Really not fun part is that loads of office jobs can be done with high school education level where companies require a degree.

I guess it is because there are not enough office jobs and not enough masters/bachelors level jobs so we are all at rat race.

> Check the marketing literature for any college and you will find that is not true.

I actually had the opposite takeaway. The last university literature booklets I saw were all about the experience, the facilities, the sports, the events, and the fun. I don’t even remember if they included content about getting a job at the end.

I think everyone would have been up in arms had the OP said the opposite.

> The only people doing degrees for knowledge and prestige are the filthy rich and while they may make up a significant percentage of students at the top 5 schools, they make up a tiny percentage of all college students.

I already wrote it quite some times on HN: at least in Germany, where university is rather cheap, the situation is typically different:

- The really rich kids will typically have a "career on rails", for example because of family connections. They thus often consider getting the university degree as an annoying obstacle on their way towards a certain career.

- If you, on the other hand, don't come from a wealthy background, you better are very idealistic with respect to your chosen degree course (with the only typical constraint that it will not be not be some "useless degree" (including what is called in German "Orchideenfächer" (i.e. small, obscure degree courses for which there is often no real job market))). If you are not in deep love with the subject that you study, family and friends will likely "suggest" that you should drop out of university and get a form of tertiary education that is a better fit for you, such as Fachhochschule, Berufsakademie (both offer a much more applied tertiary education than universities do) or Ausbildung (vocational training).

TLDR: In Germany, typically not the rich kids get a university degree for their seek of knowledge (the rich kid rather often consider attending university as an annoying obstacle on their certain career), but rather the smart, idealistic kids from a less well-off family background.

I'd say the purpose is usually to get a "career" i.e. good job, possibly as a paid researcher and/or professor.

Perhaps I should have written it a bit more clearer, but in my mind I was comparing degrees with certifications. I feel studies/degrees that have an associated certification (possibly legally mandated) linked to it should have a different loan profile as compared to open-ended degrees.

Whether you are going to Trade school to become a Plumber, or Med school to become a Doctor; in both cases there is the study part (that may or may not issue a degree also) and then there is the certification part, and that certification part is what's important for the job and thus directly linked to it. You studied medicine but your certification is specifically for Cardiology, so THAT's you career path. Please stop looking at kidneys, you are disturbing the Nephrologist.

But ordinary college degrees NOT linked to certification, just have the study part... and there is NO direct linkage with a job.

An English degree can be done just for the sake of it, or to become a Teacher, or to become a Journalist or Author or whatever.

The degree itself isn't linking itself to one single career or closely related group of careers; they may waggle their eyes and pose innuendoes, but unless there is a specific certification, they are open ended, and that's deliberate by choice.

They WANT it to be open-ended because then the responsibility isn't on them. Oh you did Chemistry? Look at ALL the career options you have! We are just here to broaden your mind with the wonderful world of chemicals!

You might have the potential to become a chemist or pharmacists or a lab tech or who knows even a famous researcher; look at this example of XYZ who become world renowned in lithography machine lubrication who studied chemistry at this very institution! Or look at ABC, they now work at NASA, wouldn't YOU like to be an astronaut-chemist doing stuff on the ISS? Go forth, the world is your oyster!

The possibilities are limitless, and therefore the degree is NOT about the job, it's just about the education. Whether you end up as a chemistry teacher or a drug dealer in like Walter White is up to you.

And thus it's your duty to research, what job options do you feel are possible for you after the degree? and is a loan worth it for you?

Compare that with career-specific certifications, and there you have exact data of how many jobs are in demand and more importantly you KNOW you will be locked to a certain path and thus you (and the loan giver) can plan accordingly.

Sorry if this reply was a bit of a ramble, but I hope I was able to clarify what I meant.

> I would argue that a child has a right to a certain number of years of education.

I would also argue society is better if its people are more educated.

Sounds great, if you don’t mind sharing, what school was it? We have a couple of young kids that that seems like maybe a good fit for.

