Obama's Student Loan Forgiveness plan.

[Bakustra]

Simon, if you really think that I'm "trolling", (whatever that means in this context- if it's an accusation of insincerity, that creates some difficult philosophical problems as to the state of proof -if it's an accusation of being inflammatory, I confess to it while pointing out that you yourself are therefore trolling, and Zeon is trolling as well) then you should probably be furiously PMing moderators about it.

If you think I'm making arguments in good faith, however, then you probably shouldn't piss out snipes about me being "trolling", because that creates the sense that you're not arguing in good faith.

Simon, let me ask you this, as a counter. What is "subsidizing" education? Is it scholarships? Subsidized loans? Grants? Or is it any federal funding directed towards the teaching of the discipline, which would include NEH grants and endowments? Already we see that costs are going up, up, up as it turns out that there would be no grant money for the "arts and humanities" in this world, or indeed any money beyond that from tuition. How could English or film studies programs survive, when they would solely be dependent on tuition money and private endowments? They would become much sparser, and as a result the price would increase, as Zeon certainly indicated no measures to socialize education and in any case these would probably be only private universities offering them, and so eventually we would be reduced to whichever of the rich cared to study literature (I am being deliberately conservative and far fairer to Zeon than you, since you seem to think that she would be eliminating history).

But let's take a look at whether there is an equal amount of money going towards the Two Cultures (what this is really about, in the end) already. Let's combine the NEH and NEA and compare them to the NSF alone, bearing in mind that we are comparing 20% of basic research funding for science. The NEH and NEA combined took up 300 million in funding in 2011 appropriations. The NSF's scholarship and student research funding programs alone came to about 350 million. The NSF total budget was 6.1 billion, and so the US spends about 30 billion dollars in basic science research funding every year. So apparently less than 1% of all funding towards the arts and humanities comes from the NEH and NEA. Yes, we are clearly spending way too much on those rat-bastard artist pinkos and socio-commies. Fuck you, Simon, for not bothering to do a sanity check before spewing your concern-trolling (I think I am entitled to shoot back, but feel free to cry like a little baby about it if you disagree) about how maybe it could be correct, maybe we should "prioritize" the arts into oblivion, after all, people can create art in their spare time, or whatever nincompoop reasoning you subscribe to. Frankly, I don't care if you don't, since you're coming to the defense of somebody that does. Sources for this can be found here, here, and here, for those of you following along.

Now, Simon, you fucker, let's get this straight- Zeon was calling for no funding, not "prioritization". We prioritize funding already- I think that that's quite reasonable given the relative expenses of scientific research compared to the arts and humanities. So when you reword it to "prioritize", you're building up a strawman to pretend it's more reasonable. Fuck off.

Finally, what is fascistic is framing the educational system so that it's all about the benefit to the State and nothing at all about the individual. If you think that that's just golly-gee swell, kill your will and annihilate your self and there won't be a you to bug me or anybody else any more. (Not that it would stop you from posting...) Reduce yourself to a philosophical zombie, or admit that it's not a good thing to deny the individual completely in favor of the State. I double-dog-dare you.

This isn't going to go anywhere until we can agree on the following:

1) What is the purpose of a college or university education? Are you going there to get a fancy piece of paper so that employers don't circular file your resume, is it for learning for the sake of learning, is it learning real world skills & knowledge so that you can do your job, or all the above or something else?

2) Related to the above, who should be going to college or university? A select few? Those who are good enough? Anyone who can fog a mirror?

The current purpose is obviously number one; I think that the ideal purpose should be a combination of 2 and 3.

I think that as things stand everybody needs tertiary education of some kind- unskilled labor and semiskilled labor are no longer viable lifetime career options unless you've got another, larger income. And that's only going to get worse as automation proceeds, I think. As to whether that should be college/university or a trade school, I think that both should be viable options. But that requires changing the overall culture significantly too.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

And all the socialist intellectuals of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s got their degrees BEFORE the US had a Perkins and Stafford loan system, gasp! My argument is a very simple one... That federally backed loans should not be available to people who are studying degrees which don't socially contribute in a quantifiable sense (I am not saying those degrees don't contribute, just that we can't quantify it). The money used to back them should be used to turn federal loans into grants for fields that result in major social contributions. This would force people going into the liberal arts to be either rich, or dependent on their parents having saved money for them to go to school, or on local state programmes, scholarships based on academic performance (which would winnow the number of non-contributing people), and similar programmes. Wards of the State would be fully funded in anything they wish to do, because it's an obligation on society to provide for foster children and such. The basic goal here is to deter people who are not going to contribute academically from doing something that will massively saddle them with debt.

