Cancel student loan debt?

[JoeMorgue]

Is there any evidence that this ballooning student debt load has anything to do with increasing enrollment in frivolous degree programs or is that just an ass-pull on your part?

It's true by definition, unless you want to argue that companies aren't hiring people with necessary skills out of... what spite?

I don't even understand what they counter-narrative possibility could be.

ETA for Clarification: You're trying to strawman it into frivolous, when the argument is they are by definition non-marketable as a skill.

I'm not talking about the value or the overall "worth" of the knowledge, only its use as a marketable job skill because, as I pointed out, the fact that raw knowledge is now as accessible as we can reasonably make it makes that the only point worth considering.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

It's true by definition, unless you want to argue that companies aren't hiring people with necessary skills out of... what spite?

I don't even understand what they counter-narrative possibility could be.

Hiring can become more picky because of increasing supply of an educated work force.

The labor market is a market. More and more people entering college doesn't mean there will be an increase in jobs for college educated people, so standards tighten. No matter how you try to moralize the failure, only so many people are going to get these jobs that pay well, and everyone else is shunted off with high debt for having the nerve to even try.

An excellent example of this is lawyers. A once profitable, though challenging, career path has become overrun with new law school graduates and the job prospects have tanked.

These people studying for the bar didn't major in renaissance fife music or gender studies, they made decisions based on slightly outdated information. They got bad advice, invested a ton of money in specialized education, and got left holding an empty bag.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Hiring can become more picky because of increasing supply of an educated work force.

The labor market is a market. More and more people entering college doesn't mean there will be an increase in jobs for college educated people, so standards tighten.

Well... yeah. Again "How many people have this skill" is one of those things that's a factor in all this. That's not an evil or unreasonable concept.

Again that's why, even within the economic aspect of this argument, all we've really succeeded in doing in sending more people to college is turning a college degree into the new High School Diploma, the bare minimum. We've accomplished nothing really since "making people smarter" isn't the goal of college anymore because there are more efficient ways of doing it.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Well... yeah. Again "How many people have this skill" is one of those things that's a factor in all this. That's not an evil or unreasonable concept.

Again that's why, even within the economic aspect of this argument, all we've really succeeded in doing in sending more people to college is turning a college degree into the new High School Diploma, the bare minimum. We've accomplished nothing really.

Turning college education into the new high school diploma, as in something that everyone can get for free assuming they don't flunk out, would be a pretty substantial shift from the current situation.

if anything, we've regressed as our economy modernizes. Now the "basic" education is something that each student has to personally pay to acquire.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Turning college education into the new high school diploma, as in something that everyone can get for free assuming they don't flunk out, would be a pretty substantial shift from the current situation.

But what's the... point? It seems all that does is delay adulthood and entering the job force for another 2-6 years. We seem to have accomplished little beyond creating a generation for whom their adult lives are starting in their mid-20s and starting under a mountain of debt. Even if the debt was much more modest (to counter the "ballooning cost" thing which really isn't the topic) I still fail to see the point. And that 2-6 year chunk of time right at the core part of your young adult life is a sunk cost we can't subsidize away.

What's our overall goal here? What societal problem are we trying to fix? These are not unreasonable questions to ask.

Why does everyone need to go to college? That's a base question. If it's knowledge, see my previous breakdown, that's like purposely inefficient to the point of insanity. If it's the job market it's counter-productive.

 

[Distracted1]

Well... yeah. Again "How many people have this skill" is one of those things that's a factor in all this. That's not an evil or unreasonable concept.

Again that's why, even within the economic aspect of this argument, all we've really succeeded in doing in sending more people to college is turning a college degree into the new High School Diploma, the bare minimum. We've accomplished nothing really since "making people smarter" isn't the goal of college anymore because there are more efficient ways of doing it.