I actually wrote Egyptology in my comment but then deleted it and wrote XYZ instead ;p

Self study can only go so far, and often when someone self studies there are obvious gaps in their education compared to someone that entered a formal program.

Studying in a university has the advantage of learning from experts and being surrounded by people that are also learning from experts. This has significant advantages.

I think it's best for universities to train their own future researchers. Research, science, and the university's own core goals should be the focus of teaching.

Anything that spills over from that can be jobs, industry, innovations and all that.

Few people can do actually do that effectively.

As in, you and the college can decide privately if they want to teach you XYZ in return for money from you. Getting tax payers to chip in brings in a 3rd party and then they have right to decide whether you get to learn or not.

Student loans aren't your standard private sector loan though. They are a special legal category, which is why they can't be discharged in bankruptcy. All the usual borrowing standards don't apply either. No commercial lender would give that size of loan to an 18 year old with no collateral. The collateral is effectively a claim on the person's future earnings. What a crazy contract to have young people routinely pressured into.

I'm not convinced it's necessary but it sure as hell is nice. I got through undergrad with subsidized loans and it was nice to not worry about interest while I wasn't working yet.

The private sector does fund some loans but I think the current program just needs re-working. Forgiving all these loans is a no-go so this measure is a step in the right direction. I'd like them to lock down the interest rate to 2% + inflation next. The government does need to incentivize a certain degree of higher education for innovation.

Assuming you’re not talking about a loan to do this (at which point you’ve reinvented indentured servitude), back when there was a smaller pool of college graduates it was easier to find a company that would pay for your education, some even offering bonuses if you completed it.

I think the point is that it’s so beneficial to society for people to get these degrees that we should lower the barrier even further. I think you are right that having the private sector fund it is a good base state, I suspect you’d find that you can improve on that base by funding it with some public money. We’ve probably gone a little too far in that direction though.

In the US, college is considered a privilege for those who can afford it or are poor enough to be granted it from poorly designed taxpayer funds. Then we set the bar for hiring to requiring a degree making it so that if you want anything above minimum wage, you’re going to have to get a degree. This is how the predatory lending prior to 2008 started with student loan debt. Glad to see that 20 years hasn’t taught us anything.

Other countries where University and Education are rights or are provided via better taxpayer systems don’t understand the pure chaos the US system is.

> We live in a society and to some extent we decide what that means

Precisely my point! Tax-payers/Voters (effectively the same thing) get to decide how much indulgence they want to give.

In Australia you are happy to extend the base, but in the US it seems they are reducing the base, and thus they are limiting options.

Some countries limit the indulgence not by limiting access to loans/aid, but by limiting available seats in university instead.

Ultimately it's up to the paying party how much risk they want to tolerate.

Great for Australia! You do you. We’ll do our thing. We like you, but we don’t want to be you.

Our Constitution doesn’t guarantee free university degrees in “underwater basketweaving” or “following your dreams” for everyone.

But we also have a way to do it. Any US state that wants to guarantee loans for, or even subsidize, such degrees, is welcome to do so, with state money, not federal money.

There are not that many of those students. But oh boy, conservatives hate that kind of research regardless of how students do in the market.

It is ideologically inconvenient, because the whole premiss is that gender roles depend.

> So we should treat it the same way we treat high school which is taxpayer funded to ensure as many people as possible get one

There are no college graduates I've interviewed in the last two decades, whose quality of output suggests to me college is something the tax payer should be on the hook for.

Yes, this is slightly incorrect. The purpose of a college loan is 100% that the default rate will be low enough that the interest payments will provide a positive return for the lender. The expected default rate is given by the lendee’s expected future income. The majority of the expected income is driven by the expected job of that lender, but some of that expected income could come from other income sources such as investments especially in fields such as finance.

I'm not an american, my profile clearly states I'm from the 3rd world.

My father grew up dirt poor, and a basic associate degree (gotten via his saving from a factory job plus a partial scholarship he won) changed his entire trajectory from being a random labourer to an white collar office worker with enough funds to educate his own kids, especially his daughters.