I am asserting that, the opposite of Bakustra, I believe that the average person consistently and always makes terrible decisions, and will base their beliefs on random emotions and personal biases no matter how much information and education they are given, and therefore easy credit for studying at university is a terrible idea because it loads people up with debt to pursue their dream, with no way to pay off that debt, which creates a huge economic drag on the country, and that the average person will accrue that debt pursuing their dreams even though they have no way of ever paying it off, harming the body politic with their defaults and strains on the programme making the loans. Therefore we should remove the inducement to easy excess, and those truly motivated to pursue their dreams will find funding to do so, and will generally perform well enough in their chosen academic field to be productive academics in grad school in it, which is usually necessary in the liberal arts for someone to be contributive in the field in question.

In short, I believe that humans are innately animalistic, depraved, stupid, Hobbesian creatures who act brutishly without social constraints to force goodness, and who we see today in the Tea Party and numerous other similar organisations dedicated to fucking over and killing lots of people through starvation and poerty all so they can get another car loan for a second Yukon Denali, and that if fully educated, they will just add some more educated sounding words to their frothing rant over browns/queers/blacks/commies/wimmins. You of course believe that humans are in fact basically good creatures who when educated will make rational and just decisions. That is an unbreachable divide based on very fundamentally opposing concepts of human nature which makes arguing with you utterly pointless whether or not you are intentionally trolling or I am or whatever else you wish to believe, and my not-so-imaginary friends are generally people like me who believe in a Hobbesian view of human nature, and who support things like welfare and universal healthcare because we believe if the state didn't legislate such things into force--which are fundamentally morally good--that the average person would happily drive over a kid in the street and not bother to stop to help, metaphorically speaking.. And perhaps literally, too.

My first professor in a collegiate institution was at a community college and taught history, and he told me that one of his jobs there was to, by his classes, try and help show to people if they should be continuing on to an academic career or if they should look into a job as a roofer, and that there was nothing wrong with being a roofer, it was just, some people are only fit for that, and need to find it out before they go on to a full university and load up on tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt that fucks them over for life since you can never get student loans forgiven in bankruptcy in the US like you can other kinds of loans.

[LaCroix]

I'm curious- is there a uniform national standard for admission to a post-graduate program like medicine, or do schools set their own standards? Of course, from what you said about the number of slots at the University of Vienna vs. Austria as a whole, it sounds like there might only be one or two other schools in the country?

Either way, it doesn't sound that different in practice from the way we do things here in the U.S. There's not a single national standard, but getting into (say) medical school requires good grades and strong standardized test performance simply because there are so many more students than there are slots available nationwide. (And I know whereof I speak- I did get into med school once upon a time, though I didn't finish. Long story, and not really relevant.)

There is a deviation between schools. There are three national and on private universities, Vienna with 800 slots, the private one in Salzburg with 50, and the rest is equally divided between Graz and Innsbruck. The number of slots is limited by space requirements, but these are not extended because of concerns about national benefit. Austria already produces more doctors than the system can absorb, and there is little interest in having graduates who move into other countries (In part, the strict rules were done because a lot of German students tried to study in Austria, because it's easier to get into our universities. Also, 75% of the study slots are reserved for Austrians in response to the flooding.)

This is due to the problem that in Europe, migration of academics is easy, and nations do not want to spend a lot of tax money to educate someone who will have his income taxed by a different nation. The USA won't have this problem to that extent, I assume.

Return question - After reading some replies in this thread, it seems to me that in the States, universities have a cap on total applicants due to space available, but those are free to chose whatever field they want after getting in? So it might as well be that one university gets nothing but medicine students in a year where that degree is 'in'? This must be wrong.

[Broomstick]

Also, I fail to see what overwhelming harm "liberal arts" do to society seeing as how nations that do subsidize such education do pretty well. It certainly is not a threat to society as you make it out to be, nor is it wasteful per se.

I don't think she considers them harmful, just not in urgent need of state funds that could be used in other ways. I don't think she's right about this one, but I do think it's a sane form of argument: "Don't spend money on X, because Y has a better cost-benefit ratio and X can do well enough on its own."

Of course, it implies a fairly low standard of acceptance for what "well enough" means in the humanities, which I'm... not all that surprised to hear from her. Again, I don't think I agree.

It's no secret the Duchess does not value the liberal arts, she's stated so in other threads (unless you're talking about forcing everyone to study the dead language of Latin whether it would be actually useful to them or not).

