Education Department Forgives $415M of For-Profit College Debt
wsj.com
wsj.com
If you pay $250,000 to become a chef/cook - that is insane. That is ONLY possible with federal funding, no private lender would fund that.
I think similar issues exist with a fair number social science / ethnic studies / minor language degrees (greek etc). If you go through to a Master or PhD in ethnomusicology, while very cool (yes, I took a class along these lines I very much liked) -> the market isn't there currently in academia and the private market is to some degrees worse.
Seems like those sorts of situations are well into the territory of "if you owe the bank $1,000,000,000 then the bank has a problem"
Isn't this about private loans? Seems like it according to the title and the non-paywalled portion of the article.
250k for life long wage garnishments could be a good deal.
I'm sorry, what are you referencing here? That number doesn't appear in the linked article.
I mean, I'm sure there's an anecdote somewhere that matches, but that's hardly a representative description of the program. The debts in question are things like $40k loans for tech-related degrees from degree factory places like DeVry and ITT which are known to not have the value claimed at enrollment.
Now, there's a really good argument that, indeed, the Federal government shouldn't be subsidizing DeVry to issue junk degrees! But that's not well argued by talking about hypothetical sous chefs with quarter million dollar balances.
I would expect 8-9 semesters needed to get the 129 credits needed.
9 * 24K = $216K.
So that's $200K+ for a culinary arts degree.
If you study ethnomusicology and get a PhD I could run some numbers that would make your eyes pop :)
I liked the part where you made up the numbers you could've looked up. Average loan for CIA is 7k/yr = 28k per 4 years.
Yes, you can absolutely pick numbers that are unrepresentative to make a point. But as long as you're arguing in the real world, it would be cool if your argument was based in the real world.
Is this not a double edge sword tho?
Prior to student loans you more or less had to fund it yourself, which people did with a part time job or summer job. When they decided they wanted education more accessible and introduced student loans, all of a sudden more people could afford school and schools increased their prices 10 fold over time.
When, of course, it's a bailout for private lenders the government needs to keep lending. If some students are helped, that's at best a side effect.
Debt gets erased, lenders get nothing. Everybody wins except the irresponsible lenders.
I'm fine with this. But uhh, feels like people would complain about gov't overstepping it's bounds or picking winners/losers...
And if the answer is that you'd rather have the tax write-off I would love to take out a personal loan from you. And I don't imagine you'll be in the lending business for very long.
Or become a citizen of a country that is not hostile to its population.
In many countries you can get decent education for free.
As it should be. Because educated population that is drowning in debt is probably going to lead to better outcomes in the future.
You can have poor parents, not be particularly bright, work hard to get your education and start your life with no debt at all.
People in developing countries like Vietnam study German in high school so that they can study in a German university for extremely cheap.
"Emigration for thee but not for me"
Meanwhile the smart ones who got stuck with college loans and worthless degrees figured out it's better to teach English abroad for 6x a local's salary and substantially less hours.
Plus most US universities have resources for students whose first language is not English, probably most countries have something similar. Picking it up by immersion is hard but it’s supposed to be the best way to learn
Textbooks and parents pressuring kids to focus on their education can do it. There's also a million free online resources for learning a language in English, not so many for people who speak a less infernationally-utilized language.
The U.S. spends 1% of GDP on public support for tertiary education: https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF1_2_Public_expenditure_educat... (page 2, panel B). That's right in the middle of the G7: less than Canada, France, and Germany, but more than the U.K., Japan, and Italy.
What's extraordinary about the U.S. is how expensive tertiary education is overall: 2.5% of GDP, the highest in the world. American universities spend a lot more money per student on administrators, student services, facilities, etc.
That's extremely atypical. AFAIK the average student debt at graduation is around $35k.
Or is the plan just to forgive the loans, throw the money on the govt. balance sheet and let the for profit college owners sail away on their yachts.
