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Reason posted:Its gotten to the point where we use my wife's student loan money to help us pay for poo poo like rent and food. Its so loving broken and at some point the dam is going to burst and somethings going to be done, whether its being able to reasonable discharge private loans through bankruptcy or some kind of program to help people with massive amounts of private debt work their way out of the lovely permanent hole they're in. I'm on your side here, but I don't think that outside of some kind of big, organized "just don't pay your loans" movement (which I don't think the general populace would be very sympathetic to) that there will be any sort of catastrophic readjustment. While it's tempting to draw parallels with the housing bubble in 2008 (both big investments usually requiring hefty loans, considered primarily financial assets by many), I don't think the situations are that comparable. My knowledge of the '08 crash is probably a bit simplistic, but defaults on student loans aren't going to flood the market with foreclosures and drive down the prices of an expensive asset (houses then, degrees now) for everyone across the board; those who have defaulted still have their degrees, which are worth the same (in terms of abstract cash value) as before. Due to the non-dischargeable nature of the debt, the loaners also still have the means to go after their pound of flesh. If student lenders were really taking a big hit in a hypothetical student loan defaulting crisis, they might tighten up loaning standards (tough to do on 18 year olds with little to no credit or work history; maybe either require co-signers more often, or do some actuarial calculations on who is likely to finish their degree and land a job paying it back), which would probably lead to universities making moves to cut costs/lower tuition. I am about as far from libertarian as they come, but I genuinely think this most likely what would happen in that situation or more likely Congress would be lobbied to open more loopholes/ways for students to get credit. I'm not confident that it would work out well long-term, to say nothing for all the people trapped in inescapable debt before that kind of a "market correction". Basically, I don't think student loans are a "bubble" in the sense that due to the way the loans and the laws are written, it can't really "pop" in the traditional way. In that sense I think the situation is a lot more dangerous; rather than a short, sharp shock and re-adjustment, it will probably play out as a long-term drag on the economy (younger people delaying buying a home and other goods/services in order to service their student debt), one that I don't see any hope of it coming back from without serious top-down efforts at reform. Pompous Rhombus fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 18:54
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I consider myself ridiculously lucky in a sense that I attend an engineering school with non insane tuition prices in the Midwest and am fully funded by the government through research. Jerry Manderbilt posted:I linked him this in another thread a few months back, with this chart: The latest craze in STEM is now your only option is getting into graduate school since the the market is getting flooded by BScs.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:01
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Graduate school is the biggest trap of all, there are no jobs and even if you know somebody you are going to make better money at Walmart.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:10
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Graduate school is the biggest trap of all, there are no jobs and even if you know somebody you are going to make better money at Walmart. Yeah, the biggest benefit from grad school for me was a general "graduates of x school grad program must surely be competent", like a general validation of my ability to do things rather than anything specific I've learned.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:56
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Job Truniht posted:The latest craze in STEM is now your only option is getting into graduate school since the the market is getting flooded by BScs. I think a much more pressing point is that you only get out of education what you put into it (to quote Calvin and Hobbes), The guy that's in an STEM degree for the money, doesn't do a good job, and doesn't care at all about the subject matter is going to have limited prospects. The people who enjoy it, and go above and beyond what's required to pass, and graduate with honours are going to have a massively easier time even in a saturated market. There were 3rd and 4th years in my compsci program that I swear were coasting by on plagiarism, because they were consistently poo poo at both theoretical and practical work, and they had no idea what they were doing. They may have a degree, but any employer is going to want to steer well clear of them. Education is not supposed to be about gathering trade skills, but that doesn't even demonstrate the slightest aptitude for being able to learn new things as needed (and actually doing so before it's crucial, so you aren't playing catch-up with your skills all the time).
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Jan 23, 2015 20:03
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Effectronica posted:Well, I've finally done it. I've found someone who is actually too dumb to understand a post I made, instead of it just being a mean thing to say. Drop the lovely attitude, it's not helpful. You couldn't even be bothered to quote the person you were referring to.
