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Should [Higher Education] in the U.S. be Free or Near-Free?
Hamurabi
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MiamiRegistered User regular
The Problem
Student loan debt now sits at $1.2 trillion -- surpassing both consumer credit card and auto loan debt. The average student took on $29,400 in loan debt in 2012.Meanwhile, the U.S. government made $41.3 billion in profit on student loan debt last year. Like the article says: if we opted to reinvest that profit, we "could provide maximum-level Pell Grants of $5,645 to 7.3 million college students."
This is a really informative PDF of an annual OECD comparative report on education titled "Education at a Glance".
The (Potential) Solutions
Everyone's said for a long time that we need to Figure Out higher ed in this country. Oregon is trying a really interesting new system where students pay nothing for tuition upfront, but instead pay back some percentage of their income (iirc capped at 3%) for a decade or two. The bill itself is called "Pay It Forward" and could potentially go into effect in a couple of years.There's also a very interesting article on The Atlantic's website.
According to new Department of Education data, that's how much tuition public colleges collected from undergraduates in 2012 across the entire United States. And I'm not being facetious with the word mere, either. The New America Foundation says that the federal government spent a whole $69 billion in 2013 on its hodgepodge of financial aid programs, such as Pell Grants for low-income students, tax breaks, work study funding. And that doesn't even include loans.
But what about tuition costs themselves?
It's true, these solutions address only the 'supply' side of tuition funding; they don't address the fundamental problem of college tuitions that are rising obscenely fast.
FinAid.org wrote:A good rule of thumb is that tuition rates will increase at about twice the general inflation rate. During any 17-year period from 1958 to 2001, the average annual tuition inflation rate was between 6% and 9%, ranging from 1.2 times general inflation to 2.1 times general inflation. On average, tuition tends to increase about 8% per year. An 8% college inflation rate means that the cost of college doubles every nine years. For a baby born today, this means that college costs will be more than three times current rates when the child matriculates in college. This section of FinAid provides detailed information about the rate of increase of college tuition.
These enormous rises in tuition (even in real dollars) have generally been attributed to:
- increases in the cost of instruction (largest component)
- divestment from public institutions by states
- institutional tuition discounting (ie. institutional aid to students)
- larger gifts/endowments for public and private uni's in past decades, offsetting costs.
I frankly haven't heard any good solutions for bringing down the cost of education itself.
(I'll flesh out the OP more later, but this should be enough for a solid discussion of the issue.)
So whaddayathink, D&D?
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to seriously answer the OP, yes higher education should be free or near free
at the least, it shouldn't be a serious financial burden. I'd be more than comfortable increasing the failure rate and difficulty of higher ed if we could ensure access for those who are willing to put the effort in
for starting to cut back on debt, public funds shouldn't go into for-profit colleges, period
State divestment is a huge issue, though. Public college tuition rates were the anchor that held costs in check. Once they started ballooning, it caused everything to blow up.
The same way you do now?
Grades. Tests. Whatever is usually used to grade academic performance.
I'll see if I can dig it up, but there were articles from a few years back I remember reading that all basically end up saying the big increase in cost is not "cost of instruction" but "cost of administration" and "cost of non-education-related facilities".
Which is a sign of something more dangerous - the commercialization of higher education.
But State and Community colleges should be capped at an INCREDIBLY affordable rate. Especially since the nation has largely devalued trade positions, and at least an associates degree is required for most living wage jobs in the US, it's incredibly unfair to set the bar so high when the product of not being able to afford it is either crippling debt or bypassing it and limiting your job options considerably.
Except the government funds student loans for those institutions as well.
Or if things are going to be biased, we need to decide what direction we're going to be socially engineering in. Are we working to elevate the classically best and brightest or level the playing field for groups that are traditionally biased against on the various tests and other measures of pre-college academic achievement.
I'm all for turning the community college system that exists now into a next step past high school that is free to all, and then massively reworking high school. Then we make education past that a more directed undertaking, and as affordable as possible. Basically, we would stop charging for the "American Studies," learning-how-to-college years and then do the sifting for our engineers and lawyers after that.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
it shouldn't to be honest, that's part of the problem
the government has pissed away hundreds of billions in loans to sham for profit colleges and places like DeVry
although exceptions for places like harvard are probably fine, I doubt they're the source of the problem because they don't just accept anybody
the real issue behind all of it is absolutely state disinvestment though; higher ed is an easy place for states to save money because universities have their own revenue streams to leverage.
I really like the pay it forward model and am pretty excited to see how it does (in like 20 years, anyway)
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
As I said, probably too simple
My bottom line is that the ballooning of college tuition prices is insane and should be stopped. But it's hard to take the elite schools and ask them to lower their prices.
What you can do, however, is take the schools that are operating directly from the government level, and force them to lower the bar. I empathize with the lamenting that private schools are too pricey, but what can you do? I think it's criminal, however, when people are struggling to pay for the classes they're taking at a local community college.
This. Makes my blood boil to see a place like U Phoenix get a hold of someone's GI bill PLUS a bigass student loan for a nationally accredited degree that's barely fucking real.
