Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Second rate reporter says what?

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

It’s not hopeless, and we’re not helpless.

This blog will pay for itself.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

We’re not going back!

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / A Little Exercise

A Little Exercise

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If you, or someone you know, is concerned about the fairness of student loan forgiveness, please go here and search your zip code. Then peruse the list of forgiven PPP loans until you find, say, a plastic surgeon with a $152K forgiven loan. Or a law firm with a $1.8 million forgiven loan. Hey, here’s a church with a $20K forgiven loan. Oh, here’s a pizza business that pretty much only does takeout – $180K. The list goes on and on.

My point, of course, isn’t that the PPP program was bad, or that these people are undeserving, but let’s get real about the target of “government handouts” in the last couple of years. Hint: it sure as hell wasn’t the poor or even the middle class.

Reader Interactions

128Comments

  2. 2.

    Baud

    Hint: it sure as hell wasn’t the poor or even the middle class.

    Agreed.  Unfortunately, you have some members of the poor or middle class who didn’t necessarily get the benefits they wanted joining with the wealthy in calling Biden’s actions unfair.  You rarely see rich people complaining that other rich people got tax breaks or government handouts that they didn’t get.

  3. 3.

    HinTN

    @Mai Naem mobile: Link also don’t work for me. The PPP rejoinder is going yo be the polite STFU smackdown to all this nonsense.

    ETA: Third and fourth ought to count for something.

  5. 5.

    Frederick Stibbert

    I’m gonna assume that some proportion of those PPP loans supported wages, preventing large job losses – not all that money paid the lease for luxury cars.

  6. 6.

    Ken

    I saw a tweet along the lines of “If you’re upset about loan forgiveness you didn’t get, just pretend it’s a tax cut for the 1% you didn’t get.”

  7. 7.

    MattF

    I had a loan forgiven from grad school. As did Bill Clinton— in fact, the same sort of loan except his was for law school. You can look up ‘tuition postponement option Yale’— it’s a rather famous disaster, and the collapse of that loan scheme has had a continuing influence. The spike in interest rates in the early 1980s made everyone’s TPO loan unpayable. Clinton did the smart thing by paying his loan off early.

  14. 14.

    Steeplejack

    Oh, Lord—Megan McArdle wades into the student-loan buzzsaw. From an “I can’t look away” car wreck of a thread:

    I paid off most of my loans while laboring as a junior staffer at The Economist.

    — Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) August 24, 2022

    She is getting dragged up and down Twitter like a broken chariot in Ben-Hur.

    And the chaser from @TheRealHoarse: “This person went to a prep school that costs $60k a year.”

    Seamus McSpears: “Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

  16. 16.

    Steeplejack

    The fact that everyone complaining about student debt forgiveness seems to exclusively be PPP recipients is creating incredible moments in “Is This You?” history. We are nearing the singularity.

    — Guy Freire (@guy_freire) August 25, 2022

  17. 17.

    wegners shoppers club member mistermix

    Sorry, posted this and got a call.  Link fixed.

    Also, yes, many of these folks used their PPP loans to pay their employees, which preserved the value of their business because presumably those employees were ready to go back to work when things reopened.  So, good for them for doing the right thing, but it’s still a benefit to them even if most of the money went to their employees.

  18. 18.

    Suzanne

    I mean, I’m upset about twenty years of military spending on shitty wars that I opposed and that didn’t make us any safer. I’m pretty fucking salty about it, in fact. And yet I support giving veterans of those shitty wars a lot of medical and psychiatric care, even when the GOP doesn’t. Even though “they knew what they signed up for”. Even when “they were adults and made a free choice”. Even when I think some of them made a stupid and self-interested decision to enlist.

  20. 20.

    rikyrah

    Excellent thread 

    Anna Gifty is happy for her debt free friends! (@itsafronomics) tweeted at 8:02 AM on Thu, Aug 25, 2022:
    Yes, perspective matters, but the question is WHOSE perspective matters and why?

    It is interesting how minority and/or first gen economists and policymakers are all for #CancelStudentDebt while their White counterparts are not. Interesting and not surprising.

    Anna Gifty is happy for her debt free friends! (@itsafronomics) tweeted at 8:06 AM on Thu, Aug 25, 2022:
    If you have not been burdened by student debt or know someone who feels that pressure, saying “what about the markets?” is incredibly elite. I’m sorry.

