[DanielBMarkham]

I don't mean to restate the obvious, or pander to the crowd on HN, but every time we read one of these articles it needs to be stated that the current system is broken even when it is paid for. That is, for all the ink spilled over who can afford what and how much money is spent where, there are tons of kids right now graduating without a sliver of hope for a job. Worse yet, the system has been blowing smoke up their asses for so long that many of them somehow feel entitled to a job whether there's one out there or not.

I love education-related stories. I feel that hacking in this area can help the most people and advance the species the furthest. But we also need desperately need to keep new information we receive in context.

[ChuckMcM]

I'd like to test your assumptions here.

You claim : "the current system is broken"

You submit as evidence to that claim : "there are tons of kids right now graduating without a sliver of hope for a job."

If I ran this claim backwards (which is to say reverse its assertions) then a "working" education system would produce "most of the kids employable" ?

I wonder why that defines "fixed" (or broken for that matter). I feel a bit differently about it of course (or I wouldn't be whining here :-) that the 'publicly funded' part of our education system (that is K-12) should strive to make you generally employable, and that higher learning institutions should help you explore your interests regardless of the applicability of those interests to employment.

Of course looking at it that way its a harder problem, since it really says that every kid who graduates from high school should have the equivalent of a two year STEM degree these days, but those are the base skills that employers want to start from, and we're still not even graduating 100% literate kids from our high schools.

[ruswick]

"Higher learning institutions should help you explore your interests regardless of the applicability of those interests to employment."

I disagree. Historically, postsecondary education might have been limited to the disciplines of academia and focused solely on liberal arts. However, at this point, a four-year degree is an effective prerequisite to 90% of white-collar job. (Irrespective of the actual value of a degree in performing jobs, of course. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of professions don't require four years of institutional training or education to perform. Indeed, I'd wager that most careers don't require academic knowledge beyond that of a seventh grader.)

So, college has been perverted by the labor market into a corollary of the K-12, "career-preparatory" apparatus, and few students enter college in pursuit of actual intelectual stimulation. Most are simply going through the motions to get an entry level job. In effect, college has simply become a funnel from high school to the labor market. We can debate about whether or not this is good, but the fact remains that, given the current post-secondary education landscape, colleges exist to get people jobs and should be measured by that standard.

As for only K-12 being government-funded and thus career-oriented, many if not most students take federal aid of some sort, implicating public funding even for private colleges. It's impossible to disassociate colleges and government money, as federal aid pervades tuition expenditure.

[smsm42]

The reason why jobs require degree is because degree is a proxy for both IQ and ability to perform set tasks in defined settings and achieve measurable results. Since other proxies are either hard to get or illegal, here we go.

[DanielBMarkham]

This is a difficult issue for a lot of reasons, hence my restating the context.

I'd venture that no matter what else an education provides, if it does not enable a graduate to repay their loan, it is non-sustainable. (Whether you want to use "good" or "bad" here is up to you)

Even the phrase "public education" is broad and fuzzy. With a tremendous amount of student loans publicly-financed, with public financing also intricately involved in the public university system via research grants, there's a distinction between secondary education and higher education, but I'm not sure how much the distinction matters for purposes of broadly-based public policy discussions.

[_delirium]

> if it does not enable a graduate to repay their loan

What a weirdly backwards way of phrasing it. Why should anyone take out a loan to get an education? Why would a public university charge tuition? My parents did not take out loans to get college degrees (in California, in the 1960s). But their generation got rich and now doesn't want to pay for the next generation to do the same. Should boomers who attended fully subsidized public education now really be let off the hook with their ridiculous claims that they're some kind of Randian superhero who worked their way up "on their own", and it would be "theft" to ask them to pay taxes so the same system they benefited from can continue?

It's certainly not impossible to do so, if people aren't so stingy. I moved out of the U.S. and now live in a country that has free public education. Not just free, but you get paid to attend university, up through a master's degree. (Not paid a lot, but a modest living stipend.) We have a lower unemployment rate than the U.S. does, too. And better transit and less bureaucratic healthcare.

[brudgers]

Repaying the loans is only one way the system might be corrected. Allowing student loans to be discharged via bankruptcy would be another, which has recently been outlawed. Thus prices for education are set in a marketplace which rewards bad loans by shifting all of the risk to the borrower.

[matwood]

Why shouldn't the borrower shoulder most of the risk? If we shift risk to the lender then they will simply stop lending. Then people will complain how they can't get a loan to go to college.

[fnordfnordfnord]

The borrower, the taxpayer, and anyone who holds dollars shoulder the risk to one degree or another. The "lender" has only to move paperwork in order to reap a profit. Can you not see that if the lender had to assume some risk, then the lender would probably lend more to high paying, high demand job skills, and less to skills in saturated market segments and unproductive skills.