I host a podcast about movies.
I'm not saying anyone should be denied access to higher education, but right now we've made college the only track available to highschool kids unless you want to be a loser. So we're taking a lot of kids who could be saving a boat load of money and would be happy to go to trade school, and we're kicking them out the door with a degree they don't care about and about a decade worth of loans that they'll never REALLY get out from under.
We're asking families and young adults to take out at least tens of thousands of dollars in loans and then we're shocked when the economy is tanking because nobody has an disposable income.
The issue here is more social than anything else. You can be an exceptionally successful tradesman, make a solid living - and a low level office drone with a bachelor's just scraping by will be considered your social better.
This is another place that I think the community college model is doing things pretty well. I've got two former students attending the same community college this year; one of them is going to be transferring to a state school for engineering in a year, the other one is learning automobile restoration. Neither of them is paying through the nose to do it, though they're both paying more than they can realistically afford only working part time.
Student debt, especially when the schooling itself was ultimately pointless, is stupid and it's hurting our society in ways that are hard to fully grasp.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
How many times have you heard jokes in sitcoms or in conversation where people say something akin to "hey you want your kid to end up a plumber or something?"
The statistics are old but I found a Time article that cites bureau of labor statistics that plumbers make an average of $46,000 a year for 40-hour workweeks.
I can tell you after 100k in debt and a four year bachelors that I've never made anything close to that.
Dude, I have lots of friends who are union electricians, plumbers, machinists, shit like that.
They make really decent money, work a legit 40 hours unless they get paid through the nose for overtime, know when their promotions are coming ahead of time, and they usually don't have to take any work home. I have a cousin who is a public sector HVAC technician, he's probably up too about 75k a year, his house is incredible, his retirement is locked down for 58, he's picking out his first couple classic cars to restore...
Not everyone who doesn't go to college is a fumble-buck gas station attendant, for sure.
I host a podcast about movies.
When I applied and took an aptitude test, they told me there is a three year waiting period for an apprenticeship position to open up. There are ways to get to the top of the list, but these options are not available to everyone. I know people with years of experience that are scrounging for work. My dad is in his fifties and has been in the IBEW since he was in his twenties, and he cannot always get work. If you know anything about unions you know that seniority matters, and that this is frightening. I think people vastly overstate the need for for trade schools. To me it's just a talking point. Particularly when all of the trades are deeply dependent on what happens in the real estate market. If people are not buying and building lots of new houses there is a lot less demand for these kinds of people.
As to the general question in the OP, of course it should be either free or near free. Does society benefit in some tangible way from having large amounts of people uneducated? I think simply in that education seems to have the effect of making people more tolerant and understanding it should be a lauded goal even for people in professions where it is completely unnecessary. I think the state has a huge incentive in promoting a well rounded education even if it does not help the job market, to the point that we should literally be paying people to go college.
I suppose not. I'm probably biased in this area because I received a particularly sup-par home school education from my mother who is an 8th grade dropout, so I didn't learn anything until I went to college. I always forget that other people did not have this kind of experience.
No, but at the same time, that's more a function of poverty than anything else. If you break out US public schools by percentage of students in poverty, we outperform all other countries in each tranche.
Edit: The chart here demonstrates the point.
ed: also, creeping privatization of student loans
I'm a big believer in access to higher ed because there's no way to really know whether it's "for" you in advance. We just need to do a better and more cost effective job of managing students' transition from secondary education to a more focused experience.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Is it? I mean, the issue with saying "Who gets to go?" is that it's a question we already answer all the time.
So unless there's numbers sowing that a HUGE number of people are only barred from post-secondary education because of economic issues, it's not that big an issue. And even if there is a large number of them, you are just leaning even more on already existing discrimination criteria.
Like, schools everywhere lack enough facilities to educate an infinite number of students, so these kind of decisions are already made. And not just based on economics.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The barriers faced by non-trads are economic, but not so much in the sense of the cost of tuition as in "I need to work to feed house myself/family."
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Except the chart is bullshit because he's trying to talk up the US by comparing specific US schools to whole countries.
Other countries, even ones with lower poverty rates then the US, still have shitty schools based on various economic and social factors.
He's not comparing like things.
How is he not comparing like things? What he's doing is breaking out US PISA scores by average poverty level, then comparing them against the PISA scores of countries with equivalent poverty levels.
It's a pretty blunt illustration that in many ways, the US is fundamentally different countries for different people.
my memory is that their attrition rate actually isn't that much better than the traditional student population, but it's also for different reasons.
we uh, already do this with current undergrads of all stripes? All manner of need based aid pays the living expenses of students
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Living near the CU Boulder campus I can tell you there hasn't been a semester in the last decade that they haven't been building something new or doing some sort of major renovation. The vast majority of these seem to be with the intent of making the university more attractive to possible students. I'm not sure how much of it is actually helping with instruction. At least in my experience at the school, more money seemed like it was spent on superficial things and less on items like decent lab equipment.