We’ve been solving the wrong problem for decades and backstopping the problem by blaming colleges. People weren’t doing this until most of the decent paying factory and related jobs went to India, China, and Bangladesh. Back in the day, kids right out of high school could get jobs that could at least net you a comfortable life in a small apartment, and depending on the industry, possibly on the path to home ownership. Today, that path is mostly gone, and as such people who would have never seen college as something they want are shunted to college where they would compete with more diligent scholars for a dwindling (thanks computer networks and soon enough add AI to this) number of desk jobs where they pretend to care about excel spreadsheets of meaningless data. The actual problem isn’t college or student loans. Those problems would solve themselves if we solved the actual problem— there aren’t enough good jobs that actually pay a living wage, and because there are so few, businesses are requiring college (and doing more above that at this point like an MA and internships) to the tune of mortgage levels of cost. If there were enough “can live on my own and possibly afford to have children” paying jobs the business could not hide them behind the paywall of college because someone else wouldn’t and the employees would choose that path instead. If we focused on creating those jobs, and therefore creating a situation where businesses compete for workers instead of one in which workers compete for jobs, then people would choose college less often and costs would go down a bit to attract more students.
No, the actual problem is college and student loans and I will show you why. ninety two percent of student loan debt is federal. you fills out your FAFSA you gets your check. This is because first the FFEL then the FDLP guarantee these loans, therefore they are the lowest rates available to anyone. Note that these debts are not serviced by the US Government, merely originated. THIS IS IMPORTANT: the servicers of these debts have zero input into who gets the loans and zero risk. If you default on your student loan, your loan company reports you in default. The federal government pays out the total that you owe to the servicer. The government then garnishes your wages etc to pick-axe what you owe. That's been the same since 1958. What changed with the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention And Consumer Protection Act was that discharging student loan debt through bankruptcy went from "you can't do it until seven years after you graduate" to "you can't do it period ever we will claw your student loan debt back from your estate." Sure - NAFTA moved a bunch of manufacturing jobs overseas. they had already been drowned by the service sector and of the jobs that required more education, a goodly portion of them were in - wait for it - education: 'cuz here's the thing. You gotta go to college to get a good job. The government will give you whatever money you need to go to college. Loan companies will make that money available to you no matter what because it's not their fucking money and even private loans are absolutely risk-free because not even bankruptcy will spare you. What happened next was entirely predictable. Jeff Selingo has written like four books about this. I've read three of them. Ten years ago he argued that the way to pick a college is by the size of their endowment because it showed they were less predatory. Five years ago he argued that you shouldn't even bother, just find a b-tier place that will give you lots of scholarships because it ultimately doesn't matter. I was in architecture when all that sweet, sweet tuition money was flowing in back in like 2000-2004; my name is on the drawings for a couple dozen buildings that wouldn't exist without the bankruptcy protection gold rush. And I mean, here's the thing: for 30 years the only metric anyone cared about was US News and World Report (really!) and they very stringently never factored cost into their rankings. It's the fucking colleges. non-academic staff has doubled in the past 25 years. You could play chicken-and-egg: if everyone is going to college, why not make it a requirement? If every job requires a college degree, why not send everyone? But no, it's not because all the good, no-college jobs went away. It's because they became college jobs without earning anyone any more money, and they became college jobs because everyone was going to college, and everyone was going to college because we created a society where eighteen year olds signed up to take on $120k in debt to get a degree that might pay them $40k a year eventually. You know what everyone in the world admires? German engineering. You know what's a joke? German engineering. If you're an "ingeneur" in Germany you spent two years at trade school after finishing tenth grade. I have a super-skookum top-of-its-class German CNC machine that's the envy of the world and it was clearly designed and assembled by trade school kids. Anyone who has ever worked on a BMW (as opposed to merely driving one) will back me up - there's a whole bunch of amateurish bullshit in everything coming off the Continent. And yet. Most people would rather have a BMW than a Cadillac. Maybe the jobs are fine. Maybe it's the fucking colleges.The actual problem isn’t college or student loans.
If you could get a good job without college, then the price you’re willing to pay for college is elastic like anything else. You would never sign up to spend $30K a year for a BA if there were large enough pools of good jobs you could get without doing that. Hell, a lot of Gen Z are choosing trade schools over college now because 120K for a $40K salary is a terrible deal. But as long as most good jobs require college, people will not be cost conscious about college. And therefore colleges can get away with charging eye-watering tuition for an education that’s arguably worse than the one their grandparents paid $550 a semester for. Nobody wants to opt out because I mean what’s the alternative? Maybe you can do trades, but if you can’t, you either go to college or go wait tables, stock shelves, or collect garbage. Nobody’s going to say no if they want to be middle class. And until it gets fixed and people have realistic and viable options to not go to college and be able to afford rent and groceries on one paycheck, schools can morph into club med and add conserve room service, massage parlors, and a personal butler for every student to the tune of 200K or more a year. People will still sign the loan papers because the alternative is Walmart.
