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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: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:59PM (3 children)
Degrees for Free!
I want my MTV
I don't want to work
Money for nothin' and chicks for free
I don't want to play
Custom kitchen deliveries
I took a stick and an old coffee can
Bangin' on the bongoes like a chimpanzee
Campus Crusade for Communism!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @10:13PM (2 children)
it's easier to figure out what song you're parodying if it's not a mashup
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:14AM (1 child)
So basically you're too stupid to appreciate the similarities between the two songs, aaaaand you only like designated-Funny verbatim copypasta.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:10AM
Sounds like MTV merged with Fox "News"
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 22 2017, @07:07PM (19 children)
If it takes 38 dollars to collect 1 dollar of defaulted debt. How many dollars were repaid on time?
If the other debtors know that defaulting is painful they will keep up payments. So while the debt collection service may not reclaim their cost, it may still work in the grand scheme.
Another completely crazy idea is to select the people with the best skills and let them do free college. High earner taxes will more than enough make up for the initial costs.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 22 2017, @07:54PM (5 children)
You accurately point out that higher end kids don't go to collections because they have no debt or more post school income, but there's also pressure from the bottom where I know a couple waitresses and bartenders who pay zero, you forward proof of income (tax return? W-2 form?) and the required minimum payment is $0.
And in that shrinking middle that can afford to pay, but isn't, there's also various public service programs where you teach in the hood for a couple years or similar and if you live thru it you get debt discharged by .gov.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 22 2017, @10:12PM (4 children)
No, point were that if you have 100 people in debt and 5 of them skip on payment. Then even if the collection on those 5 people is a net loss. It will keep the other 95 people paying.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:15AM (2 children)
Except the whole point of the article is that it isn't a net loss, the companies make money when people default. In fact, it is currently in the service companies' best interests to have more people default, as the revenue from defaults is higher than the expenses from defaults. Basically, the program has privatized the gains and socialized the losses. If we are going to spend all the money, it might as well be on the people who need help.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:15AM (1 child)
But but... that flies against all the libertarian fantasies about the benefits of meritocracy!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:31PM
Then the contract with the collectors has to reflect that.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:05PM
I think we kinda agree with each other mostly.
Looking at the disease transmission model of the spread of anti-social behavior or whatever its called, if one waitress goes into default it can't spread to other waitresses because the rest of them are already on income based repayment of $0 which also has the side effect that you can't credit the collections agents with convincing people to pay if like half of loans are either already in collections or income base repayment of $0.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tftp on Monday May 22 2017, @09:11PM (5 children)
That's basically how it was done in USSR. The entrance exams to universities were demanding, but if you prove that you are not a complete idiot, you will be admitted and you will be educated for free. If you are doing good, they will even pay you some small stipend (the cost of education becomes negative.)
But consider that USSR needed and wanted educated people - engineers, doctors, mathematicians, historians, planners, writers, architects... It made sense to produce them. But what forces ask for educated people in the USA, outside of the student himself? How much influence do they have? Are they willing to pay the cost of education? Apparently, not. Instead of a single owner of everything (like in USSR) we have thousands of little owners that try to optimize their own goal function. That's exactly how the common resource ends up torn in pieces - by everyone pulling toward himself. And that, actually, was the fate of USSR as soon as the strong man at the center, the single owner, disappeared. I fear that the humanity is hopeless in this regard.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday May 22 2017, @10:10PM (4 children)
An educated populace asks way too many questions about the schenanigans you get up to while working in government. Much better to cut education funding to render them more docile.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 22 2017, @10:16PM
Until some other nation run circles around you and there's no way around that other than having their own educated people to secure national security and wealth. Uneducated people are easy to control but can't help you when the whole system is at stake.
