121–130 of 153 posts
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I went to get my CompSci master in a public college somewhere in NYC, total cost $20k. Now I earn more than $250k/yr. You can get into college without spending insane amount of money. You can also choose a more marketable major.
What year was this?
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Is there societal value in art and the humanities at all? If not, why do we produce anything except engineers and financiers? That seems like a bigger cultural question that society needs to answer over decades, rather than saying to an individual student, "Haha! You picked the wrong major. Now you're fucked for life. Too bad." Most college kids going into school have no idea what they're going to be doing in the fut…
You're arguing against a strawman. No one here is seriously claiming that there is no societal value in art and the humanities. But we are currently producing a surplus of college degrees in those fields. Many of those graduates have no real artistic talent and no future in academia. Their educations were largely wastes of time and resources. As a tax payer and voter I am unwilling to continue funding that (or suffer…
However, if you're arguing that art degrees don't produce good artists, that's a separate argument altogether. It's a valid consideration, I think. But that's less of a question of "who should pay for education" and more "what is the value of education". I don't know enough about MFAs to comment on that, but I do know that there are many, many majors that don't produce high-income careers. I don't think that should be their goal or metric, personally. Maybe that's valid for trade schools, but society shouldn't only have tradespeople learning industry skills and nothing else.
That's the underlying concern... it's not a strawman, it's the whole point: that morally or economically, we shouldn't be evaluating human productivity on dollars alone.
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Healthcare is insurance for possible future accidents. A may have higher risk of breaking a leg, B may have higher risk of cardiovascular accident. Eventually it evens out. No matter how healthy lifestyle you lead, you've a risk of ending up in hospital. For active lifestyle it may be even higher :) Meanwhile student loan is past decision. As well as paying it back or not. Some people may have lived on noodles to pay…
You’re implying morality on rows in a database (the debt in question). > Some people may have lived on noodles to pay it back asap while others took the easy route. Indeed, life isn’t fair, and why policy shouldn’t inflict suffering “because it was hard for me.” (broad strokes) That’s not just silly, it’s toxic when expressed as policy.
Some people might think that life isn't fair, thus law shall not be fair either. But other people think that law shall make the world more fair. In today's world, frequently former group ends up :surprised pikachu: when later group ain't happy.
Personally, it's toxic if a law promotes irresponsible behaviour. Choose whatever crappy degree, never mind paying back the student loan... Society will bail you out! Same „too big to fail“ BS, just targeting a different audience.
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You could use the exact same argument even for many engineering degrees. A lot of people spend a lot of time, and money (from loans) trying to get CS degrees, only to fail to get through to upper division courses before changing majors. Is that money wasted? Should we move towards a model where your major is preselected for you before you attend college, based on your aptitudes, without you having any say in the matt…
We should move towards a model where the availability and interest rate of student loans is based on actual risk as determined from the default rate of previous students who attended the same school with the same declared major. Students will then be able to make informed decisions about which major to select and how much debt to take on.
That's not to say that student loan forgiveness across the board is necessarily a good idea, but inflation worries is not what we should be considering when discussing this topic.
The entire student loan debt issue has been framed badly, because hardly anyone understands the real problem: "As of March 2021, 54% of borrowers with outstanding education debt owed less than $20,000; 45% of the outstanding federal education loan debt was held by the 10% of borrowers owing $80,000 or more." https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/trends-college-p... Forgiving $10K across the board is dumb and mi…
I guess it seems to me that there are way more questions about those with > 80k. I am going to assume they ended up that way because they made poor decisions, like taking out massive loans to do things like not work, to attend over priced schools, to slack on school work and have to repeat school. I mean I worked full-time through school, raised a family and still managed to finish my BS in 18 months and MS in 12 mor…
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>> I guess it seems to me that there are way more questions about those with > 80k. I am going to assume they ended up that way because they made poor decisions, like taking out massive loans to do things like not work, to attend over priced schools, to slack on school work and have to repeat school. > So the most important follow-up question to all of this is when did you do it? College costs have risen exponentiall…
I'm torn on clawing the money back. I can think of 2-3 instances just off the top of my head where you could (legitimately) declare bankruptcy but the school shouldn't necessarily lose $50-100k because of that. Especially if nothing else about the current climate changes, all that will do is cause costs to rise even faster as the school just increases tuition to compensate.
Do you have an example? Like buying too much house and getting then getting fired from your job?
I suppose the bankruptcy judge could make a determination of the student debt was a major cause of the bankruptcy, and only clawing back the money in those cases.
> Especially if nothing else about the current climate changes, all that will do is cause costs to rise even faster as the school just increases tuition to compensate.
But wouldn't that quickly spiral out of control for the school? If they just increase tuition, then they'd get more money clawed back down the road (assuming it's an ongoing policy, not a one-time program). I'm thinking they'd mainly have to cut costs, dip into endowments, or do some fundraising to fill the gap.
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I guess it seems to me that there are way more questions about those with > 80k. I am going to assume they ended up that way because they made poor decisions, like taking out massive loans to do things like not work, to attend over priced schools, to slack on school work and have to repeat school. I mean I worked full-time through school, raised a family and still managed to finish my BS in 18 months and MS in 12 mor…
> I am going to assume they ended up that way because they made poor decisions That's a fairly flawed assumption.
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Looks like inflation's was as high as it was today in 2008. https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/07/06/...
No, it's not at all actually: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=T1OA
So not sure how you're deducing there was no inflation. The deflationary spiral happened AFTER the bank bailout.
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I agree. But I also think that they should be able to bankrupt out of them like Trump and many other rich people have done numerous times. Trapping students into non-bankruptable student loans is pure debt slavery.
Then every student will just declare bankrupty when they graduate and already have non-existent credit.