51–60 of 564 posts
Loan forgiveness ... in essence, a form of vote-buying ... vote for me, and we'll forgive your loan (aka someone else will pay the loan).
If there is a chance that, at some point, we forgive loans - why would the cost of education ever decrease?
Even saying this a decade ago would have been labeled misinformation.
Loans are supposed to be inherently risky to the bank issuing the loan. Managing that risk is their business, and the reward for doing it right is the interest payments.
I remember people back then talking about "if the loans are non-dischargeable, then the bank is pretty much guaranteed it's money back, making it a no risk proposition to them. What's stopping them from becoming student loan mills? What's stopping colleges from asking for more and more money if the banks just lend it no risk?"
These ideas were out there, but get drowned out by the voices of the big pocket companies that are proposing the legislation. Tons of articles talking about the risk being overblown, the results are wonderful, etc. Think about the kids, good for 'murica, etc.
The big messages you hear over and over again in the media are being payed for by groups that aren't particularly interested in benefiting you. This is not a new problem, it's been this way for a long while.
And here we are 25 years later. Wondering how we got here. When anyone with a brain at the time knew this was coming.
The problem is only getting worse because of media consolidation and the vast reach of the internet into everyone's eyeballs. Be skeptical very of what you read.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We shouldn't see the government as solution to too many problems. If we overdo on it, we get socialism. And we know how it always ends. Let the market forces decide. Eventually people will realise college doesn't work and will stop going there. Seriously problem is that too many people think they are smart and can benefit from a degree, when most can't. If 10% top graders go to college from school as it was in the bo…
I question utility of that reduction. When you reduce complex situations to simple words like 'socialism' you lose nuance and predictive power. It's not binary. It's more or less. Canada is more socialist than USA. Norway is more socialist than Canada. Reducing to "is" or "isn't" doesn't help understand the problem or come up with viable solutions.
For God's sake, it will even kill custom software development which most people sitting here, do for a living - because it is the same exact thing - vast majority of clients never get what they want and even if they did they won't be able to make the money on the useless "products" they invented, because this is nothing but a systematic delusion that's moving them. Almost all of them see themselves as genius inventors of the next world-changing thing but they are in fact random nobodies who raised cash from other random nobodies, to waste it on something that makes their contractors laugh so badly they even refrain from doing video calls. It's even worse than higher education. I seen multiple software dev companies throwing lavish parties on the April Fool's day as "professional holiday of our clients".
Should we first look at ourselves in the mirror before blaming the college cabal for doing the same as we do ourselves, just more successfully?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, and jobs that selected by university degree wanted to implicitly select for class Making the path to go to a university more accessible is admirable. Entrenching this hiring practice with policy designed to enforce its implications on universities was always ill-conceived and the consequences have mostly been negative, creating a class of permanent debtors, turning universities into dysfunctional and corrupt qua…
And some jobs do. As I've noted elsewhere if you want to go into Big Law, you go to a relative handful of law schools, which are heavily fed by undergrad Ivies, and clerk at a high federal level.
E.G.: More expensive vocational programs that haven't been subsidized, selecting among universities for especially "prestigious" (read "class-signaling") ones, baking cultural assumptions of the upper classes into the expectations surrounding "professionalism" in the interview process, etc
We should be way more willing to straight up kill multi-billion dollar industries. Without that willingness, most modern problems are impossible for governments to solve, and such industries and even their potential competitors are incentivised mostly to exacerbate the problem. I love a good market as much as anyone but there really are problems markets will never solve
We shouldn't see the government as solution to too many problems. If we overdo on it, we get socialism. And we know how it always ends. Let the market forces decide. Eventually people will realise college doesn't work and will stop going there. Seriously problem is that too many people think they are smart and can benefit from a degree, when most can't. If 10% top graders go to college from school as it was in the bo…
First, no, we have some high-visibility examples of dictators claiming to be socialists, several of whom had purges of other internal opponents who said socialism was a different thing to what they were doing.
We don't point to the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea"* or "The Democratic Republic of Congo" then say of Democracy (or of republics) "And we know how it always ends".
Second, there's a huge gap between what the USA considers "dangerously lefty" and what is seen in northern Europe today, let alone states today which are or were explicitly socialist such as the USSR.
* AKA North Korea, AKA Naughty Korea
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But…the whole point is that it is NOT a market. If student debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are “solved”. Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. Universities that provide a poor ROI will shut down. Universities will need to reduce costs for traditional coursework, cut courses with poor returns, add courses with higher returns. Th…
> Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt. The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduat…
That's why the article's saying you should be able to declare bankruptcy.
> And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.
Teaching is relatively well paid and there are huge numbers of jobs. It's highly likely that a teacher could repay loans. There are plenty of degrees far less capable of providing employment than teaching.
Seems like a good overview, but I do find this bit unclear: "But why don’t market forces correct these issues? The answer lies in the unique shield that non-dischargeable student loans provide to educational institutions and lenders. In a normal market, if a product consistently fails to deliver value, consumers stop buying it. Producers either improve or go out of business. But in the world of higher education, this…
Another theory: The value creation is not linked to the value capture. So market forces make a bad feedback loop.
Look, I'm totally pro business, but business is only "good" at allocating capital when value capture and creation are linked. Education isn't like that. The closest we have are the bootcamp schools, where they take a cut out of your first 2 year's salary if you find a job or nothing if you don't.
When capture/creation are not linked, you need a different social organization method. "Government" or "Religion/non-profit" come to mind. Perhaps others have additional suggestions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But…the whole point is that it is NOT a market. If student debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are “solved”. Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. Universities that provide a poor ROI will shut down. Universities will need to reduce costs for traditional coursework, cut courses with poor returns, add courses with higher returns. Th…
> Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt. The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduat…
I think that a student debt could be replaced by dischargeable debt if you churned $100,000 of credit card cash advances in the same month, paid down your student debts, and then after the one year zero interest period expires, declare bankruptcy on your credit card debts that replaced your student loan debts. Can anyone confirm?