My masters degree probably hasn’t helped me, but I got free tuition and a salary in exchange for being a teaching and research assistant.
Dutoit
2 years ago
“High Cost But Useless Master’s Degrees”
In the same time, math is “racist” …. Ok
whirlaway
2 years ago
It is useless for the students and useless for the society as well. But it is very useful for the moneylenders. They own the government, and the government hands money over to the lenders. The students are just the conduit for the money transfer. And when the time comes for pointing fingers, it is students who get most of the blame. The real villains are ignored.
I don’t understand the obsession with coaches salaries, Columbia paid the head coaches of their men’s sports teams an average of $93,000. And there are only 13. The average professor gets $228,000 and some make over $300k. And most of them have useless graduate degrees in Film and arts and so forth.
You sound like a really fun person! But yes, sports are an important part of education. For example see: link to campuscareerclub.com…%20More%20
shamrock
2 years ago
The sad thing is with endowments in the Ivy League they don’t even need to charge tuition, 2 or 3% of the endowment each year would cover the whole thing.
That is another pet topic here – how California is “emptying”. Meanwhile traffic continues to get heavier and heavier and heavier…
As the “Geography King” said on Youtube – California-haters are primarily from 2 groups – 1. Those who live somewhere else and have never lived in California and 2. Those who live in California but have not lived anywhere else.
It was recently mentioned that California has lost some 8 billion dollars in tax revenue.
The Long Beach Convention Center was used recently though, to temporarily house illegal aliens that have been crossing the border.
Webej
2 years ago
I well remember talking to a man one evening. He was taking night courses for a Philosophy degree as a senior student. His job included going to universities to try and recruit researchers for an internationally acclaimed lab at a multinational.
He told me that he had recently met a student who had told him: Why should I bust my a$$ taking some super hard advanced science degree when I can finish this business course and become their boss, earning 4× the pay?
The man was dumbfounded, but told me: It seems crazy, but the kid is 100% right!
Webej
2 years ago
I work at a university and have been tracking student’s opportunities and initial salaries over decades.
Despite the hype about STEM education and all, degrees in Physics, acknowledge to be among the hardest (borne out by the number of people dropping the program and the small initial cohorts) rank among the last. Degrees in communications, business, psychology, and many other studies with hardly any hard core, are better bets than STEM courses.
I used to take programming courses at an institute, and it always struck me that half the participants in the developer courses were people with masters and doctoral degrees organic chemistry, pharmacology, medical sciences, etc. All people who had found better employment opportunities by switching over to IT.
The best prospects remain for medical students. For the amount of education, they have the highest prospects of secure and gainful employment.
Blurtman
2 years ago
Makes for more interesting Uber drivers.
Dr. Manhattan23
2 years ago
Get the government out of the business of issuing school loans, or at least only give school loans to those fields in demand for the future, and you will see the cost of tuition fall. To mish’s point, you can learn the same thing in online free courses, but you dont get credit towards graduation. At the end of the day, education is a business. It’s about exclusion, and not education. If you dont think so, lets see what happens if ivy league schools were to come out tomorrow and announce they will give all their courses for free so that everyone can get their degrees. Lets see how fast donors cut $$$ and get mad (I went to NYU business school, not ivy League, but certainly a good school at the time)
I think it says something when an 18 year old, or a 25 year old, can put themselves into debt to go to school for useless degrees, but cant get a business loan to start a business. Getting a smaller business loan would probably serve them better
Captain Ahab
2 years ago
There is one solution, not among those listed above, yet far more effective that emptying endowment funds. It has to do with making parties responsible, and the most irresponsible party of all is…. the UNIVERSITY (from the president down to individual faculty).
The only truly effective solution to a host of problems is for each university to be guarantor for a student’s loans used at that university.
Let’s consider some typical issues/failings in higher education:
1. the student is of marginal quality–an increasing problem.
2. the student fails to perform–a variety of issues here
3. the student undertakes a degree with low job opportunities
4. the student undertakes a degree with a crappy curriculum
5. The degree program is taught by unqualified, out-of-date, lazy, over-paid professors, or worse–adjuncts and grad students
6. Tuition is unnecessarily high as money is wasted at the university (high salaries, retirement programs, teaching loads, building projects etc)
I could go on; however, the point is that some/all of the responsibility belongs to the university, which largely turns its back on the market for its graduates. Very little in a university is performance based–although given lip-service.
Eddie_T
2 years ago
I look at this differently. There is a story here that isn’t being told. The story I’m talking about has to do with the conduit schemes designed to enrich certain people with government student loan money while bilking the people borrowing the money.
If you look at default stats, you can begin to see what’s going on.
About 78% of defaulters owe less than 40K. The high defaults are skewed heavily toward private, for-profit schools of two years or less. (This isn’t college at all, it’s mostly trade schools. Barber college. )
Black borrowers default at approximately twice the rate of whites and hispanics at 1.5X that of whites.(must be that white privilege again)…..
Most flagship state universities have very low default rates at any level of attainment. Of non-profit private universities, the default rates are about 7%…..less than half the default rate of for-profit colleges.
One of my favorite examples is Larry’s Barber College in Chicago (four locations to service you)…..default rates are 50% of graduates. But Larry is rich, and getting richer…..and he’s a local hero. Really nice website…..and he teaches inmates in the Cook County jail. What a great guy…a real humanitarian.
Here’s the Wall of Shame Schools….I’ll live to you to see if you can identify any particular racial or ethnic correlations with their stupid high defaults……(but if you can’t you’re dumb as a stump or being willfully ignorant.)
The schools that never get anybody a job are supposed to be cut off…..but they never are….the government just gives them more rope…over an over.
Of those who attend four year colleges, the vast majority of loan defaults are liberal arts grads who attended non-selective schools….
My kids went to grad school. The Masters in Music (Queen’s College in NYC) already paid off her loan. Took less than 2 years. She’s good with money.
The MFA (School at the Chicago Institute of Art) is on time with his loans, and although he worries about it a lot he’ll get it paid off too. He currently builds fake kitchens for Crate & Barrel ads and hustles logistics for their catalog shoots, which can be just about anywhere. Crappy job, really, but it pays the bills. I’m sure he’ll eventually do better.
People who go to Columbia Film School think they’re going to be movie producers and make bank…..some few of them make it big. But it takes more than a degree….although it probably helps to have the training.
ThaomasH
2 years ago
A greater equity component in student aid with the university holding the equity.
conservativeprof
2 years ago
Only suckers pay for university education now. Biden has extended the moratorium on student loan debt payments again. He will do it in perpetuity.
While it is true that universities, especially elite universities have sharply increased tuition and fees, student loan debt covers much more than university costs. At least 50% of student loans are used for living expenses. As I understand, student loans can be used to purchase a home, car, vacation, and just about anything else. A student only needs to show enrollment with making a token effort (no effort?). A friend who got a masters in education in his 50s got student loans of $66,000 over 2 to 3 years. He hardly had any tuition and fees due to his previous employment at the university. He told about his loans “How do you think I made house payments?”. He only was able to find substitute teaching work after his degree. He has never made a single payment, yet his loan is not classified as in default. He will eventually run out the clock on his student loan debt.
My understanding is jobs in education and non-profit don’t require any repayment of the loan if you work in the industry for X number of years. This is why your friend’s loan is not in default and he doesn’t need to make a payment.
Stay Informed
Subscribe to MishTalk
You will receive all messages from this feed and they will be delivered by email.
His job included going to universities to try and recruit researchers for an internationally acclaimed lab at a multinational.