Academia is a great example of what happens when you try to create a "market-free" zone: things get abused in unexpected ways while clever rent-seekers embed themselves in incredibly lucrative positions that you never knew you were creating. See: student loans/tuitions, pay-to-read journals (another front page HN topic).

The student loan problem is a result of the generalized "prestige economy" that's driving the problems with journals (and whose failures include that cascade of replication crises). To see this, realize that the only reason so many people are going to university at all is because a good name on your resume is now a requirement for getting any reasonably well-paying job. See the parallels between that and how academics need good names on their CVs in order to compete? It's a prisoner's dillema where the cooperation-case would be that every person who doesn't need their degree for their career would drop out at the same time that every academic switched to open-access journals.

> things get abused in unexpected ways while clever rent-seekers embed themselves in incredibly lucrative positions that you never knew you were creating

Don't forget the swelling of superfluous administration roles and salaries, including bureaucratic roles whose entire job entails manufacturing problems to justify the existence of their position. See: campus diversity officers https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/09/americ...

When I was in school the common trend they had was requiring some foreign language course for ALL students. It was sold with all the traditional rhetoric of making students more well rounded but at the same time you aren't getting more well rounded if you are adding an extra 1 grand to your student loan. It never got implemented though because they didn't have enough budget to implement it.

Mind you, this requirement was in addition to all the existing courses you had to take (40 for a BA degree).

Exactly. If you wonder why education and health care costs explode: when the party deciding is not the party paying, that's what happens.

I hadn't heard of pay-to-read journals being an attempt to create a "market-free zone".

The journals occupy a position where the quality of the service they provide has nothing to do with why a person chooses to do business with them. It's a market in that you can choose who to submit papers to, but the incentives are so misaligned that it doesn't work like a market.

This all doesn't explain why so many people pile up massive debt for a degree that doesn't pay well, if at all, in the current (and foreseeable future) job market - and they'd have to be very clueless to not know it in advance.

They are kids

When they go to college? They're grown up enough to be able to understand such things. This was certainly the case in my generation (mind you, in a different country) - if you asked college students why they're there, some would be actually interested in the subject, most would be there because they thought it would lead to a well-paid or at least stable job, and a few would be kids of rich parents parked away to get their requisite diploma on whatever.

Consequently, for most, choosing where and what they are going to study would either be a research project in and of itself, or else they'd just pick one of the few specialties known to pay well. And we didn't even pay for college!

You can make the student loans dischargeable in the event of a bankruptcy, but at that point their risk profile is no different than unsecured personal loans. Which for a person with low or non-existing credit history (i.e. any 18-year-old) would likely result in:

* requirement for high down payment - perhaps 50 to 75% of the tuition being covered by student or his parents (through home equity loans or retirement account loans)

* frequent and aggressive repayment schedule, starting perhaps 30 days after originating the loan

* high interest rate, perhaps front-loaded into repayment schedule due to higher than normal default rates

* aggressive monitoring of the events related to debt performance, where missed class, late homework, substandard grade or a behavioral citation could result in interest rate boost

* incentives and price control mechanisms enforced by the lender - your computer science class will have a low interest rate, but that music appreciation class or gender studies gotta be out-of-pocket

I think overall that would lower the enrollment rate and force the unbundling of academic offerings. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I can see some people being against it.

> In the US people can’t clear student loans in bankruptcy. It’s a shame...

Maybe you could explain this to me, because I really don't understand. Why do you think that it's a shame that people can't just discharge substantial, otherwise unsecured government loans?

To me, the real shame is high school employees pushing college on marginal students. One of the few things worse than spending too much money on a not-particularly lucrative degree is spending the money, but not graduating.

I believe the graduation rate at Bellevue College, the biggest and best community college* in WA state is around 25%. I'm sure they're not unusual in that regard.

* It's technically not a community college, but for all intents and purposes, it is.

Our rich entrepreneur friends get to take advantage of corporate bankruptcy, giving them second chances when their ideas don't work out. This is just an example of blatant hypocrisy and favoritism advantaging the rich.

If at first you don't succeed... damn well better be an entrepreneur so you get second chances. If you work for a living, no second chances for you!

If it’s a market then the usual market forces need a way to work. Ie. If a college can’t reliably create employed workers the colleges need to feel that loss.

Bellevue College might be the biggest, but its far from the best. They tend to hire current UW professors to teach one class a quarter, stuff the rest of the dept with teachers that were able to get canned at the Seattle Colleges and UW satellites, and hope for the best.

Many of my friends who went there have horror stories about their teachers which I'd be hard pressed to encounter at Seattle Central College or North Seattle College.

Nearly every community college in the Puget Sound decided about a decade ago to shed the community branding and add a handful of 4 year degrees. Problem is the material you learn in upper level CS classes at UW and its satellites is quite different than what North Seattle College and Seattle Central College require (eg: a whole class on SQL Server, C# as the Intro CS class at Seattle Central rathr than the state mandated Python, etc).

US is pretty dismal at graduation rates overall - Department of Education is not even tracking the percent of graduates completing a 4-year degree in 4 years anymore, instead preferring a generous 6-year completion metric for a 4-year degree, which stands at 59% https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

41% of all US undergraduate students have nothing material to show 6 years down the road except for the mounts of student debt. The quoted figure of 22% of those debts being in some kind of default starts looking optimistic.

USA checking in. I declared chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2010. Chapter 7 bankruptcy eliminates 100% of your dischargable debt. When the bankruptcy process had completed, I still owed ~200,000 USD, which was 140,000 USD in student loans and 60,000 USD in back taxes that were less than 3 years old, neither of which were dischargable.

In order to owe $60,000 in back taxes, you had to have income. Where did that income go? Were the original loan amounts even higher? Loans of $140,000 sound awfully high for an undergraduate degree. Did you attend a professional school (law school/dental/medical)?

The recession happened, and I attempted to find a job while living on money I had set aside for taxes. That was a flawed plan. About 70% of the loans were from grad school.

At this point, couldn't you just arbitrage it, and take out loans / mortgages / cash advances / credit cards just to pay off student loans and back taxes, after after which you'd actually declare bankruptcy.

If a lender is going to approve a sufficiently large loan to someone with $200k in student loans and tax debt, and without a high income, they would not be in business for long.

I was already tapped out. There was no more money to be borrowed.

That's called fraud and you will go to prison for it.

How is that fraud?

If you borrow money, and it can be demonstrated you never intended to make a good faith effort to pay it back, you're going to have a bad time.

Most people starting college are 17-20 year old young adults with income and assets far below what would be needed to take out $30K-$100K+ in loans.

Not enough lenders would want to take that risk, unless they have the taxpayer to back them up in case the borrower defaults.

If the borrower's allowed to wipe their debt in bankruptcy, then a lot of students will simply declare bankruptcy as soon as they leave school. The students who play by the rules are burdened with debt, and you're subsidizing people who game the system to their advantage.

The fairest thing to do, then, is either subsidize everybody, and have taxpayer-funded higher education (but that's expensive).

Or subsidize nobody, and let people pay their own way (but that leaves behind students whose families can't afford it).

Or fund the most promising students, and make everybody else pay (but that leaves behind students who don't have good academic record).

Personally I don't like the idea that our society starts its newest members out with a huge debt burden.

I’d rather society “waste” resources on young peoples educations than many other things. For reasons similar to why I’d like to see NASA with DOD funding.