This really adds to discussion as people get also to discuss if they really want to spend more of their own money. The word 'free' in this context seems to automatically dismiss any discussions about tax rise and public spending.

Disclaimer: I'm Brazilian, not some angry republican.

I'm Brazilian and living in Sweden, that is how society here thinks (mostly), social mobility here is absolutely real. Just as an anecdote, I have friends who are 1st generation born here from very poor immigrant families, they are architects, engineers and fashion designers with good careers ahead. That was only possible because they had access to free education for all of their lives.

I am proud to pay my taxes here and fund this, even though I never have used (and don't plan to have a family), as many issues as this society has it works and tries to improve itself, coming from Brazil it's another world.

So I don't appreciate the rhetorics around not funding public education and healthcare, these are basic tenants of the societies of the future.

What are those people doing now if they didn't go to college because it was too expensive to pursue an "impractical" degree?

Wouldn't providing people the option for further education be a net good for society in general?

I'll choose to ignore the entire notion of "impractical" degrees. The society I want to live in is not without music, literature, and art. But those are "impractical" studies.

We had this. It was called high school. But then standards were lowered so it was no longer a good filter for intelligence and conscientiousness. Standards were lowered to increase "social mobility." This did not work. Now college performs the same function. But the average IQ of college graduates will continue to decline as the percent of the population that graduates approaches 100, and so masters degrees are becoming increasingly common.

Will this, too, increase social mobility?

Social mobility in a meritocratic society is hard given the heritability of valuable mental traits. If we keep sacrificing our schools on the alter of social mobility, we will end up burning the first 30 years of or lives getting Phds in mopping floors.

Secondly, you seem to imply that no improvement in the education level has happened because of the normalization of high-school education. I disagree with this also. I have no numbers to back this up, but by looking at the world around us, at all the inventions and the added complexity and our increasing ability to handle complex systems, I think we have become smarter.

Thirdly, maybe social mobility was hijacked by some rhetoric or became a symbol for this or that group. But at its core, social mobility means allowing people to rise to their potential and not stifling them. How can we be "sacrificing our schools on the alter of social mobility" when social mobility is supposed to be _more_ meritocratic, not less?

For instance the difference between 3.5 years without graduating and 4 years + graduation is immense, whereas in a non-signaling model, they should have very similar outcomes.

Education, in the resume / HR sense is absolutely a signal.

Education, in maintaining and excelling in your profession is knowledge.

It's lamentable that degrees are used as filters, but I wouldn't trust someone to do an electrical engineering job who didn't have a related degree. There's simply too much to learn. (Yes, exceptions do exist, but they're not common)

I'd argue the more pointed questions to colleges should be: if you're not equipping your graduates with the latter knowledge, then what are they buying? And why should they continue to pay you?

Standards have never been higher. Students face pressure from college admissions and teachers face pressure from national standards bodies. Policies that have enriched standardized testing companies.

The real issue: Labor power has never been lower. Wages have been stagnant for the past two decades. You need a college degree now because safe middle class lifestyles that were previously available to graduates of high school are now limited to those with certain bachelors degrees.

Whether this is due to political collusion with capital, increased automation, globalized labor or a combination of the three is up for debate. The middle class you're imagining was fueled by an economic engine tooling up to rebuild Europe and a political climate that taxed the rich at 80-90%.

The exact same type of jobs often have different requirements year-to-year. Recruiters start adding or removing requiments based on how easy it is to find people for a role. It just acts as a filter but is often unrelated to the actual difficulty of the role.

Recruiters don't want to have to judge people entirely on merit as it is hard. They pre-filter the pool to focus their search and make it easier to manage and vary the constraints based on number of applicants.

This means people perfectly capable of doing a job get excluded for a superficial reason other than ability or competence and it overly effects people from a poorer background.

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

[0] https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/5873/00STU...

And the GDP of Venezuela as measured in bolívar is the highest it's ever been!

"More comparisons on new SAT scores versus critical reading and math scores on the old SAT:

A new 1200 corresponds to an old 1130. A new 1300 corresponds to an old 1230. A new 1400 corresponds to an old 1340. A new 1500 corresponds to an old 1460. But a new 1600 is just as perfect as an old 1600."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/05/1...

Underestimate the caliber of the rising population at your own peril. The failing generation can only cry ageism for so long before their jobs are eaten.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

The argument against the downfall of society stands pretty well on it's own without it though, mostly because there's no evidence the tests are getting easier (regardless of recent score changes a 1600 is still a 1600) and even less evidence the test takes are becoming less accomplished.

http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2017/01/10/1612113114.

I think it's a bold conclusion to leap from one genetic marker doesn't seem as strongly correlated to education levels among Icelanders to "cognitive genomics is on the decline".

Better to use hyperlinks; order of posts on HN is not immutable.