How long has America been the top of the world when it comes to science and technology? I have read some indications that it was with WWII it took of and were quite dismal before that.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:52PM (2 children)
That seems counterintuitive, doesn't it? More educated people always seem rather docile. Hillbillies and rednecks are far more likely to fight for little to no reason.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:52PM
Hillbillies, rednecks, and MUSLIMS!!!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:22PM
It's easier to tell the plebes that everything is fine if they don't know how things are supposed to work.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:41AM (6 children)
Read as: Someone I've never met should pay for my schooling even though I've done nothing to earn it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:33AM (1 child)
Yes, since that other person will be paying much more in taxes and providing your roads and police etc (healthcare in civilised countries).
If you were half smart, then you would go to university yourself and be the high earner.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:51AM
You think college is a guarantee of success? In this day and age? +1 Funny
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:41AM (1 child)
Like when you were a child, going through grade school? Lot of people you never met paid for your education.
Or did your parents send you to a private school?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:52AM
My parents paid taxes, thus was everything asked of them to school their children paid for by them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @06:20AM (1 child)
Read as: Someone who doesn't understand the concept of community whines about their fiscal responsibilities while ignoring all factual evidence.
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:53AM
Community: You have more than me and I want some of it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday May 22 2017, @07:13PM (5 children)
Back in the summer of 1981 and of 1982, when I worked pumping gas between college years, a mentor who I respected told me that the government will spend a million dollars (in 1982 dollars) to collect a quarter from you. So getting $1 collected from only $38 spent is not a bad ROI.
Yes, there was a time when you did not have to pump your own fuel. Yes, this was when those new Susan B Anthony dollar coins were introduced. Yes, there was a customer who would look at the change I gave him, scowl and say: I don't want these Susan B Anthony coins, I want REAL quarters!
Ah, the days of questions like: how much is your 39 cent ice cream?
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:30PM
$14.82 if you want federal government to collect and only the president gets two scoops!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:34PM (1 child)
I live in NJ, don't talk to me about things that have not yet passed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @09:31PM
And I live in Oregon, also yet to see these things . . .
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday May 22 2017, @08:57PM
Thirty-nine cents. But the American people only end up seeing one cent from that. I think it has something to do with communism.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday May 22 2017, @08:57PM
> how much is your 39 cent ice cream?
If "cent" does not refer to 1/100 of a US dollar, the answer will usually be "39 cents", since in most countries around the world, you don't get told a before-tax price which you never pay.
(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
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday May 22 2017, @07:20PM
My dad was involved in debt collection toward the end of his life. Legal collection not so much Sopranos style. Mostly cell phones and medical back then. The software suite at that time was very vertically integrated.
The private world is completely different from the article.
You can contract out someone to fight your accounts receivable for a commission but this is somewhat unusual.
You can buy a collection of debt off, for example, a cell phone company, for a rather modest fee just a couple percent of balance and you get to keep whatever you can squeeze out of them sort of Roman Empire taxation system.
The legal requirements are nuts in that you pretty much need a lawyer to review what you can do and say for all combinations of the state the debt is owed to vs the state the debtor is currently living in. This is computerized and is necessary given the level of complexity. Most debt collectors sit in an outgoing call center boilerroom with the computer telling them exactly what they can and cannot say and just listening to them is quite a trip. Most collectors make a modest commission. Turnover was very high, and its classist in the American corporate sense where support folks like my dad wouldn't talk to or make friends with the collectors because a 600% annual turnover rate or whatever it was meant you'd likely never see ta collector again anyway.
(Score: 5, Troll) by jmorris on Monday May 22 2017, @07:26PM (7 children)
Before Obama took over student loans, banks knew how to collect debts far more efficiently because the ones who didn't went out of the selling money at a profit business. Now they game the government system to maximize profits safe in the knowledge they can't lose money. Don't blame them for playing the game Obama gave them to play, blame yet one more attempt by the government to nationalize another industry and take the correct lesson from the experience. The government quickly realized handing out fake money from the FED was easy, collecting on the debts was hard so they did what they always do, use a contractor. Solution? Sell off all of the paper at market rates and STOP doing it. Privatize even more than before Obama by getting the government entirely out of the college financing business since it was the major driver of tuition inflation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:36PM
You won't get an argument from me that they took a shit system and made it worse.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday May 22 2017, @09:57PM (1 child)
Why flamebait? I don't have an opinion on the statement that is strong one way or the other. But is it not worth considering that maybe for America the government is the issue in education? I'm not a teacher, I couldn't tell you what it is. But come on, at least entertain criticism. jmorris was being dumb and bringing an irrelevant ex-president into the topic. But that feels like the only reason this was flamebait'd.
