Also known as right now. This is already happening. Because, in my field anyways, departments are being cut literally left and right.
Universities need warm bodies at the grad level to both look more attractive to donors and to teach those undergrads. And people are looking to get better jobs by getting a grad degree and of course, we’ve had several economic downturns in recent years. When that happens, grad enrollment goes up.
Well, yeah.
So much about modern schooling is a rort.
It amazes me young people can spend up to 12 straight years in public schooling and still somehow manage to come away without a viable skill to trade or the means to an independent livelihood.
Then what often follows is a tertiary education confidence scam.
What interests me upon reflection is that noone ever directly told me that investment in schooling would guarantee me a job yet this idea was heavily implied by society and institutions all throughout my journey to adulthood.
Make the school liable for the first 25% if the loan goes into default.
Also, start scaling down the amount that the feds guarantee, until it gets to something like $15-$20K per year.
Also, reduce the loans available on a sliding scale depending on the size of the university’s endowment. Over $1 million endowment per student, no loans.
Finally,
Universities need to have expenses for (a) teachers, (b) lab facilities for STEM courses, (c) record-keeping. But the rest of the country at large does NOT need to pay for this -
There are fixes that can be implemented right now to reverse the growth in student debt. But it requires that a lot of people get their snouts out of the trough.
I hear people bitching from time to time about unpaid internships. Well, yeah, but an unpaid internship most of the time does not leave you with mid six figures in debt when it’s over.
I have some sympathy for anyone who runs up 300 large in debt and then finds out that there are very few good openings in her field and it’s been that way for quite a few years.
But not a lot.
Which is nice, if you can find someone to pay for you to take an unpaid internship – still without any guarantee of a career at the end of it.
And that’s the problem.
You can’t go anywhere to borrow $40,000 to cover room and board for two years while in an unpaid internship, at the end of which you would owe only $40,000 even if you could not get a related job.
But if you want to borrow $350,000 funneled by the feds through a bank and a college to wind up in the same place, they’ll shovel the dollars at you.
What we also need to do here is run the numbers. Let’s say you are in a humanities program with an instructor-student ratio of 1:10. If the tuition is $60K per year and the average instructor compensation (considering that there will be a mix of full/associate/adjunct profs) is $160,000, that leaves $44,000 per student per year going for things that aren’t teachers. What exactly does that buy? This same sort of analysis could be done for all levels of education. Health care, too.
Wut? In a humanities program? Where did you get those numbers?
Take off the 1 before that 6 and it would probably still be too high.
(And btw, an adjunct isn’t a prof.)
Fine. I was basically pulling numbers out of the air to make a point. And I did not want to exaggerate the amount of tuition paid that goes to things that aren’t teacher compensation.
If it’s actually $54K instead of $44K that’s an even bigger “what the holy fuck?”
(Edit: I suspect that the schools paying their profs $60K are charging less than $60K a year. I could be wrong, in that case, how about an orange neon WTF? eight stories high)
Friend of mine got a 4 year art degree. He is at Google now doing platform evangelism.
Degree AFAIK taught him nothing germane to his current job. But probably got him through some recruiter filters.
My hat’s off to whomever hired your friend!
I’ve hired ~30 people in my career. And in more than half those cases, I’ve had to battle with HR because the candidate I really wanted did not follow the Approved Path with the Appropriate Credentials.
It is shocking how often that happens. I have gotten jobs I have totally killed and not been eligible on paper, but got to interview because of a connection.
Also have seen job postings for jobs I have vacated that I would not have been considered for, despite having done all the things listed well.
I have a generally low opinion of recruiters. They are on the same spectrum as car salespeople and real estate agents.
These days, even getting to a recruiter is something-so many places just use algorithms to sort applications that using the wrong phrasing can get you junked.
I know that’s true in some places, but the Wall Street Journal article we’re discussing here is about programs in the United States, where those are usually (always?) graduate programs.
A tempting idea, but flee to where? The countries which still have sane leadership don’t want us.
Where does the person live during such an internship? How do they eat?
A major part of the problem with unpaid internships is that the only people who can afford to take them are the same people who don’t need to rack up massive debt to get an education, because they have family money to cover costs.
Then businesses shouldn’t be charging so much for their goods and services, if their only expenses – according to you – are wages. Buildings, equipment, utilities…yeah, none of that stuff costs anything.
That’s awesome! It’s a much harder needle to thread. No matter how good you are as a student through undergrad, it’s really hard to count on being at the top of your class in an entirely new environment–and especially one where essentially every grade hinges on either a single scaled exam or a single paper.
Yep. I graduated law school in 2011, and just finished paying off my law school debt in 2020–although I made a number of choices that slowed the progress down, like taking a year out as a 3rd year associate to clerk (which slowed debt payments but dramatically increased my career prospects), declining to live in somewhat less expensive suburbs so that I could have the quality-of-life boost that walking to work provides, and never once pushing myself to hit the annual bonus numbers. I’ve landed at a humane firm in a group of lawyers I actually like and respect and I get to do interesting work. It’s my fourth firm, and I can safely say that none of that is typical for biglaw. Honestly I pretty much feel like I won not just a lottery but a whole series of them to get where I am now.
My time in law school pretty much perfectly matched the great recession. I was lucky to be essentially out of the economy during those years, but prospects for graduates of my school also changed pretty significantly between 2008 and 2011–after what (I take it) were high-80s-to-low-90s employment percentages for earlier classes coming out of OCI, they dropped so precipitously in 2008 and 2009 that the 30-40% of students who had 2010 summer jobs looked like a big improvement.
In the U.S., at least, they’re professional degrees that require several years of additional schooling on top of an undergraduate degree. There’s some distinction between pure graduate degrees and professional degrees, though in some fields its hard to articulate exactly what it is. But, for instance, I have both a J.D. (which is the practitioner’s terminal professional legal degree) and an LL.M. (which is a nonterminal graduate degree in law but which would not, alone, qualify me to practice law in most jurisdictions) on top of my B.A.
