This is a quick read in case anyone is unfamiliar with student debt "onwership":
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081216...
U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt
271–280 of 457 posts
Re: U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt
#272Is this news? The global elites harvest young people for profit just as they do older people with subprime mortgages, etc. Sorry for sounding cynical, but that is just the way I think the world works.
While not news, figures like this:
In the past 12 years, we have added a trillion dollars to
that amount and gained about 4% in the overall college
graduation rate.
Re: U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reality doesnt match your expectation. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/15/college-enro... And note there are more low-income people than high-income people demographically.
There may be less poor people in college, but it can be easier for poor people to pay. There is sort of this no man's land where a person (or their family) makes just too much for assistance, but not really enough to pay. My family fell into this area while in college, and I worked 20-30 hours/week on top of a normal 12-15 hour course load. To make up when I took 12 hours, I also went to both summer sessions each yea…
This is a case of middle-class complaining how they dont get the same benefits than a poorer-class. It can be unfair, but secondary to the reality that being poor makes college way more difficult even with that help.
Re: U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, but how does that translate into policy? Fact 1: Education in the US is very expensive, in large part because the ready availability of loans removes most downwards pressure on prices. Fact 2: If you are loaned money to obtain a degree which is not economically valued then you will not be able to pay it back. Fact 3: If you loan people money without expecting people to pay it back, then it's not a loan, it's a…
Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.
If we have basic income, why do we need to be educated at all? Just stay home and live minimally.
Re: U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt
#275Welcome to cheap guaranteed federally backed money. Private institutions will continue to jack up education prices, because they know kids will be able to get loans from the government to pay for them. It's too late for me, and millions of others paying back enormous loans, but I dream of the day school becomes affordable. There was a time, you could work you way through college washing dishes. Schools existed WAAAAAY before federal assistance.
Re: U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basic income. Free tuition. An outright grant, no repayments. Literally zero barriers except ability for anyone, for any level of academic achievement in anything. Result: a culture with a lot more understanding of the real world, and the preservation of human and humane values, rather than a laser focus on the hand-to-mouth of Jobs Right Now.
If we have basic income, why do we need to be educated at all? Just stay home and live minimally.
Because democracy. One of the major reasons we need education now.
Re: U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt
#277Re: U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry but, insinuating that humanities and arts are "hobby educations" is pretty rude and smacks of superiority complex. Look at the achievements that have stood the test of time and become valuable to us as a species. It's a pretty beautiful blending of scientific achievement and artistic achievement. If this system can't encourage both, let's not go to war with the arts, let's make the system that we invented,…
Don't apologize for personal attacks, just refrain from them. Any argument made by starting with calling someone rude or accusing them of having a superiority complex, can only be made better by instead empathizing with rather than dismissing opposing viewpoints. What's even worse is patronizing a mis-characterization of someone's statement. > I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies. This indeed is a…
Telling someone that their humanities education was all a hobby is a much greater insult than calling someone out, so I'll let the universe sort out who was the true meanie-head here lmao.
Re: U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that is obviously ridiculous. > I have friends with theology degrees who work in business and earn more than I do in technology with my CS PhD. The companies that hire them value having people with a very wide range of academic backgrounds. That has nothing to do with their degree and everything with their ability. They would probably still get hired without the degree. Degrees only really matter in formal subjec…
Its actually not ridiculous at all. There is a lot of study on the idea that the main value of education is not what you actually learn but much more signal that you are dedicated, motivated and have the ability to learn. There is a huge argument going on right now about how much of the value is signal vs actual knowledge you need for the job. There is a lot of evidence that suggest that signal is a huge part of the…
> There is a lot of study on the idea that the main value of education is not what you actually learn but much more signal that you are dedicated, motivated and have the ability to learn.
A signal, I can agree with that. But isn't that only because someone is unable to signal that (s)he can be a valuable asset in other ways? The type of person to only rely on their degree is probably a person that isn't creative enough to find more effective ways to market themself.
I think education is great and learning new things is massively important in life. I just personally don't believe in the degree fetish that a lot of people have. Just look at the quality of the average graduate in a lot of universities and/or colleges in the US and Europe.
To me, at best, a degree is an inefficient way to differentiate yourself from a group of similar people with similar skills. Maybe not a bad thing if you're at the start of your career. But at worst, it has zero additional value.
Re: U.S. Citizens Now Hold About $1.3 Trillion in Student Loan Debt
#280There seems to be a strong sentiment in this thread that the only value provided by education is the contribution to career (e.g. that loans should only be provided for financially viable courses, that studying arts is as useful to one's career as studying finger painting, etc). This just seems so wrong. Optimising for vocational training means you're effectively tuning out the abstract arts and sciences and... oh, t…
The only value provided by education is certainly not contribution to career. The question is should certain types of education be more directly subsidized by taxpayers than others.
The underlying theory of subsidizing tuition is that a college degree increases lifetime earnings, which increases GDP and the tax base, ultimately paying for itself. Generally speaking, investments which do not pay for themselves are considered bad ones.
Taxpayers don't want to make bad investments in subsidizing college education. Clearly this is happening at a massive scale, but I think liberal arts degrees are just the scapegoat. The reality is that $1.3 trillion in mostly unpayable and undischargable debt is a problem much bigger than earning the wrong degree.
With the housing bubble and subsequent crash [1], the truth is that not everyone should have a mortgage, and pushing the homeownership rate above 64% was not sustainable. But college degree rates are on a much longer term and steady rise, and there's not clearly a bubble [2] but maybe I'm looking at the wrong data.
If $1.3 trillion in student debt didn't actually result in significantly more people getting degrees than otherwise would have, then we are talking about a completely failed policy which is merely padding school endowments. Literally nothing to do with choice of degree.
Imagine an alternative policy; making a $1.3 trillion investment in building and endowing 5,000 public universities. Significantly increase the supply of college education to drive down the cost. Would that have worked better?
[1] - http://cdn.tradingeconomics.com/embed/?s=unitedstahomownrat&... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
