White House to extend student loan pause through August

I'd rather we just be more honest about the entirety of the problem space.

The loan situation is insane, and pretty much always has been. Universities get to increase tuition costs every year, don't have to respond to any market pressures because the US Government guarantees a loan to young people that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. What did people think would happen to college costs in this situation? Of course they would explode. Second, I don't think more people should go to college. I think significantly less should. There's a collective delusion that people learn things there, and some surely do, but it's become an "experience", a credentialing exercise, a "right of passage" all at once. For many people, developing a trade is a much better and faster path to financial security than pausing your income for four years, loading up with debt, and entering the market with dubiously useful degrees.

I'm a millennial, got my undergrad paid for via the military, and I feel like most of my high school classmates that didn't do that are just straight up screwed. They bought into a cultural moment that outright demanded that everyone do this same expensive exercise.

So, what is to be done ... is actually pretty simple: cancel the vast majority of debt and pay for it via a punitive excise tax on University endowments, and force them to respond by actually teaching people useful things. If said university can't make it in that environment then, well, now they know what it feels like.

I totally understand this perspective, I really do, I just disagree with it because I think it would be better to punish those who are responsible for the system being borderline fraudulent as-is. Everyone in my generation - and I mean everyone, outside of those already privileged enough to afford to gamble in the opposite direction - thought that without going to college you wind up poor. They think this way because they were told this as an axiomatic truth by guidance counselors, their teachers, and perhaps especially University recruiters who of course had a financial incentive to perpetuate this perspective.

The other problem is we did, in many ways, choose to restructure our entire economy around getting some degree to be used in the "new" economy, one that didn't have manufacturing jobs or other jobs that you could support a family on. These kids didn't choose this, elites and bureaucrats did, and as it turns out those degrees are still largely useless and certainly shouldn't require 4 years and $165k to get.

This is an okay analogy on the surface, but there is another dimension to the student loan debt situation. The borrowers are not the poorest/most vulnerable of the population. They are disproportionately from upper income brackets.

Sick people by and large don't choose to be sick. Picking a major with no earning potential and borrowing 100K to complete it shouldn't be my (the taxpayer's) problem

In this case it’s more like “why should the lower middle class pay for the upper middle classes interpretative dance history classes”

Educational institutions in general are utterly obese with bloat and it’s a direct consequences of moves like this. I don’t really put the same weight on somebodies right to learn within a brick and mortar institution instead of being auto dictate learning from the internet as I do on peoples right to healthcare, especially considering the economic argument for it has long gone out the window due to elite overproduction. The more money we pump in as well the more degrees flood the market and the more the credential requirements are raised to get any job forcing students to waste years of their life stroking the egos of incompetent teachers so somebody will give them a job.

A pox on fuelling the education cartel with more and more debt. Starve the beast.