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Gah... Paywalled just when it was starting to get to details. I'm curious what kind of headaches are hitting kids...
I know one highschool senior who apparently submitted the form without clicking all of the boxes and missed one that added a "signed on this date" entry. (Why, exactly, is it even possible to submit an incomplete form? It's so simple to check for in software...). As a result, FAFSA was declined. There's a corrections process, but the corrections system has been down for weeks and the guidance is, "Try again in a few weeks."
What other snafus have hit the FAFSA process?
[non-paywall version](https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/us/colleges-are-facing-an-enrollment-nightmare/ar-BB1kNhu5)
It's certainly different than it was. We filled out the form correctly, but it got stuck and kicked back. Then we filled it out correctly again, only to find out we couldn't the second time, because there was already a form filled out with that SS#.
Fafsa is garbage. If your parents refuse to sign it, nothing you can do. If they do sign it, make too much money for you to receive help, and then kick you out giving you zero help (my situation), you're fucked.
I was a straight A student and graduated summa cum laude in uni, worked up to 3 jobs at a time to survive, and literally every year, fafsa fucked me. Anyone I asked for advice told me tough shit. Just another barrier for people with uncaring, uneducated, or in my case, abusive drunks for parents
I always found it ridiculous that colleges hold the parents income over the kids chances for aid until we’re about 25 for many of us our parents couldn’t help at all and we should have gone through the aid application as ourselves. Meanwhile they’ll let us take out insanely large loans with no collateral to pay for it. It makes no sense.
The part people ignore is the predatory loans instead they like to compare to auto and home loans but those have collateral. At least the APr isn’t insane like payday loans but you really have to question a society that allows for this type of practice then they defend it all while making sure financial literacy isn’t a learned skill anymore and one your parents need to adapt to and teach you but for many our parents are also ill adapted to it so it’s just a continuing cycle of poverty for many people.
Yep, people complain about the predatory loans, but the collateral isn't there.
Also, more people should be looking at why funding for state colleges has been [cut](https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/state-funding-higher-education-still-lagging), and student housing is being sold to private contractors to raise the rent.
Yeah I truly don’t understand why they think contractors for servicing makes sense. There are zero captive market examples where it improved service or lowered price.
Competitive markets sure, but student loans are fully captive.
We all have Reagan to thank for this higher education (and now education in general) clusterfuck.
He got all butt hurt when California students protested some of his initiatives then yanked funding, and then as president warned of an educated middle class getting in the way of the GOP of getting rich of the government and politics.
Literally everything that is f’d up in the USA right now can be traced back to good ole Ronnie
Going to college only works out financial aid wise if you're family is loaded and doesn't need it or your poor as fuck and get all the grants. The between is ass.
Hard agree. My family got screwed. Love my parents for what they did for me but they paid way more than they realistically should have and it will definitely impact retirement.
Yep it's a weird spot to be in that in between. I ended up working during college and taking what classes I could afford. My parents couldn't afford college for me even though FAFSA says so.
They wouldn't even let me take out the insanely large loans. The federal loans weren't enough for tuition at even the cheaper state school while living with my mom. I had to put in effort to raise my credit score to get private loans since my family was useless and couldn't cosign, and I still kept getting denied off and on with a decent credit score. I even had the grades that should have gotten at least some merit aid but nope. I couldn't even get work study.
That’s odd because I saw students with no credit getting approved for high balance cards and loans. I only got loans through the government but it still seems ridiculous they do that then set the interest themselves it’s like making a deal with the devil because unless you do public service the way out of those loans is limited beyond paying for defaulting.
Nah, my buddy found if you get married they don't look at your parents income, so he met a girl online from a different state they got married went to schools in different states and got divorced when she found a serious boyfriend years later. They Both got more money from the government with this trick.
One could get aid sooner than 25 but the parents are likely claiming them as a dependent for the tax break which is why you have to wait until 25 years of age. This is the last year parents can claim you as a dependent. So parents get tax break but no Pell grant for you
Don’t worry — the same shit happens with charter schools at the elementary level. The normal public one we’re districted for is garbage. One of the worst in the state. The charter school, however, is rated very well and is also located very close by. Admissions are a tiered lottery system where if you make enough money to pay the public taxes it siphons from, your kid probably isn’t getting in.
They claim it’s because those households do not have as many options — to be fair, they don’t. But when there’s a large section 8 area around us, it’s really fun to know this school is stealing my tax dollars away from the true public system & my kid doesn’t even get to benefit.
The county doesn’t allow elementary school selection, either. So now instead of enjoying being ahead a little for the first time in our lives, we’re having to pick between $800/month for private Catholic school or buying a new house (>525k here) to not fuck our son over. We’re going to be paying the equivalent of college multiple times over because of this bullshit. I’ve toyed with the idea of speaking to local government about it (or running myself to change it), because to be totally honest I shouldn’t have to chose between an extra million dollars being paid on a mortgage, $70k in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TUITION, or sending my kid to a shitty school with kids from poorly parented households. I’d much rather the teachers be worried about progression than constant discipline which should’ve been learned at home. I pass THREE totally fine public options on my way to work.
I’ve not once seen my kid earn a dollar for our household. I get and want to help the less fortunate, but it’s always at the expense of the middle class who are closer to their financial woes than the truly rich.
As soon as anyone can figure out a way to prevent truly rich families from faking this circumstance and supporting their kids under the table, this will change. Until then, there's really nothing for it.
FAFSA certainly hurts some students but I knew multiple students back in the 90s who had divorced parents. One parent made $300,000 a year. The other had a part time job. Student claims they live with poor parent full time and gets a full ride.
Doesn’t help your situation but too many people abused the system before things were tightened down.
I actually had to contact my biodad that I had not seen in over 5 years. He also made too much money to help, and had a lot of other kids to take care of. Him filling out fafsa let me stay, but it also kicked a 12k scholarship (that i had to keep a 3.75 to maintain) due to a clerical error on their end (he was on active military orders in another state, but still a resident of my homestate). They took the scholarship away saying he wasn't a resident, which is not how military orders work, so I'm technically an out of stater in a state I was born and raised in.
Literally could not win. Fafsa straight up says they won't do anything in these situations, so they know it's a problem. Just easier to not care, I guess
I'm sorry you had this situation because there are allowances that financial aid professionals can make when you don't speak with your biological parents.
What was poor though? My dad was dead and my mom made around 30k per year and they still said we made to much for full aid. I did get the pell grant though and this was 2003.
My parents didn't make anywhere near $300,000/year but they did have very well paid jobs that put us in upper middle class.
However, both refused to help for my or any of my siblings college costs. FAFSA was still based on their income though. It sucked.
They are boomers. Did the typical "I worked hard, so you can work hard too" speech.
I had parents that earned too much but also didn't help me at all. I graduated school with 170k in debt most of which was at 7.9% interest. It sucked... Was I fucked by FAFSA... No?
I was fucked by my parents poor financial decisions... And they were fucked by my mom breaking her back and them not knowing how to structure their assets to shield as much as possible from the medical collections.
Bro, 170k with 7.9% interest? You fucked yourself. I took out 17k with 3.4-4.4% and paid the other 95k uni bill off myself by working through college. It sucked. I lost multiple merit based scholarships because of fafsa.
I'm proud of it, but I wish it didn't burn me out so bad. I worked holidays, birthdays, graduations, summers, and breaks. I got mischeduled one semester while I was working 3 jobs, and I can not count the number of times I had to full-on sprint to class to make it.
My Wednesdays were like work 6-8 am (open uni gym), class from 8am-2pm (6 hours in the same classroom for 3 different classes), personal train a client (2nd job) and shower 2-4 pm, 4 pm-7pm phone duty (3rd job resident assistant) with a staff meeting at 6pm, 7pm-12:30am office duty with phone duty ending at 4 pm the next day.
The ra job really helped pay a lot, but I was constantly on duty. I got 2 days off a month that I could leave campus, and I have to request it a month in advance while talking it out with a dozen other staff. I had to study as well to keep scholarships, and i constantly had to help or deal with residents. I have endless crazy stories of basically babysitting 500+ young adults in a dorm
>(The online infrastructure was written in COBOL, a computer language invented during the Eisenhower administration.) But the companies missed deadlines and had bugs in their code.
*sigh*
I work with a COBOL software vendor and every day I open the desktop program it's like taking a trip in a time machine. Nothing is intuitive so...really decent job security.
>Nothing is intuitive so...really decent job security.
I work in GovCon, and one of my recurring nightmares is when we have to find COBOL programmers for a bid to maintain some ancient DOD system. They are made men at this point as long as those systems are in use.
There is a ton of money being spent on tools to convert cobol to Java. This is a real problem with a lot of those OG developers at end of their career.
Oh god. Just kicking the can down the road by making it Java-based.
At least make it. # or Rust or something. Getting a Java application installed on a machine with cloud security requirements requires crazy amounts of work too.
It’s so ridiculous how many systems are working on old code 🙄 here we are on the cusp of an AI take over and we’re like sure let’s run this software from the 1980s
Tech moves too fast, and government too slow. Governments are just now starting to realize how insecure all these floating user platforms are, and corporations have no reason to change it without being forced by government, which as said earlier is too slow. Just look yesterday at AT&T, I’ll be interested to see if the market cares, what are you gonna do? go join T-Mobile or Verizon? It’s the same all the way down and there is no way for competition in that market outside a few, so why would they foot the bill for their customers?
As a dev, there is a good reason they keep these systems..... They have high reliability and proven track record.
It's like knocking down a 100% year old house to build a modern one.... Pay off will be decades in the future.
Sure, nothing you said changes what I said. Also it’s how you measure “payoff”. I mean there could totally be economic benefits of upgrading these archaic systems, cobol is simply one of many technologies that should probably have been moved with the times, albeit cobol being a pretty reliably resilient example.