If I recall correctly, these schools were not sufficiently held accountable for borrowers who couldn't repay loans. They only tracked students' ability to repay for something like two years. I think policies were adjusted so that such predatory lending for a poor education is no longer possible. It's probably a game of cat, mouse, businessmen and politics. I doubt anything was done 2016-2020 since that president once ran his own for-profit U, but I think some changes were made before that.
What is the gold standard for accountability here? Does a large state university track repayment ability for longer periods?
It perpetuates choosing degrees that will in 90% of cases never have enough of a return to pay for the loan itself.
Look, I’m not against choosing whatever degree you want. But fiduciary responsibility is doing even a tiny bit of research to see the LTV of that degree.
Unless there is out and out fraud, very little of student loans should be forgiven.
How are you going to measure it? Philosophy majors tend to have good life outcomes. Is that because they were trained in philosophy? Why would training as a chef be less valuable than training as a philosopher?
>>> Look, I’m not against choosing whatever degree you want. But fiduciary responsibility is doing even a tiny bit of research to see the LTV of that degree.
Under a system where there was no gov't guarantee, the students won't be the bottlenecks - the lending institutions would be. And any loans that a student _could_ obtain under that scheme would necessarily be profitable to the lender, and thus the lender gets to do the research. The students could too - but whatever the students find, if that doesn't match up with the lender's own research/analysis, the loan won't happen.
they would avoid bad behaviour by the lenders not enabling it. The lender's incentive must align with the student's incentive - getting a paying job that a degree would enable.
- A philosophy major -- the degree -- is a poor investment on the part of the student.
- A philosophy major -- the student -- is a good investment on the part of the lender.
The incentives of the lender and the student are not aligned. It doesn't matter what the philosophy student wants to spend his borrowed money on -- he's creditworthy! If you loaned him money for gambling he'd still pay you back.
So how does the creditworthy prospective student determine which degrees are valuable and which aren't?
valueable to who? If the student is credit worthy, then they can pay back the loan, which means they aren't making a bad decision to study something they want to.
The current status quo with the gov't backed loans is that uncredit-worthy students still gets loans, which results in the situation you tried to describe - someone borrowing to get an education with which they cannot repay the loans. If that student wasn't backed by the gov't guarantee, noone would have lent, or would've only lent some small amount that is likely to be repaid.
(1) eric4smith suggested students should put in some amount of effort to determine the value of obtaining a degree. How are they supposed to do that?
So far I've gotten four responses completely ignoring the question, even though I restate it every time.
Why are you commenting in my thread, if you have so little interest in listening to anything I'm saying, or even in discussing the only topic I've ever brought up?
Fine, i will answer that, even though it is irrelevant. Because no matter what the value that is determined by the student, the linchpin is the lenders' willingness to bet on the repayment.
A student can value the degree financially, by looking at the post-graduation salary, and potential career progression, discounted by some probability of not making it. Salary information is readily available for common professions.
A student can also value in part their interest and passion - a degree in history might not bring money in a career, but gives the student personal satisfaction. Therefore, the student would value the degree higher than the same degree being valued by a financial lender.
Alternatively, it's fairly winding down the adverse effects of government-sanctioned programs that saddled people with debt for the promise of degrees that will in 90% of cases never have enough of a return to pay for the loan itself.
No one argues that these were bad loans and bad degrees. We all agree they shouldn't have been written and that we shouldn't be doing that going forward.
But there are still a bunch of young adults out there with unsustainable debt. Isn't that a problem worth doing, well, something about?
Loans that produce higher profit than the interest payment is a good (aka, non-parasitic) loan. The student loans _could_ be good, or could be parasitic - it depends on the degree. Unfortunately, because of gov't guarantees and backing, the risk of the loans is offloaded to the taxpayers, but the profits taken by the private institutes. This is what makes it parasitic in most cases.
If a private entity is not willing to make the loan, then the gov't shouldn't either. Then naturally, only the non-parasitic loans would be given.
There are other ways for true risk sharing such as paying someone with a business idea cash in exchange for a portion of his business. If it succeeds, both parties benefit, if it doesn't, both parties lose.
> and hence not a very objective method of measurement.
