While I agree on the economics and the dire need for deeper reform, my biggest concern is actually the optics. 'The Dems are giving out a lot of free money, and it's only for people who went to college' seems tailor-made to build resentment. It's not just that it's regressive, it's that it's regressive in a way that's incredibly obvious to a normal person.
The galactic horribleness of the current GOP is letting Democratic politicians and strategists get fat and lazy. Faced with the 2020s Democratic party, how many voters who refuse to hold their nose and vote for Donald Trump would do so for 2012 Mitt Romney?
Was he? Romney was running against Obama who was a very talented politician. Trump ran against Clinton who was one of the most unpopular politicians in the modern history and barely squeaked out a victory. If Romney runs against Clinton, I think he has just as much a chance of winning as Trump. Definitely would be a different coalition though.
As someone who has 4 degrees (not bragging, just giving bonafides), made poor choices and good choices along the path, has advised and taught for over 29 years , and is very much part of the higher ed insider establishment, here is the simple advice I gave to my son who is looking at colleges:
1. If you’re in the top 10-15 percent of your undergrad college’s gpa when you graduate, the difference between public and private in terms of job or grad school opportunities is zip.
2. Colleges have made it much easier these days to get a double major in 4 years, so choose a major you love and a major that gets you a job. If those are the same major, even better.
3. If a department can’t tell you on its webpages within 2 clicks what jobs its majors get and if its first example in its placement page is “our majors go to grad school” that’s a warning sign.
4. You really only know what your parents do and don’t understand your career opportunities at 18 so over the next 4 years, intern, intern, intern. Don’t know in what? The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook is a great way to learn what an occupation actually does.
5. This is the only time in your life that society will let you “find yourself” so take a variety of courses, read newspapers, read books, join clubs and, yes, take jobs and learn there as well. Everything you do in the next 4 years is basic training… you just don’t know what it’s for yet.
6. Never underestimate the blessedness of sitting alone under an oak tree reading a book.
Great advice John.... my daughter is an 11th grader considering schools and majors. Her two interests right now are economics and material science. I say combine them. Give her options.
economics combined with some sort of engineering degree like materials science is a good combo. Both emphasize mathematical systems and the person who sees how both systems work does well in my experience. If she goes on to grad school in econ, having the engineering background will serve her well and if she goes down the engineering route, econ is one of those majors that will help her think more broadly and be a well-rounded person. I wish her the best of luck!
I would disagree partially in that based on my experience, I don't think upper-level econ is really that valuable unless you plan to become a professional economist or statistician. Otherwise it's just rehashing the same principles you already learned in the lower-level econ classes, just applied to more specific topics. (Everyone should take the lower-level econ courses though.)
My advice to every student who can afford to do this is to plan on getting two degrees, with one of them being an undergraduate degree in a humanities subject, and the second one being a practical degree designed to get you a job. Degree #2 can be either a second undergraduate degree or a professional degree.
So I try to help our physics BS students who decide against grad school figure out how to find jobs. And while most of them eventually turn out okay, there's more than you might think who have a hard time finding something, even with GPAs over 3.0. Places aren't falling over themselves to hire "generally smart" people unless they have specific skills, most often coding experience. Part of this I also attribute to physics students not being sufficiently practical (if they were they'd be engineers!), so they struggle to market themselves, apply to jobs, etc. And despite me pushing them, they often avoid even confronting this reality until after graduation.
Contrast that with the engineers and computer scientists who usually have something lined up *before* they graduate.
One, I wouldn't advise any student to go for "general employability." Choose a field (wisely) and go for it. None of this wishy-washy stuff.
Two, I think as long as you have one course of study that's designed to secure employment, that's enough, and you should use the rest of your course load for other priorities. Having taken a wide range of classes myself, when I look back on them with the wisdom of years, it seems to me that while it was much easier the avoid failing humanities courses (though still hard to actually get A's), the courses where the instruction actually made me a more intelligent person were invariably humanities courses. Science/math courses (a) generally involved me teaching myself the material out of the textbook, (b) didn't make me feel any smarter after the class was over - they enabled me (sometimes at least) to prove to myself how smart I already was, but that's different. And now in the real world, I very frequently run into people who are good at math and (often) capable at their jobs, but can't hold an intelligent conversation to save their lives. I rarely encounter that with people who are genuinely well-read.
As for the social sciences, most of them are the worst of both worlds: getting good grades in them doesn't prove much, and they don't make you a more intelligent person either. You do learn some interesting facts in them, but you could do that just as well by buying the textbook and reading it on your own.
Anyway, it's healthy for students to balance those priorities, which is why I would, again, recommend that every student try to get one humanities degree and one career-oriented degree (which can be a technical degree).
Yep, it's a great combo, particularly if you might be interested in some form of management --- whether that's of people, projects, or companies --- later in your career. That said, I'm biased as an engineer who did a second degree in economics (was working for a university and the collective agreement for staff allowed for free courses, so I figured, why not?).
My kids are grown, in their thirties. What's interesting to me is how their interests have changed over the years. My daughter wasn't very interested as an 11th grader in history, but today is a rare book dealer, and enjoys a life researching the history of old books and forgotten authors. Her reading is almost entirely history, her income modest, but enough for rent and food. My son was a math nerd who majored in math and computer science. His main interests today are playing Chopin nocturnes and reading Chekhov short stories. I wouldn't have predicted this when either of them were 18, but leaving options open and letting them find their way in life is good advice. Buying a used piano when my kids were young was my best investment in my son's happiness, more than any college course he took. He had one year of piano lessons after learning to read music on the oboe in grade school. Math brains can apparently sight read music better than you and me. You never know what will give your children happiness, but rejoice in whatever makes them happy. I doubt any particular college curriculum is the secret to their happiness, but loading them with a life of debt will almost certainly detract from it.
This is one of the best responses. We think we know what is best for our children, but we really don't. It is good to provide guidance and advice, but don't force your views on them - being impressionable them might be easily convinced, but regret later. Or emotionally blackmail them to do what you think they should be going.
To elaborate, my daughter after college followed a boyfriend to Texas A&M where he was getting a graduate degree in physics. After a few months waiting tables at a local restaurant, she landed a job as a cataloguer at the university's rare book library, which led her to meeting a lot of the country's dealers and subsequent jobs with Rob Rulon-Miller in St Paul, MN and Lorne Bair in Winchester, VA, both rare book dealers, before setting off on her own. All serendipitous, and unpredicted by me. If you're ever in Washington, DC visit Capitol Hill Books a short walk from the the Capitol, where you can find her and her husband, Aaron Beckwith, who co-owns the shop. Her rare book business is separate and online from Aaron's shop.
I confess that as a material science guy that I am biased towards it. We need every graduate we can get. But if you were going to combine them with something else I can think of few better subjects than economics. Mostly because that field is inundated with smart people who happen not to understand what anything is made of, where it comes from and why it is used. In consequence economists write a lot of dumb stuff that isn't helpful at all.
Nice Peter. My career is NDT which is material science adjacent. My daughter took a tour of the Micron Materials Science Laboratory at BSU. Wow... the place was amazing. I think economics, especially with a data concentration would be helpful for a lot of fields.
My father was chairman of his economics department at an Ivy League university when the Bank of Sweden announced its Nobel prize in economics. My father's reaction at the family dinner table was 'they won't find anyone to give it to'. He was a smart guy, but dumb about how much people like prizes. He's been dead thirty years but would agree the spread of economics degrees has been a net bad for humanity.
I miss sprawling under a tree reading a book. The next time I expect to have the free time to do so is when my daughter is hopefully doing the same at a university.
Don't sleep on accounting as one of the double majors.
I had a liberal arts undergrad with a journalism minor that went basically nowhere before getting an accounting grad degree. As an auditor, got to see deep inside a crazy variety of businesses and organizations and the many roles possible within them. After only a few years, could've gotten financial leadership role in a non-profit that would have been a much faster and dependable route than some squishy non-profit management program.
Ended up in my final/correct career of data analytics, which I would have never even thought or known I enjoyed without exposure through the accounting/audit job.
The reasons why Student Loan Forgiveness rankles me even more than the pademic.
1. It's greed disguised as social justice. When you look at the main advocates, its mainly 20-30 somethings with a lot of debt... usually with dumb degrees. I see very few engineers advocating for it and a whole lot of "social policy" majors.
2. None of the advocates really care about long term reform. They want the cancellation first, then the reform after (yeah fucking right). This means that our kids in High School get jack shit. It's a one time give away to those who cry the loudest.
3. Once forgiveness happens, future students will assume that it will happen again in the future. Right or wrong, this will encourage them to take bigger loans and make irrational choices... Lets go to USC instead of UCLA (note, I am a USC Football fan, but UCLA is a much better deal).
