Nm
- Thread starter KNIGHTTIME^
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The kids who worked multiple jobs while in college are all debt free? Is that the story you're selling us this morning?
Anyone who thinks that dependence on student loans to get through college is a sign of the "slacker culture at work" hasn't been paying attention to the rising cost of higher education. 70% of students leave college in debt. When you consider the number of Mommies and Daddies who pay Junior's full tab, who does that leave?
While there are people in the Democrat Party who are pushing for 50K forgiveness, President Biden isn't one of them. He bluntly told a questioner at this week's town hall that he had no intention of forgiving 50K. He said his plan was to forgive up to 10K. That seems reasonable to me.
But it's another example of addressing the symptoms instead of the problem itself: the obscene increases in the cost of higher education over the years.
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The decision to get a 4, 6, or longer degree is individual choice, as is the decision to take out all the loan debt. A huge forgiveness of these loans is stealing from The poor and working middle class and giving it back to the wealthier.
Hopefully some day you lose all this hate you have.
yes ther are those promoting debt forgiveness if 50k. Biden is not for it. I do think his idea about free community college and vocational school is an interesting idea. I just wonder how it skews the education system. Does it create a larger divide between an elite “paid” education vs a free education? It’s a no brainer on vocational school.
I also find it interesting that you are so naive that you don’t understand what is really going on. Politics is all a big dance. Certain Democrats ask for 50k debt relief because their voters will want that, it’s not happening. It does allow the administration to look as if they are not being controlled by a certain group. So Biden comes back with a compromise solution which they have rehearsed well in advance.
you keep talking about woke but you seem to be so fing clueless it’s amazing
The student debt crisis is 100% a result of well intentioned but failed government policy.
When the government changed the laws around student debt to make it impossible to discharge through bankruptcy they turned student borrowers into indentured servants. Students from lower and middle classes could borrow whatever they needed and private and government lenders weren’t concerned about defaulting. After all, your wages will be garnished if you fall far enough behind, and that won’t stop if you go bankrupt.
What started out as a nice thought - to help more people be able to afford college - has quickly turned off all incentives for colleges and universities to keep costs low. They have kept raising prices to suck as much money as they can out of the futures of most of their students and they don’t worry about it. Students can just borrow whatever they don’t have because lenders are more than happy to make loans that will keep paying off for decades.
The result is exploding costs to get an education while at the same time receiving a degree that doesn’t set you apart in the job market the way it once did.
When the government changed the laws around student debt to make it impossible to discharge through bankruptcy they turned student borrowers into indentured servants. Students from lower and middle classes could borrow whatever they needed and private and government lenders weren’t concerned about defaulting. After all, your wages will be garnished if you fall far enough behind, and that won’t stop if you go bankrupt.
What started out as a nice thought - to help more people be able to afford college - has quickly turned off all incentives for colleges and universities to keep costs low. They have kept raising prices to suck as much money as they can out of the futures of most of their students and they don’t worry about it. Students can just borrow whatever they don’t have because lenders are more than happy to make loans that will keep paying off for decades.
The result is exploding costs to get an education while at the same time receiving a degree that doesn’t set you apart in the job market the way it once did.
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Fair is irrelevant. Just because some people suffered doesn't mean everyone should.
I keep coming back to federally funded corporate welfare. Why are we not more concerned about funneling billions of dollars to large corporations to supply systems we don’t really need. But many believe providing health care and an education is not a worthy goal.
THIS ^^^^^^ 👍 (PS: This includes all those loans to attend those for-profit scam mills.)
AND THIS ^^^^^^ 👍
In fact, it did just the opposite. It served as an incentive for colleges to keep bumping up their prices -- at more than twice the rate of inflation.
When my son was born I put some money away in a 529 plan and I bought the Florida Prepaid Program. I drove used cars. I still drive my 2008 Tundra . I sacraficed and saved. So , for those of us who were responsible why is it as tax payer, business owner and employer that I have to also kick in for those who ran up debt? How am I responsible for their lives? Will I get a check from the government because we worked hard to provide for our kids?
My other observation is this. The entire reason tuition and fees are ridiculous is because there so much money available for college.. universitiea know they can increase costs well beyond inflation because they have easy money through the federal financial aide program . They know we all bought the lie everyone needs to go to college and they know we will borrow our souls to pay for it. They have zero accountability or free market competition to drive their costs down. IF students had zero federal loans available to pay for school universities could only truly charge what the market could bare. Then supply and demand would kick in and heaven forbid but they would actually have to compete on price and value in the free market place. Student loans have distorted the true price and universities are just a giant sucking machine for money .
I am opposed to this debt forgiveness idea. You racked up the debt , you pay for it. I racked up $35,000 between my two degrees at UCF and FSU and I paid my loans off. It's called being responsible for your own life, your choices and not shoving that debt off onto the national debt and the tax payers.
