Putting a lot more money in the hands of people who would spend it would boost the economy, economists say. Duh.
I am not an economist, but it has long seemed to me that if you ended student loan payments, folks could use that money to buy houses, cars, and other consumer goods. Maybe even avocado toast! The NPR article I linked is the first time I’ve seen the media explore that idea.
- About one-third of adults under age 30 have student loan debt.
- In 2016, the amount students owed varied widely, especially by degree attained.
- Young college graduates with student loans are more likely than those without loans to report struggling financially.
- Young college graduates with student loans are more likely to live in a higher-income family than those without a bachelor’s degree.
- Compared with young adults who don’t have student debt, student loan holders are less upbeat about the value of their degree.
The last two points amount to “A college degree leads to higher earnings, but college graduates who have student debt are bummed out about it.” More detail at the Pew link.
Back in May, a majority of voters opposed making college free and forgiving student debt. Now a majority is in favor. People need time to think things over.
CarolDuhart2`
Student Loan foregiveness will allow me to spend my 70’s out of debt. $200K. I never borrowed that much, just that I never got a job or arrangement that would pay my principal. Associate degree after about 10 years-I got sick during part of it. Compound %6 interest did it. If student loan forgiveness means anything, it should help someone like me out. It’s not like I’m going or able to borrow any more money, And I bet the popularity of the idea comes from a lot of people like me who just want to die without this debt hanging over my estate.
Baud
The May poll was a live person telephone interview poll, and the more current one was an online poll. I’m not sure how much we can clean by comparing these two polls alone.
Chetan Murthy
And maybe if we forgive all the student loans, the Fed’ll be able to stop buying so many bonds, stop doing so much quantitative easing.
Cheryl Rofer
@Baud: I agree, and they’re both close to 50%. Just spinning the positive for a change.
CarolDuhart2`
Long term, we need to look at college funding over all. We should do what other nations do: fund a basic post-secondary education so that people don’t go into debt for training to be electricians or nurses, so that people get at least a basic college education regardless of financial status.
Funding free college for the rich? Objections like that are rich. Those who have the funds will still go to private school because of connections to other rich and connected people and so they can do things that may not stand up to a lot of public scrutiny. And even here, there are some rich kids with dysfunctional parents who won’t pay-at least some road should be open for the handful of those folks.
An idea I’ve toyed around with is to make basic school 0-14 with the last two some sort of vocational/paraprofessional/college training. Considering the job prospects out there, would staying in school an extra couple of years be such a bad idea?
Kent
I’m of mixed mind on this.
There are really two ways to address college costs, at the front end and at the back end.
Addressing college costs at the front end means things like bringing down tuition costs at public universities. The extreme option is the Bernie Sanders free public university plan. But even getting half-way there and cutting public university costs down to where they were in the 60s and 70s would be an ENORMOUS step. Just don’t fucking means test it like Buttigeig and Klobuchar want to do. I’m currently dealing with the FAFSA for my college age daughter and it’s a fucking nightmare and millions of middle class Americans are always looking for ways to game the system to squeeze a few more $$ out of the system. Just lower tuition for everyone and pay for it with slightly higher tax rates. It all comes out in the wash.
2. Reducing costs at the back end mostly means loan forgiveness. I’m less enthused about this, mainly because I’m surrounded by lots of young doctors earning many hundreds of thousands of dollars who have big loan balances. They are just fine. The basic problem with student loans and loan forgiveness is that they are a huge subsidy for sleazy religious schools like Liberty Baptist and sleazy for-profit schools which rakes in hundreds of millions of subsidized loan dollars every year. Just forgiving loans without doing anything to hold those kinds of schools to cost accountability does nothing but open up a firehose of public subsidies for private religious schools. That said, I think there are things that could be done. Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy and do a hell of a lot better job screening out fly by night fraudulent for-profit schools and make the loan forgiveness programs work better. Trump has been going backwards in all of those areas.
germy
RSA
@CarolDuhart2`:
Yes. These are appropriate refinements on Cheryl’s initial suggestion. Do medical doctors need their loans forgiven? Only in combination with adjustment of their overall compensation, which is justifiable in part because they have huge loans (a kind of circular issue). Lawyers? Unfortunately for the legal field, there are too many lawyers on the market, and graduates have been screwed over the past several years, which makes it hard to balance individual and systemic incentives.
It’s a tough problem, as I understand it. But a basic two-year or four-year college education? I think that’s a no-brainer.
surfk9
Most of the rich kids will go to private schools, where they can network with other rich kids. You want the children of the rich in public schools. There they will be acquainted with regular folks and maybe develop some empathy for them. Free public education democratizes the educational system.
dr. bloor
Cue Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankenfuck, et al bleating “MORAL HAZARD” any second now. This is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from their cash grab during the housing crisis.
