So what happens when the millions of engineering students who hate engineering but want a college degree decide they don't want to keep working as engineers after two years and become art historians? We force them to stay engineers until they pay back the loans?

Uh... yeah? This is pretty much what happens now. Except it doesn't really happen, students drop out of engineering all the time because it's hard. Very rarely do they stick all the way through, get the high paying job then decide they hate it and move on to art history.

Nich- This weird backlash against art history majors is, I think, telling. Is the student loan bubble being driven by people who take out huge loans for liberal arts educations? That information is likely available. People who actually care about "issues and stuff" look that kind of **** up before proposing massive new subsidy programs whereby OK maybe SOME poor people can go to college but they gotta study what I want them to, none of that hippy ****.

People who like to tell themselves stories about caring about issues come up with semi-plausible stories that they like to hear and skip the first step.


You know, like how you approach each and every issue?

P.S. Do you think it's a coincidence that you, a person who believed and repeated white supremacist propaganda about Jim Crow, has such a poor opinion of people who study humanities? History classes make you read books!


P.P.S. Why should "major and aptitude" criteria only kick in for college? We're giving a FREE RIDE to all sorts of Gammas and Deltas up to 12th grade, and those ****ers are taking like gym and arts and crafts and theater classes ON MY DIME.

I think we should be a lot more lean with our education. History? Literature? These things only get in the way of a good STEM education. What does Shakespeare have to do with rubbing out a spreadsheet for your boss? Nothing. Why even bother learning about it? If we've learned anything about art history is that it's for rich yuppy white kids. Minorities and people of color don't make art and don't have a history of art. For them it's the salt mines of engineering, numbers and formulas are their future, save literature, art, poetry for those who deserve it like trust fund babies.

There is no reason an art history major to cost 80k plus. Fly is defending a system that ensures this is the case. That's really ****ed up

There is no reason why people who go into medicine should get reduced rates ikes. Though I agree art majors should get reduced rates.

lol, sure, if you ignore the guaranteed job that american MDs have that pays at least 100-120k 3 years out of graduation. The level of risk an american md student poses for a lender is massively less than any other student.

But hey, carry on dude.

TBH i thought that's what you were "arguing" too.

Fly isn't actually arguing. Like always, he's throwing around childish insults while not actually engaging in any adult conversation.

Once again, thread delivers the lulz. Thanks ikes!

Ikes, you do know that that guaranteed job is because of an artificial shortage created by a cartel. A cartel you have argued shouldn't exist or at least be lessened. Why should a college kowtow to a cartel's demands? Wouldn't increasing the rate put even more pressure on that cartel to lessen its grip? I know I know, the market. But the market is really just a way of you saying you like the current status quo and you should profit by it. So when you think you're trying to appeal to being objective you're really just appealing to what you want.

1) Without the cartel I'd still have a virtually guaranteed job
2) The banks decision to lend or not lend and the rate to lend is independent of what you think of physician licensing.
3) You seem to think that schools lend money for tuition. Yeah.... no. The schools are guaranteed money and take absolutely none of the risk presented by students taking on debt. Thus they can increase tuition with near impunity. This is a problem.

It seems that medical degrees are paying a premium and art majors are enjoying a subsidy. I am assuming that 1) default rates are higher for art majors than doctors and 2) doctors pay more taxes over their careers. As a bean counter it is hard for me to see some huge amount of positive externalities provided by art majors that make this desirable.

Well yea they do now because of the terrible statist system we have where banks don't loan money based on your major. Though I think banks should be able to loan based on the bloat that your major has. Want to take history when you want to be a doctor? What good does that do you? Tack on another 5k. Want to take an ethics course? Why? 3k dollars.

I have no problem instituting cost control measures. Why should a college pay for a premed undergrad degree when it can be handled by treating the medical profession as a trade craft? Zero tuition assistance for premed undergrads.

You don't? Let's expand this from art majors to the humanities. Why bother having humanities at all? What good does Shakespeare do to society? It doesn't produce a spreadsheet or code for Google.

My perception is that we are subsidizing a mismatch in the skills college students are buying versus he skills desired by the employment markets. The good to society is a bit much for me to conceptualize. We should insure that the student understands what he is buying. My suspicion is there a bunch of baristas that didn't recognize that their degree was going to lead to a bunch of skinny decaf lattes.

