Student-loan-debt-forgiveness plans by --biden-administration

Finance
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Purdue does it. The university became a lender themselves and setup an income share agreement. They use the estimated income after graduation to give you a percentage of income necessary to repay the loans. In turn, that limits the amount they’ll lend you. In their comparison tool, the very first thing they ask is what’s your major and your graduation date.

There’s no reason to assume this type of lending cannot be done elsewhere. It does not prevent people from pursueing their dreams. It just bakes in expectations that the loans are gonna cost you more of you expected future income. Pick film studies and you’ll have an income share of 4.58%. Pick Biomedical engineering, your income share is gonna be 3.84%. That’s actuarian science because they predict that one major is gonna earn less than another so the repayment % needs to be higher for majors earning less so the net dollar repaid align. It also puts some skin in the game for the university itself in terms of backing the quality of their education. If you effectively don’t get your money’s worth for their degree, neither will they so they have vested interest to provide you a good education for the money.

You still assume that lenders will lend you as willy-nilly as they currently do. For marginal degrees, they’d adjust the interest rate to reflect the higher risk of default, ask you to provide collateral, or simply refuse to lend you altogether. Maybe the universities will as a result also reconsider their fees or their major offerings. Suck to have a passion for something that doesn’t pay but life isn’t fair. And this system would be fairer than having the current system where the value of different degrees is disconnected from reality.

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We agree. But the reality is, reign in the lending and that is what will be constantly highlighted as being “the” problem. The rabblerousers will “cancel” you and I for making basketweaving a rich-person’s degree, that the average student is unfairly not allowed to pursue.

Let’s not forget that the driving force behind this hole is not the cost of college or worthless degrees, it’s been the incessent expectation that everyone is entitled to go to college. Had that expectation never developed, most people struggling with student loans wouldnt be in that situation today.

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Clearly we need the government to pay for degrees no rational person would sign up for. Where else will we get our next generation of grievance studies majors to staff HR and diversity officer roles?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-worth-cost-debt-major-computer-science-11636142138

In a report for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, I calculated the return on investment for nearly 30,000 different bachelor’s degree programs. I estimated the median lifetime earnings for graduates of each program based on Education Department and census data, and subtracted tuition costs and the wages missed while enrolled. I then compared that number with a scenario in which those students didn’t attend college, using the earnings of high-school graduates as a baseline and then adjusting for demographics, cognitive ability and family background. As a result I was able to compare the net boost in lifetime earnings students got from each college degree.

The results show that 28% of bachelor’s degrees, weighted by enrollment, do not have a net positive return. More than a quarter of students are in programs that aren’t worth the cost.

What’s actually worth the cost won’t surprise you.

Programs in engineering, computer science, economics and nursing all yield a high return, often increasing their students’ net lifetime earnings by $500,000 or more. But a majority of programs in art, music, philosophy and psychology leave their average students financially worse off.

One of the nation’s highest-return programs is the computer-science major at Harvard University. This degree has an expected value of more than $3 million. But attending the nation’s most elite school is no guarantee of financial security. Harvard’s ethnic and gender studies program leaves its students worse off by around $47,000 on average, according to my estimates.

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It sounds about right. But this skips the issue of why cost is so high in the first place.

One thing that is asinine is the requirement for 120 credit hours to graduate. When you look, the number of classes in your major are frequently around only half of that number. The rest being frankly filler classes of very limited usefulness. General education is largely non-value adding and certainly does not require the 40+ credit hours the kids need to take to graduate.

It’d be pretty easy for all these diplomas to shave a third of the tuition costs by streamlining the fluffy bunny classes that are non-essential. It’d make way more kids able to graduate in 3 years, exchanging 25% of the cost of attendance for a year of gainful employment. But I guess it won’t happen soon since that’d mean getting rid of the dead weight of faculties teaching classes in wokeness while milking students via meal plans and overpriced housing.

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General education is non-value adding?
Fluffy bunny classes that are non-essential?

What are you talking about specifically?

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Daughter is chem engineering major. 74 credits go into STEM related classes for her BS. That leaves 46 credits to graduate.

