Here I am before my morning coffee after a night out. Forgive my orneriness, rambling, and errors.
This is not good. This is a transparent political attack on universities and programs perceived as hostile by an administration and political party that has spent the years attacking higher education. "I love the uneducated", indeed. They have attacked science within the government - from the CDC through the EPA. And just last week they were taking down governmental advice on how to conserve energy during a heatwave because they didn't want to support a political opponent who had the audacity to give appropriate advice that matched the federal guidance. If you're taking this action at face value, I have a bridge to sell you. 10 million dollars, you get the Ben Franklin Bridge! I'll mail you a certificate and everything. I digress...
> If a program fails to show at least this modest financial return on investment for its graduates in two out of three consecutive award years, it will lose eligibility to participate in the federal Direct Loan program.
I saw some other comments that seemed to have a misunderstanding here. This 3 year period is about evaluation of the program, not graduates earnings in the 3 years after graduation. The evaluation in any year could be "20 year earnings outlook", for example, but is not specified here. The proposed rule is here: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/earnings-and-accountabilit...
Claude summary of the actual test: "When earnings are measured for an individual cohort:
The Department looks at median earnings in the fourth tax year following program completion (i.e., graduates are given a few years to enter the workforce before their earnings count).
Only people who were working (not enrolled in school) during that measurement year are included.
Cohort period / averaging across years:
For small programs, the Department doesn't rely on a single graduating class — it aggregates completers across multiple years into a single "cohort period" to get a large enough sample and to smooth out one anomalous year (e.g., a COVID-affected earnings year) from swinging the result."
But we have a deeper problem here - well, a couple: 1) education is not just about employment and 2) the design of our education system, and how it's funded, is absolutely insane and fucked up for a plethora of reasons. We don't want a culturally bankrupt society. The examples used by the administration are silly (cosmetology, really? I've never heard of a college offering that to begin with). As noted, only 1% of bachelor's programs are worse off than high school anyway. Those philosophy grads actually do really well financially (I'm one of them!), but so do the English majors. The more artsy of the arts are where there's no financial future? Yeah, maybe those need to be cheaper programs. But in reality, it means that rich kids get to study and practice art and the rest of society has to actually work for a living. That's basically how things have been for 2000 years.
Now on to the economics around American universities. The loan issue has been covered elsewhere in the comments. Yes, it's fucking nuts to not allow loans to be discharged, and this has been a huge contributor to the rising costs of education. I may come back after coffee and drop a few other sources here, but maybe some of you can do that instead. But it's not the only contributor: the establishment of a degree as a gate to prevent employment is another. Two more: universities felt the need to compete on lifestyle to woo students (not employment) and finally, the way that bureaucracies tend to continuously grow when they have no natural predators. All of these have contributed to the growing cost of higher education in the US (and I'm sure there's more), but those are the big ones. I think we do need to push on universities. But I think we do that with cheaper universities, with online programs, and with free, federally funded education for fields that are projected to have growth. The total cost to fully fund higher education is about 10% of our yearly military budget: https://educationdata.org/how-much-would-free-college-cost - maybe I'm crazy, but that seems like a great deal to not saddle our best, brightest, and youngest people with a ton of debt.
Unfortunately this rule is going to add more administrative overhead while only eliminating 1% of degree choices. People will still attack the philosophy degrees even if those graduates make far above average income. The administration and anti-education crowd will continue to attack critical thinking, and they'll focus on those majors most likely to create people who oppose them (biology, chemistry, other sciences, humanities, anything outside of business).
To any students out there, do yourself a favor: go to community college, do online courses for a degree and masters, do anything you can to avoid paying $50,000+ a year to a university. The "experience" is just summer camp for almost-adults. Focus on your knowledge. Especially with AI having arrived, make conservative financial decisions.
Bankruptcy must be filed with a court and the creditors get a say. You don’t just wake up and say “I declare bankruptcy!”. A judge would look at your income and tell you to get bent, or at best set up a payment plan. They aren’t going to let a financially solvent person get out of debt. Here’s a quick summary:
I have found khan academy to be really good for filling any math gaps - it goes up through linear algebra and differential equations. Coursera also has a bunch of math courses you can take as well.
I’m thinking about what Rails would look like without activemodel and activerecord. Or even just without activerecord, where we had to write the same sql every time we wrote a model but introduce the opportunity for a dev to screw it up. Imagine starting on a legacy code base and all the models had subtle differences in how they query the db. They don’t have the established conventions around _id fields, polymorphism, the nice bits around joins, and instead you have to discover bugs where you did a join but the two models each have a field called “description”…
Do you think the only bottleneck in dev has been the speed of coding? I think it’s obvious that this is not the case. It’s finding product market fit, actually discovering and deciding what must be built, and then selling it. And there’s a deeper economic reality: budgets for software are finite and limited, and already close to maxed for most consumers and businesses. If my customers can only afford $500/month total for software, no amount of software I make will push them past that.