Indeed, her first assumption is that people studying them are incapable of degrees in math or science or engineering, she has a great deal of trouble comprehending that someone who could get a highly technical degree might choose liberal arts instead of “settling” for them because of inability to do something more worthwhile. Well, her view is consistent and while I don't agree with her viewpoint as to their value she certainly isn't saying eliminate the liberal arts, just don't spend public funds on them.

There is some merit to her position, and even some current implementation – other than guaranteed student loan rates, I received no Federal aid for my fine arts degree (the loans themselves were made by private banks, it was the loan rate and guaranteed repayment that were Federal in nature) whereas my college roommate had her medical education paid for by the Federal government in return for seven years of serving in severely needy communities. It seems entirely reasonable to me – although I value art, I would be the first to say that society needs to subsidize doctors before artists.

I think where the Duchess stumbles is in failing to recognize that “General Studies” actually does have utility. We can't all be nuclear physicists and bridge engineers, there really is a need for generalists in society, people with moderate but balanced skills in reading, writing, history, psychology and so forth to occupy the middle-management positions and function of jacks-of-all-trades in small businesses and so forth. Studying six years of calculus will not teach you how to effectively manage the wait staff at a restaurant, as just one example.

Now, there is much to criticize about education in its current form – I could give an earful about the travesty the student loan program in this country has become (in my day the only people who could borrow $100,000 for a degree were medical students – the loan amounts were capped in my day in a way they aren't any longer) and making “general studies” and “liberal arts” degrees more utilitarian is a valid discussion (I would say some mandatory classes on basic business practices might be a good idea, but that's for another thread). But draconian changes are probably not a good idea, neither is the wholesale elimination of entire fields of study nor the government dictating and micromanaging who goes into what.

[K. A. Pital]

Ideally education should be about a diverse, multi-faceted development of the personality. Ideally. What we have now is such a long way from ideal that I cringe.

And yet, it can still be moving toward that ideal. But not by setting limits or kowtowing to market needs, certainly.

[Broomstick]

See this is where you're mixing it up. The reason I'm suggesting education be somewhat tied to the economy, is because it's what will ensure that individuals will get what they need, be it education, a home or an addition to their retirement, it's not to ensure that citizens serve the state as much as possible, if that was true I'd suggest only letting people get education in certain fields and force them to get said educations.

That's a lovely idea, but the problem is things change. Over 30 years ago I acquired some very solid skill sets that at the time were as close to guaranteed employment as you could get (because I was realistic about my chances for making it big time in the arts). Then again, that was in the days when NCR paper was a great advance over carbon paper and we still used ditto machines (mmmm.... the smell of fresh dittos...mmmm... solvent fumes....). It made all the sense in the world to learn skills like typing, double-entry bookkeeping, and so forth because they were in constant demand, everywhere. I was never unemployed long enough to collect unemployment. Whether I was laid off or quit a job I'd be back to work in less than a week. Hell, I even got a job with a genuine old fashioned pension attached to it at one point (still waiting for me to turn 65 - at this point it's more secure than a 401(k), IRA, or perhaps even social security). It was a sound, solid decision that not only provided me a roof overhead and food on the table, but enough money left over for an expensive hobby like aviation.

Then the world changed

ALL of those skills I learned over three decades ago are now either obsolete (double-entry bookkeeping) or commonplace (typing). ALL of them. But - this is a very important concept here - there was no way to foresee that back in 1978 when I started learning all those skills. I get youngsters these days saying I should have studied something more "practical" and "useful" and "in demand" and they totally do not get that, in fact, those skills WERE the practical, useful, and in demand skills of the time.

I guarantee that, whatever anyone in college is studying now, the world 30 years from now will be a very different place, and different skill sets will be in demand and there is no way to foresee what the new skill sets will be. That's where the whole idea of "educate people according to the economy/market/business demands" falls down. Sure, it might be useful 5 years out, or even 10, but after a couple decades there's going to be a pile of people whose skills - practical, useful, and in demand when acquired - are obsolete. As we see currently. The current solution is to dump those people - the majority far too young to retire and with decades of work potential still in them - on the trash heap and call them lazy, stupid, immoral, and all sorts of bad for not being able to foresee the future to the extent of studying specialties that may not have existed yet when they were in school. I don't think that's a particularly good solution, either for the people thrown on the discard pile, nor for society, which is losing the potential that is still in them.

