Cancel student loan debt?

crescent said:
But again, even if we keep the proportion of the population that goes to college equal - tuition has gotten more expensive. Much, much, much more expensive.

College tuition rates have been rising about twice as fast as regular inflation. That really starts to add up over time.

Tuition Inflation




To me at least, the higher tuition rates are the elephant in the room. All of us thinking about what our cohort paid for college is meaningless in the current situation. The current generations, our kids and grandkids, are facing vastly higher college costs than we did.
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How does the increase in tuition rates compare to the cuts in government support?
 
acbytesla said:
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.
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I would fully support this, as long as we agree that it's essentially all one thing: College students are business owners whose business is failing due to some combination of misfortune and mismanagement.
 
theprestige said:
Clearly you're not being productive enough to pay off your debt to the people who invested in your productivity.
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This is tedious. I've interacted with you enough to know you're not this obtuse.

Productivity and wages aren't inextricably tied. The entire history of labor relations shows that haggling over how much a worker's productivity should belong to that worker is very much a contentious issue.

Let's say all the burger flippers get together and form a union that forces the burger joint owners to increase their wages. This kind of thing still occasionally happens, so it's not an absurd hypothetical.

Did their productivity instantaneously increase once the union agreement was signed by management? Of course not.

Acting like worker wages is some immutable property of the universe and economy is absurd and you know it. Such things are the frequent matter of government regulation in pretty much every country on Earth. Please don't peddle this smooth-brain nonsense, it's unbecoming.
 
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Well it seems we're not talking student debt reform at all, but rather having some broad philosophical discussion about whether to punish rich people for being rich or poor people for being poor.
 
acbytesla said:
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.
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I've been surprised by that myself. Up until about 2000, I really didn't see any need for huge changes in the concept of "college" and education in general.

Once youtube, edX, udemy, and now Zoom have become a thing, I sure can't figure out why we thing we need a geographically concentrated cluster of 18-22 year olds to provide the necessary skills for the next generation of workers.

Not that someplace like MIT doesn't have value. It's incredibly valuable to be in that kind of environment.

But that local, run of the mill, college down the road that you go to if you didn't get admitted to the University of Michigan? Maybe we could find a better way, and I've felt like this for at least a decade, but if anything, the four year college's hold on education has grown stronger even as the technology needed to replace it has matured.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Well it seems we're not talking student debt reform at all, but rather having some broad philosophical discussion about whether to punish rich people for being rich or poor people for being poor.
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So far I've only seen suggestions to punish the poor by compelling labor usually reserved for those convicted of crimes.

Taxing the wealthy to pay for needed social spending isn't punishment. Stuffing them into guillotines is punishment, and I have yet to see anything of the sort suggested. Requiring the rich to pay more taxes isn't punishment no matter how much they cry about it.

Such moralizing is inevitable. The conservative mindset often revolves around the ideological belief that everyone in society is where they deserve to be.

While there is no shortage of moralizing from progressives and those further left, I have yet to see any such framing of the issue here.

A single person in debt is a personal problem. Large swaths of population in debt during the prime working years of their life, causing them to modify their spending habits and life decisions in service to that debt is a society problem.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Well it seems we're not talking student debt reform at all, but rather having some broad philosophical discussion about whether to punish rich people for being rich or poor people for being poor.
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We should punish poor people who attempt to become rich, for not staying in their lane. How can we accomplish this? By convincing them that to become rich they need to spend enormous amounts of borrowed money. When they drown in debt this will slap them back where they belong and encourage the rest to know their place. The only fault with this scheme is that we'd have to lend out the money...perhaps we could get the government to chip in?
 
TragicMonkey said:
We should punish poor people who attempt to become rich, for not staying in their lane. How can we accomplish this? By convincing them that to become rich they need to spend enormous amounts of borrowed money. When they drown in debt this will slap them back where they belong and encourage the rest to know their place. The only fault with this scheme is that we'd have to lend out the money...perhaps we could get the government to chip in?
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Ouch.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
This is tedious. I've interacted with you enough to know you're not this obtuse.

Productivity and wages aren't inextricably tied. The entire history of labor relations shows that haggling over how much a worker's productivity should belong to that worker is very much a contentious issue.

Let's say all the burger flippers get together and form a union that forces the burger joint owners to increase their wages. This kind of thing still occasionally happens, so it's not an absurd hypothetical.

Did their productivity instantaneously increase once the union agreement was signed by management? Of course not.

Acting like worker wages is some immutable property of the universe and economy is absurd and you know it. Such things are the frequent matter of government regulation in pretty much every country on Earth. Please don't peddle this smooth-brain nonsense, it's unbecoming.
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I'm talking specifically about the problem of a creditor's return on their investment.

The whole point of a loan is that it gets paid back. With interest. If loaning you money won't put you in a position to pay it back, what's the point of making it a loan? If the only job you can get underpays you to the point where you cant cover the costs of your education, what's the point of loaning you money for your education?

At that point, you should call it what it is: A gift.

And if you're giving such gifts with taxpayer money, you need to have some good explanation for the taxpayers about why this is the best use of their money.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
So far I've only seen suggestions to punish the poor by compelling labor usually reserved for those convicted of crimes.
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What, because I suggest that loan forgiveness should be accompanied by minimal community service? I fear you betray your own classist snobbery here: you don't place a value on work! You think "labor" is something bad, a punishment for criminals.