It is very possible to measure the outcome of such system. Look at our current financial system today how corrupt it is, and compare it to the financial laws that Islam defines and the financial health of the resulting societies in each. Wall St would have to be shut down because of the immoral and parasitic practices it engages in (shorting, selling what you don't own, options, selling debt for debt, loans and mortgages, money printing (we know who's in bed with the fed) etc. etc.). The problem is that people keep believing they can patch the system to make it work out, but in actuality, the system only benefits a select few at the top, while everyone else suffers. The end is not going to be pretty when it all comes crashing down.
Money lets us pretend that society must pay the cost of spoiled grains by replacing them with fresh grains free of charge. So people must constantly raise prices or stop working.
Interest free loans, yes. Interest bearing loans? They're immoral and parasitic.
> The problem is that people can simply hold cash for free.
Islam solved this with Zakat.
Free or cheap education seems to be a far better idea than enormous loans to pay for overpriced for-profit colleges. Education is not just about earnings potential; it's also an investment in society as a whole. A society with a well-educated population is better off than one without. Although expensive education that doesn't provide any job prospects is kinda pointless, and those definitely do exist.
Citation needed. The prosperous America you live in was built by generations where the vast majority of people hadn't gone to college. When Intel was founded in 1968, only about 10% of the population had four or more years of post-high school education. When Apple was founded in 1976, that number was still under 15%.
Since then it seems we've hit diminishing returns. 35% of the population has a college degree, but that just means your receptionist has a college degree, where previously they would have been a high school graduate. Waiters and bartenders are more likely to have a bachelors degree today (about 15%) than the general population was back when Intel was founded. Does that make us better off?
I strongly suspect our economy would continue to run fine if half the people who go to college now never went (and we banned the practice of requiring college degrees as a threshold filter for people who have their shit minimally together).
People quickly learn they are complete crap and perception is reality so the degree becomes worthless when looking for a job.
The actual price paid of four year colleges has been dropping even as the sticker price has going up in the US. The discount rate is at an all time high. Almost every student gets some kind of tuition discount.
If you want to save money going to college in the United States either get a scholarship (if you can) or go to two years of community college in-state, get good grades, and then transfer to the best in-state school with the program you want to major in. You will earn a four year degree for a reasonable price.
This comment reeks of privilege. It ignores the fact that vulnerable people, poor people may have made a decision to to try to improve their future at a young age, say 17 or 18, and are forced to live in debt when their situation isn’t improved or worsens over time.
Loan forgiveness should be a tool that can be used to relieve suffering and/or stagnation in some circumstances. Hardly a horrible idea.
So whether or not it’s a poor choice doesn’t really matter. The impact of that choice is really too difficult to understand until later in life, at which point it’s too late.
The end result, and really the only thing that matters, is that young people in America are royally fucked, and many aspects of that are outside of their control. Bad societal things tend to happen when a certain class/generation gets completely screwed over (many examples throughout history, including the French Revolution and World War II.) Which is why it’s important to solve the issue instead of blaming people.
With student loan forgiveness specifically, there are more options than just forgive everyone. We need to change how federal loans work moving forward to avoid more problems. At the same time, you could forgive loans if the total dollar amount you’ve paid matches the principle of the loan. (Lots of people are on repayment plans where they only chip away at interest.)
But the real question is why would it be a bad thing to allow young people to have an extra several hundred to thousand dollars per month? Obviously there would be a huge economic impact. Ok the one hand, people could spend more on local businesses, which would almost definitely be good. More spending in general is good for the economy. On the other hand, more people start being able to afford “expensive things” like houses, which are very scarce. In those markets, competition would increase, highlighting the scarcity we already have.
But the root problem isn’t that people can suddenly afford a better life, but that we’re putting up with scarcity in several parts of the economy. If we also made economic or policy changes to promote abundance (e.g. an abundance of new housing above and beyond population growth), that problem also goes away.
We all want to live in a better world, I’d hope. Public student loan repayments are regressive and have no place in this better world unless they’re changed drastically.
