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A college degree is a lousy investment

According to this chart you would be pretty close:

http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm

It says that $1.00 in 1968 would equal to $6.87 in 2014 in buying power.....after an average inflation rate of 4.28% over all those years.

However, look at it this way: $2,300/year = 23% of $10,000/year. $55,000/year (assumed WF cost today) = 80% of $68,700/year.

In other words, the cost to attend WF has increased by more than three times the rate of inflation & wages during those years.


well worth it too because the most recent Wake grads are the most brilliant of all :)
 
This kid paid down $124,421 in six years (with help from his parents) - https://medium.com/matter/the-124-421-man-56e3b84a321

Good read, lotta lessons about this cost-benefit kids these days will have to navigate.

I’m the outlier, the best-case scenario, the happy ending, and still I’m left without much in savings, since it all went to the accelerated repaying of the loans. My fellow debtors took the same risk I did, but it hasn’t worked out for all of them. We used to be indebted to the American Dream, but now we’re in debt because of it.
 
http://thesocietypages.org/socimage...lprit-behind-rising-tuition-wall-street-skim/
In the lasts 15 years, student debt has grown by over 1,000% and the debt held by public colleges and universities has tripled. Where is the money going?
The scholars behind a new report, Borrowing Against the Future: The Hidden Costs of Financing U.S. Higher Education, argue that profit is the culprit. They write:
Scholars have offered several explanations for these high costs including faculty salaries, administrative bloat, and the amenities arms race. These explanations, however, all miss a crucial piece of the puzzle.
Sociologist Charlie Eaton and his colleagues crunched the numbers and found that spending on actual education has stagnated, while financial speculators have been taking an increasing amount of money off of the top.
Higher education fills the pockets of investors in three ways:

  • Interest on student loans, paid by students and parents.
  • Interest paid by colleges who take out loans to fund projects — everything from new academic buildings to luxury dorms and stadiums — ultimately repaid with tuition hikes and higher taxes.
  • And profit from for-profit colleges (with “dismal graduation rates, by the way).

 
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

Didn't know where else to put this. Guess it fits in that his argument is ultimately that public spending on higher ed--to combat the class sustaining influence of private elites--is a good investment.

Lots of great lines.

"Is there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don’t have a satisfying answer, short of telling them to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing: not in the context of “service,” and not in the spirit of “making an effort,” either—swooping down on a member of the college support staff and offering to “buy them a coffee,” as a former Yalie once suggested, in order to “ask them about themselves.""

"If there is one idea, above all, through which the concept of social responsibility is communicated at the most prestigious schools, it is “leadership.” “Harvard is for leaders,” goes the Cambridge cliché. To be a high-achieving student is to constantly be urged to think of yourself as a future leader of society. But what these institutions mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm or becoming a chief executive, climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. I don’t think it occurs to the people in charge of elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning, or, really, any meaning.

"The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things. As of 2010, about a third of graduates went into financing or consulting at a number of top schools, including Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell. Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science. It’s considered glamorous to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker. “What Wall Street figured out,” as Ezra Klein has put it, “is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next.”

So basically, #publicschoolfilth.
 
A few basic points in response to the video.

First, the student loan bubble and overall wage stagnation and income inequality are linked. As we continue to move closer to Headcount Zero, the standard isn't going to be what job people can get out of college, it will be what job people can create for themselves. Good luck estimating that using somebody's major.

Sure wages for college graduates aren't rising or are even going down. But that doesn't really matter with respect to the decision to go to college. What matters is the gap between wages earned by college graduates vs. those with only a high school diploma. If anything, stagnant or low wages among those with bachelor's degrees only encourages more people to take out more loans and stay in college to get graduate and professional degrees. In order words, college doesn't get less valuable just because college graduates earn less. As long as employers are looking for college graduates, that degree is extremely valuable.

The best way to combat the student loan crisis is robust job creation for people at all level of education with strong wage growth. Bullshit College of Law can't sell the dream of a law degree to people with single digit LSAT scores if they can get a good job with a bachelors. People who don't want to go to college wouldn't feel the need to waste their time aimlessly taking courses if they could get a decent job without one.

Second, majors are fluid. Will it be charging for the major or credits? There's a huge difference. Will a computer science course simply cost more than a sociology course? How many levels of credits will be charged? More importantly, how many more bean counters will state university systems and private institutions need to hire to determine how to price their credits or majors for federal loan purposes? How many more staff will be needed to administer refunds after someone drops Organic Chemistry and picks up Intro to Cultural Anthropology? Heck, who will set the policy that there will be refunds at all? Adding to administrative bloat isn't going to drive down the cost of education.

