[jdsully]

Yes, but the dirty secret is the earning potential of a college student is bimodal - yet people often use averages to discuss the benefits of a college degree. The $30,000 in additional earnings figure is propped up heavily by those making six+ figure salaries. Those who just barely scraped by do not earn more on average than those who only went to high school.

If you have the aptitude college will absolutely help. But for those who do not pushing them into college is just saddling them with debt for little benefit.

[jimhefferon]

Some of the people without six figure salaries were interested in a subject that just simply did not pay at a high rate. They, or some of them anyway, may be glad they learned about the subject. (Of course, we are talking about lots of people so many may not be glad about what they did.)

My point is just that there are payoffs other than monetary ones. Nothing wrong with monetary, but nothing wrong with the others if that drives you.

[jdsully]

> My point is just that there are payoffs other than monetary ones. Nothing wrong with monetary, but nothing wrong with the others if that drives you.

The issue is that college imposes a very real and life changing monetary cost on people attending. If you fail to achieve a high paying job after college you will be far behind your peers who never went, and dramatically more limited in your life choices. College debt is the closest we have to indentured servitude in the modern world.

For those who just want to learn, continuing education or course auditing is the better solution. I do wish colleges would expand upon these programs.

[learc83]

90+% of all loan disbursements are Federal and Federal loans offer income based repayment plans.

You pay 10% of your disposable income (income above 1.5 times the poverty level) for up to 20 years.

Not sure that's really far behind. For a family of 4 making the median household income that's roughly equivalent to a cable bill.

[jdsully]

That's a myopic view of the situation. Under income based repayment most students' loans will actually increase despite the payments. The massive debt will prevent common middle class milestones like getting a mortgage. Further loan forgiveness comes with a balloon payment in the form of taxes - forgiven debt is income according to the IRS. After allowing it to grow unchecked for 20 years the amount forgiven will be substantial.

IBR operates very similar to welfare - including the embarrassing intrusion and analysis of your private life by your lenders. It is a last resort option and not something we should be encouraging.

[learc83]

Lenders look at monthly payments when calculating debt to income. $150 a month in student loans won't prevent you from getting a mortgage unless $150 is all that's preventing you from affording the mortgage.

Cancelled debt is only taxable up to the point of solvency meaning that most people who have a substantial amount of debt cancelled won't owe anything.

>IBR operates very similar to welfare - including the embarrassing intrusion and analysis of your private life by your lenders. It is a last resort option and not something we should be encouraging.

I've done it. You provide your tax return. They don't care about anything but income. It's by no means intrusive and shouldn't bhe thought of as a last resort.

[Konnstann]

The problem is the degree in a topic you are interested in but pays very little costs the same amount. The debate around college is the return on investment, which if you go to college for something you are interested in rather than something you want to market, you don't care about. I can study underwater basket weaving and get a degree in it, but being happy about learning doesn't offset the ~$80k in student loans that will make me very unhappy for a long time.

[layoutIfNeeded]

>They, or some of them anyway, may be glad they learned about the subject.

What percentage of college subjects don’t have readily available high-quality material across the Internet for free? Libgen is free. SciHub is free. Whole semesters worth of lectures are available for free on YouTube.

It would be stupid to take out loans for a degree that will never break even, when more knowledge is out there for free than ever before in human history.

[Mediterraneo10]

> What percentage of college subjects don’t have readily available high-quality material across the Internet for free? Libgen is free.

I trained in a field that might be classed under "areal studies" more generally for a certain stretch of Eurasia. (And not a "useless" humanities subject, but something that does bring desirable job prospects.) The vast majority of literature in that subject is not available online. More recent publications might be created in PDF format, but for the most part students will need to hit the library shelves, even at the undergraduate level.

Sure, I have scanned and uploaded a great deal to Libgen myself, but I appear to be the only volunteer doing so for this entire field. Most volunteers on LibGen or r/Scholar don’t want to undertake any more effort than downloading already-digitized materials from behind paywalls and then uploading them to Libgen, they don’t want to do the hard work of scanning thousands of pages. I suspect there are a lot of academic fields where it would take decades for the handful of Libgen volunteers to adequately upload the standard publications in that field.

[dsfyu404ed]

>I trained in a field that might be classed under "areal studies" more generally for a certain stretch of Eurasia

I'd guess former bomber pilot but the rest of your comment makes me think otherwise.

[rimliu]

How about subjects that need some lab work? My subjects were chemistry and physics and believe me we spent a lot of time in the labs.

[opnitro]

Humanities courses often thrive on discussion sections. These are hard to replicate with just books.

[povertyworld]

I think the people who live their life as a series of income maximizing transactions aren't really the humanities type anyways.

[mamon]

And hard science, like mathematics or physics relies on teacher helping you get unstuck. Learning the same thing from books takes significantly more time.

[watwut]

Most people dont know they exist. I surely did not just a few months ago about libgen.io.

More importantly, while I can use thesearch to learn something I know quite a lot about already, I would not know where to start in things I know nothing about. And let's not start about things that I don't know they exist (which my school covered).

[myself248]

All true, but you can also learn about subjects that interest you in more settings than just college. Many of them more engaging, many of them cheaper. People go to college almost entirely for the piece of paper that you can't get just by being passionate about something and exploring it on your own terms.