3a. They will also take more risk at studying oversubscribed (some might say useless) degrees such as (well you know which ones I am talking about)
4. If this happens, kids get loose with money, then the schools will just start raising tuition. Yey capitalism (no seriously, I like Capitalism).
So... what should happen with the reform.
1st. All public colleges should be free for the first two years, or private schools that have similar programs at the same cost level of public schools.
2nd. Student loan debt should become eligible for bankruptcy.
3rd. College programs should be reviewed for effectiveness to be made eligible for loans. Graduation rate/job prospects. Not too strict and it should account for underserved students, but basically, held accountable.
4th. Only after all that has happened, should we consider student loan debt relief... but in a targeted manner. The forgiveness should be directed at those who dropped out of school. Anything else should be income based.
......................................
My alternate proposal is to give $10,000 to all Americans except those who have student loans. Their balances would just be reduced by $10K.
Also... as a well know swing voter. Student loan forgiveness is one of those... I will not vote for any candidate that supports it.
Yes, I have class resentment.
On a separate note: I had my daughter max out her student loans to use for school, then we put her savings into a bank account. If they forgive student loans, she stands to make $7K free and clear. I guess it will be a windfall that we really don't need. Hate the game, but make sure you win.
I also own residential rental properties and am going to buy more.
Lol.
But yea, I’m an engineer who advocates forgiving most student debt. Just not without the systemic reforms to keep this from happening again.
Honestly, I think it’s time for a bit of old-fashioned command economy strictures. “If you have more than X administrative/support/secretarial/organizational staff per teaching professor, your university is not eligible for federal research funds, student loan funding, or federal grants of any kind”
Then ratchet X down each year until actual students start saying they’re getting hurt by lack of support en masse.
I have a senior and junior in high school currently. We've been saving money every month since they were born to help pay for college. If there is any hint of this policy coming down the pike, the first thing we'll do is take out student loans for them. I'm sure I'm not alone.
I don't have as strong feelings about students loan relief as Matt and Rory do. I paid mine off in ten years without starving myself. That said, and based only on what I read online and in the news, universities, both private and public, have been pricing themselves like Gucci for a long time, fed off parental anxiety and easy credit. I'm in favor of the commenter who said tax Harvard, Yale and Princeton unless they increase their enrollment 4x. Their enrollment has barely budged since I entered college in 1970 while the US population has doubled.
On the list of why student loan forgiveness rankles, I mostly agree with points 1 through 3a. Point 4 seems within the control of parents: rip up their credit cards.
On what to do, point 1 seems a tradeoff with those who want free preschool. If we're going to offer 14 years of taxpayer funded school, should it be 3-18 or 5-20. This is too hard a nut for me to crack.
2. is complicated. Student loan debt isn't dischargeable because the 1976 Bankruptcy Act, altogether a good thing, banned it after one doctor declared bankruptcy after having his schooling paid because his debts exceeded his liabilities. One bad actor can have a lot of consequences.
3. Programs 'reviewed for effectiveness'. I dunno, seems pretty slippery slopeish, anti-capitalist and un-American. That said, I'd make the lenders eat it if their borrowers can't pay off their loans, but see point 2. A bankruptcy code letting the sleezy doctor off is a tough pill to swallow, and in changing the law to make sure he didn't get away with it, there was a lot of collateral damage to innocent naïfs who deserve a discharge for being dumb but not evil, but it's tough to write laws distinguishing one from the other.
4. Why would you give money to dropouts over graduates. Everyone will drop out the day before graduation??
The issue, moreso than loans, is the cost of college. I think in order to solve that, we should demand our universities create large administrative committees to study the issue!
Wait, there is something I forgot! How do we know that the affordability committee members are qualified to do their jobs? I propose a new College Affordability Studies major to offer appropriate certification!
The fundamental problem with student debt is that the student loan program has funded the entire higher Ed sector becoming a massive grift. The debtors are victims who deserve forgiveness, but as long a new loans are happening the grift is ongoing. Shutting off the fire hose of cash is by far the more important consideration.
I strongly agree that the debt fueled higher-ed industry -- and it is an industry - is a total racket. Universities don't give a sh*t if students can repay over decades or not, as they get cash over the barrel, and lenders get sweet terms, including non-dischargability in bankruptcy. If big companies were able to effect such a scheme, Elizabeth Warren would be denouncing their greed and holding hearings. And I agree that first step is to turn off this odious firehose of cash going forward. But I am not a proponent of wide-scale loan forgiveness. Changing bankruptcy law to allow for discharging student debt in bankruptcy may suffice. Hope you are well, Dave.
I mean purely from a justice perspective, the Feds are in on the grift and they shouldn't be able to keep taking in revenue off it. There's obviously lots of instances that's not fair to people, but I don't really care, that's way less significant than stopping the bleeding and the bad actors responsible should bare as much of the costs of that as possible.
Now I'm not a zealot about forgiveness. Lots of ways to implement it. Types of means testing. Move up the forgiveness line from 20 years to 5 or something like that. All good, but if we're going to keep bringing in revenue off this it should going directly to people harmed by predatory loans and programs and not back onto the Feds balance sheet.
Higher education and healthcare have in common that their most valuable products will never be accessible to the poor without some mechanism to assist the poor - otherwise the rich will always outbid the poor, which is not an acceptable outcome in a democracy or from the perspective of distributional fairness. The superficially simple solution is for a third party payor to pay on behalf of the poor, but that creates very bad incentives for providers (universities, hospitals, etc), who quickly figure out how to take advantage of the generosity of the third-party payer, and lack incentive to be efficient and cost-effectiveness. Whenever possible, it's best in situations like that to look for structural reforms that force providers to internalize as much of the risk and cost of inefficiency as possible, so injecting third party money into the system has minimal distortion.
Even the winners in the system get robbed by an industry that has the government assuring them they can charge literally whatever tuition rates they want and they'll still get paid no matter what.
This is precisely the source someone else posted so forgive me for copy-pasting my reply:
When you actually dig in beyond the headline, you find an interesting discussion and figure about halfway down that shows that the median break-even point for all degrees is *12 years* past graduation. That, in most cases, is around age 35-36.
Even for many whose lifetime earnings improve considerably, they're so back-loaded that pursuing a degree really does delay the financial ability to buy a home and form stable family structures.
That, more than anything, is what tells me this system simply does not work. It doesn't work if we want children in anything like replacement rate, nor does it work if we want people under age 40 to feel they have enough to lose to turn them off of the various radical movements that want to burn everything to the ground.
I suspect that discussion and the figure that accompanied it would have looked radically different for anyone graduating college before 1990. I suspect they look very different for skilled trades programs today.
As is, though, we've created an environment in which something like half of university graduates are doomed to live a less stable life than they would otherwise have had, until close to age 40.
That's just *not* a success by any metric except the return I can expect on my major-metro rental properties.
Life is trade offs... if I invest money now, it means I cant use it to go to Hawaii next week. I'm not sure why the fact they break even at 35 should bother me... They do get a pay off.
Sure, college is less expensive now than it was in the 80s or 90s... but that's a direct result of supply and demand. More people want to go to college than ever before... and quite simply a large portion of them shouldn't be going to college (4-year). They would be better off in trade school where the payoff is more like 2-3 years.
The real fix is to send less kids to college. Reduce demand.
The fact remains that college graduates do better than non-college graduates throughout their life. There is real inequality. That they don't have it even easier is just not an argument I am going to be sympathetic with.
And if we are going to reform the system... reform the whole damn system. Not just a one time giveaway to a select cohort of students who happen to have graduated and have debt at just the right time in history.
College is cheaper now than in the 80's or 90's? I went to CU Boulder starting in 87 and now my daughter is applying there for next year - the cost is a helluva lot more expensive for the same school after accounting for inflation.
I agree as regards both reform and the effective “sale” of other career paths. And the industrial policy needed to make the latter work.
But once that’s done, the reset button still needs to be pushed.
This was a failed experiment in which every stakeholder except the actual students bears more responsibility, and as such both universities and the damned government should feel most of this pain.
Interestingly, college enrollment has been slowly declining. While the pandemic accelerated the trend, I think it's mainly due to dropping population, which will be a continuing issue for decades to come. (For example, there are 2.3m fewer 0-5 year olds than 20-24 year olds.) So far, I believe the decline has primarily manifested in boutique colleges closing, but it doesn't appear to affect the prices at most, yet.
It’s actually not, two of my properties will break-even on cashflow alone before that, to say nothing of equity.
