'Financially Hobbled for Life': The Elite Master's Degrees That Don't Pay Off (wsj.com) 485
An anonymous reader shares a report: Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000. Yet two years after earning their master's degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year. The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master's degrees that don't provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data. Recent Columbia film alumni had the highest debt compared with earnings among graduates of any major university master's program in the U.S., the Journal found. The New York City university is among the world's most prestigious schools, and its $11.3 billion endowment ranks it the nation's eighth wealthiest private school.
For years, faculty, staff and students have appealed unsuccessfully to administrators to tap that wealth to aid more graduate students, according to current and former faculty and administrators, and dozens of students. Taxpayers will be on the hook for whatever is left unpaid. Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master's students at universities across the U.S. took on debt beyond what their pay would support, the Journal analysis of federal data on borrowers found. At Columbia, such students graduated from programs including history, social work and architecture. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said the Education Department data in the Journal analysis can't fully assess salary prospects because it covers only earnings and loan repayments two years after graduation. "Nevertheless," he said, "this is not what we want it to be."
At New York University, graduates with a master's degree in publishing borrowed a median $116,000 and had an annual median income of $42,000 two years after the program, the data on recent borrowers show. At Northwestern University, half of those who earned degrees in speech-language pathology borrowed $148,000 or more, and the graduates had a median income of $60,000 two years later. Graduates of the University of Southern California's marriage and family counseling program borrowed a median $124,000 and half earned $50,000 or less over the same period. "NYU is always focused on affordability, and an important part of that is, of course, to help prospective students make informed decisions," said spokesman John Beckman. Northwestern spokeswoman Hilary Hurd Anyaso said the speech-language pathology program is among the best in the world, leading to a "gratifying career path that is in high demand." USC spokeswoman Lauren Bartlett said providing students financial support and employment opportunities was a priority for the school.
For years, faculty, staff and students have appealed unsuccessfully to administrators to tap that wealth to aid more graduate students, according to current and former faculty and administrators, and dozens of students. Taxpayers will be on the hook for whatever is left unpaid. Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master's students at universities across the U.S. took on debt beyond what their pay would support, the Journal analysis of federal data on borrowers found. At Columbia, such students graduated from programs including history, social work and architecture. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said the Education Department data in the Journal analysis can't fully assess salary prospects because it covers only earnings and loan repayments two years after graduation. "Nevertheless," he said, "this is not what we want it to be."
At New York University, graduates with a master's degree in publishing borrowed a median $116,000 and had an annual median income of $42,000 two years after the program, the data on recent borrowers show. At Northwestern University, half of those who earned degrees in speech-language pathology borrowed $148,000 or more, and the graduates had a median income of $60,000 two years later. Graduates of the University of Southern California's marriage and family counseling program borrowed a median $124,000 and half earned $50,000 or less over the same period. "NYU is always focused on affordability, and an important part of that is, of course, to help prospective students make informed decisions," said spokesman John Beckman. Northwestern spokeswoman Hilary Hurd Anyaso said the speech-language pathology program is among the best in the world, leading to a "gratifying career path that is in high demand." USC spokeswoman Lauren Bartlett said providing students financial support and employment opportunities was a priority for the school.
Don't worry (Score:4, Insightful)
After the banks drive us all over the next financial cliff, $181,000 will buy you a Hershey bar.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
After the banks drive us all over the next financial cliff, $181,000 will buy you a Hershey bar.
Don't worry, now that a Democrat is President, there's always an upside to a bad economy. [twitter.com] Pardon the Twitter link. It represents the originally cheerier headline for the story, which is also shown by the story URL: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/08/the-upside-to-inflation-rising-wages.html [cnbc.com].
Re:Don't worry (Score:5, Informative)
The reality is that inflation is not, itself, a bad thing. Like most economic factors, it's a bad thing when inflation is either too high, OR too low.
Inflation too low is literally deflation. Inflation near zero, or actually into the negatives, is incredibly bad. A prolonged deflation event is a self-reinforcing economic death spiral in which job losses and wage deflation continually degrade the ability of the economy to function, reducing the amount of mobile money in an economy and thereby destroying more businesses, which results in more job losses, more wage deflation... think "people hoarding money stuffed into mattresses with bread lines around the block during the Great Depression" level impacts.
Inflation too high can also be problematic, because spiral effects ("stagflation" and similar) can occur at that point too.
HOWEVER: what this means in reality is that there is a "sweet spot" or "butter zone" for inflation. An inflation rate neither too low nor too high benefits the economy overall, allowing for the adjustment of prices and wages on a meaningful timeframe and scale, making investments such as home loans viable and serviceable, and generally enabling economic growth.
