NBC News: Exposing the College-is-for-Everyone "fantasy"

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

I can't remember where I heard the idea, but in principle you could set up an investment fund where prospective students can apply to get money for their education in return for some *portion of their income for a certain number of years after graduation. If the fund vetted students for academic ability and choice of program, it could potentially be a pretty good investment.

My own [socialist -- we were all socialists once] instincts in my youth led me to firmly believe that such "income contingent loans" were a good idea. Alas, they are not because of "adverse selection".

I wonder who is spinning in their grave faster:
- Milton Friedman for being called a socialist
- actual socialists for being bundled with Milton Friedman

[dismalist]

I can't remember where I heard the idea, but in principle you could set up an investment fund where prospective students can apply to get money for their education in return for some *portion of their income for a certain number of years after graduation. If the fund vetted students for academic ability and choice of program, it could potentially be a pretty good investment.

My own [socialist -- we were all socialists once] instincts in my youth led me to firmly believe that such "income contingent loans" were a good idea. Alas, they are not because of "adverse selection".

I wonder who is spinning in their grave faster:
- Milton Friedman for being called a socialist
- actual socialists for being bundled with Milton Friedman

Don't know if you know, but the people who called Milton a socialist were his own family! His brother-in-law introduced him as "My left wing brother-in-law".

Milton can rest quietly.

There are no actual socialists left. I lament their passing. They were worthy opponents.

Today, we have neo-marxism, substituting  race and gender and identity wars for the class war.

These, too, will fail.

As I said, scarcity sucks. Get used to it.

[Kron3007]

No, I think I mean equitable.  Those who excel should be given opportunity, rather than based on financial status.

University graduates' future financial status will be wonderful! They collect the benefits of their education. Having loans to finance this is the way to go.

I can't remember where I heard the idea, but in principle you could set up an investment fund where prospective students can apply to get money for their education in return for some *portion of their income for a certain number of years after graduation. If the fund vetted students for academic ability and choice of program, it could potentially be a pretty good investment.

*Portion no doubt subject to certain minimum dollar amounts, etc.

Good students going into programs with good earning potential would benefit a lot from this.


ETA: Come to think of it, it's not all that different from people who go into the military to get an education.

My own [socialist -- we were all socialists once] instincts in my youth led me to firmly believe that such "income contingent loans" were a good idea. Alas, they are not because of "adverse selection".

The scheme will unravel because those who expect to earn a lot of money will finance privately at lower cost. This leaves low income people in the contingent loan pool.The best they can do is be charged  market rates of interest.

Sorry, people, scarcity sucks.

Ironically, I was very conservative (libertarian perhaps) in my younger days.  This changed after moving into a region with policies more in line with that. Seeing the results of conservative policies in action drove me to be more socialist.

I just came back from a trip to Sweden, which only reinforced my metamorphosis.

[dismalist]

No, I think I mean equitable.  Those who excel should be given opportunity, rather than based on financial status.

University graduates' future financial status will be wonderful! They collect the benefits of their education. Having loans to finance this is the way to go.

I can't remember where I heard the idea, but in principle you could set up an investment fund where prospective students can apply to get money for their education in return for some *portion of their income for a certain number of years after graduation. If the fund vetted students for academic ability and choice of program, it could potentially be a pretty good investment.

*Portion no doubt subject to certain minimum dollar amounts, etc.

Good students going into programs with good earning potential would benefit a lot from this.


ETA: Come to think of it, it's not all that different from people who go into the military to get an education.

My own [socialist -- we were all socialists once] instincts in my youth led me to firmly believe that such "income contingent loans" were a good idea. Alas, they are not because of "adverse selection".

The scheme will unravel because those who expect to earn a lot of money will finance privately at lower cost. This leaves low income people in the contingent loan pool.The best they can do is be charged  market rates of interest.

Sorry, people, scarcity sucks.

Ironically, I was very conservative (libertarian perhaps) in my younger days.  This changed after moving into a region with policies more in line with that. Seeing the results of conservative policies in action drove me to be more socialist.

I just came back from a trip to Sweden, which only reinforced my metamorphosis.

Conservative vs. Socialist is a limited dichotomy.

Sweden is a redistributive state, financed far more by the middle class than in the US, with freer markets than here, a trade union system that only a few [like me] understand, and wait for this: School Choice!