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My older son needed a certain ACT score to get into the school he wanted. He wasn’t anywhere near the score. After 10 one on one tutorial sessions at $100 a pop with former college professors. He got in. He didn’t all the sudden get smarter. He had access to resources.

Another anecdote, I had the highest SAT score in my school and I believe at least the second highest in my city out of 5000 graduating students (not a large city). How much of that do you think was due to me being one of the smartest or hardest working students in my city (usually ranked near the bottom in income in the US) and how much was it due to my mom not only being a high school math teacher but she also had done SAT workshops for years?

I didn’t have to go to a “SAT Tutorial” class with 30 other students where an overworked teacher volunteered to come in the morning for an hour before school started. I had all the help at home I needed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...

More important is to ensure that a college education is not required and not useful for social mobility.

OTOH the traditional college may be not the best way to acquire certain kinds of knowledge. In many cases learning outside campus using recorded lectures, books, and computers may be as efficient, and visiting labs for necessary work could be vastly less expensive than doing full-time college.

I suspect the value of certain independent examinations / certifications, that is, the comparative advantage they give, will grow with time. The effort of passing them will be (or already is) university-level high, and the prices will also grow, but definitely not to the level of college prices.

This will democratize learning because of the lower prices, easier choice of time / pace, and easier choice of what you really want to learn. It's already happening, of course, but it's low-key by now. I posit that it will be a major force.

Certain things, like medicine, are not amenable to this approach, or course. But a lot of STEM, financial, media, even liberal arts curricula can benefit from such an approach.

College doesn't only improve your income via teaching you valuable skills that demand a higher wage on the job market. It also tells employers that you're the sort of person who can successfully get through college, and employers rightfully discriminate based off this signal.

Furthermore, there's a selection effect too. Colleges don't necessarily make their students better, but can often simply find better students. If you took Stanford and replaced 100% of the instruction with putting the admitted kids in a room together, the "graduates" would end up out-earning others simply because of the kind of person that they are.

There's some debate about the relative sizes of these three factors, but it's my opinion that the human capital theory is a relatively small portion of it. Under 20%, I think.

In a narrow IT industry sense, having an MSCE, or JCP, or Cisco certification used to be somehow valuable. But tech moves fast, so topic-bound certifications don't keep their value for very long.

In my country, vast majority of people go to post-high-school education. The result is that a lot of people have bachelor's or even master's yet end up working shitty dead-end jobs. Which they could do as well right after high school. In fact, many places prefer to hire people without degrees for such jobs for various reasons. Effectively higher education becomes net negative if you went there for the lulz and didn't make it.

Its being accessible is the issue, that is, we don't want to miss a bright child of not so well-off parents who can't afford to pay a lot. Hence education credits: if you're bright and determined, a good education will give you a lot, and land you in a financially more gainful place.

OTOH a diploma becomes a token of costly signaling, "all good kids get a degree", so a lot of people go to college just for lulz, or to appease parents, which is a pretty bad use of their time, and also a source of crippling debt.

Here's where differentiation actually occurs: it's between the determined kids who actively work on and benefit from education, and unmotivated kids who just fool around, because peer pressure, parents, or fashion pushed them to a college which they don't care much about, or which teaches only unmarketable skills. It's a pretty painful and costly way to differentiate; I hope the society will eventually find a different way to achieve a similar effect.

(To say nothing of the rising cost of education, fueled by the unending source of the educational credit money.)

For the record: I did not press my son to go to college, and he decided not to go. I'm fine with it. He's got an engineering job anyway.

Perhaps on a purely relative scale, not much would change comparatively between the citizens. But the country's wealth will have increased.

Good plumber can advance standards of living and overall wealth much more than another failed literature critic. Who feels too smart to go to vocational school to learn plumbing after spending 4 years for useless diploma.

This is not a problem that has any easy solutions. I've been kind of partial to making tuition free for four years (paid for by the state) as long as you can maintain a 3.0 GPA. Basically extended public school but more aggressive about weeding out people who are not cut out for school. The state would negotiate appropriate tuition each year to discourage ever inflating rates.

A 4-year degree should also not be as widely required as it currently is, which is something else that needs to correct, which would happen with a collapse of graduates.

But as mentioned upthread, if we simply keep things as they are and throw good money after bad, people are going to have to be in school until they're 30 in order to meet the minimum requirements for mediocre jobs. Better to have some tough times to weather, given that you can always enroll later in life after things have settled, assuming it's something around a 5-year correction.

1. Provides government with cheap, high-quality workers. 2. Teaches leadership, discipline and other necessary soft-skills.

So, stop federally guaranteeing (and issuing) student loans (which mostly don't go to the poor) and increase need-based, and public-service-based, grants. Widely available no-need loans drive up prices but also insulate people from the immediate effects at a time when they are cognitively least able to appropriately assess long-term costs.

Is this better or worse than the credential treadmill and a lifetime servicing debt? At least when college was cheap in the 70s, you could pay for it with a summer job and part time work during school.

