Student loan overhall

[Mich the Tester]

...There as the artist on my road works in a bar and another one I met was a barber.

Interestingly, old fashioned barbers are doing quite well over here in NL.

[SueEllen]

Interestingly, old fashioned barbers are doing quite well over here in NL.

But do you need a 3 year degree for it?

It's an apprenticeship trade and if he wanted a degree it would make more sense to do it in something like business once he had his apprenticeship.


(Sorry I didn't make clear the guy was an old fashion barber.)

[Mich the Tester]

But do you need a 3 year degree for it?

It's an apprenticeship trade and if he wanted a degree it would make more sense to do it in something like business once he had his apprenticeship.

No, it's an apprenticeship or trades school thing; some barbers also offer courses. However, the artist/barber combination seems to work if the creative abilities help to market an old trade. It's obviously a minority interest and probably won't become a mass market thing, but just an example of how the combination of arts training and practical job training can add value and bring a real business to life. Take a look at Welkom There are definitely some artistic/creative types involved in that and it's quite a succesful enterprise. The same principle could be applied to many other trades.

[SueEllen]

No, it's an apprenticeship or trades school thing; some barbers also offer courses. However, the artist/barber combination seems to work if the creative abilities help to market an old trade. It's obviously a minority interest and probably won't become a mass market thing, but just an example of how the combination of arts training and practical job training can add value and bring a real business to life. Take a look at Welkom There are definitely some artistic/creative types involved in that and it's quite a succesful enterprise. The same principle could be applied to many other trades.

The problem is in the UK we don't have trades schools and few proper apprenticeships.

You do some college courses then find a salon where you can finish your training, or train at a hairdressing school however you can open up as a barber/hairdresser without any training what so ever.

In the case of the barber he could have saved himself about £9,000 in fees plus his living expenses by not doing his degree.

[Mich the Tester]

In the case of the barber he could have saved himself about £9,000 in fees plus his living expenses by not doing his degree.

Indeed, but I'm thinking more along the lines of how people with arts degrees can combine with skills or other people from other trades to make something more appealing to customers.

[minestrone]

The student loans company have a 283 column table where they store pretty much every detail about a student's loan.

To fix the obvious performance issues you might expect with that they decided upon that adding a new column and populating it with nulls as they thought that would speed up the oracle database. I tulip you not.

[darmstadt]

Presumably this is a result of the government now not selling off the student loan debt:

10 reasons why the privatisation of student loans is a really bad thing - Opinion - Student - The Independent

Student loans sell-off abandonment raises tension in cabinet | Education | The Guardian

[Zero Liability]

Here's a crazy idea; seeing as many of the loans don't get repaid as people don't earn enough to repay them, or disappear abroad, why not set up a system whereby people whose parents are unable to fund their studies will be given a sum of money to pay for their living costs for a fixed number of years while they're in full time education? We'll call it a 'student grant' and it might cut out a lot of the admin costs of the student loan system. We'll also put a limit on the number of full time university places that will be funded, and set up some thingies called 'polytechnics' for people who want more practical higher qualifications, so that people won't be forced to pick the easiest coure just to get a useless degree, but will actually be qualified in some field of work? Perhaps this could all be combined with a concept I call 'part time studying', where people work, and study alongside their job at the pace they can manage?

Am I completely mad?

Well to do that would require the stigma that goes with not attending university to be removed, as well. Personally, I don't see the point of putting everyone through it, particularly as it isn't cost-efficient for all sorts of courses, when as you say, part-time studying may be more conducive to most people's ends, and probably to many employers' as well, if they got over this idea that the state is there so that they can outsource their training costs to it, rather miserably I might add. I think aside from STEM subjects and the professions, some humanities, social sciences and arts are still worthwhile having a degree in, provided that the student is aware that their value isn't necessarily in the subject itself, but the transferrable skills it confers. Generally speaking, that should be the attitude taken irrespective of the degree, as flexibility and willingness/ability to learn matter more than the one degree you happen to study, IMO. It's a personal choice, however, and in some cases the degree will purely be a consumer good, which you can substitute with other forms of learning.

That said, Labour who are moaning the loudest about this, probably have some of the worst "solutions" to the problem. It's politics as usual and so to be expected, but I really would like to know what they propose to do to resolve the whole matter. At the moment, the focus seems to be on getting a degree - any degree - just to say you've been to university.

[Mich the Tester]

The student loans company have a 283 column table where they store pretty much every detail about a student's loan.

To fix the obvious performance issues you might expect with that they decided upon that adding a new column and populating it with nulls as they thought that would speed up the oracle database. I tulip you not.

I saw that kind of thing when I was a DBA. Starts as a spreadsheet, then became an Access database thrown together by whoever in the office could operate this newfangled windows thingummy, then became a SQL Server or Oracle monster that couldn't be killed. The rate just can't be high enough for me to go through what I dealt with at a pharmaceutical firm that had done something similar. In their massive table of everything they'd even called columns 'name', 'number', 'date' and the like, which is just really fab if you're trying to migrate the data to a SQL DB.

Still, as long as there are really, really dumb clients, I only need to be a little tiny bit less thick to carry on invoicing.

[Mich the Tester]

And how's about this then?

Grieving parents get hit with $200,000 in student loans - Jul. 28, 2014

What a wonderful system. indeed.