For example, one could easily imagine a loan forgiveness program where only people making less than $50,000 a year have their loans forgiven. Or a program where the loans are not forgiven all at once, but the regular payments are taken over by the government, and the person becomes responsible for the payments themselves if they begin to make more than some inflation-adjusted amount.
People with higher education tend to make more.
It’s a regressive policy. Not necessarily a bad policy. But one that favors the better off.
We should only be subsidizing loans for degrees that have a decent chance on being able to pay the loan back. A lot of these degrees are fraudulent in that regard. I know higher education is supposed to be more than a trade school, but when student loans are concerned, viability in the workforce needs to be taken into consideration.
Of course, companies used to prioritize and hire people with degrees regardless of what the degree was in because it proved they were teachable. I'm not sure why that isn't the case any longer.
Around 2000 when my friends and I went to school a few picked expensive private school art degrees, English lit etc. Thank goodness I'm a nerd and chose CS, because I did it with absolutely no regard to earning potential.
What I'm getting at is that with all the fallout of the loan crisis, I think there's a lot more awareness of what higher education is for the 99%. Let the uber-rich learn extinct languages and medieval cooking, the rest of us need jobs.
The Boomers fucked up American culture in so many different ways.
Many colleges, to their credit, are shifting their focus more and more to outcomes and average salary potential.
"The loans of nearly 16,000 former students are being forgiven under a legal provision known as borrower defense to repayment, which allows students to have their debts erased if they prove that their schools defrauded them."
I paid off my student loans for the state university I attended. How does a student who can prove they were defrauded being forgiven penalize me?
You're also missing the illegal behavior on the part of the for-profit institutions. That's what we, as tax-payers, are on the hook for. And we would be on the hook for it regardless. You want to complain, complain about the for-profit institutions that defrauded these people illegally for us to have to clean up.
those who took a sacrifice to pay off their loans would not have had to make the sacrifices had their loans been forgiven like the article claims.
Not receiving a grant that is paid for by taxpayers is a form of "penalty".
There are plenty of necessary degrees that don't provide enough compensation to pay off the loans of people who take them. We don't pay money in this society for people who provide necessary services. If you think that we do, then please, by all means, explain to me why Software Engineers (a profession invented in the last 50 years), get paid more than farmers (a profession that defines how humans have come so far).
Plus supply and demand, farm labor can come from Mexico for cheap, but firmware software engineers in agriculture aint coming for the same price
Yes, farmers need Software engineers to make complex GPS software, which is why we didn't have farmers until after software engineers became a profession. Before software engineers made gps for tractors we were all hunter-gatherers.
The first part of your comment is so absurd I legitimately can't tell if you're serious.
Nothing Software Engineers are selling to farmers is necessary to do farming. I don't even have to go back that far to make this case. You don't need tractors with GPS on them to farm, because people in the 1960s had tractors without GPS. GPS might make things slightly easier, but it's not changing enough to justify the difference in salary between someone who does work that literally feeds the entire population of a country, and someone who tracks your location.
One of those things is absolutely critical to survival, and the other might occasionally be helpful. It's the difference between a 'need' and a 'want'. I need food to survive, I want an app that can give me directions to an address.
And not everyone needs farmers believe me, especially overpaid american farmers. Food can be imported dirt cheap from other countries.
The short explanation is supply&demand dictates wage, big supply of farmer labor in an increasingly automated agriculture + low supply of IT labor doing that automation dictates pricing.
Are farmers really that important? We import a lot of food and heavily subsidize farmers already.
Only if you think eating is important.
>We import a lot of food
> In 2019, the United States ag exports account for $128.718 billion with soybeans, beef, veal, pork, poultry and fresh and processed fruits and veggies topping the list. United States agriculture imports total $127.6 billion with coffee and cocoa, fresh and processed vegetables, and grains and feeds accounting for the majority.
We're a net exporter. We import a lot of speciality foods (coffee/cocoa) grains and livestock feed. Doesn't sound too appetizing.
>heavily subsidize farmers already.