    What about the markets? What about rent? groceries? buying a home? What about this livelihood? I want people to EMPATHIZE HERE! https://t.co/EzWOmrsNrT
    (https://twitter.com/itsafronomics/status/1562788592719523842?t=Hjc9ebG3kiEhHE4x6Rgz8Q&s=03)

  23. 23.

    Chief Oshkosh

    Holy Moly! My little area code came back with millions in forgiveness, the majority to quasi-religious organizations and a bunch of LLC holding companies. I’m not SURE that that problematic, but it doesn’t seem quite right…

  25. 25.

    Suzanne

    @Steeplejack: Megan McArdle is so fucking dumb and entitled that dunking on her feels like taunting a medical patient.

    You know, like Dr. Oz did.

    Sharing a country with these people is a really heavy lift sometimes.

  27. 27.

    Chief Oshkosh

    As to student loan forgiveness, and the cost in general of higher education, I’m a poster child for the conservative response. I worked multiple jobs simultaneously to put myself through college and grad school. Hell, I was sending money home at one point to help my siblings. And, I spent decades paying off loans while I watched my born-wealth(ier) peers buy new cars and homes.

    Student loan forgiveness? All I keep thinking is: About Fucking Time. Go Dark Brandon!

  30. 30.

    Ken

    Also spotted: A cartoon of the trolley problem, where the trolley is going to kill 5 people; but if the switch is thrown, no one will be killed.  The person at the switch is saying “If I throw the switch and save these people, isn’t that unfair to the people who’ve already been killed by the trolley?”

  31. 31.

    lowtechcyclist

    Hey Spanky, the Rod & Reel in Chesapeake Beach had just shy of $2M in loans forgiven.  (They basically run the town.) Looks like a couple of gambling-related businesses in the same zip code had 6-figure loans forgiven, and AFAIK the R&R is the only place locally where they could operate.

  32. 32.

    HinTN

    @Chief Oshkosh: I recognized most of the recipients in my little area code and thought, “good for you!” There was some egregious padding but mostly just folks getting by.

  34. 34.

    Suzanne

    I will also note that I support free medical care, even for dumbasses that refused to get vaccinated and now have Long COVID, and for people that get fucking hooked on opioids.

    We are either a society in which we support one another in making a stronger society, or we aren’t.

  35. 35.

    gvg

    If you run into people who complain that it didn’t do enough, explain to them, there is always more to be done and to make a list of the next steps. If you complain that step one isn’t enough, no one will ever get anywhere and you are a saboteur.

    As a financial aid counselor at a University I would really like to see Grad loans include subsidized again. I think it is incredibly stupid to only have unsub and plus for grad students so the interest is capitalizing while they are in school. In fact I am not sure any loan in school should have interest, but the grad students are getting screwed a bit more IMO.

    The states control tuition which is why I don’t know how to fix it, but a whole lot of problems would just go away if the states were subsidizing tuition better, like they used to. The rational was that college educated citizens earned more and ended up paying more in taxes which made them more profitable for both the state and the Feds.

  36. 36.

    Baud

    Why do the haters always assume that their tax dollars are going towards people they hate?  Why don’t they assume their tax dollars are paying for the military and law enforcement?  Liberals pay taxes too.  Our taxes can cover all the good stuff that helps regulary folks.

  37. 37.

    Ken

    I am now wondering whether the student loan announcement involved a bit of 11th-dimensional chess to get people looking at the PPP loan information.

  38. 38.

    Baud

    @Ken: Heh.  I thought the same thing.  A bunch of folks are going to be looking up the Streisand Effect on wikipedia pretty soon.

  42. 42.

    Lapassionara

    What I found astonishing about the student loans was that the amount to be repaid kept going up for some borrowers. I could not get a satisfactory explanation for that. Then there is the drastic increase in the cost of higher education that can’t be just the result of inflation.

  47. 47.

    trollhattan

    Now that’s an eye-opener. Catholic church is first in the queue, with several organizations, the bishop receiving nearly $3mil (lender is Notre Dame FCU, so a tidy package that makes).

    I see restaurateurs receiving forgiveness both under their names and again for their restaurants. Weird incorporations and partnerships? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  49. 49.

    trollhattan

    @Baud: There’s always an underlying “somebody’s getting away with something” and it’s nearly always aimed at chump change grifts and never at the Big Boys with their massive tax-evasion schemes, white collar crimes, theft of public resources, cheating on environmental rules, etc. But a “young buck with a welfare t-bone, man, somebody needs to do something!”

