Going to college without debt is not always possible. I tried everything to get scholarships to no avail. Picking a major with a good ROI is definitely possible.

Assuming everyone can do what you did is foolish because there's not physically enough scholarships to go around. There's probably a much greater number of people equally puzzled why they have to go to community college because they couldn't get a scholarship.

I think his point was that he went to a college he could afford. It's true that not everyone can get scholarships to pay for their entire education. But no one has to pay $40k+/year in tuition to get a good education.

In Denmark everyone can get scholarships to pay for their entire education. That and they get a stipend for living expenses. Everyone gets this, young or old, rich or poor.

It gets more complicated in a non homogenous country with 56 times the population. But for sure, Denmark is a nice, well run country.

> It gets more complicated in a non homogenous country

Can you please give me a simple, non-racist explanation why this matters? Please explicitly spell-out what is/is not homogeneous (I always assume race), and explain why that complicates things.

Well I can: it's a lot easier to get things done when everybody agrees on doing it. People with a shared culture are more likely to agree on things.

Here is an argument for your consideration:

Consider the concept of a business cluster, note that the city as a cluster is a reasonable idea [1].

Note that the population of Denmark does not break top 30 in a list of global cities [2].

Conclude that the country of Denmark, with its small geographic and demographic attributes, could specialise entirely in one high-margin economic area and further specialise their laws and social systems to that.

Basically, 5 million people can be sustained by the excess wealth of a strong local cluster. 50 million people cannot be sustained by one strong cluster, and the different clusters may have different needs.

I have no idea about Denmark, but if they /are/ clustered as a country around some high-tech industry, maybe the economically rational equilibrium to give out scholarships to support the local cluster? Maybe they are just nice people? A country with many clusters needs a one-size-fits-all legal and social system that works with all the clusters. The economic equilibriums may be different to a single cluster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster#By_type_of_co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities

I've tried to ask this before. It's basically semi-conscious racism by people who are careful with their words. You'll not get a satisfactory response, because there is none.

You're begging the question. People are racist, that exactly what he's saying.

Not all of them but enough that it affects government at the highest levels. It definitely complicates any topic dealing with poverty becuase race usually gets tied to status in various nonsensical ways.

He's right. There's nothing wrong with being brutally honest.

Why should we pay for "these" people.

> It gets more complicated in a non homogenous country with 56 times the population.

It's also divided into 51 smaller, more localized governments.

If it was all delegated to them, it might work. But what you have instead is 50 secondary layers of bureaucracy, while the Federal govt holds firm control of the student loan market, and imposes control and regulation on colleges, using both carrot (R&D money) and stick (loans).

Yeah but I bet your sports facilities are nowhere near as good, and the admin departments are way understaffed /s

I never understood why universities need competitive sports facilities in the first place (except when it's required for the curriculum, e.g. where sports medicine is offered). I suppose it's something to do either with tradition ("our sports team has been the best for over a century") or income from sponsorship and merch sales, but not sure.

This is just one example, but my university recently revamped their football stadium due to a huge donation from an either an alumni or coach (I can't remember exactly) who donated specifically for this cause. If money comes from a donation, sometimes it's not the school's decision how money should be spent.

How do taxes work out in Denmark? I tried to work out how it would compare to the UK, but it seems significantly more complex to work out. I _think_ an average programmer on £50-60k would end up paying about 35-40% of their income in tax? Or have I completely miscalculated? Compared to about 30% in the UK

Its somewhat complicated, but you pay 8% off the bat as "Arbejdsmarkedsbidrag", then you have a lot of deductions and pay about 40% on the rest. All in all I would wager that my effective tax rate comes to just under 40%, but your milleage will vary.

It's muddied slightly in the UK because of Employer NI, if you include that it gets a little higher.

In a lot of other countries education is a lot cheaper

US has become a country where profit runs everything. What happens when a large percentage of youth don't get education and make enough to buy a house?

thats partly because education consumers (students) keep demanding education to cost so much. If everyone applied to and went to the cheapest colleges they could find, universities would be clamoring to reduce their costs, not increase them.

of course, a big part of the problem is employers. Employers place a large value on Ivy league schools and expensive universities, thus creating the consumer demand in the first place.

What happens is that housing prices fall until enough people can afford them.

Yea, my point was both college selection and major selection should be guided by ROI. This was pretty thoroughly drilled into me by my parents and my high school advisors / guidance counselors. We couldn't afford much so I went to a low cost state school, took advantage of as many scholarships as I possibly could, and picked an engineering major. At no point in the process did anyone ever advise me to "follow my dreams" or "pursue my passions".

I did this as well, spent my first 3 semesters at a private school that cost 40k a year had a pretty decent scholarship but the kicker was that I was in a major that had a minimum starting salary around 100k. So I felt that going to this particular school was worth the debt I'd accumulate because of 1 the major, and 2 the socioeconomic status most of the students came from.

