CDL, you seem to think free college with no long term benefit is a rational choice for kids but earning 4 years of salary and experience isn't.

you think the people who get degrees in [whatever] studies actually think there degrees have real life value equal to their costs? I think these students know full well that the value proposition isn't there, but they still choose to do it. If people are willing to pay to get worthless degrees now then why do you not think that would get worse in a society where these degrees are now free?

We do need to do a better job at educating kids on job prospects and career paths and should probably start that around 8th or 9th grade, but that is a separate issue.

I don't know what to say to you if you don't believe people can skate through college without doing much if any work. I have seen countless examples of people who get through college with much less work and lower grades than a reasonable application of their ability would explain. I myself am one and there are tens or hundreds of thousands more kids like this every year. I am sure you are also familiar with the people who have been taking undergrad classes for 5+ years which is also way too long.

Also, the "ridiculous tuition burden" is overstated. For one, the highest priced schools are private and would not be affected by any of the current proposals. Neither Sanders nor anyone else with clout is proposing funding a change to the cost of private colleges so the people graduating with >$200k in debt are still going to be doing so. $10,000 a year at a state school is hardly an insurmountable or even worrisome burden for someone getting a degree that actually increases their earnings potential.

Can't really blame colleges for offering their product to willing buyers. The responsibility is on the creditors for assessing the creditworthiness of its students and the buyers themselves.

Are they passing all of their classes while partying or just partying and not doing any schoolwork?

it can also be rational, but most 18-22 year olds value short-term experiences more than long-term financial benefits (especially when they can get those same benefits just a little later) so the rational choice only applies to those with economic foresight and values who are already thinking toward the future in the present system.

Also, no one has addressed how this alleviates the huge bulk of student loan debt. The heaviest burdens for student loan debt come from 4 categories of people and not one of them are helped by the current plans. These groups are people who went to graduate school, private universities, for profit colleges, and dropouts. The first 3 are categories that would be completely unaffected since current proposals only apply to undergrad public universities.

If you are really worried about the student loan burden then why aren't we offering to pay for graduate schools and private universities too? Graduate schools provide education for lots of essential jobs and additional training for many of the most capable people we have. Private schools make up a large portion of the best educational institutions in the country and attract some of our brightest minds. These two also result in much higher debt loads than public undergrad degrees.

It is my opinion that for profit institutions are morally reprehensible and should be banned by law, but if they are not then these students (who are often in the worst positions to make good decisions about college and personal finances) are still left with the same debt burden on a nominal basis, but a larger one on a relative basis and are now relatively worse off.

You could argue that dropouts benefit by no longer being hindered by debt, but we could very well increase the share of dropouts by creating a free college experience where people unsuited for it are encouraged to attend and thus end up hurting those same people as a group as they have now wasted more collective time than they would in the current environment. In this case we increase the financial burden on society without adding any educational value.

could be either. Even if they get kicked out 2 years in thats a pointless drain on society.

Based on your response, it doesn't seem like you even read it. Trade skills pay very well, and we don't really live in a free market. Social pressures also push people away from these jobs and towards debt, I'd blame that on a mix of consumerism, irrationality and banking scams, all things the government benefits from. I'm not sure why you say the article offers little in the reasons why the social push for 4 year education is bad - huge debt(either for the consumer or the citizens- someone has to pay for it), no real job training and no real jobs post education.


lol @ comparing welding to orange picking by the way

A person with a college degree earns on average ~$1 million more over a lifetime than one who does not. Also



Source http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

A negative income tax + tax rebates for upper education(including on future income) are far better solutions than "Spend more on education" and a lot more practical too, as well as a lot less vague. End the bureaucracy and the connected interests/industries that benefit massively from it.

Oh on the contrary, I read the entire thing. It's fairly typical of the trash with which reason litters the derposphere day in and day out.

I mean, reading **** like this

tells me that this Rowe character is obviously just interviewing himself and repackaging bootstraps derp and blogging here. I'm not sure why you'd take anything in that article seriously, but then again I'm not sure why anyone reads that dumb site.

I'm not disputing the numbers, but all the jobs that people do without college degrees will still be there tomorrow (talking in the literal sense as these will be absorbed by technology over time). If everyone gets a college degree then some of these people will be better off and move into jobs that aren't accessible to them now, but there will also now be college educated people who are working menial jobs that do not require a degree and will thus end up earning less. So while college increases earnings for those that attend and decreases the chances of unemployment it doesn't mean that we will necessarily or even likely have more jobs for college educated people going forward. It certainly benefits an individual financially to go to college if all else is equal. However, then benefits of everyone going to college only benefit the individual to the degree that the pie grows in size as the least educated or skilled people will still be doing the most menial tasks on average.