Baud
@germy:
Injecting a trillion dollars into the economy will boost the economy. That doesn’t tell us a whole lot.
Baud
@surfk9:
I don’t understand your comment. There’s no way to force rich kids into public school.
Another Scott
I got free tuition for college because my mom was a secretary for a B School Prof. But I still had $10k in student loans for books and various other expenses. It took me 10 years to pay that off. And it weighed on me the whole time.
I can’t imagine what people are going through now.
Yes, that debt should be forgiven and the system needs to be rationalized so that young people don’t have such huge debts (from expenses other than tuition) hanging over them when they’re trying to start their lives and families.
We’re a rich country, we shouldn’t impoverish the next generation before they get started.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@Cheryl Rofer: they also asked noticeably different questions (on phone, but they’re in the links). But positivity is always appreciated! At least for me, a careless optimist.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@CarolDuhart2`: There was a candidate who had a plan for that in 2016, but she had emails.
trollhattan
@surfk9:
Betsy DeVoss finds your ideas Commie-like and does not wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Such a pleasure knowing the woman in charge of national educational policy and budget did not attend and did not send her kids to public schools.
Yarrow
Related to impoverishing the next generation and that same generation making life decisions differently at least in part because of their massive debt:
Link. People won’t have kids if they think they can’t afford them.
Citizen Alan
I would not have gone to law school had I not been awarded a scholarship that paid 50%. I just couldn’t bear the thought of taking out that much in student loans. I’d have toughed it out and gone back to teaching (and maybe been happier in the long run).
raven
I still owe 8k and I just retired!
raven
LBJ (fuck LBJ) noted, when he signed the Vietnam GI Bill that it was “The greatest economic flywheel in history. We have this phony “Hope Scholarship” in Georgia that uses lottery money fo fund white, suburban kids to go to school free.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Best political trade-off in history.
Ruckus
We’re a rich country, we shouldn’t impoverish the next generation before they get started.
It’s even worse than that. The money they aren’t spending could be, probably would be used to grow the economy, making life better for all, including those rich fucks who just want it all anyway. As it is that money is going to enrich colleges and repay loans with unreasonable percentage rates. The only people getting anything out of it are the lenders.
Yarrow
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’ve heard there was also a…{looks around furtively, lowers voice}…server.
Honus
Whenever I hear about how much forgiving student loans would cost or how it would also let the kids of billionaires go to college free I want someone to point out that we went another trillion in debt last year to give a tax cut to billionaires.
trollhattan
@raven:
Is there any state lottery that didn’t eventually simply offset a previous funding stream? They sold the Calif lottery as a path to expanding education funding “Our kids win, too!” and the post-Prop 13 education budget is just as crappy as it was before the lottery.
Mike in DC
Graduated GWU Law in 2011. My debt is visible from orbit. If I do income-based repayment for 20 years and get the debt “forgiven”, I am “rewarded” by the IRS counting the hundreds of thousands in principal forgiven as income(!) for that year and taxing me accordingly, an amount that could rival the original debt. It’s a racket. Forgive every borrower, cancel the debt and find a new way to pay for college tuition. Education shouldn’t be a profit center for the financial services industry.
Baud
@Honus:
This is an internal Democratic debate about how broad student loan relief should go. The GOP isn’t in this game. They aren’t even in the stadium.
anarchoRex
It’s cool to see the needle move towards supporting free tuition/student loan forgiveness. Wow, it’s almost as if when you push and defend left positions, people begin to like them.
JPL
@Kent: I think there could be both. Extending public school for two years could help and then low interest loans for the rest. I’d only do low interest loans for public education though
edit an additional two years of public education would be the same as community college.
raven
@trollhattan: They actually haven’t done that here but we have had record enrollment and record budget cuts for 20 years.
Ruckus
@raven:
My sister passed away in her 60s owing, if I remember correctly, a lowish 5 figures. And she taught part time at a major private college in LA.
Luthe
Forgiving my student loans now (instead of in eight years, Athena willing and DeVos don’t fuck it up) means I could buy a car and start saving for a house. Right now, that money is basically being lit on fire instead.
If nothing else, the government could lower interest rates to something closer to the Fed rate. My largest loan has a 7% interest rate. I will never pay it off. The only reason I will be able to retire is because I have a job that will vest me with a defined benefit pension after I’m there five years.
raven
@Ruckus: I want the last check I write to bounce!
k Friedman
Honus
Whenever I hear someone saying how much student debt forgiveness will cost, or that it would mean free college for the children of billionaires , I wish someone would point out that last year went a trillion in debt to give a tax cut to mostly the top 1%.
Honus
@Baud: fair enough, but I would also like to point out that by the late 60s college was essentially free at state universities. My tuition at UVA in 1973 was $125 a semester. That was about a weeks wages at minimum wage. This was a conscious decision that education was a good thing.