It’s not just us: where’s the revenue in the entire market? We can see all the public filings. There haven’t been any revenue gains. The only people making money from AI are the LLM providers. And even they are losing money. Even the biggest tech companies are limiting token spend. At best the tech is a new cost just to maintain parity, and I think most businesses look at it as a way to cut dev costs (trading for token spend). I think they will learn that it’s less of a win than they hoped. If a dev was spending 50% of their time coding, and you reduce that to 10% - that’s a big change but it isn’t really making you more because it’s all that time we hate in meetings, understanding customer needs, etc, that make us money.
I disagree. I work at a very large international corporation. How much revenue do you think we’ve seen due to AI? I’d guess it’s zero. I know for the groups whose finances I see, it’s zero. Yet costs have gone way up. There’s a bunch of new code, but not anything customers are going to pay more for.
And either way no AI basically puts you back to where we were last year. US employees have always been far more productive, that’s nothing new.
Is xAI being used by any professionals? I see them acting as a data center rental service for the others, but that doesn’t justify their valuation imo. They seem to be behind on everything and don’t seem to have any relevance. The cursor purchase may change that but for how long?
When I click on the link to Alibaba Cloud Model Studio from the linked post, that page sends my CPU (9950X3D) to 100%. Which is just... impressive. Is this a js based crypto miner? Or some strange browser based particle display? Super weird.
Israel only ended up in Lebanon due to PLO attacks from Lebanon.
Hezbollah is responsible for the deaths of nearly a million Lebanese and Syrians. They are much better at killing other Arabs than Israelis. They are a tool for Shia clerics and Iran, not a legitimate force for good in any way.
> When you make a ceasefire and then strike first, that’s called being the aggressor.
Oh boy, let me tell you about October 7th. Attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and Iran followed. Oh, and half a dozen other Palestinian groups were involved in 10/7 but they don't like to talk about that.
> How many civilians has Israel killed since oct 7? When is it enough?
Probably not too far off from how many Iran has killed in the same timeframe (of course, they are killing their own). Iran killed 30,000 of their own just this year.
And just so we're clear, Iran supported Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen, both or whom are responsible for easily 10x as many deaths as Israel (total). The civil wars in Lebanon and Syria left millions dead, and the one in Yemen also resulted in hundreds of thousands dead.
Yes, they hit the building in Syria where Iran and proxy military leadership were meeting two weeks prior. That’s a lot different than attacking another country directly, let alone recklessly targeting civilians as Iran has in every attack they’ve led or had proxies lead.
And it's really important that you understand this was after 45 years of proxy warfare by the Islamic regime against Israel, which resulted in tens of thousands of Israeli dead. This was entirely instigated by the Islamic regime - Iran was friendly with Israel prior to the Islamic revolution. Israel did not pick the fight with Iran, Iran picked the fight with Israel and has maintained it for decades because it drives support for their regime - the holy war is great motivation for the cultists.
War crimes as a concept was invented by the current US hegemony to punish others, not to be bound by.
I think about it this way: would I have had any problem with the allies bombing Nazi rallies, even though they were mostly civilians? My answer is absolutely not. I feel the same way when I see pro-Islamic regime or pro-Hezbollah rallies. In fact, I think the limited repercussions for these extremist civilians - and their very tangible support for the regimes - is what keeps these movements alive and powerful. Cost to civilizations - military and civilian alike - is what ends wars.
I agree with most of the sentiment in the OP with a few key disagreements. OP repeatedly says Iran is not very important (not strategically important). This is clearly not true for a few reasons:
1) They control the flow of oil, as we're seeing now.
2) They provide a huge amount of funding to hostile forces throughout the middle east - Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, pro-Iran militias in Iraq. This destabilizes the entire region, including important partners beyond Israel (Saudi Arabia, UAE). Their support for the Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah, who killed nearly half a million Syrians during the civil war there, also created a huge refugee crisis throughout Europe that has led to a rise in far-right parties who are reacting to the failed integration of these refugees.
3) They provide drones to Russia and instructions for how to build those drones.
4) They provide oil to Russia and China, two major geopolitical adversaries.
5) They are among the most significant propagandists that use social media to destabilize the west - having been caught repeatedly manipulating social media platforms like Reddit, Instagram, Twitter/X.
There are also some strategic benefits to the current war, especially if you're a narcissistic kleptocrat running the US:
1) We've already seen the market manipulation.
