Cancel student loan debt?

[Meadmaker]

Again I know this is a certain someone's default answer to everything, but we can at least address the Student Loan Crisis without jumping right to "Burn Capitalism to the ground, begin the Socialist uprising."

Especially since without Capitalism... what are you even going to college for? It's 2020. If it's just about knowing stuff go on the internet. "Knowledge" is post-scarcity along with pictures of boobies and funny cat pictures. Hell major colleges on the level of MIT and Cambridge put almost all of their actual study material online for free.

People go to college to get jobs, not to get smarter. Pull the icky, sticky core evil of "Capitalism" and college as a post-information age concept collapses in on itself.

I have wondered, as have many, how Covid will affect the future of college. Right now, my kid is studying on the internet, as are many, many, college students across the country. Surely some people will realize that it is possible to push education via internet, at a significantly lower cost than the 20th century way of doing things.

I take some very good online classes, and pay next to nothing for them. I wouldn't say they are as good as my high quality college education back in the day, but they're close, and they are a whole lot cheaper.

 

[Segnosaur]

Beyond the college grads that paid their loans, it actively hurts non college educated and trade workers that already have it rough. It seems to reward the worst actors and penalize the best, which seems like bad policy and incredibly bad in regards to future voting.

(Comic of a trolley heading towards a group of people tied to a train track, with the question 'should it be diverted since it is unfair to those it already killed)

[qimg]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Em8dSApW8AAEr3_?format=jpg&name=small[/qimg]

Cute comic, but it has one problem...

The insinuation is that the people the trolley has run over are dead i.e. what happens to them is irrelevant to what happens later. But that is a flawed analogy. The people that had been run over are still very much 'alive', and they have an interest in what happens if/when the trolley is diverted, since it will be their tax money that goes to paying for the other people's debt.

A better analogy would be that if the people who just got run over by the trolley (but survived) had to pay the switch operator to divert the train from running over more people. You could argue that "it is still the best option for society in general", but the people that had been run over are still being harmed twice... once when they were run over (i.e. affected by high college fees/debt), and a second time when they have to pay for others who had their debts forgiven.

 

[crescent]

I can't help but notice that all of your quotes dealt with per student funding. None of them said anything about absolute funding. I haven't looked it up, but that suggests to me that absolute funding is probably more, which would mean there are more students. It plays into the narrative that perhaps more people are going to college than really ought to be going to college.

Hmmm....

So I looked that up. The proportion of the U.S. population with college degrees continues to climb - I knew that was true of women, but it is also true of men. I would have thought it would hit a plateau as costs went up and student loans became more predatory. I was wrong about that:

Percentage of the U.S. population who have completed four years of college or more from 1940 to 2019, by gender

n an impressive increase from years past, 36.6 percent of women in the United States had completed four years or more of college in 2019. This figure is up from 3.8 percent of women in 1940. A significant increase can also be seen in males, with 35.4 percent of the U.S. male population having completed four years or more of college, up from 5.5 percent in 1940.

 

[JoeMorgue]

It's not a trolley problem if we're talking about forgiving student loan debt without talking about whether or not should be doing doing student loans.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Regardless of the worth of the thing the debt was for, I think it's reasonable that people getting debt forgiveness from society should do something in exchange that benefits that society. Community service, for example. It needn't be a dollar-for-dollar accounting, but even if it's only a minimal gesture I think it should be made. People get mad when they perceive other people "getting something for nothing", I think a token of appreciation would go a long way to smoothing the sell. It's just good manners.

 

[acbytesla]

Why not just allow the same kind of debt cancellation that we use for other financing? I mean if a failing business owner can have his debt canceled, it seems reasonable that others could avail themselves to this kind of grace.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Why not just allow the same kind of debt cancellation that we use for other financing? I mean if a failing business owner can have his debt canceled, it seems reasonable that others could avail themselves to this kind of grace.

Doesn't it depend on who he got the debt with? Private lenders are doing it as a business, and writing off a debt is simply the risk they take when they gamble. But if it's the government doing the lending then it's not really a gamble.