The answer to this is pretty much yes.

Cliffs:



The opposition to the idea that the government should not subsidise unproductive education is what strikes me as weird. General education is a different matter. I'm very much in favour of living in a society of educated, well-rounded and informed people and I'm in favour of the government spending considerable money on that. Subsidizing someone doing a dissertation on early-1940s German cinema does not help achieve this.

The question of whether the humanities are a worthwhile thing to study is irrelevant. That doesn't help us decide whether there ought to be subsidy of that study, or how many places colleges ought to provide for that study. I don't for instance think there should be 90,000 places per year for students to study sports. That would just be paying for people to study something essentially as a leisure activity at almost no benefit to the community. That I think this doesn't imply that I think playing or watching sports is useless activity. It's a similar story with the visual and performing arts, which is enrolling students at a rate massively out of proportion to the benefit either of the student or the community. It's malinvestment pure and simple.

How does this work tho? Everybody changes their major like 15 times in college. Is the tuition more depending on what major you declared this semester? Or does it not go into effect until you graduate and people who chose silly majors get crushed with higher interest rates (in addition to being unemployable)? In addition, I'm sure how effective this will be in driving people from majors with no jobs to majors with good jobs. The people spending tens of thousands of dollars on making themselves unemployable have already proven they are quite resistant to making logical choices here.

The idea would be a limited number of subsidized places available in less-useful degrees such as the fine arts. Access to those places would be merit-based, as with, say, academic restrictions on entering medical degrees. Obviously if you pay your own way you can study what you like.

I kinda skipped the start of this conversation and I'm not entirely sure how the system works in the US, I gather there are student loans available with subsidized rates of interest? In Australia the government just straight up pays like half the fees and for the rest it loans students money at zero interest rate (with the balance indexed to inflation) and you only have to pay it back once you earn above a certain level. We have similar problems with overuse of the system and malinvestment in degrees that are not useful. To some extent it's a vicious circle: when people with degrees flood the labour market, employers start demanding degrees for jobs which don't actually require them, which then leads young people to believe they all need degrees, and so on.

Fwiw I am a big advocate of liberal arts education, I minored in art history, my sister is a curator in an actual art museum. I paid for my undergrad via academic scholarships, my graduate work via assistantship, and the fact that I'm even making this post just shows how fast fly runs out of actual argument and tries to get personal.

There's a big difference between thinking that the existence of the humanities is good for society, and that anyone who wants to study it should get subsidised. A very small proportion of people become anything close to being the next Shakespeare, or even a great scholar of Shakespeare. What are the positive externalities from a mediocre humanities graduate? I have a hard time seeing it as being anything other than close to zero. There are a lot of private benefits, sure - having fun at college, getting to study something you love, thinking in different ways - but those are pure consumption. What is the compelling public interest in subsidising this?

Scholorships are one thing, rigged is another

Yeah this.

For the record, while Shakespeare attended a grammar school, his education was done and dusted by 18. Didn't stop him from becoming a great writer. The idea that getting an extended arts education supports great artists of the future seems to me fictitious.

Just as random reference, maybe the two most key members to art-rock band Radiohead (Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood) respectively either didn't even start college or quit mid-degree (psychology) to play in the band. It's not at all clear to me that arts courses actually increase the amount of good art produced.

As someone with an engineering degree and 3 years into an MD, I have to say I get somewhat rustled by how popular it has gotten lately to bash on the liberal arts and humanities. That's not to say I think that taking 120k in loans for an undergrad history major is a good investment, but I can't stand all the bashing of liberal arts and humanities in general that comes along with this conversation in the general media. I got relatively little training in the humanities during my engineering degree and honestly at this point I think having a better knowledge of philosophy/history/literature/etc. would be much more valuable to me (and society) than a bunch of calculus and quantum mechanics classes I literally can't remember anything about except that at one time i could do some fancy looking math.

Meh. I think you have a perspective problem. If you'd spent 3 years studying philosophy/history/etc you'd be like "jesus I'd have been much better served studying something useful". It's hard to take a dispassionate view.

I think in general at college people are taught too much stuff which is general theory (i.e. random calculus) and not enough stuff which is practical. All courses are taught with the assumption that the course-taker is going on to an academic career. I do not exaggerate when I say that in my 3-year computer science degree 90 to 95 % of what I was taught was utterly useless.