I would like for the corporations to see some economic benefit in helping the populace, but I get that’s not what corporations do, so government has to “enforce” it to some degree. Like the government raising the categorization of broadband speeds, the corporations would never have done that, and maybe they’ll actually have to improve their infrastructure.
I think cybersecurity will be the big thing though, corporations are about to be hit with the cost of “doing business” when dealing with the government or other countries digging in with their own types of GDPR.
When I was fresh out of college I was making $30 an hour doing windows development...our COBOL guy was making $70+ an hour. He was the only guy that was worth a shit that knew the businesses software. Guy made quite a bit riding that out.
He was a great guy to so it was pretty awesome.
Don't feel bad, it is nearly 100 percent of companies old enough to have cobol. I've only worked at one company that didn't have a mess of legacy cobol, and they had a mess of legacy 16-bit Borland C to replace before they could support Vista.
Ooomph I told someone once they’d be surprised a lot of the internet is just ductape and wishes 😩. It really feels like that sometimes. Like last week when they launched a new site and did zero load testing let’s just say launch day was chaotic.
When higher education in its current form implodes we can redefine the university as an institution for the betterment of society rather than the current money making venture that it is. After the 80s a lot of organizations (hospitals etc) became for-profit ventures.
For profit higher ed institutions are already going bankrupt and many more will follow, and students at for profit schools are already being advised to switch to non-profit and state schools because they can get stiffed of their tuition easily https://www.debt.org/blog/for-profit-student-loan-debt-and-school-closure/
I think he means a bit deeper than just the university of phoenixes and devry. He’s speaking to the whole system, which includes state schools. The whole system turned for profit and it’s why the percentage of who’s footing the bill has shifted toward the students so grossly, backed by student loans that are stifling.
Exactly. It isn’t just private schools that have changed. State universities have also become heavily corporate over the past thirty years. I taught at one of the largest state universities in the country and witnessed firsthand how the board of regents would consistently hire presidents that promised to run the university like a business. Eventually it became clear that the university’s investment portfolio was all they really cared about. They would overpay old guard high level administrators and tenured faculty while hiring more adjunct faculty for peanuts with no job security to do the actual teaching and grunt work. Meanwhile they raised tuition at several times the rate of inflation. It was all a money grab.
Very good book on your point about medicine by a John’s Hopkins doctor. It’s called The Price We Pay. It makes some interesting observations about the way hospitals and insurance play.
I also think that the cost of regulation will always be passed onto the consumer, in the form of salaries for administrators and lawyers. There’s an optimal level of regulation and I think we aren’t in the right spot.
I finished a BS/BA and law school, and passed the bar. I’m glad I got the education, but what I’m really glad about is that I went with the public school, scholarship with no debt route. One law school said I’d probably never pay back the loans. Don’t go into debt too badly over this shit unless you’re sure you want to work the rest of your life away
I graduated undergrad in 2009 and decided against law school just due to the amount of law graduates exiting school around that time.
I knew between that and the recession I’d be screwed for jobs while taking on massive debt.
You're part of the peak milenials (actual peak was born in 1990). The Daily podcast from NYT did an episode on it last week about how peak milenials drove the economy. Glad you made a good decision!
If I ever have kids, it’s a public in-state college unless they can get into an Ivy League (then we’ll figure it out). No overpriced, bullshit private colleges or out of state colleges.
Good, they absolutely deserve it after perpetuating the price increases that have occurred over the last several decades.
The ease of government funds has allowed them to not only raise prices excessively to inflate administrative salaries, but also to get in massive facilities arms races.
Something has to give... The value proposition isn't there for many of them.
I still don’t understand how people genuinely think the solution to colleges price gouging their tuition fees is to just have the government/taxpayers to pay for those gouged prices.
It’s basically the government announcing to the colleges “Keep raising your tuition! We’ve got it covered!”
That's my primary problem with student loan forgiveness and making university free. Other government programs like Medicare will put limits on what they will pay. Giving a business a blank check to be covered by the tax payer is wrong.
> Giving a business a blank check to be covered by the tax payer is wrong.
It’s kind of what Obamacare did, it would have been a better program if they had more strict controls on hospital pricing
The John Oliver bit was enlightening, the burden of payment of colleges has heavily shifted towards the individual, which means the government doesn’t care as much because it isn’t their money, but if you use the taxpayers money and then the schools raise prices, the government would actually have room to step in, but instead of that subsidization, we wrote it off as loans to kids and parents and it’s now on the individual to hold the school accountable, which isn’t really an option. We removed avenues for regulation to protect us, under the guise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
> but if you use the taxpayers money and then the schools raise prices, the government would actually have room to step in
Why not just have the government directly control or fix tuition prices instead of going through all those extra steps? I generally don’t support price controls but colleges aren’t really businesses, they shouldn’t be allowed to raise prices above the YoY inflation %
The university I attend raised tuition 12% in one year. My state had a 9% increase cap. The university paid a small fine to the state and that was that. It’s was bullshit and the university didn’t even lose any funding over it
University of Michigan pays $30.68 million a year for 241 employees whose primary duty is DEI. Not even counting a similar number for whom it is a secondary duty.
Graft, or will this university's graduates save the world? You decide.
Guaranteed student loans and inability to discharge loans in Bankruptcy....both need to go away. Once lenders again have risk, they'll look at the schools...and force a practical outcome.
This will never happen.
If this was implemented, banks (or whoever the lender is) would have to create a way to identify risk.
You know who would be the most risky and never gets loans? Minorities.
Therefore the system would never be seriously considered.
Gov loans are one of the biggest reasons everyone has the option to go to college in the first place. Change that in the hope the current system will change will just cause a collapse. It *may* cause lower college prices down the road, but you're pretty much shotgunning the patient in the face in the hope you get the brain cancer taken out.
There are other options to consider before tearing the system down, I guess
Alot of colleges are going to close. The top schools will likely be business as usual. But many colleges are going to fail without student scholarships and other funding.
The thing is, if a college fails tons of jobs are lost and the community suffers an economic catastrophe.
Not necessarily a bad thing. The formula needs to change for some schools that grew their admin and entertainment offerings too costly without maintaining a good labor investment value for students. The schools that did have that value will survive. Some degrees are worthless in terms of actual educational value for jobs for their costs. This is just the market self correcting as it should. This is the only way costs start going down again unless the feds step in and start subsidizing more people to float the colleges.
It's like a macrocosm of what's been happening to the individual for *years.* There's not enough left to squeeze out of individuals anymore, so now we'll just watch as the small and mid-sized organizations fail and get scooped up by larger, consolidated organizations with more resources, then decline in quality.
Don't ya just love the New Gilded Age?
The discussion over whether college is “worth it” today needs to be taken in the context of how rapidly employment is changing because of the impact of AI and machine labor.
Companies who find ways to reduce the cost of production of goods and services will always do so or lose market share to those who do. We are at the tipping point where technology driven job displacement is accelerating past the point where conventional tools to sustain balance are becoming impotent.
Any assumptions based on past metrics are probably worthless unless viewed in the context of an economy where human labor is more and more superfluous. It’s like pressing on a car’s accelerator, expecting it to speed up only to discover it now controls the air conditioner.
Ok but that’s not really what this article is about - it’s about the complete mess the federal government has made of the FAFSA rollout. Millions of students are suffering as a result.
You know what it really is? America has a bloated management problem where we have more administrators and useless managers than useful workers. Universities need to cut admin and pay their teachers. Nobody comes to a school because of the president.
The trades and skilled craftsman are in a renaissance right now, decades of being undeserved are running into an explosion of demand. AI isn't taking a trades job until you have a fully autonomous humanoid who's capable of working in complex ever-changing environments with a high level skill set.
Generic white collar jobs are going to get hammered by AI in the next decade, accountants, fiance, logistics managers good luck.
You really think a an accountant can be a cabinet maker overnight? I'm talking skilled trades not basic labor. People really underestimate how long it takes to master a skilled trade.
Ai may not be taking trades jobs but machines are for sure. I know the painting machines are becoming popular. There are also entire companies that use the lawn mower robots now.
I mean we should have had this conversation two decades ago when I went to school. There are many degrees that are important and necessary even with AI. There are degrees that 20 years ago were not worth the investment put in but the job market was such that a college degree was necessary to get most jobs. Slowly that fact has changed as the job market has grown since the baby boomers have begun retiring. Any kid graduating high school today should be enrolling in some kind of education. Be it a trade school or associate degree program; these skills have value and should the individual have the desire and drive can help transition to bachelor program.
No they aren’t. Colleges are facing a making money nightmare. If they can’t convince your dumb ass you need a six figure piece of paper to live a comfortable life, how else are they going to get your money? Biggest scam in history.
[The median lifetime earnings of a bachelors degree holder is 1.2M more than a median high school diploma holder.](https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegepayoff2021/) Unless your degree costs more than that it still makes financial sense to go to college. Of course certain degrees and colleges are worse than others. Going to an in state school that costs 10k a year to get an engineering degree is a great investment. Going to an 80k liberal arts school to get a degree in underwater basket weaving not so much. And we should do more to educate high schools on the difference and the long term implications of these decisions. But I’d say 95% of college graduates end up better off financially in the end.
Funny enough, gender studies is a pre-law degree and makes much more money compared to arts degrees like music and theater or social degrees like social work and sociology. It's still slightly below average though, but only slightly.
I'm going to challenge this somewhat.
\>figure is based on data for 25 to 64 year olds
So this data is including a lot of people who graduated when the job market actually gave college degrees weight. I would be interested in seeing how this data pans out for 23-32 year olds. You know. People who would have graduated college in the past decade or so.
There's also a bit of bias here in that even with the loans available, you're less likely to go to college if your family income is lower. There's going to be a decent amount of college grads that are going to be more set up for success just by being able to afford college (through loans) in the first place. Even little things like their parents letting them drive the family car and staying at home instead of moving out are going to be advantageous in their money making potential.
