Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Free tuition at US public Universities?

I meant that prices could decline even though there was still an infinite supply of credit.

There was not an infinite supply of credit in 2008 when the private credit origination bubble failed.

Health care also stopped growing more rapidly than the general economy recently.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/33/1/67.abstract

I would also note that all of these systems are guild-related.

Ph.D's (J.D.'s for law school) and M.D.'s (for health care).

No, SLABS never really launched as a product the way that I thought they would.

If they had, I would be agreeing with you.

Something else is happening here in law school world.

Common sense, perhaps?

Higher rates aren't required, or even inevitable. For fields with above-average demand, rates would actually decline with market indexed rates. Right now the public subsidies are blended average across geographies and domains. You could devise any number of levers to move rates across classes to be responsive to market demand, then use merit scholarships to subsidize high-ability students in low-demand fields to ensure a diverse legacy of scholarship. You would expect that, on net, education costs would decline in aggregate because a portion of students would shift to lower cost programs.

I'm also a fan of in-course scholarships rather than entrance scholarships. I'd like to see financing somewhat back-end-loaded to disincent prep schools from inflating grades so that students have the opportunity to gain more support if they show talent.

Lots of people have a great deal of actual interest in the subject, even if that doesn't reflect in their grades.

Someone who has a great deal of energy and dedication to a certain subject matter should get more money and support than someone like me who is simply coasting on their intelligence and is literally just there because it's free, it's a great way to avoid working, and you need a ticket punched to get to the next stage of life.

Yes, my grades were higher than someone like that, but I didn't even know why I was studying what I was studying in the first place, since the only thing I was interested in was getting better grades than my classmates in order to show them that I was getting better grades than they were getting.

one, I am with Dude on the securitization of student debt. Debt is debt is debt in securitization. It doesn't have to go up or down, the debt servicing just needs to be paid for the investor to be happy.

Second, didn't I say, in more layman terms, that debt relief should be tied to majors? Though I gave the example of engineering.

Job prospects are tied very closely to the major and school you attend in China and people know it. They focus on the job prospect. They take engineering or computer science. They take multiple languages on the side to enhance their prospects.

They do not have a bunch of people going to a liberal arts college and then say, "what kind of job is out there waiting for me?"

This is a negative, not a positive.

Yes, students and graduates of places like Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, and Williams are pretty much parasitic lampreys feeding off the hard-working graduates of Colleges That Matter.

Education is supposed to be about exposing a student to important ideas and getting him to really think about the world around him. Science and engineering have a very important place in education, but when we elevate these subjects to being the only areas that "matter," we become narrow and unimaginative as a society. And we elevate these sorry characteristics the status of virtues.

IMO, the foundation underlying this type of thinking is the same one that leads schools to disparage gifted kids. Which is to say, "Your kid should just be like all the other ones and do what we've decided is best." In this way, they don't want kids who remind them of things they don't like or see as being unimportant. I guess they aren't alone.

Personally, and again, it's very disheartening to see the ideal of a well-rounded, educated mind being replaced with a crass approach that devalues the arts and humanities. It just advances us along our national road to nowhere.

I don't disagree; but indeed, there is an argument that even those who value "useful" disciplines should heed here.

That same crass approach ultimately dries up innovation in the sciences (and by extension, later technology transfer) as well, because it only looks at relative simplistic/short-term cost-benefit and risk analysis. Basic research? Who needs it! All just a waste of money and resources. Those people should be making better widgets and at lower cost...

Jon makes a good point (he makes good ones elsewhere also, to be sure) about that superficial way of viewing things, which SHOULD have made him an ideal candidate for "free education" as a sure thing from the taxpayer perspective. In reality, I think that he's suggesting that from a societal standpoint, that $$ could have been better invested in someone in the top 20% who actually was DRIVEN by love and passion and would stay in the field, rather than the top 1% driven by nothing more than ennui.

Great word, ennui.

Agree-- VERY short-term gains from a societal perspective using that model of things.

There is an excellent reason why so many of the top students in STEM still come to North America for graduate work in those disciplines-- it's not to improve their English. It's also not because they lack the ability to build universities in PRC, or that they lack educated people to staff them.

Indeed and all the more ironically funny in this context because it almost slant rhymes with 'Uni' - LOL