Many people do not belong in college and learn next to nothing, but go because they're shoo'ed along into it and the universities are in on the joke, and in on the money-making, and undergoing a drastic reduction of standards as a result.
Some data on just how bad higher ed is getting, from 2017: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...
If you are allowed to re-enroll, you have 1 strike left. Another sub-2.0 GPA and you're gone.
If the US brought such a generation-transforming policy like this to the table, the easiest part of it would be to set that minimum standard across all participating schools. Most likely already have something close to this in place now.
Free higher education works well in the European countries that offer it.
What better investment could a society make than allow someone to pursue a field they are passionate about, and letting them start life with a clean slate? I'm by no means a socialist, but I think university should mostly be free.
The only thing (student) debt does is tie someone down. To a lifestyle or employer that they actually should have no loyalty to.
Tax brackets don't need to rise, resources just need to be moved from alternative things (i.e. military spending).
It depends what you're looking at. I think it hurts local communities by exporting all the young talent and gets people plugged into the white collar, global economy.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy what I do, but I think a lot of the time in college could have been better spent learning how to build houses, make furniture, grow food, etc.
If the government is going to pay for it I would like it to be a better resource for enriching the nation, not just a tool for generating more wealth.
Then go do a degree on agro engineering ?
(If performance at an identifiable subset of schools is better, then it's more that spending resources on the other schools is questionable than it is that higher education is in a crisis)
Median salaries pool are much higher at the top yet tuition is really similar across all schools.
This is true with undergraduate programs as well. Median starting salary after graduation at University of Florida is 52k. FIU and UCF, both a few hours away with similar programs? 46k.
University of Houston? 53k. Rice University a few miles away? 64k.
I've named schools that are all pretty good...the story gets much worse with private universities that are not selective. There are always people who do fantastic regardless of which school they go to but in aggregate schools matter a lot.
Salaries for adjunct professors teaching the classes cannot get any lower, so the quality of education could remain about the same
The future is in income sharing agreements. Let the market and investors decide if they can be paid back.
Saying that college loans should be dischargeable is basically saying that student loans shouldn't exist (which is a fine point of view, but people should be clear on what their position is).
Second point. Saying a loan should be dischargeable does not mean the loan shouldn't exist. It is a cost the lender has to assume. And before you point out that this will be inflicted upon the borrower in the form of higher interest, I have my doubts. The bearer of an additional transactional cost depends on mostly on elasticity, but basically there is so much profit in student loans right now the lenders will just make a lot less money, and nothing else will change.
1) loans should be dischargeable via bankruptcy so that
2) lenders refuse to make such large loans so that
3) tuitions are forced down
Making this change would have an enormous impact on how higher education in the US functions.
I like the way this girl did it. Great deal and she was smart about it.
> Join the rest of the developed world.
Let me tell you about the situation in Germany with its "free" universities: First of all, there's a three-tier school system with the lowest tier barred from higher education altogether, the middle tier requiring further schooling to access second-rate colleges only and only the high tier allowing university access. Usually, children are separated into these tiers by their teachers, at the end of primary school. While it's technically possible get back on the higher track when they're 16 or so, it is rare. Parental income/education and race is a huge predictor on which bucket a child ends up.
So let's say you were a "good child" and are allowed to the universities, prepare for long waiting times (years) unless you have a near-perfect grade average, in case you want to study something "popular" like medicine, business administration or law. Don't expect to get a seat at one of those crowded auditoriums, prepare to sit on the stairs. Also prepare to be "weeded out" early, especially in the technical fields. Fail a test in a course three times and you will not only be thrown out of your degree program, you are permanently barred from getting any degree that has that course in it. Failed your law degree? Maybe try computer science then!
Okay, let's say you went through all those filters, you finally get a degree. If you're got one of those "popular" degrees, it turns out that job competition is actually quite tough, because far more people have a degree than what the job market actually can absorb. It's still better than in Spain, Italy, Greece etc, where degrees are handed out like candy but actual jobs are as rare as gemstones.
