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More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

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Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

#221

Post by billmalarky »

AutomationTool wrote: post #56

This one is easy. People are buying things that they can't afford. Throwing it into a loan and then partying their way through school. Since that worked out so well, then they do that with their car, house, furniture, cell phones, and car rims. You aren't entitled to 100,000 dollar education. You aren't entitled to go down to Mexico every spring break. you aren't entitled to eat pizza and hit the bar every weekend. Y…

>I have zero sympathy for junior who goes to some 150,000 a year liberal arts college and gets a degree that makes no money or requires another 2-4 years of school.

Then you're an asshole. Young people with zero real world life experience make poor choices often. Sometimes critically poor choices. It's a part of growing up to fail and the fact that you can't squeeze together an ounce of sympathy for these folks suggest you have a lot of growing up to do yourself.

Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

#222

Post by emmelaich »

tdeck wrote: post #171
valj wrote: post #24

From the article: "Department of Education ticked up to 18.8 percent as of June 30, up from 18.6 percent the same time last year, new federal data show." There's your answer - 0.2pp is totally insubstantial, which makes the title borderline clickbait. The economy doesn't uniformly grow or distribute wealth, so a change so small could just be from the distribution of college leavers in a particular year being overinde…

Here are more depressing statistics: https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/funding-d... tl;dr: States have been cutting back on funding public education even as it's gotten much more expensive every year.

And more: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23843

> Small business lending by the four largest banks fell sharply relative to others in 2008 and remained depressed through 2014. We explore the dynamic adjustment process following this credit supply shock. In counties where the largest banks had a high market share, the aggregate flow of small business credit fell, interest rates rose, fewer businesses expanded, unemployment rose, and wages fell from 2006 to 2010. While the flow of credit recovered after 2010 as other lenders slowly filled the void, interest rates remain elevated. Although unemployment returns to normal by 2014, the effect on wages persists in these areas.

Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

#223

Post by lovich »

mejin wrote: post #97
fhood wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of lessened "value" of degrees, University's need to be held accountable for some of the debt that they are encouraging students to take on. For example, at my public university, STEM students were charges several thousand dollars a year more than humanities students. STEM programs also did their best to discourage enrollment. Meanwhile the anthropology department is literally begging students to stay and ge…

Some vacation companies advertise that people should take loans to go on vacation. Should they be held accountable when it turns out that adding that you went on a cruise to your resume is just as useful as adding that you got a useless degree? In fact some colleges advertise their college as you would advertise a vacation. They use terms like "college experience".

No,but the government isn't also paying employees to tell people in schools and since they were children that they _need_ to go to on a cruise or be doomed to a life of mediocrity/poverty. Our college system in the US is having a similar problem as our healthcare. We've decided everyone needs it badly and it's better for all of society to have it, but we leave it up to corporations to serve that need when they will take advantage of the extremely inelastic demand.

It's like having an open wound next to a hungry tiger and being surprised when they try to eat you. The government should be setting price ceilings on schools that take Federal loans if we as a society have agreed that it's such a worthwhile goal as to ensure everyone can go and that we will pay for it

Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

#224

Post by lettergram »

kiliantics wrote: post #189
lettergram wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, student loans are rediculously high. Every adult I know always pushes college, but had I been given a $100k loan to buy a rental unit at 18, I'd have turned that into $250k by the time I finished 5 years of school. Not to mention, I could have worked a 9 - 5, $25 / hr job, and bought a second or third... Perhaps school isn't the best in many cases. Now I pay $1k a month in student loan payments, on top…

Where do you get a 9-5 job that pays $25/hr without going to college? I know adjunct professors that get paid less than that.

That's the median starting salary for a lot of places. I was actually speaking to a UPS driver about how that was his starting salary..

Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

#225

Post by Fomite »

pmorici wrote: post #212
Fomite wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. States slashed higher education spending during the recession, and it's not coming back. At the same time, federal grant money got tighter. Student tuition is literally the only dial left that can be moved.

Have you considered that universities might be able to operate more cost efficiently? Purdue University has manged to freeze tuition for the past 5 years for example. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q2/purdue-plan...

I know the university I'm at has been holding the line in my college as long as it could, and its finances are screaming. And it's done a great deal of trimming along the way.

Purdue also has a $2.443 billion endowment. The university I'm discussing is a public university with maybe a sixth of that after a major capital campaign.

But what actually happened? It's state allotment got slashed in half, capital improvements are no longer covered, and the per-capita payment per student has stalled while we've admitted more students.

Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

#226

Post by djrogers »

tbirrell wrote: post #36

Serious question: Who loses out if all the student debt got canceled? Not the colleges, I assume, because they already got the tuition. And not the students. So would it be loan companies and the US government? Would such an action be catastrophic?

Student loans are mostl federally backed, so the US taxpayers would lose out.

Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

#227

Post by lovich »

pmorici wrote: post #212
Fomite wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. States slashed higher education spending during the recession, and it's not coming back. At the same time, federal grant money got tighter. Student tuition is literally the only dial left that can be moved.

Have you considered that universities might be able to operate more cost efficiently? Purdue University has manged to freeze tuition for the past 5 years for example. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q2/purdue-plan...

To add to your point. Schools have massive expenditures on things that have nothing to do with learning _and_ do not bring in money. Its one thing to spend money on something like basketball if you are UCONN and you routinely bring in enough revenue to cover the costs or even post a profit.[1] Its another thing to keep spending millions on your football team that does not bring in that much money[1] These are just one example in a school system. There's similar waste everywhere, like redoing the landscaping every few months so prospective students always see a fantastic looking campus, or the massive increase in administrative staff. The schools don't try to be more efficient because they don't have to be. They don't have legally set budgets and everyone can get students loans since they cannot be discharged so they can just dial up tuition.

Our whole financial system is built around accurately accessing the risk that an investment will be paid back and charging an interest rate commensurate to that, but its thrown out the window once you can try and convince the least experienced adults in the country to sign on the dotted line.

Until banks stop getting paid whether or not they made a good bet on someone's college expenses, or the schools are given a limit on what they can spend, its not going to change. My fear is that this won't happen in any way but a massive amount of defaults that cause the whole system to collapse unexpectedly and cause add on pain to the rest of the economy

[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-financial-impact-of-champio...

Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

#228

Post by almano »

olalonde wrote: post #218

I firmly believe that university is way, way overpriced in a world of free, high quality MOOCs. It just makes zero economic sense and I believe the market will correct this sooner or later. Think about how utterly inefficient it all is: you have hundreds of professors around the world, each mechanically teaching the same subject semester after semester to new students (I know, they do a bit more than that). Some will…

Christ, I've been struggling with this all month.

I finished college in 2014, worked in industry for three years, then came back to school for a PhD. I am now completely shocked that these undergrads are paying $60k/year to come here to listen to the same cookie-cutter lectures that are being given at thousands of other institutions across the country.

I almost feel embarrassed for the professors as well, having to act like they're doing something useful or valuable by giving this lecture, when in reality its just a mechanical performance.

I feel like you need 20-30 different MOOCs for each class. You need a tier 1 (MIT etc) level difficulty Physics I class, then a tier 2 class, and so on.

This would even be advantageous for students at 'top' schools (if they still exist), as it would be easier for a physics major to acquire cs skills if they don't have to go through their schools theoretically biased curriculum.

Its completely insane...

Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

#229

Post by PhasmaFelis »

1_2__4 wrote: post #108

I hate sounding both old and weird but I cannot shake the feeling that much of the claims of economic health and growth in the US is... if not fake (I’m not totally nuts) but not accurate. My most charitable interpretation if I’m right is that we’re using the wrong metrics (possibly intentionally) that give a distorted view of the economy. But I keep hearing employment is great, productivity is great, stock market is…

Official US government "unemployment" rates only include people who are "jobless, looking for a job, and available for work". This means that the graduate who can't find work, gives up, and goes back to his parents' basement is not unemployed. The guy who can't work anymore due to injury or chronic illness, barely surviving on disability, is not unemployed. The man begging for change outside the subway, who doesn't look for work because no one will hire someone who can't get clean clothes or a shower, is not unemployed. They are, rather, "not in the labor force."

Keep this in mind when you hear someone saying that unemployment is down.

Source: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#concepts

Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why

#230

Post by thephyber »

LolWolf wrote: post #196
trts wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hedonic adjustment" is meant to control for the 'quality' of some (limited) products sampled in the CPI such as rent, computers and automobiles. 'quality-adjusted' means that they run a standard linear regression across the features of sampled items to normalize the variation in the sample. For example, the sampled rent of apartments would be modeled as (in the simplest example I can think of) : y = rent, b = slope,…

> But there is no conspiracy; that would presume far more competency than they have hired for. This seems to be the case almost universally, but I guess it's easier to jump to the 'malice' conclusion than to attribute it to lack of competency. Perhaps more succinctly: if you think the world is out to get you, then it is.

> But there is no conspiracy

People want structure and simplicity in the world. They want to believe someone is in control, even if that someone is harming them.

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