I don’t know. I know how it sounds. But I can’t stop thinking that stuff isn’t adding up. And this article is one more to add to the pile of “how can this be happening if the economy is actually healthy, at least in a way that means people’s financial lives are healthy and prosperous?”
The question you have to ask is, who are you hearing this from? The answer is: people with a vested interest in making you believe the economy is doing great, or people fooled into believing this by those with a vested interest.
I suggest you closely examine the metrics used by those who claim the "economy is great". First these metrics are usually comparing year-over-year changes to point to "positive changes" in the economy. What they fail to announce is that the formulas they use to calculate these metrics are "adjusted" regularly to ensure that the numbers they seek are reflected. CPI is a perfect example. The FED claims that inflation has been very low, if not non-existent for years (good for workers, since their wages have fallen or remained stagnant for decades). Some have noted, however, that prices for most of the things people need to survive (food, rent, education, healthcare, insurance) continue to rise dramatically. How can this be? Well one way the FED lies with their numbers is through a mechanism called the "hedonic adjustment". If you paid $2 for a roll 60-sheet roll of toilet paper last year. This year you paid $3 for a 60-sheet roll this year, that's some serious inflation, right? Not according to the FED. The FED claims that the quality of the toilet paper is better now. Even though you are paying 50% more, the FED says the toilet paper is 50% better, so there is no inflation. How are these "hedonic adjustments" calculated? Arbitrarily by FED functionaries, in a black-box.
Rising debt, falling and stagnant wages, higher prices, consolidation of wealth - these are the real conditions we face and why our economy is lagging. Many will look at you as if you are wearing a tinfoil hat if you question the "official numbers", but even casual scrutiny of the methods and metrics used (the ones they do release) will raise substantial doubts about their worth.
y = rent, b = slope, x = sqft
y ~ b + x is the extent of the 'hedonic adjustment'
There don't really exist any control variables for 'better'. Nobody at CPI is subjectively saying toiler paper is better. What they will stochastically estimate is the per-unit price. So if for $10 you get 9 double roles, and last year you got 9 single roles for $10, then the price went down. But I assure you as someone who has looked at row-level data of what the CPI samples and does, there are no cases that are this extreme in the aggregate. They could drop the hedonic adjustments and it would make no practical difference. Private companies use similar sampling methods with better data and don't show wildly different headline inflation (see: Billion Prices Project http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/)
There is no doubt however that the CPI data is inadequate, has a non-trivial lag, and does not capture true regional differences in prices. Just try using it to adjust your salary if you move from Birmingham to New York City and see how comfortable you'd be. But there is no conspiracy; that would presume far more competency than they have hired for.
The costs that are increasing for most Americans are housing, healthcare, and education costs. Yet over 40% of American households own their primary residence. Then you can factor in the lack of rent growth away from urban centers, and you see that this metric isn't as pronounced when it comes to the median American. The costs of many goods are falling. Commodity prices are low despite the fact there is a healthy demand for them. It's strange that you're calling out toilet paper. Its price has fallen [1].
The directors of the Federal Reserve, if they had some secret interest in tricking everyone, wouldn't be flatly admitting they consider why inflation isn't hitting targets a "mystery." [2]
The unemployment numbers being released should be viewed with skepticism, and there are plenty of good articles explaining why the main unemployment rate should be viewed in context with the other unemployment metrics, such as U6. (The idea is that there are many people who want to work who aren't counted in the main unemployment statistic.)
Furthermore, certain localities are experiencing extremely high price increases in housing, such as the Bay Area. Anyone in such a locality is going to feel the squeeze. The problem is that these statistics represent the nation, not individual localities.
1. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf, page 12; table 2: Household paper products.
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-26/yellen-kn...
It could be they're taking home 95% of the income so capturing 85% of the growth is actually relatively low. I just don't know.
I feel like we're headed into a really deep economic downturn, but hey, at least we have plenty of golden parachutes for the rich!
I'm struggling to see the impact this has on economic reality. Could you expound?
Keep in mind, much of the hockey stick'ing happened under Obama, who was and still is perceived to be a green prez. Yet no one has really stopped to ask why is gasoline so cheap? Why would we sacrifice the planet for fossil fuel burning? The answer is simple: because we have to.
p.s. Low oil prices also puts the screws to the Russian economy. That probably isn't a hig deal but it's certainly for some a nice bonus.
Not to mention, I could have worked a 9 - 5, $25 / hr job, and bought a second or third...
Perhaps school isn't the best in many cases.
