The banks should demand the school take responsibility as part of agreeing to the loan.
if the degree is for fun not a job that is fine - but as the taxpaper subsidising this all I only want to help those who will pay off my investment (or those who stasticaly would have had not whatever unexpected disaster happened)
As a taxpayer I support degrees as job tickets. There are plenty of other things to do with a degree and I'm fine with them - but I have better use for my money than to give degrees to those who won't use them productively.
You’re a drug abuser, I’m a drug dealer. I can’t sell you drugs without money. I have a friend who can give you a loan if you convince him, then you can pay me.
I know the drug dealer is not issuing the loan, but the dealer accepts and facilitates it. I’ll make it clearer:
I’m a drug dealer that doesn’t care where you get your money. If you rob and kill someone and bring me the money, I will take it.
So how does the dealer facilitate this entire institution?
They take the money, simple as that. If a drug dealer was a legal entity, they’d be sued into oblivion. These schools may as well be selling kilos of coke.
I’ll go one further:
I’m a drug dealer, currently you have no drug addiction. I cannot make money if you don’t have an addiction. Let me convince you need to take this drug.
The dealer creates the market for the loan too. Higher education needs you to take the loan.
The loans should not be given out, but also schools should not be charging the sort of tuition that they do for professional degrees, for professions that do not provide a salary that could pay for said tuition.
I’m specifically talking about professional, graduate degrees. Undergrad is a different matter.
A professional degree should give you an opportunity to increase your income in proportion to the cost of the degree. If that is not even close to being the case, as is what happens with a lot of degrees at elite schools, then I’d call that what it is — a scam.
The stats from the US FED show that people with professional degrees earn approximately 3x what people without degrees make, and people with undergrad degrees earn - on average - 2x what people without degrees make. Your hypothesis is somewhat flawed.
No, it’s not flawed and it’s not a hypothesis — I’m speaking from specific knowledge and experience regarding particular degrees.
Those averages include things like medical school for doctors and law school for lawyers. Tuition and expected salary are more aligned there.
Where tuition and salary are not aligned are fields like the humanities and social sciences. At top graduate schools for those fields you will have tuitions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with average salary expectations far below that.
The only way that it makes financial sense to get a degree like that is if you are independently wealthy to begin with, but these schools will not tell you that and will cheerfully direct you to take on a ruinous amount of debt.
Why didn’t you start with that? You implied all professional degrees and then all graduate degrees and only mention humanities now? Forgive me for not catching your unstated assumptions. So who was under the impression they’d get rich with a graduate degree in social science or humanities? Seems like it has been common knowledge for many decades that humanities jobs pay considerably less than medicine or engineering, since long before today’s tuitions blew up. It’s been a cultural trope as long as I can remember that parents try to steer their kids away from humanities and towards higher paying fields. You could make a decent living in academia with humanities up to maybe 5 or 10 years ago, but I totally agree it’s getting a lot harder now. All tuition has blown up. Calling humanities graduate degrees a scam is a bit hyperbolic. Going to a state school won’t usually leave you with ruinous debt, that’s something that’s more likely to happen when choosing to go to a highly ranked big name school. Knowledge of outcomes in various fields is relatively well known and available information, and the amount of debt you end up with is mostly under your control. Sure some people might egg you on but nobody is hiding it or tricking you; most humanities graduate advisors I’ve met will tell you to study something else with very little prompting.
School should be provided, IMO, and nobody should be left with ruinous debt. This country can afford it, and money invested in education comes back in multiples in economic output, and yet we choose to keep education out of reach from many poor people and make it extra hard for those who can only just afford it. I’m sorry if you got stuck with a load of debt that’s difficult to manage. That sucks and it’s not fair.
I qualified my initial comment with "for professions that do not provide a salary that could pay for said tuition".
And my comment is not about people thinking they'd be getting rich -- it's about people making a (or what should be) reasonable assumption that they'd make enough money to pay off their tuition without lifelong financial struggle.
Yes, state schools are the smart choice here.
My point is it's not all on the student, they are victims to a large extent. We should also place blame on these elite institutions for suckering in young adults with their prestige and then not delivering a product that is worth what they charge. And on the government for providing a blank check for this nonsense.
Anyway, I do think we're mostly in agreement. And btw, I'm fine, I'm just speaking from the experiences of many of my peers, which have left me pretty teed-off at a prestigious university in my city that I will refrain from calling out by name.
