7 ms·

One round of loan forgiveness is fine, but it builds an expectation of it in the future. All of the loans, growing larger and larger, just encourage universiti

by lokar 9mo ago

One round of loan forgiveness is fine, but it builds an expectation of it in the future. All of the loans, growing larger and larger, just encourage universities to grow fatter and raise costs to students. If students could not borrow enough to attend, they would be forced to lower costs (not necessarily the very top universities, but all the rest).

tehjoker 9mo ago
other poorer countries just pay all or most tuition for students and own the universities
- jandrewrogers 9mo ago
  The State governments do own many universities. To a large extent, the government is responsible for the current situation. Also some of the universities are older than the government by hundreds of years and private, the government can’t just “own” them.
  - tehjoker 9mo ago
    This is true, state gov does own many universities, though there was a concerted effort to bring the idea of privatization and deregulation there too since at least the 1990s by cutting subsidies. I met a Polish student a number of years ago who was attending a U.S. Ivy League institution. She said people made fun of her back home for "buying her degree". That has stuck with me ever since.
- creato 9mo ago
  In most such countries there is also an entrance exam requirement that would exclude most student loan borrowers in the US.
estimator7292 9mo ago
It's already unaffordable, enrollment is dropping, and tuition has only continued to go up to offset lower enrollment. The incentives are not so naively simple
- toast0 9mo ago
  Population trends are a pretty big factor in enrollment. Most enrollment is by fresh high school grads. And there are significantly fewer of those then there were 10 years ago; you can make up some of that by expanding eligibility and encouraging more young people to go to college (even those that would be better served doing something else), or expanding international admissions (but maybe not in this administration). Cost is certainly also a factor, but I suspect population is a bigger factor.
bondarchuk 9mo ago
The student loan system is fucked up, so what should happen is an acknowledgement that it's fucked up, forgiving the fucked up loans, and also changing the system to be less fucked up so it won't have to happen again.
- AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
  A reasonable option. But was that on the table? Or was "just student loan forgiveness with no change to the system" what was being proposed? And if that was the proposal, would that be better or worse than the current status quo?
  - cogman10 9mo ago
    Healthcare is in exactly the same boat. A major part of why it's so expensive is because of government subsidies to private healthcare insurance. No or little public option is exactly what allows insurance companies to go hog wild on their premiums. The ACA subsidies are simply a bandaid on a broken system which allows insurance to further break the system as they adapt to what people are willing to pay for a necessity.
    - lokar 9mo ago
      Healthcare is really complicated. No one factor makes up a majority of the excess (compared to other rich nations) cost. The ACA is a bandaid, and may be making things worse over time, at least in some areas. But Americans don't see to have the appetite to really change anything. Probably because most voters are insulated from this by good (enough) employees plans.
    - epistasis 9mo ago
      A big part of that is also the transfers between private insurance and Medicare, with health care providers accepting far lower rates for Medicare and then subsidizing operations with the rates charged to private insurers. Hospital administration is pretty hellish. As is administering payments! Any functioning health care system is going to have a "band-aid" exactly ACA subsidies: make sure that those with the lowest incomes can still afford health care. Something in between Medicaid and the full cost. But as we rein in the costs and get healthcare to be a smaller fraction of GDP, the size of the band-aid can shrink.
cogman10 9mo ago
The solution to that is rebuilding the state and federal funding for higher education with added regulations on where and how that money can be spent (perhaps even putting tuition caps in play). The reason universities are so expensive is there is no limit on how much they can charge for tuition and no requirements on how much they pay their professors. It allows them to dump a huge portion of their funds into the marketing and athletic departments. I know of a few religious universities who's mission is mainly to educate (so their well educated members can pay back more money to the church). While they do subsidize the educational costs, it isn't by as much as you'd think and it does result in some very cheap education. There's no reason the government couldn't do exactly the same thing. It did right up until reagan.
Spivak 9mo ago
