When will the college tuition bubble burst?
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Anonymous
Yeah they're real losers 
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Anonymous
This. Like many messes, the federal government is to blame. |
Anonymous
So spoiler alert: neither will actually happen. Lol |
Anonymous
those loans are the path that masses have to educations formerly reserved for the elite. Does the poor kid financing UMD on loans now just not get to go to school? There are no easy answers, getting rid of loans would be a boon for families that don't qualify for them in the first place, but it would close a ton of doors to those that do |
Anonymous
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If you have the money, what are you supposed to do?
I think it’s ridiculous too but we actually do have the money to pay so I don’t feel like we can really say no. It costs what it costs. Shrug. |
Anonymous
No kidding. Someone is a wee bit jelly! |
Anonymous
I don't think this little parable portrays you in the shrewd, favorable light that you believe it does. But, tell yourself whatever you need to think. "Well, we didn't even *want* to go to Duke! So there." |
Anonymous
Not bitter or jealous, just shaking my head at people who shell out an extra $200k for the same outcome. |
Anonymous
If you want lenders to stop giving education loans in a carefree manner, make those loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. Students loans are not dischargeable, so there is zero incentive for lenders to actually consider ability to repay. That debt will follow you to the grave. Make the lenders have some skin in the game and they’ll be more circumspect with their loans, which means colleges will have to react by bringing down prices. My bankruptcy professor in law school walked us through it. |
Anonymous
+1. Federally backed student loans should be limited to something like 1/2 of tuition. So, if subsidized loans are capped at $5,000/year, school tuition should be capped at $10,000/year. This would make it reasonable for a student to “work” their way though school or to “save up” for tuition. |
Anonymous
This is the sort of post I expect to see on a site like DCUM, where it seems like 90%+ of users have HHIs above $250k. For the kids in those families, there's really no honest question about whether they can go to college. Of course the vast majority can. Yes, the loans suck, and perhaps parents don't want to help, but it is at least a clear and feasible option for the vast, vast majority of kids in those situations. And still would be possible almost regardless of what the government would do with federal student loans. Then there's the families at or below the median household income of $68k per year. Or even harder, in the bottom 10%, which in Maryland would mean about $25k per year. In these cases, federal grants and loans are critical to simply giving these students have the option to go to college. Cutting federal student loans programs wouldn't hurt the DCUM crowd. Perhaps they'd benefit from slightly reduced tuition costs. But it would absolutely hurt the many young adults to need this funding to have any hope of paying for college. There's no easy answer here, but I don't think market forces are going to help without dramatically screwing over the lower socioeconomic classes. Subsidies don't work well if you don't have tight control over the industries benefiting from those subsidies. I personally think the best option is to dramatically improve the funding to public universities, making sure that they are affordable to all. Federally-mandated state reciprocity agreements can help provide competition within the public education space. Fix state/federal student aid to the public university tuition cost (with some adjustment to account for direct subsidies to the public schools), and hope that they'll fall in-line. It might still create a two-tiered system of public and private schools, but I'm not overly worried about that. Public research universities are already quite good. The top-end of public universities is first-rate. The bottom tier won't be great, but that's probably OK for a variety of reasons. I think the key would be making sure that the middle-tier public universities are on-par with private liberal arts colleges. As part of this, it would make sense to try to make sure that there are plenty of smaller, public colleges with strong on-campus cultures, to replicate the benefits many of the private colleges give you. (See the University of Minnesota-Crookston as an example) |
Anonymous
Connections are the old guard. Kids these days are way more disconnected (in my opinion in a bad way). Going forward not respected and not what it used to be. Efficiency is the enemy of unearned excess. |
Anonymous
You really don't see the problem with this thinking? From a social mobility perspective, we *want* to give grants and loans to students that, at least on paper, would look risky to issue an unsecured loan to. |
Anonymous
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I'm in academia. There are a lot of factors at play here of course. On the spending side, potential students show up and want to see how nice our non-academic facilities are, like the student center, cafeteria, dorms, and athletic facilities. That all costs money and drives our costs up.
Then on the consumer side, it's sort of a moral hazard. Student loan money is basically free, with no thought given to your ability to pay it back later. You can get just as much student loan money if you are studying social work or elementary education as if you are studying computer science. I'm leaving the societal benefit of each aside -- just it's a fact that some professions pay more than others. Colleges can raise tuition, then the student loans will rise to cover that increase. Not much incentive to keep tuition down. Then you have foreign students. By law, they are not eligible for financial aid. The middle class in China (for example) is larger than the entire US population. It's very prestigious for your kid to study in the US, even at third-tier schools. Universities love them because they pay the full tuition. The number of these students has increased greatly over the last few years. That means you have a bunch of foreign students ready to pay full fare, along with well-off American residents ready to pay full fare, and lower income level students armed with student loans ready to pay slightly discounted tuition (the university will find some financial aid, often from hapless donors, to cover the difference). Where I think we will see _some_ focus on value is at 2nd and 3rd tier schools. There's less of a "name" to sell on, and they tend to draw only regionally not nationally. The fix is to limit student loans, but that's politically untenable. |
Anonymous
| ^^^ Thoughtful post. Don’t forget bloated administration. |