Re:Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
by ghostcluster on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @11:19PM
(#15919914)
> 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...
Re:Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
by anonymous5133 on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @11:26PM
(#15919943)
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).
Re:Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
by paulddraper on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @11:03PM
(#15919860)
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".
Re:Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
by whatshisface on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @11:09PM
(#15919884)
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.
Re:Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
by int_19h on Thursday December 14, 2017 @12:05AM
(#15920074)
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.
Re:Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
by hjjiehebebe on Thursday December 14, 2017 @08:20PM
(#15928987)
They are kids
Re:Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
by int_19h on Friday December 15, 2017 @04:26AM
(#15930617)
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!
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.