And key to understanding this is also understanding that having interest rates near zero is definitely NOT within that butter zone. It's way too fucking low and a sign that the economy's still got issues. A healthy inflation rate should be hovering in the 1.5%-2.5% rate (approximation of course), reliably and predictably.
Re:Don't worry (Score:5, Insightful)
Inflation is not a problem for certain groups of people whose pay keeps up with inflation. Inflation is a problem for people who are on fixed incomes and with our aging population, that is an ever growing segment. Inflation is also a problem when wage inflation pushes jobs off-shore.
Its a pretty grey topic for discussion. It isn't as black as some would make it to be (for a lot of people who see wages rise anyway) and it isn't as white a topic as you seem to think it is.
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I'm guessing you didn't actually read my comment then if you think I see inflation as anything other than a grey topic with a "butter zone" that needs to be tightly managed...
Re:Don't worry (Score:5, Interesting)
No. I read it correctly. The point I'm making is that for a large group of people, even an inflation rate that is low (1.5-2.5% in your ideal scenario) is bad for them. It may be good in a macro sense for a very large economy, but that doesn't mean it is good for every member in that economy. The fraction of the population that is fixed income is growing as the population ages and birth rates drop. Ask them what medical and pharmacy inflation has done to them. Ask them what food price increases do. Large numbers of families have two working members and some have three jobs for two people just to make ends meet. Their wages aren't the ones going up uniformly (due to low minimum hourly wages). They can't add a fourth job and still stay sane. Even three is too many. I didn't want the conversation to drift off into the wisdom of a big hike in minimum wage, because that is a real grey mess as well. But even low inflation directly impacts them and keeps them from being able to move out of the situations they are in to the "middle" class. There's a reason the middle class is shrinking.
Just because the macro case was true for the majority in past decades when life expectancies were shorter and birth rates were high doesn't mean it will continue to be true forever.
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Large numbers of families have two working members and some have three jobs for two people just to make ends meet.
You are conflating economic issues. Inflation is a good thing, for everyone. It may not be good for an individual but it's far better for that induvial than the alternative. The alternative is not the 3 income household being able to continue to afford bread, the alternative is the 3 income household being turned suddenly into a 2 income or 1 income household and definitely unable to afford bread.
The people who do poorly when the economy does well usually suffer the most when the economy itself stops doing
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No, we quit reading your comment when you decided to throw your little jab out there about how conservatives are economically illiterate.
Leave your personal politics out of it next time.
Re:Don't worry (Score:5, Informative)
And what about wages? When you punch a clock for a living, there are a fixed number of hours in the week which you can work, usually at a fixed rate.
Since 1970, productivity has gone up some 300%.
Since 1970, executive compensation has gone up 300%
Since 1970, wages have gone up.... 26%
for all groups.
So no, you don't want any more inflation *unless wages are indexed to it* ... and if they did that, the minimum would be over $20 an hour right now. Shit like this is one big reason why you have homeless among other things -- people up and coming can't even get into the market any more, they simply don't make enough. Through NO fault of their own.
Re: Don't worry (Score:5, Insightful)
No fault of their own? No, these people are absolutely at fault. Take the grads in this article. They chose to pursue masters degrees at a high priced school, they chose to borrow without understanding the return on the return on this investment, and they now are stuck barely getting by. They made a series of choices to get high priced degrees they could not afford and now they are demanding that society bail THEM out because they made bad choices. We can whine all day about the evils of tuition at universities and the moral hazard of the taxpayers funding a failed student loan system, but at the end of the day these folks DECIDED this path. No one forced them into it.
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Why should we expect wages to go up with productivity?
Let's say that I own a landscaping business and you mow lawns for me. Last week, I had you using a walk-behind push mower and, on average, it took you 2 hours to mow the lawn (and it was hot and sweaty work). This week, I bought a brand new riding lawn mower with a much wider cutting path. As a result, it's now taking you 1 hour to mow the lawn, and you get to ride instead of walk.
Your productivity has doubled thanks to this new equipment. And, at
People who use literally figuratively (Score:3)
Inflation too low is literally deflation.
I know that modern dictionaries now accept the use of "literally" to mean "well, it doesn't actually mean 'literally'," but I still hate this.
No.
Your statement is identical to saying "if you are going upward too slowly, you are literally going downward." You are not. Rising slowly is not "literally" the same as descending.
teachers never actually worked (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:teachers never actually worked (Score:5, Insightful)
how you going to pay someone 200k to teach you something they never did?
