" cost (god knows what that means) and make some percentage dischargeable. ~50%?
- clcaev 5y ago
  ... and make the issuing university be on the hook for the other 50% that defaults
khawkins 5y ago
Tie the ability for a student to take out a loan to go to a particular school to the ability for its graduated students to pay back said loans. Put simply, incoming Colombia film students can only borrow money Colombia film graduates have paid back. Schools that have always graduated successful people with valuable degrees will prosper, and schools which prey upon idealistic young people will quickly find themselves only able to entertain rich dumb kids. It's an indirect solution which will fix future and past wrongs, without giving any University the right to sue. It doesn't impose any unreasonable burden on institutions, other than the most reasonable one, that they're giving young people educations that actually have value.
gameman144 5y ago
> They can’t possibly know better. This seems to be kicking the can down the road a little. College applicants and students absolutely should bear some responsibility in making sure that their programs, degrees, and desired careers are actually feasible and practical in the long-term. Where you're spot-on, though, is that they don't bear all the responsibility. The big problem, it seems, is that there's no safety-valve for those students who didn't (whether through their own fault or not) get the memo about programs being worthless. In those cases, making other stakeholders (schools, the state) have some skin in the game seems like it'd make the problem solve itself. Like you said, if the students are the only ones incentivized to have universities give a good education, we're going to have a bad time.
dd36 5y ago
Allowing easy bankruptcy would clean it up very fast. That’s how it was prior to 2005.

alisonkisk 5y ago

The best college teachers are he really grad students / postdocs with social skills / the personality for teaching. They are still fresh on the material, energetic, and know some of the applications.

ashtonkem 5y ago
And haven’t had their hope and will ground down by the academic system yet.
steveBK123 5y ago
Exactly, my best "professors" were not, technically "professors".. a few were basically grad students, but the best were paid instructors who came from industry to teach. I'm sure perversely they were also the worst paid & treated.
- tmp538394722 5y ago
  Exactly my experience. Often the professors held us undergraduates in open contempt. One in particular said straight up on the first day, “I do not like teaching. I am required to do this in order to do the research I want to do.” I guess I at least appreciated his candor, it gave me insight to what many of the other professors felt but never said out loud. …and actually he was in the better half of instructors (there was an admittedly low bar with a few excellent standouts).
  - steveBK123 5y ago
    Exactly. The joke was our department also paired us with a faculty advisor. When I met with him and mentioned my intended career track, his immediate response was to go talk to the career center. That was it, he was done with me.
- qmmmur 5y ago
  Categorically the field I work in industry have no idea how to teach. They are good at what they do for work but not at engendering any kind of critical thinking of self learning in students.

underseacables 5y ago

Requiring the universities the back some, or all, of student debt would get rid of a lot of wasteful programs, majors, and hopefully, professors. My university, large non-elite state school, was overloaded with tenured professors who taught courses for majors that would not lead to most of their graduates.

joe_the_user 5y ago

The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil. Just absolutely ruining peoples lives. Indeed. The only question is, do you crush their dream now or later? Is more evil to crush their dream now without debt or later with debt? And the kids? What are the odd they are know and would prefer a fun youth to an ordinary career? If we're talking a world where global warming looks like doom?

dfadsadsf 5y ago
Global warming is a real thing but there are no plausible scenarios where it will affect quality of life of current 20 year olds in US in a meaningful way in their lifetime. If Miami get flooded they can just move a bit inland. With that debt they won’t own waterfront property anyway. And to your question - much better to crush dreams earlier like they do it in Europe.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Global warming is a real thing but there are no plausible scenarios where it will affect quality of life of current 20 year olds in US in a meaningful way in their lifetime. It's extremely hard to determine cause but 100s of people just died in the heatwave in Oregon, Washington and Canada. Here in California, unbearalbe heat and noxious smoke seem like they'll be with us a third of the years (it's started now where I am and went to October last year). Doyle, Ca was destroyed a couple days ago. It's a pretty small place I hear and towns destroyed last year were also are small. All this may be coincidence but it's coincidence that makes people think (well, the jet stream slowing is what creates extreme heat and cold aside from average temperature increase, so well, telling people "no problem isn't credible to me, an oldster even less likely to see further futures).
  - lazide 5y ago
    These are all things impacting property owners (aka not 20 somethings with massive college debt), folks in rural areas (also unlikely to be 20 somethings with massive college debt), and old people (same). It’s not that these things aren’t happening, it’s just unlikely to concretely cause problems for this demographic.