> more aggressive about weeding out people who are not cut out for school

This would never happen.

I was accepted to a well known engineering school. I chose to go to a much cheaper state college and stay at home. Looking at the salaries reported by the engineering school for graduates three years out, I was making the same.

Setup a corporation owned by a trust, all your assets go into the corporation. If you have a catastrophic life changing event, your base will be secure.

You can also rent your home back from yourself and write off things you can't do as a homeowner (depreciation, upgrades, interest, etc.).

Moving your assets to their own entity is how you protect them. Should something go wrong, you have no assets for them to come after as they're owned by the trust. You can use your lifetime estate giving to help avoid taxes on the first few million. Plus if you're putting things in there before they've appreciated over decades, it will be at a lower cost basis as well.

Discuss this with an accountant and attorney that understands trusts and the tax implications of course.

But, in-state tuition at universities can be very affordable. The average public four year tuition is $6,841. Knock out two years at junior college and it's even cheaper.

There are pretty generous subsidies based on income, where you can get junior college almost for free.

Yes private university tuition is very expensive, but public colleges are not.

(Lots of poor people applying for colleges don't know this, of course, and restrict themselves to “cheaper” public schools.)

The mental shift and peace of mind GP is talking happened for me when we could pay off all of our debts with our liquid assets. We chose not to do this however because of interest rates, and because the nest egg meant we never had to pay for anything, even a broken car or arm, on credit. I believe that you will discover you feel the same way.

Don't confuse 'no debt' with 'wealthy'. Wealthy people take loans too, when it's cheaper than the alternative.

I understand the financial reasoning behind not paying them off...but I think her time is worth more to us than whatever money we would save if she had to continue working.

If the interest rate on your student loan is lower than the investment returns you make, then you:

(1) End up with more money if you don't pay off your student loans, and

(2) Can still pay off your student loans whenever you need to, so your wife would not have to continue working any longer than she would otherwise.

It is strictly more money, and doesn't change your wife's timeline. You basically get free money at the spread in yields between your student loan debt and your investment returns.

One way to think about it is this: If you could borrow $50k at (say) 3% interest and could invest it in a way to make (say) 8% returns, why wouldn't you? You'd make 5% on that $50k!

The fact that you already have the debt, and the cash comes from saving monthly instead of in a lump sum doesn't change that basic math, and doesn't change how long you need to keep saving for -- in fact, it would lower it!

Of course, that assumes a low student loan interest rate and a high rate of return on investments, as well as risk tolerance, etc. etc. etc.

If you ever want to be comfortable (nevermind wealthy for the moment), you must overcome the urge to spend money that you have 'lying around'. The forced austerity of paying off your loans as fast as you can is a different kind of discipline that is useful, but it avoids temptation. When you pay off your loans you make that money disappear, in a much more concrete way than for instance setting up automatic transfers.

Eventually, you have to learn to resist that temptation, and I think it's healthier and more efficient to exercise those muscles long before you hit a net worth of $1. You have to get comfortable having liquid assets, and still live below your means. To spend it when it's wise to do so instead of when you want to. If you can do that your wife can quit her job, or you can take a chance on that new job that is in a new town, or might explode in a fiery cataclysm. You can remodel your kitchen to make your house worth more than you spent on the remodel.

Even simple stuff like putting aside money for a new TV or laptop and then not buying it until there's a sale can make a huge difference in your spending money. Or bigger, like a car. Don't get the one without air conditioning because it's the color you like. Just wait.

If you feel you do not have the discipline to avoid dipping into your investments, then by all means continue as you are.

Otherwise you'll still be stuck in the loop. You'll get a little breathing room but you'll never really be free of the worry.

There's almost nothing I learned during my 4 year college education that prepared me for any of my (tech) jobs post-graduation. And, due to poor decisions that I made, essentially as a child, I dropped out of high school when I was 16. So, a GED and a college education seemed like the only way out of the hole I dug myself at the time.

I guess now that I am 30 and know myself a lot better, what I do regret is not being more creative. I probably could've figured out a way into a job similar to the one I have now if I had been more creative and avoided getting a 4 year degree.

Did you participate? I've always been an avid and successful self-teacher, but college gave me opportunities and goals that I would have as an individual "smart" person. Everyone I've met who "tried" in an educational setting has come out knowing more than when they went in.

Now I have a stable relationship and I'd love to have children... but I can't, because 70% of my income goes to debt payment. My country has no US-style bankruptcy (if I stop paying I'm a pariah for life).

Absolutely agree about universal healthcare, that's something my country does well, and would improve the life of Americans.

Education... well, I'm more on the fence. I think current college prices in the U.S. are too high, but there's so much amazing free education... but yes, some basic level should be free. Maybe UBI would enable self-taught or other alternatives (I know there are some YC startups focused on alternatives).

Edit: no idea why I was downvoted :(