  50. 50.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Spanky: He ceased being Mayor-For-Life awhile back – he won only narrowly for his fourth or fifth term, and decided to run the town through surrogates after that.  I assume he’s still running his little business empire, either directly or through the next generation.

  53. 53.

    Cacti

    I don’t feel like being polite with Republicans about it.

    Tell them to pretend that student loan forgiveness was just another billionaire tax cut, corporate bailout, or foreign war that did absolutely nothing for them.

  54. 54.

    eachother

    Fewer than half of Americans have a post high school degree.
    Just over half the American population are women.
    Is there something about 50% in the minds 50% of Americans that believes half of our full potential in this country is sufficient and needs no examination.
    Return on investment in education and equal rights would benefit our economic and social future in manifold ways, eclipsing short sighted concerns of the moment.
    The usury and human potential wasted are long lived debilitations that have benefited few and harmed many. Too many for too long.
    Contrast the tax cuts the wealthy and corporations were given with women’s rights being taken and education terrorists eroding freedom of access to topics that seems to offend the few but loud promoters of ignorance.
    Half of our population is not able to fulfill their potential without obstacles obstructing them all along the way. The whole population suffers this selfish choice deeply.

  55. 55.

    Baud

    Like the NYT, liberals need to stop supporting Starbucks but won’t.

    Starbucks illegally withheld wages and benefits from thousands of unionized baristas, the National Labor Relations Board alleged in a complaint Wednesday.

    The complaint arrives during a campaign by the coffee chain and its interim CEO, Howard Schultz, to tamp down unionization efforts at its stores around the United States. More than 230 locations have voted to join the Starbucks Workers United union since late 2021, driving a surge in unionization nationwide.

  56. 56.

    Cacti

    Reminder:

    Members of Congress helped themselves most generously to completely forgivable PPP funds for their personal business interests.

    Mitch McConnell’s wifey got 1 million bucks.

  57. 57.

    PPCLI

    That’s presumably also Gym Jordan’s view of the Ohio State wrestling team sexual abuse: “That sexual abuse had been going on before I became a coach at OSU, to many wrestlers who had already graduated. If I reported the sexual abuse I learned about, think how unfair it would have been to all those earlier wrestlers whose abuse didn’t get reported.”

  60. 60.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Baud:

    Turtle groomers

    Mitch McConnell is grooming turtles? Would it be irresponsible to speculate….?

  61. 61.

    RinaX

    @Baud: I’m not a coffee drinker, but the place always seemed highly overrated. It always seemed counterintuitive that a company that seemed so progressive on the surface would charge so much for coffee.

    On another note, I dreaded the impact of student loan forgiveness. However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the response from real people. So many are thrilled and happy about the changes. I didn’t anticipate the interest cap changes or the $20K for Pell grant recipients. That seems to have undercut a lot of the bloviating.

  65. 65.

    Ohio Mom

    That was an eye-opener. Tons of money went to the businesses in my zip code — there are a lot of businesses in my zip code.

    Only recognized a couple of names, the insurance agent on the main drag who has a big sign in front of his office, and the little mom and pop produce and speciality market I frequent several times a week. I was thrilled to see the market listed, to know that they were helped, they deserved it.

    Now I’m going to look up some other local zip codes.

  69. 69.

    JCJ

    Just looked up in-state tuition at Purdue in 1980 – $933 (Estimated to be about $3500 in 2022 dollars) while Purdue’s actual tuition now is $9992.  My tuition was about half that (maybe $500) since my mother worked at Purdue.

    What really took my breath away was tuition at Indiana University School of Medicine.  In 1985 I think I remember it was about $4000 or $5000 for a year, while now it is $35,000.

    When I went to Universität Hamburg for a year in 1981 I had to pay about $20 for an administrative fee, but nothing else.  The German government even gave me a subsidy for my dorm fees.

    Perhaps the loan forgiveness didn’t go far enough

  70. 70.

    Ohio Mom

    @RinaX: My theory is that Starbucks is partially the modern malt shop. Not too many people order plain coffee, the orders are drinks with syrups added and often, mounds of whipped cream. It’s especially noticeable after high school gets out and the students arrive en masse.

    It’s also the place two non-drinking adults can meet up. I see mini-business meetings in my local Starbucks all the time, and pairs of girlfriends gabbing away. It’s cheaper than meeting a restaurant.

    The actual coffee is the least of it.