OJFord 5y ago

> The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil. Just absolutely ruining peoples lives. 50% agree, and I'm not in the US (UK) so our experience (and reality) may differ. But are 'upscale [up-market?] universities marketing', or are governments and people with votes deciding that everyone needs a university education (because people with degrees have higher income and correlation is synonymous with causation) and when 'everyone' inherently isn't interested in.. 'traditional' subjects, we end up with this? Vocational degrees not even leading to the vocation.

steveBK123 5y ago
I think theres a fallacy that US education is just universally debut induced indentured servitude level expensive. Fancy schools, and popular out of state universities are expensive. So is paying for room&board in NYC & Boston because you "had to go to school there". You do not need to go to somewhere costing $75k/year and pay full sticker price. There are plenty of community colleges, in-state (dorm or commute), etc that you can match your aptitude, parental savings and future income prospects towards. My parents did well enough that I wasn't going to get any need based money, and I was like top 5% of my HS class.. but I didn't stretch and apply to Ivys, MITs, etc. My wife came from a similar background and was actually #1 in her class but likewise took a similar path. I applied to ~5 good state unis & competitive but not ultra selective engineering institutes, where I either was going to get favorable in-state tuition or merit based scholarship money to take me well below sticker price. I always worked during high school so I had an idea of income & savings. I also had a concept of how much my loans were going to cost me as I started paying interest payments after my first year, and saw how it stacked up over time. My dad went to a technical school for an associates degree first because he thought he'd end up being drafted so why bother, and then ended up living at home and working while getting his bachelors. Some of this is education as high end brand consumerism.

fourtrees 5y ago

The way I've viewed it for a long time is that they're a spin of the roulette wheel for wealthy young adults. You expect to lose, but there's a slim chance you'll win big, and even if you don't, you've not lost that much, relatively speaking, and may be able to keep playing. The problem emerges when the player is unwittingly risking more than they can afford to lose.

burgessaccount 5y ago
That’s exactly right. I work in film and TV, and there are great, high-paid jobs in those fields… if you win the equivalent of a professional lottery. Unfortunately these MFA programs are (of course) not transparent about that. And, unfortunately, the people who can pay to play tend to already be pretty well off.

wmf 5y ago

There just shouldn't be loans for these degrees. At all.

seiferteric 5y ago
If student loans were discharchable in bankruptcy there likely wouldn’t.

nathanvanfleet 5y ago

I really hope your comment made you feel all big and smart!

harikb 5y ago

> mean sure we can side with the 18 year olds making bad financial decisions taking on debt for a BA degree. But by the time you are 22.. 24...26 and going for these six-figure MA/PHD tracks .. cmon. Person doesn’t find meaningful employment after step 1, it is natural to assume (and universities push too) that a higher degree is the differentiator.

steveBK123 5y ago
Sure but we also can't discount that some just enjoy being in school perpetually. I had a dorm roommate who did go on to do very well in the end, but spent another 8 years getting a PHD.. anyway I'll always remember a couple years into my career we were having drinks and he said to me something to the effect of liking continuing his education due to the the lack of responsibility. I have a neighbor who is 10+ years into getting a PHD in liberal arts. He gets a lot of feelings of prestige from being associated with very well regarded universities and he has no career intention when he finishes due to being funded. However I think of all the BA/MA students for the classes he is the lecturer for and what debt they have taken on to go on their own fruitless journey. They aren't all funded the same ..

throwaway984393 5y ago

"The scale of these degree programs and the irresponsibility of upscale universities marketing them to those that clearly cannot afford them is evil." But also kinda Darwinism at work? Ask 100 random strangers to clean a loaded gun while staring down its barrel. You'll probably get at least 5 people to do it. Student debt isn't even that evil.