 

[Segnosaur]

College also is biased toward low tech fields that never change.

You can't go to college for 2-6 years in the IT or Medical fields and be set for the next 40 years of your working life.

I'm dropping a few hundred to a couple of thousand bucks a year, and will be for the rest of my working life, to get new certs, upgrade old certs, etc.

I have a basic Computer Science degree but I'll admit its functionally useless at this point. I got in the Windows 3.11 / Dos 6.22 days.

I am in a similar boat... my computer science degree is from the 80s... that was pre-windows (I think people were using Dos4 when I started). And a lot of what I learned wasn't transferrable to work... I never programmed in Fortran, or Pascal for example.

But, some of what I learned HAS been useful. (The networking, as well as a lot of database stuff.) And more importantly, some of the stuff I learned in university WAS useful in the first job that i got... which in turn gave me skills that I used in the second job, and so on. I learned C in university, which helped me learn C++ later, which then helped me learn Java.

 

[mumblethrax]

Some of those people trapped in poverty are there because they're drowning in student loans, which they took out in hopes of getting out of poverty.

Sounds like the problem is poverty, not student loan debt.

College is a means to get out of poverty.

There's this idea that education is the great equalizer, but it's mostly a myth. Colleges in the US replicate socioeconomic advantage across generations.

If the goal is greater access to a college education, reducing the barriers to a degree makes sense. Subsidizing debt after you've sorted people along socioeconomic lines is just a giveaway to the upper and middle classes, ie regressive.

 

[crescent]

Regardless of the worth of the thing the debt was for, I think it's reasonable that people getting debt forgiveness from society should do something in exchange that benefits that society. Community service, for example. It needn't be a dollar-for-dollar accounting, but even if it's only a minimal gesture I think it should be made. People get mad when they perceive other people "getting something for nothing", I think a token of appreciation would go a long way to smoothing the sell. It's just good manners.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)

It has been my experience that such programs don't keep up with changes in student loan programs.

For instance, when I was looking in to joining the Peace Corps, they touted that the PC can help pay down student loans. But in the mean time the loan program changed and the sort of loan that the PC was paying down was not the one much in use anymore. They ended up paying down about 2% of the original balance of the loans, while the interest continued to accrue, such that I owed more at the end of my service than at the beginning.

I hear now of people trying to use the PSLF I linked to above. It seems like a good program but a lot of people trying to use it run into technical glitches making them ineligible for the program.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)

It has been my experience that such programs don't keep up with changes in student loan programs.

For instance, when I was looking in to joining the Peace Corps, they touted that the PC can help pay down student loans. But in the mean time the loan program changed and the sort of loan that the PC was paying down was not the one much in use anymore. They ended up paying down about 2% of the original balance of the loans, while the interest continued to accrue, such that I owed more at the end of my service than at the beginning.

I hear now of people trying to use the PSLF I linked to above. It seems like a good program but a lot of people trying to use it run into technical glitches making them ineligible for the program.

Yeah, it was Americorps when I was college-aged. It didn't seem to really work out for the people I know who did it. I was thinking something a lot less formal and buggy, like "okay, but spend Saturday mornings picking up highway litter for six months" or something. As the ancient prophet said, "there's plenty of chores need doing".

 

[acbytesla]

Doesn't it depend on who he got the debt with? Private lenders are doing it as a business, and writing off a debt is simply the risk they take when they gamble. But if it's the government doing the lending then it's not really a gamble.

Student debt like all other debt use to be allowed to be discharged through bankruptcy. But that changed.

There is something inherently wrong with a system that encourage profiteers to prey on the underclass getting them to secure government debt that they can never pay off.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Student debt like all other debt use to be allowed to be discharged through bankruptcy. But that changed.

There is something inherently wrong with a system that encourage profiteers to prey on the underclass getting them to secure government debt that they can never pay off.

I agree. But the solution isn't to feed the parasites, or shoo them off one victim and onto another. It's to stop the parasitism entirely.

