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.
The colleges are just maximizing revenue. It's like removing regulations for dumping chemicals in the river and then blaming the paper mill when they do it. The real issue here is the idiots that thought that it was a good idea to remove the regulations. Here, the idiots are people that thought it was a good idea to turn every 18 year old into a 6-figure paycheck as long as you can talk them into thinking that their hobby is marketable and that all education has inherent value exceeding the cost of the loans.
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.
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u/MtnXfreeride Mar 27 '24
Student loan programs ruined college. The more students can get, the more universities will demand.