Define doing? Do you need to be a professional writer to teach english? Do you need to be a professional cartographer to teach geography? What you say makes great sense for trade jobs. You absolutely want a professional carpenter to teach carpentry.
You do *not* want a professional mathematician to teach mathematics as they almost universally suck at teaching, as do most people in many professions.
Re:teachers never actually worked (Score:4, Interesting)
You do *not* want a professional mathematician to teach mathematics as they almost universally suck at teaching, as do most people in many professions.
I hate to break this to you but the people who teach at prestigious universities are researchers first & foremost. They aren't hired for their teaching ability nor are they rewarded or given any kind of meaningful professional recognition for being any good at teaching. It's all about the research & the quality of teaching that goes on in higher education reflects this. If you get a half decent teacher, i.e. someone who actually cares about their students & puts in extra hours to improve their teaching quality for little or no reward, it's more by chance than by design.
I've heard of cases of faculty actually getting berated (literally shouting & swearing) by peers & middle management for giving any kind of serious attention to their teaching responsibilities.
Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Choices (Score:5, Interesting)
Should kids that age with so little real-world experience that you wouldn't hire them except to make your fast food be making non-dischargeable $181K decisions? It will be 3+ years before American society trusts them to have a beer.
Re:Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
Should kids that age with so little real-world experience
be allowed to vote?
be allowed to have sex?
be allowed to have credit cards?
be allowed to drive cars?
Re:Choices (Score:5, Informative)
You left out "Serve in the military"
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You left out "Serve in the military"
Right up at the top of the list of reasons people join the military is so they don’t have to be saddled with lifelong debt just to get an education. This is also a big reason why America won’t ever get reasonable public funding for universities or forgiveness of student loans, given the choice students would rather not have to kill people abroad or get maimed for life to make an oil company even richer.
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Those things either come with a learning curve, or don't entail $181K of commitment. Well, maybe the sex if you're not careful.
But for example, we don't put a teen behind the wheel of a car and say, "okay, you're an adult now, go drive!". We enforce they take lessons and pass a test and have insurance just in case. Voting? One vote isn't all that likely to have dramatic consequences. It takes time to rack up debt on credit cards, and they're dischargeable.
Yes, personal responsibility is important, but there
Re:Choices (Score:4, Informative)
Your million dollars to raise a kid is garbage. My brother-in-law has 3 children the youngest is 16, oldest is 22. I can assure you he did not earn a million dollars over the past 22 years, and yet his children are still being raised and doing about as good as the typical kid.
My other brother-in-law is the same way with the same amount of kids. My parents may of earned 1.3m over the last 22 years, but I assure you most of it went to paying the rent, car, food, insurance, blah and not all that much was going to me, even in the form of cloths and other essentials.
So please stop saying that nonsense that it takes a million dollars to raise a kid. That means at least a simple majority of children apparently aren't being raised, and that's of course nonsense.
Re:Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
Should kids that age with so little real-world experience that you wouldn't hire them except to make your fast food be making non-dischargeable $181K decisions? It will be 3+ years before American society trusts them to have a beer.
Read the headline again. This is about graduate degrees. One would hope their first four years of university would have taught them enough critical thinking to recognize a poor choice like these loans. Or maybe they were drunk (legally) when they applied.
Re:Choices (Score:4, Insightful)
One would hope their first four years of university would have taught them enough critical thinking to recognize a poor choice like these loans.
I suspect you know little about graduate degrees, or the many industries where a graduate degree is a minimum expectation. Hint: What you think of the absurdity of requiring an undergrad degree for everything applies equally to graduate degrees in many cases.
The real problem here is WTF isn't education socialised. Seriously my wife just got her Masters degree and it cost her $8000, total, and it was absolutely an expectation that she have a masters degree to be allowed to teach her subject to high schoolers.
Re:Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
It is egregiously wasteful for us to be providing student loans for degrees for which supply greatly outstrips demand. Clearly, the world does not need more people trained for these positions. The work just isn't there! So why in the world are we spending so much money to train people to do jobs that don't exist?
Student loans are supposed to help put the lower classes on more equal footing with the upper classes. Well, in these cases, the loans are enrichening universities for selling worthless degrees, and leaving students trapped in lifelong debt with degrees that don't get them jobs. And, of course, the taxpayers are footing the bill for all of this. This is bad for everyone (except the university administrators, of course).
This should be obvious to literally everyone. In a sane world, we would not be giving student loans for these degrees.
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How many 18 year olds do you know are in master's-level programs?
Re:Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, 18 is an adult. They made adult decisions and now they have to live with the consequences.
18 is an adult only by social contract. Executive function in young adults doesn't fully mature until six years later. Exposing them to a situation where they are allowed to make such risky decisions without guidance is what makes them vulnerable, and we now have a system which exploits that vulnerability.
