The elite Masters degrees that are not worth it

[sanantone]

While it sucks for those individuals, in the grand scheme of things, they are not costing taxpayers nearly as much as other sectors of higher education with high student loan default rates. NYU is a traditional university that accounts for a disproportionate amount of the student loan debt in this country, and it's because of their graduate and first professional degree programs. Other colleges that account for a disproportionate amount of debt are schools like Capella and Walden that have high tuition rates, a lot of graduate students, and low graduation rates. Capella and Walden do not offer arts degrees. For-profit colleges have 10% of American college students and account for half of student loan defaults. This year, the U.S. Department of Education has canceled $3 billion in student loan debt so far, and much of it is because of for-profit colleges that defrauded students. The interesting thing is that for-profit colleges mostly offer business, IT, education, and mental health licensing programs. They're not offering a bunch of humanities programs, and their graduates still don't do well in comparison to other types of colleges.

If you look at the numbers for how many people are graduating with humanities degrees each year, you'll see that they are among the least popular majors. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of business management and business administration majors graduate each year, and that field has a high underemployment rate due to an overabundance of those degrees. Once again, while it's stupid to take out six figures of student loans so that you can attend a residential master's program in the arts, these people don't even come close to being the majority who leave taxpayers paying for bad college choices. Honestly, I find it interesting how some of the people who are complaining about expensive Columbia degrees are the same ones who defend the for-profit colleges that are overrepresented in fraud cases and student loan defaults. We could save a lot of money if taxpayers only funded public institutions. Prestigious private schools could survive without public funding, but small, non-profit colleges and most for-profit colleges couldn't survive.