My father and my siblings helped fund my education, a privilege I'm very cognizant of, and I'm very jealous of countries with free education.

But as someone living in a country with a very poor economy and an even poorer tax base, I also have very realistic expectations in terms of what tax money purchases and what reasonable expectations one should have.

I desperately want an expansion in the education base of my country, but also realise the current tax payer base has limit on how much they can pay to purchase this expansion.

And this fact also extrapolates to rich countries, they may have more money but at the end of the day the math is the same, there is a limit to how much they wish to indulge.

In fact I'm currently applying for a chance to win a PhD abroad, which would clearly be funded by foreigner tax payers. I would be at the whims of their largesse to get paid to study, and if I don't win, it's clearly because they do not wish to expand this indulgence to me, a bitter fact I must accept with grace and move on.

I may cry and moan about it, but one has to be realistic about these things.

I think folks would agree with you in valuing arts and humanities, just that they shouldn’t do it on someone else’s dime. I suspect you’d find that a widely held belief and not just an American one.

It’s hard out there and I have some non-college educated family who also struggled in life wondering why we should pour money into degrees people can’t pay off when they received no help themselves.

Why not gather up with other like-minded individuals and fund scholarships and grants if you feel strongly about this? I disagree that taxing the rich is our way out of this. There's a reason the starving artist is a cultural trope.

Not only that but the higher ed industry has abused the hell out of this program. I'm close to people who were studying degrees they will never come close to paying and now they're $100k+ in the hole. The reality is that degree shouldn't have been available to them.

You are allowed to have fun. Do what you want I don't care. I don't even know you.

However if you want me the taxpayer to pay for the fun it needs to be a good investment for me. Otherwise I want to use my money to have fun myself.

Very well said. i wish I could give you 1000 upvotes, or better yet a real vote.

Message aside, I'm surprised your post is tolerated here. If this same tone was used against the HN group think it would be [deleted]. Be a little more respectful if you want to win minds.

Assuming you were educated, your assertion that natural rights are meaningless is a good argument to me that the project of universal tertiary education is simply not worth it. If we can't even get people to see that there's a difference in kind between e.g. your right to reciprocal force in the event someone attempts to take your life vs. your "right" to have people work for you to do nothing but attend classes (when all of the information is already free online, so really it's just social hour for years on end plus a credential), then the value of the "education" we're providing seems dubious to me.

> Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated

This is what the public school system is for. Post-secondary education was not meant to be for everyone. But the world has changed and universities and colleges only service as the gate-keepers to degrees and diplomas that every employer now has required to get a job (regardless of whether that education is needed for the actual job). It's not that young people passionate about learning as much as they can in a given field don't exist, its that university is not about them anymore.

> Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated while their brains are still maximally plastic, and society get maximal value out of the education?

Eh, I’ve often thought that going to college would’ve been much better after a few years of building software in the workforce. I didn’t understand the “why” of going into a lot of the subjects I studied, they didn’t have much real experience to attach to in my brain, and retention was worse.

I think Waterloo’s mix of school and working is a pretty solid way to tackle this.

Then they don't need to tax you and you can just give the money to educational institutions. The argument for taxes is either "I don't think it is fair for me to pay for this alone since others are benefiting" or "this absolutely positively must be a group effort" (eg, the military).

"I want my taxes to..." is a generally a bad start, because the point of taxes is it doesn't matter what an individual taxpayers wants to happen to them. Most taxpayers want the taxes to not be spent the way they will be. That is why they are taxes. If people had an actual choice then in all likelihood they wouldn't pay them.

If the future labor market is so unpredictable that we literally know nothing about it, then we really shouldn't be giving out student loans.

You don’t think investing in arts, humanities, and music contributes to a functioning democracy?

Here we have an example of someone who see college/university as a vocational training center for worker, instead of seeing it as higher education that inspire civilized thinker.

A lot of people severely underestimate the value and impact of the arts because they don't produce immediately visible results. But artistic works are often a massive source of inspiration and they help people through dark times.

