6 ms·

This creates an incentive structure that is exactly the opposite of what you want.

BizarroLand 5y ago
How so? Take a lower paying course that benefits society for little or no cost to you or a higher paying course that will push you into the upper middle or lower upper class that costs more. The only losers here would be the colleges that no longer get to charge the same $300k for every degree they stamp. Where is my logic wrong?
- jeffy90 5y ago
  There's a shortage of software engineers and we need more students to enroll in STEM. When deciding between an expensive STEM degree or a free liberal arts degree, students are incentivized to chose the free degree in your proposed solution.
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    But as it stands right now, people are equally incentivized to take degrees for passion as they are for profit, possibly to their own detriment when one comes with misery from poverty and the other with misery from golden handcuffs. Not everyone is cut out for a STEM career. You can't turn cavemen into electrical engineers if the aptitude isn't there, right? It's not a big leap to say that some people will prioritize greed over compatibility and end up risking being able to cheat their way through or flunking out / being expelled if they fail with nothing but either a degree they aren't qualified to possess or a debt they aren't able to repay. A lot of people in IT would be happier as truck drivers, a lot of engineers would be happier as welders. It always boils down to balancing the money with the passion, and the current system is balanced to the college's coffers. I did preface my original statement by saying that I don't know if there is a good solution. I proffered a solution knowing that it wasn't a good solution because there are things I with my single brain simply am not capable of calculating for, but I believe we can all agree that the current system has some significant flaws that should be addressed, right?
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      This might be a very unpopular opinion here. I'll mention it anyway. Free tuition. Germany has had zero tuition university for quite some time. And though they allowed charging tuition again a while ago, it was capped at something like 600EUR (?) per semester. Many universities apparently also went back to not charging tuition again. It works well enough if you ask me. I got a great education with zero student debt. Was it Harvard? No. Was it a great education? Absolutely. Masters degree. I have a good job and of the people in my study group more than one is working at Tesla, Facebook and Google. More than one of them also have a PhD.
      - mrep 5y ago
        I don't think it is very controversial to increase funding for public state schools so that they can lower prices. USC though is a private school that costs a ridiculous $81,659 a year [0] and I don't want my tax dollars paying that much to a private institution. [0]: https://admission.usc.edu/learn/cost-financial-aid/ https://admission.usc.edu/learn/cost-financial-aid/
        MandieD 5y ago
        I’ve spent the past decade in the IT department of a really big German company Americans outside of the auto industry have probably never heard of, and I have yet to meet a German colleague who went to a private university, even up through our CEO. The very concept of student loans is mind-boggling for them.
        dagw 5y ago
        The very concept of student loans is mind-boggling for them. I only know how it works in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, but students loans are super common there. Even though tuition is free you still have food, rent, books and other living expenses that all have to be paid for. How do most German students pay those costs?
        5y ago
  - wyclif 5y ago
    There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money. ~ David "Pardo" Keppel
- zdragnar 5y ago
  It funnels poor people into low paying jobs, and those who are better off into higher paying jobs, as they can afford the risk of taking out the loans (and likely have parents with good credit to back them). Of course, that's assuming that the cost of lost tuition on cheapo degrees is made up by bumping up the cost of good job degrees. If you merely cut the tuition of some without raising the rest, then you will need to deal with all the school's who have wildly outsized budgets that were being subsidized by the cheapo degrees. Or, the government will end up paying for it, and there'll be a glut of social worker degrees flipping burgers because social work and library sciences have a relatively fixed number of positions available.
- eindiran 5y ago
  Loosely, jobs which pay poorly have a lot of labor supply relative to demand and jobs that pay well have a lot of demand relative to supply. If you artificially change the price of degrees to match the expected lifetime ROI of that degree, you are decreasing the barrier to jobs that we already have too many people attempting to do and increasing the barrier to jobs we need more people to do. Of course this analysis overlooks that some jobs are "good for society" on some metric, but no one wants to pay for them. But then the approach should be to directly incentivize those jobs eg through grants or government-funded work programs.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bmhin 5y ago
  The loan burden is on many people who do not complete their degrees. If a college's options are: enroll people in very low margin degrees, with likely comparable costs, or enroll people in the high margin (& high earning) degrees but with a success rate of ~75% year over year, the school makes way more money but only a third come out with the value add degree. The incentive there is to push people into the alluring high risk high reward field cause they make revenue regardless. Let in more people, allow for bigger class sizes, offer more classes, etc. The happy path might be the same or better, but the sad path gets grimmer. All that said, the completion rate fiasco is it's whole own can of worms.
- csee 5y ago
  The logic is wrong because you've assumed a negative or zero correlation between societal usefulness and earnings when the correlation is actually a positive one. Maybe a social work degree has positive externalities that far exceed the earnings. But there's also a lot of crap that doesn't, and incentivizing the landslide of crap and disincentivizing the skills that are in shortage will do a lot of damage. Stuff that pays well tends to be stuff that's actually valued by society. Structural engineers and surgeons get paid lots of money because they actually value add and their skills are in short supply.