Work is work, it needs to be done, and people ought to be paid to do it. That's the exact opposite of punishing the poor.
 
Efficient use of resources isn't a capitalist/socialist position, it's just basic common sense.

If you went 16,000 dollars (the current average debt at the time of graduation here in the US) into the hole to get a a degree in something that begins in "Liberal" and/or ends in "Studies" that's hardly my problem. You didn't learn a useful skill, you obtained knowledge which, again, you can get for free/pocket change in 2020.

Society has a duty to spend its overall resources on things that will return that investment. That's, again, not a capitalist/socialist position it's "not being intentionally stupid."

There's no Polysci 101 approved clustering of government ideals where society paying for people to go to college to get whatever degree "they" want to get makes sense.
 
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Meadmaker said:
... I sure can't figure out why we thing we need a geographically concentrated cluster of 18-22 year olds to provide the necessary skills for the next generation of workers.
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Maybe it was just my major, but there were still a lot of things I did in college that were physical, such that we used specialized equipment or did physical things that sometimes required a TA to lean over a shoulder to show how its done.

I mean chemistry lab, physics lab, use of spectrometers and gas chromatographs, chemical testing, dissection, growing plants in greenhouses (because its hard to grow them anywhere else in February) to compare fertilizers and such. We had a four week field camp at the beginning of the program and a one-week camp at the end.

It's going to depend upon the field of study, but a lot of fields would still require an on-site presence.
 
theprestige said:
I'm talking specifically about the problem of a creditor's return on their investment.

The whole point of a loan is that it gets paid back. With interest. If loaning you money won't put you in a position to pay it back, what's the point of making it a loan? If the only job you can get underpays you to the point where you cant cover the costs of your education, what's the point of loaning you money for your education?

At that point, you should call it what it is: A gift.

And if you're giving such gifts with taxpayer money, you need to have some good explanation for the taxpayers about why this is the best use of their money.
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Given that the creditor is the government, prompt repayment of the loans isn't the only concern.

We should call it what it is, public spending. I agree, the government should not be in the business of loaning money to students to pursue education. College educated citizens can pay back the government the way everyone else does, through taxes on their income and other wealth. Some people will consume more government services than they pay in taxation, others will not. Such is the nature of living in a society.
 
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TragicMonkey said:
We should punish poor people who attempt to become rich, for not staying in their lane. How can we accomplish this? By convincing them that to become rich they need to spend enormous amounts of borrowed money. When they drown in debt this will slap them back where they belong and encourage the rest to know their place. The only fault with this scheme is that we'd have to lend out the money...perhaps we could get the government to chip in?
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The real tragedy is that it's not even intended as a punishment. They're not supposed to drown in debt. This wasn't a genius plan to punish them. It was a sincere and heartfelt plan to really help them. The whole idea is that far from drowning in debt, they'll be swimming in profits. The nation invests in their education, their education gets them a high-paying job, and the high-paying job puts money back in everyone's pockets - debtor and creditor alike!

But somehow it's not working out that way.
 
There's definitely a feeding frenzy when it comes to government subsidized loans. The government guarantees loans, but does nothing to ensure that schools that receive the money are spending responsibly. Schools are in competition with eachother to attract students with fat wallets filled with public money, and that leads to an arms race of spending to make the campuses more luxurious and elite.

Nobody involved wants to curtail the gravy train. Not the college admins that are pulling fat salaries, not the loan companies that are guaranteed repayment, and not the students who just want to get the best education that the modern job market demands.

It's a true abomination that only a public-private partnership could dream up. The government, in the end, pays for it all because many of these students never repay the debt. The government pays, just in the most idiotic and detrimental way imaginable. Far simpler to just state fund the universities, stop the glut of cash, and provide quality education directly as we do for K-12.
 
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theprestige said:
I would fully support this, as long as we agree that it's essentially all one thing: College students are business owners whose business is failing due to some combination of misfortune and mismanagement.
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That's the way it use to be until the government changed it and made it impossible to discharge student loans.
 
Segnosaur said:
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.
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Yep, college loan debt is not a new problem. I'm well into retirement and both my wife and I had to pay back thousands of dollars in loans. My kids worked their way though with a combination of scholarships and loans, and my wife and I took care of those, too. I see the reasoning behind cancelling the debt, but those of us who had to pay 10s of thousands out of our pockets see another, possibly more selfish, side.
 
theprestige said:
The real tragedy is that it's not even intended as a punishment. They're not supposed to drown in debt. This wasn't a genius plan to punish them. It was a sincere and heartfelt plan to really help them. The whole idea is that far from drowning in debt, they'll be swimming in profits. The nation invests in their education, their education gets them a high-paying job, and the high-paying job puts money back in everyone's pockets - debtor and creditor alike!

But somehow it's not working out that way.
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Why isn't it working? I can see one obvious reason it's not: the high-paying jobs aren't being acquired. Either no jobs at all, or jobs that pay too little. So either a) the supply of jobs needs to be increased, b) the pay of jobs needs to be better, or c) the expense of the education needs to be reduced. Or d) some or all of the above.

If Lender X is willing to loan $YY,YYY to W for a degree in Q, is Lender X willing to hire W for a salary of some reasonable ratio to $YY,YYY? If Lender X laughs uproariously at the notion, says Q is useless, and the starting pay for an employee with a degree is 1/10,000th of $YY,YYY...then perhaps Lender X is more of a parasite than a symbiont to society.
 
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