An econ grad student at Washingtn University in St. Louis writes:

I hesitate to say this since “more kids in college” means “more money for me,” but I wholeheartedly agree that college educations aren’t entirely necessary. Here’s another thing to think about: without federal loans guarantees that will pay tuition for anything you want to study, students would have to demonstrate to prospective lenders that they are a good investment. That would mean more engineers, business students, and science majors and fewer humanities majors. It would also mean fewer people taking six years to get a four-year degree. On net, it would improve productivity.

So actually, if the reduction in total students is made up for by a reallocation of students away from the humanities and toward business, economics, etc., it might mean more money and better job opportunities for me anyway. Unfortunately, it isn’t politically feasible because humanities scholars have a lot of political clout.

Great point. The politicians who bitch and moan about outsourcing often say we need to revamp our education system to produce more science and engineering majors. Of course, I think outsourcing is a good thing. But if that’s really what they want, a surefire way to do it would be to scale back federal loans, which would likely drain many schools of, for example, sociology majors — probably be a pretty good thing for society in general

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 23rd, 2004 at 7:58 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.