How so? Take a lower paying course that benefits society for little or no cost to you or a higher paying course that will push you into the upper middle or lower upper class that costs more. The only losers here would be the colleges that no longer get to charge the same $300k for every degree they stamp. Where is my logic wrong?

jeffy90 5y ago
There's a shortage of software engineers and we need more students to enroll in STEM. When deciding between an expensive STEM degree or a free liberal arts degree, students are incentivized to chose the free degree in your proposed solution.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  But as it stands right now, people are equally incentivized to take degrees for passion as they are for profit, possibly to their own detriment when one comes with misery from poverty and the other with misery from golden handcuffs. Not everyone is cut out for a STEM career. You can't turn cavemen into electrical engineers if the aptitude isn't there, right? It's not a big leap to say that some people will prioritize greed over compatibility and end up risking being able to cheat their way through or flunking out / being expelled if they fail with nothing but either a degree they aren't qualified to possess or a debt they aren't able to repay. A lot of people in IT would be happier as truck drivers, a lot of engineers would be happier as welders. It always boils down to balancing the money with the passion, and the current system is balanced to the college's coffers. I did preface my original statement by saying that I don't know if there is a good solution. I proffered a solution knowing that it wasn't a good solution because there are things I with my single brain simply am not capable of calculating for, but I believe we can all agree that the current system has some significant flaws that should be addressed, right?
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    This might be a very unpopular opinion here. I'll mention it anyway. Free tuition. Germany has had zero tuition university for quite some time. And though they allowed charging tuition again a while ago, it was capped at something like 600EUR (?) per semester. Many universities apparently also went back to not charging tuition again. It works well enough if you ask me. I got a great education with zero student debt. Was it Harvard? No. Was it a great education? Absolutely. Masters degree. I have a good job and of the people in my study group more than one is working at Tesla, Facebook and Google. More than one of them also have a PhD.
    - mrep 5y ago
      I don't think it is very controversial to increase funding for public state schools so that they can lower prices. USC though is a private school that costs a ridiculous $81,659 a year [0] and I don't want my tax dollars paying that much to a private institution. [0]: https://admission.usc.edu/learn/cost-financial-aid/ https://admission.usc.edu/learn/cost-financial-aid/
      - MandieD 5y ago
        I’ve spent the past decade in the IT department of a really big German company Americans outside of the auto industry have probably never heard of, and I have yet to meet a German colleague who went to a private university, even up through our CEO. The very concept of student loans is mind-boggling for them.
        dagw 5y ago
        The very concept of student loans is mind-boggling for them. I only know how it works in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, but students loans are super common there. Even though tuition is free you still have food, rent, books and other living expenses that all have to be paid for. How do most German students pay those costs?
        5y ago
- wyclif 5y ago
  There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money. ~ David "Pardo" Keppel
zdragnar 5y ago
It funnels poor people into low paying jobs, and those who are better off into higher paying jobs, as they can afford the risk of taking out the loans (and likely have parents with good credit to back them). Of course, that's assuming that the cost of lost tuition on cheapo degrees is made up by bumping up the cost of good job degrees. If you merely cut the tuition of some without raising the rest, then you will need to deal with all the school's who have wildly outsized budgets that were being subsidized by the cheapo degrees. Or, the government will end up paying for it, and there'll be a glut of social worker degrees flipping burgers because social work and library sciences have a relatively fixed number of positions available.
eindiran 5y ago
Loosely, jobs which pay poorly have a lot of labor supply relative to demand and jobs that pay well have a lot of demand relative to supply. If you artificially change the price of degrees to match the expected lifetime ROI of that degree, you are decreasing the barrier to jobs that we already have too many people attempting to do and increasing the barrier to jobs we need more people to do. Of course this analysis overlooks that some jobs are "good for society" on some metric, but no one wants to pay for them. But then the approach should be to directly incentivize those jobs eg through grants or government-funded work programs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bmhin 5y ago
The loan burden is on many people who do not complete their degrees. If a college's options are: enroll people in very low margin degrees, with likely comparable costs, or enroll people in the high margin (& high earning) degrees but with a success rate of ~75% year over year, the school makes way more money but only a third come out with the value add degree. The incentive there is to push people into the alluring high risk high reward field cause they make revenue regardless. Let in more people, allow for bigger class sizes, offer more classes, etc. The happy path might be the same or better, but the sad path gets grimmer. All that said, the completion rate fiasco is it's whole own can of worms.
csee 5y ago
The logic is wrong because you've assumed a negative or zero correlation between societal usefulness and earnings when the correlation is actually a positive one. Maybe a social work degree has positive externalities that far exceed the earnings. But there's also a lot of crap that doesn't, and incentivizing the landslide of crap and disincentivizing the skills that are in shortage will do a lot of damage. Stuff that pays well tends to be stuff that's actually valued by society. Structural engineers and surgeons get paid lots of money because they actually value add and their skills are in short supply.