 

[theprestige]

I humbly suggest that the Devos family's fleet of yachts is not an efficient use of the nation's wealth, even factoring in the boat mechanics and barnacle scrapers that manage to pull a wage from their existence.

It's not the nation's wealth, though.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I was thinking something a lot less formal and buggy, like "okay, but spend Saturday mornings picking up highway litter for six months" or something. As the ancient prophet said, "there's plenty of chores need doing".

While I agree with the overall point being made, it runs up against another problem. One of the reasons our current system of "college" is starting to show cracks of the inevitable collapse is that we have more people then we have jobs to go around. You can't, by definition, solve this problem with busy work.

In other words if Ted defaults on student loan debt and one of the ways he repays his debt to society is to "Perform Task X" well... then Ted why not just train Ted to perform Task X and get a job doing it in the first place?

Honestly at this point I think the whole system can just collapse naturally. Stop giving out student loans, give debt forgiveness to those who need it, but just stop propping the system up and let it die.

Traditional "Put a total hold on 2-6 years of your life just when you are entering adulthood, all so you can sit in a room and just get information" will die off but good riddance. It can be replaced with a 300 dollar Chromebook and a 30 dollar a month internet service. Raw knowledge is now as democratized as it possibly could be short of jacking into the Matrix. Going to college "to get smarter" is self defeating at this point.

Skills that societies needs will survive in trade schools and apprenticeships and those offer a much better return on investment.

The only thing we lose, and I'm getting the impression more and more this is the elephant in the room, is college as a pure status symbol and the idea of an elite "Educated" class.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

It's not the nation's wealth, though.

Unless they derived it overseas, it's the nation's wealth. It may be in their private control, but that can easily be rectified. Tax codes change all the time.

 

[acbytesla]

I agree. But the solution isn't to feed the parasites, or shoo them off one victim and onto another. It's to stop the parasitism entirely.

Yes. But for 40 years I've heard the rhetoric that we need to rethink education and for 40 years I've only seen the status quo only get more entrenched.

 

[theprestige]

What a toddler-tantrum of an argument.

We can discuss forgiving college debt because it's public debt, it's within the federal government's authority to forgive. The other debts you mention are private debts and therefore not.

Eminent domain. The government can seize private debt and forgive it, to boost the economy. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First we should agree on whether it actually boosts the economy.

And that's true even if we stick to taxpayer-funded loans that the government already has authority to forgive. Not only that, but we should also agree about the opportunity costs. Is the government going to continue stimulating the economy by taking money from productive citizens, making bad loans with it, and then forgiving the loans? Is that really the best use of that money? It seems to me that forgiving large amounts of debt should be a violent spur to reconsider the premise of these debts in the first place.

 

[theprestige]

No. Not being paid enough is not the same as being unproductive.

Clearly you're not being productive enough to pay off your debt to the people who invested in your productivity.

 

[Meadmaker]

I am in a similar boat... my computer science degree is from the 80s... that was pre-windows (I think people were using Dos4 when I started). And a lot of what I learned wasn't transferrable to work... I never programmed in Fortran, or Pascal for example.

But, some of what I learned HAS been useful. (The networking, as well as a lot of database stuff.) And more importantly, some of the stuff I learned in university WAS useful in the first job that i got... which in turn gave me skills that I used in the second job, and so on. I learned C in university, which helped me learn C++ later, which then helped me learn Java.

Youngster.

Actually, I was just a few years earlier. In other words, from a completely different generation of technology. And I've hit the point where all that new learning I need just isn't happening. It's too hard, and I'm tired of it.

However, that's diverging from the topic. An on-topic related fact is that I, and I'm sure others in this thread, find myself competing with a bunch of people who never went to college at all, or who went for a, shall we be generous and say less marketable, degree, and then went to "boot camp" or taught themselves how to program.

When it comes to programming, they're just as good as I am, and in terms of productivity, they're usually better, because their knowledge is more recent. They didn't need college to get those useful job skills.