If the student is lucky enough to have parents or mentors who can help guide them, then they are fortunate. Those who do not are easy pickins' for a system which profits from their lack of readiness to weigh the consequences.
Re:Choices (Score:5, Informative)
TFA is about people going to grad school.
They are not 18-year-olds.
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If they go there straight from an undergrad program, they're still kids even if they aren't literally 18
After 4 years of undergrad, an 18-year-old is 22.
A 22-year-old is not a "kid".
Re:Choices (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with your sentiment, but I think it should be looked at through a different lens...
Would a bank provide a loan to an 21yo (these are masters programs - they already have their undergrad (BA, BS, etc) degree) to someone wanting to buy a $181,000 car, house, etc.? Maybe - if they showed their creditworthiness.
New angle... would a bank provide a loan to an 21yo to someone wanting to buy a $181,000 car, house, etc. that only had a valuation of $60,000? Bank would kick them out of their office in a heartbeat.
This is not much different than predatory lending practices.
The rub is here... the *cost* of the degree is not commensurate with the *value* of it. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of solid marketplace data to help guide students (and their parents) to make informed, value-based, decisions. The college and universities like to lump things together (the MBA and the film school), with the ROI from the MBA being conflated with the ROI on the film school degree. A couple of well designed lawsuits would help end this - that the degree cost becomes commensurate with the degree value. But the boards of trustees as these places, most likely high-priced lawyers themselves, would fight this tooth and nail.
Seriously, 11B endowment nets you 500M-1B/yr on investment returns. Tuition, room & board dollars, is peeing in a bucket in comparison - even at a really large school (UoI, OSU, etc), not some mid-sized elite like Columbia.
At the end of the day, places like Columbia are just a bunch of greedy bastards - no different than Wells Fargo, ExxonMobil, Enron, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, Trump, etc.
Re:Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want me to use my tax dollars to forgive their student debt screw that.
But you are. These students will likely stay in debt their whole life, and when they die the government has to accept the loss.
These universities are privatizing profit and socializing losses, while preying on the dreams of their students.
Re:Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
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At least needing medical care isnâ(TM)t a choice unless youâ(TM)re an overweight smoker. Health I donâ(TM)t mind subsidizing, poor decisions much less so.
I assure you, choosing to die so as to not saddle themselves or the rest of the family with debt is always an option, one that is exercised disturbingly often in America.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Not old enough to buy alcohol
Not old enough to adopt a child
Not old enough to be an Ubur driver
but old enough to agree to a disastrous lifetime of debt
Re:Choices (Score:4, Insightful)
Not old enough to buy alcohol Not old enough to adopt a child Not old enough to be an Ubur driver
but old enough to agree to a disastrous lifetime of debt
Do people really apply for Master's programs before they're 21?
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Well you pay for them anyhow - be that they don't contribute as much to your economy as they could have, that anything disposable they earn will go to the university and not the economy, that they have to rely on social assistance later in life. Anytime you just let people fail around you, particularly young people who maybe shouldn't be expected to know better than the institutions charged with educating them. Letting them off the hook for prioritizing profits - using the traditional methods of muddying th
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If you want me to use my tax dollars to forgive their student debt screw that.
Unless institute is a bunch of crooks. [insidehighered.com] But of course in this era of "tough love" that's the borrowers fault as well.
Re:Choices (Score:4, Informative)
If Columbia wants to use their endowment to help out financially that's on them. If you want me to use my tax dollars to forgive their student debt screw that.
Do we taxpayers have a choice though because from the WSJ article, it doesn't seem like it.
For years, faculty, staff and students have appealed unsuccessfully to administrators to tap that wealth to aid more graduate students, according to current and former faculty and administrators, and dozens of students. Taxpayers will be on the hook [wsj.com] for whatever is left unpaid.
Re:Choices (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want me to use my tax dollars to forgive their student debt screw that.
Do we taxpayers have a choice though because from the WSJ article, it doesn't seem like it. For years, faculty, staff and students have appealed unsuccessfully to administrators to tap that wealth to aid more graduate students, according to current and former faculty and administrators, and dozens of students. Taxpayers will be on the hook [wsj.com] for whatever is left unpaid.
What this is pointing out is that federal student loans are backed by the government. If the student fails to pay, the government has agreed to step in. That makes student loans risk-free for the lender.
But in fact, federal outlays for defaulted student loans is not a big thing-- to the contrary, student loans are extremely lucrative for financial institutions; the debt can't be discharged by bankruptcy, and the institutions get big rewards at zero risk.