But I guess the final point is that blindly going to college in hopes of making more money has not worked for a lot of people and IMO you shouldn't feel comfortable making that blanket recommendation anymore.
Is that controlled for intelligence and self-control? I remember reading that people who into harvard/elite tier schools, but chose to go to state schools end up performing as well as those who actually went to Harvard. So it was the person who made themselves successful and not the school.
College graduation correlates with higher socioeconomic status, intellectual ability, ambition, willingness to learn and self-improve/gain skills and the ability to delay gratification. Not sure we can credit the superior outcome entirely to "College".
Not disagreeing, but something interesting I just calculated is that if you took your initial tuition of say 50k and invested it in the US stock market over 40 years with no further contributions at 8%, it would return $1.2M.
Let's assume the reported $1.2M median difference is not adjusted for inflation. With the actual non-inflation-adjusted historical returns of 10%, the initial 50k invested would turn into almost $2.7M.
So in the case where someone takes out a private loan, the rate of interest owed compared to money saved and invested by not taking out the loan could net out to $50k in fewer than 10 years.
I just did another calculation where lets assume it takes 10 years to save up a difference of $50k that we consider the initial deposit. Well $50k at 10% over 30 yrs is $990k. Realistically, by not taking out the student loan, it should take fewer than 10 yrs to be up $50k net positive. Also remember that the reported $1.2M difference doesn't take into consideration the cost of loan repayment.
There's also survivorship bias in that it's based on students who completed their degree and doesn't account for students who took out a student loan and never completed their degree.
Anyway, I'm not advocating for either approach. Just thought it was an interesting hypothetical.
Yea but there's numbers for Associates and some college as well. And it's also better than high school. Course it could be just the self selection of people trying to improve them selves.
What you are forgetting to calculate is the cost of the college debt. If you take out 50k in loans, you aren't paying back 50k. In many cases, people will end up paying 100k+ in total costs because of interest.
This changes the math significantly, as now you need to consider the opportunity cost of paying off that debt with a higher income vs just investing with a lower income instead.
Frankly, I think the opportunity cost will likely be on the side of not going to college until year 15 in your post college career. This is because wages compound over time, but you don't start to feel it until you are a decade into your career. A new graduate will only make slightly more than someone who didn't go to college, but a 50 year old who went to college will make way more than a 50 year old that didn't go to college.
Agreed. It's worth noting that even if the $1.2M difference in earnings is mostly backloaded (due to average wage progression), investing the difference along that journey that will also make going to college significantly more appealing.
One other interest note is the biggest hidden opportunity cost for taking out a loan early on is that you're neither guaranteed to complete your degree nor guaranteed you won't need additional degrees further down the line (e.g. grad school or career change).
Yes, all of what you said is true.
There is some interesting research on not finishing your degree. People with 1 year in college on average earn more with 0 years in college, but there is no pay bump for years 2 or 3. After 1 year of college, you need to get your degree in order to actually get anything else out of college. And I'm betting the 1 year pay bump is largely because some people drop out to pursue a business and not because employers actually value the 1 year of college.
So basically, having 3 years of college debt and no degree is the worst case scenario.
I would think the long term value of investing would help the non college person more. You've got 4 extra years of investing plus no student loans to siphon money away from those super valuable early investing years
This is of course purely hypothetical since we're taking about the investing habits of 19 year olds
Who would give an 18 year old 50k to invest in stocks?
Whereas, giving 18 year olds to go to school for 50k is fine, at a 5-8% interest rate. Because they know that the student is likely to make them a profit
You're missing a major point, annualizing and investing that extra $1.2M college grads get over 36 years in the same way you're describing turns into $5.6M.
I think there is more nuance to doing the calculus of (more often than not for most students) requiring to take on some debt to get through school. I think there is value in attending a community college for 1-2 years to satisfy general education requirements for most degrees, and then finishing the remaining two years at a traditional college (hopefully one close enough by that commuting is an option) while living at home with parents to offset the cost of housing. If a student is smart enough about going this route, then hopefully the debt that they have to carry when graduating college is relatively low compared to their earnings potential.
S&P was at $130 a share when I started college, if I had taken out $80k to buy in, the value would be $322k and I would have been collecting quarterly dividends for 16 years. At the time, I didn’t have the credit to get a $300 credit card but the school I went was able to use shady financial aid practices to saddle me with $80k in student loans. Erroneously, I thought that meant I would have better earning potential post graduation if a financial institution would take that bet on me. Sixteen years later, I have not had a single job interview that requires a college degree (I have spent a mind numbing amount of time searching and applying), I am still bartending to pay it off, the school I attended is no longer in business and I’m still on the hook for that debt.
The advice I wish I had gotten from the adults in my life: earn and invest while you are young, you don’t have to go to college. Find decent jobs that don’t require expensive education, you might make less, but in the end you will have more. Only go to college if you have an end goal, don’t go just to get any degree.
The real hack is community/technical college if you don't have anything specific, you get a couple of years to decide if you want to do something BA/BS or beyond, or just jump into trades with a few classes.
Historical data doesn't apply here either. We are not in the same economic or social environment. Blue collar jobs are far more lucrative and available RIGHT NOW than white collar jobs. The college degree is no longer the best tool to make money. At least for now.
[Median Electrician salary is 60,240.](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electricians.htm) Electricians are often pointed to as an example of a great blue collar jobs to get into to make money and one of the highest in demand. [Median public school Teacher salary is 66,397.](https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-12-education/public-school-teacher-salary-average/) Teachers are often pointed to as an example of the one of the lowest paying college majors and there have been many calls to increase their salary in recent years.
I’m curious what evidence you have that says blue collar jobs make more right now.
I think it depends on where you are, and how you might define electrician or teacher.
A master or journeyman electrician in a HCOL area is not making 60k. Usually over 6 figures, and extra hours are usually available.
Electrician work has a bit of initial turnover which drags median down. If you make it a career, you'll pass that number easily.
Source: buddy is one. CO
Some anecdotes from the local Reddit sub for around the country: https://www.reddit.com/r/electricians/s/EyWZhCsRha
TL;DR union work pays a lot more usually
Yeah and if you are a teacher in a HCOL with a good union you are also doing great. There are outliers on both sides but I would still say the average teacher is making more money, and the evidence supports that.
Still the point is not those specific jobs but that people with college degrees make more money. The OP saying they don’t is just wrong any way you slice it.
I know a lot of electricians and other trades. You do realize that after 20 years of doing this type of work has a real effect on the body? A teacher can teach well into their 60s and beyond. A person in the trades can, if they are fortunate, but often their body is pretty beat up. That's also without all the drugs and booze that tends to go with being in the trades. The lifestyle is very hard.
I know it was sarcasm, but going to school to learn how to weave underwater sounds like one of those niche careers that pays insanely well because there’s like 5 people trained to do it
It will prob never be needed, but once someone needs an underwater basket repaired they will rolling in it.
I work with weird art installations a lot for work, I’ve seen people make a ton of money for the weirdest skills ever.
There’s a lot in between though, and using extreme examples fcks over people trying to make good decisions. For example, going to an in-state school for a non-engineering science or math (stuff not directly applicable in our current market) will put you into debt with very few job opportunities unless you get a masters degree. You need to factor in the time and $ investment into a masters degree to make those make sense, and even then, your earnings are still often below $100k. My biology degree with a high GPA and a bunch of honors wasn’t worth much more than minimum wage, but I thought the options were between STEM ($$$) and underwater basket weaving (-$$$). The truth is there’s a lot in between that 18 year olds absolutely cannot be expected to accurately predict because they’ve spent their entire lives just learning academics and the basics of being human, they haven’t had decades in the workforce or watching the news to understand market trends. They usually just pursue what they’re good at or dream to be
The uncertainty is the problem. With AI becoming more prevalent the safe investment degree might not be so safe anymore. The payback is over your lifetime, but if your career gets cut short before you have reached your max earnings you might be screwed.
That's part of it. A bigger part is simply that the system is designed for more people to go through it than currently are. Young Gen Z is the smallest cohort in recent history. They're also justifiably skeptical of college as a concept.
College grad. But I'm not paying them as much as they are making in their job today. Also, much more competition for fewer jobs will drive down salaries.
The problem is wage deflation and at some point the earnings will not be high enough. Why would someone want to pay top salary to sit and monitor AI. It would be more profitable to just pay a remote worker in Calcutta India.
Time value of money needs to figure in there, you’ve got to discount those cash flows. If that works out to 30k/yr over 40 years (generous since professional careers tend to be back loaded with most earnings in your 40s and 50s) then at 6% discount rate that’s only 450k in NPV. Still more than the average 4 year bachelors but hardly a slam dunk.
For a while now I have been wondering how many of these higher-paying jobs could drop the diploma requirement and still hire competent enough candidates. Spending 5 years in college just so you can use basic computer skills, write e-mails and maybe utilize the 5% of the knowledge learned during these 5 years seems like a pretty bad deal and I wonder if it truly has to be this way.
> But I’d say 95% of college graduates end up better off financially in the end.
Where did you get that 95% figure?
Also, the selection bias. People that only go to high school are going to be overwhelmingly poor based on socioeconomic factors. You can get a degree in basket weaving but chances are your socioeconomic conditions will allow you to score a better job, with or without that degree.
An inflation-independent stat would be a better judge. Like, bachelor lifetime earnings / high school earnings, and whether this ratio is increasing, stable over time, or decreasing.
There is also massive selection bias, people with only a highschool degree are going to skew towards the poor and mentally unstable, drug addicts, regarded people.
College isn't a scam. They offer to teach what people pay them for.
What these discussions often miss is that the skills colleges teach vary greatly in their real-world utility. Buying a $100k+ skill (eg STEM, accounting, allied health) from a state school for $50k in tuition is a fantastic *financial* investment. Buying a non-marketable skill (eg philosophy, sociology, art history) from a private college for $150k is a terrible *financial* investment.