What we really need, at this point, is not only a way to give current 20 year olds appropriate training, but also a means to give adults at any point in their lives a really valid way to retrain in an entirely new career, and a society that actually supports such career changes. We've got to stop with the notion that graduating college puts a final end on education. And frankly, I think a mix of means of funding/promoting such education is just fine - nothing wrong with the government subsidizing the education of doctors, civil engineers, the miltiary. Nothing wrong with businesses helping to fund education in areas important to them - Ford motor company, for example, used to do a LOT of training for the automotive industry (I have no idea if they still do). Of course, there will probably be obligations on both sides - my roommate was required to serve seven years in a desert clinic in the middle of nowhere for her education, my old employer used to require that anyone earning an MBA through their tuition support program either stayed with the company 5 years after completing their degree or return a portion of the tuition support (did not apply if the company laid you off, only if you chose to leave), and as long as these requirements are reasonable it seems fair enough.

Currently, I'm receiving a lower hourly rate than my coworkers, but that's because I'm a trainee learning a new trade (one I'm sure the Duchess would agree has some practical use) and the company is expending some resources to train me, as well as gaining from the work I do. Once I complete training (and they do have a written plan and schedule, which is adhered to remarkably well) I'll earn a higher wage as I will be of more use to the company. It's nowhere near what I made before, but it will be enough to live on and pay my bills. It will also allow me to pursue other avenues from that base. That's the it is SUPPOSED TO work - you can get enough of a wage to live a reasonable existence, yet not be so overwhelmed by physical labor and sheer hours of work that you can't improve yourself. Holy shit, it only took me four fucking years to get to this point, THAT'S what is ridiculous. It should not be so goddamned hard to change careers when the needs of society changes.

[K. A. Pital]

That's where the whole idea of "educate people according to the economy/market/business demands" falls down.

If we note that the intensification of change in the market and the rising productivity of labour in traditional industrial sectors is limiting the number of jobs that these sectors could take in the future and that the speed of change is also rising, that whole idea is not just wrong but can fundamentally hurt the very economy you're trying to help.

By producing hordes of precisely "fine-tuned" human appendages for the superindustrial machine with little to none additional knowledge and little to none chance of interprofessional shift supported by the government/society, you basically create more problems along the way. You shoot the future into the foot and espouse some sort of libertarian "well, but if conditions change they should fight for their survival!" shit.

[Alphawolf55]

Except I never said get rid of Liberal Arts education, in fact I said we should keep them and expand access to them to make them free, but change them to a more community college area where cost are far more kept in line. Your points would only be true if I said 'Lets teach people only their majors and nothing else" which is not what I said.

[Thanas]

And all the socialist intellectuals of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s got their degrees BEFORE the US had a Perkins and Stafford loan system, gasp!

What a brilliant retort. I am sure we can apply this reasoning to any other argument and it would just be as valid. Let's see, the presence of free black people in the 1700s obviously meant there wa no slavery whatsoever in the americas.

Also, that damned funding for the arts.

The National Endowment amounts to less than 1/100th of one percent of the total budget for the federal government. It costs taxpayers 39 cents a year. The arts budget for the U.S. is equivalent to the arts budget of Sweden.

My argument is a very simple one... That federally backed loans should not be available to people who are studying degrees which don't socially contribute in a quantifiable sense (I am not saying those degrees don't contribute, just that we can't quantify it).

You can't socially quantify the impact of any degree. What this is in fact is you playing judge and deciding that degree a is worthless and degree b is not, based on no metric other than your own feelings about the degrees. For example, what does a nuclear engineer in Germany contribute to German society in 30 years? Diddly squat. Does that mean we should bar people from studying it? No.

But here's one for you. Quantify the social value of any of the following positions:
a) an art teacher
b) a historian
c) a nurse
d) a police officer
e) a soldier

State the exact dollar value they bring to society.

Fact is, the only thing we can use for such a metric is income and by that standard the executives at Goldman Sachs are worth more than Captain Sully.

The money used to back them should be used to turn federal loans into grants for fields that result in major social contributions. This would force people going into the liberal arts to be either rich, or dependent on their parents having saved money for them to go to school, or on local state programmes, scholarships based on academic performance (which would winnow the number of non-contributing people), and similar programmes.

Yes, we've already heard this authoritarian outlook on society from you before. You restating it does not make it in any way more applicable or valid. It flies in the face of every academic institution in history. Even the soviet state had no such draconian outlook on education. Heck, not even Dracon had. And yes, it is increasingly authoritarian and holds shades of the views the Nazis held about liberal arts.

The basic goal here is to deter people who are not going to contribute academically from doing something that will massively saddle them with debt.

Then inform them about that. But don't make their choices for them. Unless you believe dictator marina will do a better job, at which point I am going to nominate this thread for comedy awards. And btw it is not as if the US spends massive amounts of money on those bad, bad liberal arts.

