If people are trying to pay loans back with degrees that don't lead to good jobs, surely that's a problem, right? If you think that large amounts of people being unable to pay loans back is a problem, that is.
Sure, but that could be a problem for any number of different reasons, and the article doesn’t provide any insight into what they might be.
Are people being deceived in some way into thinking that particular degrees are more marketable than they actually are?
Are degrees that are thought to be very marketable (and perhaps once were) no longer very marketable?
Are people knowingly choosing to do degrees that are known to be unmarketable?
All of those things are completely different problems. The article doesn’t give me any insight into what the problem might be, and doesn’t actually provide much more insight than I could have gotten from looking at two graphs.
This isn't an article about the morality of student loans. It's about the economy. If the economy is struggling because of people unable to pay student loans, that's a problem. Doesn't matter whether it was 'right' that it ended up this way. The problem is that people have student loans that they are unable to pay. How to solve it is another issue.
The article doesn’t make any case for the economy struggling. ‘Struggling’ in this context would mean that there’s less skilled employment opportunities available than there used to be. The article doesn’t put forward any argument to say that’s the case. With increasing enrolments, the economy could be doing great and still produce underemployment.
The question is why are people completing unmarketable (or not sufficiently marketable) degrees? The article provides no insight into what the answer to the question might be. ‘Many degrees are less marketable than the used to be’ is one (partial) explanation. But it’s not the only potential explanation, it’s not obviously the correct explanation, and it’s not an explanation that the article provides any content to support.
> The question is why are people completing unmarketable (or not sufficiently marketable) degrees?
There's no reason to single this out as 'the question'. There are many interesting questions around student loans. The article singles out the question 'What caused the student loan debt load to get to the level of “crisis” in the United States?' There is no reason that an answer to this question needs to involve the actions of individual students. You could answer the question by talking about how states are reducing the % of tuition they they contribute to state universities, or the explosion of university administration, or how student loans are easier to get now than in the past.
The problem statement in the article is ‘student loan crisis an underemployment catastrophe’. If you accept the idea that some degrees are more marketable than others, then ‘the question’ absolutely is ‘why are people completing unmarketable degrees?’.
That’s not to say there aren’t also other problems. But the problem this article is discussing is that people are completing college degrees that do not improve their employment opportunities.
If you're talking about a single individual, doing a degree in something employable might be a good strategy for getting a job, but it doesn't follow that getting more people into professional degree programs will significantly change the underemployment situation. Our economy only needs so many teachers, engineers, doctors, etc. Underemployment of an entire generation isn't caused by the degrees they choose.
The article doesn’t put forward a case for underemployment of an entire generation. It puts forward a case for a certain level of increased underemployment for a generation of student loan holders.
It’s self-evident that if those college graduates who are underemployed had chosen different courses, then the problem would look quite different. The fact that developed nations have to import large amounts of skilled labour proves this (although you could make a solid argument that they import more than they strictly ‘have to’).
There’s likely a number of factors that contribute to this problem. Generally increasing enrolments seems like it would be having some level of impact. But this article does not even attempt to shed light onto what those factors might be, and how they might be weighted. I don’t know what I’m supposed to have learned from reading this that I couldn’t have picked up from just looking at the graphs it includes.
> It’s self-evident that if those college graduates who are underemployed had chosen different courses, then the problem would look quite different.
Not only is this not self-evident, it defies common sense and economics. If more people take professional degrees then the supply of those degrees increases and salaries decrease (and we're back where we started). That is, if there are enough professional jobs to go around which there aren't. You seem to think there are lots of professional jobs to go around, but I went to school with many engineers who struggled to find jobs after graduation. It seems like we're above the point of saturation in many professions.
Your anecdata doesn’t add much to the conversation, and you seem to be relying on a particularly extreme interpretation of what I said. It’s a fact that there are many skilled professions where we have labor shortages. If more people (I never said all people) had chosen to study in those fields, then they likely would not be facing underemployment. Unless you want to disputed the existence of skilled labor shortages, then this is a perfectly self evident conclusion. If you’d like to claim that there simply aren’t enough skilled employment opportunities in the entire economy to provide all of the skilled professionals with employment (which it seems you’re hinting at), then I’d suggest you produce some evidence to support that position.
There is no doubt some salary gains to be made by a small percentage of people choosing to go into professional programs (as I said above), but it's really besides the point. The main issue is that there will still be a large number of students who can't benefit from this strategy.
For that to be true, there has to be too few skilled employment opportunities available in the entire economy to provide employment for college graduates. A position neither you nor the author of the article have provided any evidence to support.