Yes, eat your hearts out, but it doesn't work for free. And you can't get a flat in Stockholm.

It also doesn't like foreigners.

[Stockmann]

But your right and why stop there?  Why should I have to pay for your snot nosed kids to go to high school?  Or the fire department, my house isn't on fire.  Don't even get me started on police, I can protect my own damned family!

Err... that's exactly how American K12 mostly already works. The rich and upper middle classes pay substantial property taxes for good schools being available to their kids (or they go to private schools, a choice the poor don't have) and the poor pay little or nothing in property taxes for awful schools (and are unlikely to be able to homeschool). Yet the American Left prefers keeping the children of the poor in this modern-day villeinage to their school district over alternatives like changing the way schools are funded or public schools with merit-based admissions, etc.

There are many countries with free university, so we do not need to create these wild scenarios of what could happen.  We can simply look around to see if that actually happens in the real world.  I have not seen Klingon studies in any of the free university countries, but I admittedly have not looked too hard.  That being said, I suspect this is actually more likely to happen in a for-profit setting where they are incentivized to attract tuition dollars.   

Places with free/dirt cheap* college plus grants or other financial assistance tend to produce a lot of perpetual students. I guess it helps keep the unemployment stats down. Places with free/dirt cheap college but limited additional support tend to have a lot of perpetual students from the middle classes and the poor are largely still shut out of college.

*Compared to the US everywhere has dirt cheap HE, but I'm thinking of the kind of place that an ordinary summer job can be enough to pay all of a year's tuition and other fees.

[Wahoo Redux]

Yet the American Left prefers keeping the children of the poor in this modern-day villeinage to their school district over alternatives like changing the way schools are funded or public schools with merit-based admissions, etc.

Who or what exactly are you referring to? 

This is Betsy DeVos: "The notion that spending more money is going to bring about different results is ill-placed and ill-advised."

[Kron3007]

No, I think I mean equitable.  Those who excel should be given opportunity, rather than based on financial status.

University graduates' future financial status will be wonderful! They collect the benefits of their education. Having loans to finance this is the way to go.

I can't remember where I heard the idea, but in principle you could set up an investment fund where prospective students can apply to get money for their education in return for some *portion of their income for a certain number of years after graduation. If the fund vetted students for academic ability and choice of program, it could potentially be a pretty good investment.

*Portion no doubt subject to certain minimum dollar amounts, etc.

Good students going into programs with good earning potential would benefit a lot from this.


ETA: Come to think of it, it's not all that different from people who go into the military to get an education.

My own [socialist -- we were all socialists once] instincts in my youth led me to firmly believe that such "income contingent loans" were a good idea. Alas, they are not because of "adverse selection".

The scheme will unravel because those who expect to earn a lot of money will finance privately at lower cost. This leaves low income people in the contingent loan pool.The best they can do is be charged  market rates of interest.

Sorry, people, scarcity sucks.

Ironically, I was very conservative (libertarian perhaps) in my younger days.  This changed after moving into a region with policies more in line with that. Seeing the results of conservative policies in action drove me to be more socialist.

I just came back from a trip to Sweden, which only reinforced my metamorphosis.

Conservative vs. Socialist is a limited dichotomy.

Sweden is a redistributive state, financed far more by the middle class than in the US, with freer markets than here, a trade union system that only a few [like me] understand, and wait for this: School Choice!

Yes, eat your hearts out, but it doesn't work for free. And you can't get a flat in Stockholm.

It also doesn't like foreigners.

But they do have free university, and many social programs that seem to work well.  This is what we were discussing.

And you also can't get a flat in San Fransisco, bit have the added bonus of student debt....

[dismalist]

...

But they do have free university, and many social programs that seem to work well.  This is what we were discussing...

And you also can't get a flat in San Fransisco, bit still have student debt....

I want more, too.

[Mobius]

But your right and why stop there?  Why should I have to pay for your snot nosed kids to go to high school?  Or the fire department, my house isn't on fire.  Don't even get me started on police, I can protect my own damned family!

