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My Upcoming Surgery?
I have made an appointment for surgery at the end of summer. I haven’t chosen which operation to have yet, but I know it’s going to be costly. I don’t mean that I have to choose between two similar operations. I mean I don’t have a clue in the world what kind of surgery I am going to get. But I look at it like this: nearly everyone gets some kind of surgery at some point in their life, right? So I went ahead and made an appointment on the assumption that I will eventually figure out what is the right kind of surgery for me. I’m sure the hospital will have a guidance counselor or patient advisor who will make a good suggestion as to what kind of surgery would be a good fit for me. There’s a government loan program for this, and if it turns out that the surgery was totally unnecessary, maybe I can convince some politicians to let me off the hook on repaying the loan.
The above paragraph is satire, of course. I was listening to the latest episode of The Ricochet Podcast and at the end of it @peterrobinson talks about a conversation he had with a gentleman who went to Princeton. Not knowing what he should do at Princeton, he let people talk him into getting a major in Hispanic Studies. This degree was good for getting him a job driving a taxi. This — in my opinion — is not an anomalous situation. I have heard of many young people who have gone off to college with no idea of what they want to do with their life. They just know that everyone goes to college, except for those . . . well, you know . . . dumb people who just aren’t smart enough to get in. Usually, though, at least these young people are going to a more affordable school than Princeton.
I realize that some people may believe they know what they want to do with their life, then change their mind. Charles Krauthammer, as a famous example, was a psychiatrist and decided he didn’t really care for it and became a writer and political pundit. So I’m not criticizing young people for not knowing where they really want to be 20 years down the road. But doesn’t it seem foolish to sign up for tens of thousands of dollars in debt (or get your parents to shell out that money) when you don’t know what you are going to use your education for? I guess I’ve just seen too many people with a college degree, who then went on to sell carpeting, insurance, shoes, or cars for a living. Or get a degree in mass communications and wind up dealing blackjack, before deciding to go through college again and get a nursing degree. Has it always been like this? Or has the easy money — either from generous parents or easy-to-get loans — taken pressure off of students to only go to school if they know what their goal is?
Published in Education
Yeah, but. . .after we skip a generation once, after we don’t transfer the skill once, we have entered a dark age. And we have.
And to shorten what you said considerably, “Bring back the Trivium!”
That, sir, is brilliant.
My mother once collected a debt from a mob-front business. And the mobster came away with a serious case of respect for her.
I wonder what the max tuition loan amount would be for Queer Environmental Puppetry Studies if school loans were market-based.
Colleges have held hostage entry into the middle and upper-middle class and imposed rate hikes consistent with being an extortion racket. But now they also want to keep squeezing their marks while (a) they produce damaged left-wing cupcake zombies (b) at a time when the market for generic college grads is already saturated and shrinking.
There are new lawyers and engineers who will have a real struggle paying off tuition loans. What chance does a Critical [insert anything here] Studies/barista have?
The local AM news station had a segment on college student’s expectations regarding how much they would make in their first job. Those poor fools have been living in a fantasy land. The most disconnected from reality was the journalism majors. According to the reporter, their estimates were about twice what a realistic starting salary will be.
Aren’t you from Detroit?
Are there other kinds of businesses there?
Actually, I do think change has happened in how high school students view their options and the advice they are given, partly due to the tremendous publicity the student loan crisis has shone on that form of credit.
The collective student loan debt the government is looking at is mostly old debt, some two and three and even four decades old. These loans were written like the original dishonest credit card loans. Some guy stood up in Congress–wish I could the link to the story–during the Bankruptcy Reform Act debates and said he tried to pay off an unsecured credit card debt just making the minimum payment and he could never pay it off.
These student loan debts snowballed to include fees and fines and interest charges. And they were included, by the way, in the Bankruptcy Reform Act so that education loans could never be included in a bankruptcy. To me, that was a solid indicator of how corrupt the relationship was between the universities and colleges and the government. Why should the universities be exempt from bad-loan losses? No one else is.
And because of that guarantee, the schools had no vested interest in ensuring that the student would ever be able to pay it back. How all of this mismanagement and corruption has born down on individuals is a sorry story. It was the students (and parents in the case of PLUS loans) who were left holding the bag.