To be fair: Books are fucking expensive (no, I don't care that you can find them on cheggskytorrent.to), tuition is expensive, teachers are incompetent and there is probably a staffing issue. We already know that there's going to be a generation of two of mouthbreathers because of our bizarre Leave All Children Behind way of quota whoring. Maybe perhaps government involvement isn't helping matters either?
Not that I think privatizing it is smart mind you. Really don't know why anyone thinks this is a good idea in America especially anymore. Have you not learned? Or do you need to be arrested and put into a private prison for a few years to figure it out?
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:06AM
That is me knowing stuff. Before Obama there was government guaranteed loans, in that the government would cover some of the losses on bad student loans if certain conditions were met. Of course those conditions were all about giving the government undue influence, duh, why do you think they did it? But Obama eliminated all of that and fully nationalized the whole college financing system. Bad for the students in that it is now a debt owed directly to the government and not dischargable in bankruptcy. Bad for the taxpayers because as we are seeing in the story today, government is not good at banking.
Obama's justification was whipping up hate against 'the banksters' because they made profits. Obama deemed every dollar of profit the banks were making as revenue in the takeover and used it as 'offsets' against the cost of Obamacare, something we who understand these things said at the time was fraudulent. Turns out it actually costs the government more to attempt to service these loans than the banks were making in profits so it costs the taxpayer more and instead of netting money to pay for Obamacare it counts as more of the unplanned costs of that fiasco.
Now we should all be able to see the banks were actually were adding value to earn their living, they actually know how to make and service loans. It would be better still were they entirely cut loose from all government control and guarantee programs. Let them build risk models and make loans. Yes that means useless majors will get unfavorable loan terms, this will serve as a valuable market signal to students that majors that do not increase one's earning potential are best left for trust fund babies who don't have to care, vs taking out a six figure loan for a four year party.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Justin Case on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:17AM (1 child)
Dude, you currently have +5 Flamebait! Congratulations. I envy you. That's still on my bucket list and I've never come close. Treat yourself to a cocktail. Molotov, perhaps.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:40PM
Think I also have a +5 Troll in the history. Don't have the whole set yet. Don't think I have ever managed +5 Redundant either. Don't think a post can be Under/Overrated, Offtopic or Disagree if there are any other tags applied so I ain't trying for those. Good to keep achievable goals. :)
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:42PM
Sound reasoning except for the idea that Obama started it. This goes back much further than him.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 23 2017, @03:46PM
Ahhhh, the coveted +5 troll score. Sweet. I wish I could get that. I guess I'm just not trollish enough. *sigh* Congrats, jmorris!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 22 2017, @07:32PM (17 children)
From TFA:
Wow. Perhaps before you are eligible for a student loan, you should be required to pass some sort of basic "financial literacy" test. Require a retest every year that a student wants to borrow more. Include questions like:
Question 1. You defaulted on a loan, but you've crawled your way back from default by making minimal monthly payments. But you still don't have a job and can't afford to make your loan payments. What should you do?
(A) Ignore your payments and upgrade your smartphone data plan.
(B) Ignore your payments and spend more time at Starbucks "working" to find a job while sipping $5 coffees.
(C) Ignore your payments and go backpacking in Europe for a few months.
(D) Ignore your payments and hide in your parents' basement.
(E) Contact your lender and see whether there's a way to negotiate payments or get a forbearance until you find a job.
Question 2. If you don't make loan payments on time and don't make arrangements with your lender, what's most likely to happen?