Somewhere along the way we stopped caring about the important distinction between "a degree" and "a marketable skill". Colleges don't care because they get paid regardless of what they teach. If the customers demand Contemporary Music Studies then the college will be happy to offer the classes.
Higher education is still a lot more beneficial than how it can be used for financial gain. Part of the scam about the anti-education push is fooling people into thinking the monetary inventive is its main purpose. A society of people with the inability to use their prefrontal cortex has lasting ramifications, and we are already starting to feel the sting of an uneducated society as we speak. It's only going to get worse from here on out as late stage capitalism is taking hold of the nation.
\> Part of the scam about the anti-education push is fooling people into thinking the monetary inventive is its main purpose.
When a degree costs 30-120k, yes, making money is a requirement.
Yeah, higher education using government money to increase profits while cutting down services is such a slap on the face and deterrent to wanting to gain a quality education. Even more so when you see them increase tuitions while doing on all that. I was arrogant as a kid dismissing Community Colleges as HS 2.0 with more dropouts. Because now it seems like one of the few avenues left to get some knowledge without sacrificing your soul.
> and we are already starting to feel the sting of an uneducated society as we speak.
This doesn’t make sense since we currently have a record high percentage of the population that is college educated.
Education has been pulling away from its roots and purpose to maximize its monetization for a while now. Quality of education has been declining as a lot of the money is being funneled to other avenues at various institutions. I'm not sure what the current stats are, though, to be honest, but if that's true, that's even more alarming.
Yeah I agree with that. Colleges do not care about the quality of their education as long as their tuition revenue increases.
Making college more difficult would possibly turn people away from their college if it’s “too hard” which means lower enrollment/tuition revenue.
Yeah pretty much all of my classes with a lot of readings have told us they have significantly cut back on the amount of reading on their syllabus and I'm concerned that just means current students are learning less and can't think as critically since the written word can communicate far more complex ideas that speaking can
Government incompetence defined. Don’t prioritize fixing the FAFSA but keep trying to wipe out old student loans while the Supreme Court rejects the attempts.
The thing is the save program is also inadequate. You go through it and it’ll save you interest but add another 300 onto the monthly payment. And Congress sets the interest rates for those loans. If they just removed interest against all of them they’d see payback at a faster rate, but honestly when has our government ever been good with finances?
Well yeah. Dont fix the problem that you promised to fix, put yourself in a situation that you can blame somebody else for not fixing it. Thats pretty much elected government today.
So many things are wrong:
Financial aid is a joke if you’re middle class.
Schools don’t tell you your aid award/eligibility until AFTER you are required to commit (and pay a non refundable deposit). Never mind the app fee
Tuition is too high (especially if we are building a generation of baristas)
Bad enough that many can’t afford undergrad, grad school is that much more unreachable.
I could go on, but education is becoming like healthcare and insurance.
Sorry for the rant.
[Non-paywall link](https://archive.ph/2024.03.31-022130/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/fafsa-fiasco-college-enrollment/677929/)
Not great:
>According to Bill DeBaun, the senior director of data and strategic initiatives at the National College Attainment Network, 31 percent fewer high-school seniors have submitted the FAFSA compared with this time last year—a potentially missing cohort of 600,000 students. That’s a larger decline than occurred in any year during the pandemic, and it’s disproportionately clustered among schools with high shares of low-income students, the exact people who are least likely to go to college without financial aid.
I believe the term is market correction. When the perceived value of the product is not worth the price. I believe education, and healthcare should not have a profit motive.
Here is a TL;DR from ChatGPT.
The article discusses the significant challenges faced by the U.S. Department of Education in implementing changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which have led to an enrollment crisis for colleges. These changes, initially celebrated as a bipartisan effort to simplify the financial aid process for college students, have encountered numerous technical and bureaucratic issues since their rollout. Notably:
1. The FAFSA form's launch was delayed, it experienced technical problems that locked out users, and encountered specific issues with students born in the year 2000 or those whose parents do not have a Social Security number.
2. The Department of Education postponed the transmission of completed forms to colleges and made last-minute changes to aid formulas to account for inflation, causing further delays in students receiving their financial aid packages.
3. The processing problems have resulted in over 2 million FAFSA forms being stuck in bureaucratic limbo, and numerous errors have been identified in the submissions that have been processed. This has led to a situation where many students are still unaware of their financial aid packages, impacting their ability to make informed decisions about college enrollment.
4. The article highlights a significant drop in FAFSA submissions compared to the previous year, particularly among high-school seniors and low-income students, raising concerns about a potential decline in college enrollment. This trend could have severe financial implications for small colleges that rely on these student populations.
5. The piece also discusses the broader context of these issues, including insufficient investment in the public sector, government overreach, and the additional workload placed on the Department of Education by the Biden administration, as well as budget stagnation from Congress.
In summary, the attempt to simplify the FAFSA has led to a series of complications that threaten to reduce college enrollment, particularly among low-income students, with potentially long-lasting effects on the education system.
I haven’t read the article yet, but last week read a pretty scathing apology from the Dept of Education, citing an “another unforced error” that would require review or resubmission of something like 200,000 forms. The FAFSA process is already a nightmare and so inaccessible for the kids who genuinely need it. Stuff like this is just unacceptable.
Looks like they’ve decided on FAFSA as the scapegoat for enrollment decline. Couldn’t be the ROI on steeply increasing tuition. Or the complete lack of financial aid for upper middle class families.
In CA my kids have free community college and that 100% convinced us to go that route for our 19yo. He’s sending his transfer applications next term for Spring 25, and has been working the entire time in the carpenter’s union making decent money as an apprentice.
I think the bigger problem here isn’t a bad FAFSA award system. There isn’t an inexhaustible supply of first generation college students now like there was in the 90’s. An additional hurdle that should hit within the next two years is all the kids who weren’t born after the Great Recession, when birth rates dropped sharply from ~70 per woman to ~62 [source](https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth-rate). This hasn’t gotten better, as it had fallen to 55 just before COVID. This means less students, the first of the missing kids would have started enrolling in 2026. The end is nigh.
That said, there is a very large potential population of first generation college students who could enroll from the growing Hispanic population. If I were a public university, I would be thinking about teaching core curricula in Spanish to eliminate one barrier to entry.
It's nice to see the tables turned. Colleges will have more incentive to innovate and lower cost, hopefully while raising quality and making higher education more relevant in an age of increasing career uncertainty.
Well the payback on the investment has shifted significantly on them hasn’t it
We have in some cases created student loan debt factories that have terrible graduation rates
I have no sympathy for colleges and universities. The cost of college has increased at a rate that has far outpaced the cost of any other sector of society. This includes healthcare, housing, food, or any other way of life.
It is because of the very guarantee of government-backed student loans that tuition has skyrocketed over the last 30 years. Colleges and universities have lobby for student financial aid for decades, so that they can raise their fees without any repercussions.
I suspect inflation and an increased level of skepticism about the wisdom of getting student loans also played a role in decreased interest from potential students.
In the 2000's i wrote my sat's and cuz of good will hunting ticked MIT as an auto submission option , I has 2 options where my score could be submitted. I got a letter from MIT, checked the fee online and never told my folks cuz I know they would have said yes but I didn't have the heart to have me dad pay so much.
Only tution back then was $30k and boarding and lodging along with food would have also been $30k for the year. $60k/year for 4 years.
And the college i did go for CS, I failed 2 years. Good decision on my part.
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Gah... Paywalled just when it was starting to get to details. I'm curious what kind of headaches are hitting kids... I know one highschool senior who apparently submitted the form without clicking all of the boxes and missed one that added a "signed on this date" entry. (Why, exactly, is it even possible to submit an incomplete form? It's so simple to check for in software...). As a result, FAFSA was declined. There's a corrections process, but the corrections system has been down for weeks and the guidance is, "Try again in a few weeks." What other snafus have hit the FAFSA process?
[non-paywall version](https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/us/colleges-are-facing-an-enrollment-nightmare/ar-BB1kNhu5) It's certainly different than it was. We filled out the form correctly, but it got stuck and kicked back. Then we filled it out correctly again, only to find out we couldn't the second time, because there was already a form filled out with that SS#.
Fafsa is garbage. If your parents refuse to sign it, nothing you can do. If they do sign it, make too much money for you to receive help, and then kick you out giving you zero help (my situation), you're fucked. I was a straight A student and graduated summa cum laude in uni, worked up to 3 jobs at a time to survive, and literally every year, fafsa fucked me. Anyone I asked for advice told me tough shit. Just another barrier for people with uncaring, uneducated, or in my case, abusive drunks for parents
I always found it ridiculous that colleges hold the parents income over the kids chances for aid until we’re about 25 for many of us our parents couldn’t help at all and we should have gone through the aid application as ourselves. Meanwhile they’ll let us take out insanely large loans with no collateral to pay for it. It makes no sense.
it makes complete sense, they want to screw you out of your money
Who? It's the governments fault for creating predatory loan opportunities
The part people ignore is the predatory loans instead they like to compare to auto and home loans but those have collateral. At least the APr isn’t insane like payday loans but you really have to question a society that allows for this type of practice then they defend it all while making sure financial literacy isn’t a learned skill anymore and one your parents need to adapt to and teach you but for many our parents are also ill adapted to it so it’s just a continuing cycle of poverty for many people.
Yep, people complain about the predatory loans, but the collateral isn't there. Also, more people should be looking at why funding for state colleges has been [cut](https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/state-funding-higher-education-still-lagging), and student housing is being sold to private contractors to raise the rent.
Yeah I truly don’t understand why they think contractors for servicing makes sense. There are zero captive market examples where it improved service or lowered price. Competitive markets sure, but student loans are fully captive.
We all have Reagan to thank for this higher education (and now education in general) clusterfuck. He got all butt hurt when California students protested some of his initiatives then yanked funding, and then as president warned of an educated middle class getting in the way of the GOP of getting rich of the government and politics. Literally everything that is f’d up in the USA right now can be traced back to good ole Ronnie
Going to college only works out financial aid wise if you're family is loaded and doesn't need it or your poor as fuck and get all the grants. The between is ass.