She has to take 3 credits in a class in creative thinking, none of them of vague overlap with her major. She has to take another class in cultural diversity, again her options are all humanities-based. She has to take a class in civic engagement, another in Core Humanities (all 6 options being culture, theater, film studies, music, arts or literature), another class in core social sciences (her only options are macroeconomics, American history, US government, sociology, anthropology, or psychological science). I could go on but she has about 2 semesters worth of classes totally unrelated to her major and that will make little to no difference in her ability to perform her work appropriately or not.

I have nothing against the particular classes taught when they fit into their respective majors. Like was brought up before, some of these same majors may arguable not be worth the money but that’s a separate point.

But to me, many of these Gen Ed. classes are is at the level of hobby interests, not something that’s fundamental to educate grads in for them to get a good job, and especially not at the cost of attendance of an entire year (averages $37k/yr in the US). High-school should be good enough for a lot of the general education requirements, no? After all, the rest of the population without a college degree does not get these classes and somehow manages to function normally as citizens.

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But college isnt an apprenticeship, either. If you want to only learn the relevant job skills, go to a trade school. It isnt value directly related to your future career, and it may not be worth the tuition cost, but there is value in having everyone experience such humanities/etc electives.

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It sounds like you want your daughter to have an engineering degree from a 4 year engineering trade school and not a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in engineering.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but that isn’t really what our college and university system is set up to do. I think it should be an option that some private schools should consider implementing for parents like you.

But, just to add a little context from someone that went to a large state university with a well known engineering school - nearly half of the kids that entered my school with an engineering major don’t graduate with one. Many figure that out right away after their first freshman engineering intro classes, but several find out they can’t cut it later in the sophomore year. These “fluffy bunny” classes are general ed classes, but they are usually taken in your first two years. So that when people change their major later in the sophomore year, they didn’t “waste” their first 2 years in school. They spent the majority of those years taking those gen ed classes that are needed for all majors. Not to mention the fact that a large portion of kids don’t even have a major when they first get to school and use their experience in those gen ed classes to figure out what they should major in.

But just to be clear, I have no issue with wanting 2.5-3 year trade schools awarding students with the equivalent degree in one particular field that a BS would get you, but without the “bs” that goes along with the BS. I suppose if my gen ed credit hours cost multiples of what they did, I might agree with you, but at the price I paid, I thought my gen ed classes helped make me a more well rounded college graduate. I think there is a value to those classes and I would only put 1 or 2 of them in the category of non-value added. And I don’t think any of them at my school were “fluffy bunny” classes, though those classes probably did exist. If you let your daughter take some crappy sociology class instead of macroeconomics (a useful class that isn’t fluffy bunny in the least), that’s on you.

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I had a slightly better experience: of the ~130 required credits, just 24 were non-STEM gen ed & writing, and only about half of those were completely useless.

Universities accept transfer credits or grant waivers for non-major classes from AP/IB and community colleges, so that’s one solution.

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She did transfer 27 credits from IB and 9 from AP classes but I was more talking systemically. She’s on track to graduate in 3 years. But the 120 credit should not be a hard requirement. If you’re undecided, sure explore options, feel free to change major, etc. But if you know what you want to study and only want classes related to your major as defined by each college what they consider cores classes for that major, there should be a way to get just these.

I got my BS overseas where it was only 3 years all of which were STEM. I wasn’t sure between physics and chemistry but could change course. However, the only requirements for my BS were the core STEM classes related to it. No hard-coded courses completely unrelated. And that did not hurt me one bit on the GRE.

And as far as going to trade schools, first availability is just not there compared to colleges. Second, some careers just require a specific degree to get hired. So this is often not a practical or viable alternative. The much simpler solution is to have fixed requirements for various degrees but no overall number of credits required so that there is a way to graduate from college faster than the current 4-5 years it takes most kids.

IMO all other solutions/remediation options are a band-aid. The college hard requirement of a specific number of total credits to graduate is simply unnecessary and only implemented to keep students paying fees for longer.

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I think we all see your point in that for some students there’s no point in taking unrelated courses, I don’t think it’s all about collecting fees, because, as we already agreed, students can transfer or waive requirements by taking the necessary courses elsewhere for free (IB/AP) or cheap (community college), so the universities do not get to collect those fees. All gen ed can be transferred in, and you could even test out of the low-level major courses (for example, a passing score on AP CompSci can get you out of CS 101, or even 102, assuming both teach the same programming language).

