I am generally anti-forgiveness on the basis that no one is proposing we FIX the issues you lay out. I know people (C students in high school) who racked up 30K in student loans in their first year of private school and then dropped out. Probably sitting on a balance of around $45K now. That should never have happened. To my knowledge, debt forgiveness isn't really being proposed in conjunction with meaningful change to the system.
There are some uncomfortable truths about the fix-- we might return to a time where kids who are ready and able to go to college will not be able to. The post-secondary education industry is immensely powerful in the US and should be seen as a powerful industry rather than some lofty pursuit of knowledge. Universities are the basis of small town economies throughout the country. Cracking down on them risks a larger economic fallout. It's a mess & there are no painless solutions.
To forgive without making other changes seems silly and even borderline unethical. What about the current cohort of kids entering college? Does it not matter that they are being manipulated and given predatory loans? Or should we forgive on a rolling basis every time there is a new Democrat president?
On the flip side, my soon to be wife has $30k in student debt (also a Pell Grant recipient). Wouldn't mind some forgiveness coming our way. It really shows that everything is about the culture war when few on the right complained about PPP loans (extremely abused program) but middle class conservatives are going crazy on Facebook about an imagined liberal college student receiving a pay-out.
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.
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 enjoyed your article, thank you.
I am generally anti-forgiveness on the basis that no one is proposing we FIX the issues you lay out. I know people (C students in high school) who racked up 30K in student loans in their first year of private school and then dropped out. Probably sitting on a balance of around $45K now. That should never have happened. To my knowledge, debt forgiveness isn't really being proposed in conjunction with meaningful change to the system.
There are some uncomfortable truths about the fix-- we might return to a time where kids who are ready and able to go to college will not be able to. The post-secondary education industry is immensely powerful in the US and should be seen as a powerful industry rather than some lofty pursuit of knowledge. Universities are the basis of small town economies throughout the country. Cracking down on them risks a larger economic fallout. It's a mess & there are no painless solutions.
To forgive without making other changes seems silly and even borderline unethical. What about the current cohort of kids entering college? Does it not matter that they are being manipulated and given predatory loans? Or should we forgive on a rolling basis every time there is a new Democrat president?
On the flip side, my soon to be wife has $30k in student debt (also a Pell Grant recipient). Wouldn't mind some forgiveness coming our way. It really shows that everything is about the culture war when few on the right complained about PPP loans (extremely abused program) but middle class conservatives are going crazy on Facebook about an imagined liberal college student receiving a pay-out.
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.