(A) Your lender will throw you a free birthday party.
(B) Your parents will be very proud of you.
(C) You'll get a job faster.
(D) Play scratch tickets; you'll win the lottery.
(E) Your credit will be ruined for a very long time, making it harder to find a decent apartment, buy a car/house, and ensuring that you'll pay more on loans if you ever need to borrow again. You'll also likely accrue lots of late fees and penalties that will make it even harder to pay back your loan.
I'm obviously joking a bit here, and I know that many young folks are working very hard to try to make ends meet while under student debt. But it simply would never occur to me to just ignore bills that arrive, particularly for major debts or something. If I were that desperate and knew I couldn't pay, I'd be on the phone the moment a statement arrived and trying to find out if there is anything I could do.
Why are 90% of delinquent debtors failing to take basic steps like filling out a few pages of paperwork to keep themselves afloat?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:45PM (4 children)
They're millennials. They think they're entitled to botulinum toxin-free organic artisan cheese and hipster kale on their nachos.
Kill them all, immediately. We'll just have to try again with the next generation....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @08:22PM (1 child)
Who will birth your "next generation" when your surviving women are menopausal?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @08:34PM
Niggers and Mexicans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @11:41PM (1 child)
ummm start with the generation that produced them. Boomers. yeah, thats right.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:03PM
I don't think a lot of boomers gave birth to millenials. Yeah, there's probably some, but early boomers were menopausal well before the first millenials were born. Let's blame it all on generation X.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 22 2017, @08:11PM
I suspect the population of defaulters is different than the population of income-based-repayment plans.
It seems like all the waitresses and bartenders and substitute teachers heard about income-based from coworkers and they all sign up together etc.
My guess is defaulters are cut from a different cloth and have high school kid jobs (mcdonalds) where the coworkers know nothing about it, or they defaulted not because they don't have income but they got cleaned out in a divorce or medical incident such that their check(s) bounced.
Like the people in the plan are situationally structurally poor as are their coworkers and culturally the income based plans are just part of being a young school teacher, just like signing up for food stamps is part of working at Walmart. I'd theorize the defaulters are people who were doing OK on a normal repayment plan until some kind of event gave them an economic knockout punch and now they don't know what to do.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Monday May 22 2017, @08:24PM (1 child)
They are ignoring it in the sure knowledge that eventually the government will wave the magic wand and make it all go away. They apparently believe the news accounts from election day where HRC was a sure thing to win and are sticking their fingers in their ears and humming really loud and putting Antifa masks anytime somebody points out the actual results.
Why is anyone shocked is my question? These snowflakes were raised from babies to be babies sheltered from the very idea that actions have consequences. They have been carefully taught that reality itself is an evil conspiracy of the cis het patriarchy and their dreams have the power to remake it; with great (social) justice! Of course they assume they can ignore their debts and somebody else will take care of it. Paying debts is so UNFAIR!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:42PM
Yeah, yeah, right or wrong, etc. We agree pretty much. If the .gov were rational in belief and behavior, etc. But it isn't. If the government leadership wasn't indistinguishable from a cabal of its own enemies, etc.
In practice, hasn't the government done every form of economic insanity for decades to boost housing prices? And the median boomer is gonna sell to the median gen-x who's gonna sell to the median millennial... the only question is what those median prices will be . The median millennial having a mortgage sized student loan means the government, which we know will do anything to goose housing prices, will do ... anything ... to get those kids into a bigger mortgage than mine, and they're gonna have to do something drastic about student loans if they want to pull that off.
I'm just saying the boomers can ask whatever ridiculous price they want for their retirement home nest egg, but I'm under no obligation to offer that much and they gonna have to sell because of death if nothing else, before I have to buy. And going the other direction my house will get sold to a millennial kid for what he can afford not what I need to pay to upgrade to a former boomer's house. And what he can afford isn't much after those student loans and miserable economy. Meanwhile the government has spent decades doing insanity to boost capital prices like real estate and equities.
