Category Archives: Education

“Americans need to think about the choices contributing to student debt.”

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As much as I agree with Addison Del Mastro re $10k of loan forgiveness now, Tom Nichols has the right take on the path forward.  At this point, no one contemplating taking out a loan to pay for college tuition should have any illusions about the downsides.  The $10k forgiveness was grace.  Appreciate it as such.  From Nichols’, The Trouble With Boutique Colleges (emphasis mine):

Going to a top-tier university, if you can afford it, is a life-changing choice that will likely work out well. Going to an affordable public institution for particular professional skills (such as nursing or teaching) is also a life-changing choice that will likely go well.

Going to an extremely expensive school that is neither selective nor known for a particular course of study and majoring in medieval Corsican poetry is a life-changing choice that is almost certainly not going to work out well…

Tuition-dependent boutique schools are keenly aware that they are competing for students, as I wrote in my book The Death of Expertise:

This entire [shopping] process means not only that children are in charge, but that they are already being taught to value schools for some reason other than the education it might provide them. Schools know this, and they’re ready for it. In the same way the local car dealership knows exactly how to place a new model in the showroom, or a casino knows exactly how to perfume the air that hits patrons just as they walk in the door, colleges have all kinds of perks and programs at the ready as selling points, mostly to edge out their competitors over things that matter only to kids.

… For students who refuse to go to a public school (which, in most states, is still a good deal) but did not gain admission to a top-tier school, the beautiful boutique school is a tempting debt trap. Debt forgiveness is a Band-Aid. In order to fix the broken system of higher education in America, we need to start changing our culture and how we think about what it means to “go to college.”

 

More on Student Loan Forgiveness

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Addison Del Mastro’s essay, Could You Loan Some Forgiveness?, is the best I’ve read on the subject to date.  An excerpt:

It’s the human cost of these loans, and the aura of fraud about them—the fact that they can’t be discharged via bankruptcy, the fact that parents might have urged their college-bound children to take them, the fact that colleges sold them with promises of employment and high salaries—that pushes me in favor of forgiveness. Many of these loans should never have been offered, many degree programs are oversold, and many students did not, and reasonably could not have, taken them with a clear-eyed understanding of what it would mean for them five, ten, or twenty years down the road.

Yes, some people made bad decisions. But there’s a limit to how much you can blame them, and to how severely they should be punished, for being starry-eyed 18-year-olds who believed what their parents and guidance counselors and prospective colleges told them. “Buyer beware” might work for used cars, but colleges, which trade on the notion that they have a higher, public-minded purpose, should be held to a higher standard.

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Student Loan Foregiveness

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So tonight I log on for the first time in god knows how long and I see an draft of a post I started to write in 2020.  I haven’t touched it since – still just a brain dump and excerpts of pieces other people wrote – but interesting that I still see things pretty much the same way as I did then.  Anyhow, here’s the unedited draft –

A few questions to frame the discussion of student debt forgiveness:

  1. Why privilege forgiveness of student debt over forgiveness of other types of debt, e.g., medical debt?
  2. What’s the root cause of the student debt crisis?  What, if anything, will debt forgiveness do to address the root cause?
  3. What broader social goods will be achieved by forgiving student debt?

I remain lukewarm about straight-up debt forgiveness because I don’t have satisfying answers to those questions and I haven’t heard any from anyone else. Continue reading →

Thought for the Day – December 18, 2021

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Betty Hall, founder of Simon’s Rock, on education:

“There is a four-year span here when youth should become acquainted with the whole range of human inquiry – man in relation to his physical environment – man in relation to his fellow man or social environment – and man in relation to the world of his own creation, his music, his art, religion, literature, and philosophy.”

Thought for the Day: September 7, 2020

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Northeastern dismissed 11 students the other day for violating COVID-19 social distancing rules.  The university dismissed them but kept their $36,500 tuition.  The elephant is the room is how did private university come to cost $50k/year (tuition plus other expenses)?  That’s a discussion in and of itself but, given that the cost is what it is, is it worth it following COVID-related changes, i.e., on-line learning, reduced interaction and limited access to campus facilities, etc.? Continue reading →

Thought for the Day – July 18, 2017

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I read a piece in the NYT today on “pragmatic” Democratic governors. (The NYT reporter uses “pragmatic” and “pro-corporate” interchangeably where I don’t believe it’s justified, but I digress.)  One of the governors interviewed was Steve Bulloch of Montana.  I have a favorable impression of him but that’s beside the point.  In the article, Bulloch was touting apprenticeships as an alternative to free college.  I have a favorable view of paid apprenticeships as well as tuition- and fee-free public college. Vocational training is a good thing and it’s a good thing when people can use their college education to obtain gainful employment.  That stated, it’s important not to regard college as high-level vocational training.  The greatest value of higher education isn’t that it enables better employment opportunities, it’s that it advances Enlightenment values.  Paraphrasing what I think is a spot-on description:  The purpose of education is to help people to learn on their own. It’s the learner who is going to achieve in the course of education and it’s really up to them to determine how they’re going to master and use it.  The greatest value of an education is that it fosters the impulse to challenge authority, think critically, and to create alternatives to the status quo.  (I suspect that’s why so many Republicans don’t view college favorably.)  Is college the only place where you can get that kind of education?  No, but it’s a great opportunity for you to do so if you’re so inclined.  Compared to life in the rest of the world, the barriers are low.

 

All in a day at nursery school

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From the daily teacher’s email:

[Today] we read a book about how dinosaurs eat and we asked the children what they thought dinosaurs ate.  Here are their words:

[Child #1]:  Meat

[Child #2]:  Garbage and ham.

[Son]:  No, just ham.  There wasn’t any garbage back then.

 

The cost of higher education

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Several months ago Mike Konczal had a piece, The [University of North Carolina] Coup and the Second Limit of Economic Liberalism.  An excerpt:

The UNC System Board of Governors voted unanimously to cap the amount of tuition that may be used for financial aid for need-based students at no more than 15 percent. With tuition going up rapidly at public universities as the result of public disinvestment, administrators have recently begun using general tuition to supplement their ability to provide aid. This cross-subsidization has been heralded as a solution to the problem of high college costs. Sticker price is high, but the net price for poorer students will be low.

This system works as long as there is sufficient middle-class buy-in, but it’s now capped at UNC. As a board member told the local press, the burden of providing need-based aid “has become unfairly apportioned to working North Carolinians,” and this new policy helps prevent that.  Iowa implemented a similar approach back in 2013. And as Kevin Kiley has reported for IHE, similar proposals have been floated in Arizona and Virginia. This trend is likely to gain strength as states continue to disinvest.

The problem for liberals isn’t just that there’s no way for them to win this argument with middle-class wages stagnating, though that is a problem. The far bigger issue for liberals is that this is a false choice, a real class antagonism that has been created entirely by the process of state disinvestment, privatization, cost-shifting of tuitions away from general revenues to individuals, and the subsequent explosion in student debt. As long as liberals continue to play this game, they’ll be undermining their chances.

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