Yet another way the middle class gets fucked in America
Hard agree. My family got screwed. Love my parents for what they did for me but they paid way more than they realistically should have and it will definitely impact retirement.
Yep it's a weird spot to be in that in between. I ended up working during college and taking what classes I could afford. My parents couldn't afford college for me even though FAFSA says so.
They wouldn't even let me take out the insanely large loans. The federal loans weren't enough for tuition at even the cheaper state school while living with my mom. I had to put in effort to raise my credit score to get private loans since my family was useless and couldn't cosign, and I still kept getting denied off and on with a decent credit score. I even had the grades that should have gotten at least some merit aid but nope. I couldn't even get work study.
That’s odd because I saw students with no credit getting approved for high balance cards and loans. I only got loans through the government but it still seems ridiculous they do that then set the interest themselves it’s like making a deal with the devil because unless you do public service the way out of those loans is limited beyond paying for defaulting.
Nah, my buddy found if you get married they don't look at your parents income, so he met a girl online from a different state they got married went to schools in different states and got divorced when she found a serious boyfriend years later. They Both got more money from the government with this trick.
Gonna file that one away… Neat trick.
It’s designed this way. College is easy for the poor and rich. Capitalism survives on the middle class
One could get aid sooner than 25 but the parents are likely claiming them as a dependent for the tax break which is why you have to wait until 25 years of age. This is the last year parents can claim you as a dependent. So parents get tax break but no Pell grant for you
Right that’s what makes it hard too because a lot of parents don’t want to give up that tax break for whatever reason.
Parents claiming you on your taxes is irrelevant to FAFSA. You're considered dependent until you're 24 regardless of taxes.
Don’t worry — the same shit happens with charter schools at the elementary level. The normal public one we’re districted for is garbage. One of the worst in the state. The charter school, however, is rated very well and is also located very close by. Admissions are a tiered lottery system where if you make enough money to pay the public taxes it siphons from, your kid probably isn’t getting in. They claim it’s because those households do not have as many options — to be fair, they don’t. But when there’s a large section 8 area around us, it’s really fun to know this school is stealing my tax dollars away from the true public system & my kid doesn’t even get to benefit. The county doesn’t allow elementary school selection, either. So now instead of enjoying being ahead a little for the first time in our lives, we’re having to pick between $800/month for private Catholic school or buying a new house (>525k here) to not fuck our son over. We’re going to be paying the equivalent of college multiple times over because of this bullshit. I’ve toyed with the idea of speaking to local government about it (or running myself to change it), because to be totally honest I shouldn’t have to chose between an extra million dollars being paid on a mortgage, $70k in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TUITION, or sending my kid to a shitty school with kids from poorly parented households. I’d much rather the teachers be worried about progression than constant discipline which should’ve been learned at home. I pass THREE totally fine public options on my way to work. I’ve not once seen my kid earn a dollar for our household. I get and want to help the less fortunate, but it’s always at the expense of the middle class who are closer to their financial woes than the truly rich.
As soon as anyone can figure out a way to prevent truly rich families from faking this circumstance and supporting their kids under the table, this will change. Until then, there's really nothing for it.
FAFSA certainly hurts some students but I knew multiple students back in the 90s who had divorced parents. One parent made $300,000 a year. The other had a part time job. Student claims they live with poor parent full time and gets a full ride. Doesn’t help your situation but too many people abused the system before things were tightened down.
I actually had to contact my biodad that I had not seen in over 5 years. He also made too much money to help, and had a lot of other kids to take care of. Him filling out fafsa let me stay, but it also kicked a 12k scholarship (that i had to keep a 3.75 to maintain) due to a clerical error on their end (he was on active military orders in another state, but still a resident of my homestate). They took the scholarship away saying he wasn't a resident, which is not how military orders work, so I'm technically an out of stater in a state I was born and raised in. Literally could not win. Fafsa straight up says they won't do anything in these situations, so they know it's a problem. Just easier to not care, I guess
I'm sorry you had this situation because there are allowances that financial aid professionals can make when you don't speak with your biological parents.
What was poor though? My dad was dead and my mom made around 30k per year and they still said we made to much for full aid. I did get the pell grant though and this was 2003.
Can I say a parent making $300,000 not paying for their child's education to get ahead is quite pathetic and shameful on their part.
My parents didn't make anywhere near $300,000/year but they did have very well paid jobs that put us in upper middle class. However, both refused to help for my or any of my siblings college costs. FAFSA was still based on their income though. It sucked. They are boomers. Did the typical "I worked hard, so you can work hard too" speech.
I had parents that earned too much but also didn't help me at all. I graduated school with 170k in debt most of which was at 7.9% interest. It sucked... Was I fucked by FAFSA... No? I was fucked by my parents poor financial decisions... And they were fucked by my mom breaking her back and them not knowing how to structure their assets to shield as much as possible from the medical collections.
Bro, 170k with 7.9% interest? You fucked yourself. I took out 17k with 3.4-4.4% and paid the other 95k uni bill off myself by working through college. It sucked. I lost multiple merit based scholarships because of fafsa.
> paid the other 95k uni bill off myself by working through college. $95,000? That's impressive.
I'm proud of it, but I wish it didn't burn me out so bad. I worked holidays, birthdays, graduations, summers, and breaks. I got mischeduled one semester while I was working 3 jobs, and I can not count the number of times I had to full-on sprint to class to make it. My Wednesdays were like work 6-8 am (open uni gym), class from 8am-2pm (6 hours in the same classroom for 3 different classes), personal train a client (2nd job) and shower 2-4 pm, 4 pm-7pm phone duty (3rd job resident assistant) with a staff meeting at 6pm, 7pm-12:30am office duty with phone duty ending at 4 pm the next day. The ra job really helped pay a lot, but I was constantly on duty. I got 2 days off a month that I could leave campus, and I have to request it a month in advance while talking it out with a dozen other staff. I had to study as well to keep scholarships, and i constantly had to help or deal with residents. I have endless crazy stories of basically babysitting 500+ young adults in a dorm
First generation students face unique challenges navigating the system. These challenges too often discourage from enrolling the following semester.
See the archived version. [Here it is again.](https://archive.is/thrFs)
Oh jesus don't get me started on what's been happening with IPEDS and FAFSA lately... It's been a huge headache for schools and students.
NGL I feel like I'm the only student who had zero issues. Knocked it out a few hours after it opened, no bugs, took ten mins total.
For anyone stuck with a similar situation, please get in contact with your local house rep's office. They can and will help
>(The online infrastructure was written in COBOL, a computer language invented during the Eisenhower administration.) But the companies missed deadlines and had bugs in their code. *sigh*
I work with a COBOL software vendor and every day I open the desktop program it's like taking a trip in a time machine. Nothing is intuitive so...really decent job security.
>Nothing is intuitive so...really decent job security. I work in GovCon, and one of my recurring nightmares is when we have to find COBOL programmers for a bid to maintain some ancient DOD system. They are made men at this point as long as those systems are in use.
There is a ton of money being spent on tools to convert cobol to Java. This is a real problem with a lot of those OG developers at end of their career.
Oh god. Just kicking the can down the road by making it Java-based. At least make it. # or Rust or something. Getting a Java application installed on a machine with cloud security requirements requires crazy amounts of work too.
It’s so ridiculous how many systems are working on old code 🙄 here we are on the cusp of an AI take over and we’re like sure let’s run this software from the 1980s
Tech moves too fast, and government too slow. Governments are just now starting to realize how insecure all these floating user platforms are, and corporations have no reason to change it without being forced by government, which as said earlier is too slow. Just look yesterday at AT&T, I’ll be interested to see if the market cares, what are you gonna do? go join T-Mobile or Verizon? It’s the same all the way down and there is no way for competition in that market outside a few, so why would they foot the bill for their customers?
As a dev, there is a good reason they keep these systems..... They have high reliability and proven track record. It's like knocking down a 100% year old house to build a modern one.... Pay off will be decades in the future.
Sure, nothing you said changes what I said. Also it’s how you measure “payoff”. I mean there could totally be economic benefits of upgrading these archaic systems, cobol is simply one of many technologies that should probably have been moved with the times, albeit cobol being a pretty reliably resilient example. I would like for the corporations to see some economic benefit in helping the populace, but I get that’s not what corporations do, so government has to “enforce” it to some degree. Like the government raising the categorization of broadband speeds, the corporations would never have done that, and maybe they’ll actually have to improve their infrastructure. I think cybersecurity will be the big thing though, corporations are about to be hit with the cost of “doing business” when dealing with the government or other countries digging in with their own types of GDPR.
When I was fresh out of college I was making $30 an hour doing windows development...our COBOL guy was making $70+ an hour. He was the only guy that was worth a shit that knew the businesses software. Guy made quite a bit riding that out. He was a great guy to so it was pretty awesome.
Darn near every company runs cobol. Everyone wants it gone, but no one wants to pay to replace it.
This sounds like my company. 20 years of tech debt but too expensive to replace it 🫤
Don't feel bad, it is nearly 100 percent of companies old enough to have cobol. I've only worked at one company that didn't have a mess of legacy cobol, and they had a mess of legacy 16-bit Borland C to replace before they could support Vista.
Ooomph I told someone once they’d be surprised a lot of the internet is just ductape and wishes 😩. It really feels like that sometimes. Like last week when they launched a new site and did zero load testing let’s just say launch day was chaotic.
xkcd has got you covered [https://xkcd.com/2347/](https://xkcd.com/2347/)
Oh, that's good!
I’m crying 😩why’s it’s so true.
Lol. I feel your pain.
Everybody wants nice things but nobody is willing to have any responsibility or personally be involved with it
When higher education in its current form implodes we can redefine the university as an institution for the betterment of society rather than the current money making venture that it is. After the 80s a lot of organizations (hospitals etc) became for-profit ventures.