In a way, either way, the kids win. If the government supports boosted capital prices then the kids student loan has to be wiped out either literally or via inflation in order for me to sell my gen-x house to a millennial at a government guaranteed nominal profit. If the government washes its hands of capital prices and there's an epic tulip style collapse in the price of real estate and financial markets, again the kids win because houses will be back to '80s prices where a single job family at minimum wage can afford a $40K house. Unfortunately the boomer thought he was going to fund his retirement nest egg by selling at $500K but LOL thats not happening. Either way I think the kids will be alright. The boomers and gen-x, not so much. Especially not the boomers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by StarryEyed on Monday May 22 2017, @08:27PM (5 children)
I've been in a situation where I was eligible for a $0 payment, due to series of effectively random catastrophic events.
At one juncture during this period the loan servicer decided that whatever paperwork I filed wouldn't be 'good enough' for about 4 months of back and forth. It was good before, and then later, good afterwards.
Cue giant debilitating black mark on credit that was effectively created out of nothing by the loan company.
During that period I faced several Kafka-like bureaucratic impossibilities that would warp any mind.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 22 2017, @08:37PM (2 children)
Thanks for the story. Sorry to hear about such bureaucratic nonsense. I've had to deal with my share in my life, but thankfully nothing that ever affected my credit. [so far, knock wood, crosses fingers...]
But it also sounds like in TFA we're talking about people who simply are continuing not to make sufficient payments as due, rather than even attempt a forbearance or whatever. I'd imagine the credit "black marks" for that would end up at least as "debilitating" as you situation, and perhaps even more so, no?
(Score: 1) by StarryEyed on Monday May 22 2017, @08:49PM (1 child)
Another good term to go along side Franz Kafka is Freakonomics. What are the unanticipated incentives here? If the collectors get paid regardless, what makes them more money? Someone who never defaults, a successful rehabilitation, or a long series of government paid for failures?
It's quite possible they go about the process in such a way as to discourage long-term rehabilitation, as to do otherwise would be to reduce their profits.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:44PM
I suspect someone had a quota of "successful rehabilitations" to achieve and your lucky number got pulled.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Justin Case on Monday May 22 2017, @08:50PM (1 child)
But you do owe a debt which you are not repaying, is that correct?
In which case why do you think other potential lenders should not be warned about your situation?
(Score: 1) by StarryEyed on Monday May 22 2017, @09:08PM
You missed my point of it being the lender's refusal to process paperwork properly, and not the borrower.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @08:37PM (2 children)
You've never been poor.
Stress which leads to depression. When you're struggling to make ends meet you're forced to juggle bills around your cash flow. You start delaying one payment and then another more urgent expense arises. Do this for 12 months and you stop even opening demand letters. You'll see this exact behaviour (due to stress) when people are dealing with any difficult circumstance over a prolonged period. Life doesn't stop, problems don't come one at a time and the less you're able to deal with things the more passive aggressive contempt you'll will be met with.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:04AM (1 child)
No no, it is their moral and character failings! /s
We have a major problem with the boomer generation having had it way too easy for way too long (compared to now) without requiring higher levels of education. We now have a way higher percentage of young people that are quite highly educated, and thanks to the internet much better informed about actual reality. Couple that with a country that has been steadily being robbed blind for the last 40-50 years and we have the problems of stress and depression becoming much more widespread. The older generation, and those who blindly listen to them, are usually not educated enough to understand these patterns and so they find it easier to blame the people. It is a convenient scapegoat which is promoted through media to further the cultural divide.
Go go conservative fucktards! Blame the victims as usual, believe the propaganda which prevents us from fixing the broken systems. At least you lot occasionally have some historical perspective, such as jmorris above who actually had a decent point for once about government making the student debt problem worse. Sadly you're smart enough to see some problems, but dumb / uneducated / close minded enough to believe propaganda. There are liberals who unnecessarily boost the hate train as well, but like it or not the main problem is the conservative population in the US. As a liberal I'm tired of trying to play the compromise game, having my empathy played as some sociological strategy has gotten old. I intentionally added the "liberal hate" sentence above to head off the conservative response of "boo hoo liberals can be mean and stupid toooo!" but make no mistake, conservatives are the ones who won't compromise and have steadily been unable to stop the GOP from passing more and more evil legislation.