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Jan 23, 2015 20:26
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The top graduates will generally have good job prospects, but in any competitive enterprise, by definition, most people don't get to be top graduates. There's no one right answer for college and career choices. Good jobs are getting rarer and rarer and if anything truly was the one hot ticket, it will get filled quickly. I took programming classes over the summer from one of those code academy situations, and the instructors were basically begging their students for jobs and references.
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Jan 23, 2015 20:26
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As a relatively new parent who literally just opened a 529 plan, this jumped out at me today: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/your-money/obamas-proposed-changes-to-529-college-savings-plans-would-reduce-benefits.html?src=me (tl;dr - Obama's new tax proposal would tax all withdrawals from 529 plans as ordinary income) From a purely FYGM perspective, the prospective loss of the biggest current benefit to the 529 plan obviously bothers me. It's probably the biggest draw to those plans, after all. That annoyance is tempered by the fact that it probably won't pass Congress, because it is Obama's idea and both houses are currently packed with contrarian Republican legislators who might just stop drinking water if they saw Obama take a pull off a bottle of Aquafina. On the other hand, the proposed tax credits and adjustments might be helpful to a lot more people beyond my own family. I'm having a really hard time evaluating this proposal outside my own immediate knee-jerk reaction, and I am interested to see some alternate perspectives.
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Jan 23, 2015 20:27
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PT6A posted:I think a much more pressing point is that you only get out of education what you put into it (to quote Calvin and Hobbes), The guy that's in an STEM degree for the money, doesn't do a good job, and doesn't care at all about the subject matter is going to have limited prospects. The people who enjoy it, and go above and beyond what's required to pass, and graduate with honours are going to have a massively easier time even in a saturated market. There were 3rd and 4th years in my compsci program that I swear were coasting by on plagiarism, because they were consistently poo poo at both theoretical and practical work, and they had no idea what they were doing. They may have a degree, but any employer is going to want to steer well clear of them. Education is not supposed to be about gathering trade skills, but that doesn't even demonstrate the slightest aptitude for being able to learn new things as needed (and actually doing so before it's crucial, so you aren't playing catch-up with your skills all the time). It's particularly bad in CS I think, as I saw the same thing in my undergrad. Other engineering courses usually failed fast, and it was much harder to get inept engineers (though I could still name one or two).
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Jan 23, 2015 21:31
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The point about grad school is an interesting one. I go to an Ivy and have a bunch of friends who are paying ~$60k a year in tuition with $15-20k living expenses on top of that. While the Ivies and other elite private schools make a point of talking up how much financial aid undergrads get and how they don't graduate with much if any debt at all, the insane debt that grad students go into is never mentioned at all. Despite non-PhD grad students getting sweet gently caress all in terms of financial aid. So the move to masters degrees becoming the norm should be seen as absolutely horrifying; not only is it another couple of years of education and expenses, those years are likely at sticker price. Absolute insanity. I've got some experience with public universities too, having completed 2 years of my undergrad degree while studying abroad in the US. They were public universities with massive endowments though (admittedly Berkeley is now apparently struggling a fair bit). It IS true what a poster said earlier about the US college experience being completely different to overseas. College in the US is seen as a rite of passage in a way that doesn't occur in other countries, with a great deal more focus on living on campus, the "college experience" etc. College in the US is in all likelihood, considerably more enjoyable than in other countries. That said, I don't necessarily think this is the reason for the skyrocketing costs or ballooning student debt. Private schools are going to do whatever the hell they want, put it seems pretty clear that public school tuition costs have gone up in direct response to government funding cuts. Obvious solution; restore the funding. Pay for it by making the rich actually pay their taxes. Probably the most realistic hope one can have for public colleges in the US is to ape a system similar to Australia's HECS system, where students defer all costs and only ever repay when earning above a given yearly income (paying a small percentage of their income in repayments). Regarding employability of