I don’t know where the credit requirement comes from, but since it is uniform, it may be an accreditation requirement. As discussed above, a college degree is supposed to represent at least a somewhat rounded person, not a robot that only knows enough about one narrow subject to get a job in that one field.

Since you hail from somewhere behind the iron curtain (I’m guessing), it’s probably not a fair comparison. Do you think your secondary education (pre-college) was more advanced and demanding than the secondary education in the USA? Don’t use your daughter as an example, considering she took like 1.5-2 years worth of IB/AP classes in high school, which is very atypical AFAIK. Her education may be on par with what you received overseas, but she’s one in a million (well, maybe one in a thousand) US students.

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I’m not sure where it comes from either but every single college we’ve looked at for our first two college students all had this. That’s across 8 different states, most public schools but some private as well.

I don’t know by what metric to measure well-roundedness. But in the workplace, I cannot say that it has done me any disservice to not have to take Art appreciation or introduction to EDM during my college years. Certainly it had no bearing on my research when doing my Ph.D in the US. I have 2 data point for this since DH also got his undergrad done abroad (France). At the current cost, IMO well-roundedness is a luxury many cannot afford.

Good guess. I’d say secondary education was more demanding but it’s subjective. A combination of different era and different system. Certainly true in STEM. A lot of the first year classes in college is stuff that we learned in 11-12th grade. But we had much less extra-curricular activities at school too.

But wouldn’t it mean that this general ed stuff should be taught in high-school at a much lower cost? Either way, it’s too expensive to learn this basic stuff in college IMO.

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It is taught in high school but only at the AP/IB level, so not everyone gets it. So in a way college is more expensive for the average-achievers, not for those capable of learning and determined to save money.

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No option for business or technical writing? Just curious.

Great discussion. I would argue that at least some of this “filler” contributes to a well-rounded person. Maybe it is too much though.

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Very good article (sorry possible paywall) about a CA community college getting tons of sophisticated bots / fake students all signing up at the same time for the same courses, some of which continued to remain minimally active their classes.

“As I looked into it further,” Rich said, “I realized that about one-third of my class, which had about 30 students, were actually fake students.

“In my opinion, it appears there are at least two different scams at play,” Rich explained. “One is where ‘fake students’ are enrolling, then likely paying someone else to do the minimum amount of work to remain ‘active’ in the class in order to qualify for financial aid. The other scam appears to involve ‘bots,’ where the person behind the scam is simply trying to register as many ‘fake students’ or ‘bots’ into the system as possible so they can get in, get the financial aid and get out. Little work is being completed by these ‘bots.'”

Based on her discoveries, Rich began looking into what classes the “fake students” had taken prior to hers. She discovered many had taken the same classes with the same professor in the summer. Rich also realized that 11 of her new, suspected “fake students” were anthropology majors.

“That’s unheard of,” Rich said. “I don’t get 11 anthropology majors in any of my classes, which lead me to believe the bots had gotten in and just picked anthropology, which is I believe one of the first majors you can enroll in going from the top of the alphabet down. That just does not happen.”

They suspect it’s a scam to collect financial aid, covid aid, or debt forgiveness.

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I don’t know where the credit requirement comes from, but since it is uniform, it may be an accreditation requirement.

I don’t have a reference to fully validate this for you – but 120 hours is definitely the standard minimum for a 4-year undergraduate degree in the USA. (almost certainly a hard requirement for regional accreditation, which is the one that matters)

And the gen-ed classes are all part of the regional accreditation requirements to cover certain basic coursework – coupled with a few “state specific” requirements that get imposed by each state’s board of regents (at least for public schools)

I know that, at least at the state board of regents level, there are maximums as well.

My engineering program had 132 required hours, and that bumped up on the maximum they were allowed to require for the program. (though you could certainly take more as electives)

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That’s fair. In 2018, 39% of high-school kids took at least one AP, 25% of students got a 3+ on an AP test. But that’s often not enough to get you the credits you need in most cases.

For my daughter, she could skip the first year of calculus/physics/chem classes only with a 5 on AP test. With 4, she’d get one semester of credit only, with 3, she’d have gotten credit for a non-stem major course in these subjects (useless for a STEM major).