Ruckus
@Honus:
Don’t forget the “planned” cuts to SS/Medicare, for which every person over 65 who collects on the money they put in for 45-50 yrs will get fucked because of. Like me. I’m still working, trying to get to the point that I can retire and just survive on SS. Cut that, make me have to work till I drop and you think I’m pissed now? Think I’ll be the only one?
Fuck the rich, fuck the republican party, and I don’t mean in a nice way.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
My youngest daughter (the ungrateful, in thankful one) has been expensively educated and was lavishly kept by us her entire academic career. She doesn’t do well with others (or so she claimed), so I got volunteered to find an $800 a month apartment, along with utilities and food. She needed reliable transportation, so I got volunteered to fund a lease on a new car. She wanted summers abroad, sonI got volunteered to fund those, as well. Further, with the magic of interest, I’m probably about $120-140K into loans on this and will likely die owing on PLUS loans. Of course all that heavy spending on archaeology and classics went to good use when she started talking about doing gender studies for a masters, something she could have done a fuckton cheaper here. Now that every jackass who talked her into that uselessness has gone away, and after she’s burnt so many bridges to the archaeology/classics community with allegations of patriarchy, sexism and failure to honor pronouns, she acts like she wants to return to that world (she’s tending bar as she writes her thesis and lives with a complete candyass who is not in any way fit to follow her into life as a professional academic). I fear that she has settled, and that I’m in debt the remainder of my life in order to create a bartender who spouts social justice slogans at me like a Tourette’s patient.
That said, I have some thoughts:
1. There is no such thing as “free” college. It may be a scaled benefit, but funding has to come from some mechanism and it is really dishonest to refer to it this way.
2. Nobody who is proposing it has discussed anything about the differential in rates between institutions, the difference in state formulae for reimbursement, differing capital project funding requirements in each State, who picks up room and board, how books are acquired, differing internal governing criteria in each state or the biggie – HOW TO ALLOCATE ADMISSION AT POPULAR DESTINATIONS. For instance, how does somebody get to go to Alabama vs going to UAB? UCLA CD UC Davis? Requiring payment from students/families tends to cause them to price-in their priorities.
3. Yes, Europe has a tendency toward massive state support for secondary education for low to no cost for the student. They also career track high school kids so that the resource isn’t wasted due to disinterest or lack of aptitude. Will we be spending huge amounts of money for Johnny to find himself for a few years as he bounces from Film Studies to Gnat Physiology to Literature? For Susie to find her muse in the theater program, dabble in psychology, explore a study abroad in weaving methods?
4. Much of the societal pressure about student loans dissipates if you make them dischargeable in bankruptcy again. Say 10 years from last loan, or maybe immediately on certain extraordinary circumstances (death being one). If they can be eventually shed if things don’t go well, that is an ordinary event. It also creates a quantifiable metric on how much benefit those student loan dollars actually provide.
WereBear
It’s a scheme to extract wealth, even from the poor. They make it up in volume and misery.
It would also be another thing if you did get that high paying job. But apparently that is rare too.
trollhattan
@Honus:
It’s never a bad time to revisit the educational priorities of one R. Reagan (governor edition).
anarchoRex
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: shoot, I was only missing “SJW”, “snowflake, or “safe-space” to win your conservative buzzword bingo.
Ruckus
@raven:
There are other things I want to bounce.
It wasn’t conservatives that started the French Revolution, it was people squeezed to the last drop and those who had been doing the squeezing telling them to fuck off.
cain
I left college with no debt. This was in 1995. My dad was a professor so my tuition was half off. But I literally paid for most of my education myself on a minimum wage job working in computer labs. I have no idea what my life would be like if I left with a large debt. My ex-wife still has her college debt but she got lucky, she did her dentistry at the right time.. right before her senior year all the federal student loans went from 2% to 7-8% and the costs for going through the school skyrocketed because students had to use their own insurance instead of whatever was managed by the school. Grossly unfair. This was all during the Bush administration.
Our education system is fucked up, and I would totally support debt forgiveness as sound financial policy, and I think Kent’s idea of front end changes is good as well – removing or at least holding charter schools accountable is something that should happen. I also think we should really be putting in some life skills in high schools. I don’t know if they still do shop or home economics but that sounds dumb compared to understanding how to manage your finances, and how some things work in real life instead of trying to figure it out yourself.
Kent
In K-12 education we have a very clear demarkation between public and private education. People move to communities and states that have well supported public schools. And pretty much no one thinks that average middle class people have a “right” to go to Choat or the Dalton School or Groton or any of the super-elite private prep schools scattered about New England.
