59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse • Hacker News Board

Re: 59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse

#81

Post by pc86 » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #71

pc86 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the length of time won't tell you much. I owe about $15k, but I graduated in 2008. For the longest time I was making basically interest-only payments because I didn't make enough. Then I was making interest-only payments because I was trying to catch up on my retirement contributions. Then I was making interest-only payments because I was making more money in the market. Then COVID. Now if payments are re-instat…

> maybe think about what jobs you can get after school with whatever you want to study What if the answer is "college professor"? We can't have college at all without college professors, and it's a very long, treacherous road from undergrad to grad school to tenure track to tenure. Many people, perhaps most, get lost along the way. Yet society needs kids to keep trying, or we have nobody at the end.

I think this says more about grad school than it does the costs of undergraduate education. You just have to look at the competition for tenure track faculty positions to see that there are plenty of people qualified for the positions who want them today. As far as I know there is no drought of applicants for prestigious grad school programs either.

Re: 59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse

#82

Post by mountainriver » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

l30n4da5 wrote: post #61

immigrantheart wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Student debt is a personal responsibility. It is a personal choice. There are people who knowingly decided not to take higher education because they knew it would make them go into debt and instead went to work instead, providing for their family. These are real tangible opportunity cost for these people who decided that they couldn't afford college debt. If you forgive student loans, then those people who went on de…

> Student debt is a personal responsibility. It is a personal choice. While I agree with you, to an extent, you cannot ignore than many young people were pressured into going to college, and going to a 'good school' by the authority figures in their life at the time (be it parents or school counselors). they were sold the lie that college would pay for itself, and for many it has not. I got lucky, personally, and don…

Yeah and now they have a good degree from a good school which is advantageous over someone who was more frugal.

Re: 59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse

#83

Post by tzs » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

spywaregorilla wrote: post #51

lapcat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who are these people with $80k balances of debt? A lot of them are graduate students. > Off the cuff, this group seems like the least important to pay off Why do you say that? We're now seeing senior citizens get their Social Security garnished for student loan payments! Do you want to see people with a lifetime of student loan debt?

What kind of grad students? Excluding PhDs because people don't typically take on debts for those we've got med school, and masters programs. The former should be cheaper but it seems very inappropriate to bucket them in with the general population. The latter could vary wildly in terms of ROI.

> Excluding PhDs because people don't typically take on debts for those we've got med school, and masters programs.

Also law school.

Re: 59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse

#84

Post by richm31415 » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

immigrantheart wrote: post #45

whoomp12342 wrote: post #11

wow, what an abstract and deplorable example of NIMBY. i.e. "we want people to suffer crippling debt because we are worried about bananas costing 10 cents more"

Student debt is a personal responsibility. It is a personal choice. There are people who knowingly decided not to take higher education because they knew it would make them go into debt and instead went to work instead, providing for their family. These are real tangible opportunity cost for these people who decided that they couldn't afford college debt. If you forgive student loans, then those people who went on de…

"Hipsters on Food Stamps" or "Why would someone take out $100k student loan to go to U of Chicago to earn a 'useless' degree? And why does it make me so angry?"

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_sta... https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_sta... https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/12/product_review_panas...

Re: 59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse

#85

Post by josephcsible » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

dbingham wrote: post #50

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #25

I don't know how you can have a blanket forgiveness of student loans without also addressing college costs. Otherwise consumers become even less price-sensitive, expecting another round of forgiveness in a decade or so.

College isn't a consumer good. We need to stop thinking of it as such. It's a prerequisite for the vast majority of jobs. Which makes it a vital public good that should be run as a utility. We should be running a public university system with the goal and assumption that everyone has a seat at their local university - covered by their tax dollars.

Water and electricity are vital public utilities too, despite the taxpayers not being forced to pay for those for everyone else.

Re: 59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse

#86

Post by raxxorraxor » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #7

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…

Does it really pay for itself or is that only true for law, medicine and engineering degrees?

Re: 59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse

#87

Post by peteradio » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #56

buscoquadnary wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> partied hearty during school This is a straw man.

Not necessarily, we don't have the stats in front of us. My anecdata matches this pretty well though.

Re: 59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse

#88

Post by mountainriver » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

dktokyo wrote: post #70

immigrantheart wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Student debt is a personal responsibility. It is a personal choice. There are people who knowingly decided not to take higher education because they knew it would make them go into debt and instead went to work instead, providing for their family. These are real tangible opportunity cost for these people who decided that they couldn't afford college debt. If you forgive student loans, then those people who went on de…

Many of these students lay at the generational divide between college guaranteeing a great job (during the generation when most people went to high school and then trade) and college being a prerequisite for any job (today). And those universities only became so expensive because the federal govt guaranteed loans in the first place. University is radically more expensive than it was a few decades ago. It's not as sim…

His point still stands that giving everyone 80k is more fair. The people who took out huge loans for degrees still have degrees from nice schools which will likely help them in the future. This shouldn’t be a win-win for people who mismanaged their money

Re: 59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse

#89

Post by buscoquadnary » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 3:04 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #73

buscoquadnary wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So the most important follow-up question to all of this is when did you do it? College costs have risen exponentially faster than just about everything other than healthcare, especially over the last 10-20 years. I graduated almost 15 years ago, and I am starting to think that anyone who graduated more than a few years ago simply cannot comprehend how bad it is to have to pay for school now. Average annual tuition at…

Finished my MS last year, finished my BS in 2018. So there's that, and you don't need to go to a fancy pants top of the line university. Plenty of ways to make things more affordable, like go to a community college for your associates then transfer to a full university.

Maybe I do have an impressive lack of understanding of a dozen or so topics, but I grew up as the oldest of over 5 children to a single mother who was a school teacher, I spent most of my school time on free or reduced lunch, and was categorized statistically speaking as likely to end up low achieving. So sure there might be mitigating circumstances for some people, but I don't think that we can completely abscond with the idea of personal responsibility.

Further the reason school costs have continued to rise is because the schools know everyone will get a loan for it because the government pumps a bunch of money into just this one sector through the loans, by forgiving loans you are incentivizing a continuation of school's increasing price because they face no consequences for it and will still receive the money they want.

Finally if you aren't convinced by my account, I have a friend currently finishing his degree, he has spent his entire summer laying concrete in the hot sun for hours a day, busting his but to provide for his family and have enough money to finish his degree, so that is currently happening. To pretend that college can't be afforded without ridiculous loan is hokum.

Re: 59% of Americans worry student loan forgiveness will make inflation worse

#90

Post by nradov » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 3:04 PM UTC

dbingham wrote: post #50

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #25

I don't know how you can have a blanket forgiveness of student loans without also addressing college costs. Otherwise consumers become even less price-sensitive, expecting another round of forgiveness in a decade or so.

College isn't a consumer good. We need to stop thinking of it as such. It's a prerequisite for the vast majority of jobs. Which makes it a vital public good that should be run as a utility. We should be running a public university system with the goal and assumption that everyone has a seat at their local university - covered by their tax dollars.

Obviously college isn't a prerequisite for the vast majority of jobs. The majority of people working today don't have college degrees. Look outside the tech industry bubble. In many cases, employers only list a college degree as a job requirement because it's an easy way to filter down an excess of job applications. If they were actually short of labor they would eliminate that requirement in order to get more applicants.

Most people don't belong in college in the first place. It's just a waste of their time, and a waste of resources. I'm certainly not willing to pay higher taxes so that students can goof around and party for 4 years. What we really need is expanded access to trade schools and apprentice programs.