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<p>I don’t have a strong opinion on this idea but will note that reducing banks’ ability to collect on private student loans will increase the default risk on such loans and therefore the interest rates charged on such loans.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, I know that. But I do not think banks should loan irresponsibly. It is intersting to note that our new Consumer Protection Fiance Board is putting out standards for responsible mortgage lending. But not student loans – becuase the banks would scream too much.</p>
<p>"Oh, and does this Princeton grad leading workshops have a permanent full time job with benefits? It sounds pretty good but you never know these days.</p>
<p>“Innovation workshops”</p>
<p>Right. Kind of sounds like sales . . ."</p>
<p>Of course it’s a regular full time job with benefits. And a workshop to help clients come up with new concepts to develop isn’t remotely like sales. It’s a real thing, valued by real companies, with real results.</p>
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<p>If a responsible loan is defined as one which the the borrower has a high chance of repaying without undue hardship, lenders need to estimate the chance that a student will graduate and what his expected earnings are if he does or does not. These numbers depend on his academic qualifications (high school grades and test scores), major, and college attended and on what earnings by college and college major have been in the past for similar students. Petroleum engineering majors with 2400 SATs would be allowed to borrow more than sociology majors with 1500 SATs. Each semester a responsible lender would update its estimates of a student’s earnings, allowing further borrowing by college students getting A’s and perhaps cutting off college students getting C’s.</p>
<p>I doubt that the government should mandate responsible lending, but I’d like to see student loans privatized, so that lenders would bear credit risk and restrict funding to credit-worthy students, as described above.</p>
<p>Funny you should mention it. Among my younger kid’s friends, one of the ones who is making the most money straight out of college is a sociology major. With 2350 SATs. He is making a LOT more than any of the engineers. The other similarly high earner is a history major with a minor in painting. </p>
<p>The thing that has been disturbing me about the idea in this thread, which has gotten more publicity recently, is not how misleading, costly, and difficult-to-interpret the data will be. It’s that this will effectively force colleges (and majors) to try to screen out applicants who will not be interested in making the most money possible the year after they graduate. Peace Corps volunteers, nonprofit founders, artists, entrepreneurs . . . they are all going to make their colleges and majors look bad. What you want to graduate are finance professionals, computer and software designers, other types of engineers (besides civil), and maybe some accountants. The non-greedy need not apply.</p>
<p>it’s not even just that JHS. It goes further.</p>
<p>I would venture a guess that those two who are “making the most money” aren’t even motivated by “making money.”</p>
<p>The problem with this measurement is the idea that everyone is primarily motivated by a career goal or financial gain. Some are motivated by ideas.</p>
<p>I have a kid who didn’t even want to go to college, who only started through basic bribery on the part of H and I, but who is very bright. Suddenly, in college, she is in LOVE with school. She thinks she will major in Philosophy.</p>
<p>She already has a job that is supporting. I worry not one bit about her financially, for the future. But to watch a kid like this, who never exhibited any intellectual bent in high school, become suddenly intellectual? It simply argues against every single “idea” on this thread.</p>
<p>I find the direction of these conversations depressing, to some degree. I also understand that the inflated cost of college creates the environment where these discussions become possible.</p>
<p>Poet, I have cousins overseas who would give anything to be able to study in the US. In their own country, they take a series of exams when they are 11 and 12 and the results decide who becomes a hairdresser or a cake decorator and who becomes an engineer or a doctor. So anyone who is a late-bloomer- too bad. One cousin had a meeting with the guidance department in HS and the parents to lament the fact that apparently- in a surprise to everyone-- said cousin was gifted in math. Guidance Counselor suggested a certificate course in book-keeping after HS.</p>
<p>Here in the US we are all gagging. We have an entire generation of cousins who are now or who are training to be physicists and engineers and computer scientists- with at least some of the same gene pool-- and frankly, not all of them were exhibiting extraordinary math skills in middle school. Some of them were doing fine academically but were behavioral problems- and for sure, in another country would have been tracked into a vo-tech HS.</p>
<p>Kind of nice that in the US we don’t determine someone’s life based on a three day test administered in the 7th or 8th grade.</p>
<p>I also find it depressing to read that we should limit educational advancement to a small group who inevitably will be the children of the affluent and the Tiger parents. I’ve worked with lots of late-bloomers in my career and some of them are outstanding professionals after a not-very-promising adolescence!</p>
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It’s obnoxious to describe people who choose practical majors as “greedy”.</p>