The more necessary component of the shift has been to extend childhood a few years further into the third decade.
This has the effect of keeping people out of the workforce, thereby keeping the unemployment rate low in the face of fewer actual jobs due to increases in efficiency from automation.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

But what's the... point? It seems all that does is delay adulthood and entering the job force for another 2-6 years. We seem to have accomplished little beyond created a generation for whom their adult lives are starting in their mid-20s.

What's our overall goal here? What societal problem are we trying to fix? These are not unreasonable questions to ask.

Why does everyone need to go to college? That's a base question. If it's knowledge, see my previous breakdown, that's like purposely inefficient to the point of insanity. If it's the job market it's counter-productive.

Sure, there's a wider question of why there is a shortage of jobs that provide living wages, and there are certainly jobs now requiring degrees that really aren't necessary, and there are plenty of students who would be happy to skip college if they thought they could find a good job any other way.

The modernizing economy probably does require a greater degree of skilled labor than what universal K-12 can provide, but that's not all that is happening here.

There just aren't enough jobs paying decent wages, so we are seeing competition in the labor market become more intense, making the costs of losing greater.

I don't see student debt forgiveness, or even free college, as a magic bullet here. This problem seems more a symptom of a larger issue than a cause in itself, but symptom management is often desirable.

It's definitely a problem that colleges can sell education on the vague promise of a "better future" and suffer no real consequences when that turns out to be untrue.

It's an issue with many contributing parts. As always, the answer is fully automated luxury communism.

 

[gnome]

Sure, there's a wider question of why there is a shortage of jobs that provide living wages, and there are certainly jobs now requiring degrees that really aren't necessary, and there are plenty of students who would be happy to skip college if they thought they could find a good job any other way.

The modernizing economy probably does require a greater degree of skilled labor than what universal K-12 can provide, but that's not all that is happening here.

There just aren't enough jobs paying decent wages, so we are seeing competition in the labor market become more intense, making the costs of losing greater.

I don't see student debt forgiveness, or even free college, as a magic bullet here. This problem seems more a symptom of a larger issue than a cause in itself, but symptom management is often desirable.

It's definitely a problem that colleges can sell education on the vague promise of a "better future" and suffer no real consequences when that turns out to be untrue.

It's an issue with many contributing parts. As always, the answer is fully automated luxury communism.

A funny thing is we think of it as sort of a new problem but it's been hitting for a while--to bring in a cheesy old song:

Well, we're waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard, if we behaved

So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke, chromium steel

This was 1982. That was nearly 40 years ago.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Advice to 18 year olds: You must pick a degree program to invest in that matches well to your talents and interests but also is in an industry that has not yet attracted a lot of attention, but will be booming in about 4-5 years so that upon graduation you will have marketable skills that are in high demand.

Advice to 30 year olds: The market is so unpredictable that you are far better off investing in low fee mutual funds than trying to predict the market.

Stupid 18 year olds who can't even figure out how to invest in education . . .

 

[xjx388]

My family would personally benefit from cancellation of student debt. Greatly.

I am against the idea unless it's targeted to benefit society the most. I see no benefit in cancelling debt for the rich guy who got a degree in 19th Century Indonesian Basketweaving or (more realistically) the kid who wanted to be an actor and used those loans to get a drama degree or worse, never even finished the degree.

There is great benefit in extending loan cancellation to teachers, engineers and a myriad of other necessary professions. In the context of the pandemic, think of doctors, nurses, first responders, and other health professions who have been on the front lines without a break who kept working, saving lives and putting themselves at risk. Their work is benefitting the country and they didn't get any extra $600 a week. I can see cancelling debt for those people.

 

[theprestige]

The point is being missed.

I made the point earlier in the thread that this is self defeating argument. You pull the wet, sticky, icky of money out of this equation and... what are talking about?

