lf german mentor

I feel like if so many students didn't choose to go out of state then the student debt problem wouldn't be so huge. Sure, in-state colleges still can cost like 20$K+ a year for tuition and room and board which can still be very difficult for some people to afford, but when someone complains about paying off their Notre Dame student loans of 55$K+ a year I have trouble feeling sympathy for them.

Yeah I know someone who has 100k in student debt from going to graduate school twice. He's not making enough to pay that off in the next 20 years.

Why would you go to graduate school twice for a degree you won't make enough money to pay off the cost. I feel like this is happening more and more nowadays. It's hard to feel bad.

People go to expensive 4 year universities for the "college experience" and end up paying tens of thousands. In my state, and I'm sure many others, going to community college and transferring is the smartest option. I'm going to a community college that has guaranteed admission to OSU when I get my associates. I'm paying a fifth of what I would pay to go to OSU.

Edit: working a minimum wage job for 20 hours for 9 months out of the year is enough to not acquire student loan debt.

Yeah I think one big thing required for a country to have this is "Don't be in debt for 17 trillion dollars"

I know Finland has this too but they have gotten stricter on their tolerance of foreigners abusing it IIRC

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't colleges in the U.S privately owned who need to collect money through tuition from students?

I'm not sure how much going to school out of state factors into this. The average cost of a four year degree in the US is still over $29k a year, more for some, less for some. Regardless of if you'll be living at home, or living in residence/off-campus housing.

Some people have to travel in order to attend school for their discipline, i.e. trades, whatever. Some people will have to travel no matter what because there's no four-year college near their city. I had to travel across the country to study broadcasting because there is literally no program for it in my province. I'm sure a lot of students are in a similar boat.

Bottom line it's just very difficult to get a degree in the US without paying about 100k.

I think the tuition fees here are reasonable enough to not fall into crippling dept once you graduate (roughly 5k per semester), but we do pay more taxes in the end.

The issue is a bit more complex than it maybe looks from across the pond - as all inner issues do when viewed from the outside. German tuition fees were about €500 per semester - very manageable. Additionally, most students with poor parents would've gotten them back from the state, which is why 'tuition fees are social injustice' is somewhat of a questionable argument. I haven't made my mind up on whether fees are a good idea or not, since determining which students can't afford the fees is not easy and misjudgements would be common.
I am currently on an exchange in Ireland. My tuition fees are paid for by the EU, so that's fine, but I have noticed how much more up-to-date facilities are and how many services are offered for students which just don't exist in Germany, like uni-funded student activities. I can use a huge sports complex with a sauna, weight rooms and a public pool for free - it's pretty amazing.
So tuition fees are maybe not all bad, at least within certain bounds. The American system is pretty terrible, I'll admit that. But arguing for sensible balance between state funding and students' contributions seems, in my opinion, to be a more politically sound platform than dogmatic approaches of 'categorical no to tuition fees' or 'universities have to be profitable and keep themselves afloat'.

Source: Studying in Germany - wow, this became a bit of a wall of text.

If the average is 29K a year, why is it very difficult to get a degree for under 100k? That doesn't make sense.

maybe they should major in economics because if ur degree isn't going to make u enough money to pay it off then ur both dumb and bad at business

paying for college is udmb anyway lol

29k * 4 yrs
116k
it isn't difficult to get a <100k degree if u just do college first lol
like every comm colg here is like 5k a year for classes
also community college is significantly easier and much easier to get in touch with teachers

source?

Honestly college in general is dumb in the US 90% of the shit they teach us doesn't matter or is to outdated, or meaningless without actual work experience. Even getting a degree doesn't usually help us get a job it actually usually bars us from getting a lot of jobs from being overqualified.

What the fuck are you talking about...

There is an issue with overqualification among new job seekers but I think that's probably way off course from this thread.

(If you Google it, you will find TONS of articles and reports on this.)

Whoops, you're right, I got ahead of myself on that one. I heard the fact mentioned in various conversations I had about tuition fees in Germany, but apparently that was just a proposition to make the fees less of a burden on financially disadvantaged students.
What is actually a thing is that your fees, along with the nationwide financial support (which is dependent on parents' wages) do not have to be paid back until you earn a certain amount of money. Also, there is an upper limit on how much you have to pay back (10k for state support only, probably more if tuition fees are included). So, even though you might not be entirely exempt from tuition fees, this still seems to be a reasonable system to me.
You still were entirely right in calling me out, however. Good opportunity to read up on that sort of stuff too, I expect tuition fees to make a comeback in Germany in ~5-10 years.

My point was that given current tuition and your likely hood of getting a job in the US after graduating college their's almost no point in going unless it's community college or you really like going.