If everyone gets a college degree then we only see a shift in unemployment from any narrowing of the skills gap. As thayer pointed out a lot of the current skills gap is not due to a lack of people who could learn a trade or set of skills, but rather due to a lack of people who have chosen to pursue that. Likewise, we will almost certainly enter a situation where we meaningfully increase the rate of underemployment as the current economy simply doesn't have enough jobs to employ people in fields where degrees are necessary and not merely nice looking.

also, a lot of the people with more advanced degrees are simply smarter than the people with lower levels of accomplishments which means they will make more on average even if education is the same.

Umm, yeah. You can't just wave a wand and make someone a doctor, of course someone with a doctorate is going to earn more than the average person without a degree. That doesn't mean it's better to go to college than to learn a useful skill that pays well. It also negelcts the cost of debt. Someone who doesn't know what he wants to do or what to be doesn't benefit(or society/the economy if we assume the public should pay for it) from 6 figures of debt to finish college with no job prospects or no worthy skills. They and we would be much better off if they learned a useful skill, and at the least would be better off if they didn't spend a ton of money on something that's not worth it.

"If everyone gets a college degree..." was one of the bad arguments applied against the idea of government-backed student loans in the first place and it was just as bad then as it is now. If everyone COULD get a college degree they still wouldn't because not everyone would choose to do so, but fortunately that will never be an issue because there are plenty of people who can't do the work.

I mean yeah if everyone behaved rationally and chose optimally 100% of the time we'd all be better off point conceded I guess

namath, why does it make sense to pay for people to go to public schools, but not for profit, private, or grad schools? Do you not think this would also offer benefits at least as substantial or moreso than public universities?

Conservatives never really give up on battles, though, especially not those that are prominent features of the liberal/conservative divide. It is strongly related to the conservative worldview that the past was a glorious time and that unless that can be preserved, the whole world will literally go to hell. This contrasts with the liberal view that the past was a relatively brutal time that we need to improve upon.

Liberals won the Civil War, but conservatives didn't give up. They waged terrorist campaigns against Northern troops and the black populace, eventually achieving the withdrawal of the former and the subsequent subjugation of the latter via Jim Crow such that the social order wasn't that much different from slavery. Liberals thought they won great victories with Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act, but conservatives have found legal ways to skirt these, leaving schools and housing nearly as segregated as ever. The progress of the Montgomery bus boycott was largely undone by terrorist intimidation campaigns in its wake that generally had blacks back to riding in the back shortly after victory was declared. Roe is the law of the land, but terrorist campaigns against doctors and legislative campaigns against facilities have made it tremendously difficult to obtain constitutionally protected medical care in vast swaths of the country. And now, Kim Davis is not some pariah. She's an exemplar of conservative values, fighting the Lost Cause to the last by whatever means she has available, because to do otherwise is not just conceding one issue to liberals but to contribute to the destruction of the very social order that Makes America Great.

I don't have the numbers but I would guess a huge majority of these loans are paid back and are +EV to society. The issue is those loans that are not +EV to society.

How is earnings defined? That seems surprisingly low for the high end education categories unless medical and retirement benefits aren't being included in earnings.

I don't believe they are referring to anything other than salary there but I'll see if I can get a definition on the site somewhere

I'm sure there's a benefit, I'm not sure those benefits would outweigh the additional cost though. I guess I could be convinced otherwise.

The question kind of reads like responding to, "I would support a policy that would provide affordable housing to all," with, "Why not go ahead and put everyone in a gated community?"

what do you mean by +EV to society?

So we both agree its only worth a certain amount of money to further education for others. We might disagree on the exact number or range, but we agree its more than $0 and less than "cover everyone for everything they want."

If that is the case then wouldn't a much much better proposal be to allot people certain amounts based on merit (I'd also be fine with people without financial need to be excluded) regardless of where they want to go to school? I don't think the bottom of the barrel public school people deserves money while the kid who goes to Harvard and comes from the same financial circumstances gets none. I think there should be multiple merit based tiers, but these grants/scholarships/whatever you want to call them should be distributed not based on what school you go to or even contingent on it being undergrad, but rather on merit. Ideally, merit would be determined by the economic benefit you will provide after getting your degree, but that is impossible to measure and couldn't be predicted even if it could be measured. I'm much happier with the public funding college for future engineers and teachers and accountants than I am for people majoring in nebulous fields like philosophy or history.

What would be the arguments against tax-free incentives for upper education? Why must the solution always be more public spending? This always inevitably hurts the whole while benefiting the few. Let people who want to go to college to better their future earning potential benefit economically by their decision by being able to write off college expenses on future income taxes. This would also vastly improve the student loan market giving them more collateral and thus better rates and also better base the decision to loan on it's economic benefit. STEM degrees should cost more than Bavarian art studies but it should also be easier to get a loan for it.