I didn't find any threads in the archives devoted to the spiraling cost of higher education in the US, and what to do about it. This seems like a huge issue for posters in this forum, so I thought I would try a containment thread.

I have a lot of experience with education debt. (I don't want to make this thread about me, so this will be the only post where I discuss my personal experience in any detail.) Although my family was far from wealthy, at the encouragement of my parents, I went to an out-of-state private college for undergrad. The plan was to fund college through a combination of scholarships, student loans, work study jobs, and paying out of pocket. My parents offered to pay the out of pocket piece, and assured me that they had the money to do so. For reasons that I still don't understand, my parents misled both me and my college about our family's financial situation, and their ability to pay out of pocket. The end result was that I finished my senior year with a huge tuition bill that neither I, nor my parents, had any way of paying. Because of the unpaid tuition, the college withheld my diploma. That meant I couldn't get a job that paid enough for me to repay either the unpaid tuition or my student loans. And I also couldn't get into any sort of grad school or professional school without a diploma. I ended up having a judgment entered against me, which wrecked by credit for years.

After more than a year, I convinced my college that I would never be able to pay unless I had a diploma. The college eventually allowed me to sign a promissory note for the unpaid tuition and released my diploma. One year later, I applied to law school, which I funded 100% through loans. Needless to say, my undergrad and law school debt has had a significant effect on my career choices.

The entire experience left me very conflicted. On the one hand, the cost and debt was crippling and had a terrible effect on me psychologically. On the other hand, it all sort of worked out in the end. My education allowed me to get jobs that have provided me with a degree of financial security that my parents never had. And without access to the debt, I couldn't have gotten those jobs.

To start the discussion, I'll offer up Andrew Cuomo's recent proposal for NY state. The following link gives an overview:

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/gov...ree-new-york-s

And here is a column from David Brooks that lays out what I would describe as a typical GOP establishment criticism of the policy:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/o...asco.html?_r=0

For now, at least, I don't intend to push one position or the other, in part because I don't know what the best solution is. Here are some additional questions that occurr to me:

What is actually driving the spiral in education costs?

If you believe that college should be free, should it be funded 100% by the federal gov't, or should the states somehow participate?

Should free college be limited to public universities? If not, how does it work with private colleges and universities?

Should there be any sort of "stay in school" incentive?

Is it politically feasible to fund the additional cost of gov't subsidization of higher education in a way that is not aggressively regressive?

Should government subsidization of education expenses be need blind? In other words, should the gov't pay for the children of billionaires to attend college?

Should subsidization be limited to undergrad education, or should it extend to graduate and professional schools? If it should extend beyond undergrad, where do we draw the line? It's hard to imagine that we want to subsidize the education of a 26 year old investment banker who decides to quit his job at Goldman to go get an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Are there any unintended consequences of subsidizing education costs that we should worry about?

Like the idea of making it need blind but you only get a free ride at public schools. That seems like it would at least partially resolve the issue of the wealthy getting free rides at Harvard.

Well nothing is free, someone will be paying for it. And being in NYS, I believe it is only applying to people that have a household income of less than $120,000. Not sure on what colleges it applies to yet, or even when it goes into effect (at work and only skimmed the article a couple days ago).
However, I believe that at the last minute Cuomo added to the bill that whoever receives "free" tuition for x amount of years, has to stay in NYS for x amount of years after graduating so people don't just come in, get an edgeumication and bounce.
Personally though, I believe that if someone receives this so called "free" tuition and drops out/fails out of school they pay it back in full. And there should also be a minimum GPA set that once it dips below said GPA the student has the possibility of losing the tuition. The student has to be held to some sort of standard and feel a need to do well in school, or there will be alot of freshman dropouts and people with sh*tty grades just going to college.
Prepare for alot of new liberal arts degrees coming from good ol' NYS lol.

Price would go down if kids were told there are other options. College in europe is cheaper even including flights, trade schools can still get you a good job, nano degrees, there's more out there by the day but that's not the narrative.

I'd prefer getting rid of general education requirements and lowering the amount of time spent in college--nobody cares or remembers any of that.

Biggest thing is making sure you can get a job with that degree, too many kids aren't. I know more people with degrees working whatever min wage jobs they didn't need the degree for than I do with good ones. I assume they're all still paying the debt off. College was a huge mistake for them.

Technology is also making college obsolete. You can get a lot of the same information for free right now. (ofc it's making some jobs obsolete too, have to get ahead of it, and we're not doing that either).

Another key is ability, if we send kids who can't read it just lowers the quality of college (which has already been the case, too many one year and dones, that just raises the costs for everyone)

We don't need to subsidize the harvard kids, that university has roughly a bazillion dollars.

Also gov't writing a blank check just means they charge more for less quality and pocket the difference--same as it ever was. People still don't get this part despite it happening over and over and over. I don't want to pay for the college cartel corruption.

Definitely undergrad only. Most kids in grad school are just wasting time from what I can tell. Nobody cares about a masters or PHD in random ****ing ****.

Cuomo's proposal is only free with certain conditions, it's just for well off kids, not poor ones because screw them. It's **** and it's getting praised, same as it ever was in politics. Maybe 10% qualify or some low number like that.