Anyway, two general points:
1. Breakeven as it relates to assets with inherent value is not even *close* to breakeven on a degree. The comparison is criminally misleading. If I want to upsize my house I can sell one of my rentals. My degree, no.
2. “Low interest rates” is all well and good with regards to my mortgages, but less so when most existing student debt bears 5-8% interest.
The ROI calculations in the article being discussed necessarily do not consider this, but that makes the numbers even worse for the median degree-holder with median debts.
It's not directly touched on here, but a contributing problem is it now seems an unspoken mainstream #online progressive position that the right amount of education is always axiomatically "more".
It's great that our farms are more productive because you can go to Texas A&M or whatever and get a BS in agronomy. In part, that education is so beneficial because Norm Borlaug went and did his PhD on the subject and kept a billion people (and counting) from starving. But if *everyone* went and got a PhD in agronomy, nobody would farm anything and we would all be eating dirt.
Full disclosure: went and got my own PhD, like a dummy
are progressives doing that much to increase educational attainment in this country or is it just an inchoate preference? The University of California has never been less accessible to californians. The cost of Cal State has gone from $500 per year to $7300 (inflation adjusted). https://calbudgetcenter.org/blog/the-cost-of-college-then-and-now/
I feel like a lot of the discussion on free college/debt forgiveness is run by people who went to ivy league and top level state schools so it's just about getting fancy degrees and getting fancy jobs. But would we really run out of workers if we made Cal State something closer to free again and encouraged people to go?
"But if *everyone* went and got a PhD in agronomy, nobody would farm anything and we would all be eating dirt."
Yeah, and I'm sure, back when Fairchild was employing low-wage Navajo women, folks said "if *everyone* went and got a PhD in electrical engineering, nobody would build the circuitboards and we'd have no computers." But now we have computers for everybody because the fabrication plants that are several orders of magnitude more productive and require a PhD in physics to run. There's no *technical* reason we can't have giant automated farms in bubble biospheres now, except that the price of labor isn't high enough yet to make it economical. But that day is coming, and then one'll need a PhD in agronomy to run the farm, and still nobody will starve.
I mean I think it makes sense for Democrats to pursue increasing educational attainment generally given that education has become extremely correlated with partisanship. It seems like that would be a political win-win.
Obviously it would eventually stop working. If we had 100% college enrollment and graduation rates we wouldn’t win elections by 100%. But I think we’re a long way from education stopping making people more Democratic.
Right now education polarization is hurting Democrats because most people never went to college. If we increase the number of college graduates then maybe we can turn things around and make education polarization help Democrats.
Coalitions always reform around the available voters. More college-educated voters would inevitably make both parties more responsive to college-educated voters concerns. Neither party benefits in the long-term because both parties evolve to capture the voters available as their (our) composition evolves
That’s what has happened in the past, and it’s what we would expect to happen in the future if everyone remains committed to small-d-small-r democratic republican governance.
Except that the GOP does seem to have an increasingly prevalent notion that it should just weight the scales until it’s virtually impossible to lose short of a long-term shift in the coalition structure and a massive failure that produces a wave year 30 years down the line.
That’s not a good thing. I think the risks are being overblown by Democratic partisans, but they’re still very real, and words like “always” understate them immensely.
I heard an NPR interview with a guy from Brookings who said it was racist to not forgive student loan debt because of the wealth difference between student debtors by race, even within income bands. This argument was, typical for NPR, not contested or vetted and was taken at face value.
You alluded to specious progressive race arguments for forgiving student debt and then described how wealth was a poor metric for determining need of loan forgiveness, but I was wondering if you could more directly rebut the race based arguments for loan forgiveness if indeed they are flawed.
This is just the new way of promoting something in NPR type spaces. It used to be the income inequality argument (which was a much stronger argument) now it has devolved to the "racial equity" argument which is one of the slipperiest and is used routinely for the worst outcomes in policing/crime or education.
The fact that such crude racialized thinking goes not just unchallenged but actually is accepted sometimes makes me think the Democratic Party and associated ecosystems like Brookings has collectively lost its mind on issues of race, has just completely lost the thread of what kind of society we should be trying to make. The entire Ptolomaic system of racial classifications needs to be thrown out, not just tweaked with yet more, better-intentioned epicycles to correct for problems created by previously epicycles.
I'm generally not a big "personal responsibility" guy because life is hard but at some point people need to live with some of their choices, don't they? I'm all for shutting down scams and deceptive practices and garbage programs that don't do what they say they're going to do. I'd be fine with exploring any options for cutting the price of school going forward. But if you decided to go to school and you decided to take loans, you should probably be accountable to paying the loans back.
I live in Maryland.
Towson University - $15k/year if you live off campus
Loyola University - $53k/year if you live off campus, but few people do that, so $67k
If you're from Maryland and want to be a sociology major, education major, art history major, etc. and you're going to Loyola University (and you aren't from a wealthy family)... you've made a terrible choice. It's bizarre to me to think that the government should step in and fix it.
You touch on this trend, but there really has been an explosion of what you could call bullshit majors in the last few decades, and loosening on the quality controls for a number of others. And there's less honesty up front about how overwhelmed certain majors are. There are 3,000 "Sociologist" jobs according to 2020 data, and over 37,000 new sociology graduates graduated that same year. I know the social scientists broadly can prepare someone for a lot of jobs, but do we really think that sort of ratio is the best outcome?
Most of the "bullshit" majors are just "learn to write, think critically, and communicate" about a specific topic. They're in the exact same category as English, History, Classics, Philosophy and all the other long-standing "bullshit" majors—and to the degree that writing, critical thinking, and communication are important skills, they do their job, even if there's a vanishingly small number of jobs that are specifically for English professors, historians, classicists, and philosophers (or gender studies professors, sociologists, environmental studies etc.).
(I think there's a separate question of "how much are the writing and critical thinking skills actually being taught, and how much are success in these majors just signaling to employers that the students have sufficient work ethic are baseline ability to get a degree while they mature out of being teenagers, but that's been true for forever).
Talking to people who've done hiring decisions for non-technical jobs (i.e. most business positions, consulting etc.), they attribute economic value to humanities degrees, and the outcomes of people with humanities degrees are generally better than people with no degrees. I have my own doubts about how much of this value is in being able to find people who are good at humanities and able to get good grades at good schools, but it's clearly not just leisure pursuits for the smartest of people (in fact I'd argue the smartest usually do fine, it's the marginal english student who probably would benefit more from trade specific training and is screwed over by their college debt).
I think we shouldn't be trying to central plan this though. Our host has a philosophy degree and seems have done quite well (not to mention all the lawyers). Just tie the loan/grant/whatever amounts per major to the job prospects and let the market decide.
Philosophy students also start out with the highest SAT scores. The question is, does Philosophy do any better than other degrees? I doubt it does worse. Philosophy at a decent school is probably a worthwhile endeavor...
I don't think it's that the programs have gotten worse, it's that too many people and the wrong people are going to college. Most jobs don't involve a whole lot of "knowledge work" and shouldn't require a college degree. I think that what happens as more and more people get degrees is mostly that people are doing the same shit, but with fancier accreditations.
My wife used to teach English to college freshmen who were underprepared for college, and from the stories she tells, the marginal college student is someone who has already been failed many times over by the education system. What is the point of trying to push someone who is barely literate through a B.A. program? I'm not trying to crap on these people; they have genuine contributions to make to society, and it's a shame that they're forced to sit through four years of lectures first.
I think we can have a lengthy philosophical debate over whether it's worthwhile for so many young people to get relatively undefined majors. but really the biggest bullshit mongers in higher education thoroughly cloak themselves in the language of career prospects. This ranges from the ridiculous Columbia journalism major Matt links to down to for profit schools that charge $10k in tuition to train you for jobs like Certified Nursing Assistant where you might make likje $22k.
When I got hired as a certified nursing assistant, back in high school, the nursing home hired you first, then not only paid for my CNS training at the local tech school, but even gave me a paycheck to attend. I couldn't believe how lucky I was, and thought I'd really arrived, a huge step up from my previous job as a cook at KFC!
There are definitely bullshit majors but I don't think this is a good example. Sociology is a field with pretty wide application and people with that degree are going to do fine on the job market. Sociologists are mostly academics and that ratio isn't really relevant.
A college degree is already something that's going to broadly help you on the job market. I'm suspicious whenever someone falls back to arguing that the major has a wide application as a justification for why you'd pick something up with only a narrow field of credentials required jobs.
That ratio is of such a vast disproportion your fallback is essentially that we have an economy in which we need unspecialized yet broadly educated labor, which I don't think is really the situation we face.
Yeah if you look at college (regardless of your major) as a "this will get me a job" thing rather than a "this will get me a job saving the world" thing your life becomes much better.
