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Student loan forgiveness and free college are bad ideas.

Meadmaker said:
I know. That's why I brought him up.

But how many do we need? Should we pay for the education of everyone who wants to be one?
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I think we should pay for the education of anyone who wants one.

It's not exactly as if there's a popular run on "ornamental horticultural degrees" that is vastly outstripping demand.
 
I am surprised there are posters here suggesting that somehow the number of certain majors to be supported should be limited to the “need” for the graduates once they graduate. The carrying capacity. Who should determine the numbers? A council of university elders? The government? Doesn’t this resemble too much the failed central planning concepts in communist countries? Isn’t this in essence assigning people certain limited career choices based not on what they want to do but on what big brother thinks they should do? Unless they are in the wealthy elite?

And how should the numbers be reliably determined? Things change. Just one example: in the early 1970s the number of PhD biochemistry openings was fairly limited. Then molecular cloning was discovered, the commercial start up companies grew exponentially, and suddenly in just two or three years the need for these PhDs doubled. Versus 8 to 10 years to train new ones. A board of experts in 1970 would have missed entirely the growth of this job market. I can name other examples, including those job markets that unexpectedly collapsed.

Central planning of job training: not freedom and not effective.
 
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Giordano said:
I am surprised there are posters here suggesting that somehow the number of certain majors to be supported should be limited to the “need” for the graduates once they graduate. The carrying capacity. Who should determine the numbers? A council of university elders? The government? Doesn’t this resemble too much the failed central planning concepts in communist countries? Isn’t this in essence assigning people certain limited career choices based not on what they want to do but on what big brother thinks they should do? Unless they are in the wealthy elite?
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It's an extrapolation about what I am saying, but it isn't what I am actually saying.

We never had anything like what you described in the past......except, we did.

When the state universities grew up, there were limited spaces. Then, as now, the state universities had boards of governors that were, and still are, elected officials. I know I vote for those boards every time I go to the polls. I don't know who they are, but I vote for them anyway.

In olden times, they would decide, or hire people who decided, the budgets of various departments. They decided how many French professors to hire, and how many Mathematics professors to hire, and all of those things.

I suppose they still do.

They were the ones who established the quotas, by determining how many seats were available in which classrooms.

A further check on the educational passions of the students was provided by the fact there was no such thing as a "student loan". Whatever tuition and fees were not covered by the subsidies had to be paid in cold hard cash, which was provided by parents, who were somewhat more judicious in how it was spent than were their offspring seeking an education.


So, we've always had restrictions. What happened with the student loan program was that some of those restrictions were eased, much to the detriment of some of those students who followed their true passion to a mountain of debt.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Proposal: government subsidizes education to the point where the next marginal dollar does not produce a margi am increase in positive externalities greater than a dollar?

Any objections?
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Yes: there's not a god damn snowball's chance in hell we can figure out where that point actually is.
 
Meadmaker said:
It's an extrapolation about what I am saying, but it isn't what I am actually saying.

We never had anything like what you described in the past......except, we did.

When the state universities grew up, there were limited spaces. Then, as now, the state universities had boards of governors that were, and still are, elected officials. I know I vote for those boards every time I go to the polls. I don't know who they are, but I vote for them anyway.

In olden times, they would decide, or hire people who decided, the budgets of various departments. They decided how many French professors to hire, and how many Mathematics professors to hire, and all of those things.

I suppose they still do.

They were the ones who established the quotas, by determining how many seats were available in which classrooms.

A further check on the educational passions of the students was provided by the fact there was no such thing as a "student loan". Whatever tuition and fees were not covered by the subsidies had to be paid in cold hard cash, which was provided by parents, who were somewhat more judicious in how it was spent than were their offspring seeking an education.


So, we've always had restrictions. What happened with the student loan program was that some of those restrictions were eased, much to the detriment of some of those students who followed their true passion to a mountain of debt.
Click to expand...

The restrictions still exist of course: the administrations determine through funding the sizes of different departments. Based in large part by demand for each major by the students. (This gets complicated because some majors can teach more students per dollar. Art history is relatively cheap to teach. Biochemistry is much more expensive per student because of the lab courses. Also some majors get their primary support through research grants not tuition. Biochemistry gets lots of grants. Art history not so).

But your argument is mostly that student loans have removed the student side of this selectivity and the number of students deciding to major in a “less directly vocational” area, such as art history, has increased as a result. Frankly I haven’t seen this and I wonder if you’ve located statistics supporting this idea. Students who take out loans are only too aware they have to pay them back. Loan forgiveness is retroactive; how could it have altered major choice?

If you are advancing that a free education would broach even this hypothesized constraint I have a convincing argument against: it did not when there was free higher education in California. We were not overwhelmed with angry gangs of unemployed art history majors.
 
Giordano said:
If you are advancing that a free education would broach even this hypothesized constraint I have a convincing argument against: it did not when there was free higher education in California. We were not overwhelmed with angry gangs of unemployed art history majors.
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1) Admissions was more selective.
2) The education itself was much cheaper to provide, so there didn't have to be nearly as big a return on investment with a much smaller investment.
 
Ziggurat said:
1) Admissions was more selective.
2) The education itself was much cheaper to provide, so there didn't have to be nearly as big a return on investment with a much smaller investment.
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More selective as to major? Which is the topic being discussed in this exchange. If anything I understand there were more liberal arts majors when UC had free tuition: it all worked just fine.