I think the point wound be to eliminate all borrowing for tuition. It would be drastic and universities would complain the whole time but band-aid has to be ripped off at some point. I don't think a solution other than welding shut the money font will have a meaningful effect. * Eliminate the entire federal student loan program. Just gone. No more loans. * Make it so that private loans for tuition and related expenses can be trivially discharged. Like just fill out a form and it's auto-approved. You can just decide to not pay your student loans with no repercussions whatsoever. There's probably a better way to accomplish this legally but make it so that they're toxic to private lenders. Once the money officially dries up and less than 1% of families could pay out of pocket for current tuition rates then we watch as jobs stop requiring degrees, apprenticeships become popular, and schools belt-tighten to focus on student ROI. Watch magically as GE requirements evaporate and we find out they weren't ever necessary in the first place. Watch as high schools get pressured to teach actually useful things instead of being grade school the sequel.
- p_j_w 9mo ago
  Your solution means that only the wealthy can attend university, someone who grew up poor wouldn’t stand a chance.
  - Spivak 9mo ago
    Your argument is basically that current university costs are intrinsic and can't possibly be reduced but we know that isn't true. We have not two generations ago people paying for their college tuition with money from their part time jobs. My grandpa paid his way to a PhD as a line cook. Got no financial support from family who were only slightly above dirt poor. Like I don't want to be completely reductive but a good chunk of university classes are 30-100 people paying for a single dude and a room with chairs to lecture for 5 hours a week. This doesn't have to be ruinously expensive.
    - zeroonetwothree 9mo ago
      I’m guessing those were at subsidized public universities. I don't think anyone was paying full fare Harvard tuition entirely with part time work.
criddell 9mo ago
> encourage universities to grow fatter In a typical state school, where's most of the fat accumulating? What could be cut significantly without affecting the quality of education?
- lokar 9mo ago
  I'm not an expert, but a lot has been written on this. Some areas: - more and more administrative staff and "middle management". The assistant to the assistant vice chancellor for elm trees. - Building and running very expensive science research operations. These may well be worthwhile efforts, but conflating them with undergraduate educations is a problem. - more and more student amenities. Fancy dorms, student centers, rec centers, etc - competitive athletics A big part of this, is that they need to attract students, ideally ones who can pay or borrow. And students are putting a lot of weight on the research programs (they impact public ratings), fancy dorms, rec centers, football teams, etc. And they are spending loan money, and don't seem to fully grasp the economics. But even if they did, the highest rated schools are the ones spending all this money, and thus charging more, it's a cycle. And this propagates down to mid- and lower tier schools. And then people in the leadership ranks of these schools are in part evaluated on how the ranking of their school changes. So if you can go from spot 150 to 140 by raising fees to build stuff you don't really need to teach (but improve your ranking), that is good for you.
  - lokar 9mo ago
    Also, I should mention: highly competitive employers do filter based on school ranking, both in recruiting (acting looking for people), but also in hiring. For example, requiring extra approvals to hire someone who did not attend a top N school for their major. So it can be rational for a student to stretch hard to get into a higher ranked school. (I know this from being personally involved in this at more then one company)
positron26 9mo ago
Just can't help humming in my head reg yoo la toe ree cap chur Any system that can juice itself by increasing both funding and cost will scale both until the natural incentive gradients (are you smart? do you actually want to do stuff or do you just want a desk job?) vanish into the noise. When everyone went to college, nobody learned anything. University is one of those things you always want to be capability rather than means gated, but those of means will always want their kids to get in regardless of how they were raised. After all, they worked hard. Why should their kids? They will ally with every convenient rationalization in order to moralize for the politics, taking advantage of arguments about "disadvantaged backgrounds" etc to treat everything as a means problem, but the goal is to dilute the capability aspect, and that robs talent. If you have exceptional talent, you need to know the truth. Systems naturally try to optimize the dumb-rich to smart ratio so that there's a lot of subsidy available for anyone who actually needs to be there, but consequent GPA inflation demands that we make the education somewhat meaningless, so you're really on your own to set goals, and any good ones are way higher. Check the boxes, take the free lunch, and then treat the overall coddling like a charade that must be ignored. Then again, isn't self direction always that way?