Education? Knowledge? That has nothing to do with anything we are discussing. It's 2020. Raw information and base knowledge is as democratized as it is going to get until we all start jacking into the Matrix and downloading Kung-fu directly to our brains. The entire collected sum of human knowledge is available at your fingertips for the cost of a 200 Chromebook and a 50 dollar a month ISP. Knowledge is post-scarcity. Taking 2-6 years out of your life and going into massive amounts of debt right at the moment you are entering adulthood for the sole reason of "getting smarter" is the dumbest thing you can do. If you're going to college on some vague idea of "I want to get smarter" then you've already failed because you're an idiot.

If you're going to college without the "idiot" modifier you're doing it for one reason. To have a piece of paper that proves you have knowledge about the thing in question. And you get this for one reason, so somebody will pay you for that knowledge.

So yes if you go X amount money into debt to get a skill and 10, 15, 20 years later are still in that debt, you by definition did something wrong because you wasted your time and resources.

That's why "Any degree that ends in 'studies'" are jokes and rightfully so. If you get a degree in "Gender Studies" and during that whole 4 year period you fail to notice that there are no "Gender Study" factories or stores with jobs waiting for you when you get out, waaaaaaaaah.

If you aren't going to college for a marketable skill then do it on your own dime because you're just picking the least efficient way and most expensive way of learning something for no reason. And "asking you to use resources you are demanding from me in an at least vaguely efficient manner" isn't the same thing as greed no matter what the Hippies say.

Go to trade school for 2 years at 1/10th the cost, learn to become an electrician or plumber or to install gutters so that can charge 40 bucks an hour, and listen to the Great Courses Audiobooks on Gender Studies on the weekends. Boom you've accomplished the same level of knowledge you claim you wanted about the topic you wanted but know about, but now you're an actual functional and productive member of society.

You thinking computer support is my personal passion? Of course it isn't. It's nobody's. But I can fix PEBKAC errors for 8 hours and then spend my personal time learning about my personal passions that I'm mature and adult enough to understand aren't the same thing as marketable skills.

I get it. We all got told "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" but I thought we all understood that wasn't universal. I thought we all understood that at no point did the social contract include the idea that everyone was going to be able to make a living off of their passions.

If your personal passions are also marketable skills, good on you. Consider yourself lucky and blessed. But if they aren't it's not anyone else's fault or problem.

But that's not what people want is it? Let's be fair here, and here we come to probably the closest thing I will ever make to anti-intellectual statement, there's still a very strong idea that certain jobs are just too good for smart people and that's bullcrap.

It's weird how, not to play a game of gotcha, the more progressive and socialist minded arguments in this threads are the ones that depend upon the idea that you are defined by your vocation.

I agree with all of this.

 

[xjx388]

Another thing: you don't even have to cancel the debt; you just have to make non-payment less draconian, especially for licensed professionals. If a doctor, nurse or teacher have trouble paying loans back, the state can take away their license to work. This is, ultimately, self-defeating. Now they can't use their degrees, they lose their jobs and we've ensured that they will be in a financial hole almost impossible to dig out of.
We've basically ruined them and they won't ever be able to repay and they basically wasted all that time and taxpayer money anyway.

That should go away.

 

[Tony99]

...Go to trade school for 2 years at 1/10th the cost, learn to become an electrician or plumber or to install gutters so that can charge 40 bucks an hour, and listen to the Great Courses Audiobooks on Gender Studies on the weekends. Boom you've accomplished the same level of knowledge you claim you wanted about the topic you wanted but know about, but now you're an actual functional and productive member of society...

If I just had a do-over button.
Anecdote: Had some remodeling done at the house and the plumber, cabinet guy and HV/AC guy were lamenting about the difficulty in finding a trainee, apprentice or associate. All 3 had way more work than they could schedule, but no pool of interested talent. Most of their kids were not interested in the 'old man's job or wanted to take over a very lucrative business in construction or infrastructure service.

It's rather concerning. Who is going to fix the machines of automation and general living?
When the air conditioner breaks in August my quality of life is seriously impacted. The AC repair technician can pretty much name his price.