[sokoloff]

I can also see that lenders might exert their influence in ways you'd find objectionable, making lending predicated on family assets/income, requiring co-signing from a parent with a 650+ credit score, not lending to liberal arts majors at all, refusing to lend at "black colleges", or preferentially lending at Ivys, etc.

Of course, they'd do it in the name of lending to high paying, high demand job skills and high likelihood of repayment. Under such a system, I'd have still gotten loans, but I'd rather see a system where some percent of people who make bad choices suffer from their choices, but where educational loans are widely available than a system where few are "allowed" to make bad choices, but loans are more narrowly available.

I don't want a world that's even more "rich get educated, poor don't" than today. If I look back at my family, my generation is much, much better off, primarily via education, than my grandparents who very literally mined coal and worked in a steel mill. They scrimped and saved so my parents could go to college to become teachers, who in turn ensured we did as well. That's no college to no-name college to top-name college in the span of two generations.

Of course that's only one data point, and if I read it in a paper, blog or on news.YC, I'd roll my eyes at the cherry-picking, too, because it'd be 1 story hand-selected from 100s of millions. In my case, it's 1 of 1, so I want to ensure we preserve the conditions that let my parents work hard to forge a better life for themselves and my siblings. Maybe in a world where college loans are hard to get (such as the world they lived in), this would all work out similarly, and easy college loans are in fact part of the problem, but I think there's been heaps of hidden benefits to having education being more widely available and more common that people overlook when they see Mr or Ms Bad Choices as an adult with untenable student loan debt.

[ChuckMcM]

Perhaps we don't see a similar level of difficulty.

"I'd venture that no matter what else an education provides, if it does not enable a graduate to repay their loan, it is non-sustainable. (Whether you want to use "good" or "bad" here is up to you)"

Your reasoning here doesn't make any sense to me, are you claiming that if a student takes out loans in order to pay for an education in basket weaving. Then fails to earn enough money by applying their acquired expertise in basket weaving to repay that loan. That they educational institution was at fault here?

There are many colleges which will train you in skills that will pay off the entire cost it takes to attend them in under 5 years. In California alone there are 23 campuses of the California State University system, with a median four year tuition of $25,000 for state residents which will train you in a STEM degree which is less than you would pay for a new car. There are community colleges which will do an Associates degree for even less.

But you are absolutely right there is a problem here, it just isn't with the colleges (although there may be grounds for accusing them of collusion).

Come at this from a different angle, how would you like to be able to conscript hundreds, thousands, maybe even a million people into a program where some fraction of everything they earn goes right into your pocket? Sell them a government guaranteed loan that they can't afford to pay back. It was a great scam in the Mortgage business for a while, the banks made billions on it, the tax payers took it in the shorts when the bottom fell out. And why did the bottom fall out? Because those damn suckers could declare bankruptcy and get out of paying the loan! Can you imagine. Well the banks have fixed that loop hole, you can't declare bankruptcy and get out of a student loan, no way no how, you're mine for life.

And guess what, the same people who were fleecing stupid people with bad mortgages are now fleecing people with student loans. In some cases literally, like when I heard from the same Wells Fargo loan officer who used to do mortgages and now wanted to talk to me about getting loans for my college age kids.

Its a problem *for schools" if they are over priced since they need students to survive. Guess what, if they can't justify their costs they go out of business or they get more efficient. As long as there are people willing to provide the same degree for less money, the system will continue to work and anyone who wants to be a doctor, or an engineer, or a lawyer, or a geologist or whatever can get their degree.

I implore you not to let the red herring story of 'students drowning in debt' convince you that college is broken, its not, student lending is broken and students are not be properly informed with respect to what "a degree" means versus what an "employable degree" means. Once we educate them and they start spreading out to the more affordable schools the private schools will have to fight harder for the top talent and will do so with scholarships so that their 'total cost' is the same as if they went to a state school but got their 'marquee' name.

Make students more discerning shoppers and the "problems" you decry go away.

[sp332]

"I'd venture that no matter what else an education provides, if it does not enable a graduate to repay their loan, it is non-sustainable. (Whether you want to use "good" or "bad" here is up to you)"

Your reasoning here doesn't make any sense to me, are you claiming that if a student takes out loans in order to pay for an education in basket weaving. Then fails to earn enough money by applying their acquired expertise in basket weaving to repay that loan. That they educational institution was at fault here?

Not at fault, just not sustainable. As in, if the students can't make enough money to pay the school, the school will go out of business. Less drastically, if a student knows they will have to take a job doing something else to pay off the basket-weaving-school loan, they will not pay thousands of dollars to learn something that can't make them that money back.

[enraged_camel]

>>that the 'publicly funded' part of our education system (that is K-12) should strive to make you generally employable, and that higher learning institutions should help you explore your interests regardless of the applicability of those interests to employment.