> It's easy to make the argument:

And it is false. Those are truthisms, except at one point, college can destroy people’s lives. College can teach people wrong things. College can misdirect people from being about to contribute to the economy and redirect them towards the political goals of the teachers, especially when those don’t derive revenue from their contribution to the economy. College can also misdirect people who would have been happier and more useful with immediate work.

There goes my demonstration: College can be harmful to society, it’s subjective to judge when the threshold was crossed. For my opinion, it was crossed in 2013 through politicization.

Is this like, a real sum of money americans pay for a degree? Overhead must be mind-boggiling if like just two students are needed to pay educator's salary for the period.

Well, the way things are going, maybe it should be way more subsidized...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818544

https://archive.ph/94e7p

Right. And also, when you have paid $240k for that degree, don't write endless screeds complaining that the degree was a "scam" and that it's someone else's fault that you're not earning much with that degree.

Even in the 00s and 10s, there used to be people complaining bitterly that they have a lot of student loans after getting a degree in puppetry (seriously.) And the same people would have lit themselves on fire in a public square if they had been denied student loans for getting a puppetry degree.

I feel that you can't have it both ways: guaranteed student loans for any degree, no matter how impractical, and also complaining that some degrees funded with student loans don't lead to a lucrative career. Choose one or the other.

Collectively, yes, but not individually.

The problem is that the electorate tends to not understand the concept of second-order effects. For example, a college graduate in the arts might, directly or indirectly, generate more economic activity than someone without a college degree, regardless of the difference in income level of people in those two buckets.

The full reason is that preventing bankruptcy is the only way to keep interest rates low and make the loans widely available.

If bankruptcy was allowed then the obvious play would be to take the loan, max out credit cards right before graduation, then declare bankruptcy before you get your first job.

Lenders would respond by increasing interest rates dramatically and restricting loans to those who had assets. This would basically turn into loans being for people with wealthy parents or having eye-watering interest rates.

That answer is still begging the question of why it matters that bankruptcy rates stay low.

It's obvious that bankruptcy costs the lender, but how that cost gets absorbed is very important here. A mortgage or a car loan are secured debts, where the lender can repossess and sell the collateral, to pay off most or all of the losses if the borrow defaults on the loan. A student loan is an unsecured debt, so any defaults have to come out of the interest of the rest of the borrowers serviced by that loan program.

The more borrowers default on their payments, the higher the interest rate is needed to cover the write-downs. Without any protections against defaulting, interest rates would have to be near those of credit cards, while limiting when student loans can be discharged limits how much needs to be written down, which keeps interest rates lower.

Higher interest rates would not only make student loans cost more, it would also reduce their availability and increase the default rate, which could create positive feedback, causing the rates to increase significantly faster than inflation. Combine that with incentivization for college attendance already causing tuition itself to increase significantly faster than inflation, which itself makes student loans increasingly necessary, allowing student loans to be discharged during bankruptcy could have compounding effects on the fragile system that currently props up college attendance rates.

That still leaves the question of why the government should incentivize a significant portion of their constituency to be in college, (more than 1 out of every 13 US adults are currently enrolled) but I'll have have leave that question for politicians or maybe even voters.

> it was to discourage students from immediately declaring bankruptcy upon graduation.

Yes, this was a thing in (IIRC) the late 70s / early 80s, and the fed crackdown on the non-dischargeability of school loans in bankruptcy was enacted very quickly in response.

I myself got my bachelors in '79 and read about this idea and did not try it cos it was so incredibly unethical (and it sounded risky). In the words of the infamous Vince Lombardi, "Nice guys finish last."

> There is no evidence that students were actually doing this in any significant numbers.

premature optimization is the root of all evil. Seems like we shouldve actually shown that kids would do that before putting it into law

You can't really tell people that they just can't be bankrupt though. What are they supposed to do if they have debts they can't pay but they're not allowed to declare bankruptcy because they pinky swore they wouldn't do it seven years ago?

