lol, cmon man, you can't just extrapolate out forever from every success. Why don't we just keep educating people until they're 60, then they can work 5 years and retire? Infinite wealth will be ours!

More to the point, I'm a big supporter of public education, but the question here isn't whether people should be educated, it's whether the college system is functioning well or is broken. There's a good analogy with healthcare, like of course I think that everyone should have health coverage, but just "SPEND MORE MONEY! COVERAGE FOR EVERYONE!" is the wrong answer, because you have a broken system where expenditure per capita is miles too high and stuff like rent-seeking is absolutely rife. Likewise, I think the amount college costs in the US is out of control.

Then they either shouldn't have gone to college or should have taken the additional steps needed to secure a better job.

I would say that at least 95% of the people I regularly interact with who have a college degree benefited financially from that degree.

The problems outlined in that article have been here for a while now, but they were greatly exacerbated by the great recession. There was a double-whammy that started around 2007 and is still ongoing, where you have a bunch of people going to, or going back to, college because they're unemployed and don't know wtf else to do. Simultaneously, states started massively cutting their education funding because, well, there was a recession ldo, tax revenues sank like a stone and cuts had to be made somewhere because many if not most USA#1 states have balanced budget amendments in their state constitutions. This required students to borrow more and more. Meanwhile universities are jacking up their tuition and fees and such to help cover shortfalls in their own budgets created when the states cut their funding.

Obv that only explains the problem, and even then only partially. It doesn't address solutions, admittedly. More state funding is needed, admin salaries need a serious look, hell probably every department needs a good audit. But I'm not sure how "free college" doesn't help solve at least the student debt bit of the problem, though.

"College isn't worth it because I know some people with a crappy job" is among the more laughable takes even for this thread.

Are there enough people on the college margins that would benefit from free college by pursuing worthwhile degrees like engineering to offset the number of worthless English and communications and arts degrees that would result?

No, but a pretty good chunk of people are lawyers, finance bros, teachers, nurses, dentists, doctors, pharmacists, accountants, engineers, programmers, architects, marketers, and psychiatrists

Even English and Communications degrees can be really valuable. Having any bachelor's opens a significant number of doors that will at least let you get into an entry level of a field that can let you become a high earner.

Obviously it's stupid to spend 60k a year on one of those degrees but getting any bachelor's at a state university is massive value long term.

lol aspie engineers

I mean take like a girl who gets a degree in social work or sociology or something. Many consider that a worthless degree. But even a social work or civil service job with that degree will earn her like 45k a year instead of 24k a year as a secretary or bank teller or whatever else would have been in her range. Not to mention that over time there is a chance for significant increase in those wages. Sure she'll never make 150k but could easily get up to like 70-80k after compiling years of experience.

The "worthless degree" probably still represents >500k of value life time net of cost and debt for a low-wage relatively skill-less worker.

And there's hundreds of other situations like that.

Sorry for wheatrich's entitled bros who didn't want to put in the werk and gain the experience required to take advantage of their degree. World needs Uber drivers and bartenders too.

Like most people with degrees I've gotten interviews for positions having nothing to do with my majors by virtue of simply having the degree. I'm definitely better off financially with the degree than without it even with the $40k I still have in student loans.

GOP failure on healthcare getting 16th billing on foxnews mobile.

Although it's the #1 "Top Story".

ya "college is a net negative to society" is one of the worst takes recently

Just need that piece of paper so the employees can discriminate with ease.

Sorry that this is off-topic, but can anyone explain to me the downside to this system?

Instead of the current ACA/healthcare system, doctors and hospitals must give a somewhat accurate estimate of what their services cost. A checkup costs this much, an MRI costs this much, this procedure costs this much.

All people will be covered for "emergency" care such as major surgeries and such. From my understanding, this doesn't cost the government that much because they are so rare.

People at the lowest income rates are given $X to spend on healthcare every year. Of the amount left over at the end, they get back Y%. No idea what x and y should be, but you get the idea.

The people being subsidized for healthcare will now shop for lower prices so healthcare costs will decrease due to competition. Since the ridiculous costs of healthcare is the biggest burden on insurance companies, this will decrease insurance costs and help those in that income range.

Nah, just a political one. Literally dozens of countries have functional versions of both operating smoothly. It's a solved problem. We just don't have the political will to solve it.

You're basically beating around the bush of Medicare for All.

I think this is actually the charitable view of what the GOP was trying to accomplish. Or at least the charitable view of Avik Roy, when he said this:

Roy's point of view seems to be that the architecture of the bill was good, in the way that you framed it: instead of just giving people access to healthcare, which they would treat like an all-you-can-eat buffet, the bill would create a structure where individuals would actually have an incentive to price shop and be non-wasteful in their healthcare consumption. The problem with the current bill (in Roy's view), is that it doesn't provide nearly enough financial support to poor people for them to actually do this. But his view is that this insufficient financial support is a small fix (crossing out one number and substituting a much bigger number), while it's the architecture that's the big necessary change. You can hear him discuss this in detail on Ezra Klein's podcast.

