 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| It would be better to cap college prices and make student debt dischargable by blackwater 06/28/2019, 9:18am PDT | ||||
 |
 |
|||
| The problem is that college is mostly signalling. Basically, there are only so many spots in the middle class, and college is an auction to get one of them. It's a particularly evil kind of auction because you are bidding against people who might be wagering more than they have-- going deep into debt, even. And it's a debt that can't be discharged by bankruptcy.
Ironically, colleges often raise their prices not because they need the money -- many of them are run like huge, tax-free hedge funds-- but because a higher price means the college becomes more exclusive and hence attracts "the better sort." For example, Harvard's endowment is 37 billion dollars, and it's all tax free. These institutions don't need your kid's money. It's like you're paying to work at Goldman Sachs, just for the prestige of having said you were there. But college often doesn't teach people much or anything useful. Unless they study a technical field, most people don't end up using anything they learned in college. It's just something you have to know to join the upper classes, like knowing Latin and Greek in the 19th century. In fact, it's worse than that. The old classical education at least gave people a common language and a common set of metaphors drawn from Greek mythology and history. The new humanities taught at universities is a toxic mix of grievance studies, fake p-hacked social "sciences" and stuff that's basically glorified babysitting, like "communications." Colleges know all this. They make the bare minimum effort to teach people. They often fob the job of lecturing on to low-paid grad students with incomprehensible accents. Trump knows all this too. He ran his own fake college, Trump University. The whole value was paying $X to be able to say you went to an institution associated with Trump. It was so fake that he even got sued. The federal government already throws a huge amount of money at the universities. In fact, the government is the main lender for student loans. What we need isn't for the government to give more money to these people, but for the government to set some ground rules about maximum costs, minimum quality standards, and maximum lengths of time that people can stay in school. Universities should also not be able to be non-profits. All of the administrators associated with these institutions are profiting handsomely, and there's no reason they can't be taxed at normal rates. |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