Somehow that seems to have gotten blurred when it comes to higher education. People think that if they get into whatever elite private school they want (USC, Stanford, Duke, Harvard, NYU, etc.). And that we should be spending billions in public dollars to subsidize those elite private institutions through tax dollars via student loans, student loan subsidizes and so forth. If places like USC need public dollars then I’d like to see them give something back. Look at whatever needs we have. If, for example, there is a shortage of nursing schools, let USC open up a nursing school with public dollars and then charge public school tuition and students can go study nursing at USC for what it would cost at some local state school. That sort of thing.
I’m not opposed to loan forgiveness to dig us out of the current mess. But I’m leery that it would be the best use of say $500 billion dollars of public money vs putting the money up front into cheaper public university education.
Steve in the ATL
@raven: UGA costs more now for in-state students than private colleges did back in the eighties and nineties. It’s ridiculous.
CarolDuhart2`
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I understand some of your bitterness with a kid who is “finding herself”. But tracking in the states has often meant that bright minority kids get/got tracked into “vocational” rather than fields that might challenge racist notions about intelligence. How to do that without the waste of education you fear? One way might be to make working in some of these low-opportunity, high abstract fields reliant on some sort of internship, or teaching internship. Find out whether or not these fields are really for them before getting too deep into them. Plus require matching funding-rather through a government job or endowment beforehand.
Maybe some of this stuff could be diffused through other courses as well, so the benefits of classic education are more widely used, without the burden of having to major in a particular field.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@anarchoRex:
You’ve not had the joy of talking to my youngest daughter, who thinks I’m a neoliberal corporate shill for supporting Hillary, and never lets a day go by without sneering about my gender, the fact that I actively participate in capitalism and race. She wasn’t like that until those grievance junkies in gender studies (who’ve now skittered off to various non-careers) recognized that she has organizational talent and a solid academic record and roped her in before abandoning her.
So yeah, I’m fucking salty about it, considering what I’ve done for her.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
He really was a republican’s republican wasn’t he? Greedy, selfish bastard. He wasn’t the first conservative to be greedy and selfish of course, he just started the fall that has ended up in our laps with an ignorant, greedy, selfish bastard supposedly in charge, who would lose money running a lemonade stand at the beach, in the summer.
JaneE
I am not in favor of totally forgiving student debt, but there are several things I would be happy to see.
A fixed interest rate about 1% less than a prime mortgage rate and elimination of prepayment penalties (aka rule of 78s). A limitation on total amount repaid, so that interest doesn’t add to the debt beyond a certain point – maybe a number of years, or a percentage of the original loan. I would limit payments, and total repayment amounts to a percentage of a person’s wages and consider the loan paid in full after 20 years, regardless. And student loans would be eligible for bankruptcy like any other personal loan. I would allow for public service jobs to reduce any government-guaranteed student debt at something like 5% a year. For profit school student debt should be tied to work in the student’s area of study. If the student can demonstrate that either jobs aren’t available or they are not considered qualified for them, then the loan contract is null and void.
cain
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Wow, hard not to create a psychological profile on your daughter just from that description. Maybe she’ll go into politics and get into congress? :-)
I have no doubt that patriarchy exists in a lot of these areas. It might just be she has absolutely no tolerance for it. It seems like social issues especially gender issues is something very clearly important to her. Maybe worth having a conversation about.
Unfortunately, I don’t know about the debt, I think it just comes with the job. She’s not gonna get anything as a inheritance I suppose. She does owe taking care of you if it was in the Indian tradition :D
trollhattan
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I know nothing about ‘Bama but UCs all cost about the same, they do have a wide range of difficulty to enter. It is true a Davis Regents scholarship will be a lot larger than one at Cal.
I want the financial incentive to open seats to out of state and foreign students eliminated. Top priority to California students until such time as they’re meeting need; grant out of state and foreign entry on scholastic merit, not triple tuition.
Steve in the ATL
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: my sister in law has a BA in drama from SMU and somehow, despite that crucial education, didn’t make it as an actress. Are you suggesting that was a waste of a quarter million dollars?!
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
Lots of overlap between Reagan and Trump. Reagan cleaned up nicer.
cain
I read somewhere that free education didn’t work when it was tried in Europe. That there has to be some price to it in order to have perceived value. It’s dumb, but I’m held under its sway because something is higher cost doesn’t necessarily mean its value is the same.
Yutsano
@trollhattan: Reagan was an actor. He was always capable of playing the part and giving the right speech even when he was addled with Alzheimer’s later in his presidency. President Toadface has none of those skills. He’s barely capable of spelling a tweet correctly. Yet here we are anyway.
Steve in the ATL
@Kent: it’s Choate, not Choat. Welcome to the prole filter, looser!
Oh, there’s only a pie filter? Never mind then!
I’m kidding of course—I love your posts.
Steve in the ATL
@trollhattan: Bama aggressively recruits out of state students from Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas, etc. to pay full freight so the RWNJ legislature can keep cutting taxes for rich people and reducing services. Also, their football team sucks!
