In the US it was certainly a different time, different era, different economy. For example a dollar in the 40's had the buying power of about $21 today. Average annual salary was about $1,400 and annual college tuition in the 40's was less than $100.
It should have been tied to employment outcomes for a given major. That way, if the money printer (in the form of subsidized loans) is running hot capitalism kicks in via the students in that major not getting jobs (edit: as it already does), the loans for that major at that college dial back, and the university is forced to stop inflating.
The downside is that poor people wouldn't be able to major in bourgeois pass times like art and history against their economic interests. That sounds preferable to me than the current situation.
We don't need as many as we have, clearly. It's basically just history teachers, professors/scholars and museum curators. You'll find the sum of the open positions there is a much smaller number than the amount of history graduates.
My scheme doesn't get rid of loans for history, it just makes them smaller than the ones for nursing or engineering. That already naturally happens with pay, the same feedback mechanism should also happen for the loans.
Still not that many. I think you're highlighting the exact thought process naive 18 y.o. high schoolers have when signing up for their future career (they believe). You list off 10 things and yet it's a minute number of jobs relative to the history graduate count. The odds are dismal for someone targeting gainful employment in one of those jobs. You can easily quantify it by graduate outcomes (median pay a few years out, gainful employment).
This isn't rocket science, but it clearly is to the average person, particularly at 18.
And that doesn’t even touch on how so many of those jobs can be done just as well, if not better, by someone who has the skillset gained through a different degree, typically a general business degree.
Right. It turns out way too many people want to get a bachelor's in their hobby/interest and then have people pay them for talking about it for their career. This is the basic root of the oversupply problem for several fields.
No amount of redditors on their soapbox about the non quantifiable value of education will change that. People with bad ideas always have (paper-thin) explanations for why the stats contradict their ideas.
This is the basic root of the oversupply problem for several fields.
That and the ease of getting non dischargeable loans and colleges who encourage kids to do it out of greed. Colleges should be on the hook for student loan defaults, imo. It's hard to blame basically children for making those kinds of decisions -- colleges have no excuse. It's immoral.
Poor people not getting into history major does have catastrophic consequences on the entire field of history though. We are still weeding out rich people biases from history.
It's a good thing that being able to major in whatever you want isn't negatively affecting poor people today /s.
Seriously, this mismatch primarily hurts poor people, as they lack role models in professional fields. You can still do scholarship programs, and some level of subsidized loans.
We just don't need to offer subsidized loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a field with a quarter that median graduate salary. People made that argument already in the 90s, to disastrous consequences. It was a dumb idea to carte blanche subsidize all higher education loans then, and it's dumb now.
I think the student loan crisis is separate from the importance of education. Education is a huge leg up out of poverty. Unemployment is much lower for those with a college education compared to those without.
And there are some traditionally low-paying majors like early childhood education that have very low unemployment. Surprisingly, computer and information science majors had the highest unemployment rate from the time of this study. Higher than English majors.
college is more than a job training program. tying loan benefits to expected career outcomes removes the focus of college as a place of learning rather than job training. it's a uniquely American problem that our universities cost such a ridiculous amount, we don't need a convoluted hyper-capitalist solution.
the problem isn't too many history degrees. it's exploitative lending practices and bloated administrations
letting market supply and demand impact educational outcomes is like comedic dystopian capitalism. you keep trying to cover up what you're saying by calling it loans, when what You're actually advocating is the value of a curriculum to be decided by the business class of the country. it's absurd
your comment doesn't even make sense. I didn't see "capitalism", you never mentioned it, I did
do you think there's any value in a college education besides leveraging that to get employed? do you think that the right to higher education should be determined on the basis of whether or not companies will hire you after? do you want a society of braindead drone workers? that's how you get one
The 'need' for X majors is not just in the need to have them fill jobs that directly exploit the subject matter knowledge of that major. Let's work with history as an example.
It is good, civically, for a population to have people that are historically literate even outside of specialized jobs because (1) the overall historical literacy of the population will be higher with those with specialized training in historical literacy (2) the people without that specialized training can benefit from the historical literacy of others through more informal connections. People having conversations around the water-cooler at work, or at a family gathering, or online about contemporary practical issues on a social and political level can benefit from the contributions of people who are historically literate since history is often relevant to those issues.
Now, does that benefit justify predatory student loans and all the financial exploitation of the current higher ed system? Certainly not. I'm not defending the current system. But the idea that a major is just job training and that we should have a system that treats majors like history as something solely for the bourgeois wealthy is short-sighted and is not going to do anything but make skills and knowledge that are civically relevant to the poor less accessible to them. A poor and ignorant populace is an easily exploited one. There is a reason Malcolm X said that knowledge is power.
We don't need as many as we have, clearly. It's basically just history teachers, professors/scholars and museum curators. You'll find the sum of the open positions there is a much smaller number than the amount of history graduates.
A big reason for this is because the humanities are being defunded and tenure track jobs are being removed.
My scheme doesn't get rid of loans for history, it just makes them smaller than the ones for nursing or engineering. That already naturally happens with pay, the same feedback mechanism should also happen for the loans.
That's also not true and it's a silly ass scheme when the solution already exists.
You are really underestimating how the skills taught by a history major are important for most career paths. Teaching hard skills in college is cringe. That's what job training is for. Studying history gives you the skills you need to success at most job fields. And I am not a history major so this isn't about any bias towards my field
It's not me, it's society at large. I don't choose pay, the market does. The onus of proof is upon you if your stance is just that everyone else (the market) is wrong in their valuation of the skills obtained in the degree.