More selective in terms of percent of applicants being admitted? I’ll have to look that up. And cost in real dollars I’ll look up too.

But the economics and ability to allow students free choice of major still works in a free higher ed system; there are countries doing just that.
 
And here is some real information as to the employability of liberal arts majors. Depends on specific major, not surprisingly. But not bad in general as it turns out. And often significantly better incomes in general vs those without a degree.
https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow...not so well. Job satisfaction reported high.
 
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Would you prefer a doctor who is genuinely in it for the species, or one which is in it for the money?

Would you prefer a doctor who is in it for the people they can help, or one which is in it for the idiots they can milk for money?

Because both of those actually happen in a pay system. The motivation for the career doesn't matter. The ability to pony up sacks of money does.

Anyone who has lived a few decades has encountered doctors that never should have been doctors in the first place. They merely had rich parents.

Is that really a good selection process for doctors?
 
Giordano said:
More selective as to major?
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No, more selective overall. Which means fewer people. Which means that any misallocation of majors doesn't matter as much. Same with reduced cost: if costs are lower, misallocation matters less.

More selective in terms of percent of applicants being admitted? I’ll have to look that up. And cost in real dollars I’ll look up too.
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Tuition has been outpacing inflation for decades now.

But the economics and ability to allow students free choice of major still works in a free higher ed system; there are countries doing just that.
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It won't work in ours unless costs are radically reduced. That may be possible, but if you can radically reduce the costs, you won't really need to provide it for free. Focusing on the free part first, rather than reducing the actual cost, is doing everything backwards.
 
Something else to throw into this debate. In Australia at least, science graduates have had a very high employment rate. Just not in science. The skills they developed were in high value in many non-science and technology industries. Were their degrees a waste of money?
 
Ziggurat said:
No, more selective overall. Which means fewer people. Which means that any misallocation of majors doesn't matter as much. Same with reduced cost: if costs are lower, misallocation matters less.



Tuition has been outpacing inflation for decades now.



It won't work in ours unless costs are radically reduced. That may be possible, but if you can radically reduce the costs, you won't really need to provide it for free. Focusing on the free part first, rather than reducing the actual cost, is doing everything backwards.
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Already posted just upthread: more selective based on percent of applicants accepted.

Why can it work in Germany for example but not in USA?
 
lionking said:
Something else to throw into this debate. In Australia at least, science graduates have had a very high employment rate. Just not in science. The skills they developed were in high value in many non-science and technology industries. Were their degrees a waste of money?
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True of a significant number of humanities majors too.

Better education is valued by most employers. Despite internet memes to the contrary higher education is still one of the most reliable ways of improving one’s job marketability and future salary. Even for most liberal arts majors. Not always, but typically.

This is one of those cases where the facts are quite different from what is commonly believed.
 
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Giordano said:
The restrictions still exist of course: the administrations determine through funding the sizes of different departments. Based in large part by demand for each major by the students. (This gets complicated because some majors can teach more students per dollar. Art history is relatively cheap to teach. Biochemistry is much more expensive per student because of the lab courses. Also some majors get their primary support through research grants not tuition. Biochemistry gets lots of grants. Art history not so).

But your argument is mostly that student loans have removed the student side of this selectivity and the number of students deciding to major in a “less directly vocational” area, such as art history, has increased as a result. Frankly I haven’t seen this and I wonder if you’ve located statistics supporting this idea. Students who take out loans are only too aware they have to pay them back. Loan forgiveness is retroactive; how could it have altered major choice?

If you are advancing that a free education would broach even this hypothesized constraint I have a convincing argument against: it did not when there was free higher education in California. We were not overwhelmed with angry gangs of unemployed art history majors.
Click to expand...

As a backdrop to this and to some of your recent answers, I just have to reiterate something.

What do you suppose the problem is? Because Bernie thinks there's a problem. And Elizabeth Warren thinks there's a problem. And in 2016, Hilary Clinton thought there was a problem. For that matter, Betsy DeVoss thinks there's a problem. Why do these people think there's a problem?

What I see, though, is that Bernie's solution to the problem is to not solve the problem, but instead shift the cost of the problem to someone else. I don't see anything in his plan about easing regulatory burdens. I don't see anything in his plan about addressing the factors that lead to high costs. I don't see anything in his plan about changing the way people are prepared for life in the workforce that will offset the economic cost of four years with no pay while receiving high services. In fact, I see in his plan, very specifically, that people should be able to do all the things they do now, and more, but not be burdened by the cost of things so that they can become environmentalists, teachers, social workers, and artists instead of having to take a job that would allow them to pay off their loans. (That's directly from the plan, if you can call that set of platitudes a plan.)


So, maybe my analysis of the root of the problem is all wet, but somehow, an awful lot of people seem to be burdened by student loans, or possibly unable to pay them at all. There are enough of those people that politicians are saying, "Vote for me and I'll make someone else pay off your debt!" (They usually phrase it differently.)

What went wrong that made this situation come about?

To my way of thinking, the people in that situation must have made some bad decisions, and there are a lot of those people, which points to some sort of systemic problem. What is it?

Well, I've offered some possible explanations for that problem, and people seem to think my explanations are wrong, but one thing I'm certain of is that those bad decisions were made by people when they were 18 years old. I think somehow, somewhere, that is actually part of the problem.
 
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