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U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

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Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#181

Post by Kephael »

jogjayr wrote: post #99
briandear wrote: post #37

This will be highly unpopular but it seems to me like a solution is to start doing some amount of payroll withholding for those with student loan debt similar to the way social security/Medicare is handled. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount, but enough to ensure repayment. Government forces us to “save for retirement” via social security, yet being debt-free is a far greater advantage in retirement than the retirem…

I rather like the idea of making student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy (not retroactively obviously). Why should borrowers alone face the consequences of their bad decisions? Aren't lenders equally complicit? I understand that educational loans are essentially unsecured loans. So fine, let them be treated like personal loans and let lenders evaluate their risk accordingly. It'll quickly put an end to letting an 18…

The government backs the loans and this ends up being a massive subsidy for academia. If loans were priced accordingly, far fewer loans would be issued and there would be fewer students in college, and fewer colleges and universities.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#182

Post by nickthemagicman »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #177
rubyn00bie wrote: post #138

Let it burn down. No one should pay back their student loan debt. Seriously, just stop. This is a scheme in which they've fucked over a large portion of the population with the skyrocketing prices of education. Further, this education is the regularly accepted means of increasing your production. Society says you have to do this, and then continuously increases the price, without reason. The gist of this is; some shi…

That would be the end of poor people going to college in this country, at least under the current legislative regime. The only reason anyone loans money to poor people to go to college right now is because they know the recipients can't get out from under the loans. A no-collateral loan to someone with few assets or prospects just wouldn't happen if that provision in the law didn't exist. Or the interest rate would b…

Yeah we'd have to do something crazy like say fund it....like we do K-12...

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#183

Post by ddebernardy »

sschueller wrote: post #9
alkibiades wrote: post #2

i predict we’re going to have to bail these people out. once a critical mass of americans do something idiotic, it becomes politically expedient to bail them out and blame the companies for greed. this is a direct response of the government providing unlimited loans to anyone

Who are be baling out? The middlemen? Aren't these loans almost all government backed? Meaning if the loan defaults the government pays the creditor?

> Meaning if the loan defaults the government pays the creditor?

Yes. And therein lies the problem insofar as I'm aware, because you then owe the money to the US government and you cannot declare bankruptcy on the US government. You can escape paying a ludicrous mortgage or car loan or what have you by declaring bankruptcy. You cannot do the same with the US government, which will garner your wages for all you're worth for the rest of your life if you don't pay back your student loan.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#184

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #160
iguy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> each course credit ... should all be subject to review on a periodic basis ... needs of the country This sounds horrifying. You want every change of a course to go via some central bureaucracy for approval? This bureaucracy will be staffed by ideologically neutral disinterested angels, regardless of which party is in power? I think there's a much more free-market solution here. Cap student loan payments at 15% of t…

The predictable outcome will be a glut of professionals with high-prospect degrees which will actually drive wages down in those fields, while useful-but-low-prospect careers - nursing, the arts, teaching - will continue to be underfunded and underpaid. There's already more than enough "ideologically neutral disinterested" distortion of social value created by so-called free markets everywhere else in the economy. If…

> If free markets were going to solve university education they'd have done it by now - just as they've been promising to for decades now.

The market in university education is not free, though. There are significant distortions induced by the various loan and scholarship policies enforced at both the federal and state level.

Has "the free market" been promising to solve university education? Is such a thing even an entity capable of making a promise? As far as I can tell, it's totally uninterested in doing so. Most reputable educational institutions are not for profit. The for profit ones seem almost entirely taken with the problem of bilking students and taxpayers by providing shoddy goods at outrageous prices and exploiting the student loan regime and ignorant customers. The university education system and the free market are, as far as I can tell, basically uninvolved with one another.

FWIW, I don't think the free market would solve university education either, for entirely foreseeable reasons. In a completely free market, universities and lenders would bet on the affluent, and the poor would be left out in the cold to an even greater extent than they currently are. But on the other hand, it's hard to blame the free market for the current state of affairs.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#185

Post by danaur »

bad_good_guy wrote: post #108
ourmandave wrote: post #32

This is why keep pushing my daughter towards a trade school. (Once you become immune to eye-rolling life gets easier.) There's a lot of companies with unfilled skilled blue collar jobs. And despite self-driving trucks, semi drivers can make some serious money. And HVAC projected job growth is 14% over the next 10 years. Thank you Global Warming!

Should you really be actively pushing your child in any direction? Would the best course of action not just be to make sure that trade schools are a completely viable choice, should she not be interested in an academic subject?

Parents should guide their children, you can argue about the level of guidance but the meme that you should give your child full control over what they choose to do isn't sensible

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#186

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #182
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be the end of poor people going to college in this country, at least under the current legislative regime. The only reason anyone loans money to poor people to go to college right now is because they know the recipients can't get out from under the loans. A no-collateral loan to someone with few assets or prospects just wouldn't happen if that provision in the law didn't exist. Or the interest rate would b…

Yeah we'd have to do something crazy like say fund it....like we do K-12...