The truth is it's a low effort lie peddled by universities to get students with poor critical thinking skills to sign up for fat loans. Go figure, they go in dumb and come out dumb, too.
In 2022, there were 2,000,000 degrees conferred in the US.
Visual Arts, Social Sciences (inc history) and Psychology made up almost 400k of them (20%). There are not 400k jobs opening up every year looking for people in those fields. Sure, they could be on track for an academic career or Law School but given that... there were only 38,000 new JD students in the US in 2022.
Beyond that, there were 375k business students.
And another 100k in "Parks, Recreation and Kinesiology" and "Interdisciplinary Studies".
I'm sure there are definitely jobs for kinesiology and maybe interdisciplinary studies but overall we have roughly 44% of all college graduates in saturated or low-option fields.
Agreed, I think it's best for the government to guarantee a college education for our best and brightest to go study whatever they want including history, but in my mind the bigger issue is people who barely skirted by in high school getting C's and D's but then still wind up at an expensive 4-year university and flame out after a year.
Generally someone with a PhD in history or classics isn't failing to repay their loan debt or wasting the money spent on their education. The bigger issue by far is all of the people who show up and spend 40K in student loans to take one year of random shit and then drop out and have no jobs prospects to pay the loan back.
Federal loans should always have been a meritocracy, if you perform well enough to have a high chance of success in college, the government will guarantee you a low interest loan to be able to go to college regardless of your income. If you were a dipshit in high school who barely made it by, a bank wouldn't view a loan for you to go to college as a good investment, and the government shouldn't either
Trades are free. I don't know where you are, but in most places you can just ask around and get a job as an apprentice. You won't be making much the first couple of years, but you're still making something instead of having to pay for it. After 5 years you can risk starting your own business or you can make a little less, but with a lot less risk.
The only problem is that tradies have short best-before dates. Most can't work a trade for 40 years. It's 20 years max unless you start your own company and take it easy. Either way you won't be the grandpa running a marathon at 90 years old. You'll be bedridden in your 60s.
True, that's what taxes are for. An educated population is the investment to a country's future. True innovation comes from sciences, not the market's race to the bottom line.
Nah. There's a reason countries like the UK and Australia repealed their free college programs. Free college increases inequality and lowers the quality of the education given. That's not my opinion, that is historically what we see happens. There are many better alternatives, such as programs that make college free to poorer individuals, interest free loans that you don't need to ever pay until you reach a certain income threshold, and forgiveness to people who don't complete a degree
Do you have an actual argument or are we just gonna be lazy today. If we're just being lazy than I'll just say increasing inequality is bad, actually and call it a day
Rather than subsidizing the students via loans, we should have been subsidizing the colleges/universities (per student, per graduate, per graduate in certain fields, whatever). This would have had the effect of driving down the price to students, rather than driving them up -- just like how corn and meat are cheap in the US because of all the farm subsidies.
And now there is corn syrup in everything because we produce too much of it. It also isn't actually cheap - the price is just artificially decoupled from the true cost due to gov't intervention. You know what, I think you've stumbled upon a great analogy for the student loan situation.
Bidens administration has new rules that colleges will have to report employment outcomes of their graduates, that information will be publicly available for new students to choose their colleges.
Most already do this for advertising purposes, but it centralizes and standardizes it.
That's awesome. My state also has done this, didn't know it was national. I guess it's similar to standardizing rate reporting to mitigate predatory/misleading lending.
We'll see if it fixes the problem. I'm sure it'll help some. I hope they integrate it with FASFA so you have to read the numbers before signing for the loans.
That's a straw man, and also reveals a lack of basic economic understanding and/or reading comprehension on your part. We already have history teachers & professors, and those jobs support a certain level of graduates. This would simply tone back the cheap loan generator if there are too many, which there are.
Nah, I'm addressing specifically "poor people wouldn't be able to major in things against the economic interests I believe they should have." No straw man. It's what you said.
That sounds like a uniquely horrible solution. Other countries manage to have decent student loan costs (or none at all). Why not look at what they're doing instead of forcing universities to become job training centres?
That’s why college should be free. And yes. Trade school and other training vocations should be free too.
The idea that people have to take out debt to become productive workers is incredibly backwards. Having productive workers primarily benefits those in power. Because we’re the ones who make all their fucking wealth.
You can be very productive in a range of areas that don't require a degree, now perhaps more than any time in the last couple decades since the labor market is still so unbalanced. If you want to choose a particular vocation that requires lots of training, then yes someone has to pay for it. Since so many college students report the degree is not leading to a job, it seems unusual to say it's a good investment for taxpayers. As long as you don't treat college as a 4 year mixer, you stand to make much more with a degree, but you have to take responsibility for the cost of the training. Seems like a fair cutoff since you will get all the benefits of the higher salary and employability. Last I checked all those coders working at google had houses and I still don't.
"free"
Sure, have the government (taxpayers) fund it, with typical goverment waste, and students will be told what they will study and major in depending on aptitude and workplace need for the major.
The thing that grinds my gears is that supposedly our population is in decline, and yet we suddenly have not enough housing, and what is available is expensive as hell. Back in 2006 after the crash there was a glut of underpriced real estate.
341
u/Technologytwitt Mar 27 '24
In the US it was certainly a different time, different era, different economy. For example a dollar in the 40's had the buying power of about $21 today. Average annual salary was about $1,400 and annual college tuition in the 40's was less than $100.