Antony Mason at The Intergenerational Foundation on the mis-selling of university degrees:
http://www.if.org.uk/archives/967/the-mis-selling-of-university-degrees > The BBC has recently produced an excellent Student Finance Calculator with > a direct bearing on this subject: > > http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14785676#student_finance_form > > It lets you adjust certain conditions to see how much a person taking out a > loan under the new student finance arrangements would end up paying off. > > Most telling of all is the fact that graduates earning the national average > salary will never fully pay off their loans – by a long chalk. > > Try changing the loan box sum (set at £9000) to a more likely £14500 per > annum, and the results are shocking. A man earning the national average > salary would pay back nearly £33,000 of his loan, but have £29,000 (which > includes interest) written off after 30 years. > > Because the difference between career average salaries for men and women > are so great, the situation for women is even more startling. A woman > earning the national average salary will have nearly £46,000 written off > after 30 years, having only paid just over £1,000 back. (The article shows > projections of how salaries rise over a career: see the statistics beneath > the graph.) > > So, if graduates earning average salaries fail to pay off their loans in > full, who does? Well, according to the BBC Student Finance Calculator, you > would have to earn something like £30,000 at the start of your career, > rising to £70,000, to cover the loan in 30 years. That is a salary 40% above > the average. > > As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I would suggest that in 30 years’ > time the government will be writing off at least £9 billion a year of > student loan debt, and more like £14 billion. Note that current total > funding to universities by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills > stands at £14.5 billion (2009-10). > > It looks like a classic example a government solution that gets the problem > off today’s balance sheet, but ties the hands of future generations. > > > On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:03 PM, Sandwichman <[email protected]>wrote: > What some (who I won't bother replying to) may rudely label a "rhetorical > trick" is actually observation from experience of attending a doctoral > program at an ivy league school where "bait and switch" was the order of the > day from administration and faculty and students counseled one another with > cynical tales about how to get grant funding without doing the work > specified in the grant. Years earlier I'd read Randall Collins's book on > Credentialism and before that C. Wright Mills. I only encountered Veblen's > Higher Learning in America subsequently. > > There are several faculty members in the Harvard Economics department whose > "scholarship" does not meet the minimum standard of even an earnest attempt > at truthful representation. See the following interview with John Campbell, > chairman of the Economics Department, from "Inside Job": > http://www.youtube.com/embed/AmMISMFN6XQ > > > > On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 7:12 PM, Carrol Cox <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 10/12/2011 4:47 PM, Sandwichman wrote: >> > Harvard is so fundamentally a scam. >> >> Probably. It has had Stephen Gould, Richard Lewontin, & Richard Levins >> on its faculty, which might be considered a redeeming factor. Not all >> scams are also technically illegal. >> >> Carrol >> _______________________________________________ >> pen-l mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l >> > > > > -- > Sandwichman > -- Sandwichman
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
