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The federal government has, in recent years, paid debt collectors close to $1 billion annually to help distressed borrowers climb out of default and scrounge up regular monthly payments. New government figures suggest much of that money may have been wasted.
Nearly half of defaulted student-loan borrowers who worked with debt collectors to return to good standing on their loans defaulted again within three years, according to an analysis by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For their work, debt collectors receive up to $1,710 in payment from the U.S. Department of Education each time a borrower makes good on soured debt through a process known as rehabilitation. They keep those funds even if borrowers subsequently default again, contracts show. The department has earmarked more than $4.2 billion for payments to its debt collectors since the start of the 2013 fiscal year, federal spending data show.
[...] Officials at the CFPB say the government should reexamine whether the loan program, and the lucrative contracts it bestows on private firms, is working for the millions of Americans struggling to repay their taxpayer-backed student debt.
"When student loan companies know that nearly half of their highest-risk customers will quickly fail, it's time to fix the broken system that makes this possible," said Seth Frotman, the consumer bureau's top student-loan official.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:17PM (34 children)
Everyone has to go to college, even those who are not academics. Partying, sports, and making money are far more important than silly academia and education. The corporate takeover of higher 'education' has given us a situation where the vast majority of colleges and universities are little more than degree mills which are little better than our abysmal K-12 school system. Just going to a college isn't good enough if you seek an education; you'll have to go to a top school for that. There is a massive education quality gap between the average and the top schools.
It's no wonder that the toxic 'even complete morons have to go to college' mantra, combined with predatory corporate schools who want to make as much money as possible and foolish employers who demand degrees for even the simplest of jobs, has resulted in ridiculously expensive, dumbed-down schooling.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Monday May 22 2017, @07:29PM (24 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @08:47PM (1 child)
Great, you've discovered a way to make yourself feel superior to others, because that's what's important in life. Stand around and jerk off to how great you are, that's the ticket to a good life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @09:29PM
I like you.
You're the right kind of person.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Monday May 22 2017, @08:50PM (18 children)
This certainly ranks among the most retarded hot take in the history of dimwitted analyses.
It's bad enough to merely drag out the alt-right's favorite vague, unfounded accusation of "virtue signaling", but it's utterly incomprehensible how you and everyone who upvoted you can so monumentally misunderstand a term whose meaning is embedded right there in the name.
I get you're only using the term because you value how shitty and worthless you are as a human being and are desperately looking for a way to excuse your failure in life by constructing the basic human decency of others as somehow flawed, but can you please at least use your idiot misappropriations of language in the correct context?
Signaling in game theory(and biology and a few other fields) is the general concept of engaging in a behavior to represent that you possess that quality. If we're talking biology it's frequently in a way that consumes or exhausts resources to separate the individual from those casually pretending to have the quality.
Now, to interpret a fairly obvious fact that your "wah sjws" whine completely failed to even broach: virtue signaling would be behaviors designed to indicate that one has socially positive moral characteristics. That is to say, used in the villifying sense that whatever dumb blogs you read would use it, virtue signaling would be to act like you are trustworthy in order to cynically manipulate positive responses from others.
A degree is not that. Not even in said, cynically retarded interpretation of human society. It might be a class signal, to represent ones station. It might be a stability signal, to indicate that one can hold ones' trousers one for four years without giving up on the modest tasks of passing university courses. It can even be an interest signal to tell prospective employers that you like or care about what they do.
Now, if you were to rewrite your screed towards a modicum of accuracy towards your own fucking ideology, it'd still be full of shit, but at least it would because your ideology is dumb, and not because your a shitty monkey flinging YouTube IntellectualTM branded shit without any actual understanding of what you're claiming.
In short, go fuck yourself.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @08:56PM (6 children)
He got +5 because the phrase "virtue signal" is itself a virtue signal.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday May 22 2017, @09:09PM (4 children)
That's the standard turn-around on the idiots who use the phrase, but I don't think it's accurate.
The under-educated sociologist in me says it's actually a tribal signal. They aren't trying to communicate that they're good, trustworthy people to form bonds with. They're indicating an affiliation. It's more akin to wearing a Red Sox jersey to work than talking to a stranger about how you're on the way to a soup kitchen to volunteer, after you hit the gym. And the upvoters are exactly the kind of tribalists who would buy it.
Either way, the clear distinction between definition and usage tells me they have no interest in meaningfully trying to communicate a real concept.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:46AM (3 children)
I think you're missing that it's being used ironically and derisively. SJWs have no real virtues, thus the need to signal so hard.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:27AM (1 child)
Standard response to idiocy. Followup sentence about potential trolling. Heading off TMBs inevitable statement about it being completely serious. Realization that the whole exercise if futile. Cynical statement detailing the failings of tribal members.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:55AM
If you can't see the irony in what you just posted, I despair for your future.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:17PM
Does your brain work, buzzard?
