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I wish everybody could see what the life of a university student looks like right now.
The dorms have morphed into all inclusive luxury apartments. “Student loans” are spent on food delivery, and fast casual restaurants like chipotle.
Go visit a college town and look at the apartments and the restaurants and everything around it. It’s unsettling.
A university should be surrounded by dive bars. Dorms should continue their long tradition of being just barely habitable, and students should have jobs that they use to pay for their tuition. Anybody who can do basic math saw that as the availability of money increased (unsecured student loans), the cost rose to meet it. There is no gating function on university cost. It will continue to go up until it either reaches infinity, or until we stop giving unsecured loans to children to pass on to these massive multi billion dollar institutions.
“Forgiving” these loans is insane. We’ve robbed billions and billions of dollars from the American people and given it to a small minority of elite wealthy children and massive real estate investment firms which also happen to teach a few worthless classes.
And, to note- students can opt out of cost disease. This isn’t a ‘no starter homes available’ situation. You can live with your parents, go to community college for 2-3 years, and then transfer to podunk state school of commuting for 1-2 years, and get a degree for like 1/8 the cost. This is the less popular option.
At some point, controlling the student loan problem requires either underwriting that will automatically get blown up into an algorithm based on throwing money after Shaniqua or reinstitution of sumptuary laws. Simply… cap the conditions available on campus. Require food halls to serve exactly the same food as the nearest prison, ban individual dorm rooms(and for an added bonus, require one-locker-room-per-floor level facilities), prevent the use of student loans for off campus expenses, etc. You want better than that, you pay with cash.
You can also opt out of a lot of problems by going and living in the woods like the Unabomber. Why are people complaining about inflation when they could simply opt out to go sharpen some sticks and hunt rabbits in the forest? There are incredibly severe outcome differences between someone who goes to Harvard or Yale as opposed to podunk state school of commuting and I feel like it is dishonest to claim that they're equivalent.
The outcome differences are primarily due to the kinds of people who go to podunk state vs harvard. Once you control for that, the differences are pretty slight.
I think the estimate of the breakdown of the private returns to college education from Bryan Caplan (not a huge fan of the status quo) was around 50% ability bias ("the kinds of people who go to podunk state vs harvard"), but also 40% signaling (even if you're smart enough to go to Harvard, can you prove that to employers without the diploma?) and 10% human capital (Harvard actually does have some classes that teach you more because they don't need to worry about the slower kids keeping up). If he's right then you still want to steer clear of podunk; the net return to education is still too huge to throw away half of it lightly.
You're misrepresenting Caplan. That's his breakdown of returns to college education vs a high school diploma, not Harvard vs Podunk state.
Sure, but when I can't take a derivative I'll still prefer a finite difference over nothing. How would you think those estimates change when we reduce the delta?
I think the answer depends on what you think is the margunal value of Harvard over Podunk state, which is the very question we are discussing.
We were discussing ability bias vs human capital - did anyone bring up signaling before I did? It seemed a very weird thing to leave out of the conversation, so I thought it was surely worth mentioning that it could be nearly as large an effect as ability bias despite falling on the opposite side of the "should I go to a cheap college" question.
But as long as I'm bringing up weird things to leave out of the conversation - what's your source for "Once you control for that, the differences are pretty slight"? I was providing what seemed to be a relevant counterexample to an assertion not yet tied to data, but if you do have more relevant data then that's a trump card - just go ahead and play it?
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