Depending on subject, rate of getting 5 is between 10-20% for most STEM subjects (daughter took Chem 10%, Calculus 18%, Physics 23%, Statistics 16%, English 5%, Environmental Science 6%, and French 13%). That’s of the 39% of students taking 1+ AP. In other words, to get college credit via AP, many AP exams have a success rate of 4-7% of the total high-school student population.

4-7% (per subject) is beyond average-achievers by quite a bit so it seems to me like the system is not really working as a viable way to basically reduce college graduation time by a year. In comparison, if you take regular college classes giving credits equivalent to these AP classes, pass rate is way way higher. And finally, there are also a lot of Gen Ed classes that you simply cannot take AP class/exam for.

I indeed take our daughter as an exception case in that she transferred just enough to graduate with Chem. Eng major in 3 years. It shouldn’t take tons of 4/5s on AP/IB exams, national merit scholarship finalist status to hope to graduate in 3 years if you know what you want to study and prepared for it through high-school courses. IMO that just excuses to pad the curriculum with filler and over-charging in the name of the dubiously marketable well-roundedness skill set.

In interview of new hires I do about 2-3 times a year, well-roundedness is not a skill I look for. I just don’t see how a lot of these filler classes contribute to a skill I’d be looking for in an applicant. Some classes she has to take such as scientific ethics or personal finance, sure can fit but like I see it, about 6-8 other classes are just going to be utterly useless to a chem engineer.

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I understand the part about collect financial aid. I almost thought about taking a class, loan then consolidating so I can qualify for Direct Loans (mine are FFEL quasi fed/ pubic loans that are really private for all practical purposes inspite of using UHEAA.

That’s the real scam, private banks that are back stopped by the feds, and collect fees. Direct Loans are the way to go if the feds are on the hook anyways.

Everyone in the system including college, faculty are getting rich (one of my state school profs was married to dean, made 500K/yr lived in a mansion)

The only ones left holding the bag are students and the feds.

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Considering a bachelor’s degree is 4 years of school, yes, yes it should take that much to graduate in 3 years.

I understand your point about overcharging considering the cost of college right now, but these total credit hour requirements and gen ed requirements have been around WAY longer than the cost has been astronomical. So no, they are not excuses to make more money.

You don’t want your daughter to have a bachelor’s degree. You want her to have a trade school degree to allow her to be a chemical engineer. Those schools don’t exist in the US. You’re in the majority when it comes to being pissed about the cost of a degree, but you’re in the minority when it comes to how useful it is for young adults to meet gen ed requirements as part of a bachelor’s degree.

You’re also in the 1% when it comes to knowing this sort of stuff. I don’t think there was a single parent of anyone I graduated with that could spout half of what you just said here. And I’m sure this only scratches the surface of what your know about your daughter’s higher education. If I were as invested in getting my kid through college and into the workforce as you are, I’d probably have the same opinions you do about them finishing in 3 years and disagreeing with certain gen ed class requirements.

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I’m actually not that mad about it on a personal basis. Our fist two kids so far got merit scholarships allowing them to graduate for what should be around $80-100k each at great public schools. And I think their majors are gonna more than pay for that cost in the long run, but I sympathize with people complaining about out of control costs. What bugs me is that the ways to mitigate these costs actually run almost counter-culture.

The concept of “dream school” is about as valid as the nonsense about natural diamonds and wedding costs. High-school advisors keep telling kids to have the wrong conversations about colleges, starting from dreaming about unattainable overpriced ego-boosting institutions at which many will fail, emphasizing college experience vs. academics, and way down the line factoring in affordability and the concept of value for money. Its like pitching Teslas to minimum wage workers. Sure you can’t afford them, but you’re gonna love them!

And on top of that, preparedness for college is often abysmal. Some kids take remedial classes earning them no credit towards a degree but still paying through the nose for them. This is a failure of the educational system IMO. That substitutes affordable high-school education by much higher priced college education. And even the so-called remedies are far from being free (AP or IB exams at $100-150 a pop are a bargain vs the cost of college credits but it still shifts the benefit to already privileged kids whose parents can afford the investment).

Maybe it’s because I was educated under a system that had a more demanding high-school curriculum but I just don’t see the current US education system as working well for the country from a talent management standpoint. Wouldn’t it be better to increase efficiency of our education system (not just college) rather than relying on our continued ability to import talent educated cheaply elsewhere?

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