Anyways after 3 semesters I realized that I really didn't like the major I was in so I dropped outta that school and moved home and went to community college until I got myself together and motivated. When that happened I moved into a local state school that is known for being extremely good for its cost.

I don't regret going to the expensive school even if most of the credits didn't transfer, I met some great people there who will be valuable friends to have made. I also don't regret not going there anymore because it would have been way too expensive.

The right way to put it is, "no one should have to pay $40k+/year in tuition". This is a failure of the system, period. And when the bubble explodes it will be a decade or more too late.

I'd venture a guess that helpful and savvy parents matter as much as (if not more than) coming from money

You need luck or connections or wealth to succeed. Connections can include parents, friends, etc. But something has to break your way -- simply attending college is not enough to tilt the odds in your favor.

Many colleges are being pressured (by accreditation committees, donors, government, etc.) to provide methods for students to acquire connections that make it easier to succeed. Networking opportunities, guest lecturers from industry, internships, and special programs are fairly common ways that colleges can make a difference for students beyond an education.

While some (perhaps many or most in some schools) professors live in the isolation of academia, lecturers or part-time, non-tenure professors often work in a field related to the subject they are teaching, and can be a good source of connections for students.

Sure, simple attendance may not be enough for many students, but most colleges do at least try to give you the opportunities and tools you need to succeed.

So that's how they justify the administrative bloat in universities these days. And it's a great excuse to keep hiring lecturers instead of faculty!

I'm not trying to be hard on you, it's just that I'm skeptical about whether new non-academic programs in universities improve outcomes enough to offset their costs to individual students. The check on administrative bloat is very weak in the US, and arbitrary ratings like the US News & World Report have more influence than customers do.

I realize this is days later, but I felt the need to respond even though I didn't feel the need to check for responses earlier.

I do see how it can be easy to believe that ratings have more influence than students. At the same time, many ratings include student surveys as a substantial part of the ratings process.

Additionally, I can see how it can be easy to believe that there is significant administrative bloat in universities, even when the reports on funding sources and costs state that the administrative costs have been going down. For many the budgets and administration of public universities simply don't have enough transparency, and even when they strive to achieve transparency there may not be enough historical data to give people any real perspective.

Further, it's easy to point the finger at all sorts of practices within a University as sources of said administrative bloat, regardless of whether the budgets support those arguments.

When you have a significant reduction in state funding for public universities, you drive those institutions to look for ways to overcome those budget shortfalls. Generally speaking, it's hard to get people to accept salary reductions, so cost-cutting measures come from other directions. Where I work, tenured/tenure-track faculty in some colleges are teaching significantly more credit-hours than they would have ten years ago, so there are fewer lecturers, students, part-time faculty teaching classes. Since the tenured faculty don't get paid more for teaching more classes, this is a pretty effective cost-cutting measure for some colleges, but it has its limits, especially since those faculty are also expected to continue with other intellectual contributions (such as research).

Every new staff or faculty member hired anywhere within the University has to be justified. They no longer hire someone simply because a position has been vacated, so when someone retires it's possible that their duties simply get distributed among others and the position goes away.

However, if someone's job is basically fund-raising, it's probably going to be easier to get approval for that position, especially if you can find a candidate with a proven history of improving the budget situation for an educational institution.

Meanwhile, programs and physical things like buildings and equipment tend to be attractive to donors. You can put up buildings and fill them with equipment by demonstrating a willingness to pay for 50% of the cost and then creating a big push for donors, and with the right people working on the project you can end up paying significantly less (or nothing). Further, you can then leverage the new building/equipment for further facilities/equipment upgrades.

Good luck getting someone to pay someone's pension or to pay the salary of any of the staff dealing with the budget, custodial work, IT, etc.

Coming from money isn't a necessity for an individual, but on a statistical basis, the correlation is undeniable - you're so much more likely to succeed if you come from money that the idea is substantially correct.

If I had a "small $1 million loan" right now, I'd be able to take much greater risks in terms of quitting my job to create a startup or whatever. Thus I'd be far more likely to be more successful (financially speaking)

> If I had a "small $1 million loan" right now

... then your fate would be similar to the fate of a typical big lottery winner: having all your money spent in a few years and your life derailed.

Children of wealthy people succeed not because of inherited money, but because of wealth management habits they learned from their parents.

They succeed because of connections, plain and simple.

It's not zero sum. As somebody who has come from money and made a lot of money in a field entirely unrelated to my parents and with zero financial help from them after university, a lot of the disparities I see between myself and others in my situation who came from more disadvantaged backgrounds is that they spend their money far less wisely because they think that, for example, a house in the country will make them happy. I know from my childhood that is not necessarily the case.