More than 40% of U.S. students aren't making payments on their student loans!

Your comments in this thread are in support for student loans without addressing more fundamentally whether or not folks ought to be confronted with such a choice for an education. Do you have any thoughts at the meta level about student loans?

@mattbbpl: He doesn't care. He is blaming the students, not the system that deserves the blame. Of course this is a thread dominated by people who think only rich people deserve an education. Even people with good degrees can't get jobs....lets blame a bad economy on them too.

As an intelligent individual you clearly recognize the fundamental flaw in the "to give a loan, or not to give a loan" paradigm. It's a broken system, and the best way to troubleshoot any system is to identify and eliminate the variables that may be the root cause of the problem until the system functions properly. I would say fundamental causes could include:

• The SAT as a standardized test and admission standard. I can go into more detail in this regard, but the bottom line is that the cost of the SAT and alleged value of their results are inflated and there is an entire industry devoted to ensuring that college-bound students become "good at test taking", rather than providing them with essential knowledge. It is a biased standard in favor of those with pre-existing socioeconomic superiority.
• The fact that degrees with little applicable career opportunities are offered to students in exchange for debt. While I advocate an individual's freedom of choice, these factors should be made absolutely clear prior to the student prior to them acquiring any debt.
• The existence of a college culture that promotes underage drinking and a party atmosphere. This should be more strictly enforced and violators held more accountable for participating in such activity. There should never be any individual that makes a decision in regards to where they'll be most able to engage in activities that are obstructive to acquiring an education. "Top party schools" should not be a discernible characteristic of any educational institution.

@TheWalkingGhost: yeah, it has become clear that he doesn't want to identify any macro issues nevertheless address them. I spoon fed him a study on the matter and he has yet to even address it.

@mattbbpl: Happens when somebody is wrong.

Really consider what your logic implies.

Basic Fact:

• There are individuals without a college education that do not live in poverty.
• There are individuals with college educations that do live in poverty.
• There are "free ride" scholarships granted to individuals that possess intellect and work-ethic.
• 40% of Students are not paying their student loans.

Questions:

• If only the "top 1%" can go to college, then would it not create mass vacancies at educational institutions?
• Do you have to earn over $400,000 annually to be able to afford a college tuition?
• Is acquiring student loan debt a viable means for one to "pull themselves out of poverty"?
• What are the primary factors that cause one to remain in poverty?
• How is a "right" to transcend poverty directly correlated with one's ability to acquire a college education?
• Is there a way to transcend poverty without a college degree?
• Is it beyond reason to imply that students are unable to make payments because jobs do not exist that require such degrees?
• Is giving more individuals degrees going to create these jobs?
• Are those even making payments employed in their field of study and being paid proportionally in regards to the merit of the degree they have acquired?

It was never my stance to reserve education to the economically endowed. If you read my stance to which @omotih replied, I was simply citing his disagreement, lack of counter-proposal, and pessimistic stance to being as disingenuous as denying the problem altogether to which the only solution would be to "only offer college to those who can afford it".

The problem, however, remains that the market is flooded with post educational opportunities that our economic infrastructure does not have career opportunities for.

It's more in line that work experience is needed to land jobs. Some college graduates believe that a Bachelors is enough to land a high paying job, but what they don't get is the work experience. Companies know that you have knowledge of accounting with the degree, but do you know how to deal with pressure in Tax Seasons?

The reality is that most companies realize that what they ask you to do doesn't require 4 years of college. Their accounting systems are more data-entry oriented and they would rather train a pre-existing employee with a certification who knows the in's and out's of the industry and has a proven record of attendance and established work-ethic.

There are also better paying jobs that require a 4 year degree, but there is substantially more weight on the risk in terms of the reward. While great rewards come with a 4 year degree, the demand for them has deflated while their implied value has been inflated to a point of "you'll always be poor if you don't go to college".

De jure there aren't any debtor's prisons. De facto, they do exist now.

New York Times: Return of the Debtor's Prisons

It should come as no surprise. Money, greed and profit govern everything now.

Google's choice of Java as the standard language for developing architecture-independent applications for the Android platform did breathe a bit more life into Java, but I expect that extra lease on life to be temporary.

I agree that C++ is much more broadly applicable than Java. The designers of cross-platform development environments (like Xamarin, Unity 3D etc.) seem to prefer C# over Java and, of course, Javascript has long been favored over Java for web development.

Android notwithstanding, I still think Java's days are numbered: There are simply too many modern alternatives, regardless of platform.

I would expect a good programming school to teach at least C++, C#, HTML/CSS/Javascript and SQL.

I do not think that loans are an inherently flawed form of financing. However, colleges and universities throughout the United States have an incentive to continue giving student loans. That is, the United States government continues to willingly give them, and that funds these colleges and schools. This has developed an enormous student loan bubble, so to speak, that is potentially paralyzing both for individual debtors and the United States economy.