<p>The schematic[College</a> Value Profile](<a href=“http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/image/college-value-profile.pdf]College”>http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/image/college-value-profile.pdf) at the web site of the White House suggests that colleges should provide information about</p>
<p>(1) net costs
(2) 4, 5, and 6-year graduation rates (it would be more useful to have such rates conditional on a student’s grades and test scores)
(3) student loan repayment rates
(4) student debt upon graduation
(5) earnings potential (these numbers should be supplied both overall and by major)</p>
<p>Sorry, Beliavsky, but if colleges are being publicly rated based on first-job salaries, enrollment professionals at ambitious colleges will be looking for the greedy, not the merely practical. Why accept a computer science student who says her ambition is to work for the Defense Department on cybersecurity issues when you can take one who says she wants a six-figure job with Google doing ad placement algorithms? Either could pay back her loans perfectly well, but the second student will look a lot better in the college’s numbers. </p>
<p>And ROTC kids? Nursing students interested in Medecins Sans Frontieres? People looking for a career in local government? Fuggedaboudit! Pulling down the averages!</p>
<p>And of course what’s really golden is the prospective English major whose father will get him a job at Goldman Sachs. Or give him a job at a Goldman Sachs-like salary. But only if it’s clear that’s what the kid is looking for, not a chance to move to Bushwick and try to write plays.</p>
<p>Reading CC over the years, I am always amused at the number of high school students whose intellectual passion is finance. There is plenty of greed out there to mine if you have an incentive.</p>
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<p>I define greed not as wanting to earn a lot but as coveting what one has not earned.</p>
<p>“It’s that this will effectively force colleges (and majors) to try to screen out applicants who will not be interested in making the most money possible the year after they graduate. Peace Corps volunteers, nonprofit founders, artists, entrepreneurs . . . they are all going to make their colleges and majors look bad. What you want to graduate are finance professionals, computer and software designers, other types of engineers (besides civil), and maybe some accountants. The non-greedy need not apply.”</p>
<p>That is depressing.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s necessarily greed- more like hubris. Like the 17 year olds who post here who know they want to be orthopedic surgeons. And the 16 year olds who know they want to be litigation partners in a large law firm.</p>
<p>I don’t know that this would work.</p>
<p>I don’t think that students are unaware of the average earnings of their field. I think students, overall, overestimate how much they are going to earn when they graduate - but I think that’s across the board true, just as true for art majors as it is for engineering majors.</p>
<p>So when a student choose to major in English or history, I don’t think they do it because they think they are going to make the big bucks after college; I think they do it because they are genuinely interested in English or history or whatever else and they are trusting themselves to follow their passions into careers that will make them happy, even if they are never rich from them.</p>
<p>Also, what is the goal of this? I was a psychology major in undergrad. I was well aware that the average salary of psychology majors was somewhere in the mid-$35K range and I was okay with that. I loved psychology; I loved the study of it and I realized the connections it had to most careers. I went to an LAC and I love a liberal arts education; I’ve used the skills and knowledge from a variety of classes in my life and my career as a grad student and future professor. More importantly, I think it’s made a critical, analytical thinker and a good communicator, able to function well in our democratic society - which is the purpose of a liberal arts education.</p>
<p>Pretty much all of the careers I ever seriously considered post-high school (public interest lawyer, high school guidance counselor, social worker, public health researcher, and now professor) were not lucrative. I was more concerned with living a satisfying life in which I felt I was making a difference, and the jobs I considered had that in common. </p>
<p>I also think that if we are doing this we should collect data on other things, like satisfaction and quality of life on the job. Salary isn’t the most important thing to a lot of people. Personally, although sometimes I think about what it might be like if I didn’t have to worry about money - as long as I am able to afford the things I need and some of the things I want, I am content. A lot of students are like that and they don’t mind making low but adequate pay to do what they really love. And it’s not like you make that your entire life - I know plenty of teachers with families and houses who are mid-career and they are certainly not making $34K anymore.</p>
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<p>Only the most selective colleges are holistic enough that they could even try to tune their admissions processes in this manner, and they are already said to be looking for students who will succeed after graduation and bring prestige and donations to the colleges (although “succeed” includes other types of prestige beside wealth to donate).</p>
