OTOH, college is expensive for students, why don't self-taught people have to pay tuition fees as well? I think it's obvious that the being self-taught (technically: self-teaching?) and being a student isn't the same thing.
Are they not? If you're teaching yourself, you're by definition studying the subject matter, hence you're a student.
You're not a formal student but a student nonetheless.
> why don't self-taught people have to pay tuition fees as well?
That should be fairly obvious. Tuition fees are meant to (at least partially) pay for teachers (time, expertise), teaching infrastructure and ancillary structures to a formal education. Since you're self-teaching, you're providing all of those yourself. You could pay, but you'd pay yourself and that would be silly.
Note that I'm not arguing about the general point of the OP but rather about these specific points.
Those grads are never going to pay their loans off, so that's a 9% tax on their salary every month forever.
The only ones who can get out are those with family who can lend/gift the money to pay the loans off.
Well, 9% of your salary above £28k, and wiped 30 years after your first payment.
In any case, it means no-one is too poor to study at tertiary level (recognising that there will always be circumstances that mean someone cant') while still making everything can be funded.
It's not perfect, but no system is.
Edit: that’s what they were 10 years ago when I was a student. I’d guess it’s more expensive now.
In this case, it's the Scottish people—both those who have and those who haven't had their own schooling subsidized.
Do you think the people reading it don't know this? Are you trying to make some sort of implied argument?
Sure, but why shouldn't it be treated the same for the purpose of free dev tools.
People are currently arguing that we should.
Edited subsidy to bailout.
Sue the school if they lied to you about the prospects of the degree. If they didn't and you went into this deal clear eyed, why am I paying for your years of partying?
But I was too poor to even think of going to University in the UK, and that's not even half as bad as it is in the US; it's not just the student loans; it is also student living (rent, food, supplies), putting earnings on hold for half-a-decade and the possibility that you may not even have anything to show for it in the end (if you can't hack it or if the degree turns out to be not in-demand) it's not like you're guaranteed work.
It's a gamble, and a hard one to make if you're from a lower-class blue-collar or non-working household.
I'm sure I'll get a deluge of very privileged people here telling me that it would be effectively free to have an education in the UK due to certain debt forgiveness models and earning thresholds, I'm aware of those, but people would be hugely missing the point.
All it will do is encourage more borrowing in the hope that there will be another future round of forgiveness. And lenders will have every incentive to offer those loans in the hope that the government pays for it. This money will enable colleges to raise tuitions more, and we get the same problem we've had, just grown more.
Instead allow student loans to be disengaged in bankruptcy. Just like other debts, and just like student loans could before George "W" Bush changed the laws. Now students aren't incentivized to hope for another forgiveness round, lenders aren't either, and we aren't pouring fuel on rising tuition. Plus we'd offer ongoing assistance to those who got in the worst binds. (Unpleasant assistance to be sure. But not a one time bandaid, and very precisely targeted at those who need it most.)
Countries that offer free tuition tend to pay universities directly and cap payments. That provides a strong incentive for universities to control costs. Similarly students who take advantage of the prospect of free tuition do not themselves go into debt.
By contrast student loan forgiveness involves forgiving loans to students who have already gone into debt. This makes their private loans easier to pay for them. The prospect of this makes people more willing to go into debt. Nothing about this program gives universities an incentive to control costs.
Rather than compare this to free tuition, it is better to compare this to other programs that make it easier for students to borrow to pay high tuition. The USA has had a lot of these programs, and the result is one of the factors driving tuition to rise faster than inflation for a half-century now.
I'm just predicting that the result of this program will be the same result that we've seen for the last half-century.
Normally a subsidy is established in advance to incentivize some behaviour, like... manufacturing solar panels or something.
A retroactive payment to only specific indebted solar panel manufacturers is called a bailout and does not have that effect, unless it was widely anticipated. It distorts the competitive landscape because it gives them a leg up over competing manufacturers who held back on investments that they would have made if they'd known the debt would be forgiven, and over new companies who are about to take loans to invest in their own factories, who now have to compete against fully-amortized equipment.
So in other words, it's not really a proper subsidy unless it's also available to new students going forward. But due to the weirdness of the education market, that would probably require some form of tuition price controls too.
One complex bit of debt forgiveness is what happens with those who have sacrificed much to already pay off much of their debt. Should they get some kind of repayment?
We need to stop treating colleges and college administrators as only the purest churches and priests.
It would be a major net positive if half of all universities went bankrupt, as was already predicted by HBS professor to be in 10-15 years.
I took out students loans and struggled financially with very little help from my parents. I graduated with about $25k in debt.
Ten years later, I’m finally about to pay it off completely. I’ve been very fortunate to get jobs with salaries that allowed me to do this.
I realize not everyone is fortunate in this way. But, at least in America, college is a financial decision. The argument about whether or not it should be is meaningless here. People knew going in what the cost would be, and how much in loans they’d need to take out.
Someone taking out $100k for an art degree made a decision that likely wasn’t very wise. Why should someone that made more responsible decisions and made sure they’d be able to pay their debts now foot the bill for those that didn’t? This isn’t like other welfare — food stamps, for example. This is someone taking out a loan for something and not being able to pay it back.
It might not directly benefit me because I worked to make sure my student loan could be settled. It’s a really tough sell to anyone that has done that. Had I felt confident we would be forgiving student debt, I would have simply reconfigured my pay off so that it was over the longest possible term with the lowest possible monthly payment and just wait.
If our government decides to forgive student loan debt, I’d fully expect a check in the mail for what I paid. That only seems fair.
I would be curious to break down and audit time against 4 buckets of things you will learn. Things you "need to know", "ought to know", "don't need" and "don't actually understand". I wonder how long it takes to fill each bucket and how much faster the latter two grow.
Experience is the best teacher of all and additional schooling is the biggest barrier to useful experience.
They also include people who have any other unexpected event in their life that affects their employability or income.
a) Forgive their student debt
b) Discourage non-wealthy people from becoming teachers
c) Force schools to pay them more
d) Pay them more via GoFundMe
e) Have less educated teachers
Being forced to pay a school that your children don't attend is rent seeking. Strip schools of all rent seeking funding, make tax money follow the child and let the parents on vote what education style works with their children's attendance.