My brother went to welding school with low costs and doesn’t like the idea to pay off peoples student loan debts. I paid my off a few years ago…I don’t like it either. Lots off people are not going to like it.
Loans based on the financial merit (ability to pay back based on earning potential of degree) makes sense.
The government should initiate a rating system for degrees. A similar lines of thinking to putting calories on food. They could identify key economic data about the degree on is about to go into debt to obtain and force universities to provide the information with the advertising for the degree. If we do it for a Pepsi why not for a $100k degree. These decisions are key to financial health. Clearly young people need protection from predatory universities (i.e. all of them).
Right, Matt discusses how the Obama admin tried to do this (in the 2 paragraphs beginning "The Obama administration tried to curtail some of the worst abuses...")
A very compelling argument that will find no favour with the college educated white Dems that are quickly becoming the largest constituency for the party. There are no more New Deal Democrats. Now this is the program:
Forgive our student loans.
More federal grants to create well paid make-work NGO jobs for professionals (“do tanks” not “think tanks”).
Give us more immigrant maids and nannies (and amnesties so that we're not breaking the law)
Tax the rich to pay for day care so our immigrant nanny can dump her kids in daycare while personally taking care of our little prince and princess at home so Dad can work at the law firm and Mom at the NGO (or Vice versa)
Mass transit to make it easier for our badly paid immigrant nanny to commute to our home (we take Uber or Lyft ourselves)
Densify urban areas so we can afford a downtown apartment.
SALT tax exemption forever so red states will subsidize our expensive blue city lifestyle
Cut spending for public police while our condo association hires private security
Dumb down the public schools, to make those kids less competitive with ours, who go to private schools
Get rid of the SAT so smart Asian kids won’t compete with our dumb white legacy kids when applying for college
Ration Covid medicine by race, so working class whites we despise will die first
Raise energy prices for the working class and industry, while giving us a tax subsidy for our pricey Tesla or Prius
Encourage Twitter, Google and social media to ban any viewpoints we disagree with
Gee, I wonder why the Democrats aren't doing too well in the polls these days...
The idea that dense public transit cities are extravagant uses of government money while freeway sprawl is just natural and righteous and cheap, cannot die fast enough. It is ass backwards. You’re damn right, I’m sick of subsiding sprawl America’s insane lifestyle.
The point is less that it is an extravagant use of gov't money (it isn't), but that many of the people who use it would rather live in those nice suburban areas with a bit of space. Just look at the places that became super spreading venues for Covid.
Well, the issue is that those preferences are not really being satisfied. Additionally, there are public health considerations to consider in light of Covid. In the COVID-19 pandemic, the much-maligned dispersed urban pattern proved to be an asset. Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs have had a considerable number of cases, but overall this highly diverse, globally engaged region managed to keep rates of infection well below that of dense, transit-dependent New York City. That's an aside. But to your broader point, the underlying consideration is one of equity and fairness. As Matty points out, student debt relief is a regressive form of debt relief. I'd rather move toward socialising the costs of healthcare by moving toward a singlepayer or All-payer type of system. You'd capture far more beneficiaries that way and it would be far less regressive.
It’s pretty clearly not the case that sprawl is justified by public health. Even if we grant that low density places fared marginally better under COVID (dubious), the automobile is a far more prolific killer, both directly and via pollution.
I'm not sure the data bear that out (am at work now so can't look for sources). I was in a very un-dense area in the Midwest starting a few months after the pandemic started - temporary move from NYC - and caseloads were horrible. A lot of refusals to comply with any COVID-related measures, including vaccines.
In NYC, I live in Manhattan and work in a public building there. I was the last one to start remote work (came into the office until I wasn't allowed to anymore). Haven't been sick a day during the whole thing.
"Mass transit to make it easier for our badly paid immigrant nanny to commute to our home (we take Uber or Lyft ourselves)"
I suggest you take a gander at the going rate for nannies in major metro areas, and also the Federal rules about overtime. It's going to take A LOT of immigration for them to be badly paid if everything is above board.
I'm an equal opportunity cynic. Same exercise for the small business owners who dominate the GOP—the big guys in small towns:
Import cheap immigrants as workers in your low wage small business (not so much as nannies and maids)
Crush labor unions
Minimize regulations in general
Support regulations that protect certain small businesses (ban on direct sale of contact lenses and glasses, instead of through opticians, etc)
Maximize SBA loans and grants
Gut IRS capacity for enforcing tax laws (thereby focusing the IRS attention on middle class employees who generally fill out clean, easy to understand returns and get arbitrarily audited)
Favor offshoring and Chinese imports if they are cheap inputs in your small business (rebar in construction etc)
Stepped-up exemptions for multi million (not billion) dollar inheritances for their kids
Write-offs for boats, weekend houses, fancy cars as business expenses
Meanwhile, the two topics without any constituency in either party:
US manufacturing
The private sector working class (the unionized public sector is a cash cow and voting bank for the Democrats, so they are left alone).
Why forgive loans for public service instead of raising wages for that public service? The social benefit of this work doesn't depend on how costly the degree program was, or how much of it someone financed with debt.
Easier said than done, since many or most(?) of the jobs that qualify as public service are at private sector non-profits. there are a million and one funding streams from fed and state levels that feed into paying these salaries and changing them all at once would be infeasible
If we want to subsidize those private sector non-profits we could do so with a grant. As long as the work's getting done, why does it matter that it's specifically done by someone with high levels of student debt?
The problem with any of this is that it is not a solution for the overall issue.
If the issue is the high cost of education, then deal with that. Simply forgiving student debt does nothing for that and probably increases costs because it removes a moral hazard if people think this is the new norm.
My own selfish take is what about me? My kids are in college now. Do they get this? Do I get this?
Don't think there aren't a lot of people thinking this.
And yes Baby Boomers got more subsidized colleges at much lower prices for them, but as always the "grey greed" is a big issue and will make this also super unpopular.
If we wanted to conjure in a lab an issue that would reunite libertarians, earnest social conservatives, and opportunistic rightwing populists, opposition to student debt relief (aka a bailout to the coddled, leftist higher education establishment) would be it.
“Some people might say we shouldn’t subsidize doctors’ education because they earn high salaries. Others might say we should subsidize doctors’ education but in exchange reduce their compensation. Still others might say we should subsidize the education of even more doctors and let competition drive down the price.”
And some pop-eyed radicals will note that as long as the AMA controls and limits the number of residency slots available, subsidizing more medical students is actually _guaranteed_ to produce nothing but more people with huge amounts of med school debt and an MD that they can’t actually use because they can’t get certified.
[edit: this was posted before coffee and in fact the AMA supports lifting the residency cap. The fault here is with the AAMC, Medicare and an enormous amount of bad legislation]
I am in tremendous agreement with the proposition that we need more residency spots and doctors in the US, but the AMA really has nothing to do with residency slot supply. For that matter, it also does not control medical school enrollment.
Derp, you are of course correct; posting too quickly and with too little coffee. We regret the slander against the AMA and instead suggest that people direct their ire against the AAMC, Medicare, and several decades of bad legislation. :)
While I agree on the economics and the dire need for deeper reform, my biggest concern is actually the optics. 'The Dems are giving out a lot of free money, and it's only for people who went to college' seems tailor-made to build resentment. It's not just that it's regressive, it's that it's regressive in a way that's incredibly obvious to a normal person.
This is a great point. Democrats are already bleeding non-college educated voters of all races and this seems like it would only accelerate that.
The galactic horribleness of the current GOP is letting Democratic politicians and strategists get fat and lazy. Faced with the 2020s Democratic party, how many voters who refuse to hold their nose and vote for Donald Trump would do so for 2012 Mitt Romney?
Donald Trump was a better candidate than Mitt Romney so I don’t think that example really works.
Was he? Romney was running against Obama who was a very talented politician. Trump ran against Clinton who was one of the most unpopular politicians in the modern history and barely squeaked out a victory. If Romney runs against Clinton, I think he has just as much a chance of winning as Trump. Definitely would be a different coalition though.
Agree that Dems are fat and lazy, but would argue that that's been the case for a loooong time!
As someone who has 4 degrees (not bragging, just giving bonafides), made poor choices and good choices along the path, has advised and taught for over 29 years , and is very much part of the higher ed insider establishment, here is the simple advice I gave to my son who is looking at colleges:
1. If you’re in the top 10-15 percent of your undergrad college’s gpa when you graduate, the difference between public and private in terms of job or grad school opportunities is zip.
2. Colleges have made it much easier these days to get a double major in 4 years, so choose a major you love and a major that gets you a job. If those are the same major, even better.