I can understand what you're going for here, but it's difficult to argue against post secondary education in 2014. Yes, there are MANY people who have been successful without it, and there will continue to be. But post secondary certainly makes it MUCH easier to get a career and earn a good salary, in many ways. It would be foolish to say "Don't go to college, it's too expensive." There's more to it than that. This is an interesting article that touches on that idea somewhat, although I'm sure there are far better ones.

what if the state you live in is really gay like maine

:( look at what first-world countries can do.

A. It makes sense, even if you aren't a Communist like myself, to socially fund education because education breeds positive externalities for everybody in the society -) more educated population --) better society. It's not hard to figure out. People who *did not* pay for your education, in the US, will benefit from it.

B. Standards for US colleges have fallen tremendously in a drive to let in every student possible to maximize revenue - ask any old curmudgeon of a professor and they will tell you university in the US resembles day-care a lot more strongly than it used to, and that many students cruise through to degrees that are basically useless because nothing of value was learned or at least retained.

C. Not going at all has economic benefits in the short-term, particularly if you instead go to a trade school or you go to a two year program which leads directly into a job, but in general anybody with a bachelors degree *should* out-earn anybody who doesn't have one once it's aggregated out across the whole population.

D. It's relatively easy for governments to afford this kind of policy because the state has the power to dictate the tuition fees that it would pay - as universities that were free to the user would be, generally, highly preferred by the student population. It's called a monopsony (one buyer as opposed to monopoly one seller).

E. The US's debt isn't why we don't have education for all. The debt literally matters not at all. If you want a short economics lesson, the USD is in such high demand world-wide, we can literally print the stuff off with little to no real inflationary consequences, so we generally just pay our debts with money hot off the press, and whoever takes it is happy to have it lol. That, and the fact that, thanks to interest rates being 0 between some countries and the US at the moment, they're literally paying us to take their money, so most of our debt has already been refinanced lol.

It's similar down here to in the US except the politicians who are just now deregulating the fees which will push some up to ~$200k over the four or five years all had the benefit of free tertiary education in the seventies, so I find it hard to sympathise with that point of view. It's like they don't realise that this is exactly what taxes were invented to pay for.

at least from the people i talked to in hawaii (who deals with hiring/firing people), they tended to favor college grads over non-college grads just because it showed that they could stick it out through whatever their major is for a few years without quitting

those are for tech/law/office type hiring though

i mean, i felt like i didn't learn much in college, but i did network with a lot of people and professors, and it does open up a lot of avenues for career choices

i got a few job offers before i even graduated through my school and classmates

just posting my insight because of the two guys arguing that college is a complete waste of time and money itt lol

I didn't say it was a complete waste of time, I inferred that College costs FAR to much for what you actually get with the exception of Trade/Community Colleges. This is especially true for anyone in the IT industry were specific certifications and job experience are 100x as important as a bachelors degree. Yes you can get those certification at college but for 4-8x the cost.

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Government programs can sometimes be inefficient, but in general, they provide services at a far lower cost than a private company can - this factor is why private entities fear government intervention in the economy more generally and why any tremendously large project (space program/trans-conintental rails, mail with horses) are government run at least at first. This is because the state doesn't have to worry about being profitable or even having a sensible revenue flow - they'll just print more money or raise taxes to cover any losses on the project, and they have a monopsony over any materials they need to buy. If you want any sufficient evidence, just walk your way down to Washington DC and look at the huge river of tears that was formed when private health insurance companies began to think that they might have to compete with a state-run insurance company - there is absolutely no way they could've survived in the long term with such an entity existing, because they'd be competing against a company that wouldn't have to worry if it made money or not.

Socially funded education simply makes sense because it's a cheaper solution than the current system, it doesn't burden a significant portion of the economy with absurd amounts of debt (over 1 trillion in total) the state has the ability to lower costs by rejecting institutions which don't charge the amount it wants (the same reason why socially funded healthcare is cheaper than our joke of a system), not to mention that just getting an education causes positive externalities throughout the economy - for which the receiver of said education will never be properly compensated for.

I also wasn't imply that simply because you got a BS/BA you should earn more, but in general, any study of persons who hold BA/BS degrees will show that, on average, those folks will earn more than folks who do not have a 4 year degree. It's not a question of should or should not, but a statement about what *is* at least on average.

Funny that reasonable for u guys is 5k/semester when we're paying 500€/semester over here and I still find it a bit unreasonable.

Great that Germany is changing it, education should be free for everyone.

On the out of state argument: it's 34K for UC Santa Cruz and more for Uc Berkeley, those were the only two I looked out. Still pretty ridiculous.

The problem I have is that the government would fuck up reducing student costs. They messed up on Obamacare (example: my father has kidney diesease and has had 2 transplants, he's now paying the same amount for worse care. my mom has degenerative spine and now she can't see the experts she used to be able to see.) so I don't really see how they'll not mess up college more than they did. They messed up student loans up to this point, why should a fix now work?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2014/10/03/there-is-not-such-thing-as-a-free-college-education/

Government cannot make anything "cheaper", it just hides costs by socializing them across a populace.