There's no "irony" in using a phrase a bunch of neofascists cooked up to vaguely and incorrectly attack the very same people the neofascist movements hate. You know you can't just say "it's a joke" after being called on your shit unless, you know, it's actually true.
No wait, you don't know that, because you have a complete absence of personal integrity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:37AM
I modded you up because your post had "virtue signal" in it twice.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Monday May 22 2017, @09:05PM (6 children)
A degree is certainly a signal; I don't think you're debating that.
I'd call it a quality signal, which is close enough to virtue that I'm willing to let arik slide on this one.
I had one teacher (of incentives and game theory) ask the class rhetorically "Why you go graduate school get degree? Because you know you better than the next guy." (English was not his first language.)
Like most signals, it can be faked. There was a time when graduating college was a fairly reliable signal. Somebody noticed that college graduates get the best jobs. So, they absurdly concluded, if everyone goes to college everyone can have the best jobs. Being "best" became a civil right to be subsidized by your tax dollars. Now we have a flood of "best" people only willing to do the "best" jobs, and nobody (from this country) willing to harvest potatoes.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday May 22 2017, @09:15PM
Since now we're actually talking about reality: I still think that's full of shit.
It's a signal the same way all our job titles and deeds and licenses and every other fucking piece of mundane bureaucracy we file away in a cabinet in our spare bedroom is: nobody knows shit about who you are and what you've done and the pieces of paper help establish that, yes, maybe you're an idiot, but in this case you're an idiot who has at least had to write a merge sort once in their life. Yes, you paid 250,000 for these 3 acres. Yes, someone sat with you and made sure you could drive without speeding for 10 minutes, and you're not totally blind.
That is to say: no they don't speak to your actual competence beyond some minimum, but a lot of people don't have that minimum, and so they're useful.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday May 22 2017, @10:33PM
It's a signal which at this point in time has essentially become fetishized and made into a virtue of its own, and the way you describe it is pretty much the way I remember it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday May 22 2017, @11:09PM
To be fair, the potatoes can also be somewhat (inconsistently) selective [youtube.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @11:49PM (2 children)
Which is odd because potato pickers arent evenly distributed between the genders and races. We must fight for equality of pickers, more women and white people!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:53AM (1 child)
Heh.
Think of it this way. If you're serious about doing something about illegal immigration, you have to be serious about making sure that farmers have seasonal labor available to harvest potatoes or whatever. If all you're serious about is just hounding some brown people who were unlucky enough to be caught (wherever here is) illegally, you're sort of dipping into racism territory.
Yes, yes, I've heard "illegal is not a race" enough times. I mean look. I grew up not far from farm country, with blueberry fields in walking distance. There were migrant kids in the classroom with me. Somebody has to pick those blueberries, and that was one opportunity that was available for me when I was 12 and wanted money to buy whatever was trendy, say fidget spinners because I don't remember. (Magic the Gathering? Pogs? Something like that.) However, it was an under-the-table opportunity. You can pay kids who aren't old enough to work legally, and you can also pay migrants who aren't here legally.
Point is, somebody needs to do it, and I think even minimum wage is too high. I'm not going to pretend to be able to formulate the Golden Answer to this problem in an AC post to SN, but if you really want to stop illegal immigration, you need to adjust the law so that 12 year old kids can pick those blueberries. (There are special rules for agricultural CDLs in my state, why not agricultural workers?) Then you need to really crack down on blueberry farmers who pay for labor under the table. Once that's done, then I'll agree that "illegal" isn't a race.
Of course, the blueberry farmers absolutely won't like it. Even if you make this special class of agricultural labor tax-free (and why not, that seems a reasonable way to transition to me), now you're requiring the blueberry farmers to keep track of shit loads of paperwork they never had to before, especially since we're talking about people who don't have state ID.
That may also increase diversity among seasonal agricultural laborers by essentially allowing these jobs to be fully exposed to the market. Or it may not. I spent too long typing this. I leave this half-baked post for somebody else to tear apart. Holy crap I went off topic.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:16AM
And here's how you do that. It's called a price mechanism. The price of manual labor rises until people are willing to do it again. The price of potatoes rises until the farmers can afford to pay that much.
"Yes, yes, I've heard "illegal is not a race" enough times. "
It's not, and it's odd that you seem to be dissing the notion without engaging it.
"However, it was an under-the-table opportunity. You can pay kids who aren't old enough to work legally, and you can also pay migrants who aren't here legally."
This illustrates two solid rules that the legislators all too often forget - good intentions don't guarantee good results, and the little people you are trying to control are always going to resist in the ways they can (because they must.)