lumost 5y ago

I think we need to acknowledge the utter deluge of marketing material that liberal arts programs and the loan industry that backs them foist on students, pre-college teachers, and parents. It doesn't help that the odds of the teachers from K-12th grade having a liberal arts degree are pretty good as well. We can try to say that students should educate themselves about the odds, but that's kinda like telling someone sitting in a McDonalds that they should get something healthy. Even students going on to MA/PhD programs have a good chunk of sunk cost fallacy goading them on. No one entered these degrees without honestly wanting to make a go of it, but when they pop out the other end with 120k in debt, no idea how to pay it and a ~10% job placement rate - deferring for another 4 years and getting more credentials sounds pretty appealing.

nonameiguess 5y ago

That might be true of liberal arts, but I don't know about film school. USC's was the first American film school and opened in the 1920s. NYU, Columbia, and Cal Arts followed in the 60s. Everything else came later than that. These aren't prestigious past times for the nobility. They're relatively new things. Film degrees don't have much prestige associated with them any way. Schools can certainly try to argue they make a difference, but the vast majority of successful filmmakers don't have film degrees. It's not like you go apply to direct a film and the studio gives a crap about your education. It's completely driven by portfolio and nepotism, and the only possible advantage a school can offer is helping you make that first film to build the portfolio, but if they don't even do that like this guy said, and you have to self-fund your film on top of paying for tuition, well, it's hard to see what value they can even claim to offer. I don't want to dismiss this guy's tweet thread or anything. He definitely seems to be saying Columbia tried to market the program as giving you a better chance, but students have to know becoming any kind of artist at all, filmmaker included, is purely a lottery. There's at most a few hundred people in the world at a time making any real money doing it. Schools can't just pretend that isn't the case. For what it's worth, I think it's a disastrous career choice either way, unless you're relying on nepotism and your parents were famous actors or directors. I had a girlfriend 20 years ago going through Rutgers' MFA program, and she realized some of her dream for a little while, being a working producer for a cartoon studio and even moving to LA for a few years, but burned out eventually from every place she ever worked going out of business and moved back to Jersey and opened a bakery. My best friend from college actually did not study film, but did succeed in becoming a Hollywood writer and even won an Emmy a few years ago. It didn't make any difference. He's even poorer and in more debt than my ex who owns a bakery now. Even "success" in the art world doesn't mean you won't be begging for table scraps for the rest of your life. Hundreds of people work on any given project, but even if a project is wildly successful, wins a ton of awards, and makes a billion dollars, maybe five actors, the director, and possibly the head writer if that isn't also the director, actually see any of that money. The rest goes to the studio.

quanticle 5y ago

> I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn't get the memo and took on huge debts to join them. This could be said of a lot of elite, expensive, liberal art degree programs There's a pretty good book that explores that phenomenon and what happens when people don't "get the memo": Paying For The Party: How College Maintains Inequality, by Elizabeth A. Armstrong (https://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequality/dp/0674088026/ https://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequa...).

mc32 5y ago

Totally agree. To a degree, many of these 'prestige' degrees amount to a kind of version of "become the next president of the USA and if you don't, you can become a volunteer part-time mayor of a small town" If they sold it like this, people would see the odds in this lie. Very few people in the US will become president of the USA. And while filmmakers are somewhat more abundant, it cannot accommodate as many as there are enthusiastic pupils, so they end up doing other things like massage therapist when thigs don't work out but they now have a mountain of debt. There are many more degrees like that. Ironically, when there is some slack in demand for something like EEs, suddenly people abandon that track en-masse. But these liberal arts degrees don't seem to suffer the same attrition they actually deserve.