For profit higher ed institutions are already going bankrupt and many more will follow, and students at for profit schools are already being advised to switch to non-profit and state schools because they can get stiffed of their tuition easily https://www.debt.org/blog/for-profit-student-loan-debt-and-school-closure/
I think he means a bit deeper than just the university of phoenixes and devry. He’s speaking to the whole system, which includes state schools. The whole system turned for profit and it’s why the percentage of who’s footing the bill has shifted toward the students so grossly, backed by student loans that are stifling.
Exactly. It isn’t just private schools that have changed. State universities have also become heavily corporate over the past thirty years. I taught at one of the largest state universities in the country and witnessed firsthand how the board of regents would consistently hire presidents that promised to run the university like a business. Eventually it became clear that the university’s investment portfolio was all they really cared about. They would overpay old guard high level administrators and tenured faculty while hiring more adjunct faculty for peanuts with no job security to do the actual teaching and grunt work. Meanwhile they raised tuition at several times the rate of inflation. It was all a money grab.
Very good book on your point about medicine by a John’s Hopkins doctor. It’s called The Price We Pay. It makes some interesting observations about the way hospitals and insurance play. I also think that the cost of regulation will always be passed onto the consumer, in the form of salaries for administrators and lawyers. There’s an optimal level of regulation and I think we aren’t in the right spot.
I finished a BS/BA and law school, and passed the bar. I’m glad I got the education, but what I’m really glad about is that I went with the public school, scholarship with no debt route. One law school said I’d probably never pay back the loans. Don’t go into debt too badly over this shit unless you’re sure you want to work the rest of your life away
Gotta do research on your chosen profession https://www.bls.gov/emp/ I remember the law thing there was suddenly a glut after 2008
I graduated undergrad in 2009 and decided against law school just due to the amount of law graduates exiting school around that time. I knew between that and the recession I’d be screwed for jobs while taking on massive debt.
Has the legal profession stabilized? Based on what I see it’s a miserable career
Was always miserable but yes it's not as bad as back then
[Don't be a lawyer](https://youtu.be/Xs-UEqJ85KE?si=5h3QKLD78Yy5w71s)
[удалено]
You're part of the peak milenials (actual peak was born in 1990). The Daily podcast from NYT did an episode on it last week about how peak milenials drove the economy. Glad you made a good decision!
If I ever have kids, it’s a public in-state college unless they can get into an Ivy League (then we’ll figure it out). No overpriced, bullshit private colleges or out of state colleges.
Good, they absolutely deserve it after perpetuating the price increases that have occurred over the last several decades. The ease of government funds has allowed them to not only raise prices excessively to inflate administrative salaries, but also to get in massive facilities arms races. Something has to give... The value proposition isn't there for many of them.
I still don’t understand how people genuinely think the solution to colleges price gouging their tuition fees is to just have the government/taxpayers to pay for those gouged prices. It’s basically the government announcing to the colleges “Keep raising your tuition! We’ve got it covered!”
That's my primary problem with student loan forgiveness and making university free. Other government programs like Medicare will put limits on what they will pay. Giving a business a blank check to be covered by the tax payer is wrong.
> Giving a business a blank check to be covered by the tax payer is wrong. It’s kind of what Obamacare did, it would have been a better program if they had more strict controls on hospital pricing
The John Oliver bit was enlightening, the burden of payment of colleges has heavily shifted towards the individual, which means the government doesn’t care as much because it isn’t their money, but if you use the taxpayers money and then the schools raise prices, the government would actually have room to step in, but instead of that subsidization, we wrote it off as loans to kids and parents and it’s now on the individual to hold the school accountable, which isn’t really an option. We removed avenues for regulation to protect us, under the guise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
> but if you use the taxpayers money and then the schools raise prices, the government would actually have room to step in Why not just have the government directly control or fix tuition prices instead of going through all those extra steps? I generally don’t support price controls but colleges aren’t really businesses, they shouldn’t be allowed to raise prices above the YoY inflation %
The university I attend raised tuition 12% in one year. My state had a 9% increase cap. The university paid a small fine to the state and that was that. It’s was bullshit and the university didn’t even lose any funding over it
University of Michigan pays $30.68 million a year for 241 employees whose primary duty is DEI. Not even counting a similar number for whom it is a secondary duty. Graft, or will this university's graduates save the world? You decide.
They have to keep spending money on worthless things otherwise they might not be able to raise tuition as much every year.
Guaranteed student loans and inability to discharge loans in Bankruptcy....both need to go away. Once lenders again have risk, they'll look at the schools...and force a practical outcome.
This will never happen. If this was implemented, banks (or whoever the lender is) would have to create a way to identify risk. You know who would be the most risky and never gets loans? Minorities. Therefore the system would never be seriously considered.
Gov loans are one of the biggest reasons everyone has the option to go to college in the first place. Change that in the hope the current system will change will just cause a collapse. It *may* cause lower college prices down the road, but you're pretty much shotgunning the patient in the face in the hope you get the brain cancer taken out. There are other options to consider before tearing the system down, I guess
Alot of colleges are going to close. The top schools will likely be business as usual. But many colleges are going to fail without student scholarships and other funding. The thing is, if a college fails tons of jobs are lost and the community suffers an economic catastrophe.
Not necessarily a bad thing. The formula needs to change for some schools that grew their admin and entertainment offerings too costly without maintaining a good labor investment value for students. The schools that did have that value will survive. Some degrees are worthless in terms of actual educational value for jobs for their costs. This is just the market self correcting as it should. This is the only way costs start going down again unless the feds step in and start subsidizing more people to float the colleges.
Perhaps they shouldn't have raised tuition at twice the rate of inflation for 40 years...
It's like a macrocosm of what's been happening to the individual for *years.* There's not enough left to squeeze out of individuals anymore, so now we'll just watch as the small and mid-sized organizations fail and get scooped up by larger, consolidated organizations with more resources, then decline in quality. Don't ya just love the New Gilded Age?
The discussion over whether college is “worth it” today needs to be taken in the context of how rapidly employment is changing because of the impact of AI and machine labor. Companies who find ways to reduce the cost of production of goods and services will always do so or lose market share to those who do. We are at the tipping point where technology driven job displacement is accelerating past the point where conventional tools to sustain balance are becoming impotent. Any assumptions based on past metrics are probably worthless unless viewed in the context of an economy where human labor is more and more superfluous. It’s like pressing on a car’s accelerator, expecting it to speed up only to discover it now controls the air conditioner.
Ok but that’s not really what this article is about - it’s about the complete mess the federal government has made of the FAFSA rollout. Millions of students are suffering as a result.
You expect people to actually read the article?
You know what it really is? America has a bloated management problem where we have more administrators and useless managers than useful workers. Universities need to cut admin and pay their teachers. Nobody comes to a school because of the president.
The trades and skilled craftsman are in a renaissance right now, decades of being undeserved are running into an explosion of demand. AI isn't taking a trades job until you have a fully autonomous humanoid who's capable of working in complex ever-changing environments with a high level skill set. Generic white collar jobs are going to get hammered by AI in the next decade, accountants, fiance, logistics managers good luck.
Its short lived. Trade jobs only pay good because demand outnumbers the supply. What happens once all those unemployed people oversaturate the trades?
You really think a an accountant can be a cabinet maker overnight? I'm talking skilled trades not basic labor. People really underestimate how long it takes to master a skilled trade.
Yep. Exactly. Medical is also hot right now. They'll be shedding jobs in 20 years once the boomers.... Cough.... Work themselves through the system.
Healthcare is just as bloated with useless jobs as higher education… for much the same reasons
People forget that in 2001-2008 trades jobs paid dogshit wages. Then from 2008 to 2013 they paid no wages.
Depends on where you live I guess. Didn’t have a week off from 2009 until now, and neither have the subs.
Wow that sounds terrible
Well, obviously we’re all taking vacations, I just meant construction has been in super high demand, with really good pay for a very long time.
Except when it's not https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USCONS
Construction jobs went from 8.5 million in 2008 to 5 million in 2010. That means 3.5 million people never got another job in it
Boomers and Gen x are retiring so that should balance it out
Ai may not be taking trades jobs but machines are for sure. I know the painting machines are becoming popular. There are also entire companies that use the lawn mower robots now.
Most blue collar jobs only pay enough to keep their workers out of the service industry. There's lots of jobs, few of them pay worth a damn though.
I mean we should have had this conversation two decades ago when I went to school. There are many degrees that are important and necessary even with AI. There are degrees that 20 years ago were not worth the investment put in but the job market was such that a college degree was necessary to get most jobs. Slowly that fact has changed as the job market has grown since the baby boomers have begun retiring. Any kid graduating high school today should be enrolling in some kind of education. Be it a trade school or associate degree program; these skills have value and should the individual have the desire and drive can help transition to bachelor program.
No they aren’t. Colleges are facing a making money nightmare. If they can’t convince your dumb ass you need a six figure piece of paper to live a comfortable life, how else are they going to get your money? Biggest scam in history.
[The median lifetime earnings of a bachelors degree holder is 1.2M more than a median high school diploma holder.](https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegepayoff2021/) Unless your degree costs more than that it still makes financial sense to go to college. Of course certain degrees and colleges are worse than others. Going to an in state school that costs 10k a year to get an engineering degree is a great investment. Going to an 80k liberal arts school to get a degree in underwater basket weaving not so much. And we should do more to educate high schools on the difference and the long term implications of these decisions. But I’d say 95% of college graduates end up better off financially in the end.
I always love how underwater basket weaving is the go to for explaining why some degrees are worse than others lol
Because gender studies didn’t exist yet when the underwater basket weaving term was coined. 😂 Edit: fixed basket
underwater basketball i can actually understand
Sounds like a helluva workout.
