[patio11]

Seen from another angle, she spent $100,000 of other people's money and is asking to never repay a penny of it.

This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot the last two weeks, since client work has me doing some calculating from federal data on what the current value of a degree in $FOO is likely to be. (I'm sure you will not be surprised that neither religious studies nor women's studies appears near the top of the list.)

I'll blog on that subject if folks are interested in it.

Some of the solutions, like cutting her off at $60k, are just insane. She'd be halfway through her college degree then. If she'd quit then, she'd be unemployed, have no sheepskin, and still owe $60k with no expectation for salary much higher than a generic high school graduate.

[DilipJ]

Consider this from her point of view. Here's a girl, that has never worked in "the real world", and has no idea what the costs of living and consequences of this debt will be. Technically she's not old enough to go to a bar, but she should be allowed to accrue a six-figure debt? Consider if this was any other industry. If you bought a product at a store that the retailer knew would break the second you took it home, or say a home from an owner that knows that the foundation is unstable, then there would be ways for the purchaser to invalidate the purchase. That's because in any transaction, the purchaser has the right to full disclosure of the product, so that they can make the decision to purchase with the full knowledge of the consequences. However, in the education field, there's a certain level of deceit that both the universities and lenders are complicit in: they know that they are charging excessively for a degree, based on the salary the student could expect to get with that degree.

[houseabsolute]

> there's a certain level of deceit that both the universities and lenders are complicit in: they know that they are charging excessively for a degree, based on the salary the student could expect to get with that degree.

The charge for the degree isn't based on the income you can make from it, it's based on the cost of producing it (ostensibly). This is true of most things you buy. How much can you buy a steak for? How much can you sell it for after it's cooked just right? But the price is determined mostly by the cost of production and its intersection with the market's willingness to pay.

The real solution is to remove all special protection from college loans. Bankruptcy should cancel them like any other loan, and they should not be especially easy to get, especially not for poor people (who, despite all hopes for an equal world, will probably be making less on average after school and thus be in a worse position to pay back). Let the banks take their risks and let the shareholders pay for the mistakes. And if people have to go to state schools or (gasp) not get educated in retarded subjects like womens' studies, so be it.

[pmichaud]

I'm trying really hard not to down vote you. Since you kept it relatively civil, I won't, but let me say that I'm extremely disappointed in your attitude:

1) Making it more difficult for poor people to get the loans that are now pretty required for higher education is retrograde. The idea is to compensate for the already significant disadvantages that the poor face in climbing out of poverty, not to create yet another barrier. I'm guessing you're middle class, never experienced anything but?

2) Picking a subject out of the sky, like womens' studies, and declaring it "retarded" (classy in itself), is anti intellectual. What if evolution had to abide arbitrary rules about which biological configurations were "retarded" and which were acceptable? That's just not how it works.

[houseabsolute]

> Since you kept it relatively civil, I won't

I applaud your restraint!

> . . . higher education is retrograde . . . not to create yet another barrier

The individual being discussed in this essay is far from unique. The question is whether many poor people aren't being saddled with even more debt for very little payoff; debt that the education lobby has made it very difficult to escape. Poor people studying in subjects for which there is likely to be a good return on the investment ought to still be able to get loans. But you won't see as many poor womens' studies majors. And you won't see as many poor kids woefully underprepared for college going in the first place to throw five or ten thousand dollars and two years of earning potential in the garbage when they have to drop out.

I think the takeaway is that sometimes it is good to limit peoples' ability to get credit if it's not going to be used for a productive purpose that's likely to result in it being paid back. But since you can't discharge the debt through bankruptcy, the banks have no incentive to help make this determination. I don't mean that there should be government mandated limits, by the way; I just want the government to stop giving people nooses to hang themselves with.

The other factor is that if we stop propping up the market, colleges will likely be forced to stop charging so much money, especially the private ones. Or they will do something like what Stanford has done and adopt a graduated pay scale to maintain that desirable trait of diversity.

> Picking a subject out of the sky

If you'll read the article you'll note that the person in question was a women's studies major. It's hardly picked out of the sky. But even if it was, what does it matter if I picked an example out of the constellation of disciplines whose study do not deserve financial support? I could have picked religious studies too but I had forgotten that part of her degree's name.

> What if evolution had to abide arbitrary rules

Might as well call gravity, by which evolution does have to abide, "arbitrary." The rule that makes Women's Studies retarded is that it's not a productive or useful course of education. To wit:

1. Essentially no one except a government subsidized education facility and a few rare counseling jobs will pay you more at the margin for having a degree in Women's Studies because it is useless and nobody wants to pay for that.

2. Women's Studies is not, in most cases, very important in determining how effective a feminist you will become.

So if no one will pay for it and it offers little broader societal benefit that we might want to subsidize, what is it for? The entire field, like academic literary criticism, is masturbatory. That is why it is stupid and study in it should not be subsidized. Especially for poor people who cannot use it to climb out of their difficult situation.

[foldr]

>So if no one will pay for it and it offers little broader societal benefit that we might want to subsidize, what is it for?

You could ask that question about all of the humanities, really, but presumably you want poor people to have the option of studying English, history, philosophy, etc.

[philwelch]

"Picking a subject out of the sky, like womens' studies, and declaring it "retarded" (classy in itself), is anti intellectual."

What if you declare it "retarded" after years of careful and intellectual consideration? What if you go on to point out that the field of study itself is intellectually bankrupt if not outright anti-intellectual?

[earl]

Seen from a more realistic angle, the school sold her a defective product for $100K. Better yet, the banks bought themselves a sweetheart deal where they sell one of the very very few products that is almost impossible to discharge in a bankruptcy. Hmm... I wonder how those two things came to be?