Until you conservatives can do the necessary self-reflection and see that your hate is guiding you're reason instead of the other way around we are doomed to major problems. My only hope is that Trump will finally unite a majority and we can reverse the horrifying wrongs of the last many decades. The conservatives that do unite for the greater good will be the ones that do realize we still have massive problems with bigotry and racism, and they will finally stand against their hateful neighbors and actually embody the teachings of Jesus.
For the atheistic libertarians, I don't know what your solution will look like. Maybe just spend a year pretending to be a liberal and researching such viewpoints. You'll probably find a lot of information that isn't partisan but that you've ignored because it goes against your personal beliefs, and then you'll move away from the fringe lunacy of pure libertarianism / anarchy.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:54PM
The alliance is shaky and in group politics the usual response is circling the wagons.
Both parties are going thru a re-alignment.
The D are jettisoning the legacy white limousine liberal types and going full on anti-white racial identity politics while the extremists have exceeded cultural escape velocity and make a great punchline for Trump winning over and over and over.
Meanwhile the R party is in turmoil between the legacy libertarians and neocons who are anti-populist and the right wing populist "just call them nat soc". Right wing populism is a funny thing where the opponents deride the legacy R party for being anti-populist, then the Trumpenfuhrer God Emperor arrives and starts dropping bombs like at that union meeting he called the new Republican party "the american workers party" and the media flipped out. That was awesome... He's not far enough right and not populist enough, but the next guy, whoever that is, thats gonna be a good one.
It seems likely the political borders in the 2020s are going to be something like the white alt-right nationalists vs the aggressively anti-white progressives.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Monday May 22 2017, @08:11PM
What did you expect from a financial program designed by clueless and/or self-serving politicians?
Reduce their ability to spend other people's money. It is the only cure to their addiction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @11:37PM (3 children)
Free education and healthcare, because an educated and healthy citizenry is a productive citizenry. I know, its un'murkin, flies in the face of all the greed and narcissism thats the base of The 'murkin Dream. How's that working now...
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:15AM (2 children)
Except reality refuses to line up with your beliefs. You choose the bad option, discard reality and keep the belief.
Free government schools didn't work in K12 here in the U.S. and you can't point to a success story anywhere on the planet at any time where they have worked anywhere from PreK to graduate level. Read the people who organized the push toward government schools and realize there is a reason, the government schools DID work almost exactly as designed but because they have suppressed the original design goals we foolishly judge them based on whether they actually teach people and noticing they don't do very well at that task.
Then the failure was made complete when the private schools the future leaders were supposed to attend became infected with the rot from the public government schools for everyone else and now we have idiots leading idiots. And in a nutshell this is why Western Civilization is doomed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @07:33AM
Lovely how you ignore the multiple successful countries where this does work. For some reason you just think taxing the rich at a much higher rate is on par with treason.
K12 is actually quite successful, the level of education for the average teen is way higher today. The worst change was No Child Left Behind, and there are many problems, but overall the US population is quite highly educated. The US college system really went downhill when Reagan defunded much of the system and for-profit corporations got their hands in the pie. Its like you look at the world through a distorted mirror that filters reality through the lens of radio talk shows and Fox news bullshit. Occasionally your hateful cynical viewpoint of reality hits the mark, but that is just simple statistics at work. Propaganda has to have some basis in reality or it quickly falls apart.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @10:09AM
Not by your unstated criteria, perhaps. However by the obvious--if somewhat nebulous--criterion of literacy, Latvia would appear to be a success:
--
https://www.britannica.com/place/Latvia [britannica.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:21AM
...it's a start.