AmericanChopper 5y ago

The solution I’d prefer is to remove federal student aid eligibility from all study programs that don’t result in sufficiently increased earnings for their graduates. There’s lots of arguments to be made about how having lots of history/English/whatever graduates benefits society in some intangible way, and they might have a lot of merit to them. But that’s not the purpose of federal student aid. The purpose is to improve social mobility. It’s not difficult at all to measure which programs achieve that goal, which don’t, and which are in fact harmful to social mobility.

coryrc 5y ago

Limit loans to median first-year earnings of a graduate of the program. Better universities can charge more, no one can go too far into debt.

fortran77 5y ago

> I saw some sensible commentary that basically.. these types of degree programs have always existed for the bored children of the rich. It just seems some didn't get the memo and took on huge debts to join them. This could be said of a lot of elite, expensive, liberal art degree programs.. And the world would be no worse off if only rich children with trust funds got degrees in film, Russian literature, or art history. And if the Government stopped propping up college loan programs, tuitions for practical degrees would drop like a rock.

vkou 5y ago

> An interesting idea I saw was the idea of making schools have skin in the game on these degree programs by requiring them to back some percent of the debt of these federal loans. Since little short of death can cause a student loan to be discharged, I don't think that would actually put any skin in the game.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"I mean sure we can side with the 18 year olds making bad financial decisions taking on debt for a BA degree" Lets call it what it is: institutionalised debt bondage. Non dischargeable debt is a mind-boggling violation of liberty. It's creating a class of serfs that will always owe their lord.

rob_c 5y ago

I think there is a disconnect here between different people's expectation and reality. Having been on both sides. I can sympathise. In the UK the responsibility of preparing students for wider world lies with the University. (this is the perspective of many lectures who teach within stem) The departments believe their commitment to teaching is finished after assessing the students ability within their chosen field, that's their job and the universities provide external optional support material which they believe covers everything else. The students that teaching staff spend the most of their time with are doctoral students. Speaking frankly these students have passed a filter to being students willing to work at a problem for hours. This is not a guarantee they're the best, but they are normally the most hardworking. There is a huge expectation that these students teach themselves missing skills and abilities. This is what teaching professors expect from all students. Although it would help if they said that. Some lectures are just plain awful at teaching. Like some Coders make bad managers. Some are doing it because their successful position to pay for their really expensive toys in labs demands it. Imo these lecturers need to be taken aside and disciplined for failing at their job because a single bad lecturer in the wrong topic can do a _lot_ of damage to a department's reputation and functioning... However most lecturers work assuming they're speaking to PhD students mainly because they spend so much other time with them. It's difficult to identify that for 2 hours a week you're speaking to a room of people without the common skillset to be a PhD student. (I'm not spreaking of raw ability and intellect, it's the mindset to focus on a problem for days or weeks until you understand it by yourself) The problem is for UG students that often don't know what skills they're missing to be of most use to outside academia. Being about to identify and work on this is askill in and off its own right. Imo it's much less that staff try to mould students to academia and much more that students who are of the correct mindset find their way there. The expectation is that UG students would identify where they need to work to become more attractive to an employer. And that they will seak extra material out and train for this. (academics are the people who setup how the university works and they follow the academic model amidst everywhere, which, well... works when you understand the unwritten rules) This is different to the expectation that teachers teach you everything you need to be useful. (my background is coming from a state school which was demolished down for failing) I can see how paying huge amounts of money creates an expectation now that the university should prepare you to enter the workforce straight away. It took me until PhD to appreciate this and my grades at UG weren't exceptional but from comparing notes to colleagues over the years this is one of the cultural differences which seems to come from expensive private schools vs state funded local failing "sports specialist" schools. Fighting against this at a institutional level is like shouting at a wall imo so I just make the best effort I can to make a difference with students who cross my path who are falling into the same traps and feeling let down by the uni overall. (my favourite being a lecturer I keep arguing with that is bad at his teaching because I (a native English speaker) need a thesaurus to follow his lecture slides, this does not help meaningfully convey the finger points of data driven physics labs to international students, despite the fact that's how it was taught at Eaton)

ip26 5y ago

My personal experience was that professors cared about research first, PHD track students second, and career track BS degree students.. somewhere a few more notches down I know little about film school, but in many research-based departments, there's a very practical motive for this. PhD track students work in your lab, and you are listed as an author on their papers. Basically, they help accomplish the first goal.