The spiral in education costs is b/c kids have been brainwashed to get loans and just hand over the $. College is basically a cartel at this point.

There are many free or very cheap online education options. Learning things has never been easier or cheaper.

Degrees aren't about learning things though. They are signaling valuable information to employers about a candidate's employability.

We really just need to find a way to perform this same signaling without the requirement of the typical 4-yr unscalable institution.

The requirement that you get a job in NY kinda sucks, depending on your major. That's a good argument for expanding it to a national program.

I think Americans need to ask themselves: why are kids paying $30k a year to go to college, when countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland charge nothing?

Here you go:

-Benefit is limited to four years of college, community college, trade school, etc., but not graduate programs.
-Covers in-state tuition, local poverty-level room and board, and books at public universities.
-Automatic discharge of student loans to the extent they exceed X% [X=200?] of student's average earnings for first five post-graduation years where the student was in the labor force.

You can probably ditch the last one, since professional school tuition seems to be a lot higher than regular graduate school I don't think we need to specifically subsidize lawyers and doctors, and that creates an obvious hustle for being a prosecutor/public defender for 5 years then getting a private job.

The answer to your question is obvious -- because higher education is not subsidized as heavily in the US as it is in Sweden, Norway, and Finland.

But that just begs the real questions, which are: how much subsidization is optimal and what form should the subsidization take?

You could vary X depending on the kind of institution (or just exempt JD/MD/MBA programs entirely, but I feel like it's hard to objectively distinguish scam schools from legit programs). Or you could just claw back the forgiveness if the student's income increases more than Y% over the next five years. The idea, which I think does have value, is getting someone other than the clueless student to underwrite the risk that the degree they're investing in is not worth the tuition.

So you should subsidize it instead of wasting the money on illegal wars!

I'm in Denmark now. Education is not only free but you receive a government stipend to go to school. My current hosts are both unemployed and have an apartment nicer than I ever had when I was employed.

That's how it used to be in the UK before student loans replaced government grants.

Because the electorate in countries which don't fund education are full of nasty, stupid c***s led by evil, warmongering selfish bastards.

As with most similar policies it doesn't take a genius to work out that the more meritocratic society is the better the society is.

Americans in general are anti-taxes, no matter what they fund, and the majority believe they're already overburdened by taxes despite paying the lowest (or close to it)
in taxes of any developed country.
But illegal wars drive up profits for "defense" contractors, free college just subsidizes useless **** like "schools" and "students".

"Biggest thing is making sure you can get a job with that degree, too many kids aren't."

This sounds good, but I dunno how realistic it is. Once you get outside the STEM degrees, it gets chancy for jobs in a lot of areas, and as another poster noted a trade school is a better bet. CNN about every three months or so dusts off "The plight of the unemployed college grad" story and interviews a dozen or so minimum wage types with 6 figure debt figures bemoaning their fate. Last one had three history majors, a couple of theater majors, and a meteorologist. Shocking they can't get a job, especially when they graduate from some school I'd never heard of.

I'm curious how the Denmarks of the world do it - do they limit the majors? Is the labor market somehow more receptive to (for lack of a better term) "soft" degrees? Is it just a matter of #'s of people attending? I think college is a good thing for a lot of people for a lot of reasons, but I don't know about subsidizing degrees in Medieval history at Bum**** state college....

MM MD

For those who live outside the US, the question in the US of whether to subsidize higher education has little to do with a zero sum choice between guns and butter. In other words, free college wouldn't necessarily have any immediate effect on US foreign policy or US military spending.

"Quit bombing brown people" is a perfectly defensible position, but it's pretty irrelevant to this thread.

Yeah it would. Every time you get some grunt on the internet talking about their experience they talk about it, free education is a high priority for a great many of them. You'd remove a lot of manpower for these illegal incursions if you gave free education to everyone.

The lowest income tax bracket is 37%.

The highest is 57%.

The median parental income at Michigan is like 150k. Its not all that different from Harvard for the purposes of this discussion. The best universities overwhelmingly educate the rich and I don't think making it free will change that enough to make a need blind policy anything other than a regressive handout.

OK - that answers part of the question, sort of. I'm more interested in the destiny of the Danish kids with their free degrees. Do they all get some sort of job even if their degree is in Flemish literature, or something? Are they pointed towards specific areas of study? My understanding is the French system lets everyone in but flunks out a high % of students - is that accurate, and what happens to them afterwards?

I know pretty much nothing about Euro higher education, and the US model is pretty screwed up. I'm interested in other strategies, but magically making college free doesn't result in jerbs on the other end. At least they get out not owing 100K for student debt, but are they any better positioned in life beyond that (which I know is not insignificant)

MM MD

Pretty sure that getting in somewhere in Euroland isn't a free for all like the states. Honestly, the most scandalous part of the status quo is that a terribly high number of students who start don't finish, and they are still stuck with five figures in debt.

The schools know exactly what they are doing, too. If 100% of a freshman class magically came back for sophomore year there wouldn't be many schools capable of accommodating them.

To answer the question, college should be free enough that anyone capable can graduate in four years, debt free. Shackling millions of young adults with five figures in debt that's non-dischargable is modern day serfdom.