STEM degrees and grad school, it's obviously something that varies significantly by school. Massive debts aside, students graduating from my school don't really seem to freak out about employment because the old boys network in place to employ Ivy grads is insane. It's very strange coming from a country where such networks aren't nearly as overt. I did an investment bank internship last year, and while I had to do many rounds of grueling interviews before I was offered the position, I got the first interview on the basis of a professor knowing a person who knew a person. If I went to a random state school, it's very possible that I wouldn't have had the chance to demonstrate my competency. It seems like all the positions are filled by such introductions, or these companies specifically making a point of coming to my school to convince students to apply to them. If students don't have enough money to go to elite private schools, or the luck to get one of the limited spots at the few elite public schools, they obviously face a completely different world when it comes to employment. The stratification of society the ballooning costs of higher education in the US are creating is incredible, and only going to get worse. Arcanen fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 21:44
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Pompous Rhombus posted:Basically, I don't think student loans are a "bubble" in the sense that due to the way the loans and the laws are written, it can't really "pop" in the traditional way. In that sense I think the situation is a lot more dangerous; rather than a short, sharp shock and re-adjustment, it will probably play out as a long-term drag on the economy (younger people delaying buying a home and other goods/services in order to service their student debt), one that I don't see any hope of it coming back from without serious top-down efforts at reform. Yeah, I think its more likely the response to data showing Millennials and younger forming households, buying homes, having kids, have a lower net worth, and generally buying things at a significantly lower rate they'll be derided as shiftless children unwilling to do the hard work of being an adult instead of acknowledging the student loan debt problem. My question is what their kids will be like and end up doing. I know that if my wife and I were having kids I wouldn't know what the gently caress to tell them.
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Jan 23, 2015 23:30
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Iron Twinkie posted:Yeah, I think its more likely the response to data showing Millennials and younger forming households, buying homes, having kids, have a lower net worth, and generally buying things at a significantly lower rate they'll be derided as shiftless children unwilling to do the hard work of being an adult instead of acknowledging the student loan debt problem. My question is what their kids will be like and end up doing. I know that if my wife and I were having kids I wouldn't know what the gently caress to tell them. If having student loans effects enough of the population (which it already does effect a majority of graduates today and there's no sign of that trend reversing in the near future) then eventually you're going to see debt forgiveness as the indebted become more of the voting populace. You're already starting to see that with some policies Obama proposed.
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Jan 23, 2015 23:36
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One saving grace about PhDs is usually you get tuition and at better schools a stipend, if you are smart you can save some money in school and come out marginally better on the other side. In addition, if you are a real superstar you can start accumulating outside grants together to give you sometimes a fairly middle class income over a couple years. The academic job market itself is dire when you finish though, especially since many schools prefer to simply hire adjuncts for 1/3rd or less of a tenure track professor (it is also known as adjunct hell). So basically you either need to find a very rare tenure track position or look at a job in an affiliate field (it surprisingly works often enough).
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Jan 23, 2015 23:47
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But everyone does know that the STEM CRISIS was utterly invented by people wanting to pay programmers and engineers less, right?
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Jan 24, 2015 00:07
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Ardennes posted:and at better schools a stipend If you're in a PhD program without a stipend you're nuts. Never accept such an offer. Do something else for a year and try again the next application season.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:53
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Mineaiki posted:But everyone does know that the STEM CRISIS was utterly invented by people wanting to pay programmers and engineers less, right? Pretty much, it's saying "where are the programmers and engineers?!" while looking right at a huge surplus of boomer programmers and engineers who are now regarded as unemployable because they want a living wage and health insurance.