Bottom Line: "Free College" just produces over-education, because most people choose popular degrees beyond what the market actually needs. With ISAs, at least there's an incentive to only support those degrees that are actually in-demand.
Paying for education for all is something we could very easily afford by moving money from other publically funded programs, so you wouldn’t have to pay an extra cent in taxes above what you’re paying now.
So the question is why not divert some money from the military or other programs? It has been demonstrated many times over that we don’t need new taxes to cover a national education program.
Several countries in Europe have publically funded university, and they are ranking higher in education than the U.S. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index
And that doesn’t seem to hurt those countries; wealth per adult is higher than the U.S. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
So is it possible you’re mistaken and that public funding for education might not just be free but even have financial returns, that it might even make us richer in the long term not poorer?
Also, net contribution has nothing to do with whether you can afford to pay to build private roads, or pay for doctors without insurance, or pay for private education. Almost nobody could afford to pay for their own roads, freeways cost billions; that's precisely why we share the cost, even if not every single person uses them. It should be somewhat evident that transportation and distribution businesses and the executives that run them benefit financially more from public roads than individuals do.
By using the term "net contributor" you're comparing tax payers against each other and painting a picture of what's more or less fair from person to person. What I'm suggesting is you should compare the services that come with taxes to what you get with no shared services at all, which is the logical conclusion of the GP comment. I care less about the fear of paying 2% more taxes than someone else when I think about the fact that the services I get would cost me many orders of magnitude more money than I have if I had to pay for them individually and privately.
For the sake of conversation, I wouldn't mind hearing why you think HN demographics makes people net contributors. I'm quite skeptical that services for the poor cost more than the sum total of tax breaks and infrastructure the rich enjoy, if that's the direction you were headed...
And, of course, the entire concept of contributor/recipient is irrelevant if we fund education without raising taxes, and moreso if a national education system were to bring in more money than it costs, which may be the case in Norway & Finland among other places. Fretting over what's fair and worrying excessively about freeloaders might be costing us a lot more than it saves.
Public universities are run like businesses now, with trillion dollar endowments and tuition expanding at insane rates. My own state school tuition has gone up 250% in the last 20 years, outpacing inflation by several times. Something needs to change to bring this under control.
There's little evidence that modern college provides skills to succeed; There is increasing evidence that there is a shortage in trades.
[1]:https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_322.10.a...
From the table in the link:
Business - 371,694
Health Professions - 228,896
Public Admin/Social Services - 161,230
Biological + Medical Sciences - 113,749
This is Hacker News. Please respect the community here and attempt to present some data to support your comment.
Nonetheless, the parent posts' point and evidence still stands, that the largest groups of degrees granted are in subjects of value.
I strongly disagree with that. "Business" majors are an effectively general education humanities degree, that is pretty worthless a lot of the time.
The same goes for biology, actually. Yes, it is a hardish science, but the career path for biology majors is pretty grim.
Re: the responsibility thing, it’s a fundamental difference in ideology and subjective preference, I get it, and I’m not going to argue it. I used to make the same argument, actually. My own subjective preference is to live in a developed nation where everyone has a good on-ramp towards work that they find fulfilling and interesting, and where everyone pays it forward. Other countries get better outcomes in this regard so I want to follow their lead. Anyways see you at the ballot box.
Even in healthcare! "I have my money, if they die it's because they chose to be poor."
My mother-in-law is like this. She would let a convicted murderer that was down on their luck move in with her because "everyone deserves a roof over their head"
Again, I GET IT. But do you understand why some may have these selfish viewpoints?
What's special about the US among highly developed nations is that we've convinced ourselves that most of us would be harmed, when it's likely that only a very well-off minority would be harmed (where "harmed" means "be slight less well-off, but still well off").
A complete lack of empathy for fellow people
Psychopathy.