>The question is why are people completing unmarketable (or not sufficiently marketable) degrees?
For the pursuit of knowledge. Universities are not job training. You getting a good job with your degree is a bonus not the intend outcome for a university.
That used to be called a "liberal education", which meant an education that was appropriate for free men, as opposed to slaves, who would be trained in a trade.
Today, that corresponds to pursuing knowledge if you don't need the money. If you do, pursue something that pays. (Pursue as much knowledge as you can work in around the edges, but the main focus has to be on something that pays.)
I'm talking about students, not institutions or rules. I'm saying that if you're a student, and you need to work for a living, pick your major with some wisdom, no matter how much you want to "seek knowledge".
My position is "Student, protect yourself." I take no position on whether the rules ought to change to protect students. (Perhaps they should, because 18-year-olds probably will get carried away with the romance of "pursuing knowledge" and ignore the way the real world works...)
Perhaps the loan requirements should be more stringent on fields that are unlikely to support repayment for people that aren’t in a financial position to repay them? Not very different to lending in other areas of life.
Or remove the non-dischargeability and the govt backing at the same time, and let interest rates and lending requirements fall where they may.
There can always be a private loan market for student loans. Government guaranteed student loans basically happen out of goodwill. The assumption is that it will be a net benefit and therefore everyone should be given the opportunity. However this didn't turn out to be true. If the government keeps funding loans that will never be paid back then it won't be able to fund the loans that can be paid back. I don't really see why limiting certain degrees is seen as pure evil. In Germany some university degrees only accept a limited amount of participants. People with higher grades will be prioritized. This restriction however doesn't apply to the STEM degrees (not an exhaustive list) because they never get enough students. Therefore even if someone is poor and suffers from low intelligence, they are not barred from a degree that leads to a prosperous career.
The description of the STEM/MINT situation in German universities is far too generalized. You have quite a few STEM/MINT universities and programs which require a numerus clausus, its just up to the university to set the NC. Many classical STEM/MINT programs dont have a problem with having a few hundred students each year instead of a few dozen since alot of those will fail in the first years where students just have to learn the basics of the field. Those courses are generally easy to teach and require little interaction with individual students. In the most prestigious technical universities having 70 to 90% of the students fail specific exams is nothing special. And studends are barred from the program after failing the 3rd try. You are also not completely barred with to low of an average entry grade from school, you will just have to wait longer to start your degree. That part is the case for every university and every program, STEM/MINT isnt a special case here.
Man, this canard gets really tiring. Don't get me wrong: I was crazy about university as a place of learning and added a "useless" major & minor from a career perspective to take advantage of the opportunity to learn
But 1) this doesn't reflect the priorities of the vast majority of people, 2) this wasn't to the exclusion of paying attention to what's marketable (ie my other major), and 3) it beggars belief to claim that any significant number of people are intentionally taking on high debt loads in order to play-pretend being an unemployable philosopher-aristocrat.
Leaving aside whether society _should_ be providing the no-strings-attached opportunity for a broad-based education[1] as disconnected from economic productivity, it's beyond laughable to claim that students are actually making this choice en masse in the knowledge that their education is unmarketable.
A misguided and anachronistic belief in the marketability of arbitrary degrees is a far more plausible explanation.
[1] I certainly think it would be nice in the abstract, pending feasibility obviously
People are taking one of those courses because universities in the USA are basically companies. As a result you get marketing to sucker people into buying stuff they dont need and cant afford.
That doesnt change the fact that we have those programs in the first place for the pursuit of knowledge in the hope that it will benefit society. That benefit doesnt have to be an economic one. A degree in your native language has arguably little financial value, but you only have to look to countries like France to see how much a society still collectively values their language.
Investing in universities is historically something nations afford themselves in the hopes it will be of benefit to society. The idea of individuals investing into themselves is a rather American one. I would argue the only reason a large amount of US universities exist is because they have a special tax status and people get to take special loans to pay for their services. Alternatively you would just have companies providing job training. From the outside it looks like much of the problems with the US system stems from purposefully not communicating that difference to new students
edit: To word it differently, the sole purpose of the teaching arm of a classical university is to enable the next generation to introduce novel ideas into their fields. Thats what a doctoral dissertation is. You advancing your field and adding to the collective knowledge.
That explanation likely accounts for some of the underemployment. How much, I’m not sure, perhaps a lot of it. Now, this still leaves people with a debt they may be unable to service. Which is still a problem, and raises its own set of questions. But it’s a completely different problem to any of the other potential explanations.