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The person is young, has little financial experience with large sums of money, and little career experience to know the value of these degrees. The university pitches them are great assets, so just like any other false advertising the advertiser takes a lot of responsibility.
Some of it is on employers too. They want the exact skills they need and are not willing to take people on to train them up. My mum has a degree in Latin and never had trouble finding work because employers look at is as an indication o
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Some of it is on employers too. They want the exact skills they need and are not willing to take people on to train them up.
Maybe the employers don't trust applicants who got expensive graduate degrees completely unrelated to the jobs they're applying for.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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The moment you mention housing loans alongside student loans, you reveal that you're just defending predatory [cnbc.com] practices [responsiblelending.org]. I suspect anon had your narcissistic political leanings correctly determined.
Wow, that's a lot of mind reading there.
To me, a loan is a loan, whether you borrowed to buy a home, invest in a business, or invest in yourself. Borrowing hundreds of thousands to invest in a profession that pays minimum wage sounds idiotic to me, but if that's what you want to do, go ahead. Just don't whine about the bill afterwards.
Re:Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
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However, it really STILL is the responsibility of consumers to be informed.
In order to be informed, they had to take on quite a loan. That was how they got informed.
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However, it really STILL is the responsibility of consumers to be informed.
In order to be informed, they had to take on quite a loan. That was how they got informed.
No, they had to do their due diligence before taking on the loan.
Re:Choices (Score:4, Insightful)
The loan terms do not tell you the true value of the education nor the ROI. Previous generations had fewer college enrollees and basically everyone that graduated got a good job. Then they told EVERYONE in the next generation that they had to go to college. This is what causes the ROI to become negative. Market wages don't go up based on student loan debt.
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All you need to know is that you need to ask the question, and that much has been obvious for decades.
This isn't rocket science; as a student you only need to look at what you'd like to do when you graduate, look at the income range, then balance that against the cost of the needed education. If you can't even do this minimum amount of due diligence before signing, then that's hardly predatory practices by the loaning agency.
Re:Choices (Score:4, Interesting)
If the loaning agency needs the public to make these loans not dischargeable in bankruptcy, It sounds to me like the lenders are the ones not doing their due diligence. And it sounds like I'm the one who ends up paying for the cost savings lenders enjoy by not needing to do their own due diligence.
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Re: Choices (Score:3)
Exactly. FFS people think before you take out loans. It actually turns out that prestigious universities don't really offer you a better quality education, really you're just going there for name recognition. If you want to be educated, then be smart too. Don't spend a fortune on tuition when community college followed by spending as little time as possible in a low cost in-state university will do.
I don't recall what all I spent on college, but I paid mostly out of pocket with cash, I think somewhere close
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Who on earth would loan that much money to a student who would never be able to pay it back?
This is precisely why employers don't train employees anymore and want them to have a degree. Why would they want to pour all that knowledge into an employee just to have them walk off and find a better job elsewhere, fully trained?
Tuition reform (Score:5, Interesting)
Two things would solve this:
1) Make student loans dischargeable via bankruptcy
2) Make the colleges who consume the loans liable for repayment in such an event.
The current system is a horrendous mess created by the government to funnel guaranteed funds to colleges using idiotic kids who don't know any better as the "guarantor".
With my system colleges would not only be motivated to create real value in their offerings, but they'd also be motivated to find places for these kids to earn good money. This creates a positive feedback loop; if colleges want to earn more ( and reduce their liabilities ), they need to be able to find higher paying jobs for their graduates. This would end up being a win/win.
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Maybe employers could get a clue too. When do employers start looking at advanced degrees like this and assume the person is an idiot rather than “educated”? I would rather hire someone who taught themselves a difficult skill and made practical use of it.
Re:Tuition reform (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with making student loans bankruptable is that then it would be stupid for a kid to not just not pay the loans and bankrupt themselves right out of undergrad. Sure the bankruptcy would "ruin their credit" (shivers) but that only lasts 7 years. Most young adults would be free and clear by age 30.
Re:Tuition reform (Score:4, Informative)
As someone who's walked the path of "bad credit" that's nothing to sneeze at. It saddles you in many ways including financially never mind the stress.
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The problem with making student loans bankruptable is that then it would be stupid for a kid to not just not pay the loans and bankrupt themselves right out of undergrad. Sure the bankruptcy would "ruin their credit" (shivers) but that only lasts 7 years. Most young adults would be free and clear by age 30.
Would you lend tens of thousands to kids without a repayment guarantee? The repayment risk is huge.
Offsetting that would require student loan interest rates to shoot up to credit card rate levels.