3. If a department can’t tell you on its webpages within 2 clicks what jobs its majors get and if its first example in its placement page is “our majors go to grad school” that’s a warning sign.
4. You really only know what your parents do and don’t understand your career opportunities at 18 so over the next 4 years, intern, intern, intern. Don’t know in what? The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook is a great way to learn what an occupation actually does.
5. This is the only time in your life that society will let you “find yourself” so take a variety of courses, read newspapers, read books, join clubs and, yes, take jobs and learn there as well. Everything you do in the next 4 years is basic training… you just don’t know what it’s for yet.
6. Never underestimate the blessedness of sitting alone under an oak tree reading a book.
Your double major point is 100% spot on.
Great advice John.... my daughter is an 11th grader considering schools and majors. Her two interests right now are economics and material science. I say combine them. Give her options.
economics combined with some sort of engineering degree like materials science is a good combo. Both emphasize mathematical systems and the person who sees how both systems work does well in my experience. If she goes on to grad school in econ, having the engineering background will serve her well and if she goes down the engineering route, econ is one of those majors that will help her think more broadly and be a well-rounded person. I wish her the best of luck!
I would disagree partially in that based on my experience, I don't think upper-level econ is really that valuable unless you plan to become a professional economist or statistician. Otherwise it's just rehashing the same principles you already learned in the lower-level econ classes, just applied to more specific topics. (Everyone should take the lower-level econ courses though.)
My advice to every student who can afford to do this is to plan on getting two degrees, with one of them being an undergraduate degree in a humanities subject, and the second one being a practical degree designed to get you a job. Degree #2 can be either a second undergraduate degree or a professional degree.
So I try to help our physics BS students who decide against grad school figure out how to find jobs. And while most of them eventually turn out okay, there's more than you might think who have a hard time finding something, even with GPAs over 3.0. Places aren't falling over themselves to hire "generally smart" people unless they have specific skills, most often coding experience. Part of this I also attribute to physics students not being sufficiently practical (if they were they'd be engineers!), so they struggle to market themselves, apply to jobs, etc. And despite me pushing them, they often avoid even confronting this reality until after graduation.
Contrast that with the engineers and computer scientists who usually have something lined up *before* they graduate.
One, I wouldn't advise any student to go for "general employability." Choose a field (wisely) and go for it. None of this wishy-washy stuff.
Two, I think as long as you have one course of study that's designed to secure employment, that's enough, and you should use the rest of your course load for other priorities. Having taken a wide range of classes myself, when I look back on them with the wisdom of years, it seems to me that while it was much easier the avoid failing humanities courses (though still hard to actually get A's), the courses where the instruction actually made me a more intelligent person were invariably humanities courses. Science/math courses (a) generally involved me teaching myself the material out of the textbook, (b) didn't make me feel any smarter after the class was over - they enabled me (sometimes at least) to prove to myself how smart I already was, but that's different. And now in the real world, I very frequently run into people who are good at math and (often) capable at their jobs, but can't hold an intelligent conversation to save their lives. I rarely encounter that with people who are genuinely well-read.
As for the social sciences, most of them are the worst of both worlds: getting good grades in them doesn't prove much, and they don't make you a more intelligent person either. You do learn some interesting facts in them, but you could do that just as well by buying the textbook and reading it on your own.
Anyway, it's healthy for students to balance those priorities, which is why I would, again, recommend that every student try to get one humanities degree and one career-oriented degree (which can be a technical degree).
Isn’t it true anyone with a computer science degree OR an engineering degree is VERY employable in America?
Yep, it's a great combo, particularly if you might be interested in some form of management --- whether that's of people, projects, or companies --- later in your career. That said, I'm biased as an engineer who did a second degree in economics (was working for a university and the collective agreement for staff allowed for free courses, so I figured, why not?).
My kids are grown, in their thirties. What's interesting to me is how their interests have changed over the years. My daughter wasn't very interested as an 11th grader in history, but today is a rare book dealer, and enjoys a life researching the history of old books and forgotten authors. Her reading is almost entirely history, her income modest, but enough for rent and food. My son was a math nerd who majored in math and computer science. His main interests today are playing Chopin nocturnes and reading Chekhov short stories. I wouldn't have predicted this when either of them were 18, but leaving options open and letting them find their way in life is good advice. Buying a used piano when my kids were young was my best investment in my son's happiness, more than any college course he took. He had one year of piano lessons after learning to read music on the oboe in grade school. Math brains can apparently sight read music better than you and me. You never know what will give your children happiness, but rejoice in whatever makes them happy. I doubt any particular college curriculum is the secret to their happiness, but loading them with a life of debt will almost certainly detract from it.
This is one of the best responses. We think we know what is best for our children, but we really don't. It is good to provide guidance and advice, but don't force your views on them - being impressionable them might be easily convinced, but regret later. Or emotionally blackmail them to do what you think they should be going.
To elaborate, my daughter after college followed a boyfriend to Texas A&M where he was getting a graduate degree in physics. After a few months waiting tables at a local restaurant, she landed a job as a cataloguer at the university's rare book library, which led her to meeting a lot of the country's dealers and subsequent jobs with Rob Rulon-Miller in St Paul, MN and Lorne Bair in Winchester, VA, both rare book dealers, before setting off on her own. All serendipitous, and unpredicted by me. If you're ever in Washington, DC visit Capitol Hill Books a short walk from the the Capitol, where you can find her and her husband, Aaron Beckwith, who co-owns the shop. Her rare book business is separate and online from Aaron's shop.
I confess that as a material science guy that I am biased towards it. We need every graduate we can get. But if you were going to combine them with something else I can think of few better subjects than economics. Mostly because that field is inundated with smart people who happen not to understand what anything is made of, where it comes from and why it is used. In consequence economists write a lot of dumb stuff that isn't helpful at all.
Nice Peter. My career is NDT which is material science adjacent. My daughter took a tour of the Micron Materials Science Laboratory at BSU. Wow... the place was amazing. I think economics, especially with a data concentration would be helpful for a lot of fields.
My father was chairman of his economics department at an Ivy League university when the Bank of Sweden announced its Nobel prize in economics. My father's reaction at the family dinner table was 'they won't find anyone to give it to'. He was a smart guy, but dumb about how much people like prizes. He's been dead thirty years but would agree the spread of economics degrees has been a net bad for humanity.
Ha. That’s sort of funny. Great story.
"Everything you do in the next 4 years is basic training… you just don’t know what it’s for yet. "
That should be a mantra recited repeatedly to every student during their first semester.
I miss sprawling under a tree reading a book. The next time I expect to have the free time to do so is when my daughter is hopefully doing the same at a university.
Don't sleep on accounting as one of the double majors.
I had a liberal arts undergrad with a journalism minor that went basically nowhere before getting an accounting grad degree. As an auditor, got to see deep inside a crazy variety of businesses and organizations and the many roles possible within them. After only a few years, could've gotten financial leadership role in a non-profit that would have been a much faster and dependable route than some squishy non-profit management program.
Ended up in my final/correct career of data analytics, which I would have never even thought or known I enjoyed without exposure through the accounting/audit job.
Or Finance as a compromise
The reasons why Student Loan Forgiveness rankles me even more than the pademic.
1. It's greed disguised as social justice. When you look at the main advocates, its mainly 20-30 somethings with a lot of debt... usually with dumb degrees. I see very few engineers advocating for it and a whole lot of "social policy" majors.
2. None of the advocates really care about long term reform. They want the cancellation first, then the reform after (yeah fucking right). This means that our kids in High School get jack shit. It's a one time give away to those who cry the loudest.
3. Once forgiveness happens, future students will assume that it will happen again in the future. Right or wrong, this will encourage them to take bigger loans and make irrational choices... Lets go to USC instead of UCLA (note, I am a USC Football fan, but UCLA is a much better deal).
3a. They will also take more risk at studying oversubscribed (some might say useless) degrees such as (well you know which ones I am talking about)
4. If this happens, kids get loose with money, then the schools will just start raising tuition. Yey capitalism (no seriously, I like Capitalism).
So... what should happen with the reform.
1st. All public colleges should be free for the first two years, or private schools that have similar programs at the same cost level of public schools.
2nd. Student loan debt should become eligible for bankruptcy.
3rd. College programs should be reviewed for effectiveness to be made eligible for loans. Graduation rate/job prospects. Not too strict and it should account for underserved students, but basically, held accountable.
4th. Only after all that has happened, should we consider student loan debt relief... but in a targeted manner. The forgiveness should be directed at those who dropped out of school. Anything else should be income based.
......................................
My alternate proposal is to give $10,000 to all Americans except those who have student loans. Their balances would just be reduced by $10K.