So, politics is the art of compromise. I'd go for repealing the child labor laws AND simplifying the legal immigration process into something that mere humans can navigate without lawyers. I suspect we can both agree on eliminating the H1B program and if so we can throw that in too and call it the grand compromise.
"Point is, somebody needs to do it, and I think even minimum wage is too high. I'm not going to pretend to be able to formulate the Golden Answer to this problem in an AC post to SN, but if you really want to stop illegal immigration, you need to adjust the law so that 12 year old kids can pick those blueberries. (There are special rules for agricultural CDLs in my state, why not agricultural workers?) Then you need to really crack down on blueberry farmers who pay for labor under the table. Once that's done, then I'll agree that "illegal" isn't a race.
Of course, the blueberry farmers absolutely won't like it. Even if you make this special class of agricultural labor tax-free (and why not, that seems a reasonable way to transition to me), now you're requiring the blueberry farmers to keep track of shit loads of paperwork they never had to before, especially since we're talking about people who don't have state ID.
That may also increase diversity among seasonal agricultural laborers by essentially allowing these jobs to be fully exposed to the market. Or it may not. I spent too long typing this. I leave this half-baked post for somebody else to tear apart. "
Well I don't know if it counts as tearing you apart, but your first mistake is not to quit digging.
You make this big costly system with all this cost of compliance... why?
Just legalize freedom and be done with it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:00AM (3 children)
"virtue signaling would be behaviors designed to indicate that one has socially positive moral characteristics."
Correct.
"That is to say, used in the villifying sense that whatever dumb blogs you read would use it, virtue signaling would be to act like you are trustworthy in order to cynically manipulate positive responses from others."
As an example, sure, but it's not limited to that single virtue. Virtue signalling means, exactly as you said, outward behaviors intended to demonstrate virtue.
Think about that. It's an action that implies at least two actors - a subject, the one who sends the signal - and an object, the one who is to receive the signal. In order to successfully send a voluntary virtue signal the actor must correctly judge the preferences of the object. To pick a stark example, wearing a yarmulke on your head could be an effective way to virtue signal when the object of the signal is an orthodox rabbi - but the same hat on the same head would be not have the same significance when the object of the signal is a self-described 'nazi skinhead' whose endless rants about dajoos have finally worn right through your last nerve.
Degrees have always served as virtue signals at that level, the difference being which virtues are believed to be signaled, by whom, and to what degree. Those things all change over time, but the basic function has always been part of the package. Those who have already 'paid their dues' in this way are almost inescapably going to view it as an indicator of one sort of virtue or another. Their self-image requires it. That makes them devilishly effective things, even when you learn absolutely nothing in the process of getting them.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:19PM
"U mad bro" as a response to you being completely full of shit is lazy.
Again. Go fuck yourself.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:57PM (1 child)
"implies at least two actors - a subject, . . . - and an object,"
There you go, objectifying people again. UP WITH FEMINISM!!
;^) Just kidding
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:59PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @09:26PM
No, that's schooling. Schooling very frequently does not result in a quality education.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @09:58PM (1 child)
白左!
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:37AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:29PM
Wherever the federal government doesn't directly dictate education, it instead throws easy loans that cannot be defaulted.
As always, the problem is putting the power to allocate resources into the hands of a coercive organization known as a "government". Why can't you people see this?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 22 2017, @07:31PM (7 children)
I've watched Stanford CS lectures and MIT math lectures, thank you Internet, and the kids who go there really aren't any smarter than the kids at state U.
I'll watch math classes I already mostly know as a review of stuff I learned decades ago; I used a very old edition of Strang's book for linear algebra in like the 90s and I can watch him give the class and thats interesting. The kids ask fairly dumb questions mostly, which is funny from the "best and brightest". But then again the question askers in class were always idiots where I went, so it might not mean much.
The kids are more driven, they'll do every piece of homework and beg for extra credit, they have these crazy side jobs to get into a good school like they'll play an instrument they hate or play a sport they hate. Or they'll do that voluntoourism thing where your rich parents spend $10K/week to a firm that rents oceanfront condos in Haiti your junior year then you can write college essays about how you built village schools and crap like that. The lab work is sometimes more ambitious at the ivies, I remember watching this video series about FPGA design and the instructor tortured the kids with these ridiculous projects that must have taken 40 hours in the lab, but the foreign students all cheat so its not so bad.
Something I've noticed in videos of ivy classes is the kids don't whine, or didn't used to. You go to the local public school and the instructor assigns 20 pages of reading or 10 pages of writing and someone always starts crying, but at the ivies they made the kids little "yes men" who jumped thru insane hoops so the kids usually don't even react when I hear an assignment that would have at least resulted in a groan where I went.
The classes aren't that great nor are the kids that impressive. They're not bad, they're just not better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:40PM (1 child)
The real MIT is not the undergraduate school; it's the graduate school.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 22 2017, @10:25PM
And they will of course not take undergrads from state colleges there?