Now I pay $1k a month in student loan payments, on top of everything else. I'm in tech too, so it's not bad - but I can imagine the 95 / 100 who don't get a tech job are struggling
Eventually somebody will say "let them eat cake" and heads will start ending up on spikes.
It's been the same process throughout history: an aristocracy forms, they become blind to the suffering around them, heads on spikes.
Keep this in mind when you hear someone saying that unemployment is down.
U3 is the official measurement because it has a long history and it's useful for simplifying policy decisions. It's also fairly accurate because it's largely based on unemployment insurance claims forms, which have to be re-filled every 1-2 weeks.
U6 is also an BLS measurement[1] but it not as useful. It contains far more noise and is far harder to get an accurate count (because many of the constituent groups can't be surveyed without random samples). U3 will probably continue to be used as the "official" measurement so long as there are significant tradeoffs to moving to U6.
The stability factor is really the key - I know of few people that expect to be in the same job in 5 years, and everyone stretching for housing to try to get some longer term stability are on a knifes edge. That’s at least my perspective from where I’m standing.
Stock market and the incredible rebound of housing prices are great if you are older/wealthier and own assets.
There is no denying that if you were wealthy and an asset owner, you did incredibly well.
But if you are young with student loans or an average joe with a few thousand in the 401k, then it isn't going to affect you much.
The years since the financial crisis was primarily about bailing out the big banks and the wealthy asset owners.
If you are an young or an average person, you are doing even worse now since medical costs have increased. The ACA ( obamacare ) was about transferring the burden of medical costs from the elderly and sick to the young and healthy.
If you are older, wealthier and owned a lot of assets, the past 8 years have been the best years of your financial life. The S&P 500 rose from 600s to 2500s and looks to be headed to 3000. Everyone else has fallen behind. Stagnant wages and increasing medical insurance costs.
You can look up the statistics but the wealthy top 5% have been doing very VERY well these last 30 years and everything continues to be great.
People aren't wrong when they say how amazing it is that Trump managed to bankrupt himself.
http://www.npr.org/2017/06/02/531173429/understanding-the-pr...
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-pro...
I'd be interested in playing with that data to see if the official numbers are reproducible. Also, it'd be cool to see how well one could predict future prices of certain goods, like toilet paper.
We probably also want data on the spending habits of various locations and demographics.
Why aren't we measuring how well the economy performs by measuring how healthy people are? Or levels of malnutrition? Or happiness? Or stress? Or education?
We should measure our economic progress by how well we're doing as people, not by how much extra shit rich people can buy.
You could repay it in 10 years time while living at the same level of your non-graduated friends.
Now say that the student loan averages US$ 150,000 and - still on average - the increase in annual wages is US$ 7,500 (net).
So you can either:
1) live as before BUT repay it in 20 years instead.
2) live at a 7,500 US$/year lower level than your friends and still repay it in 10 years.
3) live at a 7,500 US$/year (or 10,000 or 15,000) higher level and never repay it.
I suspect that besides the lessened "value" of the university degree on the labour market, there is also an increased number of people that choose option #3 over option #2 or #1 (whether out of need or because of other reasons doesn't really matter).
That actually seems more equitable to me than what happens at some other schools, where everyone pays the same credit-hour rate no matter what course they take.
Teaching STEM courses, intuitively, seems like it should cost more. The pool of professors and TAs is smaller, a lot of courses call for lab equipment and the maintaining of labs and so on. And students have higher earning potential upon graduation and should, in theory, be willing to pay more.
Many humanities courses in contrast (literature, philosophy, sociology, political science, languages) can be taught quite cheaply, with labor being the only major expense. It seems unfair that humanities degrees (which are also worth less than STEM degrees on the job market) should be anywhere near as expensive as STEM degrees.
BUT you need also to compare what the labour market (outside the University) offers to a professor level mathematician, engineer or technologist and what it offers to a brilliant anthropologist.
Also, try remembering last time you saw an ad where someone was looking to hire an anthropologist (or an archeologist, a literature major, etc.).
There's your answer - 0.2pp is totally insubstantial, which makes the title borderline clickbait. The economy doesn't uniformly grow or distribute wealth, so a change so small could just be from the distribution of college leavers in a particular year being overindexed towards sectors that aren't growing.
Further to that point, it typically takes years for people to adjust their majors towards sectors of the economy that are particularly productive, so we shouldn't expect to see such a quick change in the numbers.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/funding-d...
tl;dr: States have been cutting back on funding public education even as it's gotten much more expensive every year.