And if you slap a college degree requirement on every job it's not. There's like five paragraphs up there that directly refute your arguments. The trade school thing is new - and I say that having spent three quarters in trade school within the past ten years. Even then the trade school represents a weird imbalance; the rich kids were leaning harder into 4-years while the poor kids were discovering the difference between "trade school degree" and "learning as you go" was $20k you don't have to pay back. It's the fuckin' colleges and the system of colleges. The jobs did not go away. There's a whole f'n chart up there showing what a lie that is. MORE FUCKING ANECDATA BECAUSE APPARENTLY PLATITUDES ARE ALL ANYBODY THINKS ANYMORE 1. The "Harvard of the Cascades" Friend of mine has a daughter who was pulling in about $6k a month as a babysitter at the age of 17. She's a hella good babysitter. Not spectacular at academics? It actually makes me uncomfortable how much her dad rags on her. She looked at a few degree programs, all highly competitive. The one she opted into has an admittance rate of around 5%. Her dad was super-stoked when she got in. It's for dental hygienics. Little mountain community college three hours out of town. 70 students per quarter. I was talking to my dental hygienist (her name is Gina, and she's awesome) and she said "yeah, it's always been that way. Anybody out of that program writes their own ticket. I had seven job offers without having to apply for anything." Gina graduated in '89. The other programs my friend's daughter were also med-tech related; they were all also programs utterly bereft of boys. 2. What if you threw a degree program and nobody came I went to a couple regents' meetings of the machining program I was in. It was one of four degree programs that particular school ditched in the three years I had any involvement with it. The basic problem was that students would enroll, employers would offer them jobs after a quarter or two, graduation rate would drop to 17% because the only people left in the program were the ones nobody wanted to hire. That college lost their automotive repair program, their small engine repair program and their welding program while I was there and is in the process of losing their machining program (three other local colleges already have). People in that program were leaving for jobs that paid $60, $70k a year, no degree required... or they were doing Running Start. The only guys I know who finished their degrees were a buddy of mine who was going into business for himself and a retiree who mostly liked hanging out with the kids all day. In the time I've been gone they've churned faculty four times because as a state school, their operating expenses are tied to graduation rate and as a state school, their salary levels are flat across the state so an assistant professor in Microsoft's back yard gets the same salary as an assistant professor teaching dental hygiene three hours up into the mountains. __________________________________________________ You don't go to school to be an electrician. You pull wire for an electrician until you're an apprentice, then you twist nuts until you're a journeyman, then you earn enough hours to get a bond and you're done without ever cracking a book. Plumbing is similar. To no one's surprise, there are a lot of "dude jobs" that end up the same - I've got like six people I'm paying over $80 an hour to right now and not a one of them has so much as a quarter of voc. tech under their belts. I'm waiting on all of them - they're all busy AF and if I don't have work for them I get to wait in line with everyone else. You hear about the death of the construction industry and dumb shit like that but if I wanted a GC to take over my job I would be waiting until TWENTY TWENTY EIGHT. There are plenty of jobs that require actual job training. There are plenty of jobs that don't require actual job training. What happened is we ended up with so many people going to college that the ones that don't require actual job training started requiring a degree just to thin the pile, which ended up with a bunch of kids spending four years getting a bachelor's in English just so they can end up in the right pile. You can want this to be about globalization. You can pretend that this is somehow related to off-shoring. But you don't have any facts to back it up. It's about the proliferation of needless degrees and the inflation of the costs of earning them. Full stop.If you could get a good job without college, then the price you’re willing to pay for college is elastic like anything else.
I don’t see how “actually, since you need college to get a good job, people go to college” deals with what I said, which is that if kids didn’t need college for the hope of a good job, then those kids uninterested in academic work would likely make different choices, and this would change everything in the equation. If you could do what most people could do on graduation in 1955 — go get a job pretty much anywhere that paid a livable wage, the demand for college would reduce drastically because people are not choosing college because they have a burning passion to read books on philosophy or English Literature. They want the jobs that the diploma opens to them. If you had viable options for working indoors pushing paper that didn’t require college, I expect enrollment to drop like a rock. This creates all kinds of problems. First that the cost of college is inelastic because people have to go. If they didn’t, there would be a ceiling on the cost of university education— and probably substantially lower than the current 30k a year for 5 years plus room board and meals. Second that colleges have gotten substantially less rigorous as they sop up all the C- students who want a diploma but lack either the skill or the smarts (in many cases both) to earn a degree properly. The first part would probably fix itself if there were rules about how and when you could require a degree. Nobody needs a degree to be a spreadsheet jockey, answer phones, or work in marketing. If those jobs were not allowed to require college unless those specific skills were taught only in university, people who were going to college to do that stuff are going to see the price of a college degree they don’t need and say “you know what, 30k a year to study things I don’t care to learn is a terrible deal.” This clearly would lower demand for college. And with that, the college could no longer jack up prices by double digits every year. At the same time it would solve the professors’ dilemma of having to try to teach kids clearly out of their depth and who have no interest in reading philosophy or literature. Those kids would be the ones opting out. The ones who remain are the ones who need (future doctors, lawyers, and engineers) or actually want a university education. Those kids would actually do the readings, actually study for tests, actually try to write good and interesting papers full of actual thought. Not everyone wants that.