BTW, if "going into debt" is suddenly worse than people not being able to do what they want to, we may just as well forbid them from doing anything that gets them into debt in the first place. Like doing expensive things, going on vacation, having non-life saving surgery, buying houses etc.

I am asserting that, the opposite of Bakustra, I believe that the average person consistently and always makes terrible decisions, and will base their beliefs on random emotions and personal biases no matter how much information and education they are given, and therefore easy credit for studying at university is a terrible idea because it loads people up with debt to pursue their dream, with no way to pay off that debt, which creates a huge economic drag on the country, and that the average person will accrue that debt pursuing their dreams even though they have no way of ever paying it off, harming the body politic with their defaults and strains on the programme making the loans.

Yes, yes, the USA would have so much less debt if those damned liberal arts majors would not all go into bankruptcy. I'd like you to state the exact number of dollars they cost the USA in annual costs. You must have some numbers available to you right? I mean, it is not as if you are just shooting your mouth, right?

My first professor in a collegiate institution was at a community college and taught history, and he told me that one of his jobs there was to, by his classes, try and help show to people if they should be continuing on to an academic career or if they should look into a job as a roofer, and that there was nothing wrong with being a roofer, it was just, some people are only fit for that, and need to find it out before they go on to a full university and load up on tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt that fucks them over for life since you can never get student loans forgiven in bankruptcy in the US like you can other kinds of loans.

So? That holds true for any student in any field.

[Colonel Olrik]

Concerning the German educational system, it varies a bit from state to state, but the system is set up in a way that only a minority gets to go to University and get degree. This is achieved by separating the kids, around the age of 10, into two classes, strictly based on their grades. The majority goes to Real school to learn a profession or a trade, while the others go to Gymnasium, which is the equivalent to high school and gives direct access to University. This system is the reason why youth unemployment is relatively low in Germany, and is supported by the inumerous apprenticeship positions available in companies throughout the country.

In theory, some can do the Real school and learn a trade, and then pass some exams and go to University, in practice this seldom happens. The system has some advantages, but also significant problems. Kids that are late bloomers have their legs cut off, children with emmigrant backgounds go much more rarely to Gymnasium as they tend to lack the support at home which is very important in young ages, etc. From my point of view as a naturalised German that received his education in a friendly and more democratically minded EU country concerning education, it is unfair. On the other hand, it's good to be an engineer here - their system just doesn't produce enough of them.

[K. A. Pital]

Except I never said get rid of Liberal Arts education, in fact I said we should keep them and expand access to them to make them free, but change them to a more community college area where cost are far more kept in line. Your points would only be true if I said 'Lets teach people only their majors and nothing else" which is not what I said.

You can't artificially limit access to majors either. The best idea would be the ability to switch between majors on a year-to-year basis, which also requires a lot of flexibility in the system.

[Alphawolf55]

BTW, if "going into debt" is suddenly worse than people not being able to do what they want to, we may just as well forbid them from doing anything that gets them into debt in the first place. Like doing expensive things, going on vacation, having non-life saving surgery, buying houses etc.

No one is arguing that any amount of debt is bad, they're arguing about the obtrusive debt college students are being put in. We put limits on the type of loans people can get for houses and for cars, we limit based on practicality the type of loans someone is able to take out for starting a business. Yes banks ignored these general rules and guidelines and it ended up badly.

[Thanas]

..and your argument is?

[Alphawolf55]

That your point doesn't work because we already decided as a society that we should limit the amount of debt people can acquire (except for credit cards but fuck credit cards) and by your basic logic "Let people do what what they want" we should just get rid of those standards and let people take up massive amounts of debt even if it's only going to be a burden.

[Thanas]

That your point doesn't work because we already decided as a society that we should limit the amount of debt people can acquire and by your basic logic "Let people do what what they want" we should just get rid of those standards and let people take up massive amounts of debt even if it's only going to be a burden.

If that was my point then you might have an argument. As it is not, you can just reread my post and figure out what I actually said.

[Alphawolf55]

I read what you said, you said that if we wish to deter people from taking on ridiculous loans we should inform them better you then took a shot at people who think debt is a bad thing.

You might've had a completely different point, but your statement doesn't reflect that at all.

[Thanas]

I read what you said, you said that if we wish to deter people from taking on ridiculous loans we should inform them better you then took a shot at people who think debt is a bad thing.

You might've had a completely different point, but your statement doesn't reflect that at all.

Yes, if you would take a single point out of a whole paragraph then you might think so. I assume people are competent and can read the whole argument. But here goes, for your benefit only:

a) The state does not have the right to dictate to people what they can or cannot do with their lives
b) It is impossible to judge the cost/benefit ratio of how much people contribute to society
c) Funding as a whole is miniscule for the liberal arts anyway
d) using debt as a controlling factor for what education people get is stupid. You might just as well forbid people from having surgeries which are not lifesaving but improve their quality of life anyway.

