> let's extend that even further in the collegiate system.

The government runs the collegiate tuition systems through a guaranteed student loan program.

What the government didn’t do is regulate the universities and say if you accept students with federal loans then there is a mandatory cap on your tuition prices, instead the government said charge the students what ever you want wink wink and we will give them the loan.

Unfortunately this has runaway to a $1.5T national student loan debt, and debt that will follow students around for the rest of their lives if they are lucky enough to keep up with payments. However, 1M student loan holders per year weren’t able to keep up, and that was prepandemic, since the pandemic the numbers of student loan defaults have been manipulated through policy (including the various stimulus bills) as well as just failing to report the loan defaults.

If you don’t want government involved in university monetary/fiscal issues then you more than anyone should want to reform the current system of pay to play with guaranteed student loans.

It is not the federal government but the _states_ that are responsible for the massive increase in student loan debt. They have historically had agreements with universities to cap tuition hikes in exchange for funding. In the past few decades, they passed bone-headed “Balanced Budget” amendments to their constitutions which force them to make drastic cuts to education whenever there’s a recession or the majority party decides tax cuts have more value than the working class getting an affordable college degree. The first round of cuts were passed with tuition hike cap repeals.

>If you don’t want government involved in university monetary/fiscal issues then you more than anyone should want to reform the current system of pay to play with guaranteed student loans.

Agreed, I am not a proponent of government guaranteed student loans and you're 100% correct they are an example of government gone wrong at the expense of both the student and taxpayer.

You are not in favor of publicly funded k-12, you don’t want to extend free education to colleges…you don’t want student loans for college (I agree), and you have expressed the personal difficulty and expense of paying for a private education for your kid.

You obviously value education or your wouldn’t pay the private tuition for your kid…but it sounds like you are advocating for no tax funded (public) education for k-12 because it is a bad ROI, which would leave only private educations which are a financial burden to you and probably out of the realm of possibilities for most families.

I didn't say that tax funded education _must_ be bad ROI. I gave an example of several nations that have significantly better ROI such as Germany and Finland. I did say I think we need to get our fiscal responsibility in education figured out before we move on past K-12.

I think this desire to reign in spending to make sure we find a way to do it effectively holds regardless of one's belief in which particular education we are thinking about funding. You wouldn't start throwing more money at a problem until you understand what is going wrong and have a suitable plan to fix and and witness the managers of the money are acting accordingly.

The main reason education is so expensive for a toddler is because of government intervention, such as childcare ratios and regulations regarding the facilities and licensing. If I lived in Idaho (the only state in the nation which has no such government regulation) it would be significantly cheaper.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28382710.

Yea let’s go back to life when most citizens didn’t get a primary school education let alone high school. You think 100% of families will prioritize tuition for toddlers when it’s a discretionary expense? Or will the bid up rent costs?

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of what other commenters may be doing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're trying for something else here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

The comment I replied to:

"Yea let’s go back to life when most citizens didn’t get a primary school education let alone high school. You think 100% of families will prioritize tuition for toddlers when it’s a discretionary expense? Or will the bid up rent costs?"

The fact that this above comment I genuinely replied to was not flagged nor rebuked by yourself, yet my genuine and upvoted response was flagged and rebuked, tells me all I need to know about what you're "trying for."

You can't assume that we see all the comments. There are too many for us to see them all: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

We do our level best to be even-handed, but it's way too much to expect perfectly consistent moderation, just like it's too much to expect cops to give tickets to all speeders. Of course it always feels like you're the one getting singled out and pulled over, but that's a cognitive bias we all suffer from: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

---

It's true that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28382933 was in the flamewar style and shouldn't have been. But that comment was in reply to you (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28382789), and your comment was in precisely the same style. So if we're going to try to be consistent here, the transitive logic of finger-pointing at previous comments means you end up pointing at your own.

I've scolded both of those comments now.

> So if we're going to try to be consistent here, the transitive logic of finger-pointing at previous comments means you end up pointing at your own.

Actually it doesn't, because I never claimed that _anyone's_ comment needed to be flagged or rebuked. That's quite the bald face lie. The transitive logic would be that I was saying everyone's response was genuine, including my own. I never flagged nor downvoted anyone's comment, nor communicated with anyone to do so nor advocated for it being done.

