from Hacker News

Education is Our Generation's Big Problem. Let's Fix it.

by hanibash on 8/10/12, 5:47 PM with 167 comments

by Kaedon on 8/10/12, 6:08 PM
"Do I even need to mention which segments of our population rely on student loans the most, and thus are getting screwed the most by the student loan crisis? Hint: It's not the happy white suburban family of 4."
Actually, according to the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044424690457757...), the upper-middle class has seen the sharpest jump in student debt since 2007. Households with less income have an easier time finding student aid and those in the upper class can more readily afford the rising costs. This puts the upper-middle class in a kind of purgatory for financial aid.
by patdennis on 8/10/12, 6:11 PM
There are serious problems with the for-profit university model (like the University Of Phoenix) as outlined in this article.
I think it's worth pointing out that these businesses are aware that they may have a problem, and have stepped up their political giving massively to protect their interests. Mostly, to Republican candidates, and especially to Mitt Romney. [1]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/us/politics/mitt-romney-of...
by JumpCrisscross on 8/10/12, 7:43 PM
Allowing lenders (or providing greater incentive for them) to modulate rates on loans based on (a) the institution attended, (b) the major chosen, and (c) individual performance metrics, e.g. GPA, would be a solid step towards resolving education debt insolvency.
This could be achieved by switching government subsidies from loan guarantees to payment-share plans by which the government pays a portion of each payment but ceases to do so in case of default. These loans should be absolvable in bankruptcy - an immature decision made in one's adolescence shouldn't be a lifelong burden. Thus, the credit risk is retained by the lender while financial impact lessened on the student.
Unpopular as measures radically increasing costs on liberal arts majors may be, the present situation is a clear example of artificially locked markets producing inefficient outcomes.
by trafficlight on 8/10/12, 7:11 PM
It's not a financial problem (well it is), it's a cultural problem. American culture just doesn't value education and learning in general.
Isaac Asimov articulated this very well:
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
by rflrob on 8/10/12, 8:04 PM
> Why administration had to grow 4x the pace of enrollment is beyond me.
While I won't claim that every single administrative dollar has been well spent, between 1993 and 2007, this would cover things like on campus tech support and IT staff and equipment (email, online registration, transcripts, etc), more broadly available and diverse student support (counseling, LGBT support organizations, ombudsmen, etc), and presumably tutoring services that help the growing fraction of the population in college thrive, rather than simply prep-school graduates. Again, I'm not going to claim that 4x increase relative to enrollment is the right amount, but compared to universities 20 years ago, they are providing more services.
by onitica on 8/10/12, 6:31 PM
One thing that really bothers me is how much universities are allowed to raise their tuition on existing students. I started college paying about $6k a year in tuition my freshmen year. My senior year cost me $11k. The difference in tuition raises overall probably increased my total loan amount by ~$10k by the time I graduated. This is huge and there is no way students can take this into account when applying for college. I don't know why there are no laws protecting students by requiring fixed tuition rates for students? Universities are notoriously bad for raising rates by thousands a year, which students must take into debt or leave.
*Edit - Ok, the tuition when I first went to college was $20k a year. I had a $14k scholarship, so it was a manageable $6k a year. Now the tuition, 5 years later, is over $27k. That is a 35% increase at about 7% a year. Pretty ridiculous if you ask me, especially for a state school which should be affordable.
by japhyr on 8/10/12, 6:45 PM
I was excited to read this article, because I want to see more attempts to improve education. But then I saw that this is a for-profit education company.
I know there is a place for private educational endeavors in our society. But if you really want to fix education for everyone, you've got to focus on public education. Yes, it's a big ugly political seemingly unchangeable mess. But it's the only system that reaches everyone.
Every generation has a revolution waiting to happen. Improving public education might be the next significant social revolution in the US, but it won't be led by for-profit education companies.
by nicholassmith on 8/10/12, 5:59 PM
I'm not sure that education is the big problem, but it's definitely up there. I think probably the financial climate leading to unemployment/underemployment is a bigger one, but significantly more difficult to fix.
by armored_mammal on 8/10/12, 6:19 PM
I agree education (and even more particularly, the method and quality of teaching) is a problem, but it's not the same problem as student debt.
As far as I can tell, much of the (debt) problem is caused by bad decision making by clueless parents and teenagers who think they need to send their kid to an Ivy League or think that their child somehow needs to spend 40k a year to go to an in-state school.
Let's be honest. The cost of education is going up, yes. But getting into debt is also bad and a poor choice. Yet nobody is responsible enough to consider it when making college choices, just to whine about it after the fact.