I believe we mostly subsidize farmers to not produce things as to not flood the market (see agriculture during Great Depression). Ethanol is an exception though.
With the rising costs of tuition year after year, it’s becoming unreasonable. And when they’re not dischargable during bankruptcy, it’s giving a middle finger to the poor. Saying, “F you, I got mine” doesn’t solve anything. Something needs to be done about it.
During interviews for my current position as an L6 in the AV space I wasn't asked until a degree until post offer, and even that was a recruiter asking in passing.
Turns out you can just... not go to college and learn things on your own.
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I don't necessarily agree that people with bad loans should hang out to dry, but in my opinion this mess should fall on schools first.
They got to use 18 year olds to cosign unsecured loans. Simple as that.
A school can't ask a bank for a $500 million dollar unsecured loan. But it can ask tens of thousands of kids to each bring back 50k.
Now that the jig is up I want to see for-profit schools held accountable for the practice.
The class of people affected by this are not the worse off in this country. There are a lot of places where trillions of tax dollars could be a bigger help than college grads.
I completely agree. But loan forgiveness, more student loans, or lowering the risk/cost/burden of student loans will only put more money in the system and drive up prices.
Tuition costs are a horrible situation that really needs to be fixed somehow. But loan forgiveness will only make things worse.
If it's the bigger problem, propose a better solution. And actively prove to me that not doing this is better than doing nothing. Because what you're proposing is the status quo, and we can both agree that's really shitty at the moment.
Also, even if you fix tuition costs, it won't change the fact that there is a mountain of student loan debt that isn't going to get paid back. What should we do when people can't pay it back?
1. Fix the college accreditation process. Currently it involves colleges wining and dining accreditors for a week. Change the standards to be more practical and open up the possibility for more colleges. We could even change the accreditation so that it allows for things like trade school and apprenticeships. I think that would certainly fix tuition costs.
2. Push for making budgeting a required high school course in more high schools.
1. I don't know anything about the accreditation process, but sure, if there's excess spending there then not allowing people to bribe accreditors definitely seems like a positive decision. I can't imagine that fixes millions of dollars worth of tuition cost... But ultimately not opposed to it.
2. Famously high schools teaching people classes means they use it later on in life. Not saying we shouldn't teach people budgeting, just that I doubt that it will fix the number of kids that go to college when high schools also want people to go to college.
Your reasoning is incredibly shortsighted and selfish.
Right now the Amish are able to 'opt out of social security.' Very much this were an option for atheists and those outside of these religious exceptions. I'd agree to sign my death warrant and never be bailed out by society if they agree to let me opt out of the insurance plan.
>bunch of middle men leeching
Hopefully attempt here won't merely substitute administrators and insurance leeches for government bureaucrat leeches. I'm all for tossing out the leeches. Concierge / cash only medical offices are one way to do this, but a well run single payer system could probably achieve it as well.
I also think your idea of being able to opt out is interesting, I think this could be a viable concept but I don't know how it would be implemented. It would seem that there might be two parallel systems if that were to happen.
You indicate other people shouldn't have to pay for their healthcare. How were you proposing it be paid? The main options I think of are the ones I mention, either charity or men with guns to enforce payment (taxes) of this charitable endeavor. Unless you are a doctor and you'll be performing this directly for these people.
Of course, it would be incredibly shortsighted and selfish to use violence to enforce ideals of charity.
>no idea what you're responding to.
Now you know. I'm responding to you.
I know if I had a loan right now I would be biden my time until it got forgiven.
I have a radical idea. Make medical school free, and expand residency slots. Whatever this will cost will more than be made up by a dramatic reduction in doctor salaries[1]... And medical costs in this country coming back down to Earth.
We don't charge people for elementary and high school because an educated population is necessary for the well-being of the country. Well, so is the availability of doctors.
[1] The average general practitioner's lifetime earnings are 8.5 million. I'll happily pay a million for their schooling, if that number could be halved.
the money wasted on bailing out student loans - has already been pocketed by Betsy Devos alike, maybe we should stop funding 18 y.o. for useless degrees from College of Lost Hope, AL.
public schools are funded with housing property taxes, they are NOT free. Compare house prices in good school district vs bad and their tax bills
And in the case of doctors, it's my money, and I can either pay now, or pay five times later.