My other observation is this. The entire reason tuition and fees are ridiculous is because there so much money available for college.. universitiea know they can increase costs well beyond inflation because they have easy money through the federal financial aide program . They know we all bought the lie everyone needs to go to college and they know we will borrow our souls to pay for it. They have zero accountability or free market competition to drive their costs down. IF students had zero federal loans available to pay for school universities could only truly charge what the market could bare. Then supply and demand would kick in and heaven forbid but they would actually have to compete on price and value in the free market place. Student loans have distorted the true price and universities are just a giant sucking machine for money .
I am opposed to this debt forgiveness idea. You racked up the debt , you pay for it. I racked up $35,000 between my two degrees at UCF and FSU and I paid my loans off. It's called being responsible for your own life, your choices and not shoving that debt off onto the national debt and the tax payers.
They are lobbying bc they have maybe 15
Dem Senators max on this. Biden never committed to 50k like Warren and others did during the Primary
Dem Senators max on this. Biden never committed to 50k like Warren and others did during the Primary
You have the right culprit but the wrong policies. It's not the inability to discharge the debt that's the problem, it's the policies that offer the loans to everyone regardless of ability to pay now or degree path leading to an ability to pay later coupled with indoctrinating children and parents that they need to get college degrees to avoid poverty and have any chance at success. In addition, every added dollar of financial aid adds 65 cents to tuition costs as schools scramble to take advantage of the additional money. All of this drove demand for college education that then drove the supply-demand curve on professors, which is one of the factors in the rise. Beyond that, the increasing the number of students adds demand for healthcare and student services. Embracing diversity in full also incurs a large cost in student services and facilities as it created a great expansion in the number of individual groups. Interestingly, the tuition at public schools has risen almost twice as quickly as private schools. Here's an article detailing reasons for the rise: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-college-so-expensive-2018-4
The inability to discharge debt protects the lenders/government funds that can't deny people from obtaining loans based on normal qualification parameters. If you're going to force people to lend money, you have to do something on the other end to ensure that they stay in business. Especially since the terms of loans are so tilted towards the lender until they are actually in default. Even then, the lender is required to go through a long process before they send the loan to collection.
What if we used this logic for everything? If we only allowed future generations to experience a system of government equally as shitty as the one we experienced ourselves.
You honestly believe those poor BANKS were 'forced' to lend federally-guaranteed money??!? They're right beside the colleges and universities screwing over students and their parents.
The real issue is how loans became a part of financial aid packaging in the first place.
Once upon a time, colleges and universities would tell prospective students and their parents that a school's cost of education shouldn't play a role in the choice of a college. The notion was that every school's cost of education would be compared against the family's ability to pay. Then the college's financial aid office would be able to 'make up the difference' with state and federal grants, institutional scholarships and awards, and work-study. Student loans were available back then, but they weren't part of the packaging used by the financial aid office to meet each student's financial need.
But as costs grew and state support shrank, guess what? Student loans began to slowly enter into the equation as a financial aid office's way of telling gullible families that they were successfully meeting the student's financial need: "See? You can still afford to attend school here!!!"
It's all a game. Whether you're talking about the way colleges present their 'financial aid' packages or 'those poor ole banks forced' to lend guaranteed money, trust me, it's all geared towards feeding the Big Boys and screwing over the students and their parents.
It's not the Government per se . it's a combination of things from banks to government to universities. I think you are total fool if you borrow $50,000 to earn a degree in philosophy or 18th Century women's studies . The fact is and it's a fact , some degrees are worthless and have no market value for any meaningful job.
Secondly, we are failing as a culture by removing failure and accountability out of the system. You learn by failure as much as anything. People need to be accountable for their own actions and lives. That's the cold hard truth here.
The inability to discharge the debt is exactly why lenders are willing to give tens of thousands of dollars to students who are bad bets based on major, academic profile, future job prospects, etc.
Lenders don’t care a bit about loaning a philosophy major with a 3.2 gpa $75k to party for 4 years. But that’s terrible debt. It doesn’t benefit anyone other than the lender who gets a piece of their earnings for the next up to 60 years while they try to pay it off, and the school who got to churn out thousands of grads who spent $60k on a degree that doesn’t make them any more employable than they were before. That money would NEVER be loaned out without bankruptcy protections for the lender.
The conclusion isn’t that the money needs to be loaned and therefore protected. The conclusion is that most of the money shouldn’t be loaned at all. Society doesn’t benefit from another poetry degree who works at Starbucks with $40k in debt. If you want to study something worthless, go ahead. But you shouldn’t be able to borrow money that’s federally guaranteed to do it.
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Along these lines, why should the feds allow Pell Grants to be given to students attending schools with high student loan default rates? If the national average default rate is between 9-10%, wouldn't you think that giving free money to a school with a 50% or more student loan default rate is a bad idea?
But our government routinely does it all the time. Why? Because Republicans want to protect private, 'for profit' schools (yay, Trump University!) and Democrats want to protect community colleges in poverty-stricken urban areas.
Your characterization of what republicans and democrats are trying to protect is telling of your views.
I’ve never seen a republican speak (positively or negatively) about for-profit colleges. I’ve never seen a Democrat fight for community colleges other than the recent mentions of making them free.
