Americans are weird about “socialism”. The way we do it is the government owning and running some rather low-cost universities. Bernie Sanders wants the taxpayer to pay for very expensive, private, for-profit universities. Of course that is not popular, that is like corporate welfare and special interest group lobbying. This should be about the government doing things directly to the people, without any third party getting rich on it.
I have very mixed feelings on this. But one of my concerns is that this will just allow higher ed to continue to raise their prices way beyond almost everything else. Why have their costs gone up so much? When you try and dig into the numbers one can easily see tuition and government support but its more difficult to find bottom line costs and the drivers of these.
I think we have the wrong policy on college loans. Payments should be limited to a per cent of income or alternatively to family net worth and the colleges should be on the hook to make up the difference. This I believe would drive accountability in the right direction.
BPS, I appreciate the dialog. I'm not against student load debt because it's student loan debt, or whichever argument one might choose. Those might include that the individual took on the debt willingly, etc.
I'm against student loan forgiveness because we don't have enough political capital to help struggling Americans, and in the fleeting years that we do have to make a difference, we need to spend that political capital on initiatives that benefit more Americans than only those who chose to go to college.
I believe homeownership strongly benefits a larger class of young Americans than student loan forgiveness.
1. Skill, talent, knowledge, experience gained during university are human assets which are salable in the job market, and of course, are retained even when sold.
2. I assume the truth of your claim that student debt can’t be forgiven via bankruptcy, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be.
3. As in 2., I think the government should eat the debt in the case of bankruptcy. Otherwise, they are no more responsible than a private bank (stupid, but not responsible). If the parents had taught their children not to trust the government like they should have, the students would have known better. You don’t really expect the government schools to teach them that, do you?
4. Hyperbolic, unsupported claim.
5. First: who was pushing this agenda? The ivory tower academy and their indoctrinated alumni in the bureaucracy, which is still obsessed with getting equal outcomes for the “oppressed”, regardless of merit. Second: and yet many people did not take the bait, did not go to college and are still succeeding. Regardless, people, whatever age, should feel the consequences of their bad decisions no matter who influenced them. Yes, there is the possibility of mercy. But it should be the decision of those who would be (have been) harmed, which in this case are the taxpayers, not the Biden administration (which has already been spanked by SCOTUS for this unconstitutional power grab). If it’s going to happen, it has to be done by Congress.
The rest of your post is just hand-wavy excuse making. Of course they had a choice, and of course they are responsible for their choice.
1) Most people don't actually use what they learnt at university in their jobs - they aren't instrumenatlising their education. Even if what I go on to do in my career is pro-social, did my education really benefit the public if I could have done that job just as well without the degree, and in fact I only needed the devree to *get* the job?
2) Quite a lot of people use their degrees to get themselves into jobs that provide questionable or nonexistent social value. If I graduate into a well-paying finance job for one of the big 4, is that really a "public good" or just something that makes both me and my employer a lot of money?
Education is a public good insofar as it helps citizens function in society, or helps them build the institutions of the future. But I'm not sure universities do all too much of that.
Fully agree. Really, the funding arrangements for high ed need to be revamped regardless of whether the government ultimately indulges in some broadscale loan forgivenness, and I'm dumbfounded by any subset of the pro-forgiveness crowd that is desparate to preserve the existing loan-making practices without modification: recommending loan forgiveness is, necessarily, also an admission that the current system is malfunctioning.
Americans are weird about “socialism”. The way we do it is the government owning and running some rather low-cost universities. Bernie Sanders wants the taxpayer to pay for very expensive, private, for-profit universities. Of course that is not popular, that is like corporate welfare and special interest group lobbying. This should be about the government doing things directly to the people, without any third party getting rich on it.
I have very mixed feelings on this. But one of my concerns is that this will just allow higher ed to continue to raise their prices way beyond almost everything else. Why have their costs gone up so much? When you try and dig into the numbers one can easily see tuition and government support but its more difficult to find bottom line costs and the drivers of these.
I think we have the wrong policy on college loans. Payments should be limited to a per cent of income or alternatively to family net worth and the colleges should be on the hook to make up the difference. This I believe would drive accountability in the right direction.
BPS, I appreciate the dialog. I'm not against student load debt because it's student loan debt, or whichever argument one might choose. Those might include that the individual took on the debt willingly, etc.
I'm against student loan forgiveness because we don't have enough political capital to help struggling Americans, and in the fleeting years that we do have to make a difference, we need to spend that political capital on initiatives that benefit more Americans than only those who chose to go to college.
I believe homeownership strongly benefits a larger class of young Americans than student loan forgiveness.
Thanks for considering my perspective.
v/r
Joel
https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/financial-security-for-young-americans
https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/student-debt
I’ll go through your reasons one by one:
1. Skill, talent, knowledge, experience gained during university are human assets which are salable in the job market, and of course, are retained even when sold.
2. I assume the truth of your claim that student debt can’t be forgiven via bankruptcy, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be.
3. As in 2., I think the government should eat the debt in the case of bankruptcy. Otherwise, they are no more responsible than a private bank (stupid, but not responsible). If the parents had taught their children not to trust the government like they should have, the students would have known better. You don’t really expect the government schools to teach them that, do you?
4. Hyperbolic, unsupported claim.
5. First: who was pushing this agenda? The ivory tower academy and their indoctrinated alumni in the bureaucracy, which is still obsessed with getting equal outcomes for the “oppressed”, regardless of merit. Second: and yet many people did not take the bait, did not go to college and are still succeeding. Regardless, people, whatever age, should feel the consequences of their bad decisions no matter who influenced them. Yes, there is the possibility of mercy. But it should be the decision of those who would be (have been) harmed, which in this case are the taxpayers, not the Biden administration (which has already been spanked by SCOTUS for this unconstitutional power grab). If it’s going to happen, it has to be done by Congress.
The rest of your post is just hand-wavy excuse making. Of course they had a choice, and of course they are responsible for their choice.
I wish I could have been more positive.
Education is a public good and there was never any reason for student loans to exist in the first place. It's asinine bullshit.
Two problems with "education is a public good":
1) Most people don't actually use what they learnt at university in their jobs - they aren't instrumenatlising their education. Even if what I go on to do in my career is pro-social, did my education really benefit the public if I could have done that job just as well without the degree, and in fact I only needed the devree to *get* the job?
2) Quite a lot of people use their degrees to get themselves into jobs that provide questionable or nonexistent social value. If I graduate into a well-paying finance job for one of the big 4, is that really a "public good" or just something that makes both me and my employer a lot of money?
Education is a public good insofar as it helps citizens function in society, or helps them build the institutions of the future. But I'm not sure universities do all too much of that.
Fully agree. Really, the funding arrangements for high ed need to be revamped regardless of whether the government ultimately indulges in some broadscale loan forgivenness, and I'm dumbfounded by any subset of the pro-forgiveness crowd that is desparate to preserve the existing loan-making practices without modification: recommending loan forgiveness is, necessarily, also an admission that the current system is malfunctioning.