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The cost of education

trouble13

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I saw this last night and i think mike rowe makes some really good points about the cost of college educations. Imo this is a subject that we should be able to discuss in a bipartisan way.

YouTube

Tucker Carlson makes a pretty good suggestion in a later segment. He suggests that schools should share in the risks on student loans. I think he is right about that.

What are your thoughts?

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I have a very particular gripe with Rowe's assessment of this issue: he's dead wrong when he blames the availability of college funding for making college more expensive. Basing our education system on a profit driven motive is the root of the issue - among all OECD member states, even among the ones that provide college free of charge to all students who attend their universities, America is only outspent by Luxembourg.

The more I studied America’s baffling higher-education system, the more it reminded me of health care. In both spaces, Americans pay twice as much as people in other developed countries—and get very uneven results. The U.S. spends nearly $10,000 a person on health care each year (25 percent more than Switzerland, the next biggest spender), according to the OECD’s 2017 Health at a Glance report, but our life expectancy is now almost two years below the average for the developed world.

“I used to joke that I could just take all my papers and statistical programs and globally replace hospitals with schools, doctors with teachers and patients with students,” says Dartmouth College’s Douglas Staiger, one of the few U.S. economists who studies both education and health care.

Both systems are more market driven than in just about any other country, which makes them more innovative—but also less coherent and more exploitive. Hospitals and colleges charge different prices to different people, rendering both systems bewilderingly complex, Staiger notes. It is very hard for regular people to make informed decisions about either, and yet few decisions could be more important.

Student loans, in and of themselves, are just another opportunity for big banks to make a profit off of the working and middle classes. We can polish that turd all day every day, and we may actually get it looking a bit shiny sooner or later, but it's still going to be complete, undiluted **** at the end of the day.
 
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What are your thoughts?

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Tucker Carlson is a girl. I would not give consideration to anything he says.

As to school costs, they are insane. It states at the grade school and high school where teachers are grossly over paid and extends through college where kids should be studying on line and the brick and mortar should be greatly cut back.
 
15 years ago banks were giving big loans to uncreditworthy, low income borrowers to buy houses they couldn't afford. The rationale by the idiotic political left was "Everyone deserves to buy a home."

Today banks will give a big loan to an uncreditworthy, low income borrower to get a degree in Lesbian Dance Theory. The rationale by the idiotic political left is "Everyone deserves a college education."
 
I have a very particular gripe with Rowe's assessment of this issue: he's dead wrong when he blames the availability of college funding for making college more expensive. Basing our education system on a profit driven motive is the root of the issue - among all OECD member states, even among the ones that provide college free of charge to all students who attend their universities, America is only outspent by Luxembourg.



Student loans, in and of themselves, are just another opportunity for big banks to make a profit off of the working and middle classes. We can polish that turd all day every day, and we may actually get it looking a bit shiny sooner or later, but it's still going to be complete, undiluted **** at the end of the day.
I think his point wasnt so much about the availability as it is the amount of importance thats emphasized on obtaining the educational credential.

I can relate to how much pressure is put on both parents and children to get the most expensive education you can. People work their ass off to fund their childrens college funds. Kids go into massive debt subsidizing the rest. Then at the end of it all many of them dont even go into their field of study but that spiffy diploma opens doors for them that those without cant get through.

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Tucker Carlson is a girl. I would not give consideration to anything he says.

As to school costs, they are insane. It states at the grade school and high school where teachers are grossly over paid and extends through college where kids should be studying on line and the brick and mortar should be greatly cut back.

Try cutting a Massachusetts teacher's salary down to a Mississippi teacher's salary, see how fast the best state for education turns into a crapsack just like all the red states. Paying teachers like actual professionals, like they have a 4-year degree and are entrusted with the children of our nation, is not a problem, and in fact, it's the minimum point to develop a functioning education system.
 
15 years ago banks were giving big loans to uncreditworthy, low income borrowers to buy houses they couldn't afford. The rationale by the idiotic political left was "Everyone deserves to buy a home."

Today banks will give a big loan to an uncreditworthy, low income borrower to get a degree in Lesbian Dance Theory. The rationale by the idiotic political left is "Everyone deserves a college education."
Im trying to keep this as an apolitical discussion. The issue isnt political as much as it is in peoples attitude toward education in general. The education industry is preying on peoples insecurities.

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Tucker Carlson is a girl. I would not give consideration to anything he says.

As to school costs, they are insane. It states at the grade school and high school where teachers are grossly over paid and extends through college where kids should be studying on line and the brick and mortar should be greatly cut back.
The biggest finacial drain on the sustem seems to be on the administrative side of things. The brick and mortar element of that is just one piece but definitely one worth looking at. Univerisities put too much emphasis on building new wings imo.

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Why? You have to identify the root cause of the problem before you can solve it.
Exactly and the root cause is niether the left nor the right. Its the schools predatory tactics.