As a European, I'm happy to pay taxes because it's a convenient and efficient way to get money out of my bank account and into the hands of people who need it more than me; I'm helping my fellow countrymen with literally zero effort on my part, which makes my country a better place for me to live in. If we cancelled taxes and required people to make individual donations, I would still want to, but I would probably be too busy / lazy to do it :P
(Not to say that the government does a PERFECTLY efficient job of distributing taxes to those in need, I actually disagree with much of their spending - but on the whole it does a considerably better job than I would if I had to do it all myself)
Firstly, please don't put words into other people's mouths, it is very disingenuous.
As to the actual point - I'll also go to jail if I murder someone. But I wouldn't say "the government is using force to stop me from murdering people", "the reason to avoid murdering people is because you will go to jail if you do" - I'm happy to go around not-murdering people of my own free will, because I believe that society is a better place when we don't murder each other.
> Calling at least a third of your earnings "literally zero effort" is a bit disingenuous.
The GOAL is to spend a third of my money, so I'm not counting that as effort - taxes take a third of my earnings in between my employer and my bank account, so by the time my monthly pay reaches my bank account, it has all been taken care of.
Compare to the charity approach, where I need to research, make decisions, do bank transfers, keep up-to-date with the changing needs of a changing society... If I want to do a not-half-assed job of it, then I'm going to be spending so much time on it that it cancels out the benefit. A few people organising national spending at scale, even if they are only barely competent, is more efficient than everybody doing it individually.
In your view of the world, people like me essentially wouldn’t have access to opportunity that would be reserved for the wealthy folks.
You shouldn’t have to care about me individually, but if there are enough people like me, it takes a huge toll on society. You won’t be able to hide from it.
That is just not true. Historically, working your way through college was completely feasible. It still is feasible, unless you need one of those fancy 50,000$-100,000$ degrees, in which case you need a loan.
In Germany, a lot of students are working and living modestly through college. You don't have to rush your degree, employers do value actual work experience.
> You shouldn’t have to care about me individually, but if there are enough people like me, it takes a huge toll on society. You won’t be able to hide from it.
Look at it this way: In society, not everybody can or needs to be an academic. If you're not willing to work your way through college, or get a loan, or get one of these ISAs, then society isn't worse off if your place is taken by someone else.
Just look at the situation right now, there are tons of Americans with advanced degrees that are bartending and they're deeply in debt. Clearly society didn't need them to get that education, so it's better off not having paid for it.
>If you're not willing to work your way through college, or get a loan, or get one of these ISAs, then society isn't worse off if your place is taken by someone else.
It absolutely could be. People are not interchangeable pieces. Our society is built on the achievements of improbable people doing improbable things. You need only imagine a world where Einstein was born on a struggling farm without the resources or encouragement to prosper to understand the problem.
At some level it's a statistical game of trying to distribute opportunity to get the relatively few outliers into position for us to reap the rewards of their output. If you narrow the funnel you minimize the probability of great intellectual work getting done to help steer society, which holds all of society back.
And if you don't understand how it could be infeasible to be able to pay your way through $50k on top of living expenses before starting your career, or how it could be unbearably risky to take on $50k+living expenses in debt as a 20y/o, even if you expect to exit that pipeline with good career prospects, you really need to explore outside of your bubble.
My first semester, I took pre calculus instead of calculus 1 because my high school didn’t offer anything higher than trig, and growing up in poverty and going through and underfunded school district were the main reasons. My second semester I was in a data structures course and my professor was confused when I asked him to tell me what the sigma symbol was because I had never seen summations before.
I would like to assume people post generally on this forum in good faith, but your comment is incredibly ignorant and out of touch with reality. The wealthy send their kids to preschool. On the other hand, those of us who go through a regular K-12 system in middle America don’t have the proper prerequisites to succeed in college. We aren’t taught about finance, credit, the economy, investing, etc. Math and STEM education in general takes a back seat. Taking loans for college can be pointless unless you’re 100% motivated to learn not just what your college courses offer but the prior knowledge you need to wrap your head around the concepts.
I hate to break it to you, but this is already very much the case. Do you think the education you got was even CLOSE to what a Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg received? You are dreaming.