Cancel student loan debt?

[gnome]

In what sense are you using the term "value" here? I'm sure there's personal fulfillment value for a lot of people being educated to their potential. I'm not sure there's societal value in it if that education doesn't actually benefit society. And in a whole lot of cases, there's no economic benefit either to the individual or to society as a whole.

Not talking about personal fulfillment--I am talking about the benefits of an informed citizenry, not just economic earning power.

 

[rockinkt]

We might disagree what counts as the chaff there, but I would happily revamp in favor of more critical thinking.

I really don't care what the subject matter is - the standards are set so low that students really have no understanding or knowledge of either the wheat or the chaff.

According to a recent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, 32 million of American adults are illiterate, 21 percent read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates are functionally illiterate, which means they can’t read well enough to manage daily living and perform tasks required by many jobs.
https://fee.org/articles/did-public...ecent study,living and perform tasks required

When the OECD tested half-a-million 15-year-old students around the world in a test known as PISA in 2012, US teens came in 27th place in math, below their counterparts in Estonia, Latvia, Vietnam, and Spain.
American adults, it turns out, are no more capable. And when it comes to digital problem-solving, they are literally the worst in the developed world.https://qz.com/638845/americans-are...answering-even-the-most-basic-math-questions/

 

[theprestige]

Not talking about personal fulfillment--I am talking about the benefits of an informed citizenry, not just economic earning power.

I'm all about the benefits of an informed citizenry. However, I have lots of questions. For example:

- What benefits?

- How are they measured?

- Is funding arbitrary college degrees the best way (or even a good way) to get those benefits?

- If this program isn't yielding the expected benefits, shouldn't we cancel it and use the money for something else?

 

[TragicMonkey]

The US government is notorious for making rules that they exempt themselves from.

I know, right? They execute people all the time but when I do it it's somehow a problem. Sheesh.

 

[Venom]

Society would be far better off if we could teach students how to think critically by the age of 14.
To do that though would require a huge revamp of the education system starting with far, far, far, far, far (get the drift?) higher qualifications and standards for elementary and high school teachers along with higher demands being placed on students before allowing advancement.
Putting the money there would be exponentially better than continuing the game of fulfilling laughably easy standards based on regurgitating the accepted group think that make up the bulk of basic college/university BAs.

I tend to agree with this.

 

[xjx388]

Society would be far better off if we could teach students how to think critically by the age of 14.
To do that though would require a huge revamp of the education system starting with far, far, far, far, far (get the drift?) higher qualifications and standards for elementary and high school teachers along with higher demands being placed on students before allowing advancement.
Putting the money there would be exponentially better than continuing the game of fulfilling laughably easy standards based on regurgitating the accepted group think that make up the bulk of basic college/university BAs.

Yes indeed. We already hold our kids captive for 18 years in a free compulsory education system and then treat it like a glorified babysitting service with authoritarian features. Conform or fail.

I have a lot of family in education and they all desperately want these kinds of sweeping changes. However, they are bound by legislatures and school boards. There is no room for thinking differently. They spent their school days learning about all these theories of child development, psychology, learning styles, etc and then it all goes out the window as soon as they get hired.

 

[rockinkt]

Yes indeed. We already hold our kids captive for 18 years in a free compulsory education system and then treat it like a glorified babysitting service with authoritarian features. Conform or fail.

I have a lot of family in education and they all desperately want these kinds of sweeping changes. However, they are bound by legislatures and school boards. There is no room for thinking differently. They spent their school days learning about all these theories of child development, psychology, learning styles, etc and then it all goes out the window as soon as they get hired.

I feel sorry for the good teachers who are constrained by the system.

 

[rdwight]

Because it's punitive in motivation. TragicMonkey had the presence of mind not to explicitly describe it in those terms, but you've just gone and compared it favorably to Community Service sentences, which are literal punishments. You're saying "this is how much someone should be punished to be forgiven a debt."

You seem to have this backwards. According to those asking for loan forgiveness, the punishment IS the debt. To offer a token repayment method that actually offers some form of 'payment' is the gift. Much like community service is not the literal punishment. It's in lieu of one. Feel free to not do yours if ordered by the court and let me know if the alternative that will arise is better off for you.

There are plenty of people that are full time employed whose incomes result in IBR repayments that may not even exceed the accruing interest of the loans. Some on are track to repay their loans after decades, some on track to have the bulk of it forgiven once the IBR time period runs out after 25 years.