Rather than colleges being encouraged to decrease the variety of courses offered by average career potential, I think that public colleges becoming tuition free for students is something that at least ought to be considered.

It should be emphasized that some college cultures encourage partying that often includes drug use. However, not all of them do. There are student review websites like Niche.com where undergraduates rate various aspects of student culture. It may be thought that strictness in prohibition is the right approach, but the war on drugs makes drug dealers more powerful when stricter bills become law and this is because illegal drugs and alcohol have a relatively inelastic demand. Instead, regulating harsh drugs can decrease the power of drug dealers, and increase safety of drug use. I would say that this is a more reasonable approach to drugs than what the United States currently does, including the colleges and universities in this nation.

I'm not sure what you mean.

Is it really beneficial for society to increase taxes to pay people to not learn any skills to make them more productive?

Would it really help people make more money? People being educated doesn't magically make more jobs come into existence.

If you go into a major that is in demand or provides skills that are marketable, there is no reason you cannot pay back your loans.

you know whats the problem is? ... C++ and Java is from the 90s or even the 80s ... thats the real bottleneck here ... humans are simply terrible software programmers ... this way it will take forever

Free college sounds great, but when everyone has a degree, it just inflates the bubble. Not to disagree, I would advocate that if it were to be free, that certain academic criteria be required for one to attend college.

The crux is that these institutions have a vested interest to fill all vacancies as per their business model and will always structure tuition/acceptance criteria to fill those vacancies. The current education infrastructure is dramatically outpacing the job market in terms of graduates vs. career opportunities.

At this point you have to acknowledge that not everyone can go to college because it ultimately devalues the degree. If you set more stringent criteria, you leave vacancies and the business model fails. So how do you solve that problem without putting educational institutions out of business?

Making a 16 year education the new standard is a massive waste of labor and resources when only 25% of them will ever be able to have a job that requires a degree, and jobs that don't require a degree aren't going to pay you more because you have one nor will they pay you four years income for the time you spent in college.

@still_vicious: not only more money, but more employment, stems from having a degree

Managed code doesn't always have to be slower than unmanaged code.

It depends on how the managed app is executed at run-time, i.e. whether it's executed by an interpreter or compiled to native machine code by a JIT ("just in time") compiler.

In theory, a managed app can be as fast as an unmanaged app if the JIT compiler does a good job of producing optimized machine code.

I think the main drawback of using managed languages for games is that the garbage collector tends to kick in at inopportune moments and cause hiccups in the animation. I remember reading a blog about writing "pure Java" games for Android, and much of the effort involved structuring the code so that the garbage collector didn't run during the game loop. It's difficult, but not impossible.

Unity 3D uses C# and produces pretty decent games. But I must admit that I've been too lazy to look "under the hood" to see how Unity 3D actually works. I'm guessing that it produces compiled code with customized memory management that's optimized to work well with a game loop.

Edit: Apologies to loco145. We're way off topic for this thread! :-P

@mrbojangles25 said:

@still_vicious: not only more money, but more employment, stems from having a degree

While the facts don't lie, there are indiscernible factors to consider:

• Intelligence - If you barely pass high school taking basic classes because you struggle, then you're less likely seek secondary education and more likely to make poor decisions resulting in a lack of earning potential and possible unemployment
• Motivation - if you're not academically motivated, chances are you'll be less likely to seek educational or advancement opportunities and have poor work-ethic. This may also contribute to unemployment rates.
• Previous economic conditions - jobs that used to require a 4 year degree might now require post-grad education.
• Socioeconomic status - With family support you have a safety net and are less likely to settle for a lesser paying job. Most who attend college tend to belong to a higher economic class.

I don't disagree with you. Go back and read my posts before that one. My entire argument was that the government should give out loans based on major. I'm willing to bet that most of that 40% who are not paying either didn't finish school or got a degree in something useless.

That's my mistake, I didn't understand what you were saying.

@mrbojangles25 said:

@still_vicious: not only more money, but more employment, stems from having a degree

Depends on the degree.

@still_vicious said:

@mrbojangles25 said:

@still_vicious: not only more money, but more employment, stems from having a degree

Depends on the degree.

Depends on a lot, true, but this is just a general idea; college degrees are not as useless for the individual as people think, and it generates revenue (more taxes) for the government. It's in everyone's general interest to support education, and to do everything they can to alleviate the financial burden of going to school.

This makes perfect sense. Sometimes the career path students choose do not help their financial debt. My gf is a school teacher and can barely afford to pay her loans. She can't save any money at all. School teachers are paid shit, so if you're a step below their crappy pay grade you're fucked.

I am referring to normative economics. Do you think that colleges and universities should be loaning out billions of dollars of money if it makes the remainder of a lifetime more difficult when other countries are seeking alternatives and arguably have similar quality of higher education?