Student tuition is literally the only dial left that can be moved.
> Small business lending by the four largest banks fell sharply relative to others in 2008 and remained depressed through 2014. We explore the dynamic adjustment process following this credit supply shock. In counties where the largest banks had a high market share, the aggregate flow of small business credit fell, interest rates rose, fewer businesses expanded, unemployment rose, and wages fell from 2006 to 2010. While the flow of credit recovered after 2010 as other lenders slowly filled the void, interest rates remain elevated. Although unemployment returns to normal by 2014, the effect on wages persists in these areas.
Wages and benefits are too low, tuition is too high, cost of living is too high, and student loans are a scam. Tuition is a scam.
The rent is too damn high! ;)
Loans that are guaranteed by the government, for all students, that can't be discharged by bankruptcy, is an idea clearly put together by lenders.
If we wanted government subsidies for private education, there are plenty of alternatives. Here's one: government guaranteed loans for all students; but repayment of those loans is capped as a percentage of the person's income, and interest rate is capped well beneath that. This would allow the government to subsidize students to go to college, while providing market pressure against universities raising their tuition yearly. It would also allow students who went to expensive institutions to pursue careers that aren't at the top of the financial spectrum, like, say, teaching.
This is the same probably I have with the affordable healthcare act: it started off about healthcare, but became about healthcare insurance.
Depending on what you mean by this, it could be either a good idea or nothing would change. So can you clarify?
If you simply mean that the students would only have to pay back a portion of the loan, but the government would still have to fund the rest to the university, then nothing would change from how things work right now. The universities would keep raising the prices.
Social pressures are more complicated than that, and they come from many different directions. I mean, in the hip-hop world, "I Finished Paying Sally Mae Off!" is one of the top rated songs right now. And listening to that song, it's clear that the rapper had fallen behind on his loans from time to time.
So if that "pay it off" attitude has made it down to the hip-hop world, it must be prevalent in the larger society as well. And that's just one "for instance" when you're talking about social pressures around student loans other than the desire to walk away from them.
Are you referring to the efforts to correct down on Navient actively and often deceptively steering people into higher-cost paths when better existing legal options were availablel, or it's crackdown on predatory loans by fraudulent institutions? Or something else?
Perhaps more and more students are simply refusing to pay, taking the free college they should have been given by economic force.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-27/it-should...
Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them.
Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc.
>the economy has improved
For the top 6% of Americans that are millionaires, it absolutely has improved. Most of their income is from capital gains, dividends, and business equity.
The average person with student loans has almost none of these things. They are relying on a wage from a job that requires them usually to pay rent, own a car, buy a monthly transport card, and so on.
When you are only making $1400-2000 per month after tax, and $1,000 of that is out the door on work-related expenses alone (rent, transport, insurance, phone), there isn't much left over for a $300 per month student loan payment.
Disclaimer: Don't shoot the messenger. These are merely my thoughts on what is happening. Please reply with criticism.
This is just another example of why I urge any young people I know (high school age) to think long and hard before choosing to go to a 4 year college. When I graduated high school in 99', we were primed to think "college degree == good job". Of course, that is anything but the truth. And, it only serves to put someone in serious debt without any guarantees.
Hands on technical jobs like electrician, plumber, welder, are many times more lucrative than some bullshit business degree. A friend of mine's son is 22 or 23, and making a hell of a living welding. Granted, he's exceptional at it. But, that doesn't change the fact that his 2-year trade school investment was a good one.
Or, teach yourself a skill. Like lots of us on here, I'm a self taught programmer. It took years of doing small projects in the evenings, but I make a living from it now with $0 in student loan debt.
The idea that trade school somehow is lower tier or oppressive is a staggering disservice. Just like every college-bound high schooler is not med school material, not every high schooler is college material. Put a wrench or saw or blowtorch in the hands of a doctor or engineer, and crummy is the likely result. Skilled trades are an honorable, respectable way to earn a good living. Forcing people into tracks for their own supposed good but where they feel hopeless is horrible social engineering.
A college degree is still worth a considerable bump in lifetime earnings.[1] Perhaps you should revise your advice to "think long and hard before choosing to go to an expensive 4 year college" or "consider spending the first two years of college at a local community college."
1 - https://trends.collegeboard.org/education-pays/figures-table...
Stories based on average numbers lose a great deal of the details that matter.
Last year according to credit Suisse, the median wealth of the typical American actually /decreased/! And if I remember correctly, it was by quite a sizeable chunk, from 49,000 usd to 45,000 usd.