It has been a mismanaged program that has much in common with the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae loan programs. Whenever an organization doesn’t understand whether it is a charity or a business, mismanagement and harm ensue.
I wonder how big the debt would actually be if we stripped away all the fees and penalties and we just looked at the principal.
Carburetors? That is my generation from the 60’s/70’s. These days it is EFI in all of it’s various permutations. The current de Rigour is direct injection into the cylinder head under very high pressure, just like Diesel engines, and that come with all of the expenses and high techory issue of those engines. Working on a car these days is not for the faint of heart or the unskilled.
I live in the Detroit area now. I grew up in Joliet, near Chicago.
I used to work on cars in the 80’s, just when fuel injection was coming out. It never worked, so we called it “fuel infection”.
Oh – much better…
Yep. And my father was a cop. Oh, the stories!
Yes yes yes I know about fuel injection. Fuel injection is Keynesian engineering — MOAR STIMULUS! Carburetors teach conservatism — the system reaches a new equilibrium based on a single input signal, without requiring some central brain. For extra points, an economist could describe how a single water valve is what the navy uses to control nuclear reactors, but that would be unreasonable. Requires knowing about coolant, moderator, and reflector.
Carburetors are still widely used. Just not in the cars we drive.
I like the Northeastern University and the Rochester Institute of Technology coop programs in which companies employ and pay for the students’ education. Those students have been leaving those programs with a job and almost no debt for thirty years at least. What’s wonderful about this is that if at some time in the future those students want to go to their local expensive colleges on their own to take some lofty liberal arts courses, they will have the money to do so. :-)
Mike Rowe is a great guy and I love his message, and he acknowledges that we live in a highly specialized work world in which the guy who fixes the farm owner’s combine needs a lot of expensive education.
There aren’t enough people who are sufficiently wealthy to afford higher education to give our country a running reliable supply of combine repairmen. We need some student financing program available.
I paid as I went to get my Engineering degree (two jobs, one at Burger King, the second a campus computer support job). I graduated in 81 (1.5 years late from a major change mid way thru) with two degrees and no debt (UofMD only let me count one, but I had all of the credit hours for a secondary, they did not do that at the time).
Even during the ugly years of Carter recession (and early Reagan) I have never been unemployed. My youngest also got his degree in Engineering a few years ago, and also has not been for want of a job. Since I cover most of the costs for both of my boys, we said reimbursement 100% for A’s, 80% for B’s the rest was on their shoulders, and we had a veto on choice of degrees (basic anything that was remunerative upon graduation). They lived at home, chore free, to conservative money (and we could insure no goofing off). The eldest also had no problems getting and staying employed with a degree in Accounting.
My peers have criticized us for being hard butts with them but I think is was just early lessons in how the world works once they were no longer under my roof.
Call me a mean old bad dad.
Brilliant. Simple. Therefore brilliant.
And yet today you think nothing of the fact that you car starts immediately on the first crank, no matter what the weather is like. Try starting one of these bad boys when it is 25F outside, and think about that heater which was barely adequate for the British Isle.
This is what I owned in college and need for the daily commute. It was a character building experience.
Government has made it more difficult to hire people by making certain questions or factors punishable if used to consider who to hire. Employees turned to college degrees as proof a person can learn and stay on task. That is some expensive government interference.
I wonder what percentage of employers actually even verify that someone did graduate from the school they listed on their application. A guy I know claims that he once got a job where he made up the name of a college on his job application, and was never asked about it.
As did I.
My uncle the Sheriff.
Which one?
Maybe they figure that if someone got through college, they have at least some experience with getting to classes on time and such? Apparently that’s a big problem with trying to get people to work a regular shift in some locations: they never learned to be on time for things.
Probably legal reasons as in lawsuits, from colleges etc.
Only twice? I’ve heard some truly absurd expectations from people who asked Kevin Samuels for advice on his youtube videos.
Can’t get whiter than that.
Is it this one?
😆
That one is a Sharif.
Oh of course. Never mind. :-)
Oh, and…