To piggy back on your post, student loans should be made like other types of loans. The amount of the loan is made in direct proportion to the ability to pay it back.
In this fashion, students in the S.T.E.M. fields would get a proportionately larger loan than those in a “Studied” program.
Over the long haul, most of the “touchie-feelie” faculty would diminish or become nonexistent as less and less students enroll in these fields.
The bonus is that it is the liberal faculty that are the supporters of “safe-spaces” other such nonsense, and less of them there are, the more students will be prepared to interact with, survive in, and excel in the real world.
I’ve long believed that if you study a discipline where the preponderance of core learning doesn’t involve closed-form formulas or the rigorous understanding of algorithms and the statistical basis on which many are formed, then you are investing in something that has value that is yet to be determined.
The exception to this of course are disciplines like medicine and a couple of others, but the core to me are the ones that advance us as a civilization. This touchy-feely crap is way too susceptible to the baser human proclivities for my taste.
I have a bachelor’s in economics and a master’s in public administration.
Damn shame I can’t cash my diplomas in.
Every time I talk to young men about their futures, I urge them to learn a trade — and then read voraciously, especially history.
Everything I know comes from a lifetime of reading. I approached my college years as strictly fulfilling the requirements for a couple of sheepskins — neither of which gave me any wisdom, any character, any real-life experience.
As we used to say in the Army, it was just a matter of “getting my ticket punched.”
I’d sooner give a buck to a wino on the street than donate to either of my universities.
Don’t get the impression I’m bitter. College was strictly a business deal. They got their tuition, I did the coursework, I got my diplomas. No rite of passage, no expanding of my horizons, no encounters with great ideas.