pete on education

TOTAL.FARK.com: (5601520) This just in: dumbfarks with no skills get paid less than smart people with serious degrees. no, your english degree still is worthless

RodneyToady: namatad: why are you giving the same number of loans and the ammount of money for degrees with little or no payback expectation compared to a field where there is expected payback?

history/english/women studies? small loans to a small number of students.

math/science/eng/comp sci/medicine? larger loans to a larger number of students.

It's kind of impractical, though. This isn't like buying a house, in which you can look a credit score and the price and make an assessment of ability to pay the loan back. Would someone be forbidden from changing majors? Many students aren't allowed to declare a major until their sophomore or junior year... what happens to the freshmen? Are we going to use high school GPA or SAT scores to determine loan eligibility?

Plus, some of the majors tend to have useful skills embedded in them. A BA in Psychology is more or less useless if you want to "practice" psychology, but it's obviously useful if you want to go to graduate school in psychology. It also tends to give a good background on statistics and research methodology, as well as (potentially) aiding someone who wants to work in marketing or advertising. Pair graduate psychology with a law degree, and you can do some pretty lucrative things. If you don't get the initial loan, you may never get there. I assume that for certain other non-STEM majors, you can get similarly useful skills.

Now the next logical question is, even taking that into account, is there an oversupply of people even in those advanced fields, that will limit earning potential, the way it is with law, for example? I don't know. Probably. In which case, is there even a real point in going to college and accruing massive debt for a significant chunk of the population? And if there isn't a real point, and people begin to doubt how beneficial college is to the extent that they go in smaller numbers, are we looking at a higher education "bubble"?

supply and demand for any field changes over time.
with less young people being born, there is less demand for k-12 teachers.
with more people getting OLD, there is more demand for health/old people care. (the full spectrum, from drs to ass wipers)
with more manufacturering being automated or shipped to cheaper labor, there is less demand for human robots.
there is a continuous need for people in the trades. low to middle paying jobs. people need to eat, sleep, be entertained.
so there will be a constant demand for cooks, waitors, entertainers, managers, store clerks.
there is a fixed demand for law enforcement and sercurity, esp as long as we have consensual crimes. if you got rid of all the consensual crimes and the black markets which come with them, you are left with assault/murder/rape/robbery.

many/most scifi has predicted a bored lower/middle class living on the dole watching tv/internet/games. kind of like we have now.

so yah, society will continue to change and mutate in ways we have predicted and not predicted.

at some point we wont be able to afford the cost of unpaid school loans and the loan system will dramatically change.
at exactly that same point, the education system has/will change to meet those needs.

how many schools already have tons/most classes on line?
at what point could you get 1-3 years done real cheap from home and spend 1-2 year paying for the stuff you cannot do remotely?
at what point is the goal now finishing high school to get into undergrad become finishing undergrad to get into the best grad schools?
kids will stay home until they finish their undergrad and compete for grad school.
those that dont make the cut will do what people have always done, something else.

/change is good
/unless you are a fear-monger and then change is ZOMG THE END OF THE WORLD IS COMING!!!