Err... that's exactly how American K12 mostly already works. The rich and upper middle classes pay substantial property taxes for good schools being available to their kids (or they go to private schools, a choice the poor don't have) and the poor pay little or nothing in property taxes for awful schools (and are unlikely to be able to homeschool). Yet the American Left prefers keeping the children of the poor in this modern-day villeinage to their school district over alternatives like changing the way schools are funded or public schools with merit-based admissions, etc.

There are many countries with free university, so we do not need to create these wild scenarios of what could happen.  We can simply look around to see if that actually happens in the real world.  I have not seen Klingon studies in any of the free university countries, but I admittedly have not looked too hard.  That being said, I suspect this is actually more likely to happen in a for-profit setting where they are incentivized to attract tuition dollars.   

Places with free/dirt cheap* college plus grants or other financial assistance tend to produce a lot of perpetual students. I guess it helps keep the unemployment stats down. Places with free/dirt cheap college but limited additional support tend to have a lot of perpetual students from the middle classes and the poor are largely still shut out of college.

*Compared to the US everywhere has dirt cheap HE, but I'm thinking of the kind of place that an ordinary summer job can be enough to pay all of a year's tuition and other fees.

These other countries also ration heavily. No efforts at retention by design. Tech school for most.

[quasihumanist]

Somewhat back to the original topic.

I suspect one of the unsaid reasons that people avoid trade school is that they know a number of people who tried trade school and failed - either they didn't finish, or they finished and couldn't get a job, or they finished and got a job but couldn't earn a living at it.  There are a lot of failed plumbers and failed electricians out there.

Of course the failure rates are equally high for the college track, but, for a certain segment of the population, these failures are invisible.  People go off to college, probably graduate even if they don't learn anything, and by that time they've been gone from wherever they came from long enough that they don't come back.  So their former friends don't notice that they've failed, only that they've gone elsewhere.

We have a looming problem in our society - which is that a growing segment of the population are simply, for lack of a better word, disabled - unable to contribute to the economy.

It's not like Europe is immune, though they deal with it differently.  Last time I was in Zurich, I saw a barbershop without a customer on practically every corner.  They apparently send lots of folks to barber school.  These customerless barbers manage to make a living because prices for haircuts are very high, by government regulation I presume, but if you're only doing two haircuts a day, you can still only charge so much for a haircut.  A good deal of the lower wage sectors of the Swiss economy have hidden subsidies.  If you herd cows in an economically inefficient manner, you get paid by the government for preserving historical methods of cow-herding-and-milking.  Of course, this is really a scheme to keep down unemployment.

The European idea of sending more people to trade school only works because they subsidize, either directly or through regulation, many of the sectors of the economy that would employ trade school graduates.  Even there, because the gap in productivity is now so high, the system is breaking down.

[dismalist]

Somewhat back to the original topic.

...

Last time I was in Zurich, I saw a barbershop without a customer on practically every corner.  They apparently send lots of folks to barber school.  These customerless barbers manage to make a living because prices for haircuts are very high, by government regulation I presume, but if you're only doing two haircuts a day, you can still only charge so much for a haircut.  A good deal of the lower wage sectors of the Swiss economy have hidden subsidies.  If you herd cows in an economically inefficient manner, you get paid by the government for preserving historical methods of cow-herding-and-milking.  Of course, this is really a scheme to keep down unemployment.

The European idea of sending more people to trade school only works because they subsidize, either directly or through regulation, many of the sectors of the economy that would employ trade school graduates.  Even there, because the gap in productivity is now so high, the system is breaking down.

That is so wrong, quasi. Nobody sends anybody to trade school. There is no price regulation of haircuts in Switzerland or the rest of Europe. There are no vast subsidies in Europe that steer employment.

What is subsidized in Switzerland, and indeed, the rest of Europe, is anything to do with agriculture, for good reason and bad, mostly bad.

[marshwiggle]

Ironically, I was very conservative (libertarian perhaps) in my younger days.  This changed after moving into a region with policies more in line with that. Seeing the results of conservative policies in action drove me to be more socialist.

I grew up in Quebec, which is one of the most heavily-regulated jurisdictions in North America. (You can't install a ceiling fan yourself. You have to hire an electrician.) I also grew up near the US border, with the US being less regulated than all of Canada.

That's why I'm a moderate, and don't call myself either liberal or conservative. The excesses on both ends are ridiculous and counterproductive to a prosperous and compassionate society.