If a college education does not develop productivity in the student community, then the academic program should be forgone. However, what you mean by productive may be quite different than what I describe as productive. For example, I think that programs developed to increase understanding of right and ill are more important than those that lead to the best financial outcomes. I say this because new models of business in society encourage purpose leading to profits. There may be the common understanding that profit comes first, but looking at NASA, it is quite clear that the opposite is true. Their original purpose was to bring mankind to outer space and the moon. That was accomplished, and the next program became less sexy: empirical scientific research. Testing theories rather than conceptualizing a new vision for humanity in space is not sufficient leadership for a group.

Similarly, entering the workforce for economic productivity rather than creating new ideas about why people should work is utilitarian and may have the best outcomes, but that may not be the right thing to do for a society.

I would not say that giving equal opportunity utterly leads to equal outcomes. Besides that, physics professors probably seek to fail most students as the idea of unqualified graduates building the next generation of city infrastructures is a disturbing thought. Other examples of seeking to only graduate the best are probably available in different fields. As far as graduates compared to career opportunities, computer science has a shortage of professionals and will for the next six years or so by about one million unfilled positions in the United States. Having said that, there is value is trade schooling, but for the United States to remain an economic leader, we should improve our education system at the grade school level as it has significantly decreased in quality over the past fifty years. More learning communities designed to intrinsically motivate by Self-Determination Theory standards should develop more active learners, and that is the goal of education more than specifics. Moreover, there are additional ways to design a better education system for economic productivity such as encouraging specialization. Doing so would improve the comparative advantage of the United States.

I'm still able to differed my student loans. I actually went to a for profit college, (the school has now closed their doors for good) now I just have a big student debt. No one is really hiring out there, definitely not in California.

What for profit school you went to and what did you major?

I have advise for anyone in high school right now who isn't sure what they want to do. Get a trade. Electrical, machinist, robotics, mechanical/welding. You will out earn the vast majority of people with masters degrees and not have much in the way of student loans. This is assuming you live somewhere that is not a right to work state. Don't go for engineering unless you are very good as you will just end up a foreman and make less than the union employees you supervise. There will always be jobs for those that know practical skills. No one tells their kids to follow this path so jobs are plentiful.

If you do have a passion for something go for that instead because money is not everything. If getting rich is what you desire you will need to start your own buisness. No one gets rich working for someone else.

Westwood College and Game Software Development.

Yep, those For-Profit schools never take you anywhere. Since do you gaming education, why not just make an indie project?

Funny how you mentioned that because I'm doing just that. Developing my own game and company.

@XenogearsMaster: Oh nice! I wish the best of luck to you!

@FireEmblem_Man: Thank you. :)

@magicalclick: Everyone thinks theres this necessity to goto university or college. The reality is that I wouldn't bother unless you knew that what you're taking will ensure you have a job. These credits should have coop with placement as part of the package. Not ok we'll teach you a buncha books & then let you go... good luck. Meanwhile you're in massive debt trying to find work related to your school while working part time as a waiter or dept. store clerk.

Its complete bullshit and I feel bad for anyone stuck in this rut.

For young people finishing highschool unless you know what you want to do later in life don't waste time with college. Thats what it will be. You'll be taking something you don't like that you're doing primarily because your parents want you to. You won't be happy.

Take a year after highschool and just work. Gain some money, see whats open in the economy and figure out what you wanna do with your life. Sometimes taking that year off and working in low paying jobs is motivation to go back to school.

I only went to school part time, 3 credits some nightschool & worked 2 jobs. I have no student debt.

In North America there is certainly an image associated with higher education as being more successful and desirable over trades and other jobs. It certainly hurts the image of the university but what do they care they make money from all the naive students and parents.

@mark1974: just gonna point out real quick that robotics isn't a trade. You need a degree to get in.

This. Enter full-time employment at entry level and understand how businesses function. At the very least, you'll know what you don't want to do and how to transcend it. You will be that much more driven to set realistic goals, get the best possible education, and have an applicable degree with at least some work history and/or applicable skills.

Going to college directly after High School without knowing how the real world functions outside of theory and textbooks is what leads to undergraduates with unrealistic expectations that are unable through their acquired debt to work for $12 an hour and climb the ladder into an administrative salary position.

.

And it does start with primary education. Active learning allows for students to build on their strengths through accelerated learning in specific subjects. Common Core K-12, however, forces students to focus on improving their "weaknesses".

I hope they're ok by not being able to pay back.... just way too much.

I do not agree that school is only a signal for the capacity to learn as it is also, more importantly, the development of professional networks, and the education itself being more fundamental to the college experience than the signal it sends to others.

Math and English are very important for basic literacy and computation abilities in contemporary society which are aspects of Common Core. Furthermore, Common Core has accelerated courses.

Title should read "more than 40% of US students can't make payments on their loans"