Students do not need to own a television or get cable or even have a video game console. Students probably don't even need a car, definitely don't need smartphones, and at least where I went to school, could probably do just fine without owning a computer, too. Likewise, instead of getting into debt they could go to cheaper community colleges or a whole slew of things.
Instead many college students, regardless of economic background, seem to have smartphones, Macs, and 42" TVs.
When I see someone complaining about college debt, I see somebody who went to an overly expensive school, without a plan, and did whatever they felt like without ever stopping to consider first if they could make a living when they were done. I see a child.
As someone who looked at the big picture when making college decisions and now has no college debt two years out of school, I have no sympathy.
I turned down the University of Chicago (among others) so that I wouldn't be in debt and to hear all the whining about it from entitled feeling kids who didn't make smart decisions makes me angry.
Now I'll agree that you may need to take on some debt to complete college. But if you're taking on more than the cost of a new car, you're doing it wrong.
Don't get me wrong, either. I concur that colleges waste lots of money.
by zanny on 8/10/12, 7:10 PM
I just graduated with my CS degree this May, and I only took on a total of 20k debt and lived on campus, and that 20k was just the stafford loans that 3 of my scholarships mandated I take in order to qualify. Note, now that I graduated, I already paid off over half that on just reserve funds from summer jobs that I have had dating back to High School.
While I was there, only about 1 in 5 students actually had a full financial aid package. Most of them didn't fill out FAFSAs, or didn't even use subsidized stafford loans - they had direct bank loans from their parents for upwards of $60k a year.
In my opinion, the people of the 22ed century will look back and think we were hilariously dumb. We have instantanous communication of ideas and knowledge via the internet, and our internet speeds are only getting better. If you want to learn something, it is easier than ever to find a community of fellow learners for a subject, find tons of free learning materials on that subject, and buckle down without the financial obligations and classroom environment (which doesn't work for everyone, and you inherently have less engagement there because one teacher can not effectively engage with even just 10 people all the time).
Like the article said, the degree is the problem. But I don't think thats the real problem - moreso the problem than that is the inability for individuals to have ideas and persue them in business ventures, because upstart small business will demand much less degree knowledge from employees (even if they are very skilled) since they draw from a local pool.
You get the degree because you will be applying to massive companies with huge HR that don't want to try to interpret you as a person but want to get a quick diagnostic of if you are capable or not from a one word answer to a 3 word question: Got a degree? If hiring was more based on individual accomplishment and demonstratable knowledge rather than paper, we would all be better off for it by getting off the degree treadmill.
by marknutter on 8/10/12, 8:40 PM
I think the biggest problem with higher education today is the fact that colleges aren't the one issuing the student loans. If a student enters the workforce and can't find a job to pay back their loan, the colleges aren't the ones on the hook; the students are, and eventually, the taxpayers. I understand that government-backed loans are a way to try to make higher education available to more people but all this easy money has resulted in a huge cash grab by for profit institutions who frankly could care less whether or not their graduates actually pay the loans back. Couple that with the almost religious belief that a college education is the only way to achieve the American dream and you have a recipe for the exact disaster we're flying head first into today.
by Crake on 8/11/12, 9:05 AM
I don't think there's a private solution to this problem. If we look to functional educational systems (example: germany), we see that other countries are often much better at matching people up with careers that match their talents (or lack thereof). Instead, we have colleges that will take whoever can pay over whoever might be the brightest academically. The people who can pay aren't necessarily the sharpest crayon in the box, and the people who can't might be the next cure for [insert x here].
State universities at the very least should be tuition free so as to not completely fuck over students from dysfunctional families who won't help/families that can't afford it. Of course, it would also be wiser to raise entrance standards and somehow figure out how to stop the ridiculous GPA inflation that goes on in the liberal arts fields. STEM still pays relatively well, but that's because our standards haven't dropped; unfortunately, many requirements for maintaining a scholarship fail to take choice of major into account when setting a minimum GPA.
Anyone can get a liberal arts degree if they have enough (or can borrow enough) money, which is why it means shit nowadays as a measure of IQ.
by cantankerous on 8/10/12, 7:30 PM
I feel like this is just swapping degrees for certifications. In this case the certification is just saying you completed training with so and so (so and so being bloc.io). Either way, everybody's just chasing paper and maybe learning something in the process.