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Jan 24, 2015 01:23
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Most of my loans are unsubsidized based on the fact that my parents make a decent amount of money and were expected to contribute a portion. Except they didn't, but that doesn't matter. FAFSA decides what you get depending on how much your parents make (if you're a dependent) regardless of if they give you any money. That's a stupid assumption, and causes students like me to get the worst rates. Right now my unsubsidized loans are at 6.8%. That's almost three times the rate of my car loan. Education, which I would argue is a lot more valuable in many cases, should not have that kind of burden. To me it seems like the student loan system is designed to profit off of students because so many of them depend on loans and are willing to accept the terrible rates. It seems like a predatory practice, and do harm (bankruptcy) as often as it does good (getting a good job and being able to pay it off). My college is joining the trend of spending a bunch of money for little gain. We've been averaging a new building every year and they're almost completely unused. Two years ago a big high-tech building was built for 'emerging technologies'. It's almost completely empty, no one has any classes in there and it's only used for photo ops. The building that was finished this year is supposed to be dedicated to health and social sciences. Again, it's mostly empty and all of the people I know who have health or social science majors have never had a reason to even step foot inside. Next year we'll have a new building for business academics. I expect that to go unused as well because as a business major, I can tell you we have more than enough classrooms right now. Last semester a new parking lot was made for faculty to park in during the day and students to park at night. At night it was maybe a quarter full at most. They built another smaller lot further away this semester and designated it to serve the same function. Only students can no longer park in the old lot now, and the new lot is metered. So now we have a parking lot that's completely empty at night because the faculty have gone home, and a full lot where students have to pay. It's this kind of ridiculousness that mean I'll never donate a cent to the school. Students are seeing their tuitions and fees rise sharply (the parking sticker fee doubled this year to pay for the privilege of new lots that we can't use or have to pay a meter for) and just seeing big empty buildings as the result. Basically, everything is terrible. Raere fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 01:52
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SedanChair posted:Pretty much, it's saying "where are the programmers and engineers?!" while looking right at a huge surplus of boomer programmers and engineers who are now regarded as unemployable because they want a living wage and health insurance. Not to mention it goes hand in hand with the deals a bunch of Silicon Valley employers were making behind closed doors to keep wages down.
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Jan 24, 2015 02:42
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joepinetree posted:Congratulations on being completely wrong: Politicians don't spend inflation adjusted funds, they spend nominal funds, and large increases every year are a hard sell.
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Jan 24, 2015 02:56
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nothing really changes until we as a society destroy this silly notion that college is somehow needed to enter any part of the workforce above cleaning toilets
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Jan 24, 2015 03:13
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on the left posted:Politicians don't spend inflation adjusted funds, they spend nominal funds, and large increases every year are a hard sell. Seriously? Not only is that deflection incredibly dumb ("they didn't defund universities, they just didn't adjust for inflation!"), it is also incredibly wrong. Or do you really believe that Arizona had 50% inflation between 2008 and 2013? Cummulative inflation between 08 and 13 was 8.2%.
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Jan 24, 2015 03:29
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In 2001 I decided not to attend the Savannah College of Art and Design's four year course on "sequential design" because (I was an extremely intelligent and gifted 17 year-old and) it was a loving sham and tuition was $21k a year, in a city where one should expect another 10k annually in living expenses. The year is now 2015 and tuition is now $33k a year. Also, the first year is basically senior year of high school...any art school in the country, the whole first year is a freebie (for them). You literally go to an art college and take maths and sciences. Why is a Bachelor degree in America a 4-year course and a 3-year course in the UK?