I think one fatal flaw of this approach is simply that Roy's "easy fix" would never happen. Conservative politicians simply don't believe that poor people deserve handouts, whether those handouts are in the form of "free" healthcare or fully-funded health savings accounts that they would use to shop for healthcare in a more market-based system.

A second issue is that there's not a lot of evidence that people would actually price shop that much for healthcare. I'm not super familiar with this area, but at one point did some digging around and there seems to be evidence that consumers don't do much comparison for self-funded items like LASIK:

Tu, Ha T., and Jessica H. May. “Self-Pay Markets In Health Care: Consumer Nirvana Or Caveat Emptor?” Health Affairs 26, no. 2 (March 1, 2007): w217–26. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.26.2.w217.

On a related point, even if individuals aren't willing to do much comparison shopping in their medical decisions, it seems like insurers should have both the incentive and ability to nudge their insureds in a particular direction. I remember listening to a podcast at some point (maybe on Planet Money?) where one particular insurer would call the covered person and say, "I see you have an MRI scheduled at St. Mary's Hospital next week. Their MRIs are substantially more expansive than MRIs at St. Joseph's. Would you be willing to get an MRI at St. Joseph if we write you a $200 check?" That seems like an idea worth pursuing (rather than the black and white decision to exclude St. Mary's from the insured network), but I'm not sure how common it is or what downsides there are.

What? Not at all. Shimmy wants the government to negotiate with health care providers on cost. That is an anathema to the GOP.

Maybe I'm misreading, but that's not remotely my interpretation of this:

I guess I misread him, but the part you cut out, mandating price transparency, is still an anathema to the GOP, isn't in the BRCA, and is crucial to Shimmy's proposal.

On the college topic, I did a spit-take when I saw a cite to www.georgetown.edu for a study demonstrating that college costs are worth it. That happens to be the same university at which I served on the law school student-faculty-admin-fee-committee for two years, at which yearly tuition increased at a rate similar to other "peer universities" because it could because that's what they did, and for no other tangible reason.

The financial incentives for high-end universities justify industry-wide price fixing at increased tuition rates of approximately 7% per year. Price sensitivity is barely a thing for loan-carrying students and the finance industry's appetite for student debt is enormous. It is indisputable that the provision of education was monetized during most of our childhoods and teenage years, so that we have paid profits of learning directly to the boomer generation, for their benefit rather than ours.

That is one of the wealth transfers that most incenses me about the worst generation in American history. That wasn't a direct wealth transfer - instead, we had to leverage our FUTURE wealth in order to pay THAT to OUR PARENTS for the "privilege" of going to school at prices exponentially higher than they paid, if they paid anything at all.

Their commoditization of US is something that needs to be front and center in any discussion of education costs in this country.

The question whether it happens to STILL be worth it to attend school is a different question, and it's the one tut is trying to answer. Financial outcomes recently are not nearly as rosy as college outcomes used to be, in part because the financial outlay is so massive and in part because the job market has been terrible for most of our adult lives - again, for reasons we are not responsible for but will have to solve as we begin to age into political control.

CLIFFS: Tuition increases at insane rates because it can, not because education costs have spiked.

Boomers are the WOAT and were intentionally so - we're little money factories for them, which was preordained before we ever graduated from high school.

Community colleges and state universities - not the fancy faux-ivy ones (Berkeley, UCLA), but the real ones - are the barricade against an otherwise abusive marketplace.

+++

Side note:

18 year olds are not equipped to properly price student loan decisions, especially not when sites like ww.georgetown.edu more-or-less promise that paying Georgetown ~ $215,000 in just tuition for 4 years for an undergrad degree is gonna pay off splendidly when that is demonstrably untrue for many students and many professions, and dubious for all those who do not pursue a graduate degree (same argument applies to spending ~ $190,000 for a J.D. that will eject you into a marketplace for jobs that does not actually pay anything like the $160,000 to start that most law students expect but only the chosen few actually get (I actually did get that - then got laid off in the 2009 legal rescession from which the industry has never recovered)).

I'm surprised that price transparency would be undesirable for the GOP. I mean, I agree that it hasn't been a focus of their bills, which I guess is telling, but it's certainly a pretty necessary component of their view of a competitive marketplace in healthcare imo. Do you happen to have any cites to GOP people arguing against transparency?

I agree that learning a few things can massively increase earning potential. However, 1) with such easy access to information, theoretically you no longer even need college to learn these things. Even if learning is to occur through college, should be huge efficiency from technology reducing cost and 2) yet tuition has continued to skyrocketed, 5%+ a year like clockwork, even through the recession. 3) And to top it all off, they have largely phased out the concept of tenure and now rely heavily on adjunct professors that are paid slightly more than minimum wage, so where is all the money going? So again, rent-seeking transfer of our future earnings to take advantage of the value of social signalling and young people learning a few things for the good universities. Outright scams for bad ones.

The entire purpose of tuition increases across the industry is strictly price fixing and rent seeking, it has nothing - nothing - to do with costs or student benefits. Nothing.