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The people crying the loudest about loan forgiveness are people who went to expensive colleges and obtained unmarketable degrees. It is well known that many of
by AmVess 5y ago
The people crying the loudest about loan forgiveness are people who went to expensive colleges and obtained unmarketable degrees.
It is well known that many of these boutique colleges charge a lot of money because they will find people to pay the price. Simply lowering the interest rate on a loan will do nothing to stop this.
Requiring colleges to peg the total cost of an education to what a graduate can earn in that field in one year would be a good step towards reducing pointless degrees and laughably expensive tuition.
- diogenes_of_ak 5y agoI had an expensive education, just paid it off last year. We lived with my folks for a year to finally pay it off after 10 years. Nobody should have to struggle that way. Make college free and forgive the outstanding debt. My $1000/mo made my life extraordinarily expensive…
- gladinovax 5y agoyou are in favor of removing the consequences of bad decisons. No wonder you struggle. Flag away.
- b9a2cab5 5y agoIn the long run, having lower taxes from not paying for other peoples' educations is cheaper for you and for anyone with a useful degree. I will take the example of my friend. He's at a no name company as a new grad software engineer making $96k. That is, he's working at a position attainable to everyone. That's $8000/mo pre-tax and he lives in a fairly LCoL area. $1000/mo for 5-8 years is peanuts compared to the extra taxes he'd pay for a lifetime under your idea. If you consider it from the perspective of someone working at FAANG ($200k new grad salary) $1k/mo is even more trivial.
- jurassic 5y agoI don’t agree with necessarily tying price to value. I don’t want people choosing art history over CS just because it is cheaper. I do think each major should have something akin to a Nutrition Facts label laying out clear information about the financial outcomes for recent graduates. So people can understand if financing that educational pursuit is likely to be worthwhile.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago> I don't want people choosing art history over CS [because of price] This reasoning right here is why people are stuck in $100k student loans with useless degrees. Sometimes it is more useful for society as a whole to have fewer art history majors and more engineering majors. The overwhelming majority of highly impactful social science research (if it can be called that with the reproducibility issues it has) comes from the top 10 institutions. Everyone else is just getting a degree in barista science.
- otde 5y agoI’m not sure I like the implicit association here between a job’s income level and some vague metric of “usefulness to society,” to say nothing of the dismissiveness that comes with the “barista science” label.
- bee_rider 5y agoWe shouldn't push people without aptitude and interest in programming into the field. There is already too much bad code out there.
- jurassic 5y agoI'm not advocating an increase in art history majors. I'm saying if art history was cheaper, that could send even more people down a path that is financially unrewarding. By pricing degrees according to value, a CS degree becomes relatively more expensive and less attractive to somebody making college decisions with a tight budget in mind.
- b9a2cab5 5y agoIf you make universities responsible for student income outcomes (by for example making them take loan liability in case of default) that makes them steer students towards the CS degree, not the art history one.
- missedthecue 5y agoWhy don't you want that? Pricing signals are the way markets communicate. If we obfuscate those signals, problems invariably present themselves. As we are seeing.
- choward 5y agoSo you want to punish people who get practical degrees? How will this reduce "pointless" degrees? Won't it incentivize you to get them?
- AmVess 5y agoBy peg, I meant cap. Colleges will still compete on price for better students, so practical degrees will more or less remain the same cost. What will vanish are $150k degrees that have no or little value in the market.
- m_ke 5y agoMy SO is a physician assistant, which requires a graduate degree. The tuition alone at almost all of the PA programs is >100K and acceptance rates are low (<20%) so most people don't really get to choose where they go. Most of her class graduated with 150-250K in debt with 5-8% interest, they're a year into working at understaffed hospitals and are already burning out. Quitting and getting a different job is not an option because nothing else will pay them anywhere near enough to cover the $1800-2500/month tuition payments.
- RhysU 5y agoI sometimes think applying Matt Levine's Certificate of Dumb Investment, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24285305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24285305, would be relevant to the massive-graduate-student-loans process.