Is college a form of jobs training or a way to make yourself better?

There is the disconnect, because both are true in different amounts for different people.

If it is just jobs training you are correct. We shouldn't have "under water basket weaving" type courses because there is no market for that. There is some need for art, but only in the context of art is useful to make better marketing materials, so the degree should be offered by the business school in context of marketing courses. History is useful to make you a well rounded critical thinker, but if you are going for a history degree it should be sponsored by the school that will eventually give you tenure as a professor.

If you just want to make yourself better: art is very interesting as a subject. Have fun learning it. Likewise history is interesting even if there are no job prospects. However because these are no job prospects (this generalization is of course false - but true enough for discussion) you shouldn't be getting such a degree if you cannot self finance it from your current job.

Both of the above arguments makes for a worse world in my opinion.

If it is a way to make yourself ‘better’ - why not allow the loans to be used for other types of betterment, like physical and dietary health?

Or, is there a way to make oneself better without relying on tens of thousand of dollars of debt, which cannot even be waived via bankruptcy?

If you take on a loan for college then you better hope you get a job out of it. If you want a degree with no economic prospects then you can just pay for it yourself. Remember college used to be an upper class thing where people chose their education freely precisely because they already had the ability to support themselves.

There is the other factor that a worker without a degree in the USA is partially redundant. A lot of jobs that do not require a degree can and have been moved to other countries. You are free to move there and work at your low skilled job there. There is a lot of demand there but not in the USA. You can chalk this up to an incompetent government or central bank but the reality is that as an individual you have no power over this and therefore an economic degree is your best bet.

The alternative to connecting college with the job market is to introduce a job training program inspired by Germany and let people enter a three year job training program in exchange for lower wages. That ship for this has sailed a long time ago. Now that college has been burned into the minds of everyone it will take decades to reverse the trend even if you start today with full force. Germany still has the lowest youth unemployment rate in the EU and is in the top 4 world wide.

I think the simple answer is to look at how many Euro countries pull off having good universities for low cost... and copy them. No need to reinvent what has already been done. Just need to "port" it to America.

It depends from country to country. Germany pulls it off by tracking most students out of the university path at a young age. Instead, those students are basically forced into vocational schools. The US public would never accept that.

You still need to be upper-middle-class to rich to go to university in Germany. The difference is that you don't have to pay for it.

> low cost

Not low cost. They tax the hell out of their citizens.

You should compare the actual effective taxation rates. For example, high earners in Norway get taxed about ~8% higher than comparable earners in California but that comes with affordable healthcare, education, and government-backed pensions that people can actually survive on.

So they tax 8% higher than USA's highest tax state?

> affordable healthcare, education, and government-backed pensions

Affordable healthcare, education, and pensions are wonderful things and I want them as well. It's immoral to provide them through the federal government though, it should be done privately through the market.

> USA's highest tax state?

That is another myth that is floating around the US. CA actually has progressive tax brackets (i.e. the rate changes quite a bit from bracket to bracket) and only few get into the top state brackets, whereas most of the other states that have income tax, >90% of people are in the top bracket as the top bracket is around $10k (looking at https://tax.idaho.gov/i-1110.cfm).

And if you make more than a million dollars a year? With a potential wealth tax added? Certainly the highest tax state. It gets stupid.

At least in Idaho everyone is treated equally.

Why is it immoral for the government to provide that stuff? What makes private industry better in any way?

When you consider that there is no limit to the size of a company it is pretty obvious why monopolies form. A lot of markets only really need one company that provides a service or product for the entire economy. With healthcare it is extremely obvious that having one provider is beneficial because you want everyone to be on the same health insurance plan. The problems are that monopolies usually abuse their power so you need put it in control of an accountable entity such as the government.

Consider it from a different perspective: CEOs don't become billionaires because they are multiple times more productive or competent than other people but rather because there is no need for a second equally competent CEO. One CEO is enough to serve an entire market and so all the market power concentrates in the hand of the CEO who can then abuse it for his benefit.

> it is pretty obvious why monopolies form

The reason is clear: government regulation. Basically every. single. time. See Milton Friedman on this.

Better by what standard? The current system is definitely better at creating half baked artists.

That might work for Computer Science where grads can be employed quickly and at very solid wages but it won't meaningfully apply for most fields like business, chemistry or physics.

Then those schools will be disincentivized to charge people for degrees that won't pay for themselves, which is good

which will result in more people going into degrees where people can be employed quickly at solid wages, which is good

which will result in a scarcity of people going into the fields you mentioned, which will increase the wages in those fields which will incentivize people to go into them

this, like most things, is a supply and demand problem, and we have created too much supply in certain areas

They will also be disincentivized to offer those degrees at all. Which, IMO is definitely not good. Obviously these issues are nuanced and complicated...

They’re not nuanced or complicated. If society (taxpayers) want the benefit of a populace educated in those fields, they need to pay for them by funding schools.

> they need to pay for them by funding schools

I want a populace educated in those fields, and there are much betters way to do it than robbing the citizenry. One way might be to agree to work for a company afterwards who might pay for it, another to join the army in exchange for paying for it. Another might be to stop ensuring loans so that prices fall and become attainable to someone working part-time and going to school. Loans become not such a burden then, if you even want them. Lots of ways.

Such as?

Edited with examples.

Even if schools could accurately estimate the "value" of a degree based on expected future earnings, that estimate is going to be affected by a potential student's employability, and the risk that the student may not complete the program.

"Tie student loan funding to the value of a degree" is a fantasy. In the real world, what would actually happen is that student loans would become limited to those who could put up some sort of collateral, which for the figures involved involved in a typical college education would largely limit it to the already-wealthy.

If the goal is to provide the non wealthy with the ability to attend higher education facilities, then scholarships or grants or taxpayer funding for the school is the proper method.

Giving out blank check loans with no underwriting standards does not help the non wealthy. It results in what has already happened in the US, schools collect as much tuition money as they can since why not, and the non wealthy end up indebted for the rest of their life.

This is also the same reason that payday loans are predatory. You are giving someone a loan who has been rejected by all other credit institutions. The only reason why you are giving that person a loan is because you want to take advantage of their weaknesses and make a profit out of their misery.

The only real way to help is by giving out money that they don't have to pay back.