Now, you chose to only attack d. But your argument fails even there, as nobody in the USA is prohibited from taking on loads and loads of debt from surgery costs.

[Alphawolf55]

A) Yes they do. The state dictates all the time what people can do, and not only in the case of "Hey you can't harm the guy next to you" we dictate or at least use to set up standards for things like what businesses can do, what type of loans people can take out. That's a suprisingly libertarian argument coming from you.

B) Agree and disagree. It's hard to judge an individual's contribution to society, it's a bit easier to judge a group's, you can't do it perfectly and it's hard to do it in a pure dollar amount but cost estimates can be made to justify programs and investments.

C) True but I would like to see that changed, I would like to see tuition at public schools being 100% covered by the Government even for the liberal arts as long we include some kind of increased barrier to college that would hopefully improve education and stop making degrees the new high school diploma.

D) Agree and disagree. There's nothing wrong with providing incentives to choose certain career and cheaper education and less debt can be a tool to used so, I don't think we should try to make it "One side provides free education the other side crippling debt". Also read your own words, notice you say "improve quality of life" do you think the cost of a four year university if it's not going to be utilized drastically improves one's life? I don't deny that education is a virtue and that it has it's importance that can make people more fulfilled, but is it worth such a huge cost (60-100,000 dollars) for that fulfillment?

Even then when getting loans for plastic surgery you still have to prove you can pay it back, we don't just give loans out regardless of ability to pay. I mean I guess you could do that for college but seeing as college kids usually have no income, I don't see it as a viable option.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

What a brilliant retort. I am sure we can apply this reasoning to any other argument and it would just be as valid. Let's see, the presence of free black people in the 1700s obviously meant there wa no slavery whatsoever in the americas.

But it shows that not providing student aid does not in fact quash different intellectual opinions.

Also, that damned funding for the arts.

The National Endowment amounts to less than 1/100th of one percent of the total budget for the federal government. It costs taxpayers 39 cents a year. The arts budget for the U.S. is equivalent to the arts budget of Sweden.

US Students collectively owe ONE TRILLION DOLLARS in student debt, Thanas, which must be roughly paid off over a period of 15 years. Of that, 800 billion is federally backed student loans. The fact that the programme costs less than 100 billion a year to run is immaterial, and is in no way connected to the National Endowment for the Arts. This is about the fact that liberal arts programmes in the US are fueled by the government getting people in debt.

Now, only 32.6% of people are getting degrees which should, broadly speaking, be funded. So let's make it clear that we're talking about a sum similar in size to the military budget of the UK being spent every year on subsidizing liberal arts and humanities studies in the US.

You can't socially quantify the impact of any degree. What this is in fact is you playing judge and deciding that degree a is worthless and degree b is not, based on no metric other than your own feelings about the degrees. For example, what does a nuclear engineer in Germany contribute to German society in 30 years? Diddly squat. Does that mean we should bar people from studying it? No.

But here's one for you. Quantify the social value of any of the following positions:
a) an art teacher
b) a historian
c) a nurse
d) a police officer
e) a soldier

State the exact dollar value they bring to society.

Fact is, the only thing we can use for such a metric is income and by that standard the executives at Goldman Sachs are worth more than Captain Sully.

I'm quite certain we can statistically analyze the social impact of, say, doctors-per-capita and healthcare professionals per capita and regularly do (do I even have to mention this?), and it would be quite easy to extend that analysis to scientists and engineers in terms of development metrics.

Yes, we've already heard this authoritarian outlook on society from you before. You restating it does not make it in any way more applicable or valid. It flies in the face of every academic institution in history. Even the soviet state had no such draconian outlook on education. Heck, not even Dracon had. And yes, it is increasingly authoritarian and holds shades of the views the Nazis held about liberal arts.

Authoritarian possibly, but would you please not instantaneously bring this to Nazism? I am at worst an Austrofascist.

Jokes aside, there is nothing draconian about what I'm saying. I am trying to save my country from complete intellectual collapse; conservatives would gladly eliminate all federal support for higher education and already eliminated all the subsidized loans for graduate students. In this environment we do not have money to spare and must very carefully focus that money and do so by constructing arguments which conservatives can be beaten with effectively to reach the middle-American population. Degrees which result in coherent benefits for society must be used as a bludgeon against those who would eviscerate all of higher education. We cannot even implement real healthcare in this country and you think we have any grounds to even be discussing free education?