Sorry, but... what?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but why should society pay for your exploration of your interests regardless of their applicability to employment?

We use employment as a means of converting skills into economic value. This is why when you work for a company or a government institution, you are given money in exchange for the value you produce. This value is determined by consumer and citizen demand for goods and services. What this means is that you need to produce something other people want, as opposed to what you want. Otherwise you won't have a job, because nobody will need your skills and knowledge.

Public education is a contract between the citizen and the (state) government. The citizen pays taxes to fund it, and in return his/her child gets a subsidized education. But that is where the contract ends. If the kid wants a job after that, they better make sure they are making the most use of the education by learning how to fulfill consumer and citizen demand in the economy. They can pursue their interest in botanics or cultural studies in their spare time, as hobbies.

[klibertp]

Higher education should give you means to pursuit your interests later. That means giving you a set of skills and knowledge directly applicable to making money, because to follow your interests that's what you need.

At least I think so. And that's because, at least for me, exploring my interests while worrying about my employability later, worrying about grades and every failure is pure hell, enough so to make me lose any interest I had at the beginning.

Education, in the form it takes now, is for the most part killing any joy of learning. I don't really think that this is possible to fix as long as we rely on money this much. So my conclusion is this: make the education as painless as it needs to be to make it relevant for earning money (more relevant and in a good sense), but don't prolong it far into the twenties. Let it end as quick as it's possible and let the people earn enough to pursuit their interests by themselves later.

[smsm42]

Higher education is publicly funded by a large degree, via all kinds of government grants and government-guaranteed loans. Unfortunately, while it is funded on a premise that higher education equals better employment - and thus better contribution to the economy, which is supposed to more than offset the cost of the funding - the reality is that many of the degrees sponsored in such way do not produce this result, and instead only transfer money from taxpayers to people running these degree programs and on the way seriously mess up lives of many people by making them waste time and get into various financial obligations based on assumptions that never come true.

This is why system is broken. If you want unbroken system, there should be a link between how much particular degree raises the income of its owner (after paying off the loans) and the public funding available to those seeking such degrees. If you want to study aspects of underwater basket weaving in medieval French poetry - be my guest, but do not expect a dime of public funds to be invested in it.

>>>> higher learning institutions should help you explore your interests regardless of the applicability of those interests to employment.

That is true only if you ignore the premise that is described above. However, since the public support of the higher education availability is largely based on this exact premise, I do not see how you can ignore it.

[eli_gottlieb]

And then of course there's the problem that youth unemployment will always be a little bit higher than general unemployment and you're in a miserably bad economy anyways.

[superuser2]

>feel entitled to a job

Should we really insult people's character for wanting to work? Entitlement is a connotatively charged word that implies privilege, laziness, and an unreasonable desire to enjoy the fruits of other people's labor while sitting around. I can at least understand the use of the word "entitled" when leveled against welfare, progressive taxation, refusal to do entry-level work, etc.

But how is it wrong or anti-personal responsibility to want to work to support oneself?

[ruswick]

I think the connotation is that they feel as though they ought to be able to obtain a livable job doing what they want to do, which is not the case. They aren't necessarily entitled, but are naive and have unrealistic expectations.

Just because one loves writing does not mean that they will be able to secure employment as a writer. Yet, students continue to enter writing programs and graduate with useless degrees, expecting to enter the workforce immediately. Certain positions simply aren't in demand, yet students act as though finding employment will be trivial.

[shrikant]

I also believe the world has tended to conflate talent discovery with the talent quantity, because historically, talent discovery was up to a select few gatekeepers (like record labels and publishers), who could (or would) only showcase a small fraction of the available talent pool. Whether they did this because of unavoidable resource constraints or to ensure an artificial scarcity is another debate.

Now that anyone with a decent amount of talent and/or the willpower to put in some effort into honing a skill can also showcase that skill, the supply of writers and singers and musicians has suddenly become much larger than before. So it follows that the price associated with purchasing access to the fruits of these talent/labours will have dropped.

TL;DR: Microeconomics 101.

[dnr]

Perhaps a better way to say that is they "feel entitled to a job regardless of whether they can contribute any value to an organization". And a likely cause of having nothing to contribute would be studying a subject they find personally interesting but has no relevance to the broader world.

(I don't know if that's what the OP intended, I'm just clarifying in a way that makes more sense to me.)

[capkutay]

I just went through college and I can say for a vast majority of students it's a sweet fantasy world of partying and fun paired with 2-3 nights of marathon study sessions before midterms and finals.

Then we see articles saying "Well we need more science and engineering students in our colleges because that's where the jobs are too."

Perhaps the non engineering students aren't getting jobs because they just breezed through 4 years of fun while expecting a reward and a career at the end.