<p>Knowing post-graduation outcomes by both college and major may not be helpful to the student from a wealthy family who can afford to support him/her through unpaid internships and unemployment at graduation (or who can use connections to get him/her a good job regardless of college, major, and academic performance), but if we leave the bubble that many forum posters are in, we see that a lot of students do go to college to upgrade their job and career prospects (which is not exclusive against intellectual development) because they have to (i.e. they cannot afford to spend the money otherwise). Providing information may help these students avoid mistakes, like assuming that majoring in biology and various pre-professional majors like interior design, sports management, business at non-elite schools, etc. provides good job and career prospects (it is not really about sociology or philosophy majors, who generally know up front that there are not many major-specific job prospects for their majors).</p>
<p>Indeed, providing the data in question may also deflate some of the exaggerated claims often made by the bottom-feeding for-profit colleges.</p>
<p>Is it really desirable that students going from high school to college be kept in the dark about the job and career prospects of the colleges and majors that they are selecting, especially when it comes to pre-professional majors that about two thirds of bachelor’s degree graduates end up doing?</p>
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<p>It does seem that the greatest overestimation (among the liberal arts majors) is in biology and chemistry, where many students and parents assume that because they are STEM subjects, they have job prospects almost as good as those of engineering majors, when the job prospects are about as good as humanities majors. The difference is that the humanities majors generally know going in what their job prospects will be like, while the biology majors are more likely to be let down at graduation.</p>
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<p>That is perfectly fine. You knew beforehand and were ok with it. Why are you opposed to providing more information for other students to make better informed decisions like you did before committing to a college and major?</p>
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<p>That’s nice, but it’s an idiosyncratic definition of “greed,” to say the least (or, if not, then it’s an idiosyncratic definition of “earned”). I think most people think “greed” indicates an inordinate desire to acquire wealth for the purpose of personal consumption and personal aggrandizement beyond a level of reasonable comfort.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus: I plead guilty to caring more about admission practices at highly selective colleges than elsewhere. (And, in fact, to caring more in general about highly selective colleges). But I wonder how right you are about sports management majors at public universities. I will admit that I think they are dumb, but not THAT dumb. (Actually, I know a couple of them, and they are lovely, interesting people.) They know perfectly well in their hearts that they live in a sports-manager-eat-sports-manager world, and that in the process many sports managers are not going to succeed, maybe them.</p>
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<p>Even if one uses this definition of “greed”, everyone has a different definition of “level of reasonable comfort”, so it is unlikely that there will be much agreement on what is “greedy” using this definition.</p>
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<p>But would it have hurt them if they were able to make more informed decisions or set more informed expectations based on the recent historical rates of success for people in their major at their college?</p>
<p>At Harvard, the [Smaller</a> Concentrations Receive Highest Satisfaction Ratings](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/2/14/concentration-satisfaction-results/]Smaller”>Smaller Concentrations Receive Highest Satisfaction Ratings | News | The Harvard Crimson):</p>
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<p>I wonder if the pattern of students being happier in smaller departments is true at other schools. Students may rationally chose majors with lower average earnings if they find them more interesting and enjoyable.</p>
<p>The small ones may be niches which fit the few students who major in them well, while not being attractive to those not focused on the subjects. Some of the larger ones (e.g. psychology, biology, English, economics, business) may end up collecting a lot of the students who have not really completely decided but had to choose a major when approaching the “must declare a major” deadline in the fourth or fifth semester.</p>
<p>The article notes that the least satisfying majors at Harvard were: music, economics, engineering, chemical and physical biology, and government. These appear to be the kind of majors frequently chosen for pre-professional reasons (musician, finance jobs, finance jobs, pre-med, politician).</p>
<p>I just think, and maybe I am wrong, though judging by the people I know, I am right, that majoring in something so small and tiny as sports management is silly. You can get into any of these fields through savvy networking. The one person I know who is high up in a sports organization has an English degree.</p>
<p>I don’t think these niche majors are useful.</p>
<p>In the case of something technical, I “get” it. But some of these things just seem to me like our non-profit colleges and universities acting like profit schools. I would disuade my own child away from any but a classical humanities major in the arts if they were not going to pursue something like CS, CE, or any other engineering degree.</p>