Also... as a well know swing voter. Student loan forgiveness is one of those... I will not vote for any candidate that supports it.
Yes, I have class resentment.
On a separate note: I had my daughter max out her student loans to use for school, then we put her savings into a bank account. If they forgive student loans, she stands to make $7K free and clear. I guess it will be a windfall that we really don't need. Hate the game, but make sure you win.
“Hate the game, but make sure you win.”
I advocate for dense housing in Philly.
I also own residential rental properties and am going to buy more.
Lol.
But yea, I’m an engineer who advocates forgiving most student debt. Just not without the systemic reforms to keep this from happening again.
Honestly, I think it’s time for a bit of old-fashioned command economy strictures. “If you have more than X administrative/support/secretarial/organizational staff per teaching professor, your university is not eligible for federal research funds, student loan funding, or federal grants of any kind”
Then ratchet X down each year until actual students start saying they’re getting hurt by lack of support en masse.
Yeah, those are all my thoughts as well.
I have a senior and junior in high school currently. We've been saving money every month since they were born to help pay for college. If there is any hint of this policy coming down the pike, the first thing we'll do is take out student loans for them. I'm sure I'm not alone.
I don't have as strong feelings about students loan relief as Matt and Rory do. I paid mine off in ten years without starving myself. That said, and based only on what I read online and in the news, universities, both private and public, have been pricing themselves like Gucci for a long time, fed off parental anxiety and easy credit. I'm in favor of the commenter who said tax Harvard, Yale and Princeton unless they increase their enrollment 4x. Their enrollment has barely budged since I entered college in 1970 while the US population has doubled.
On the list of why student loan forgiveness rankles, I mostly agree with points 1 through 3a. Point 4 seems within the control of parents: rip up their credit cards.
On what to do, point 1 seems a tradeoff with those who want free preschool. If we're going to offer 14 years of taxpayer funded school, should it be 3-18 or 5-20. This is too hard a nut for me to crack.
2. is complicated. Student loan debt isn't dischargeable because the 1976 Bankruptcy Act, altogether a good thing, banned it after one doctor declared bankruptcy after having his schooling paid because his debts exceeded his liabilities. One bad actor can have a lot of consequences.
3. Programs 'reviewed for effectiveness'. I dunno, seems pretty slippery slopeish, anti-capitalist and un-American. That said, I'd make the lenders eat it if their borrowers can't pay off their loans, but see point 2. A bankruptcy code letting the sleezy doctor off is a tough pill to swallow, and in changing the law to make sure he didn't get away with it, there was a lot of collateral damage to innocent naïfs who deserve a discharge for being dumb but not evil, but it's tough to write laws distinguishing one from the other.
4. Why would you give money to dropouts over graduates. Everyone will drop out the day before graduation??
The issue, moreso than loans, is the cost of college. I think in order to solve that, we should demand our universities create large administrative committees to study the issue!
Yeah, but will these committees look like America? We need additional committees that study the diversity of the committees that study affordability!
Wait, there is something I forgot! How do we know that the affordability committee members are qualified to do their jobs? I propose a new College Affordability Studies major to offer appropriate certification!
The fundamental problem with student debt is that the student loan program has funded the entire higher Ed sector becoming a massive grift. The debtors are victims who deserve forgiveness, but as long a new loans are happening the grift is ongoing. Shutting off the fire hose of cash is by far the more important consideration.
I strongly agree that the debt fueled higher-ed industry -- and it is an industry - is a total racket. Universities don't give a sh*t if students can repay over decades or not, as they get cash over the barrel, and lenders get sweet terms, including non-dischargability in bankruptcy. If big companies were able to effect such a scheme, Elizabeth Warren would be denouncing their greed and holding hearings. And I agree that first step is to turn off this odious firehose of cash going forward. But I am not a proponent of wide-scale loan forgiveness. Changing bankruptcy law to allow for discharging student debt in bankruptcy may suffice. Hope you are well, Dave.
I mean purely from a justice perspective, the Feds are in on the grift and they shouldn't be able to keep taking in revenue off it. There's obviously lots of instances that's not fair to people, but I don't really care, that's way less significant than stopping the bleeding and the bad actors responsible should bare as much of the costs of that as possible.
Now I'm not a zealot about forgiveness. Lots of ways to implement it. Types of means testing. Move up the forgiveness line from 20 years to 5 or something like that. All good, but if we're going to keep bringing in revenue off this it should going directly to people harmed by predatory loans and programs and not back onto the Feds balance sheet.
All good points/proposals! Yes, these are predatory loans and should be described as such. It really is shameful.
Higher education and healthcare have in common that their most valuable products will never be accessible to the poor without some mechanism to assist the poor - otherwise the rich will always outbid the poor, which is not an acceptable outcome in a democracy or from the perspective of distributional fairness. The superficially simple solution is for a third party payor to pay on behalf of the poor, but that creates very bad incentives for providers (universities, hospitals, etc), who quickly figure out how to take advantage of the generosity of the third-party payer, and lack incentive to be efficient and cost-effectiveness. Whenever possible, it's best in situations like that to look for structural reforms that force providers to internalize as much of the risk and cost of inefficiency as possible, so injecting third party money into the system has minimal distortion.
How are the debtors victims when by and large they end up better off than the kids who didn't fall for the grift?
Even the winners in the system get robbed by an industry that has the government assuring them they can charge literally whatever tuition rates they want and they'll still get paid no matter what.
Some citations will be needed here. Many of them (us, really. I took on a bit of debt) do indeed go on to do fine.
But given some of the other data being discussed in other conversations, I don’t think “by and large” is at all fair.
https://freopp.org/is-college-worth-it-a-comprehensive-return-on-investment-analysis-1b2ad17f84c8#:~:text=Weighted%20by%20student%20counts%2C%20the,the%20median%20conceals%20substantial%20variation.
This is precisely the source someone else posted so forgive me for copy-pasting my reply:
When you actually dig in beyond the headline, you find an interesting discussion and figure about halfway down that shows that the median break-even point for all degrees is *12 years* past graduation. That, in most cases, is around age 35-36.
Even for many whose lifetime earnings improve considerably, they're so back-loaded that pursuing a degree really does delay the financial ability to buy a home and form stable family structures.
That, more than anything, is what tells me this system simply does not work. It doesn't work if we want children in anything like replacement rate, nor does it work if we want people under age 40 to feel they have enough to lose to turn them off of the various radical movements that want to burn everything to the ground.
I suspect that discussion and the figure that accompanied it would have looked radically different for anyone graduating college before 1990. I suspect they look very different for skilled trades programs today.
As is, though, we've created an environment in which something like half of university graduates are doomed to live a less stable life than they would otherwise have had, until close to age 40.
That's just *not* a success by any metric except the return I can expect on my major-metro rental properties.
Life is trade offs... if I invest money now, it means I cant use it to go to Hawaii next week. I'm not sure why the fact they break even at 35 should bother me... They do get a pay off.
Sure, college is less expensive now than it was in the 80s or 90s... but that's a direct result of supply and demand. More people want to go to college than ever before... and quite simply a large portion of them shouldn't be going to college (4-year). They would be better off in trade school where the payoff is more like 2-3 years.
The real fix is to send less kids to college. Reduce demand.
The fact remains that college graduates do better than non-college graduates throughout their life. There is real inequality. That they don't have it even easier is just not an argument I am going to be sympathetic with.
And if we are going to reform the system... reform the whole damn system. Not just a one time giveaway to a select cohort of students who happen to have graduated and have debt at just the right time in history.
College is cheaper now than in the 80's or 90's? I went to CU Boulder starting in 87 and now my daughter is applying there for next year - the cost is a helluva lot more expensive for the same school after accounting for inflation.
I agree as regards both reform and the effective “sale” of other career paths. And the industrial policy needed to make the latter work.
But once that’s done, the reset button still needs to be pushed.
This was a failed experiment in which every stakeholder except the actual students bears more responsibility, and as such both universities and the damned government should feel most of this pain.
Interestingly, college enrollment has been slowly declining. While the pandemic accelerated the trend, I think it's mainly due to dropping population, which will be a continuing issue for decades to come. (For example, there are 2.3m fewer 0-5 year olds than 20-24 year olds.) So far, I believe the decline has primarily manifested in boutique colleges closing, but it doesn't appear to affect the prices at most, yet.
It’s actually not, two of my properties will break-even on cashflow alone before that, to say nothing of equity.
Anyway, two general points:
1. Breakeven as it relates to assets with inherent value is not even *close* to breakeven on a degree. The comparison is criminally misleading. If I want to upsize my house I can sell one of my rentals. My degree, no.