You're arguing that the problem is on the jobs side, and if everyone just got paid more there would be no problems. You have no arguments whatsoever as to why the price of college exploded in the past 20 years. On the other hand, I've now given you two heavily-documented responses explaining EXACTLY why the price of college has exploded over the past 20 years and you're resolutely at if we paid people more college would be cheaper. Okay, so what changed since 1955 other than college loans becoming available to all and dissolving of college debt becoming available to none? Elastic inelastic blah blah blah you wanna give causality a try? Fucking hell, buddy, they absolutely do. Here's an undergrad in spreadsheets tearing apart the biggest conservative political theory of 2010: Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's easy. The problem isn't the education, the problem is the cost of education and the cost of education is related to policy.I don’t see how “actually, since you need college to get a good job, people go to college” deals with what I said, which is that if kids didn’t need college for the hope of a good job, then those kids uninterested in academic work would likely make different choices, and this would change everything in the equation.
If you could do what most people could do on graduation in 1955 — go get a job pretty much anywhere that paid a livable wage, the demand for college would reduce drastically because people are not choosing college because they have a burning passion to read books on philosophy or English Literature. They want the jobs that the diploma opens to them. If you had viable options for working indoors pushing paper that didn’t require college, I expect enrollment to drop like a rock.
Nobody needs a degree to be a spreadsheet jockey, answer phones, or work in marketing.
So I mean if and YES I AM GIVING A COUNTERFACTUAL HERE, just to be clear, if you had the same situation as you great grandparents and you could have a good career without college, how many people would actually go? I cannot imagine that if you didn’t need college for a full time career type job most people would not go. Why? Because until college became a job requirement, very few people actually bothered to go. In fact, up until 1960, most people didn’t even bother with high school diplomas. And what happened is exactly what I’m talking about. Basically, we took college and turned it into job training. Businesses decided that it was cheaper to require applicants to have training rather than to train themselves. So now, starting in about 1980s you couldn’t get an indoor, white collar job without a degree. So if you want to be middle class go to college. So of course if you think that being middle class requires a college degree, the price doesn’t matter. How much would you pay to be upwardly mobile? Or to avoid flipping burgers forever? So no matter how much college cost, the price point doesn’t matter. Especially once student loans were available. It’s like cancer drugs — how much is someone willing to pay for drugs to keep themselves or their kids alive? I mean you’re not really going to say “no, $500 a dose is too much to pay for my life” especially if you have access to loans. If there were an alternative to this, if I could assure people that they could have a middle class professional job without college, then there’s no reason to bear the increasing costs of college and student loan payments. It’s about as much as a home loan at this point. Unless you’re convinced there are no alternatives, nobody’s taking out a mortgage sized loan.
You're not giving a counterfactual, you're restating debunked arguments. That's my point. You have no valid or cogent argument here because you aren't reliant on facts, you're all about the vibes. We're here in a pissing match because you said - and keep saying - that "The actual problem isn’t college or student loans." Except time and time again, I've given evidence that the actual problem IS college and IS student loans. Here's what I said two fuckin' months ago: FFEL was in effect from 1965 to 2010, FDLP in effect from 2010 'til now. Simply put, college students from 1965-2010 had a different financial landscape than college students from 1945 to 1965... and college students from 1945-1965 had the GI Bill. They had the GI Bill, of course, because more than half of young men were enlisted between 1941 and 1945 and letting them into the job force with nothing better to do isn't a great idea, and then we had Korea, and then we had Vietnam but for everyone else there's FEDERALLY GUARANTEED STUDENT LOANS so you could either pay Uncle Sam up front or on the back end. You wanna die on the hill that employers just up'n'decided that they felt like requiring a college degree so all of a sudden, everyone went "well shit guess I'm going to Columbia now" rather than recognizing that when a college degree is advantageous and free, everyone goes to college. There's no grand conspiracy. The Chamber of Commerce didn't have a meeting at the Skull'n'Bones club and say "fuck yeah bachelor's degrees or no typing pool." What happened is the government extended education to everyone at favorable terms and everyone got educated. What happened next is Republicans lost their shit over the idea that college liberals might get a free ride and made it really tough to disburse college debt in bankruptcy, and then a generation later Republicans lost their shit again and made it impossible. I'm saying all this for a third time in some instances. It's not "especially once student loans were available" it's BECAUSE student loans were not only available it's that they are lucrative as fuck for anyone servicing them. It's nothing like cancer drugs, it's like student loans.ninety two percent of student loan debt is federal. you fills out your FAFSA you gets your check. This is because first the FFEL then the FDLP guarantee these loans, therefore they are the lowest rates available to anyone.
Businesses decided that it was cheaper to require applicants to have training rather than to train themselves.