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 22 2017, @07:51PM (1 child)
Sometimes I really just laugh out loud at your posts. Thanks for absurdity! I love the "old man rant" dichotomy you set up here: either you're whiners or overly deferential "yes men." Nobody wins. :)
Anyhow, I can assure you that kids at the Ivies and other top schools do whine, just not as much when they're given a long assignment. They save the whining for office hours after they get a B+ on an assignment and come to cry and tell you how the prof that he's reason they won't get into law school (or whatever).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 22 2017, @08:02PM
I could see that at an ivy especially in that classes taught by an actual professor are extremely unusual at state-U or even the private college I went to. There's some TA or grad student or adjunct software consultant teaching the class and there are no office hours for a guy who has a day job and teaches on the side. So if the instructor is excessively demanding its street justice time in the classroom with "waaaaaah" and groaning sound effects and such. Another side issue is my life experience is a lot of night school / weekend Saturday classes where some professors office hours at 2pm on Thursdays doesn't matter because like everyone else in the class I'm at work then.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 22 2017, @10:36PM
I'll suspect what the Ivy leagues or better schools has is:
* Who you get know. Is your classmate going to be a technician or CEO? guess who can help with a investment.
* Motivation. The people around you will get done instead of moaning.
* People may think about quark force interactions instead of sports.
* Teachers know their subject and perhaps even know how pedagogy.
* Labs are better?
* Better clubs like for electronics? The oscilloscope is not a dusty 100 MHz but 4 channel DSO with 20 Gs/s.
However in the end it's very much about the study environment and what get's into your head. If the environment is bad for learning with stress, lack stimuli, constant noise, shitty attitude etc. It won't work regardless how well polished the website and head office is.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:54PM (1 child)
I currently teach at Cambridge and I've previously taught at a second-tier university and I've given invited talks at MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and a few other places in the US. First, the idea that you can judge the intelligence of the students from watching a video of a lecture is complete nonsense.
Second, the difference between the two that I've noticed is not so much the average or highest intelligence but the lowest intelligence. The brightest students here are not always better than the brightest I've seen elsewhere, but the weakest students that I teach now would be in the top 10-20% in most other places. That has a huge impact on what and how I can teach: I can set challenging exercises and expect that everyone will be able to do them, whereas previously I had to cope with a wide range of abilities and ensure that I had both simple tasks that the weaker students could achieve and extension exercises for everyone else. Quite often, people at second-tier institutions won't bother with the extension exercises and this can leave the better students feeling bored with the course.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:28PM
I think we basically agree although you may have expressed about the same idea more accurately and concisely.
Not having been to MIT, but having suffered thru SAT-prep type stuff, and having heard a lot about Strang because I learned linear algebra from his textbook years ago, I had two proven false expectations:
1) Given the language prep section of SAT/ACT test prep I assumed Strang (and other lecturers) would have obscure vocabulary in their lectures to match the knowledge required to get a great standardized test score. Which in retrospect is like expecting a football player who is capable of doing many pushups to be doing nothing but endless repetitions of pushups every time you see him. I've sat thru state-U and private college tier of lectures and watched ivy league lectures online and their probably higher verbal IQ scores are not reflected in the language of the lectures. You need a high verbal SAT score to get into MIT, not to understand the professors lectures.
2) Having suffered thru the textbooks, before watching the authors of my favorite textbooks I expected (or hoped?) they'd go into greater detail or speed thru simpler sections. However the dude who wrote the book tends to put-put along about as fast as my state-U or private college instructor did the same topic. Maybe a little impostor syndrome, these students are supposed to be super smart so if my instructor had to burn an entire lecture on the four subspaces of a matrix then surely the great Strang himself and the smartest math kids in the country will blow thru the topic in two minutes, naah, he burns a whole lecture hour on it too.
There's a strong cultural indoctrination as seen in Star Trek or whatever fictional dramatic stuff that the top students learn faster or deeper, but they mostly just seem to have wealthier or better connected parents, which is kinda a bummer.
The lack of dumb kids has to do with selectivity in admissions nothing more. To be a regular 18 year old freshman at the state U or private college they act like they're doing a huge favor to allow you to go into debt but the hoops to jump thru were surprisingly low. And if you abandon that as I did and go night school and weekend school the only admissions requirement for non-ivies that I've experienced is the check must not bounce. So naturally the dumbest kids will be stuck in the classes I was sitting thru. It wasn't really a problem. In K12 public schools the dumbest kids were major discipline problems but the discipline problems don't enter higher ed in general, so the kid next to me flunking his diff eqs midterm didn't really matter. Oh one thing where it mattered is the much hated group projects but generally that means one person does all the work and everyone gets credit, which is pretty much like the business world.