2. “Low interest rates” is all well and good with regards to my mortgages, but less so when most existing student debt bears 5-8% interest.
The ROI calculations in the article being discussed necessarily do not consider this, but that makes the numbers even worse for the median degree-holder with median debts.
It's not directly touched on here, but a contributing problem is it now seems an unspoken mainstream #online progressive position that the right amount of education is always axiomatically "more".
It's great that our farms are more productive because you can go to Texas A&M or whatever and get a BS in agronomy. In part, that education is so beneficial because Norm Borlaug went and did his PhD on the subject and kept a billion people (and counting) from starving. But if *everyone* went and got a PhD in agronomy, nobody would farm anything and we would all be eating dirt.
Full disclosure: went and got my own PhD, like a dummy
are progressives doing that much to increase educational attainment in this country or is it just an inchoate preference? The University of California has never been less accessible to californians. The cost of Cal State has gone from $500 per year to $7300 (inflation adjusted). https://calbudgetcenter.org/blog/the-cost-of-college-then-and-now/
I feel like a lot of the discussion on free college/debt forgiveness is run by people who went to ivy league and top level state schools so it's just about getting fancy degrees and getting fancy jobs. But would we really run out of workers if we made Cal State something closer to free again and encouraged people to go?
"But if *everyone* went and got a PhD in agronomy, nobody would farm anything and we would all be eating dirt."
Yeah, and I'm sure, back when Fairchild was employing low-wage Navajo women, folks said "if *everyone* went and got a PhD in electrical engineering, nobody would build the circuitboards and we'd have no computers." But now we have computers for everybody because the fabrication plants that are several orders of magnitude more productive and require a PhD in physics to run. There's no *technical* reason we can't have giant automated farms in bubble biospheres now, except that the price of labor isn't high enough yet to make it economical. But that day is coming, and then one'll need a PhD in agronomy to run the farm, and still nobody will starve.
I mean I think it makes sense for Democrats to pursue increasing educational attainment generally given that education has become extremely correlated with partisanship. It seems like that would be a political win-win.
Obviously it would eventually stop working. If we had 100% college enrollment and graduation rates we wouldn’t win elections by 100%. But I think we’re a long way from education stopping making people more Democratic.
Right now education polarization is hurting Democrats because most people never went to college. If we increase the number of college graduates then maybe we can turn things around and make education polarization help Democrats.
Coalitions always reform around the available voters. More college-educated voters would inevitably make both parties more responsive to college-educated voters concerns. Neither party benefits in the long-term because both parties evolve to capture the voters available as their (our) composition evolves
The “always” in this sentence worries me.
That’s what has happened in the past, and it’s what we would expect to happen in the future if everyone remains committed to small-d-small-r democratic republican governance.
Except that the GOP does seem to have an increasingly prevalent notion that it should just weight the scales until it’s virtually impossible to lose short of a long-term shift in the coalition structure and a massive failure that produces a wave year 30 years down the line.
That’s not a good thing. I think the risks are being overblown by Democratic partisans, but they’re still very real, and words like “always” understate them immensely.
Same!
I heard an NPR interview with a guy from Brookings who said it was racist to not forgive student loan debt because of the wealth difference between student debtors by race, even within income bands. This argument was, typical for NPR, not contested or vetted and was taken at face value.
You alluded to specious progressive race arguments for forgiving student debt and then described how wealth was a poor metric for determining need of loan forgiveness, but I was wondering if you could more directly rebut the race based arguments for loan forgiveness if indeed they are flawed.
This is just the new way of promoting something in NPR type spaces. It used to be the income inequality argument (which was a much stronger argument) now it has devolved to the "racial equity" argument which is one of the slipperiest and is used routinely for the worst outcomes in policing/crime or education.
The fact that such crude racialized thinking goes not just unchallenged but actually is accepted sometimes makes me think the Democratic Party and associated ecosystems like Brookings has collectively lost its mind on issues of race, has just completely lost the thread of what kind of society we should be trying to make. The entire Ptolomaic system of racial classifications needs to be thrown out, not just tweaked with yet more, better-intentioned epicycles to correct for problems created by previously epicycles.
I'm generally not a big "personal responsibility" guy because life is hard but at some point people need to live with some of their choices, don't they? I'm all for shutting down scams and deceptive practices and garbage programs that don't do what they say they're going to do. I'd be fine with exploring any options for cutting the price of school going forward. But if you decided to go to school and you decided to take loans, you should probably be accountable to paying the loans back.
I live in Maryland.
Towson University - $15k/year if you live off campus
Loyola University - $53k/year if you live off campus, but few people do that, so $67k
If you're from Maryland and want to be a sociology major, education major, art history major, etc. and you're going to Loyola University (and you aren't from a wealthy family)... you've made a terrible choice. It's bizarre to me to think that the government should step in and fix it.
You touch on this trend, but there really has been an explosion of what you could call bullshit majors in the last few decades, and loosening on the quality controls for a number of others. And there's less honesty up front about how overwhelmed certain majors are. There are 3,000 "Sociologist" jobs according to 2020 data, and over 37,000 new sociology graduates graduated that same year. I know the social scientists broadly can prepare someone for a lot of jobs, but do we really think that sort of ratio is the best outcome?
Most of the "bullshit" majors are just "learn to write, think critically, and communicate" about a specific topic. They're in the exact same category as English, History, Classics, Philosophy and all the other long-standing "bullshit" majors—and to the degree that writing, critical thinking, and communication are important skills, they do their job, even if there's a vanishingly small number of jobs that are specifically for English professors, historians, classicists, and philosophers (or gender studies professors, sociologists, environmental studies etc.).
(I think there's a separate question of "how much are the writing and critical thinking skills actually being taught, and how much are success in these majors just signaling to employers that the students have sufficient work ethic are baseline ability to get a degree while they mature out of being teenagers, but that's been true for forever).
Note that sociology typically involves significantly more quantitative work than eg history or English.
Indeed, all those majors *are* bullshit. Why should the new ones be any different?
To put it frankly, why should the rest of us fund the leisure pursuits of the smartest among us?
Talking to people who've done hiring decisions for non-technical jobs (i.e. most business positions, consulting etc.), they attribute economic value to humanities degrees, and the outcomes of people with humanities degrees are generally better than people with no degrees. I have my own doubts about how much of this value is in being able to find people who are good at humanities and able to get good grades at good schools, but it's clearly not just leisure pursuits for the smartest of people (in fact I'd argue the smartest usually do fine, it's the marginal english student who probably would benefit more from trade specific training and is screwed over by their college debt).
I like this sentiment. If you want to learn shit for the sake of learning shit... go to the library.
I think we shouldn't be trying to central plan this though. Our host has a philosophy degree and seems have done quite well (not to mention all the lawyers). Just tie the loan/grant/whatever amounts per major to the job prospects and let the market decide.
Philosophy is a very difficult major and has pretty good career outcomes, in part because philosophy students get very high LSAT scores
Philosophy students also start out with the highest SAT scores. The question is, does Philosophy do any better than other degrees? I doubt it does worse. Philosophy at a decent school is probably a worthwhile endeavor...
I don't think it's that the programs have gotten worse, it's that too many people and the wrong people are going to college. Most jobs don't involve a whole lot of "knowledge work" and shouldn't require a college degree. I think that what happens as more and more people get degrees is mostly that people are doing the same shit, but with fancier accreditations.
My wife used to teach English to college freshmen who were underprepared for college, and from the stories she tells, the marginal college student is someone who has already been failed many times over by the education system. What is the point of trying to push someone who is barely literate through a B.A. program? I'm not trying to crap on these people; they have genuine contributions to make to society, and it's a shame that they're forced to sit through four years of lectures first.
Here is a great article from the Atlantic illustrating that: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower/306810/
For a really thought-provoking (if somewhat dense) deep dive into this topic, check out The Mismanagement of Talent: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199269532.001.0001/acprof-9780199269532
I think we can have a lengthy philosophical debate over whether it's worthwhile for so many young people to get relatively undefined majors. but really the biggest bullshit mongers in higher education thoroughly cloak themselves in the language of career prospects. This ranges from the ridiculous Columbia journalism major Matt links to down to for profit schools that charge $10k in tuition to train you for jobs like Certified Nursing Assistant where you might make likje $22k.
When I got hired as a certified nursing assistant, back in high school, the nursing home hired you first, then not only paid for my CNS training at the local tech school, but even gave me a paycheck to attend. I couldn't believe how lucky I was, and thought I'd really arrived, a huge step up from my previous job as a cook at KFC!
Every L stop in Chicago seems to have ads for absurd online Northwestern MSs that are inevitably extremely career focusee
There are definitely bullshit majors but I don't think this is a good example. Sociology is a field with pretty wide application and people with that degree are going to do fine on the job market. Sociologists are mostly academics and that ratio isn't really relevant.