I don't yet know how I feel about this, but I can't help but think its probably best for humanity that these people can live normal lives now. On the other hand, are these people now who I'm competing with for resources (e.g. housing, etc)
All I really know is that I'm glad I finally paid mine off, at 34yrs old no less..
I want to live in a world full of intellectually curious, creative people who build things. I think we can best do that by giving people access to education, health care, housing, food, and physical safety.
The positive externalities of an educated populace are massive.
I think the choice is between: (1) punish people because it's fair, and live an objectively worse life because everyone around us is miserable and dysfunctional (2) tune policy to support people, and live an objectively better life because everyone around us is healthy, productive and creative.
Immiserating debt destroys lives, and destroyed lives makes all of us worse off.
> The positive externalities of an educated populace are massive.
These people are already educated.
Debt payoff ideas send money to people with degrees, but they do nothing for people didn't go to college or who haven't yet graduated.
The problem needs to be solved at the source, not periodically bailed out after the fact. If you just pour more money into the system, tuition will skyrocket and people will become insensitive to the astronomical prices. Why even price compare if you just expect the government to pay it off for you later? Expenses would continue to spiral out of control at an accelerated rate.
>"The positive externalities of an educated populace are massive."
Forgiving existing debt does not increase the level of education of the populace. Conditionally forgiving future debts could, though there would be collateral effects.
>"I think the choice is between: (1) punish people because it's fair, and live an objectively worse life because everyone around us is miserable and dysfunctional (2) tune policy to support people, and live an objectively better life because everyone around us is healthy, productive and creative."
Failing to forgive debt is not a punishment, it's just holding people to their obligations. It definitely does support them, but the question would be why only support people who took on debt? Why not support the people who made different decisions too?
>"Immiserating debt destroys lives, and destroyed lives makes all of us worse off."
If you just want to forgive debt, why limit it to student loans? Why not forgive healthcare debts? What about consumer debt after Christmas? How about gambling debt? All of those make people worse off.
Now we're on the same page! We should absolutely have universal healthcare.
> What about consumer debt after Christmas? How about gambling debt?
Religious holidays and gambling do not improve our society. An educated, healthy populace does.
Otherwise you have to repeatedly forgive the debt. The message you are sending is to consume without regard for prices or temperance as that will be rewarded in the end.
This acts as a negative externality as it erodes trust in the rule of law (many countries do operate like this, and they are terrible places to live)
What are they?
I encourage you to spend your money supporting the ideas in which you believe.
Let us know how it goes.
If you'd prefer to not take part in these social structures, feel free to leave.
Let us know how it goes. Or don't.
I don't see why "acting in concert" implies forcing me to pay for things in direct opposition to my heartfelt belief via the coercive levers of government. Go find likeminded bleeding hearts and have a nongovernmental ball.
Why can't debt forgiveness take the Jerry Lewis/Shriners private donation route?
Then you'll do you. I'll do me. We'll all win.
No one is “punishing” anyone. There are homeless people freezing to death who could use the money.
You are conflating life and death necessities like food and shelter with someone wanting to binge drink for 4 years while getting an underwater basketweaving degree.
Bernie did the same thing.
I know plenty of people who went to 4-year colleges to get Social Studies degrees, and then went on to do social work, and guess what? Social Work doesn't pay well enough to make up for that. In one case I know, literally helping the homeless people who are freezing to death. And the person had to stop doing that work cause they still couldn't pay off their loans.
I agree, but it was the choice of the people who borrowed to risk destroying their own lives, and it is not remotely fair to ask the rest of us who worked hard, made hard choices, and sacrificed things we wanted to pay back the debt of those who didn't.
I worked my way through college and commuted from my parent's home so I could afford it. I also went to a much lower-tier state school where I could get a scholarship.