Majors are fluid by necessity. People can try out courses and figure out what they want to do. College has a built-in trial and error mechanism that helps weed out folks for department and program purposes and helps individual students better determine what they like to do and set up a trajectory for their careers. Now there are clearly some problems there, but adding even more sunk costs to lower grades in STEM majors or disincentivizing lower income students from pursuing "more expensive" majors is very problematic. Also, we should want to encourage students who aren't pursuing STEM degrees to take lower level science and math courses to improve their overall science literacy. Charging more for those credits discourage that.

The video oversimplifies both the housing and student loan bubbles into simple problems with the lendee and divorces them from much large systemic issues in the economy. Oversimplifying the solutions by putting the burden on students instead of institutions and employers isn't going help solve any problems as long as demand for higher education remains justifiably high.
 
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The best way to combat the student loan crisis is to stop giving unlimited loans to any applicant with a pulse. Right now there's no incentive for colleges to not raise prices and no incentive for the government to stop giving loans since they're making a nice profit off the guaranteed interest.
 
The best way to combat the student loan crisis is to stop giving unlimited loans to any applicant with a pulse. Right now there's no incentive for colleges to not raise prices and no incentive for the government to stop giving loans since they're making a nice profit off the guaranteed interest.

Then you put the government in the position of denying people the opportunity to get an education. The key is to stop giving unlimited loans for students to go to any school. I think schools would lower tuition or at least increase scholarships if there was some threat that student with federal loans couldn't go to their institution because of high default rates. For profits couldn't just take anybody and anybody wouldn't think they could just go to a for-profit.
 
Then you put the government in the position of denying people the opportunity to get an education. The key is to stop giving unlimited loans for students to go to any school. I think schools would lower tuition or at least increase scholarships if there was some threat that student with federal loans couldn't go to their institution because of high default rates. For profits couldn't just take anybody and anybody wouldn't think they could just go to a for-profit.

That's the entitlement attitude that has gotten us into this mess. No one has the right to student loans. Just like no one has the right to cheap mortgages.

And for profits, while terrible predators, shouldn't be turned into a scapegoat that lets traditional universities skate by unnoticed. A $160k loan from Wake has just the same onerous impacts as a $160k loan from ITT Defray.
 
Then you put the government in the position of denying people the opportunity to get an education. The key is to stop giving unlimited loans for students to go to any school. I think schools would lower tuition or at least increase scholarships if there was some threat that student with federal loans couldn't go to their institution because of high default rates. For profits couldn't just take anybody and anybody wouldn't think they could just go to a for-profit.

A student's ability to attend a university shouldn't be determined by whether or not they get a shit ton of govt loans. Cutting off the spicket of funding would probably also slow down University tuition increases.
 
District, except it doesn't because the graduation rates and job placement rates at Wake are much better.

It's not an entitlement attitude. It's letting institutions decide who gets admitted to their school. You want to add a layer of government bureaucracy on top of university admissions and university financial aid that allows the federal government to decide who actually gets to go to college.

My plan keeps admissions decisions with the university. The government should set up standards for schools to meet to make sure people aren't getting loans to attend schools that offer no return.

buckets, college isn't going to get cheaper. Wages probably aren't going to go up. There's a gap that needs to be filled if employers are going to continue to demand college degrees for low-level jobs. If education remains extremely valuable but the American worker isn't extremely valuable, something has to give.
 
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A student's ability to attend a university shouldn't be determined by whether or not they get a shit ton of govt loans. Cutting off the spicket of funding would probably also slow down University tuition increases.

spigot
 
I don't know why autocorrect did that since I don't think spicket is even a real word
 
District, except it doesn't because the graduation rates and job placement rates at Wake are much better.

It's not an entitlement attitude. It's letting institutions decide who gets admitted to their school. You want to add a layer of government bureaucracy on top of university admissions and university financial aid that allows the federal government to decide who actually gets to go to college.

My plan keeps admissions decisions with the university. The government should set up standards for schools to meet to make sure people aren't getting loans to attend schools that offer no return.

buckets, college isn't going to get cheaper. Wages probably aren't going to go up. There's a gap that needs to be filled if employers are going to continue to demand college degrees for low-level jobs. If education remains extremely valuable but the American worker isn't extremely valuable, something has to give.

Huh? College isn't getting cheaper because the government keeps supply artificially high. Of course tuition would go down if they unlimited free money tap was turned off.

Just like how housing prices tumbled after cheap mortgages dried up.
 
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