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Smeagol666 ,

Most colleges are just sports franchises that just have higher education as a side hustle these days.

frunch ,

I’ve stopped caring about shit like this because they get what? Another generation or 2 of offspring before the payback for all the shit we’ve done comes to roost? Great, some people’s kids will get to continue to believe we’re just fine while 95% of the planet burns ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

Veneroso ,

It all started when they outlawed bankruptcy discharging student loans. Cry and cry over “Lawyers will graduate from college then immediately declare bankruptcy on $5000 loans!”. Then, when they captured the students in inescapable debt, convinced everyone that college was the answer, and then Sallie May being put in charge of defaulted loans… being paid to collect… Federally guaranteed money… It’s like getting paid to get paid, perfect racket!

Got_Bent ,

I have accomplished very little in my life.

I have pissed off innumerable people, been ostracized, ghosted, fired, disowned, discarded, and deserved all of it.

I have never lived up to my potential. I’ve got less than zero ambition.

I have been a historically awful husband and/or boyfriend.

But I accomplished one thing:

I got my daughter through college with no debt.

While she did the work to get admitted and slog through the classes and deal with the remote classroom bullshit of the COVID era, I’m proud that I was able to pull my shit together just long enough to keep writing those godforsaken checks so she will never know the struggle of being shackled to a lifetime of crippling debt.

I did one good thing in this lifetime, and because it gave her opportunity, it was all worth it.

MexicanJoker ,

User name checks out

GiddyGap ,

It’s stories like this that make me thankful that my children have EU citizenship and will never have to struggle through college debt and neither will we as their parents.

frunch ,

It’s comments like this that make me happy i didn’t have kids (as a usa citizen)

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

People finding out why religions banned usury

Patches ,

And back then y’all could just move like 40 miles and become a whole other ass person. Now you’re tracked literally around the entire globe forever.

Fades ,

Yeah so they could corner the market on that shit instead lmao

bitwolf ,

My school was expensive but was marketed as cheaper. It was cheaper through scholarship, factored in Pell grants and did not comsider the extra fees from bureaucracy.

The problem is that when you try to work while paying for school the grants go down and you pay more and still struggle.

While you do this you see your school build a sports stadium and see host extravagant dinners with business clients. You see how much the president or dean makes and how much the professors make.

I gave up and transferred to a non-profit university and the experience was night and day. It was affordable and the staff worked for you.

jeffw OP ,
@jeffw@lemmy.world avatar

Holy shit dude, for profits are fuckin terrible. Although, that being said, I don’t know of any for-profits that have sports teams or large stadiums.

And I would also add that academia doesn’t really pay that well, at least for professors. They could make much more in industry in a lot of cases

Raiderkev ,

Any private university is for profit, they just don’t explicitly say it.

xenoclast ,

Ones that aren’t directly corporate run and owned by their shareholders just go through more steps to funnel money to the rich

Patches , (edited )

Look down at community colleges all day but I work with people doing the same job making the same pay (know your rights) but i don’t have 35 years of debt.

I got into University - they wanted $8,000/semester. Community College across the street offered 4 year degrees for $1200/semester.

bitwolf ,

Agreed! Community colleges are great, although the local one I attended was not without extraneous fees.

mctoasterson ,

There’s literally no market incentives for it to be otherwise. Look at the factors.

50+ years of institutions and borrowers alike trained to believe that education debt is “good debt” that won’t hurt them.

“Club ed” arms race of expensive non-education-related amenities, targeting students. Essentially it is marketing costs passed on to the student/borrower.

Heavy subsidization of student loans by state and federal governments.

Laws to make student loans not discharged in bankruptcy.

Constant implication that growing amounts of student debts can or should be “forgiven” by federal programs.

If you are the lending institution or the college, literally all of those factors only incentivize charging more.

Driving prices down would require meaningful competition or a feasible alternative. I have encouraged hiring managers to look at alternative credentialing and training for this reason. No bachelors degree is worth going $200k+ in debt for.

Kit ,

Regarding your last point, I was an IT manager for a decade and hired many people. I saw no difference in the skill set between a community college grad with an Associate’s and a grad with a Bachelor’s from a prestigious university. The vast majority of skills simply don’t translate from university to real life, so I don’t understand why we still hold them so highly in IT. I can’t speak to other fields, though.

travysh ,

I very intentionally received only an associate’s degree with the plan being to immediately get a job and start learning from there. It’s worked great. Except that was 20 years ago and now many jobs “require” a bachelor’s or otherwise have the nerve to say that 4 years of on the job experience is the same as 1 year of college.