Re:Tuition reform (Score:4, Insightful)
I would not. That's my point. If Student Loans were bankruptable, very few loans would ever be repaid. In fact, it would be kind of stupid to repay them. Take out as much debt as you like as an 18 year old kid, go to whatever school you want, pay for the $13,000,000 in tuition to do a semester abroad in Antarctica, and then just declare bankruptcy at 22. You will be free and clear by 30.
No rational entity would ever finance that.
Re:Tuition reform (Score:5, Insightful)
The students and their parents should have investigated the pay of the careers they wish to pursue. The guidance counselors should have have pointed out the low earning potential.
This is on the borrowers, their parents, and the high school systems that says you should do what you love and ignore the cost.
Re: Tuition reform (Score:4, Insightful)
What is the social value of high price zero value degrees even being available? Why should colleges be allowed to sell shit to whoever they can sucker in using their flashy brochure? Why should the most informed party wear all the benefits and be allowed to push the costs wholly onto the least informed?
Having sensible regulation to properly assign responsibility so that market forces align with our values as a society is not communism. It's good policy.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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What is the social value of high price zero value degrees even being available? Why should colleges be allowed to sell shit to whoever they can sucker in using their flashy brochure? Why should the most informed party wear all the benefits and be allowed to push the costs wholly onto the least informed?
Having sensible regulation to properly assign responsibility so that market forces align with our values as a society is not communism. It's good policy.
Then regulate the universities. But the students made their beds and now they need to lie in them. They could start by looking for a job that pays more than $30k a year, even if it's unrelated to their degree.
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No, the current system has perverse incentives that adversely impact not only the students and parents who exhibit sound judgment, but also all other Americans.
Just look at the numbers: from 1978 to today, the cumulative inflation rate in the US economy has been a relatively reasonable 312.88% [in2013dollars.com] (3.45% annual average), but the cumulative inflation rate for US college tuition over that same period has been an eye watering 1365.1% [in2013dollars.com] (6.37% annual average). The reason? The ease with which federal student loans ar
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Re:Tuition reform (Score:5, Insightful)
Two things would solve this:
1) Make student loans dischargeable via bankruptcy
2) Make the colleges who consume the loans liable for repayment in such an event.
3. Stop making federal loans available for degrees with dubious ROI.
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Like how to become a programmer, you can code too, make lots of money. Seriously learning to code has bad ROI especially since so many want to get into it.
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Problem is it's not just the universities at fault here, it's the employers who aren't training people and who demand very specific skills from graduates.
Universities can't precisely match the demand for skills in 3-4 years time. Nor should we want them to, we need a workforce with a breadth of skills, knowledge and experience to succeed, not a monoculture with commodity graduates built to fill a short term need.
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1) Make student loans dischargeable via bankruptcy
What about deferring loans indefinitely for financial hardship until a career is found in the industry making enough money to pay the loan. With the caveat that, like unemployment, you have to do periodic reviews to prove that you're trying to get a job and further your career to keep the deferment active.
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Making state colleges and universities liable....would just be unpredictable tax revenue needs. They would be better off funding their schools the way they used to than to have random peaks and valleys of costs.
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Two things would solve this:
1) Make student loans dischargeable via bankruptcy
2) Make the colleges who consume the loans liable for repayment in such an event.
I think colleges should be the ones giving the loans
But lending tens of thousands to college students without some repayment guarantee pretty much requires a huge interest rate to offset the repayment risk. That's why you can't just discharge student loans through bankruptcy.
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Two things would solve this:
1) Make student loans dischargeable via bankruptcy
2) Make the colleges who consume the loans liable for repayment in such an event.
Notice how everyone disagreeing with your post focuses on idea #1 and are entirely silent on idea #2? With the former, they can pound their table about "they made their choice, let 'em burn" and the like and that plays into their conservative biases. The latter, however, is the real issue - low-interest student loan programs were originally created to expand the range of people that could go to college, but in response, the colleges jacked up their tuition well beyond inflation or wage increases. It's now a
Is there risk advisement? (Score:5, Interesting)
US university programs frequently seem to be extortionate. Others seem to be extremely high risk. Some are both.
How clearly are prospective students advised of where completing their course ranks in terms of the cost for all courses, the completion rate, and what the job availability and typical starting salaries currently look like for graduates?
Is there some kind of clearly presented concise "risk profile" that students have to sign off on before universities take their money, or do they just commit blindly to hopes and dreams for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars aged 16-18? Hard work only goes so depending on the job availability and salary.
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Ohnonono, they never do anything like that, it would be considered anti-intellectual to look at a college education as anything but intellectual betterment for its own sake. I've had people who don't even have a vested interest in higher education use this argument on me in the past when I've advocated doing any sort of cost/benefit analysis before pursuing a college degree.