How many of those people end up working in the Ed Administrative/HR/DEI departments that the higher ed grift has primarily benefited?
A college degree is already something that's going to broadly help you on the job market. I'm suspicious whenever someone falls back to arguing that the major has a wide application as a justification for why you'd pick something up with only a narrow field of credentials required jobs.
That ratio is of such a vast disproportion your fallback is essentially that we have an economy in which we need unspecialized yet broadly educated labor, which I don't think is really the situation we face.
But it's definitely the situation we face. Most jobs are not narrowly credentialed and are not specific to a particular undergraduate major.
Yeah if you look at college (regardless of your major) as a "this will get me a job" thing rather than a "this will get me a job saving the world" thing your life becomes much better.
There are also other social sciences (econ, political science, etc.) that are probably giving much better job training than sociology is.
Biggest scam is saying we need student debt relief for racial equity.
A few points…
My brother went to welding school with low costs and doesn’t like the idea to pay off peoples student loan debts. I paid my off a few years ago…I don’t like it either. Lots off people are not going to like it.
Loans based on the financial merit (ability to pay back based on earning potential of degree) makes sense.
The government should initiate a rating system for degrees. A similar lines of thinking to putting calories on food. They could identify key economic data about the degree on is about to go into debt to obtain and force universities to provide the information with the advertising for the degree. If we do it for a Pepsi why not for a $100k degree. These decisions are key to financial health. Clearly young people need protection from predatory universities (i.e. all of them).
> The government should initiate a rating system for degrees.
It has one, sort of: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166027-Harvard-University&fos_code=3801&fos_credential=3
Right, Matt discusses how the Obama admin tried to do this (in the 2 paragraphs beginning "The Obama administration tried to curtail some of the worst abuses...")
A very compelling argument that will find no favour with the college educated white Dems that are quickly becoming the largest constituency for the party. There are no more New Deal Democrats. Now this is the program:
Forgive our student loans.
More federal grants to create well paid make-work NGO jobs for professionals (“do tanks” not “think tanks”).
Give us more immigrant maids and nannies (and amnesties so that we're not breaking the law)
Tax the rich to pay for day care so our immigrant nanny can dump her kids in daycare while personally taking care of our little prince and princess at home so Dad can work at the law firm and Mom at the NGO (or Vice versa)
Mass transit to make it easier for our badly paid immigrant nanny to commute to our home (we take Uber or Lyft ourselves)
Densify urban areas so we can afford a downtown apartment.
SALT tax exemption forever so red states will subsidize our expensive blue city lifestyle
Cut spending for public police while our condo association hires private security
Dumb down the public schools, to make those kids less competitive with ours, who go to private schools
Get rid of the SAT so smart Asian kids won’t compete with our dumb white legacy kids when applying for college
Ration Covid medicine by race, so working class whites we despise will die first
Raise energy prices for the working class and industry, while giving us a tax subsidy for our pricey Tesla or Prius
Encourage Twitter, Google and social media to ban any viewpoints we disagree with
Gee, I wonder why the Democrats aren't doing too well in the polls these days...
The idea that dense public transit cities are extravagant uses of government money while freeway sprawl is just natural and righteous and cheap, cannot die fast enough. It is ass backwards. You’re damn right, I’m sick of subsiding sprawl America’s insane lifestyle.
The point is less that it is an extravagant use of gov't money (it isn't), but that many of the people who use it would rather live in those nice suburban areas with a bit of space. Just look at the places that became super spreading venues for Covid.
“Would rather have” - yeah, we are using public funds to satisfy preferences. Why is it right to satisfy their preferences and wrong to satisfy ours?
Well, the issue is that those preferences are not really being satisfied. Additionally, there are public health considerations to consider in light of Covid. In the COVID-19 pandemic, the much-maligned dispersed urban pattern proved to be an asset. Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs have had a considerable number of cases, but overall this highly diverse, globally engaged region managed to keep rates of infection well below that of dense, transit-dependent New York City. That's an aside. But to your broader point, the underlying consideration is one of equity and fairness. As Matty points out, student debt relief is a regressive form of debt relief. I'd rather move toward socialising the costs of healthcare by moving toward a singlepayer or All-payer type of system. You'd capture far more beneficiaries that way and it would be far less regressive.
It’s pretty clearly not the case that sprawl is justified by public health. Even if we grant that low density places fared marginally better under COVID (dubious), the automobile is a far more prolific killer, both directly and via pollution.
I'm not sure the data bear that out (am at work now so can't look for sources). I was in a very un-dense area in the Midwest starting a few months after the pandemic started - temporary move from NYC - and caseloads were horrible. A lot of refusals to comply with any COVID-related measures, including vaccines.
In NYC, I live in Manhattan and work in a public building there. I was the last one to start remote work (came into the office until I wasn't allowed to anymore). Haven't been sick a day during the whole thing.
"Mass transit to make it easier for our badly paid immigrant nanny to commute to our home (we take Uber or Lyft ourselves)"
I suggest you take a gander at the going rate for nannies in major metro areas, and also the Federal rules about overtime. It's going to take A LOT of immigration for them to be badly paid if everything is above board.
"if everything is above board" is a key proviso
This is a delightfully cynical take on where the mainstream D party is at. I think it's more accurate than not.
I'm an equal opportunity cynic. Same exercise for the small business owners who dominate the GOP—the big guys in small towns:
Import cheap immigrants as workers in your low wage small business (not so much as nannies and maids)
Crush labor unions
Minimize regulations in general
Support regulations that protect certain small businesses (ban on direct sale of contact lenses and glasses, instead of through opticians, etc)
Maximize SBA loans and grants
Gut IRS capacity for enforcing tax laws (thereby focusing the IRS attention on middle class employees who generally fill out clean, easy to understand returns and get arbitrarily audited)
Favor offshoring and Chinese imports if they are cheap inputs in your small business (rebar in construction etc)
Stepped-up exemptions for multi million (not billion) dollar inheritances for their kids
Write-offs for boats, weekend houses, fancy cars as business expenses
Meanwhile, the two topics without any constituency in either party:
US manufacturing
The private sector working class (the unionized public sector is a cash cow and voting bank for the Democrats, so they are left alone).
Why forgive loans for public service instead of raising wages for that public service? The social benefit of this work doesn't depend on how costly the degree program was, or how much of it someone financed with debt.
Easier said than done, since many or most(?) of the jobs that qualify as public service are at private sector non-profits. there are a million and one funding streams from fed and state levels that feed into paying these salaries and changing them all at once would be infeasible
If we want to subsidize those private sector non-profits we could do so with a grant. As long as the work's getting done, why does it matter that it's specifically done by someone with high levels of student debt?
I think public service loan forgiveness programs are basically permanent at this point. And yes, opaque public policy is bad imo.
The problem with any of this is that it is not a solution for the overall issue.
If the issue is the high cost of education, then deal with that. Simply forgiving student debt does nothing for that and probably increases costs because it removes a moral hazard if people think this is the new norm.
My own selfish take is what about me? My kids are in college now. Do they get this? Do I get this?
Don't think there aren't a lot of people thinking this.
And yes Baby Boomers got more subsidized colleges at much lower prices for them, but as always the "grey greed" is a big issue and will make this also super unpopular.
If we wanted to conjure in a lab an issue that would reunite libertarians, earnest social conservatives, and opportunistic rightwing populists, opposition to student debt relief (aka a bailout to the coddled, leftist higher education establishment) would be it.
“Some people might say we shouldn’t subsidize doctors’ education because they earn high salaries. Others might say we should subsidize doctors’ education but in exchange reduce their compensation. Still others might say we should subsidize the education of even more doctors and let competition drive down the price.”
And some pop-eyed radicals will note that as long as the AMA controls and limits the number of residency slots available, subsidizing more medical students is actually _guaranteed_ to produce nothing but more people with huge amounts of med school debt and an MD that they can’t actually use because they can’t get certified.
[edit: this was posted before coffee and in fact the AMA supports lifting the residency cap. The fault here is with the AAMC, Medicare and an enormous amount of bad legislation]
I am in tremendous agreement with the proposition that we need more residency spots and doctors in the US, but the AMA really has nothing to do with residency slot supply. For that matter, it also does not control medical school enrollment.
*FYI not an AMA member
Derp, you are of course correct; posting too quickly and with too little coffee. We regret the slander against the AMA and instead suggest that people direct their ire against the AAMC, Medicare, and several decades of bad legislation. :)
I can dig it.
FYI Biden's BBB has (had?) GME enrollment expansion it in....