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Jan 24, 2015 03:34
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joepinetree posted:Seriously? Not only is that deflection incredibly dumb ("they didn't defund universities, they just didn't adjust for inflation!"), it is also incredibly wrong. Or do you really believe that Arizona had 50% inflation between 2008 and 2013? Cummulative inflation between 08 and 13 was 8.2%. It says a lot about the numbers that they cherry-picked inflation-adjusted per-student funding starting at the beginning of a recession, and ending midway through the recovery. Not only will inflation be disproportionately high, many people returned to university during the recession. And if university budgets are expanding faster than inflation/student enrollment, legislatures are performing a great public service by limiting funding to arrest explosive growths in cost. on the left fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 03:59
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on the left posted:It says a lot about the numbers that they cherry-picked inflation-adjusted per-student funding starting at the beginning of a recession, and ending midway through the recovery. Ah, yes, why couldn't they see into the future to provide the numbers as they will be then. And I guess you are now admitting that your post about not defunding higher education was just nonsense, since the goal posts just moved. You realize that I also posted the 01-11 data, right? Which makes your second sentence there be just ridiculous, since pretty much what is happening at state universities is that state spending is being replaced by tuition.
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Jan 24, 2015 04:05
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joepinetree posted:Which makes your second sentence there be just ridiculous, since pretty much what is happening at state universities is that state spending is being replaced by tuition. Yes, because politicians are not willing to pay, but individual people are evidenced to be willing to pay nearly unlimited amounts for university. If you were the head of a flagship university, you'd be a fool to not chase tuition dollars over state funding. State funding won't help you with attracting lucrative foreign students or allow you to build large funds for pet projects.
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Jan 24, 2015 04:26
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on the left posted:Yes, because politicians are not willing to pay, but individual people are evidenced to be willing to pay nearly unlimited amounts for university. If you were the head of a flagship university, you'd be a fool to not chase tuition dollars over state funding. State funding won't help you with attracting lucrative foreign students or allow you to build large funds for pet projects. People aren't actually solely motivated by greed, and your difficulties with this suggest you should not be allowed to raise children.
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Jan 24, 2015 04:45
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Effectronica posted:People aren't actually solely motivated by greed, and your difficulties with this suggest you should not be allowed to raise children. If you are in the leadership of a university, your objective is to increase the power and prestige of your area of responsibility. If you do not do this, your job will be absorbed by one of the other public universities in competition with you for students and various other forms of funding. Also, I can't wait to have kids. My kids will tear through the children raised by your average millennial.
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Jan 24, 2015 05:33
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on the left posted:If you are in the leadership of a university, your objective is to increase the power and prestige of your area of responsibility. If you do not do this, your job will be absorbed by one of the other public universities in competition with you for students and various other forms of funding. Nope. That's not what your objective is. Your objective is to lead the university to the best of your ability. That is merely an interpretation of what is necessary to lead the university, and frankly not one that many university administrators believe themselves to have, in all likelihood. I guess if you view things that way, I'll just have to take the murder charge for putting down you and your children before they rape and murder others, in accordance with the ideology you've taught them. It'd be a shame to snuff out lives, even ones as hosed-up as that of you and your issue, but all that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
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Jan 24, 2015 05:38
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Effectronica posted:Nope. That's not what your objective is. Your objective is to lead the university to the best of your ability. That is merely an interpretation of what is necessary to lead the university, and frankly not one that many university administrators believe themselves to have, in all likelihood. How would you judge the performance of University leaders, other than metrics like rankings and output of high-quality students/research? Various university rankings do measure these types of things, so the job would be to maximize rankings.
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Jan 24, 2015 05:45
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on the left posted:How would you judge the performance of University leaders, other than metrics like rankings and output of high-quality students/research? Various university rankings do measure these types of things, so the job would be to maximize rankings. Nice rhetorical shift, there, away from the rapaciousness. How do you judge the quality of a novel? Wordcount? Number of weeks on the bestseller list? Actually, this may not be a fair question to ask you.
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Jan 24, 2015 05:48
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Effectronica posted:Nice rhetorical shift, there, away from the rapaciousness. How do you judge the quality of a novel? Wordcount? Number of weeks on the bestseller list? Actually, this may not be a fair question to ask you. It's actually very easy to judge the quality of a university. You can judge the quality of the students, the quality of the professors, and other quantifiable things. People disagree about the exact methodology used (such as US News vs. Businessweek rankings), but it's typically very clear when a university is generally "good" or "bad".