And the median excludes children, so it is adults only.
I have all the statistics in the world to back up what I'm saying, but even more important for me is anecdotal stuff that inspires me to dig deeper.
When you see the sheer number of young kids working chipotle or retail; when you see the demographics of uber drivers vs big 5 software engineers; when you realize that so much of the wealth in the US is old money that continues to centralize, pool, and grow (much like gravity);
when you realize all that, at the very least, it makes you say "hmmm... I need to rethink and dig deeper into this topic on my own".
But here's a "nice" graph (the graph is nice, but the trend is worrying): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11327662. Labor force participation for college educated workers fell by 3.9 percent points since 2009. This is rather massive compared with the actual unemployment.
I really wish the people at statistics offices would come up with some new measure of unemployment. Sometimes I feel a scalar doesn't cut it.
It's always nagged me how we can say the economy has improved without taking the distribution into account. It's like saying one person gained five bucks and three people lost a dollar. Sure there is two more dollars but the community/society isn't necessarily better for it.
Yes. In most countries I know of, employment statistics are more about making economy/government look good and hitting targets, and less about giving any real numbers that people can use to understand the big picture.
I do agree that we have to look more at wealth equality to see what's going on.
They do, they're called "not in labor force" [0]
If you include the unemployed as well as those who want a job but aren't actively looking, it's around 5% which is considered low.
But the point of the article is that the unemployment rate is moving in the opposite direction to the arrears rate. Unless the basis for these figures has changed recently, this would require that an abnormal number of graduates aree becoming less emlpoyed while an abnormal, and larger, number of grads are becoming employed. Seems unlikely.
> ...perhaps are underemployed
Are you sure? I'm not totally familiar with the exact counting mechanism in the US but, in the UK, if someone is in part-time work but is looking for more hours or full-time work, then they count as unemployed, not employed.
e.g. http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/inflation-canada-outlook-1.4...
Is this newsworthy?
If the student fails to repay, a %age of the student loan debt should be paid for, by the edu institution where he/she graduated from.
Would be great if it is 50%. Even if university doubles the price, demand/supply economics will ensure universities cannot bump fees up at will.
Without holding the educational institutions and the students as equally responsible for the debt, edu institutions have no incentive to not-ripoff students.
Factor in the repayment history by graduates of a program at an institution to decide the percentage of debt the university is liable for.
If STEM grads are having lesser default, the school is responsible for 10% of the debt.
If a grads of <some esoteric program> have a higher default rate, school owes closer to 50%
Why shouldn't the school take on some of the risk?
You'd need to cook up some sort of risk-pooling scheme if you wanted schools to extend that credit to anyone coming from a background that made payment statistically less-likely. And once you started doing that you'd have to be careful not to distort the market so much that the original intent -- to allow market forces to have more say on what majors college students go into, and who (and how many people) colleges admit -- would be totally lost.
It's a difficult problem and I don't know if it's better to have the schools/colleges trying to underwrite the loans. It might be better to leave that to specialists rather than force it onto schools (though forcing schools to release the data that an underwriter would need to rationally price loans for students to go there would be good).
If you didn't have the government backstopping student loans, and in some cases making them non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, that would probably have much the same effect. The government backing and unique legal treatment are what makes a "student loan" different than a giant personal loan. The justification has always been that without this treatment and guarantee, nobody would make a $100k+ personal loan to an 18-year-old, which is probably true. But I think we're starting to see the other side of the coin, which is that maybe there are some good reasons why that's the case.
Or are they in any way incentivized to take on financially less-well-off students? I'm pretty sure they'd always find some way to outsource any costs/risks like that straight back to the students.
Also: It's not that much of an open market, schools work very much on prestige, certain fields are de-facto monopolized by certain schools, it isn't an "open market" where some startup can just start a school and hope to have a meaningful impact in any short time.
Imagine you and I agree to a deal, both verbally and contractually (i.e. on paper). I give you 10 euros and you pay me back 11 euros in exactly 1 year.
Now 6 months into the deal you suddenly ask yourself: "Well who would lose out when this debt gets cancelled?"
Do you see now why I think it is a nonsensical question?
(In this thought experiment we're ignoring insurance. Or you could imagine an uninsured asset being destroyed.)
Time to switch to free high education system.
But of course in reality, when universities were free in the past they weren't allowed to just raise their prices to whatever they felt like charging, as they basically do now.