EDIT: What I meant by certification was more abstract. On a resume, saying you completed tutelage with an individual or a group (and have achievements to go along with them) is pretty similar to completing certification that implies knowledge attained prior to completing the certification...the disfunctional nature of certifications, degrees, and mentor-based systems notwithstanding. People market themselves with this stuff, no matter what precisely it is, or where they got it from.
by DevMonkey on 8/10/12, 8:06 PM
Here are a couple of random thoughts:
Maybe we need to start outsourcing our education to China and India. We can send our kids to India for their undergraduate degrees and then they can come back here to get their post-graduate degrees.
Move towards knowledge certification instead of a degree that states you completed your degree. Bar Exam, MCSE, Board Certifications, etc. If you have the drive and capacity to learn without attending college then you should be rewarded only having to take a certification exam.
Once enough schools go belly up people can just start listing those institutions on their resumes. Since the school is close there won't be an easy way to verify. (Just kidding of course)
by revscat on 8/10/12, 6:10 PM
The adverse effects of a warming atmosphere is a more existential problem, and I would argue that it is for this reason that it is a more fundamental one. Education is irreelevant if food supplies are increasingly scarce.
by blackhole on 8/10/12, 7:11 PM
While I strongly support educational reform, I should point out that it is not just higher education, it's also high school, middle school, elementary school, kindergarten, and daycare. Every single aspect of the entire educational system down to the time spent on kids when they're too young to speak properly is broken. Consequently, fixing this is not as simple as having an online university, but I agree that the solution is very likely to be some sort of private, for-profit company, simply because that's the only feasible catalyst.
by waiwai933 on 8/10/12, 7:37 PM
I'm somewhat curious to know how big of a problem (and what forms it takes) this is around the world—if people could share what this looks like from where they are, I'd be tremendously interested.
by grecy on 8/10/12, 9:05 PM
> Once you default on a student loan, you'll be hounded for life: student loan debt is the absolute worst kind of debt you can have, as it is not absolvable by bankruptcy.
I've always wondered two things about this.
1. How is that even legal? I thought the whole point of bankruptcy was to raise a big flag that says "I can no longer pay my debts", and they go away. Why is student loan debt different?
2. Why do American students tolerate it? Look what happened in Quebec when they tried to raise tuition even a little.
by pnathan on 8/10/12, 7:48 PM
Yes, education is our generation's (18-30) problem.
Schools are lousy and degrade basic skills, as well as degrading deep cultural literacy and history. Idiots are held as heros. College costs are skyrocketing and dysfunctional buildings are being built by the colleges. The list of problems could go on... reams of paper have been spent documenting them.
Yes, there's a problem. I argue the essence of the problem is the deification of money.
by twoodfin on 8/10/12, 6:17 PM
There's another fix: Hire these graduates into the public sector or a random non-profit, let them make income-based payments, and then forgive their loans after 10 years, regardless of how much they've paid back. The taxpayers pick up the rest.
Thanks, Congress!
http://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellatio...
by stretchwithme on 8/10/12, 10:09 PM
As with most things government is involved with, the education industry has evolved for the care and feeding of the providers and not the consumers.
In a normal market, the customers have the power. In a market where the consumers don't really pay or think they don't, they have no leverage.
And students are just passing through, are quite busy, so they aren't exactly lobbying Congress. But rest assured everyone else involved is.
by ap22213 on 8/10/12, 8:08 PM
Maybe the problem is that there's less and less need for most types of workers.
We have a global population steadily lurching toward 8 billion. And, the richest of us seem to need less and less. And, that's coupled with aggressively commoditized global services industry that is providing more and more value for less and less cost.
Seems like major equilibrium shift waiting to happen.
by scoofy on 8/10/12, 6:57 PM
Obviously, matters relating to shortfalls in our education system are important, but the real problem is campaign finance. With election candidates raising the vast majority of their funds from special interests, there is little incentive to fix problems that are profitable for said special interests.
by roguecoder on 8/11/12, 2:21 AM
Re-introduce cheap, accessible, well-funded public universities that people can study out, without subsidizing for-profit or even private universities. Public options allow the market to work while overcoming the underprovided nature of education.
by mw63214 on 8/10/12, 7:51 PM
Agile Education. Is that a thing? If not, why? If yes, how?
Edit: serious question.
by spitx on 8/10/12, 6:10 PM
The approaches to education in the past five decades or so have produced mediocre results in producing a more civic individual. I wonder if the fundamentals of logic are imparted in any elementary school curriculum.
Our electorate is already pitifully informed. However what's really woeful is that a large portion of the vote bank cannot dissect a simple election campaign claim or promise.