2) Every bomb dropped is a bomb taxpayers must replace; that money goes right to defense contractors
3) Then consider the American oil companies: they stand to make a lot more money from this, as their products are now more scarce and more valuable. The US, as a net exporter of oil (we import low quality oil because we're good at refining it; we export the good stuff), will make more money.
4) The disruption of the Persian Gulf hurts Russia and China far more than it hurts the US and EU. There are some US allies and neutrals who get hurt (those in east Asia, gulf oil states). But it's not a balanced impact - we definitely come out on top in the current situation in my view.
5) Electric vehicles are starting to look a lot better. Who's Trump's bff and biggest financial backer, again? Does he operate in that space?
I think the overall impact of the attacks on Venezuela and Iran sum to an attack on the hostile Russia-Iran-China axis, with the benefit of hurting some of their minor allies as well. It seems too perfect that we attack the two largest non-allied oil suppliers in quick succession for it to be coincidence. It might not be Trump's plan, but it seems like a long-standing plan to achieve a favorable geopolitical environment.
This is not good. This is a transparent political attack on universities and programs perceived as hostile by an administration and political party that has spent the years attacking higher education. "I love the uneducated", indeed. They have attacked science within the government - from the CDC through the EPA. And just last week they were taking down governmental advice on how to conserve energy during a heatwave because they didn't want to support a political opponent who had the audacity to give appropriate advice that matched the federal guidance. If you're taking this action at face value, I have a bridge to sell you. 10 million dollars, you get the Ben Franklin Bridge! I'll mail you a certificate and everything. I digress...
But let's go ahead and look at the merits of the program and what government should be doing in terms of education. Here's the announcement: https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of...
> If a program fails to show at least this modest financial return on investment for its graduates in two out of three consecutive award years, it will lose eligibility to participate in the federal Direct Loan program.
I saw some other comments that seemed to have a misunderstanding here. This 3 year period is about evaluation of the program, not graduates earnings in the 3 years after graduation. The evaluation in any year could be "20 year earnings outlook", for example, but is not specified here. The proposed rule is here: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/earnings-and-accountabilit...
Claude summary of the actual test: "When earnings are measured for an individual cohort:
The Department looks at median earnings in the fourth tax year following program completion (i.e., graduates are given a few years to enter the workforce before their earnings count). Only people who were working (not enrolled in school) during that measurement year are included.
Cohort period / averaging across years:
For small programs, the Department doesn't rely on a single graduating class — it aggregates completers across multiple years into a single "cohort period" to get a large enough sample and to smooth out one anomalous year (e.g., a COVID-affected earnings year) from swinging the result."
But we have a deeper problem here - well, a couple: 1) education is not just about employment and 2) the design of our education system, and how it's funded, is absolutely insane and fucked up for a plethora of reasons. We don't want a culturally bankrupt society. The examples used by the administration are silly (cosmetology, really? I've never heard of a college offering that to begin with). As noted, only 1% of bachelor's programs are worse off than high school anyway. Those philosophy grads actually do really well financially (I'm one of them!), but so do the English majors. The more artsy of the arts are where there's no financial future? Yeah, maybe those need to be cheaper programs. But in reality, it means that rich kids get to study and practice art and the rest of society has to actually work for a living. That's basically how things have been for 2000 years.
Now on to the economics around American universities. The loan issue has been covered elsewhere in the comments. Yes, it's fucking nuts to not allow loans to be discharged, and this has been a huge contributor to the rising costs of education. I may come back after coffee and drop a few other sources here, but maybe some of you can do that instead. But it's not the only contributor: the establishment of a degree as a gate to prevent employment is another. Two more: universities felt the need to compete on lifestyle to woo students (not employment) and finally, the way that bureaucracies tend to continuously grow when they have no natural predators. All of these have contributed to the growing cost of higher education in the US (and I'm sure there's more), but those are the big ones. I think we do need to push on universities. But I think we do that with cheaper universities, with online programs, and with free, federally funded education for fields that are projected to have growth. The total cost to fully fund higher education is about 10% of our yearly military budget: https://educationdata.org/how-much-would-free-college-cost - maybe I'm crazy, but that seems like a great deal to not saddle our best, brightest, and youngest people with a ton of debt.
Unfortunately this rule is going to add more administrative overhead while only eliminating 1% of degree choices. People will still attack the philosophy degrees even if those graduates make far above average income. The administration and anti-education crowd will continue to attack critical thinking, and they'll focus on those majors most likely to create people who oppose them (biology, chemistry, other sciences, humanities, anything outside of business).
To any students out there, do yourself a favor: go to community college, do online courses for a degree and masters, do anything you can to avoid paying $50,000+ a year to a university. The "experience" is just summer camp for almost-adults. Focus on your knowledge. Especially with AI having arrived, make conservative financial decisions.