I would have loved to live at school and have that experience. I would have loved to go to a higher-end but more expensive school where I didn't have a merit scholarship, and to be able to go without also working. But I sacrificed those things so that I could graduate with as little debt as I could, and I worked hard to pay that debt off.
How is it fair to now tell me I have to pay off everyone else's school who chose not to give anything up?
You could even simplify it and just give me the money. I have like 100 students this year. Will direct debit be okay?
But also, I love it when people's response to debt forgiveness is "I suffered, so other people should have to suffer too." I guess it's time to start taking people's eyes, it will save us time because we're all going to be blind sooner or later.
The highest debt loads obviously go to expensive graduate degrees like lawyers and doctors. Medical school is vastly more expensive than a regular college degree.
That's why none of the proposals would actually wipe all student debt. Plans to pay off the first $10K of debt and such would be far more equitable than just paying off everyone's debt. The latter would vastly benefit graduate degree holders, a cohort which has the highest earnings and lowest unemployment. Would be terribly dumb to do that.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/01/st...
I think defaulted student loans should be charged back to college to create accountability
Paying off people's college debt is also highly regressive. Why give $50-100K or more to people with college degrees, but nothing at all to people who didn't go to college? Doesn't make sense.
We can extend and pretend mortgage backed securities but not student loan debt?
I'd be in favor of low interest rate consolidation programs.
But let's be clear: That's still far, far cheaper than just paying off everyone's student debt from taxpayer money.
It seems absurd to me that people think the solution to high prices is to have someone else pay part or all of it for them.
This is a proposal to fix the mountain of debt that's preventing Millenials and Gen X from purchasing property and building wealth. It is only intended to fix that problem which will be a remaining symptom/problem of the increasing price of education, even if you propose a magic solution that stops education costs from increasing.
So whats the difference between that and someone else who buys a house and realizes that they actually don't want to pay 40-50% of their income on housing payments and demands the Government/or bank give them the house for free due to it being unfairly priced?
Where I have a problem with this line of thinking is it totally throws personal responsibility out the window. You knew the costs and you signed up anyways. Do I think college costs are criminally high? absolutely. Do I think for profit diploma mills are predatory and should be shut down? yes.
I just have a huge issue with people who paid $200k-300k for a liberal arts degree where the jobs pay $30-$70k a year and then demand the government cancel their student loan debt due to it being too high. Its a slap in the face to the millions who never could go to college because they weighed the calculations and realized it does not make financial sense or came from background where they had no support for such an endeavor.
Also, where's the responsibility to colleges for selling these degrees to people (children) who have no hopes of paying them back? That's predatory. This article covers just the righting of the harm done on the people who fell into that predatory lending trap.
Her best friend went to Pace and ended up with $250k of tuition/books/boarding for her liberal arts degree, so yeah total fabrication on my part :)
Also, you're presupposing that all liberal arts degrees are bad, and I would contest that as a person who went to a liberal arts college. Also, My takeaway from your 'anecdote' possible we should pay social workers more because the cost to get that degree isn't covered by the work that they would do afterwards...
These numbers surprised me, I guess I haven't been paying very close attention:
"There are around 43 million Americans with student debt.... All told, Americans owe around $1.6 trillion in federal student loans and more than $130 billion in private student loans, according to the data company MeasureOne. About 5.2 million federal borrowers are in default."
Forgiving loans will continue to increase demand (and prices) for housing and other assets, right?
Awesome
>WASHINGTON—The Education Department will discharge another $415 million in student debt held by borrowers who said they were defrauded by for-profit schools that misrepresented their graduates’ employment prospects or otherwise swindled them, federal officials said Wednesday.
>The loans of nearly 16,000 former students are being forgiven under a legal provision known as borrower defense to repayment, which allows students to have their debts erased if they prove that their schools defrauded them.
This is unrelated to general federal student loan cancellation, which is still a good idea. It isn't as if the debt would be discharged without changes to the loan programs themselves.
But before we get into the discussion regarding cancellation in general it's important to acknowledge this has nothing to do with that.