by lokar 9mo ago

tehjoker 9mo ago

other poorer countries just pay all or most tuition for students and own the universities

jandrewrogers 9mo ago
The State governments do own many universities. To a large extent, the government is responsible for the current situation. Also some of the universities are older than the government by hundreds of years and private, the government can’t just “own” them.
- tehjoker 9mo ago
  This is true, state gov does own many universities, though there was a concerted effort to bring the idea of privatization and deregulation there too since at least the 1990s by cutting subsidies. I met a Polish student a number of years ago who was attending a U.S. Ivy League institution. She said people made fun of her back home for "buying her degree". That has stuck with me ever since.
creato 9mo ago
In most such countries there is also an entrance exam requirement that would exclude most student loan borrowers in the US.

estimator7292 9mo ago

It's already unaffordable, enrollment is dropping, and tuition has only continued to go up to offset lower enrollment. The incentives are not so naively simple

toast0 9mo ago
Population trends are a pretty big factor in enrollment. Most enrollment is by fresh high school grads. And there are significantly fewer of those then there were 10 years ago; you can make up some of that by expanding eligibility and encouraging more young people to go to college (even those that would be better served doing something else), or expanding international admissions (but maybe not in this administration). Cost is certainly also a factor, but I suspect population is a bigger factor.

bondarchuk 9mo ago

The student loan system is fucked up, so what should happen is an acknowledgement that it's fucked up, forgiving the fucked up loans, and also changing the system to be less fucked up so it won't have to happen again.

AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
A reasonable option. But was that on the table? Or was "just student loan forgiveness with no change to the system" what was being proposed? And if that was the proposal, would that be better or worse than the current status quo?
- cogman10 9mo ago
  Healthcare is in exactly the same boat. A major part of why it's so expensive is because of government subsidies to private healthcare insurance. No or little public option is exactly what allows insurance companies to go hog wild on their premiums. The ACA subsidies are simply a bandaid on a broken system which allows insurance to further break the system as they adapt to what people are willing to pay for a necessity.
  - lokar 9mo ago
    Healthcare is really complicated. No one factor makes up a majority of the excess (compared to other rich nations) cost. The ACA is a bandaid, and may be making things worse over time, at least in some areas. But Americans don't see to have the appetite to really change anything. Probably because most voters are insulated from this by good (enough) employees plans.
  - epistasis 9mo ago
    A big part of that is also the transfers between private insurance and Medicare, with health care providers accepting far lower rates for Medicare and then subsidizing operations with the rates charged to private insurers. Hospital administration is pretty hellish. As is administering payments! Any functioning health care system is going to have a "band-aid" exactly ACA subsidies: make sure that those with the lowest incomes can still afford health care. Something in between Medicaid and the full cost. But as we rein in the costs and get healthcare to be a smaller fraction of GDP, the size of the band-aid can shrink.

cogman10 9mo ago

The solution to that is rebuilding the state and federal funding for higher education with added regulations on where and how that money can be spent (perhaps even putting tuition caps in play). The reason universities are so expensive is there is no limit on how much they can charge for tuition and no requirements on how much they pay their professors. It allows them to dump a huge portion of their funds into the marketing and athletic departments. I know of a few religious universities who's mission is mainly to educate (so their well educated members can pay back more money to the church). While they do subsidize the educational costs, it isn't by as much as you'd think and it does result in some very cheap education. There's no reason the government couldn't do exactly the same thing. It did right up until reagan.