I feel the interests would rise to accommodate for all the bankruptcies that inevitably happen exactly 7 years after

You would have to prove that you are unemployable to achieve any meaningful reduction in debt. For degrees that are demanded by the job market you wouldn't be able to declare bankruptcy and you would first have to make a reasonable attempt at paying off your loan.

Basically proving the point that the loan shouldn't have been given out in the first place.

You could say the same about all government programs, including pensions and defense. Yet somehow popularly-elected governments keep finding themselves maximizing public utility. A curious property indeed.

But the return on that subsidy is positive so why not do it?

Bankruptcy is still inconvenient. But mostly, people would be less able to get loans and then colleges would get to pick between reducing prices or having only a few rich students.

Whats to stop people in their 20s now taking out tons of credit then declaring bankruptcy without the college?

Well someone has to do it as its bulk of NATO’s funding.

It also should not waste tax payer’s money of worthless degrees

We could also just decide to provide people higher level of education as a right. And, put some Medicare level pricing in place for colleges and universities to get cost in check.

I personally would want to see it with greater student participation/testing. The US education has been watered down to be so easy specifically because failing reduces LTV of a student. They want to just crank out degrees to as many people as they can. I personally think we need to figure out the healthy balance of education we need, because college for all isn’t it. Then just pay for them to learn at a high expectation level. Private schools will still exist to pump out full price degrees and that’s fine too.

> Everyone would do it.

No, they wouldn't. Source: go back a couple decades, and student loans had low interest rates and were dischargeable in bankruptcy. It was an option. And, in fact, practically nobody did that.

Maybe not everyone, but certainly lots of unethical people would do it, and there are lots of those. They'd post unbearably smug posts on LinkedIn about it too, calling everyone a sucker who didn't walk away from their $200k in student loans via bankrupcty.

The justification for student loans being exempt from bankruptcy is simply that there is no asset to be repossessed. Car loans, mortgages, and HELOCs are different. Credit cards have very high interest to pay for the higher risk. I guess we could have student loans with 29% interest, would that be preferable?

Yes as we all know Employers are just bursting at the seems to hire people without a post secondary degree. Even more so if they don't even have a highschool degree. Just cant get enough of them lol.

Education is not something arcane, TBH it's really the vocational schools that should be forced to call themselves something different. 99% of university students are not there for an education, they are in welding school upper-middle-class edition. Vocational programs are essential infrastructure, but they are not education, and those programs should not receive funds allocated for education or be held to the same standards as education programs and vice versa.

E.g. most computer science departments where computer science is not taught, students just participate in a charade of memorizing arbitrary facts that they never even attempt to understand in order to get a certificate that entitles them to receive on-the-job training to glue javascript components together for 6 figures.

Job training != education

On the contrary, who else is going to fund fundamental research that is not immediately useful? Stuff that prints money will have no problem finding funding, looking at the greater picture is exactly what the government is supposed to do

>s/learn/be indoctrinated/

Yeah, this comment demonstrates my own perspective on it quite well, in that it's likely just another bald political attack by the current administration on education, wherein a bureaucrat will get to decide what does and does not constitute a worthwhile degree, and is allowed to become the gatekeeper of what universities may teach by selective topic by topic defunding.

Will they decide to ignore the salaries of students "not working in their field"? That could be used as an instant bludgeon against anything centered on history, philosophy, or other educational paths that do not generally have high paying careers associated with them, even if those graduating from them do generally earn more on average than those with only a high school diploma.

Twenty years ago something like half of those in tech didn't have a college degree of any kind. Plenty of businesses are run by folks that don't have college degrees. Crafting statistics through careful manipulation of who is counted for making the comparisons could be used to exclude almost any set of courses that isn't STEM, law or medicine.

The more it's subsidized, the more it costs. I don't think there's any surprise there.

If that were true, wouldn’t we be better served by auditing the finances of these universities and imposing caps on university profits based on operating expenses?

> if history and philosophy are so important

Jesus Mary and Joseph we are cooked.