\Then inform them about that. But don't make their choices for them. Unless you believe dictator marina will do a better job, at which point I am going to nominate this thread for comedy awards. And btw it is not as if the US spends massive amounts of money on those bad, bad liberal arts.

BTW, if "going into debt" is suddenly worse than people not being able to do what they want to, we may just as well forbid them from doing anything that gets them into debt in the first place. Like doing expensive things, going on vacation, having non-life saving surgery, buying houses etc.

Well, we should be funding things crucial to life and happiness like healthcare before other things. In general I oppose any kind of debt spending that is not a form of investment, however. I get sick to the stomach over my own student loan debt more often than you can imagine; but I hold myself to the recommended 8% of projected income a month in monthly payments on loans for the lower third of typical engineering salaries in the US. If people did this for bachelor history majors in the US you'd have to keep your student debt payments below $150.00 a month. And the US, as demonstrated above, does spend tens of billions of dollars a year on subsidizing liberal arts programmes. It just gets paid back by the debt slavery of the students they duped into studying them.

Yes, yes, the USA would have so much less debt if those damned liberal arts majors would not all go into bankruptcy. I'd like you to state the exact number of dollars they cost the USA in annual costs. You must have some numbers available to you right? I mean, it is not as if you are just shooting your mouth, right?

As I linked above, around 2/3rds of students in the US complete degrees in non-science fields and the total student debt load is approximately 1 trillion dollars at present. So, there are around 675 billion dollars worth of student loan debt which would not exist at all under my programme; the other 325 billion would have been given out as grants to those in the sciences. Furthermore, since when have I addressed pell grants for low income students? Since when did I say those would be limited based on career? We have a social obligation to redress deficiencies in society which prevent people, especially minorities, from having the money to send their children to college to study anything they want to study, and that takes the form of pell grants. I want the debt engine to be stopped cold; I am not advocating ending all federal support for the liberal arts.

So? That holds true for any student in any field.

People who can't hack college entirely tend to study extremely marginal degrees like "Sports Nutrition".

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Sorry that I didn't cite something for the one trillion dollar figure, but it's been all over the place so I wasn't thinking about it. Here is a USA Today article for completeness' sake..

[aerius]

I think that as things stand everybody needs tertiary education of some kind- unskilled labor and semiskilled labor are no longer viable lifetime career options unless you've got another, larger income. And that's only going to get worse as automation proceeds, I think. As to whether that should be college/university or a trade school, I think that both should be viable options. But that requires changing the overall culture significantly too.

Which leads to the next questions:

1) Who's going to pay for it?

2) How is it going to be paid for?

3) What are we going to do to stop this?

[Broomstick]

Question: Are those who are currently US students today aware that the student loan program has undergone changes over time?

When I was in college I couldn't possibly have graduated with more that $20,000 in loan debt total. They just didn't loan the average student as money as they do nowadays. As it was, I borrowed substantially less than that and was able to pay them all off in 10 years (as required) while earning poverty-line wages or just above that.

Now I hear about [insert non-technical major here] students graduating with $80,000, or $100,000, or even more in debt. And I go WTF happened? I really don't know, but somewhere this all went off the rails and I'd really like to know why.

I suspect it does have something to do with expectations - when I was in college I lived in a 10x10 room (3.3 m square for you metric folks), sometimes even with a roommate (for a few weeks with two roommates in that space) and lived off of ramen noodles, bruised vegetables, and discount hotdogs. I'd hang my laundry up on a line in my room so I wouldn't have to spend money on a dryer. Stuff like that. In other words, I was a poor college student (it was good training for the last four years, for better or worse). Now I hear about some - by my standards - rather palatial dorm rooms and such and I think that maybe that money would have been better spent on the actual education. I guess the notion of the Special Snowflake living a less than middle-class suburban lifestyle for a few years is just unbearable or something. Frankly, I think a couple years of living at poverty level is character building and gives one a broader perspective, but maybe I'm just a bitter old hag or something.

I also think that the discounting by society of alternatives like community colleges (either for two years degrees, two years then on to a larger university, or for four year programs where available) and trade schools is also part of the problem.

I do think the student loan program can be beneficial but there must be limits. I don't think they should be there because of Duchess' view of people, but because the people taking these loans out are, by and large, young and inexperienced. Fully educated adults fuck up often enough, freshmen college students, if anything, need more protections and guidance. People should not be allowed to borrow more than they can be reasonably expected to pay off in 10-15 years. That does mean that medical students are going to be able to borrow more than history majors. You know what? You shouldn't spend as much getting a history degree as getting an MD.