 

[theprestige]

The more necessary component of the shift has been to extend childhood a few years further into the third decade.
This has the effect of keeping people out of the workforce, thereby keeping the unemployment rate low in the face of fewer actual jobs due to increases in efficiency from automation.

I don't think I've seen a single policymaker say that this is the reason for subsidizing student loans. Let alone explain why this is the best way to go about solving this problem. At least Depression-era work programs had the advantage of being actual work producing actual useful results.

Look at SGM's situation in the context of your thesis. In that context, we're not loaning her money so she can delay entering the workforce until she's more employable. We're loaning her money to stay out of the workforce because there's just not enough work to employ her.

Not only that, but she uses the loan to get a degree that is also not particularly employable.

Not only that, but the idea of actually doing useful work to repay the loan is now offensive and punitive to her.

Not only that, but the useful work that's been suggested has always been around. If she were going to do it, she could have done it just as well six years ago. There was no need to loan her money to stay out of the workforce after all.

Anyway, if we need to pay some people to stay out of the workforce because automation needs less jobs, I'd like to see a top-down review of the entire process. I'd like us, as a society, to say EXPLICITLY that this is what this money is for, and this is who it's being spent on. I'd also like to get a place in line for some of these "please quit your job so other people can have it" payments.

In fact, if we're going to pay people to drop out of the workforce (temporarily or permanently), we should probably do it in the form of early retirement incentives to people who have already worked for some decades to contribute to society. That way, young people can enter the workforce in the usual way, and make their own contributions to society, instead of getting paid by the contributors to not contribute. In a sense, SGM should be paying me to not work, not me her.

 

[theprestige]

If I just had a do-over button.
Anecdote: Had some remodeling done at the house and the plumber, cabinet guy and HV/AC guy were lamenting about the difficulty in finding a trainee, apprentice or associate. All 3 had way more work than they could schedule, but no pool of interested talent. Most of their kids were not interested in the 'old man's job or wanted to take over a very lucrative business in construction or infrastructure service.

It's rather concerning. Who is going to fix the machines of automation and general living?
When the air conditioner breaks in August my quality of life is seriously impacted. The AC repair technician can pretty much name his price.

I got into IT because a friend of mine pointed out there was a huge demand for network admins, and that one could make upwards of $40/hour with a manufacturer certification. My unskilled, 90s-era clerical temp ass making close to minimum wage thought that was a huge improvement. So I paid for the overpriced trade school, got the training, got the cert... and discovered that the big bucks didn't start until I'd gotten some work experience.

But I was already more employable, and at better wages even just starting out, than I had been as a receptionist or phone operator. And soon enough, I was making that huge hourly wage.

Nowadays, I kinda wish I'd gone into HVAC instead. Still might.

 

[gnome]

Education? Knowledge? That has nothing to do with anything we are discussing. It's 2020. Raw information and base knowledge is as democratized as it is going to get until we all start jacking into the Matrix and downloading Kung-fu directly to our brains. The entire collected sum of human knowledge is available at your fingertips for the cost of a 200 Chromebook and a 50 dollar a month ISP. Knowledge is post-scarcity. Taking 2-6 years out of your life and going into massive amounts of debt right at the moment you are entering adulthood for the sole reason of "getting smarter" is the dumbest thing you can do. If you're going to college on some vague idea of "I want to get smarter" then you've already failed because you're an idiot.

If we're looking for importance beyond "someone's going to pay me for this" I think a piece is missing in the above rundown. I agree it's absolutely marvelous and a game-changer how much information is available for free. I don't think research availability is the entire story though. If there is value in becoming a more knowledgeable person, value in the basic requirements that a college student takes before diving deep into their specialty, I don't know if it can be entirely replaced that way.

Part of what the loan finances is the ability to devote to learning full-time, without simultaneously diving into the struggle to survive. Sure, some people can educate themselves and work to support themselves at the same time--and anyone that accomplishes that is someone I admire greatly. But HAVING to do so is a limiter on how many can.