Re:Is there risk advisement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Choose between profit or hobby (Score:5, Insightful)
Choose between profit or hobby.
Money equals freedom. Hobbyshit may be great fun but making a career of it works for very few people even among those who imagine they're special. Those who pull it off should not hallucinate everyone can do that.
Many highly intelligent humans aren't smart and resent making coldly pragmatic choices necessary to a prosperous secure life. You only have a few very short years before you're old and obsolete. Failure to feather your nest beforehand is a mistake.
If you're intelligent enough for an advanced degree you should have your shit together. The CHOICE not to has consequences.
The article is paywalled (Score:3, Insightful)
The other problem here is that these articles are anti-education. They're actively seeking to undermine our education system, likely so that it can be privatized for profit.
They're implying that these degrees are useless because of the low pay. But like I said, they're almost certainly people trying to become professors and educators.
Moreover they're implying that the majority of degrees are worthless. This is factually untrue. You can look up statistics on what degrees are awarded by accredited Universities. The Federal Gov't tracks them meticulously. 75% are what everyone would immediately call "useful" degrees (law, medicine, engineering, Comp Sci, etc, etc). Another 15-20% are education, which as I've said before are useful if you want your crotch fruit to be something besides a ditch digger or sleeping on your coach in their 40s. That leaves a tiny portion of degrees that people would call "useless", which aren't even basket weaving feminists but are mostly a handful of esoteric degrees like race theory (which, in a country like ours with our history of racial tensions maybe, just maybe somebody should be studying that...) and most of them just convert to teachers.
TL;DR; anyone who tells you crap like this is trying to privatize your schools so they can profit from your kid's & grand kid's education (while providing a substandard one to boot). At worst you should ignore it and at best you should get angry that they think you're foolish enough to be tricked.
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Moreover they're implying that the majority of degrees are worthless. This is factually untrue. You can look up statistics on what degrees are awarded by accredited Universities. The Federal Gov't tracks them meticulously. 75% are what everyone would immediately call "useful" degrees (law, medicine, engineering, Comp Sci, etc, etc).
Most people make pragmatic decisions about graduate studies. When I decided to get a Masters, I looked at the ROI and only applied to top 5 programs. If I hadn't gotten in I'd pass because the tuition plus opportunity costs were just too high to have a decent ROI. As much as I'd like to get a PhD, the only way I'd do that is if a school offered me a teaching position plus 100% tuition free slot in their PhD program. Otherwise, the ROI is not worth it.
Another 15-20% are education, which as I've said before are useful if you want your crotch fruit to be something besides a ditch digger or sleeping on your coach in their 40s
I would guess many of those are getting them to move
Everybody forgets the failures (Score:2)
And I am aware that this is a masters degree and what I am talking about mostly happens during bachelors degr
Conflict in classism. (Score:2)
A lot of jobs require a Degree. A job that everyone wants to do often will require an advanced degree.
For example Many states require teachers to get a Masters Degree to continue teaching. However teacher salaries are rather low. This is because nearly everyone wants to be a teacher (or at least considered becoming one) at some phase in their life. So colleges Education Departments are usually rather large, and every summer the schools can get a good influx of new recruits to hire. So they can pick th
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A lot of jobs require a Degree.
Most jobs don't require a degree. Even jobs that now require a degree don't actually require a degree. The reason that jobs that don't actually need degrees are requiring degrees is the emphasis placed on going to college by teachers, parents, and officials. This is called degree inflation.
A job that everyone wants to do often will require an advanced degree.
No. A job that requires specialized knowledge will require an advanced degree. People see a person with advanced degrees who makes a lot money and/or is famous and think "I want to make a lot of money/be famous too so I
A modest proposal (Score:4, Interesting)
Tuition for specific degree programs should be inversely proportional to demand for those fields in the workplace. For example, we need a lot of STEM people so the tuition should be very low. Clearly, we don't need a lot of film graduates so the tuition should be high. Exceptions should be made for things like lawyers which we have way too many of so the tuition should be insanely high and can't be paid for with money made from class action lawsuits which we have far too many of. Doctors? Okay, let's go there. There's a misconception that all doctors are rich. They aren't. Doctors who don't perform surgical procedures don't make anywhere near as much as those who do. Therefore, med school tuition for non-surgical specialties should be lower. And so-called medical professionals who aren't physicians but who are merely bureaucrats in the C-suites of hospital corporations, their tuition needs to be on par with the GDP of small countries.