I'd have to assume without putting in the effort that most people, college educated or not, with or without loans, work. The current system definitely could be better, but it doesn't seem as overly harsh as some make it out to be. Hearing people talk about financial struggles into their 30's just sounds like.. literally everyone.

I don't see much benefit in taking people who are almost certainly working some job, which may have some tangential connection to their education and perhaps a glimmer of hope for a career track, and funneling them off to some make-work tedium that is almost certainly not going to lead to career advancement. Is it better for some part-time substitute teacher/barista to drop those jobs and go stamp license plates for loan repayment? Is it better for someone with a history degree to abandon a low-paying adjunct job to go pick up trash on the freeway?

Plenty of people would take this offer because the loan repayment would probably exceed the value of whatever paltry income they are receiving for a real job, but that's not evidence of this being a good way for the government to utilize labor.

So the better alternative is to forgive(give) them 50k, no strings, no requirements? I am not prescribing this as a great plan at all. I just disagree with this over the top push back against the suggestion. If a program would have 100% participation if optional, making it mandatory shouldn't all of a sudden make it a negative idea.

 

[gnome]

I'm all about the benefits of an informed citizenry. However, I have lots of questions. For example:

- What benefits?

- How are they measured?

- Is funding arbitrary college degrees the best way (or even a good way) to get those benefits?

- If this program isn't yielding the expected benefits, shouldn't we cancel it and use the money for something else?

How do you measure the benefits of the ability to understand foreign policy by comparing it to a historical context? Or to comprehend statistical data? Or evaluate the credibility of information?

Now, your last two questions are quite salient (as I mentioned, the method of achieving those benefits is very much worth disputing) -- but I perceived that the goal itself was absent from the discussion.

 

[Delvo]

community service is not the literal punishment. It's in lieu of one.

When assigned by a criminal court for a crime, it's a punishment: a deliberately mild one, designed to make the convict's life better than it would be with some other punishment, but still a punishment: something that they wouldn't have done if it were voluntary but they're compelled to do by a court because they were convicted of a crime.

But the situation we have here is not a criminal court and the people who have these loans are not convicts. They're more like victims of fraud. And the way the idea of making them came up was not to make their lives better than the suggested alternative, but to make it worse than the suggested alternative.

X: "Here's a way we can easily right a wrong that the system has inflicted on a lot of people and improve their lives"
Y: "That's too good for them. We need a way to make it worse than that."

That's how this idea came up. There's only one motivation Y can possibly have when that's the sequence of events, one goal which Y's proposal can truly be meant to work toward.

Feel free to not do yours if ordered by the court and let me know if the alternative that will arise is better off for you.

Anything that you need to threaten people into with movie-villain put-down lines designed to rub it in the victim face just who's in really in control around here is not intended as a benefit.

 

[TragicMonkey]

But the situation we have here is not a criminal court and the people who have these loans are not convicts. They're more like victims of fraud. And the way the idea of making them came up was not to make their lives better than the suggested alternative, but to make it worse than the suggested alternative.

X: "Here's a way we can easily right a wrong that the system has inflicted on a lot of people and improve their lives"
Y: "That's too good for them. We need a way to make it worse than that."

That's how this idea came up. There's only one motivation Y can possibly have when that's the sequence of events, one goal which Y's proposal can truly be meant to work toward.

Don't tell me what my motivations are. You are wrong. I think of it as like a parent requesting their child take out the trash or set the table. It's not punishment, it's contributing to the good of the household, in a very small way nowhere near proportional to the value of the benefits received. And the funny thing is that when asked to do such things most kids, even very immature ones, are glad to help. It feels good to contribute.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Okay someone is really going to have to walk me through in baby steps and using small words why "I demand you pay for this person to go to college with no guarantee they will pay it back" is not a punishment/expectation/whatever but "Hey we paid for you to go to college and you aren't paying us back, you need to do something" is.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Okay someone is really going to have to walk me through in baby steps and using small words why "I demand you pay for this person to go to college with no guarantee they will pay it back" is not a punishment/expectation/whatever but "Hey we paid for you to go to college and you aren't paying us back, you need to do something" is.

Asking that question is itself evil, and you, sir, are worse than Hitler.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Okay someone is really going to have to walk me through in baby steps and using small words why "I demand you pay for this person to go to college with no guarantee they will pay it back" is not a punishment/expectation/whatever but "Hey we paid for you to go to college and you aren't paying us back, you need to do something" is.