Ruckus
@Kent:
Don’t know if USC has a nursing program but they’ve had a medical school program for well over 100 yrs, are affiliated with CalTech for some things and several LA hospitals for both healthcare and teaching. I’ve attended seminars there when I was in pre-med.
And no I’m not a doctor, life and lack of money got in the way, as it often does.
trollhattan
The northern California fire season is behind us. Rain, with rain and more rain for the next seven day, at least. Plenty of snow in the high country. Making up for lost time.
I pity the folks driving home today. /Mr. T voice
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@CarolDuhart2`:
I genuinely like internships – I had a recent discussion with someone who works in fine arts; her position is that society is wasting a ton of resources there that would be better spent on funding internships in conjunction with a community college level of basic education.
my thing is that secondary education is a genuinely limited resource, and there does need to be some method of allocating that resource so that priorities are met by both institution and end user. To my mind, there are only two methods – one is done by a selection committee (meets the institutional need), the other by cost (which prices the student priority) and much of that is done in tandem. Take out the cost, and that leaves the committee only.
CarolDuhart2
@trollhattan: Most college students go to the nearest one, or the best nearest one. The transfers are often due to jobs or a major that doesn’t exist at the first one. I had a free college education at a HBCU but couldn’t finish because I couldn’t get loans, and even then I couldn’t afford the room and board out of town. So I had to go elsewhere to finish school after stumbling around trying to find a job for someone with partial college and a high school diploma. I finally got a degree in something that was considered “in demand” at the time. Never worked in the field, but finally got that degree at least. And the interest kept compounding and compounding.
Paying the tuition for a seat would have been cheaper than the mess we have now. Let’s say about 20 fully paid seats were available. If things weren ‘t really working out, I could have stopped that major, tried something else, and that seat would go to someone who really could use it.
And BTW, can someone fully fund some sort of vocational/aptitude something so that people could at least find out what they might want to do before college?
Ella in New Mexico
@CarolDuhart2`: As a mid-life adult career changer who went back to school not just once but twice: I FEEL YOUR PAIN.
I’m sure that if the present system is maintained I’m likely to NEVER pay back my entire student loan debt, even if I do manage to obtain some loan forgiveness (I can do some thru medical field incentives).
trollhattan
@Steve in the ATL:
Okay, different state, same hymnal. Been interesting to see which schools recruit my kid and her friends–other state U’s are well represented. The outgoing app blizzard is underway. We’ll probably start getting offers/rejections beginning in a couple months. (She’s yugely flattered to get recruited after races, because it’s something very different than SATs and GPAs.)
trollhattan
@CarolDuhart2:
Our young French friend who stayed with us this summer is in…not sure what it’s called but a post-HS university prep school that does something like what you describe. IIRC Canadian school goes through grade 13 for similar reasons. Our friend will be ready, based on seeing her massive summer workload, which included 45 books and advanced work in two foreign languages. My overachiever was saucer-eyed at the pile.
CarolDuhart2
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Instead of a committee who may also rejected talented but “different” students, I would ask these professions to do internships from start. Want to act? Classes plus being a hodcarrier, extra, or background in commercials. Musicians can intern doing gigs and doing shows for the college. Other majors can work as assistants, researchers, and tutors. In short, those who find they don’t really like archaeology or acting get a good exposure to the field before they get too deep to turn around.
RepubAnon
@CarolDuhart2`: The US has a consumer economy – the more income is broadly distributed across the entire economy, the more people can buy things. This creates jobs.
The 0.1% consume expensive luxury goods – but not in volumes sufficient to keep a car factory humming. This is why companies aren’t investing in increased capacity – not enough customers that have .enough left over after making their loan payments to buy stuff
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@cain:
The problem was, she was spewing some of her nonsense on Facebook about 16 months ago, and uttering some nonsense that had neither statistical underpinnings nor any clear basis in fact – I was actually angry about how sloppy it was. Her mentor was a woman who had done a lot for her (gotten her into some truly outstanding programs, connected her with some giants in the field and arranged for her to obtain some grants toward defraying some costs) and saw it as well. That very sweet professor very gently chided her for sloppy data and statements regarding what she was saying.
In response, my daughter tore her head off and made some comment regarding systemic privilege. I don’t know that the relationship can ever be repaired. She’s my daughter – I’m kinda stuck with her, but the prof? She doesn’t need to waste her time.
trollhattan
@CarolDuhart2:
ETA California has reinstated free community college for the first two post-high school years, with guaranteed transfer into the UC and CSU systems (for qualified coursework). That had disappeared for decades.
Cckids
I started college during the Reagan recession; my student loan rates were 9 and 12%. Then I had a child with serious physical & mental handicaps. I carried those loans for close to twenty years; my spouse had some as well. We were able to pay on them at times, then there’d be another lengthy hospitalization, I’d lose any job I’d managed to get, and we’d get behind again.