In my experience, I’ve seen the same thing. The university time kick starts things. But university lessons are so different than real on the job work.

Goodie ,

Or regulation.

Driving prices down would require meaningful competition, or a feasible alternative, or regulation.

(Feasible alternatives do exist, eg trades, but are not treated as viable alternatives by society)

PriorityMotif ,
@PriorityMotif@lemmy.world avatar

Some states are ditching the bar exam for attorneys. You can become a lawyer by getting experience as a paralegal. It shouldn’t be much different for other professionals.

ULS ,

We as an entire community, species even, let it happen.

whoisearth ,
@whoisearth@lemmy.ca avatar

It’s my firm belief that until we acknowledge this we are not moving forward. I’ve said this to downvotes on numerous related topics where the response is always “blame the government” or “blame the corporations” or “blame the billionaires”.

None of those excuses work because ultimately all of us are responsible for supporting a system that enables all those things and removes accountability from all but the ones who have no ability to change anything.

Collectively we need a good long look in the mirror about what is really important.

The other bigger problem is people have solutions. We’ve had solutions for decades if not centuries. Solutions no one wants to implement for a multitude of reasons of which a big one is “this is the way the system works”.

Fuck the system. The system is broken. We need to all come to that conclusion and then we can move forward.

We aren’t there yet.

antidote101 ,

One class is doing it to another.

JohnDClay ,

It really depends on the scholarships. If they offer common merit based scholarships that bring it down to single digits of thousands, I’d think it’s okay. Same with demographics based scholarships or registered need. You’d be using the rich dumb students to subsidize making the better students pay less.

But I have a feeling a lot of places are just price gouging, not subsidizing from the rich kids.

baseless_discourse , (edited )

And people who actually do most of the work (aka grad students) are still not getting a living wage.

Support striking grad workers everyone! Search for the currently striking school, and donate to their strike fund if you can: duckduckgo.com/?q=support+grad+worker+strike&ia=w…

jeffw OP ,
@jeffw@lemmy.world avatar

That’s actually highly variable. Some schools have come a long way in that regard

baseless_discourse , (edited )

AFAIK there is no school paying a living wage (based on MIT living wage calculator) to all their grad student yet, at least not in most major cities.

The grad workers union of JHU has just won a wage that is somewhat close to living wage, but not there yet.

jeffw OP ,
@jeffw@lemmy.world avatar

Depends if you factor all the free credits in ig

baseless_discourse , (edited )

The problem is that most grad students are not taking classes after the first two years, and focus solely on research. Many with masters will finish with classes even sooner.

Then it doesn’t make sense to factor in the tuition for most PhD.

Plus, I am referring to living wages calculated without factoring in any educational cost or child care cost. If they are included, the living wage will be much higher.

Etterra ,

Greed. It happened because for-profit schools are allowed to exist.

hglman ,

Fro profit schools are not the cause.

jeffw OP ,
@jeffw@lemmy.world avatar

For-profits aren’t really the problem though. They are a tiny tiny tiny fraction of higher ed. And Obama went after them pretty hard

chonglibloodsport ,

It’s administrative bloat. All that money isn’t going to hire more professors. It’s going to pay for non-faculty admin staff who provide services to students and work to attract students to the school. Schools are in competition with each other and the trend has been towards providing an all-encompassing luxury experience. While at many schools the fancy buildings may be paid for in whole or in part by donations from rich people, government grants, or other non-tuition sources (endowment), the staffing and maintenance of these buildings is paid for by tuition.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is that students comparison shop four-year luxury “Club Ed” vacations, paid for with borrowed money. That student loans are available without collateral or credit history and automatically approved is a huge part of the problem. If the flow of money dries up, the bloat goes with it. But in the mean time only rich people would have access to an education.

LordCrom , (edited )

Because there is no cap on student loans for the most part. Kids who just finished high school are sold on the concept of these loans without knowing what they are really getting into.

If a guy can’t legally buy a beer, then they should not legally be allowed to sign up for 6 figure loans either

interdimensionalmeme ,

Seems like an easy “hey you predators took advantage of me while I was young and naive” case.

And then watch all the self serving reasons why we allow this just catch on fire.

TexMexBazooka ,

You think that hasn’t happened already, like nobody has ever had that thought?

That’s what the entire student loan forgiveness from Biden was about, trying to eliminate people’s payments towards predatory student loans.

3volver ,

It got this way because younger people are willing to go into debt to get an education, and schools take advantage of that expected level of debt. I highly recommend looking up certificates that are available. One of the best ways to change this is for people to switch to alternatives.

HootinNHollerin ,

Scam bubble

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