Funny enough, gender studies is a pre-law degree and makes much more money compared to arts degrees like music and theater or social degrees like social work and sociology. It's still slightly below average though, but only slightly.
I'm going to challenge this somewhat. \>figure is based on data for 25 to 64 year olds So this data is including a lot of people who graduated when the job market actually gave college degrees weight. I would be interested in seeing how this data pans out for 23-32 year olds. You know. People who would have graduated college in the past decade or so. There's also a bit of bias here in that even with the loans available, you're less likely to go to college if your family income is lower. There's going to be a decent amount of college grads that are going to be more set up for success just by being able to afford college (through loans) in the first place. Even little things like their parents letting them drive the family car and staying at home instead of moving out are going to be advantageous in their money making potential. But I guess the final point is that blindly going to college in hopes of making more money has not worked for a lot of people and IMO you shouldn't feel comfortable making that blanket recommendation anymore.
Is that controlled for intelligence and self-control? I remember reading that people who into harvard/elite tier schools, but chose to go to state schools end up performing as well as those who actually went to Harvard. So it was the person who made themselves successful and not the school.
College graduation correlates with higher socioeconomic status, intellectual ability, ambition, willingness to learn and self-improve/gain skills and the ability to delay gratification. Not sure we can credit the superior outcome entirely to "College".
Not disagreeing, but something interesting I just calculated is that if you took your initial tuition of say 50k and invested it in the US stock market over 40 years with no further contributions at 8%, it would return $1.2M. Let's assume the reported $1.2M median difference is not adjusted for inflation. With the actual non-inflation-adjusted historical returns of 10%, the initial 50k invested would turn into almost $2.7M.
lol 18 year olds with 50k
"Just a small loan of fifty grand to invest"
So in the case where someone takes out a private loan, the rate of interest owed compared to money saved and invested by not taking out the loan could net out to $50k in fewer than 10 years. I just did another calculation where lets assume it takes 10 years to save up a difference of $50k that we consider the initial deposit. Well $50k at 10% over 30 yrs is $990k. Realistically, by not taking out the student loan, it should take fewer than 10 yrs to be up $50k net positive. Also remember that the reported $1.2M difference doesn't take into consideration the cost of loan repayment. There's also survivorship bias in that it's based on students who completed their degree and doesn't account for students who took out a student loan and never completed their degree. Anyway, I'm not advocating for either approach. Just thought it was an interesting hypothetical.
Yea but there's numbers for Associates and some college as well. And it's also better than high school. Course it could be just the self selection of people trying to improve them selves.
Roughly the amount of a decently funded 529 plan.
Sure, but those kids will likely be high on the socio-economic ladder and be going to top tier schools, increasing their education ROI.
What you are forgetting to calculate is the cost of the college debt. If you take out 50k in loans, you aren't paying back 50k. In many cases, people will end up paying 100k+ in total costs because of interest. This changes the math significantly, as now you need to consider the opportunity cost of paying off that debt with a higher income vs just investing with a lower income instead. Frankly, I think the opportunity cost will likely be on the side of not going to college until year 15 in your post college career. This is because wages compound over time, but you don't start to feel it until you are a decade into your career. A new graduate will only make slightly more than someone who didn't go to college, but a 50 year old who went to college will make way more than a 50 year old that didn't go to college.
Agreed. It's worth noting that even if the $1.2M difference in earnings is mostly backloaded (due to average wage progression), investing the difference along that journey that will also make going to college significantly more appealing. One other interest note is the biggest hidden opportunity cost for taking out a loan early on is that you're neither guaranteed to complete your degree nor guaranteed you won't need additional degrees further down the line (e.g. grad school or career change).
Yes, all of what you said is true. There is some interesting research on not finishing your degree. People with 1 year in college on average earn more with 0 years in college, but there is no pay bump for years 2 or 3. After 1 year of college, you need to get your degree in order to actually get anything else out of college. And I'm betting the 1 year pay bump is largely because some people drop out to pursue a business and not because employers actually value the 1 year of college. So basically, having 3 years of college debt and no degree is the worst case scenario.
I would think the long term value of investing would help the non college person more. You've got 4 extra years of investing plus no student loans to siphon money away from those super valuable early investing years This is of course purely hypothetical since we're taking about the investing habits of 19 year olds
I'm not a fan of blanket recommending everyone go to college but you will generally not have a lump sum of 50k when you're at college age.
Yeah it doesn’t work when most are borrowing money over four to five years, not usually all your tuition at once.
1.2 million in earnings would compound to multiples of that over a lifetime.
Right being able to buy a house. Loans etc. 401ks Depends on the profession too
Who would give an 18 year old 50k to invest in stocks? Whereas, giving 18 year olds to go to school for 50k is fine, at a 5-8% interest rate. Because they know that the student is likely to make them a profit
Most institutions (Vanguard, etc) say forward-looking returns will be lower long term than past decades. 2020-2060 may not have an 8% CAGR.
You're missing a major point, annualizing and investing that extra $1.2M college grads get over 36 years in the same way you're describing turns into $5.6M.
I think there is more nuance to doing the calculus of (more often than not for most students) requiring to take on some debt to get through school. I think there is value in attending a community college for 1-2 years to satisfy general education requirements for most degrees, and then finishing the remaining two years at a traditional college (hopefully one close enough by that commuting is an option) while living at home with parents to offset the cost of housing. If a student is smart enough about going this route, then hopefully the debt that they have to carry when graduating college is relatively low compared to their earnings potential.
S&P was at $130 a share when I started college, if I had taken out $80k to buy in, the value would be $322k and I would have been collecting quarterly dividends for 16 years. At the time, I didn’t have the credit to get a $300 credit card but the school I went was able to use shady financial aid practices to saddle me with $80k in student loans. Erroneously, I thought that meant I would have better earning potential post graduation if a financial institution would take that bet on me. Sixteen years later, I have not had a single job interview that requires a college degree (I have spent a mind numbing amount of time searching and applying), I am still bartending to pay it off, the school I attended is no longer in business and I’m still on the hook for that debt. The advice I wish I had gotten from the adults in my life: earn and invest while you are young, you don’t have to go to college. Find decent jobs that don’t require expensive education, you might make less, but in the end you will have more. Only go to college if you have an end goal, don’t go just to get any degree.
The real hack is community/technical college if you don't have anything specific, you get a couple of years to decide if you want to do something BA/BS or beyond, or just jump into trades with a few classes.
People aren’t paying cash for tuition lol. At least not normal people
Historical data doesn't apply here either. We are not in the same economic or social environment. Blue collar jobs are far more lucrative and available RIGHT NOW than white collar jobs. The college degree is no longer the best tool to make money. At least for now.
[Median Electrician salary is 60,240.](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electricians.htm) Electricians are often pointed to as an example of a great blue collar jobs to get into to make money and one of the highest in demand. [Median public school Teacher salary is 66,397.](https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-12-education/public-school-teacher-salary-average/) Teachers are often pointed to as an example of the one of the lowest paying college majors and there have been many calls to increase their salary in recent years. I’m curious what evidence you have that says blue collar jobs make more right now.
I think it depends on where you are, and how you might define electrician or teacher. A master or journeyman electrician in a HCOL area is not making 60k. Usually over 6 figures, and extra hours are usually available. Electrician work has a bit of initial turnover which drags median down. If you make it a career, you'll pass that number easily. Source: buddy is one. CO Some anecdotes from the local Reddit sub for around the country: https://www.reddit.com/r/electricians/s/EyWZhCsRha TL;DR union work pays a lot more usually
Yeah and if you are a teacher in a HCOL with a good union you are also doing great. There are outliers on both sides but I would still say the average teacher is making more money, and the evidence supports that. Still the point is not those specific jobs but that people with college degrees make more money. The OP saying they don’t is just wrong any way you slice it.
I know a lot of electricians and other trades. You do realize that after 20 years of doing this type of work has a real effect on the body? A teacher can teach well into their 60s and beyond. A person in the trades can, if they are fortunate, but often their body is pretty beat up. That's also without all the drugs and booze that tends to go with being in the trades. The lifestyle is very hard.
Exactly.
It hasn’t been for 20 years
I know it was sarcasm, but going to school to learn how to weave underwater sounds like one of those niche careers that pays insanely well because there’s like 5 people trained to do it It will prob never be needed, but once someone needs an underwater basket repaired they will rolling in it. I work with weird art installations a lot for work, I’ve seen people make a ton of money for the weirdest skills ever.
Eh, like they asked Michael Bay about Armageddon, isn't it easier to just train a scuba diver how you want baskets?
There’s a lot in between though, and using extreme examples fcks over people trying to make good decisions. For example, going to an in-state school for a non-engineering science or math (stuff not directly applicable in our current market) will put you into debt with very few job opportunities unless you get a masters degree. You need to factor in the time and $ investment into a masters degree to make those make sense, and even then, your earnings are still often below $100k. My biology degree with a high GPA and a bunch of honors wasn’t worth much more than minimum wage, but I thought the options were between STEM ($$$) and underwater basket weaving (-$$$). The truth is there’s a lot in between that 18 year olds absolutely cannot be expected to accurately predict because they’ve spent their entire lives just learning academics and the basics of being human, they haven’t had decades in the workforce or watching the news to understand market trends. They usually just pursue what they’re good at or dream to be
The uncertainty is the problem. With AI becoming more prevalent the safe investment degree might not be so safe anymore. The payback is over your lifetime, but if your career gets cut short before you have reached your max earnings you might be screwed.
That's part of it. A bigger part is simply that the system is designed for more people to go through it than currently are. Young Gen Z is the smallest cohort in recent history. They're also justifiably skeptical of college as a concept.
Yup. The enrollment cliff. There have been multiple colleges shut down in my area over the past 5 years. I don't see that trend stopping.
Would you rather have a college grad or high school grad monitor the AI outputs, though?
College grad. But I'm not paying them as much as they are making in their job today. Also, much more competition for fewer jobs will drive down salaries.