I think it’s quite easy to decide. If the students at the end of the study can contribute to the society as tax payers to fund the next generation, then what they have studied is meaningful. It doesn’t have to be STEM necessarily.

> whats the goal of government education subsidies

a more educated populace is a public and civic good on its own terms. Public funding for education is maybe partially for economic returns, but is mostly because education is a necessary part of a functioning democracy and a necessary part of living a good fulfilling life

To help people get the education that they want. Not pick winners/losers.

You're hiding behind semantics.

Why should there be a difference in the degree being conferred at all? And if so, why not split off the departments that confer degrees with a low-earning potential and call them "entertainment schools" or something?

Licensing and degrees are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of engineers take licensing exams (CS degree holders are a large exception).

They usually need their employees to have certifications and licenses, by law.

I think "trade school" is only a pejorative for those who are already fully immersed in the echo-chamber of academia.

Also unclear how it works for the PhD pipeline. If you roll straight from bachelor's to a doctorate program - you have abysmal earnings for the next 5-6 years of your life.

I read the parent comment as claiming that some colleges select student bodies that are on average worse than the average of people who don't go to college at all.

For most normal people the parents are / should be involved. In general if your average case is "I am figuring out reality from scratch" you are fucked.

I can tell you that I was picking a choice of major as a recent immigrant and even my fresh off the boat grandma could have easily "poked holes" in my theory if I had chosen to study something stupid.

How do you conduct this check and be certain that the issue lies with the education?

If one thinks doing simple derivatives is a chore, I'd suggest a career other than engineering.

I've known many engineers who practiced math avoidance. None of them were worth much as engineers.

I know a recruiter who would ask engineering candidates what is 20% of 20,000, without using a calculator or phoning a friend. He was surprised at how many could not, and it was an easy way to filter out the no hires.

Those students should be separated from the students that want to learn, I know who I want to hire, or be sitting next to on the line and so does everyone else with a pulse: it's the person that is thrilled to learn how to take the derivative of a polynomial.

Not the loser sitting in a class they hate, living out their big plan to set their life on fire doing a job that makes them sad because they love money.

Could also reverse it: Why should tax payers cover things that pay off anyway.

Why should taxpayers pay for jobs training programs? since these vocational students expect to make lots of money with their certificate in hand, they can just take out a loan. this makes an actually rational system where the cost of job training is forced to be commensurate with the economic value of the output after the job program.

OTOH education should obviously be subsidized because it is a public good to have a society where everyone is educated, even though education will have close to zero measurable economic impact on any particular individual, every aspect of society benefits greatly from everyone having access to it.

It's crazy that education has been subverted into vocational training, and now that the transformation is nearly complete people are asking, wait why the hell is there any education going on in these places, aren't they supposed to be job training programs?

At least a decade ago the system was anything but fair. The income threshold for repayment was low, while the interest rate was very high. At that point, the expectation was that those who got an average job after graduation would pay an extra 10% income tax for 30 years, after which the debt would be forgiven. Those with good jobs would pay off the debt quickly enough, and they would pay much less overall for their education.

Today we have the highest percentage of people with an university degree compared to any other time in the history. Do you think democracy today is healthier than it was 30 years ago?

And that indulgence has been cloaked in specious, ivory-tower claims about producing well-rounded students

I suspect your comment is exactly what they’re talking about. I actually agree with your claim, but with limits! And yet the proponents of your position always seem to want a blank check.

How much exactly should the taxpayers pay to ensure that little Timmy goes to college and gets “an appreciation for what makes life worth living”, and why that amount? And how do we know if it’s working or not?

This is also a straw-man. You don't just need to establish that students should learn history, literature, etc -- you need to establish that 12 years of that is not enough, and they need to take an additional 4 years at a much higher cost. But why stop at 16 years? Why not 20 or 30 years? Clearly there are diminishing marginal returns. At some point you should trust students who are motivated to learn to continue their studies independently, rather than tacking it on as a massively expensive additional requirement to a vocational degree.