In 2005, we had to declare a BK, which of course didn’t include the student loans. We ended up suing the government; by their own regulations my loans should have been discharged because I had been my son’s full-time, unpaid caretaker all those years, we had basically no chance to repay the loans, and they had not told us about programs that would have helped lower the payments. Our lawyer advised us to include my spouse’s loans as a bargaining chip.
At the hearing, the Bush administration lawyer was an absolute dick to all of us; he asked why I didn’t put my son in a home so I could pay loans back. I told him that we cared for family, and I kept him home for the same reason I didn’t put my other kids in foster care & work three jobs to pay loans back.
The judge’s decision not only forgave my loans, but spouses as well. He had zero good to say about the govt counsel. (Did I mention our judge was a 2nd generation Japanese-American whose parents lived with him?)
The government appealed, and would have kept it going forever, but then Obama was elected, and that shit stopped. They dropped the appeal. It was a three year nightmare, and we were some of the lucky ones.
Baud
@Cckids: Damn.
JPL
@Steve in the ATL: During the great recession, the first thing that the state did was cut funding to State Colleges. I assume that was done all over, especially red states.
Baud
OT.
Gin & Tonic
I attended an elite private university in the early 1970’s. My roommate for two years was the son of a single mother, and was not in good financial shape. However, he was able to cover the vast majority of his expenses by working the summers as a house painter. In today’s environment that sort of thing is completely impossible. Tuition, room and board at an elite university are within spitting distance of the US median household income – *annual*.
Raven
@JPL: And I went for 6 years without a raise as did all USG faculty/staff.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
At the end of HS I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had no goals for college so didn’t go. Had a decent job and family business to look at but that wasn’t as attractive for me as it was for dad. And I had military service staring me in the face. After the service I went to college, pre-med and did well but family, money and time interfered and family business it was. I would have loved to have a school system whose concept wasn’t to get every one out the door and gone to something else, anything else, so they didn’t have to bother.
JPL
@Cckids: Good for the judge, but it’s unfortunate that it had to go that far before you were able to find some relief.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Here’s an idea – after 5 years, each defaulted student loan shall be paid from the receiving school’s endowment fund, the note transferred to the endowment for collection until bankruptcy is declared.
Bet you’d start seeing some discipline on administrator pay & benefits, capital projects and programs offered….
Ruckus
@Gin & Tonic:
In my college aged years stories like that were not all that uncommon. I’ve known a few people with advanced degrees who worked their way through. At the cost now days there is no way anyone can do that, unless their night job is robbing banks or selling unapproved pharmaceuticals.
West of the Rockies
@Baud:
The GOP do not want educated people. They tend to believe in science and not Good Book superstitions.
J R in WV
Hola!!
I just got back from my first drive into town post-‘scope work on my knee. Did well, saw a really bright segment of a big rainbow, so happy, happy!
Well is still down intermittently… the power drop from the grid to our pole has a big outdoor breaker panel, below which is a single 120-V GFI outlet. The panel has one 120-V single pole breaker and one 240-V double pole breaker; the 120-V breaker feeds the 120-V GFI outlet in the pole below the breaker box.
When the 240-V power to the well pump fails, we can sometimes get it back by resetting the 120-V GFI outlet, which has no load and is not (so far as we know) connected to the well service. Strange!! Will call in the professionals tomorrow morning.
My knee is doing pretty well, not strong, but not much pain… the left knee, which has not been worked on as yet, hurts more than the one that was worked on last Tuesday.
trollhattan
@Cckids:
Just, wow. And bankruptcy “reform” was one of the Bush II cornerstones–i.e., removing bankruptcy protections for regular citizens. Thank dog he didn’t get his SS privatization, just in time for his super-recession.
Martin
The even bigger issue here is that we have public education for a reason – it helps the entire nation to have an educated populace. It allows us to move from subsistence farming to manufacturing to information industries. That benefit doesn’t end at 12th grade, it keeps going. When we undermine educational goals, we undermine our own economy.
smmurphy
For what it is worth, free college expands attainment of 13-16th year of education for people who already have 12 years. Its politically powerful, as it affects people who vote – people who want to go to or have gone to college. Expanding pre-K gives more bang for the buck, and people without access to good pre-K are less likely to vote.
trollhattan
@J R in WV:
Great news on your knee. Weirdness with the electrical. Definitely needs somebody to suss it completely–I’ve seen too many bizarre things done by, not people who should know better but people who don’t even know they don’t know better.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@trollhattan:
As I remember, student loans were made sticky back in the 90s. I remember a set of articles about people “getting out of” (means “unable to pay”) student loans locally, primarily local lawyers in the late 90s, early 90s. It was cast as “sneaky people beating the system” (nothing makes old white people madder), whereas what it really was is that lawyers don’t really earn all that much and should have been a bellweather for kids now.
