It’s a politically-charged talking point to discuss “useless” degrees.
I have a question—should we determine whether a degree is useful or useless based on how much money you can earn using the degree? My answer is no, for the following reason: degrees provide some benefits other than benefits that can be directly realized as salary. If you put universities on the hook for student financial outcomes, what you’ve created is a lever for people to dismantle humanities in universities. You can dismantle the arts, literature, sociology, history, and philosophy.
Regardless of whether you think people should get degrees in those fields, I think we are better off having those fields around, and it is also students’ right to determine for themselves which fields they study. If you want to say that universities are liable for students’ choices, then you have to explain why the students are somehow absolved of personal responsibility. Were they deceived? If they were deceived, why does the legislation not target the deception itself?
This out of the way, we can circle back to the complaint—that students, their parents, taxpayers, and donors are paying a lot of money for these degrees; the students are promised career opportunities afterwards; and they often end up in massive debt but without a solid career path.
I think there are other ways we can approach this problem—we can look at the perverse economics that make tuition so expensive, we can provide loan structures that account for which degree you get and your projected future earnings, and we can look at ways to provide better transparency about career outcomes for different degrees. We can work on this problem without taking away students’ self-determination (they should be able to choose degrees that aren’t economically productive) and without dismantling humanities departments.
> I have a question—should we determine whether a degree is useful or useless based on how much money you can earn using the degree? My answer is no, for the following reason: degrees provide some benefits other than benefits that can be directly realized as salary. If you put universities on the hook for student financial outcomes, what you’ve created is a lever for people to dismantle humanities in universities. You can dismantle the arts, literature, sociology, history, and philosophy.
I would agree with this if these degrees didn't require a near-catastrophic load of debt. You mention that we should be looking to bring down tuition costs instead, and while that's a good idea, I think it's a little bit of a distraction from the reality that universities are acting in a predatory capacity. They dress it up in flowery academic terms, but the reality is that one credit hour of math is far more valuable than one credit hour of ancient Roman history, yet they cost the same.
It's one thing if you want to tell students it's their responsibility to recognize the bad return on investment for liberal arts studies, and universities are just bastions of free thought who can't be expected to put a price tag on the beauty of knowledge or whatever.
But students don't have a choice -- they have to take some of these courses for "general education" requirements not directly related to their field of study. So fully half of an engineering student's mandatory costs are credit hours that are a bad return on investment.
If one student chooses to get their degree from a state school at a cost of $10k/year, and another student chooses to go to a private school at $50k/year, why should taxpayers reward the second student, for making a poor financial choice, with 5x the funds?
If there’s going to be student loan debt forgiveness, at least max it out at that person’s average in-state public tuition rate.
When students and universities are both just spending other people’s money, there’s no thought toward financial viability, and the prices will only keep escalating.
You need to wind the clock back. Why did the loan agency authorize granting such a risky loan?
It's not only the student who made the poor financial choice. The government chose to back that loan, and the government chose to make it harder to discharge that debt, and the government chose to provide loans to students attending for-profit colleges, which have a higher rate of student defaults.
The school system doesn’t spend an equal amount of money on each student in the first place. Students with special needs get more—that includes both students with learning disabilities and students who are gifted.
The students who have learning disabilities aren’t “rewarded” with extra per-student spending. Neither are the gifted students. It’s not a reward.
Determining need in the context of disability isn't the same argument, though. That's a cost specific to the individual.
I'm all for public/state schools providing even more assistance to those in need, but I couldn't be more opposed to private institutions being free to charge $500k/year or $1mil/year, and then we as taxpayers just pay it because someone decided they liked the dorm rooms better. That doesn't make sense at all.
Well, one of the reasons why institutions are free to charge so much in the first place is because student loans are so hard to get discharged. Normal loans get discharged in bankruptcy. Student loans don’t.
> There’s a huge issue of integrity in the pre-sub-remedial course. If you’re teaching 3rd grade material to an adult, you consider that adult to have the cognitive skills of an 8 year old at best. There’s nothing wrong with trying to improve education and learning, but at some point, someone should think “This student didn’t learn this in 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. Maybe he doesn’t want to learn this and we shouldn’t loan him money to learn it.” Failing that, admissions should think “Maybe loaning this person money that goes right to us would be taking advantage of someone with a mental disability and it would be not be acting with integrity to do that.”
> ...the bill would hold universities partially accountable for defaults by their student borrowers.