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Jan 24, 2015 05:56
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on the left posted:It's actually very easy to judge the quality of a university. You can judge the quality of the students, the quality of the professors, and other quantifiable things. People disagree about the exact methodology used, but it's typically very clear when a university is generally "good" or "bad". Okay, I see that that was not, in fact, a fair question to ask you, and that further attempts to explain will result in you making funny-as-hell faces as you try to comprehend the ideas involved. Good night, or probably morning by the time you see this.
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Jan 24, 2015 05:57
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on the left posted:It's actually very easy to judge the quality of a university. You can judge the quality of the students, the quality of the professors, and other quantifiable things. People disagree about the exact methodology used (such as US News vs. Businessweek rankings), but it's typically very clear when a university is generally "good" or "bad". Why should the great, top-ranked public university I went to, which the people of my state paid to establish, be out of reach for people in my same socioeconomic strata going to school 15 years later? Is this palatable to you?
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Jan 24, 2015 06:00
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SedanChair posted:Why should the great, top-ranked public university I went to, which the people of my state paid to establish, be out of reach for people in my same socioeconomic strata going to school 15 years later? Is this palatable to you? Because the leadership of the university has decided that it's way cooler to cash in on the top rank to attract tons of full-price paying foreign and out of state students. Otherwise, who is going to pay high six-figure salaries to the top administration?
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Jan 24, 2015 06:04
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on the left posted:Because the leadership of the university has decided that it's way cooler to cash in on the top rank to attract tons of full-price paying foreign and out of state students. Otherwise, who is going to pay high six-figure salaries to the top administration? Okay. I want you to explain why tuition rates aren't even higher, then. Because if they've reached the equilibrium point as of this year, then they will not increase more than inflation next year, and if they haven't, we have to ask why they aren't increasing at higher rates until they start circling around equilibrium.
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Jan 24, 2015 06:06
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on the left posted:Because the leadership of the university has decided that it's way cooler to cash in on the top rank to attract tons of full-price paying foreign and out of state students. Otherwise, who is going to pay high six-figure salaries to the top administration? You answered my first question, but not the second.
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Jan 24, 2015 07:06
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the best jobs are now offered to people who become successful without going to college, meaning college is a waste of time.
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Jan 24, 2015 08:04
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Cost of out-of-state tuition increased from $23 grand to $28 grand over the 4 (alright, alright, 5) years you went to college. That was covered by the national merit scholarship & Pell grants, BUT, even so, student loans with their 8% interest rate are a bad idea for students to get if they can do without them. College is for industrious STEM types. I'm sorry, but it is not really for those in the liberal arts fields unless they can afford to fully pay their own way: the independently wealthy, which I'll define as people making >$100k/year. I feel like a lot of people should be routed to trade schools, community colleges and the military. If they have top SAT /ACT scores, then universities are a good avenue. Far too many people don't know what to do after high school. So, they see that everyone goes to college these days, so they go. Then they get out in a few years and they have a huge debt load that they must work for 5-10 years consistently in order to pay that off & be able to afford to have a mortgage & own a house in their own name.
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Jan 24, 2015 08:42
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college cost me like 3oo a semester and then 2k for a 4 year degree how do you guys throw away money like non jews
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Jan 24, 2015 08:43
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A3th3r posted:Cost of out-of-state tuition increased from $23 grand to $28 grand over the 4 (alright, alright, 5) years you went to college. That was covered by the national merit scholarship & Pell grants, BUT, even so, student loans with their 8% interest rate are a bad idea for students to get if they can do without them. College is for industrious STEM types. I'm sorry, but it is not really for those in the liberal arts fields unless they can afford to fully pay their own way: the independently wealthy, which I'll define as people making >$100k/year. As an STEM type, I would rather not have this country sink ever further into social stratification.
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Jan 24, 2015 08:44
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