[Broomstick]

My argument is a very simple one... That federally backed loans should not be available to people who are studying degrees which don't socially contribute in a quantifiable sense (I am not saying those degrees don't contribute, just that we can't quantify it).

Why are you against permitting people to borrow money under a program where they have to (outside of death or permanent disability) pay it back? I can certainly understand limits on the amount borrowed, but to entirely eliminate the option to borrow for certain degrees? Why? Because YOU don't personally see the utility? Do you have any other reason for such a systematic exclusion?

This would force people going into the liberal arts to be either rich, or dependent on their parents having saved money for them to go to school, or on local state programmes, scholarships based on academic performance (which would winnow the number of non-contributing people), and similar programmes. Wards of the State would be fully funded in anything they wish to do, because it's an obligation on society to provide for foster children and such.

Great – so rich people and orphans can study the liberal arts, but anyone else is shit out of luck? Do you actually think before posting such drivel, or do you honestly believe the liberal arts should be reserved solely to the wealthiest?

Also – and really, this is yet another example of you making pronouncements on subject you know little or nothing about, which makes you look stupid (and you're not stupid, just narrow-minded and stubborn on occasion) – not everything depends on academics! Once again, you show your bias. There are areas of human endeavor where a portfolio of work (that is, actual accomplishments or product) is far more valuable than whatever grades you got in school. You consistently ignore this, probably because you are for the most part ignorant of such areas of endeavor.

The basic goal here is to deter people who are not going to contribute academically from doing something that will massively saddle them with debt.

First – not everyone contributes “academically”. My sister the MD sure as hell isn't contributing “academically” to anything, as she does no research, but she does definitely contribute to a better society. Your bias is showing again.

Second – one can obtain a “liberal arts degree” (which, if I understand the Zeon Definition properly, is pretty much anything that's not math, science, engineering, or medicine) without going “massively into debt” even if one is not expect to make a large wage. I certainly managed it, as did most of my friends/peers who also went to college when I did. You don't do that by cutting off loans entirely, you do it by limiting the amount that can be borrowed. This still allows students choice, it still allows programs to compete, but because there are limits are borrowing colleges have more incentive to NOT raise tuition to the point students can no longer afford it. That's the way it used to be.

Therefore we should remove the inducement to easy excess, and those truly motivated to pursue their dreams will find funding to do so, and will generally perform well enough in their chosen academic field to be productive academics in grad school in it, which is usually necessary in the liberal arts for someone to be contributive in the field in question.

Only if you define “liberal arts” in a very narrow manner, usually with the idea of being a college professor. Liberal arts majors who stop as the baccalaureate then go into NON-academic fields do contribute to society, either not needing to go to grad school, or not doing so until later in life when they have (one hopes) more resources to pursue additional education.

In short, I believe that humans are innately animalistic, depraved, stupid, Hobbesian creatures who act brutishly without social constraints to force goodness, and who we see today in the Tea Party and numerous other similar organisations dedicated to fucking over and killing lots of people through starvation and poerty all so they can get another car loan for a second Yukon Denali, and that if fully educated, they will just add some more educated sounding words to their frothing rant over browns/queers/blacks/commies/wimmins. You of course believe that humans are in fact basically good creatures who when educated will make rational and just decisions.

Then there are those of us who think the true nature of humanity lies somewhere between those two extremes...

My first professor in a collegiate institution was at a community college and taught history, and he told me that one of his jobs there was to, by his classes, try and help show to people if they should be continuing on to an academic career or if they should look into a job as a roofer, and that there was nothing wrong with being a roofer,

Having recently done some roofing work, I can tell you a LOT wrong with being a roofer!

.... it was just, some people are only fit for that, and need to find it out before they go on to a full university and load up on tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt that fucks them over for life since you can never get student loans forgiven in bankruptcy in the US like you can other kinds of loans.

Or maybe we should steer more people towards trade schools and apprenticeships rather than saying a college degree for everyone... but that will require more than just revamping the student loan program.

[Alphawolf55]

Is there honestly a way to deter students from going to college that shouldn't outside of either barriers of qualification through testing or barriers of price? I just don't see how a society that constantly teaches that college is the best part of your life and you're a loser if you don't go, will suddenly change it's tune. Especially when it comes to the media, that is mostly filled with college graduates, who are going to be bias in the messages they send.

[Broomstick]

I think "barriers of qualification" is better than "barriers of price" - it is entirely reasonable to set minimum standards for admission to a program of higher education, and such criteria can be tailored to the course of study. If you can't qualify your options would be to either acquire the skill and reapply, or choose something else.