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Try cutting a Massachusetts teacher's salary down to a Mississippi teacher's salary, see how fast the best state for education turns into a crapsack just like all the red states. Paying teachers like actual professionals, like they have a 4-year degree and are entrusted with the children of our nation, is not a problem, and in fact, it's the minimum point to develop a functioning education system.
Whats your opinion on the quality of teaching? I have no problem with your point but i feel also that students are not graduating with sufficent skills. Its not all on the teachers but they do shoulder some of the responsibility

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I think his point wasnt so much about the availability as it is the amount of importance thats emphasized on obtaining the educational credential.

I can relate to how much pressure is put on both parents and children to get the most expensive education you can. People work their ass off to fund their childrens college funds. Kids go into massive debt subsidizing the rest. Then at the end of it all many of them dont even go into their field of study but that spiffy diploma opens doors for them that those without cant get through.

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2 minutes, 55 seconds into the video: "college is expensive because we freed up an unlimited pile of money and told an entire generation they were doomed to fail if they didn't borrow it." This is an objectively false assessment of why college is expensive, while almost being on the money. Student loans are the core of the issue, and are built around the idea of driving America's youth into an exorbitantly expensive education system that will see two-thirds of them drop out, while saddling them with debt they can't even escape through bankruptcy & might not even be able to pay of WITH a job afforded by their degree. Nowhere else in the world can you find a nation whose education system is this mismanaged in terms of burdening the most vulnerable of those involved, and pretending that it's caused by the availability of funding is similarly unique to America.
 
I have a very particular gripe with Rowe's assessment of this issue: he's dead wrong when he blames the availability of college funding for making college more expensive. Basing our education system on a profit driven motive is the root of the issue - among all OECD member states, even among the ones that provide college free of charge to all students who attend their universities, America is only outspent by Luxembourg.

From your article:

The biggest system by far is the public one, which includes two-year community colleges and four-year institutions. Three out of every four American college students attend a school in this public system, which is funded through state and local subsidies, along with students’ tuition dollars and some federal aid.



Student loans, in and of themselves, are just another opportunity for big banks to make a profit off of the working and middle classes.

Private loans make up something like 7-8% of outstanding student loan debt. Most student loans are federal student loans.
 
Whats your opinion on the quality of teaching? I have no problem with your point but i feel also that students are not graduating with sufficent skills. Its not all on the teachers but they do shoulder some of the responsibility

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My opinion is that American culture itself devalues learning for the sake of learning, and that makes the entire process of educating students that much more difficult. When you look at surveys of why students drop out of high school, slightly more than 70% of kids cited some variation of "I just didn't care" as their reason for dropping out. 27 percent say they were failing too many classes (lack of motivation), 26% say they were bored (more of the same), and 20 percent just said it wasn't relevant. These are attitudes that begin in the home, not in school, and the only way a school can offset that is with outstanding teachers that know how to encourage the kind of love for learning that fixes the "what about jobs" attitude that we apply to education. Of course, marketable skills are important, but the American attitude of focusing on material reward as a motivation for pursuing knowledge is a particularly ****ty motivation, and it ensures that students go into the school system with a poor attitude towards learning. American students don't learn jack ****, we just memorize answers & forget them when summer finally rolls around.

Teachers should shoulder some responsibility for how students do, of course, but they shouldn't have to contribute the majority of the effort to motivate students like they currently do. Paying teachers a proper wage is the only way to ensure that we get good teachers, which are absolutely necessary to get any good results as it is - I grew up in a fairly poor area, and the only math teacher that ever motivated me to do well in that subject left for greener pastures two years after he got there. Half the class I was in begged him to stay. If we could get rid of the cultural attitude that education serves the purpose of profit first and foremost, we could improve our education system dramatically just by getting motivated students.
 
Try cutting a Massachusetts teacher's salary down to a Mississippi teacher's salary, see how fast the best state for education turns into a crapsack just like all the red states. Paying teachers like actual professionals, like they have a 4-year degree and are entrusted with the children of our nation, is not a problem, and in fact, it's the minimum point to develop a functioning education system.

They are grossly over paid.

and

There is no place for unions in public jobs.
 
I have a very particular gripe with Rowe's assessment of this issue: he's dead wrong when he blames the availability of college funding for making college more expensive. Basing our education system on a profit driven motive is the root of the issue - among all OECD member states, even among the ones that provide college free of charge to all students who attend their universities, America is only outspent by Luxembourg.



Student loans, in and of themselves, are just another opportunity for big banks to make a profit off of the working and middle classes. We can polish that turd all day every day, and we may actually get it looking a bit shiny sooner or later, but it's still going to be complete, undiluted **** at the end of the day.

Being a non-profit organization (as most colleges are) does not mean that huge salaries aren't paid to all sorts of administrators or that the facilities include only what is required to meet the needs of the operation - the heads (CEOs) of many charitable non-profits are paid more than the POTUS and their facilities are often quite lavish.
 
From your article:







Private loans make up something like 7-8% of outstanding student loan debt. Most student loans are federal student loans.