Some possible outcomes here:
1. Universities might be incentivized to underwrite the loans themselves to have more control over defaults.
2. Universities might change admissions to prefer those who are less likely to default.
3. Universities might prefer or require no financing.
4. Universities will require more information about and be more sensitive to any loans that students make.
> Under the bill, if poor student outcomes resulted, institutions would be financially responsible for a portion of any loans their students struggled to pay off.
"poor student outcomes" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It could change school administration incentives drastically depending on the definition.
Unfortunately, I think this "solution" will make universities change a lot of things before they change curriculums/teaching/courses. Ultimately, they will think: what control do we really have over whether a graduate makes a lot of money?
Ordinarily I'd agree, but I don't think these degrees are being marketed as vocational credentials like you'd see at a vocational school. If you get one of the more questionable humanities degrees and expect it to get you a job, that's not exactly a reasonable expectation. Some degrees basically double as a vocational credential (CS, medicine, and even journalism), but not all.
A big problem is that a lot of people think that doing what they're told by the "smart people in charge" (which might include their parents), they can expect to succeed in life. And a lot of people told the kids to follow their passions but also get into the most elite school possible in order to impress some HR person. This was bad advice.
I think when considering proposals such as this one, it's important to first consider what the purpose of university is. To many people, universities are just another kind of school. To others, the research mission comes first, and teaching students is a second order effect. This is codified in the mission statements of various universities -- for instance Caltech's: "The mission of the California Institute of Technology is to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education."
This proposal would tie the existence of a program and its associated research directly to the employability of the (mostly undergraduate?) students. Presumably entire disciplines would be slaughtered overnight, and not just the ones that right wing commentators like to go on about. You could kiss goodbye to essentially all arts education, and most niche sciences like Archaeology. You'd then massively shift to vocational degrees like engineering, law and medicine.
I think that one issue that has been identified is that the federal government is underwriting a whole bunch of student loans that will likely never be paid, and universities are not incentivised at all to keep prices down. Employability is somewhat orthogonal to that.
You also have to deal with the millions of people who already have these loans, who undeniably need bailing out at least somewhat.
Before it was called Caltech it was Throop Polytechnic Institute, and 1911 Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech there where he said:
> I want to see institutions like Throop turn out perhaps ninety-nine of every hundred students as men who are to do given pieces of industrial work better than any one else can do them; I want to see those men do the kind of work that is now being done on the Panama Canal and on the great irrigation projects in the interior of this country—and the one-hundredth man I want to see with the kind of cultural scientific training that will make him and his fellows the matrix out of which you can occasionally develop a man like your great astronomer, George Ellery Hale.
Within 10 years Throop decided that others could deal with turning out those 99 out of 100 students for industrial work, and it would concentrate on Roosevelt's one-hundredth man.
I think it should be noted in advance that The Federalist is a right-wing extremist rag that peddles conspiracy theories, and that earnestly discussing things published there is unlikely to be productive. Seriously, spend any amount of time reading about who they are and what they do.
Degrees look less useless if you think of them as socializing teens into an adulthood of interpreting experiences informed by new information. It shouldn't be a huge mystery why non-vocational college campuses lean toward the political left and why the federalist wants to tear that apart. Of course it would be nice to have a collective recognition that most careers don't require any education at all, but the schools aren't the ones to address that. Trades require trade school anyway.
I have a question—should we determine whether a degree is useful or useless based on how much money you can earn using the degree? My answer is no, for the following reason: degrees provide some benefits other than benefits that can be directly realized as salary. If you put universities on the hook for student financial outcomes, what you’ve created is a lever for people to dismantle humanities in universities. You can dismantle the arts, literature, sociology, history, and philosophy.
Regardless of whether you think people should get degrees in those fields, I think we are better off having those fields around, and it is also students’ right to determine for themselves which fields they study. If you want to say that universities are liable for students’ choices, then you have to explain why the students are somehow absolved of personal responsibility. Were they deceived? If they were deceived, why does the legislation not target the deception itself?
This out of the way, we can circle back to the complaint—that students, their parents, taxpayers, and donors are paying a lot of money for these degrees; the students are promised career opportunities afterwards; and they often end up in massive debt but without a solid career path.
I think there are other ways we can approach this problem—we can look at the perverse economics that make tuition so expensive, we can provide loan structures that account for which degree you get and your projected future earnings, and we can look at ways to provide better transparency about career outcomes for different degrees. We can work on this problem without taking away students’ self-determination (they should be able to choose degrees that aren’t economically productive) and without dismantling humanities departments.