- What is the breakdown across for-profit vs traditional school graduates? Are University of Phoenix grads defaulting at the same rate as ivy league grads? (obviously no, but the disparity would be good to know)
- What are the statistics if you include SoFi (and other similar refinancers that cherry-pick borrowers most likely to repay) borrowers that get removed from the public numbers?
* Wage garnishment is limited, maybe the ruined the credit score and the max % of garnished monthly paycheck (%15) is less than what they are already paying?
* The type of majors and students background who graduated changed. Maybe universities 4 years ago decided to accept more students into majors which are having a hard time finding employment. Universities don't care, they just want more students with 6 figure approved loans to roll in.
* It is possibly there was a hint or signal of debt forgiveness being implemented. It doesn't have to be true, just a rumor but it can start to self-perpetuate because people really want to believe it.
* Also everyone is pretty connected these day via social media so maybe if someone bragged about not paying and "look a few months later, nothing happened to me" others might start thinking, hmm, well maybe it's ok. Certainly nobody wants to be left still paying like a fool if all their cool friend stopped and they still seem to be doing ok, kind of attitude.
You aren't entitled to 100,000 dollar education.
You aren't entitled to go down to Mexico every spring break.
you aren't entitled to eat pizza and hit the bar every weekend.
You aren't entitled to a college education.
Go learn a trade, get scholarships, join the military, work for a company that will pay for your education, start your own business.
Instate tuition at VA Tech is 13k for the year, if you live in Texas, UT is 4-5k a semester. While not cheap, this is far from unaffordable.
I have zero sympathy for junior who goes to some 150,000 a year liberal arts college and gets a degree that makes no money or requires another 2-4 years of school.
> You aren't entitled...
While the person you describe probably exists, it's not all 18% of students struggling with payments. I'd just like to say that being aggressive helps nobody.
> Instate tuition at VA Tech is 13k for the year, if you live in Texas, UT is 4-5k a semester. While not cheap, this is far from unaffordable.
Are the people born away from the coasts out of luck then? There are dozens states in the Midwest with cheap tuition, but after graduation there aren't any jobs waiting.
The quality of education is usually poor when professors teach subjects for fields that they've never been a part of.
Students know these things, and feel it's worth taking on debt to get a better education and live somewhere with opportunities.
> Go learn a trade, get scholarships, join the military, work for a company that will pay for your education, start your own business.
I'm assuming you work in tech. Would your employer hire someone in their 30's with no relevant work history? I've worked at two of the large tech companies and two smaller companies, and I know they wouldn't consider it.
Apprenticeships are disappearing - low skill work gets automated now. Medium skill jobs are being outsourced or given to contractors. What you're suggesting isn't realistic.
An 18 year old assured by their parents this is the "right" move deserves sympathy when it all blows up in their face 150k down the road.
My Mother told me she would throw me out of the house if I took a job rather than going to graduate school. She also said all the loans I took out for undergrad that she claimed she'd pay she'd stop paying if I got a job rather than going to grad school.
The reality is some parents are so damn convinced that education is the magical key to a good life they'll go to some pretty intense lengths to get you to sign on the dotted line.
Blaming entitled kids for our debt-laden society and failed economy is not smart or useful. The truth is that there aren't enough jobs (let alone decent-paying jobs) for 1/4 of the tens of millions of kids who enter college every year. These kids weren't the ones who mismanaged society so that property taxes, mandated healthcare premiums, income taxes, and rents are so high.
You aren't entitled to having a loan repaid if the interest rate is too high.
...or if you loan too much money to someone who won't be able to afford it.
...or if you expect someone in a lower income bracket to pay more than X% of their income.
Common-sense laws that loosened bankruptcy and regulations on repayment amounts would fix student loans, credit cards, bad mortgages, and payday lending. Why do we always blame the person taking out the loan? The lender should have the expertise to know if a person is capable of repayment and should bear the burden of making predatory loans.
1/ Student loans are not dischargeable in bankrupty.
2/ Today, the government IS the lender.
The government has created a system of incentives (even before the student loan industry was nationalized) that encourages lending large amounts of money to anybody by eliminating the risk on the part of student loan lenders.
People can basically never get out of the debt, so you can lend arbitrary sums of money to Feminist Dance Theory majors and other sorts of poor-ROI nonsense.
"Predatory loans" is a misnomer. Predatory government is far more accurate.
Then you're an asshole. Young people with zero real world life experience make poor choices often. Sometimes critically poor choices. It's a part of growing up to fail and the fact that you can't squeeze together an ounce of sympathy for these folks suggest you have a lot of growing up to do yourself.