CliosFanBoy
Forgive the debts
Give tax breaks to those who paid theirs off already
Make the forgiven debt tax free
Subsidize public schools enough to make them essentially free
Provide extremely low interest loans for those who wish to go to a private school
Force schools with HUGE endowments to spend some of it on actual students
Tear down Miami University and salt the earth where it stood.*
* Sorry, Ohio U grad. HAD to put that in
debbie
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Well, now I have a better understanding of where you were coming from earlier today.
As a daughter, I can authoritatively state that we suck. I was less aggressive than your youngest, but I was still all up in my father’s face over Vietnam. My brothers later told me they were terrified he’d slug me.
The only thing that got me to back down was my father’s saying he’d withhold paying for college. I wasn’t about to risk escaping home. I’m not sure why your daughter hasn’t figured that out yet.
Eventually, Nixon was enough of an asshole that even my father turned against him, and peace was restored.
Gretchen
@JaneE: lots of great ideas here. Especially reducing interest rates to less than mortgages would be a huge help. Now student loans can be 6-8% while mortgages and car loans are 3-4%. My youngest has >$100,000 in loans and the payments are so high she’s not touching the principal. It would be great if they’d set a cap on how many multiples of the original loan you can get stuck for. She’s in the 10-year public interest job forgiveness program, but people who reached 10 years in that program, 99% were denied forgiveness for paperwork reasons. She had several months payments not apply because she paid more than the minimum. There’s no way to win.
Gretchen
@cain: We tried affordable education here in the US until Reagan got his hands on it. I paid my 70’s state school tuition with my summer job. My kids didn’t make $12,000 on their summer jobs so they have loans. My state school let its accreditation lapse for MPH, so my daughter had to go out of state and pay top dollar, in loans. It’s a choice not to fund public education.
Gretchen
When I was accepted into a microbiology PhD program in 1975, I said I couldn’t afford to go. They then offered me free tuition and a quarterly stipend, funded by the federal government, which covered my expenses. I think everyone in my program had a similar deal. Back then the government thought it was worth subsidizing science education so we’d have some scientists.
Miss Bianca
@Steve in the ATL: Did she make it as something else?
Anyone seriously considering going into acting should just skip going to college altogether. Ask Mommy and Daddy to give them enough money to bankroll a year in LA, and just start going to parties.
At least, that’s the advice that Sean Young gave my ex when he asked her how she got cast in “Blade Runner”.
Lucky me, I’m the one who got to pay off his student loans from that BFA from the University of Detroit when I got some money after my dad’s passing. In retrospect, probably one of the stupidest investments I, personally, ever made.
Oh, I paid off mine as well.
Steve in the ATL
@Miss Bianca:
Exactly. Her friends who made it did exactly that. And she didn’t have the hunger that they did. They needed to get that part to pay their rent or get evicted; when she didn’t get, she’d call Daddy and he’d add money from her trust fund to her checking account.
@Miss Bianca:
That’s the truly inspiring part of the story—she moved back home and is a successful country club mother!
J R in WV
@trollhattan:
We had a fairly high end licensed electrician put in a new contactor to put power to the pump a few months ago. He installed the contactor well, but then hooked up the 120-V circuit we use to keep things from freezing up in cold weather, to the side of the 240-V leg that only had power when the pressure switch called for power, which is not very much time with power to the heat.
This is the shop I’m planning to call tomorrow morning to try to remedy things… they’re a commercial with contracts in various plants and offices, always very professional, not cheap, but reliable. Except for that issue with the circuit for the heat…
Anyway, hoping to get it put right soon.
Follow-up for the knee is Dec 9, 2 weeks after the procedure. I have perhaps done more with the bum leg because of the well problem, carrying containers of water around, but so far appears to be no harm done. Shower today was most excellent!!
J R in WV
@CliosFanBoy:
Have several friends who attended or work at Ohio U, I assume you’re talking about Miami U of Ohio, as opposed to Miami U of Miama FL…
Bob
I’m 82 years old, I went to college, with a student loan, in my 70s but along the way, I got Ill . I was trying to get my loan dismissed,then we lost all we had in the California camp fire. I am on SS as my only scource of income and now they garnished my SS. This puts me in the poverty level.
Kay
Yay! Bold. I’m all for it. I want big.
This is what happens when you load everything up with conditions and qualifiers: 99% rejected.
They lied to these people and what’s worse people have been pointing to THIS program as “student debt relief” for years and almost NO ONE qualifies.
Kay
Call it economic stimulus. Like a tax cut, except this one will benefit non-multi-millionaires.
MomSense
@Steve in the ATL:
Hasn’t it been Choate Rosemary Hall for going on 50 years now? Had a friend who was there during the (whisper) trouble (whisper).