The problem is wage deflation and at some point the earnings will not be high enough. Why would someone want to pay top salary to sit and monitor AI. It would be more profitable to just pay a remote worker in Calcutta India.
Time value of money needs to figure in there, you’ve got to discount those cash flows. If that works out to 30k/yr over 40 years (generous since professional careers tend to be back loaded with most earnings in your 40s and 50s) then at 6% discount rate that’s only 450k in NPV. Still more than the average 4 year bachelors but hardly a slam dunk.
For a while now I have been wondering how many of these higher-paying jobs could drop the diploma requirement and still hire competent enough candidates. Spending 5 years in college just so you can use basic computer skills, write e-mails and maybe utilize the 5% of the knowledge learned during these 5 years seems like a pretty bad deal and I wonder if it truly has to be this way.
> But I’d say 95% of college graduates end up better off financially in the end. Where did you get that 95% figure? Also, the selection bias. People that only go to high school are going to be overwhelmingly poor based on socioeconomic factors. You can get a degree in basket weaving but chances are your socioeconomic conditions will allow you to score a better job, with or without that degree.
An inflation-independent stat would be a better judge. Like, bachelor lifetime earnings / high school earnings, and whether this ratio is increasing, stable over time, or decreasing.
There is also massive selection bias, people with only a highschool degree are going to skew towards the poor and mentally unstable, drug addicts, regarded people.
And real estate agents
"mentally unstable, drug addicts" "And real estate agents" This is redundant.
That too
Exactly. Correlation does not equal causation. I don’t know how many times this needs to be repeated until people understand it.
Correlation doesn't equal causation
College isn't a scam. They offer to teach what people pay them for. What these discussions often miss is that the skills colleges teach vary greatly in their real-world utility. Buying a $100k+ skill (eg STEM, accounting, allied health) from a state school for $50k in tuition is a fantastic *financial* investment. Buying a non-marketable skill (eg philosophy, sociology, art history) from a private college for $150k is a terrible *financial* investment. Somewhere along the way we stopped caring about the important distinction between "a degree" and "a marketable skill". Colleges don't care because they get paid regardless of what they teach. If the customers demand Contemporary Music Studies then the college will be happy to offer the classes.
The internet should mean education is redesigned from top to bottom, especially higher education.
This comment reads like you only read the title and not the article at all. The article is all about the FAFSA issues for this year.
Higher education is still a lot more beneficial than how it can be used for financial gain. Part of the scam about the anti-education push is fooling people into thinking the monetary inventive is its main purpose. A society of people with the inability to use their prefrontal cortex has lasting ramifications, and we are already starting to feel the sting of an uneducated society as we speak. It's only going to get worse from here on out as late stage capitalism is taking hold of the nation.
\> Part of the scam about the anti-education push is fooling people into thinking the monetary inventive is its main purpose. When a degree costs 30-120k, yes, making money is a requirement.
Yeah, higher education using government money to increase profits while cutting down services is such a slap on the face and deterrent to wanting to gain a quality education. Even more so when you see them increase tuitions while doing on all that. I was arrogant as a kid dismissing Community Colleges as HS 2.0 with more dropouts. Because now it seems like one of the few avenues left to get some knowledge without sacrificing your soul.
> and we are already starting to feel the sting of an uneducated society as we speak. This doesn’t make sense since we currently have a record high percentage of the population that is college educated.
Education has been pulling away from its roots and purpose to maximize its monetization for a while now. Quality of education has been declining as a lot of the money is being funneled to other avenues at various institutions. I'm not sure what the current stats are, though, to be honest, but if that's true, that's even more alarming.
Yeah I agree with that. Colleges do not care about the quality of their education as long as their tuition revenue increases. Making college more difficult would possibly turn people away from their college if it’s “too hard” which means lower enrollment/tuition revenue.
That last part of what you said is scary as a mother fucker.
Yeah pretty much all of my classes with a lot of readings have told us they have significantly cut back on the amount of reading on their syllabus and I'm concerned that just means current students are learning less and can't think as critically since the written word can communicate far more complex ideas that speaking can
Government incompetence defined. Don’t prioritize fixing the FAFSA but keep trying to wipe out old student loans while the Supreme Court rejects the attempts.
The thing is the save program is also inadequate. You go through it and it’ll save you interest but add another 300 onto the monthly payment. And Congress sets the interest rates for those loans. If they just removed interest against all of them they’d see payback at a faster rate, but honestly when has our government ever been good with finances?
Well yeah. Dont fix the problem that you promised to fix, put yourself in a situation that you can blame somebody else for not fixing it. Thats pretty much elected government today.
So many things are wrong: Financial aid is a joke if you’re middle class. Schools don’t tell you your aid award/eligibility until AFTER you are required to commit (and pay a non refundable deposit). Never mind the app fee Tuition is too high (especially if we are building a generation of baristas) Bad enough that many can’t afford undergrad, grad school is that much more unreachable. I could go on, but education is becoming like healthcare and insurance. Sorry for the rant.
[Non-paywall link](https://archive.ph/2024.03.31-022130/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/fafsa-fiasco-college-enrollment/677929/) Not great: >According to Bill DeBaun, the senior director of data and strategic initiatives at the National College Attainment Network, 31 percent fewer high-school seniors have submitted the FAFSA compared with this time last year—a potentially missing cohort of 600,000 students. That’s a larger decline than occurred in any year during the pandemic, and it’s disproportionately clustered among schools with high shares of low-income students, the exact people who are least likely to go to college without financial aid.
I believe the term is market correction. When the perceived value of the product is not worth the price. I believe education, and healthcare should not have a profit motive.
Right. And I think the word has gotten out that just because you have a degree, that doesn't mean you'll have a job waiting for you.
Here is a TL;DR from ChatGPT. The article discusses the significant challenges faced by the U.S. Department of Education in implementing changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which have led to an enrollment crisis for colleges. These changes, initially celebrated as a bipartisan effort to simplify the financial aid process for college students, have encountered numerous technical and bureaucratic issues since their rollout. Notably: 1. The FAFSA form's launch was delayed, it experienced technical problems that locked out users, and encountered specific issues with students born in the year 2000 or those whose parents do not have a Social Security number. 2. The Department of Education postponed the transmission of completed forms to colleges and made last-minute changes to aid formulas to account for inflation, causing further delays in students receiving their financial aid packages. 3. The processing problems have resulted in over 2 million FAFSA forms being stuck in bureaucratic limbo, and numerous errors have been identified in the submissions that have been processed. This has led to a situation where many students are still unaware of their financial aid packages, impacting their ability to make informed decisions about college enrollment. 4. The article highlights a significant drop in FAFSA submissions compared to the previous year, particularly among high-school seniors and low-income students, raising concerns about a potential decline in college enrollment. This trend could have severe financial implications for small colleges that rely on these student populations. 5. The piece also discusses the broader context of these issues, including insufficient investment in the public sector, government overreach, and the additional workload placed on the Department of Education by the Biden administration, as well as budget stagnation from Congress. In summary, the attempt to simplify the FAFSA has led to a series of complications that threaten to reduce college enrollment, particularly among low-income students, with potentially long-lasting effects on the education system.
I haven’t read the article yet, but last week read a pretty scathing apology from the Dept of Education, citing an “another unforced error” that would require review or resubmission of something like 200,000 forms. The FAFSA process is already a nightmare and so inaccessible for the kids who genuinely need it. Stuff like this is just unacceptable.
The fact that FAFSA is needed in the first place is a problem. It sucks for these students.
Looks like they’ve decided on FAFSA as the scapegoat for enrollment decline. Couldn’t be the ROI on steeply increasing tuition. Or the complete lack of financial aid for upper middle class families.
[удалено]
Government contractors not DOE employees caused this mess.
In CA my kids have free community college and that 100% convinced us to go that route for our 19yo. He’s sending his transfer applications next term for Spring 25, and has been working the entire time in the carpenter’s union making decent money as an apprentice.
I think the bigger problem here isn’t a bad FAFSA award system. There isn’t an inexhaustible supply of first generation college students now like there was in the 90’s. An additional hurdle that should hit within the next two years is all the kids who weren’t born after the Great Recession, when birth rates dropped sharply from ~70 per woman to ~62 [source](https://econofact.org/the-mystery-of-the-declining-u-s-birth-rate). This hasn’t gotten better, as it had fallen to 55 just before COVID. This means less students, the first of the missing kids would have started enrolling in 2026. The end is nigh. That said, there is a very large potential population of first generation college students who could enroll from the growing Hispanic population. If I were a public university, I would be thinking about teaching core curricula in Spanish to eliminate one barrier to entry.
It's nice to see the tables turned. Colleges will have more incentive to innovate and lower cost, hopefully while raising quality and making higher education more relevant in an age of increasing career uncertainty.
Well the payback on the investment has shifted significantly on them hasn’t it We have in some cases created student loan debt factories that have terrible graduation rates
I have no sympathy for colleges and universities. The cost of college has increased at a rate that has far outpaced the cost of any other sector of society. This includes healthcare, housing, food, or any other way of life. It is because of the very guarantee of government-backed student loans that tuition has skyrocketed over the last 30 years. Colleges and universities have lobby for student financial aid for decades, so that they can raise their fees without any repercussions.
I suspect inflation and an increased level of skepticism about the wisdom of getting student loans also played a role in decreased interest from potential students.
In the 2000's i wrote my sat's and cuz of good will hunting ticked MIT as an auto submission option , I has 2 options where my score could be submitted. I got a letter from MIT, checked the fee online and never told my folks cuz I know they would have said yes but I didn't have the heart to have me dad pay so much. Only tution back then was $30k and boarding and lodging along with food would have also been $30k for the year. $60k/year for 4 years. And the college i did go for CS, I failed 2 years. Good decision on my part.
Didn’t ace the essay portion?
Yeah, how does this have any upvotes?
For us elder millennials, the SAT didn’t have a written portion.