It's more to do with the grander motivation behind forgiving or reducing student debt.

I'm of the opinion that this isn't a case where the state should be engaged in moralizing. If the student debt is a societal problem worth addressing, then the problem is an economic one.

I'm not suggesting bailing out these students because it's cruel to them or because it would be nice, but because doing so would benefit the economy generally.

We don't see such strings attached to people receiving other kinds of relief. It is generally accepted that doing this is for the good of the economy and society generally, and attempts to moralize or extract gestures of gratitude is missing the point. In many cases, such requirements are counter productive to the intended goal.

I suggest that requiring make-work community service is contrary to the goal of improving the economic condition of a vital population of the economy. It wouldn't totally undermine the project, but such a requirement indicates a misunderstanding of goals.

 

[TragicMonkey]

It's more to do with the grander motivation behind forgiving or reducing student debt.

I'm of the opinion that this isn't a case where the state should be engaged in moralizing. If the student debt is a societal problem worth addressing, then the problem is an economic one.

I'm not suggesting bailing out these students because it's cruel to them or because it would be nice, but because doing so would benefit the economy generally.

We don't see such strings attached to people receiving other kinds of relief. It is generally accepted that doing this is for the good of the economy and society generally, and attempts to moralize or extract gestures of gratitude is missing the point. In many cases, such requirements are counter productive to the intended goal.

I suggest that requiring make-work community service is contrary to the goal of improving the economic condition of a vital population of the economy.

Do you say "thank you" when someone does you a favor?

 

[JoeMorgue]

I'm not suggesting bailing out these students because it's cruel to them or because it would be nice, but because doing so would benefit the economy generally.

And asking them to do something, anything up to and including even purely symbolic acts in response to this bailout would change or even effect that how?

What you (and others) are arguing and what you are angry about don't seem to be matching up much.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

And asking them to do something, anything up to and including even purely symbolic acts in response to this bailout would change or even effect that how?

What you (and others) are arguing and what you are angry about don't seem to be matching up much.

Personal moralizing is often an impediment to sound financial policy, so I take its unnecessary intrusion as unwanted. Such framing smacks of "welfare queen" stereotypes often used to undermine programs meant to elevate people out of poverty.

Sure, I suppose a token effort would not negatively impact the individuals receiving aid tremendously, and if this pointless gesture is what it takes to assuage the personal honor of smug taxpayers, I suppose it's a good deal.

Realistically, I very much doubt that this "symbolic gesture" is where it would end. It's a camel's nose into the tent, once you make it clear that these worthless layabouts have to earn this reward, you're setting the stage for either increasing the labor demanded and/or slashing benefits. The entire history of social spending getting gutted or requiring hoop-jumping for the impoverished makes it clear that this is the case.

 

[Garb]

This whole "do community service to pay your debt" tackles a symptom instead of a cause, and saddles the entire blame with the individuals within the system instead of critically analyzing the system itself.

Has tuition outpaced inflation?

Has tuition outpaced wages for college students?

If the answer to both those questions is yes, then is the "community service" solution going to fix those problems? If not, then why the focus on this as the solution? Is it not a problem that colleges are asking for more money than they did in past years, and is it not a problem that people are less capable of paying for higher education?

For the record, I also think that any method to cancel student loan debt needs to go further and actually address why this debt needed to be forgiven in the first place.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Personal moralizing is often an impediment to sound financial policy, so I take its unnecessary intrusion as unwanted. Such framing smacks of "welfare queen" stereotypes often used to undermine programs meant to elevate people out of poverty.

Well with respect that's equally as valid as your "You're a greedy robber baron capitalist because you want to keep your money and not it to people with zero strings attached and expect nothing back" stereotyping.

Socialists always get pissy when their philosophy is framed as "Give me free stuff and ask for nothing in return" but it's not helped when they are never happy when that's not what is happening.

(G)You have been giving a (potentially large) sum of money to educate yourself and when you can't pay it back playing the victim card because your path out of the situation isn't frictionless is rather unreasonable.

TragicMonkey is right. Are you the kind of person who says "Thank you" when someone does you a favor or do you go "Took you long enough?"

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Do you say "thank you" when someone does you a favor?

Who do you thank when you consume government services? I trust you're writing letters to your congressional rep to thank them for roads or unemployment insurance on a regular schedule.