If there's a case to be made that a classical education post high school is empowering beyond job prospects, one of the components that money buys is time--not just course materials and lectures. I think it might be something worth investing in as a society. The wisest way to do so, of course, is always open to discussion.

 

[TragicMonkey]

I got into IT because a friend of mine pointed out there was a huge demand for network admins, and that one could make upwards of $40/hour with a manufacturer certification. My unskilled, 90s-era clerical temp ass making close to minimum wage thought that was a huge improvement. So I paid for the overpriced trade school, got the training, got the cert... and discovered that the big bucks didn't start until I'd gotten some work experience.

But I was already more employable, and at better wages even just starting out, than I had been as a receptionist or phone operator. And soon enough, I was making that huge hourly wage.

Nowadays, I kinda wish I'd gone into HVAC instead. Still might.

It's very strange that you, me, and JoeMorgue have had such similar lives, considering whenever there's a two-sided argument here each of us is on a different side.

 

[dirtywick]

If I just had a do-over button.
Anecdote: Had some remodeling done at the house and the plumber, cabinet guy and HV/AC guy were lamenting about the difficulty in finding a trainee, apprentice or associate. All 3 had way more work than they could schedule, but no pool of interested talent. Most of their kids were not interested in the 'old man's job or wanted to take over a very lucrative business in construction or infrastructure service.

It's rather concerning. Who is going to fix the machines of automation and general living?
When the air conditioner breaks in August my quality of life is seriously impacted. The AC repair technician can pretty much name his price.

The reasoning behind why people don’t want to go into a trade as an apprentice isn’t too much different from college, you get a lucrative career. It starts different though. If you get a good mentor and a good work situation it’s great. But a lot of times you get all the bull work and the starting pay isn’t great, the hours are long and unpredictable and can be out in the elements. It can be dangerous. Plenty of people are dicks.

All for a promise of big money later. You get that promise through college too, but the strings attached don’t pull until much later.

 

[Dr. Keith]

If I just had a do-over button.
Anecdote: Had some remodeling done at the house and the plumber, cabinet guy and HV/AC guy were lamenting about the difficulty in finding a trainee, apprentice or associate. All 3 had way more work than they could schedule, but no pool of interested talent. Most of their kids were not interested in the 'old man's job or wanted to take over a very lucrative business in construction or infrastructure service.

It's rather concerning. Who is going to fix the machines of automation and general living?
When the air conditioner breaks in August my quality of life is seriously impacted. The AC repair technician can pretty much name his price.

In our house if someone appears to be very rich and have a lot of time on their hands it's common for someone to ask: what is he, a plumber?

It probably traces back more to Moonstruck than actual money spent on plumbing, but still.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

This thread is many pages deep now, and it may have already been addressed.

I strongly oppose student loan forgiveness, because it's not fair to me (yes, it's selfish, but that's all of politics).

I could not afford to pay for school, and my chosen career path was unlikely to make taking out a big loan a good idea. So, I fought, kicked and screamed my way into the middle class. At 44, I've just barely made it there.

How do you think I would feel about a bunch of younger people -- who I must compete with in the marketplace -- getting to reap the benefits of a college degree, without having to bear the burden of paying for it.

I made the responsible decision; they did not.

Hopefully, it makes you feel pleased that a system that ground you down and made you miserable has been improved so that others don't have to go through what you did. Or is that too civic-minded and generous?

This attitude is not only self-centered and mean-spirited, it is, more importantly, self-defeating and foolish.

The reductio ad absurdum of your position is that social policies can never improve because younger people aren't allowed to have better outcomes than you did growing up, because seeing them enjoy such outcomes make you sad.

If the goal is to make things better than they were before, then changes that give younger people better outcomes than you had for the same choices at their age aren't a bug, they are a feature.

All that said, I'm fine offering free college at public institutions from here forward. In that scenario, I can always go back to school.

That's great, but I still don't get why you think people who already went through school having a better outcome than you did is a bad thing.