I don’t think it’s particularly stupid to pay $130k/kid for college. It’s a lot but there’s a good chance they’ll net positive in the long run. It’s mostly just interesting that it’s him and not them taking the loans.
does that mean it’s a state school? if so, that’s a LOT!
At least one cause of the outsized inflation in cost is the eye popping increase in the university bureaucracy .
Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.
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Yes, it takes a lot of effort to rearrange the paragraphs and change the examples in order to justify making last year’s edition obsolete.
Although I think it’s stupid to pay that much per kid, it’s not quite as stupid if you have that much per kid laying around that you don’t need. What makes this particularly stupid is the guy went into debt for what’s going to be the rest of his life to pay for this. It was something he can’t afford (per the tone of the article), and it was something that was easily avoidable since there are obvious alternatives available which involve no one going into debt and everyone still getting their degree.
The article (again, per its tone) would like us to feel sorry for this guy and would like to use his case as an example of why student loan debt should be eliminated. It says he’s “highly concerned for his own financial future” and he “blames high interest rates and lending practices that don’t take into account the borrower’s income, or change in income”. The dude was over 50 when he started taking out these loans. He’s blaming the federal student aid system for the mess he’s in. I blame the guy staring back at him when he’s looking in a mirror.
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That’s stupid money to pay, especially when the same thing is available for 1/3rd the cost (or less).
People can complain about college tuition inflation all they want, but the obvious solution is quit buying the products with the highest prices.
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That’s what this guy did. It appears his budget was “whatever it costs for wherever you go”. If adults are volunteering to go into what amounts to be lifetime indentured servitude to pay for it, why blame the college for being willing to accept the money?
Eh, I don’t really get the sense that the writer wants to eliminate student debt. They are covering this guy because he’s part of the equation. I agree he says a bunch of dumb stuff about the “system”, instead of his own life decisions. I agree he had alternatives-- cheaper schools, fewer children, not getting divorced, covering a smaller % of their tuition, etc. I also don’t really think he made a “mistake”, though I probably wouldn’t make the same decisions.
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That’s not the first “Meet a person drowning in student loan debt” this writer has put out where most of the article focuses on what a terrible spot the debtor is in, and the only solution hinted at is student loan forgiveness.
Ahh, fair enough. I think I have a hard time picking up the sympathy from these things when I read them with my cold unloving actuary heart.
nothing I learned in college had much to do with my job as a pension actuary, so I disagree with this. I didn’t learn ERISA law in college.
I’m of the opinion that if a person can pass several actuarial exams, a college degree is unnecessary. My employer disagrees with that view, though.
I think college is useful for a lot of reasons generally, though, and will encourage my children to attend it unless they have a very specific plan for their life where it isn’t necessary. I have a lot of respect for trades and wouldn’t push a trade-inclined kid to attend a liberal arts college just for the experience.
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But how many people can actually pass several actuarial exams without a college degree?
I suppose you could imagine a person who runs into life difficulties and cannot finish a degree but has taken many math courses. But i think such a person is extremely rare in practice.
My guess is that you have to use mathematics as a tool to describe, understand and criticize actions taken with respect to fairly abstract financial instruments.
It is easy to forget how hard that is for most people. College classes with math or that apply math help develop those skills. For example, I think that learning how to do all the integrals in calculus 2 helps teach a person how to learn mathematical techniques even that person doesn’t actually do many integrals in their job.
Would you really be able to do that if you had gone straight from high school into working?
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I am not saying that it’s likely that many would-be actuaries can’t or don’t attend college, I think college and gpa are used as a weeding-out process for a profession that already has a built-in weeding-out process (exams) and I don’t feel that an actuarial science degree adds much to the profession. A math degree definitely doesn’t.
Like I said, I think college has other benefits, though.
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There was another thread where somebody was asking whether they needed to get through calculus 3 before taking the actuarial exams. They had taken only through college algebra, i believe.
Would you recommend to them that they don’t need calculus?
All the math I have ever had to learn for exams or my job I learned in high school. I was in advanced classes in high school, admittedly, and some actuaries use very advanced math, but not me.
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You definitely need some calculus for exams, but it’s very basic calculus. Probability and statistics were far more useful to me than calculus, which is sad for me, as a lover of calculus.
Edit: I have heard the QFI actuaries use pretty advanced math, so obviously my experience wasn’t universal.
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Please see my other post. Would you recommend somebody take the actuarial exams without college math courses?
Or maybe you think the actuarial exams that test those concepts aren’t useful in your job?