Just like we know diamonds have no real value, and you shouldn't go into debt to buy an engagement ring or have a big wedding.
But try offering your fiance a $5,000 bond instead of a fancy ring. It doesn't go well.
Social pressure is a real thing, and colleges are taking advantage of all of us by setting up expectations for normal that we just can't afford.
This is why I never really got behind Bernie's free college plan. We don't need the government to help make college free. We need to change why these costs are getting so out of control in the first place.
How are people spending over 50k in the first two years of undergrad? Basically wherever you go the core requirements that first year or two are the same before you pick your major. We need to be leveraging the best teachers and online classes to bring these costs down, especially for your basic "Philosophy 101" class that you are just taking to test the waters.
You build egos the size of cathedrals.
Fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse.
Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green gold-plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor becomes his own god.
Where can you go from there?
As we're scrambling from one deal to the next who's got his eye on the planet? As the air thickens, the water sours, even bees' honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity and it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There's no chance to think, to prepare. It's buy futures, sell futures when there is no future. We got a runaway train, boy." 'The Devils Advocate'
But you are. We have a right to an education. My parents paid literally $0 for their education, because university was free, in a time with much lower productivity and less wealth. The state could afford it then, so it can certainly afford it now.
I finished college in 2014, worked in industry for three years, then came back to school for a PhD. I am now completely shocked that these undergrads are paying $60k/year to come here to listen to the same cookie-cutter lectures that are being given at thousands of other institutions across the country.
I almost feel embarrassed for the professors as well, having to act like they're doing something useful or valuable by giving this lecture, when in reality its just a mechanical performance.
I feel like you need 20-30 different MOOCs for each class. You need a tier 1 (MIT etc) level difficulty Physics I class, then a tier 2 class, and so on.
This would even be advantageous for students at 'top' schools (if they still exist), as it would be easier for a physics major to acquire cs skills if they don't have to go through their schools theoretically biased curriculum.
Its completely insane...
> According to a visualization of MOOC completion rates assembled by Katy Jordan (2013), the 50 investigated MOOCs have generated 50.000 enrollments on average, with the typical completion rate hovering below 10%. Put it somewhere around 7.5%, or 3.700 completions per 50.000 enrollments. Meyer (2012) reported that the dropout rates of MOOCs offered by Stanford, MIT and UC Berkley were 80-95%. For example, only 7% of the 50.000 students completed who took the Coursera-UC-Berkeley course in Software Engineering. There is a similar reported dropout rate in Coursera’s Social Network Analysis class where only 2% of participants earned a basic certificate and 0.17% earned the higher level programming with distinction certificate.
MOOCs are not the solution.
Matter of fact, MOOCs turned out to be the counterfactual that clearly illustrate the depth of problems we have with education - and more importantly re-training.
MOOCs are in so many ways ideal. When Khan academy lectures were first made available online, I had huge hopes for the future of education and therefore humanity.
Education/re-training is a critical lynch pin of the modern model of economic development.
Innovation -> job loss -> retraining -> people return to well paying jobs.
But it turns out, that this was not happening, and that education and training is a lot harder than anticipated.
MOOCs had it all - convenience (always on the net), not time constrained (you can read/watch classes whenever), accessible (taught by the good teachers), high quality (same teacher, able to use visual and other aids) and self-selected by people who wanted to finish the course.
They should have been a massive success.
The self-selected, interested student part should alone, have resulted in large numbers of newly trained students.
It hasn't. Which meant the importance of those factors in educational results was overstated.
This also means, that our current education system, may well be the better state of the art option we have.
OR worse, a large chunk of humanity may not be able to transition to new subjects, and therefore new roles.
This is a huge bloody problem, because that means if coal miners lose jobs, the economy will stall.
This in turn puts huge political pressure to avoid following economics, and instead fight for protectionism, which also doesn't work.
----
Side note/silver lining: Perhaps the intransingence of education is a good thing.
If it becomes easier to teach a person how to learn X details, perhaps it can become a lot easier to also indoctrinate a person in Y religion, or belief.
In the end, a technique which has a high success rate in teaching students X subject, could easily be used to teach any subject.
The difficulty in teaching people could well be a natural impediment to mass scale conversion, or invasion of ideas/propaganda.
I even wonder if much will change with colleges and higher education by the time I have kids and they then are college age. A lot will change from now until ~20 years when my potential kids will be college bound. However, I'll definitely be looking at biggest potential on ROI for tuition costs etc.
