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Comment by techpineapple

6 hours ago

Yeah, I feel like something has got to give, maybe we don’t fund student loans for certain majors. Maybe we bring back certain types of book or social clubs to learn these materials instead. Online learning? I totally see the beauty in the humanities, it’s largely all I read for fun, But you can’t have a system that incentivizes people to take out bigger and bigger loans on investments that don’t pay back.

Student loan approval and interest rates should be based on actuarial calculations that account for risk of default based on school and major. This will allow market signals to work rather than treating everyone the same. Some people have this fantasy that everyone should be able to study their passion even if it's something with no value in the labor market but in the real world society can collectively only afford to have a tiny fraction of scholars living a life of the mind.

  • Yeah, I’d love to live in the post-agi utopia where we can all do what we want, but liberals are often not good at making trade offs within our own value systems

That's kind of my pov, on the funding aspect. Student loans should definitely have an aspect depending on the major/minor chosen.