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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

Heaven forbid a country invest in the education of its people. What a terrible no good idea, we should definitely be putting that money into pumping business or other interests.

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If you want to invest in education then negotiate deals with universities as a government instead of handing blank checks to institutions that are charging $60K/year for tuition that’s somehow offered for 1/10th the price at similar institutions. This is pouring one bucket of water on a house fire but that bucket of water was someone’s only drinking water. It doesn’t solve the problem at all but now you’ve also pissed off a bunch of other people.

I'd wager most people on both sides of the political aisle would be in favor of more financial accountability from universities.

You must have assumed I was against it - I am not sure why.

I am just pointing out that there is no forgiveness, the education expenses incurred by college graduates is now being paid by blue collar workers, and its the most regressive tax we have ever had. That doesn't mean I am against it.

I just want folks to know that the person paying your college off is a guy who wishes he could have gone to college.

Complete nonsense, there's no tax increase for anyone to fund this work. We're buying like 10 less missile systems from Raytheon on a tab of defense spending 100k items long to fund stuff like this. It's a complete nonissue and you're just trying to make some bizarre emotional appeal.

This is the thing that gets me.

We collectively invest in a large number of things that may not directly benefit us. My tax dollars fund programs that primarily benefit people that need the money due to choices I personally never would have made.

But that’s the point of a social system.

The moment that collective investment is about education or healthcare, people seem to apply an entirely different ruleset.

That isn't what this is though is it? This is people voluntarily taking loans to fund their education and now getting that paid off with other peoples money. With that logic, when are they paying my mortgage or credit card bills off which are also voluntary debt?

I an all for investing in education. This is not that.

If we want to argue about tax dollars being stolen then the massive bank bailouts and decade of QE by the fed are massively, _massively_ more of a problem and cost. Stop bailing out bad business decisions with my money and then we can talk about not spending it on stuff like paying off education loans.

Half a trillion dollars is not insignificant.

If you look back up, nobody said it was.

Yeah, the parent did. It's in the same order of magnitude.

"need" would be the key word here, do college graduates need the money? If a program is regressive, it means it's transferring money from people who need the money to people who either don't need the money or need it less. That doesn't exactly benefit people who need the money either.

We should invest in education where we need it. This is STEM majors and those without degrees subsidizing liberal arts majors that got worthless degrees.

The investment was loaning the money to them in the first place. If they can't pay it back, it was a bad investment.

it's called Pell Grants and it doesn't involve subsidizing universities for providing useless degrees at ridiculously inflated prices

People need to invest in themselves instead of begging for freebies. There's no reason why I should be paying for someone's pointless and useless education.

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