But to your point, I always welcome criticism of foolishly spent federal money. If it means grant aid just becomes student loan debt though... I don’t see much value there if the goal is solving a majorly screwed up student debt situation
I think you guys are right. It's a combination of bad policy, lobbing by big banks with no risk loans, and Big Education (although I'm not sure how to define or who that is)..
That’s a terrible question.
The better questions are: is a grant a good investment? And is guaranteeing student loans for anyone who wants any amount they like good for students?
Grants are sometimes good investments. If it produces a nurse, a teacher, an engineer, or someone in high demand in the job market, yes. If it produces someone who will struggle to find work or contribute to the economy... no.
Same standard applies to student loans in my opinion. If it helps someone pursue a job that contributes to the economy in a net positive way, yes. If it just turns them into a debtor without skills or knowledge that are in demand in the job market, no.
And banks should be accountable for writing bad loans. But they aren't. This debt can't be bankruptcy away so they write as much debt for any interest rate they can get away with.
There’s no “willing.” They are required to give these loans to everyone. The protection is the only reason a lot of people can get loans.
As for the conclusion, we agree.
Why would big banks lobby to give out loans to people that they know won’t repay at interest rates that are artificially low and under terms that only benefit the borrower? Banks lose money when people default, defer, or take forever to repay and then file bankruptcy. The only thing that keeps these businesses in the business is the relative certainty that they will get repaid.
The answer are these words. Federally Guaranteed Student loans. The loans are backed by the government not the borrower. Remove the risk from banks losing money and guess what? they do stupid risky stuff with other people's money and in this case it's our money. So what do they care when they make piece of the pie. They only see an upside here.
What other loan can’t be discharged in bankruptcy and also allows them to garnish your wages until the loan is repaid?
What other loan doesn’t allow a lender to assess risk and choose whether to lend money or not?
as colleges have created these bs degrees like "holocaust studies" or "the language of islamic culture", they've raised prices in order to compensate for tripling their staff and constructing an array of new buildings
you're seeing the unintended consequence of feel-good degrees.
Exactly. The whole point I’m advocating for is that these loans shouldn’t be federally guaranteed and they should be subject to the same free market forces just about everything else is. They should have to make sense for lenders on the merits of whether or not they’re good investments.
We are on the same page with that. But the politicians won’t stand for that because they’d crow about white privilege and how minority students need these loans to be able to find equity. They pander to voters on one end and the academic industrial complex on the other with the American taxpayer eventually holding the bill.
No, fix it. But if you're saying "this debt should be this" and "this debt should be that" then you understand that student debt is at least a little ****ed. So cancel it and fix the system. It would stimulate the economy and correct an error in the way we've handled this. Why continue with a system that is ****ed in the name of fairness?
I'm glad you said indentured servants because I completely agree. This is a systemic failure. I can't stand it when we blame individuals for systemic problems. It's like if government policy allowed crack dealers to sell at the entrance of schools, and then we blamed the rise in high-school crack addicts on the individuals making poor choices instead of the moronic policy that distorts the market and the crack dealers who lobbied for the regulations.
I think @Knight In TN made a good point when he said this was all well intentioned. I think this problem is similar to the housing bubble in that initially, there are no losers. More kids can to school, the skilled workforce grows, colleges increase revenue and improve their campus and programs. At the start, the debt incurred is reasonable to incomes and there's no structural issue. The financial industry is profiting and happy to lobby to protect their income stream and get politicians on board.
From there, it's a relatively slow burn. More and more kids choose college over alternatives. They end up fueling the growth of degree programs that have low market value. Some fields become saturated with an over-supply of graduates. Demand fuels cost increases as colleges compete with each other for growth, investing in more amenities and campus life.
I think this system is bound to fail. But there's so much structural headwind that the government will prop it up indefinitely. This is one reason I'd support some kind of "Free College" national program. If the government is going to backstop the entire system anyway, might as well cut out the financial industry middle men, simplify everything, and send checks straight to colleges. You immediately control costs because the Universities will have to adapt to the reimbursement rates going forward.
An alternative path is innovation in education. Lambda School I think is interesting. It's an online tech academy kind of deal, but their tuition setup is fascinating.
I think a national program like this would be intriguing. So college is "free" as a student and no debt is incurred. Instead of letting 18 year olds sign debt slavery agreements, you lock them into something like this. This way an engineer pays more for their degree than a social worker, but they both pay the same percentage of the income their degree generates over some time period.
The Lambda School Income Share Agreement (ISA) is a form of deferred tuition under which you agree to pay 17% of your post-Lambda School salary for 24 months, but only once you're making more than $50,000 per year (or the equivalent of $4,166.67 per month). The ISA is capped at $30,000, so you'll never pay more than that for any reason. And if you don't get hired? You never pay.
I think a national program like this would be intriguing. So college is "free" as a student and no debt is incurred. Instead of letting 18 year olds sign debt slavery agreements, you lock them into something like this. This way an engineer pays more for their degree than a social worker, but they both pay the same percentage of the income their degree generates over some time period.
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