My federal student loans are serviced by Nelnet, a private corporation. All that "federal" word means is that my debt can't be sold from one corporate entity to another, and has a fixed rate of interest. Even if it weren't situated like this, the federal loans would still ultimately work out to be a means of monetizing college expenses for the federal government, which would effectively be acting as a bank. Arguably a pretty big one.
 
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I saw this last night and i think mike rowe makes some really good points about the cost of college educations. Imo this is a subject that we should be able to discuss in a bipartisan way.

YouTube

Tucker Carlson makes a pretty good suggestion in a later segment. He suggests that schools should share in the risks on student loans. I think he is right about that.

What are your thoughts?

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

I fully support Mike Rowe and his observations and agenda.

I also believe not everyone needs to go to college. The fact the must graduate from college to get ahead is a lie being told by educators and their supporters in government. People should look at how many people take on the debt, and never graduate.

Higher Education, and the cost of it, is one of the great scams of the 21st Century.

I think Colleges and Universities should have a money back guarantee if they take in students who have to borrow to attend.

That would end this free money for bad education scam that is being perpetrated on young people.
 
Being a non-profit organization (as most colleges are) does not mean that huge salaries aren't paid to all sorts of administrators or that the facilities include only what is required to meet the needs of the operation - the heads (CEOs) of many charitable non-profits are paid more than the POTUS and their facilities are often quite lavish.

And yet, in every other OECD nation but Luxembourg, education is significantly more affordable. There's several ways this is done, often through price fixing, but the root of the issue is still that we operate our education systems under the belief that it's perfectly acceptable for colleges to operate like a business & to treat students as cash grabs.
 
My federal student loans are serviced by Nelnet, a private corporation. All that "federal" word means is that my debt can't be sold from one corporate entity to another, and has a fixed rate of interest.

The days of FFELP have been over for a decade. Private lenders are no longer being subsidized and insured by the feds against default to profit off lending to students. Their function today is, as you point out, at best to "service" student loans, i.e., provide some admin functions on federally issued loans.
 
The days of FFELP have been over for a decade. Private lenders are no longer being subsidized and insured by the feds against default to profit off lending to students. Their function today is, as you point out, at best to "service" student loans, i.e., provide some admin functions on federally issued loans.

Ah. I suspected as much, and edited my post to reflect that caution about two minutes ago. As I said there, the fed is effectively acting as a bank that you can't file for bankruptcy with, and is still out to collect an exorbitant amount of money over a debtor's lifespan. It's not nearly as bad as, say, former government program turned private loan provider Sallie Mae, but it is a loan system that owns over a trillion dollars of debt that students in most other developed nations don't have to contend with.
 
The days of FFELP have been over for a decade. Private lenders are no longer being subsidized and insured by the feds against default to profit off lending to students. Their function today is, as you point out, at best to "service" student loans, i.e., provide some admin functions on federally issued loans.

Just want to say it is refreshing to read an honest,non-partisan response on this site. The fact that your response includes no insults to the other side is an added plus. Great job!!!
 
We should end all federally subsidized student loans NOW and make existing student loan debt dischargable in bankruptcy.

In other words, stop any further bleeding and let those who took out the loans work it out with the schools that sold the loans to them.

And let's start looking at alternatives to going to a big expensive college, which in the digital age are almost as anachronistic as book stores. Knowledge is free. To paraphrasee Good Will Hunting, a person should be able to get a basic college education for nothing more than a few dollars of overdue library fines. It's that diploma that you're paying for and in many cases it's worthless.
 
Ah. I suspected as much, and edited my post to reflect that caution about two minutes ago. As I said there, the fed is effectively acting as a bank that you can't file for bankruptcy with, and is still out to collect an exorbitant amount of money over a debtor's lifespan. It's not nearly as bad as, say, former government program turned private loan provider Sallie Mae, but it is a loan system that owns over a trillion dollars of debt that students in most other developed nations don't have to contend with.

Again according to your article:

If American colleges are not adding obvious and consistent academic value, they are adding financial value. Americans with college degrees earn 75 percent more than those who only completed high school. Over a lifetime, people with bachelor’s degrees earn more than half a million dollars more than people with no college degree in the U.S. In fact, no other country rewards a college degree as richly as the United States, and few other countries punish people so relentlessly for not having one.

People take out the loans because by-and-large they get a pretty good return on them.
 
Again according to your article:



People take out the loans because by-and-large they get a pretty good return on them.

ALSO from my source:

Still, the return varies wildly depending on the college one attends. One in four college grads earns no more than the average high-school graduate. Associate’s degrees from for-profit universities lead to smaller salary bumps than associate’s degrees from community colleges, which are cheaper. And two-thirds of students at for-profits drop out before earning their degree anyway, meaning many will spend years struggling with debt they cannot afford to pay off—and cannot, under U.S. law, off-load through bankruptcy.

Having a college degree in America is very useful. Attempting to get one in America is a very dangerous gamble, especially compared to learning a foreign language and simply attending college overseas. If I'd known what I do today in 2015, I'd have gone to Germany for my education.
 
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