That's an option, but not one that most Americans would support today, and probably not tomorrow either. At least not after you tell them what it would mean for taxes. All the pithy internet retorts to the contrary won't change this fact.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#187

Post by mycorrhizal »

why-el wrote: post #148
monting wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t mean to sound defensive (I’m not American), and I mostly agree with you. But, from a non-European perspective, Europe doesn’t seem to be doing well? It seems the EU is slowly disintegrating, and the monetary union isn’t working. Also the political landscape seems to be in turmoil as well.

This is a conversation about education. The EU, with all its faults, is leaps and bounds ahead of the US in the democratization of education, even though the US was the nation that pioneered the field in the first place. Goes to show how extreme the whole political spectrum of the US has gotten.

Aren't a lot of these European countries a lot more pragmatic (cut throat?) about who can go to college? For example in Germany, I was under the impression that around adolescence they start dividing people into the university path people and the non-university path people. I don't think this type of system would go over well in the US with its individualism/"control your own destiny" mindset.

I'm not saying the European countries have it wrong, but their systems seem far from free college for everybody (how it is often reported in the states) and much closer to free college for the worthy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#188

Post by rosterface »

troutwine wrote: post #174
rosterface wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I don't have a degree. That's sort of my point. It's very possible to just enter the labor market and make money if you work hard and smart. I'm a developer but I know plenty of people I grew up with who went on to be: military people, plumbers, cops... > there's a good number of folks with student loan debt they can't easily manage who made all the right decisions but got a bad break somewhere. I don't thi…

> Actually, I don't have a degree. That's sort of my point. Apologies, you didn't state that and I assumed. > It's very possible to just enter the labor market and make money if you work hard and smart. I'm a developer but I know plenty of people I grew up with who went on to be: military people, plumbers, cops... Then again, it's also not. Some fields absolutely require credentials and long-term education and we, as…

I actually agree with you. We need to rethink how education works and is funded. I also think education is valuable and needed in lots of fields.

I just don't think we should excuse people's existing debt. We should look to fix things in the future. Some of that is the realization that there's value to be created outside of credentialed fields. Some of that is also probably the removal of credentials as a requirement for many fields as well.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#189

Post by TomK32 »

monting wrote: post #135
RGamma wrote: post #127

From a European perspective I can only shake my head at this. It doesn't seem like a good idea at all to indebt a significant part of the young population (which I presume creates a lot of avoidable stress) while the rich gain in wealth and power year after year. But I guess longer-term thinking has been thrown overboard in economic decision/policy making anyway, because that would make the numbers not grow fast enou…

Don’t mean to sound defensive (I’m not American), and I mostly agree with you. But, from a non-European perspective, Europe doesn’t seem to be doing well? It seems the EU is slowly disintegrating, and the monetary union isn’t working. Also the political landscape seems to be in turmoil as well.

In politics things come and go in waves. Yes, there's populists but the Brexit chaos shows everyone that leaving the EU is a very stupid idea. Of course the Tories are ideal as they apparently love shoveling shit onto fans facing them. Unlike the unpopular US Congress, the EU parliament has members from 128 parties grouped into 8+1 fractions. I just wish we'd send our brightest minds into this parliament and stop member countries from abusing it as a semi-retirement for some of their politicians.

The EU is making progress every year: I grew up near a border which was gone by the time I was a teen and nowadays using my mobile phone in any of the EU28 will cost me extra. It's those small things that the people do love about the EU and would miss if they'd just think harder about it. It's also boost regions otherwise neglected by their respective country's government. No one in Westminster gives a fuck about the North or Wales, the EU does, with lots of money being invested.

I hope we see a decade of consolidation and more unification e.g. in the tax, finances and transparency. Junker's own blunders as Luxembourg's prime minister are unforgivable.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#190

Post by Mountain_Skies »

orzig wrote: post #157

Honest question: what are the best two or three studies showing where all the extra money has gone over the last few decades? If millions of people are losing, some set of people must be winning (by an amount roughly inversely proportional to their size). I understand economics is complex, feedback loops, etc., but with so much money flowing it must accumulate somewhere. And I’m sure people have studied it on a deepe…

There are many winners, probably some we'll never know. Real estate developers near universities are big winners. The living standard of the average student are much higher than they were in the days of shared bedrooms and a single large shared bathroom per floor. Apartments marketed to students are pretty upscale these days. For some students, their college years will be the peak as far as living standards go. There is a whole economic ecosystem that thrives off of student dollars that were nowhere as plentiful before easy federal student loans expanded.

The financial markets no doubt have some pretty big winners though the way all of that works is a bit convoluted and difficult to pin down individual winners. If there is no tsunami of default, the government itself (and hopefully taxpayers by extension) likely will come out a winner.

The money flowing through campuses flow out in many ways beyond student spending. New construction, salaries for professors and administrators, textbook companies, journal middlemen, and many others are all thriving off of the diversion of so much money into these institutions. In general it's good for the economy around the schools but a million little drags on the economy wherever the students live after graduation as their potential spending dollars are diverted to loan payments instead of the local economy.

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