[apl68]

Somewhat back to the original topic.

I suspect one of the unsaid reasons that people avoid trade school is that they know a number of people who tried trade school and failed - either they didn't finish, or they finished and couldn't get a job, or they finished and got a job but couldn't earn a living at it.  There are a lot of failed plumbers and failed electricians out there.

Of course the failure rates are equally high for the college track, but, for a certain segment of the population, these failures are invisible.  People go off to college, probably graduate even if they don't learn anything, and by that time they've been gone from wherever they came from long enough that they don't come back.  So their former friends don't notice that they've failed, only that they've gone elsewhere.

From what I've seen, visible failures of would-be college students are pretty common.  Which I believe is one reason for the widespread skepticism about college.  In principle I would like to see as many people getting a college education and its benefits--and not just economic benefits--as possible.  In practice, it's pretty clear that the rush to push more students into college in recent years has done a disservice to many who simply didn't have enough interest in their educations to succeed.  I suspect that many of them would have flopped in trade school as well, due to sheer lack of work ethic, lack of support and stability at home, etc.  But I do believe that some students who've done poorly in college would likely do better in trade school.

As for those who seem unable to succeed at much of anything, I think that speaks to much deeper social issues than college can be expected to deal with.  This is why I don't support the "free college for all" plan.  I'm afraid it would just produce more expensive (to the taxpayer) failures.  I am very much in favor of taking steps to get away from the "ruinously expensive college for most" situation in which we now find ourselves.  The expense of college is stifling many students who could potentially benefit from it.  However, I do believe that students who haven't demonstrated quite remarkable potential should still have to pay something for their college.  It gives them an incentive not to blow it off.

[marshwiggle]

From what I've seen, visible failures of would-be college students are pretty common.  Which I believe is one reason for the widespread skepticism about college.  In principle I would like to see as many people getting a college education and its benefits--and not just economic benefits--as possible.  In practice, it's pretty clear that the rush to push more students into college in recent years has done a disservice to many who simply didn't have enough interest in their educations to succeed.  I suspect that many of them would have flopped in trade school as well, due to sheer lack of work ethic, lack of support and stability at home, etc.  But I do believe that some students who've done poorly in college would likely do better in trade school.

As for those who seem unable to succeed at much of anything, I think that speaks to much deeper social issues than college can be expected to deal with.  This is why I don't support the "free college for all" plan.  I'm afraid it would just produce more expensive (to the taxpayer) failures.  I am very much in favor of taking steps to get away from the "ruinously expensive college for most" situation in which we now find ourselves.  The expense of college is stifling many students who could potentially benefit from it.  However, I do believe that students who haven't demonstrated quite remarkable potential should still have to pay something for their college.  It gives them an incentive not to blow it off.

I agree. If anyone is old enough to remember, there was a time when high school guidance offices would do things like "aptitude tests". The value of the tests may have been less than desired, but the point was that figuring out what students might be interested in and good at was considered a good idea.

In our "participation trophy" culture, I think it's hard for parents to come to grips with the idea that their kid may not be good at anything they choose to do. The idea that a given person will have a few areas at which they can do reasonably well is close to blasphemous.

Nevertheless, there would be a lot less waste of resources and anxiety about the future if there was a concerted effort to actually help young people figure out career options that are reasonable for them.

[Hibush]

I agree. If anyone is old enough to remember, there was a time when high school guidance offices would do things like "aptitude tests". The value of the tests may have been less than desired, but the point was that figuring out what students might be interested in and good at was considered a good idea.

In our "participation trophy" culture, I think it's hard for parents to come to grips with the idea that their kid may not be good at anything they choose to do. The idea that a given person will have a few areas at which they can do reasonably well is close to blasphemous.

Nevertheless, there would be a lot less waste of resources and anxiety about the future if there was a concerted effort to actually help young people figure out career options that are reasonable for them.

Back in HS, there was an interest and talent inventory that was offereed to a lot of students. It was valuable in that it would uncover a lot of things that students were not that aware of. They might think ther were ok at a particlar thing but not think much of it. The test would show that they were in a high percentile.

The downside of the thing was that it was administered by hte Army, and doing well could make them want to ship you off to Vietnam. That was too high a price to pay.