What about all the recent and semi recent grads who have already paid thousands toward their debt? Will they get some assistance too?
I’d be fucking pissed if I were 10-20k into paying off my loans and all of a sudden the new kids come in with loan forgiveness and “free” college.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: as Mrs Parker said when told Coolidge had died, how can they tell?
Kay
@CarolDuhart2`:
We have to stop thinking of “students” so narrowly, too. Frankly, it’s elitist. A lot of people don’t go away to State U for exactly four years at 18 years old. A lot of the student loan debtors I encounter got the debt when they were retraining. In other words, they were doing what everyone tells them to do- training for a new job after working for a period of years. It’s worse for them because they’re older so they have fewer earning years to pay it off and more obligations (family, etc.). They’re in no way “kids”.
Kay
@CarolDuhart2`:
And no one takes this into account. They tell them to go retrain, which means they’re not earning while they’re retraining, and then it takes them a period of years to ramp up in the new job but they’re older, and they can’t “catch up”- they simply don’t have enough time. They can’t get 5 or 10 years of earning back AND they have debt. It’s insurmountable. They’re set up to fail.
anarchoRex
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I dunno, the caricature you’ve painted of your daughter, academia, and yourself is in some real Poe’s Law territory.
tobie
@Gin & Tonic: Most elite colleges and universities (Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Williams, Swarthmore, etc.) make undergraduate education free for low income students. In 2013, Harvard announced that tuition and room & board were free for any admitted student with a family income of $65K/year; for students from families earning between $65 and $150K, they pay between 0 and 10% of tuition. I’m assuming the figures have been adjusted for inflation since then.
As someone who has spent quite a bit of time at provincial universities in France and Germany, I can tell you they’re not the panaceas they’re made out to be. Facilities suck; drop out rates are high; the ratio of students to professors is appalling; and innovation is almost non-existent because faculty members are overworked and facilities suck. Germany recognized they had a problem and decided to go in the direction of a two-tier system with poorly funded teaching universities and well-funded research schools. They did this to mimic the American research university which they saw as the driver of innovation in the US.
Our discussion of education is exclusively consumer-oriented and this bothers me. How to reduce costs while maintaining the quality of institutions in terms of producing knowledge should be a bigger theme.
Kay
You could be creative. Take them all back to what they would have needed in 1987 for equivalent credit hours at the same school and discharge the rest.
laura
I paid cash all through my undergrad when I went to college as an adult. Law school loans were about 100k at a private local university. 20 years on I’ve paid back 244 large and still paying. Our little old house didn’t cost that much. What could’ve been…
Times tens of thousands of others.
Times 52 states.
Gvg
@Kay: they didn’t Reject 99% under Obama or even Bush. This is Betsy DeVos. I am not even sure Trump knows. Of course he doesn’t care either. I am pretty sure most of the denials are actually not following the law too. Just get rid of the GOP and lots of things get better.
Mousebumples
My husband opened a 529 account for our 3 month old this morning. We’re planning to ask for contributions for the holidays (versus toys she doesn’t need) from family. I hope we won’t need it, but I’d like her to have some money saved up for college just in case.
I’m one of the lucky ones. Between scholarships, my own 529 plan, and a little help from my parents, I managed to escape college without debt. My husband played poker in area bars to earn extra money in college, so we’re both very fortunate. We are definitely the exception, especially in our generation.
Ruckus
Some days I feel really fortunate that my father started his business and took on this child as a project to teach a craft to. As I’ve said here before I’ve had 3 distinct careers in my life but I have a good job now till I retire – have to or overwhelming desire, but I’m in better shape than a lot of people. No debt other than a vehicle and I can pay that off, no student debt ever. But I’m back doing the craft work I did for over 30 yrs and I can’t do the level of what I could 25 yrs ago. Big surprise. Had I gone on into medicine I have no idea of course if I’d have completed all the work to hang out a shingle and the cost would have been almost all school loans. I missed doing what I wanted but I’m still here and still sort of kicking so there’s that.
John Creaser
The issue with student loans, in many cases, is not the principal amount. In my case, and that of many others who may have struggled at one time or another and used forbearances and deferments, is the interest. I currently owe more in interest than I ever did in principal. When you combine the two, you find what we have now – people paying but getting no where. We do not necessarily need to “forgive” student loans as much as forgive the interest that has made paying off these loans an impossibility. Cars cost as much as many people have in student loan principle… If cars can be paid off in 4-8 years, student loan principal could be as well. You want to end this crisis, take the interest out of the way. These loan management companies thrive because few, if any, ever get to paying the principal. The balance upon which the interest is drawn never goes away regardless of making payments on time. I get that the management companies need to earn something, but there should be a lifetime cap on interest paid, not this perpetual cycle of monthly payments being made inert by monthly interest.