I think you need to go back and read what I really said:

   The fact that this above comment I genuinely replied to was not flagged nor rebuked by yourself, yet my genuine and upvoted response was flagged and rebuked, tells me all I need to know about what you're "trying for."

Please point out anywhere in my statement that said the above comment needed rebuked or flagged. I hope that your reading comprehension improves as a result of this interaction.

I took your comment as a complaint about inconsistency - that still seems to me like a reasonable way to read it, but if that's not what you meant, I apologize for misunderstanding.

Please stop posting off-topic complaints now, and please follow the site guidelines and avoid flamewar comments in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Does the US actually get poor returns on K-12 education? I assume that public K-12 education contributes a lot to the economy in the form of an educated population. Wouldn't both the economy and tax revenue shrink without K-12?

Our ROI is significantly worse than many other developed nations such as Germany, Canada, and Finland [1].

You wouldn't keep throwing more money at a problem until you find out what is going wrong and that those managing it having solved their fiscal responsibility problems.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...

Using your example of North Dakota State University.

They have about 15,000 students. Over 50% get federal student loans averaging about 6,500/student/year. That is $48,750,000 per year is taxpayer funded loans going to your State school.

If you insist on being a pedant, you had better realize that "North Dakota State University" contains neither "public" nor "college." Revise and resubmit!

Will you be upset when your toddler is no longer in school and you're still paying school taxes?

Yes because that's how taxes work. You don't have any individual say over where your taxes go. Assuming that you're talking about your local tax burden for public schools you're paying $1200/mo. for everyone's elementary school education. When spread over a population all it does it move money around, that money is right now is being spent on people's college educations and the economic hammer-on effects reach you as well. It's not so simple as "if I don't personally feel like I got a 'free' college education then I'm losing money." The thing people want when they say "make college free" is "a college education is free at the point of delivery" not that it's actually without cost.

Also we are allowed to do two things at once. There is no reason that a country of millions of people has to focus on one thing at a time that has the potential to benefit everyone.

I say this as someone who has zero skin in this game. I went to private school as a child. I paid off my student loans, I cannot have children. I will in my lifetime not directly benefit from publicly funded education k-12 or college -- I still want this policy.

>Assuming that you're talking about your local tax burden for public schools you're paying $1200/mo.

$1200 is what I pay in private education for my toddler before taxes start. I am not rich and this is a very large part of my paycheck. No one helps me with this, no subsidies, no nothing, but I'm supposed to pay even more for someone else's college at gunpoint of federal agents under the taxation system.

I'm with you on _wanting_ children to succeed. And adults. I have tutored GED for adults who didn't finish high school, and I did it for free. More money doesn't necessarily mean better education. I pay all of my toddler's education (taxpayers won't help me like they will with K-12 kids). And like most HNers I'm paying out more taxes to fund these programs than the average person. I'm doing my part, now I want the government to handle my money responsibly before I hand them more.

> $1200 is what I pay in private education for my toddler before taxes start.

Why do you pay $1200/month for the private education of a toddler, considering this is a significant fraction of your paycheck? I'm assuming there's some special circumstances here, but as a non-American I can only guess.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're trying for something else here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I admit I didn't need to call the other poster foolish. I don't think refuting their point with examples is exactly a "flamewar", though.

It has to do with how you do that. Note this site guideline:

"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar—this is exactly the wrong direction to go, even if you were provoked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been doing this repeatedly already; could you please not? It's destructive of everything we're trying to have here.

"In Comments

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

All large organizations waste and lose money. It is part and parcel to the way things are. The choices we have to make are where do we get more benefit when we engage in large endeavors. Free (or low cost) college?, probably a lot of benefit compared to the % wasted. Invade a country in Central Asia, maybe not so much benefit.....

Because no other country made that work...

Local colleges handle it acceptably. State/Federal do not. Technical colleges in my state are funded by their cities tax payers primarily. They routinely have a much better graduation and lower drop out rating, as well as a more positive experience among students than the average university here. Many people like to point to the universities not getting funding but I call bullshit on that. Most of them blow all their money on sports arenas/facilities or pointless garbage to nickle and dime students. They don't care about your education. They just wanna milk you.

You're right, it would be much better for our society if basic literacy, numeracy, and civics were gated behind whether or not your parents could be arsed to pay for it.