Be responsible for your own decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
Experience Masters (Score:3)
We're still too fixated on the degree mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
Many students have been told again and again that a degree (maybe an advanced one) will lead to success. Counselors, parents, the media - they perpetuate the beliefs that were more true 60 years ago.
But very little is said about entering one of the trades (plumbing, electrical, etc.). There is a lower financial bar to entry and there is strong demand for skilled workers. For those of you who have watched the This Old House television program on PBS, you'll note that the shortage of workers in the trades is so acute that the producers of the show are actually appealing directly to the audience to suggest that young people consider this non-4-year-degree path.
An experienced plumber or electrician may not get rich, but they can lead a very comfortable life.
Don't believe me?
How much were you charged the last time you had to hire a plumber or electrician or mason to do some significant work in your house? Now you get the idea...
A degree... is a piece of paper (Score:2)
It's actually difficult for me to fully make sense of these numbers, since they don't seem to account for regional differences in income level. I have an Associate's Degree in computer programming, and even I made more than $45K US, less than two years after completing my "formal education" -- but I also happen to live in one of the most expensive regions of the US. Does that mean that I did better on average, or worse? Who can really say for sure?
But perhaps more to the point: after college I spent very ne
A degree is an investment in class discrimination (Score:2)
No kidding.... (Score:3)
In '78, I got a then-good job as a library page. I was working with a woman around my age, who was also a page. She had a master's in microbiology... which, as she said, wouldn't get her a job.
The only master's degree that gets you a job is the one 400% bullshit masters - an MBA, since everything they teach you is wrong.
Don't believe me? Look what happens to companies run by people with them.
A Master's only where needed (Score:3)
For a lot of us here (Score:4, Funny)
Who knew that a VIC-20 and Commodore64 in the 80s might mean 6 figures years later?
Add loan caps tied to the college major (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not rocket surgery. The amount of a student loan should be tied to the earning potential of the degree. No one should be able to take out a six digit loan for a job that pays $30k. The only reason banks allow it is because the loans are Federally guaranteed, so there is no risk to them. They know the loan is not reasonable. They don't care.
Student Loan Reform Needed (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason that government guaranteed student loans exist is because, presumably, the benefits to society exceed the cost.
This premise may well be true in some cases.
For example, for large countries to be successful (i.e., have low levels of poverty and, overall, a fairly high standard of living) they will require a technically literate populace and a substantial portion of the population that can develop, innovate, and advance technology in ways that people in other counties value and will buy (just as those countries will export similar advances).
However, it's quite hard to see the societal benefits of people spending two or three years (or more) getting a master's degree in film and then finding that they can't make a decent living in the field (something any adult with the smarts to get into a graduate program should have realized before applying to such a program) -- either because they are not sufficiently talented or because demand for their skills, even if stellar, is limited because consumers don't value the product enough.
Even if the government wasn't on the hook to pay off defaulted student loan debt in such cases, just the loss of productivity of the additional time spent in school to little or no avail is a loss to both society and, in most cases, the individual who spent two or more years of their life not being productive members of society contributing to the common good of the economy.
Sure, people have hobbies (I do, most people I know do) - but there's no reason that someone else should pay for those hobbies or that we should encourage people to go deep into debt in order to pursue those hobbies. If you skydive, YOU pay for your training, YOU pay for your jumps, YOU pay for your gear - why shouldn't film buffs do the same as, it appears, for many of them it's not a viable employment option but, rather, a hobby.
The government guaranteed student loan program should be reformed both for the sake of those taking such loans and the sake of society and the economy.
First, for advanced degrees (at least) universities should receive deferred payment for a substantial portion of tuition/fees for students using government guaranteed student loans as the loan is paid off by the student. This would motivate universities to:
- Include real world marketable skills development in the curriculum,
Even with these constraints, universities will give full-ride scholarships to very promising grad students in order to compete for them. For somewhat promising but not as promising students universities would likely begin to offer their own "pay as you earn" loan arrangements - such as "We get 12% of your income in excess, annually, of (inflation adjusted) $30,000 until your loan is paid off."
These steps would make the university a true partner in the success of the student rather than a money grabbing entity scrambling for free government dollars with little regard for an individual student's long term success.
Second, there should be strict lifetime constraints on the amount of government guaranteed student loans any individual can receive. Probably one allotment for "undergraduate" and another for "graduate" work. If a graduate student is stellar and exhausts their loan availability, some university will give them a scholarship to continue their studies.
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Their degrees have zero employment potential and add nothing to society.
You are being overly charitable. It is by far worse than "add nothing to society". They are causing active harm by sowing division and redirecting resources from solving actual societal problems toward performative activism.
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