Spivak 9mo ago

I think the point wound be to eliminate all borrowing for tuition. It would be drastic and universities would complain the whole time but band-aid has to be ripped off at some point. I don't think a solution other than welding shut the money font will have a meaningful effect. * Eliminate the entire federal student loan program. Just gone. No more loans. * Make it so that private loans for tuition and related expenses can be trivially discharged. Like just fill out a form and it's auto-approved. You can just decide to not pay your student loans with no repercussions whatsoever. There's probably a better way to accomplish this legally but make it so that they're toxic to private lenders. Once the money officially dries up and less than 1% of families could pay out of pocket for current tuition rates then we watch as jobs stop requiring degrees, apprenticeships become popular, and schools belt-tighten to focus on student ROI. Watch magically as GE requirements evaporate and we find out they weren't ever necessary in the first place. Watch as high schools get pressured to teach actually useful things instead of being grade school the sequel.

p_j_w 9mo ago
Your solution means that only the wealthy can attend university, someone who grew up poor wouldn’t stand a chance.
- Spivak 9mo ago
  Your argument is basically that current university costs are intrinsic and can't possibly be reduced but we know that isn't true. We have not two generations ago people paying for their college tuition with money from their part time jobs. My grandpa paid his way to a PhD as a line cook. Got no financial support from family who were only slightly above dirt poor. Like I don't want to be completely reductive but a good chunk of university classes are 30-100 people paying for a single dude and a room with chairs to lecture for 5 hours a week. This doesn't have to be ruinously expensive.
  - zeroonetwothree 9mo ago
    I’m guessing those were at subsidized public universities. I don't think anyone was paying full fare Harvard tuition entirely with part time work.

criddell 9mo ago

> encourage universities to grow fatter In a typical state school, where's most of the fat accumulating? What could be cut significantly without affecting the quality of education?

lokar 9mo ago
I'm not an expert, but a lot has been written on this. Some areas: - more and more administrative staff and "middle management". The assistant to the assistant vice chancellor for elm trees. - Building and running very expensive science research operations. These may well be worthwhile efforts, but conflating them with undergraduate educations is a problem. - more and more student amenities. Fancy dorms, student centers, rec centers, etc - competitive athletics A big part of this, is that they need to attract students, ideally ones who can pay or borrow. And students are putting a lot of weight on the research programs (they impact public ratings), fancy dorms, rec centers, football teams, etc. And they are spending loan money, and don't seem to fully grasp the economics. But even if they did, the highest rated schools are the ones spending all this money, and thus charging more, it's a cycle. And this propagates down to mid- and lower tier schools. And then people in the leadership ranks of these schools are in part evaluated on how the ranking of their school changes. So if you can go from spot 150 to 140 by raising fees to build stuff you don't really need to teach (but improve your ranking), that is good for you.
- lokar 9mo ago
  Also, I should mention: highly competitive employers do filter based on school ranking, both in recruiting (acting looking for people), but also in hiring. For example, requiring extra approvals to hire someone who did not attend a top N school for their major. So it can be rational for a student to stretch hard to get into a higher ranked school. (I know this from being personally involved in this at more then one company)

positron26 9mo ago

Just can't help humming in my head reg yoo la toe ree cap chur Any system that can juice itself by increasing both funding and cost will scale both until the natural incentive gradients (are you smart? do you actually want to do stuff or do you just want a desk job?) vanish into the noise. When everyone went to college, nobody learned anything. University is one of those things you always want to be capability rather than means gated, but those of means will always want their kids to get in regardless of how they were raised. After all, they worked hard. Why should their kids? They will ally with every convenient rationalization in order to moralize for the politics, taking advantage of arguments about "disadvantaged backgrounds" etc to treat everything as a means problem, but the goal is to dilute the capability aspect, and that robs talent. If you have exceptional talent, you need to know the truth. Systems naturally try to optimize the dumb-rich to smart ratio so that there's a lot of subsidy available for anyone who actually needs to be there, but consequent GPA inflation demands that we make the education somewhat meaningless, so you're really on your own to set goals, and any good ones are way higher. Check the boxes, take the free lunch, and then treat the overall coddling like a charade that must be ignored. Then again, isn't self direction always that way?