  72. 72.

    rikyrah

    More good news

    Reecie @BlackWomenViews (@ReecieColbert) tweeted at 11:16 PM on Wed, Aug 24, 2022:
    PS- I reviewed the transcript of the WH press call I participated in so I can confirm Parent PLUS loans held by the Ed Dept are included in the cancellation policy, another area disproportionately impacting Black households. This cancelation has a multi-generational impact. https://t.co/KGwtHGAjhZ
    (https://twitter.com/ReecieColbert/status/1562655231602995200?t=9flwgZfoE2rJQDmFJmD1pw&s=03)

  73. 73.

    Martin

    A few points regarding the debt forgiveness:

    1. It’s going to be challenged in court, and if USSC strikes this down, you’ll have a comparably large backlash among Dems most promising demographic – young people – to what you saw from Dobbs. Having a modest forgiveness plan will make that court rejection all the more politically painful for the right. IOW, the amount of forgiveness is good politics.
    2. The amount of forgiveness is also good policy. If you look at undergrad debt load from public universities, you’ll see mean amounts at point of graduation of between $15K and $25K. The NYT headlines about students with $200K aren’t wrong, but those are students that made choices about what school they *wanted* to attend that created that debt burden. If you really insist on going to USC without a scholarship, then you don’t get to complain about your $200K in debt when you could more easily have gone to SUNY or UCF or UW and graduated with $15K. And the *median* debt load at graduation is even lower than that because in-state financial aid tends to be extremely uniform with this huge spike in the lowest decile of out of state students that are just paying out the ass, and that spike tends to pull the mean up a fair bit. So the debt relief amount is pretty much just right. It’ll wipe out all debt for a surprisingly large number of students. My employer used to have >50% of students on pell grants (that’s fallen considerably since I left, because I left) and a $14K mean debt at graduation, so probably ⅔ or more of their alums just had *all* of their debt cancelled. That’s huge.
    3. This policy hits just right, avoids rewarding the students that knowingly racked up huge college debt, it doesn’t do much for graduate school debt (which should be funded through other means, and shame on programs that don’t fund their grad students). I would like to see more targeted debt relief programs (which already do exist, I just want more of them) to retire debt for teachers and physicians who take jobs in communities that lack resources. Should add nurses and social workers to that list.
    4. Notice that Biden is doing his biggest debt forgiveness for victims of for-profit colleges that straight up scammed them. On this front, I’d like to see the federal government get out of the business of loaning to them entirely. They are for-profit – they can find their own funding mechanism.
  75. 75.

    Urban Suburbanite

    @RinaX: It’s absolutely garbage coffee. But they’re fucking everywhere, and the company has enough resources to push out other, smaller competitors.

    A Seattle Times columnist recently wrote some handwringing word salad about one of the downtown Seattle stores closing (local media loves using that area to get their quota of “Seattle is dyyyyyyiiiinnnng” pieces), as if that was some magical place and the soul of this city. Anyone who has lived here longer than a week knows that’s some bullshit.

  76. 76.

    Suzanne

    @gvg:

    If you run into people who complain that it didn’t do enough, explain to them, there is always more to be done and to make a list of the next steps. If you complain that step one isn’t enough, no one will ever get anywhere and you are a saboteur. 

    Agreed. This loan forgiveness honestly isn’t going to do a damn thing for me or many of my friends, who have a lot of debt from professional and medical and grad programs and came from families who could not help us pay for our educations. (And before everyone says that we’re making a lot of money and don’t need forgiveness, I would say that we are living very typical middle-class lives and can certainly afford some repayment, but we are also certainly driving used Hondas. None of us are “coastal elite” people and none of us went to “good schools” as defined by a ranking.)

    I’m still happy about it. Would I like more loan forgiveness? Yeah. I’m salty that education is such a fucking racket. I’m salty that I now pay a lot more in taxes, because of that education that the public didn’t do shit to help me to get, rather than putting that money toward my loans. Quite frankly, I think educated people are performing real service to their country, not going overseas and getting involved in destructive wars for no good reason.

    But starting somewhere is a shitload better than starting nowhere.

  77. 77.

    Jeffro

    I don’t have any good way to know which of the businesses listed in my Zip code might have been scamming, or which one’s owners’ lean right, or whatever.

    BUT

    I do see two university foundations that managed to secure about $2M total in (now-forgiven) loans.  As in, foundations with rather large reserves and relatively small staffs.  >(

    I’ll be sure to keep an eye out and see if these foundations’ presidents decide to pop off about the ‘undeserving’ in the months ahead.

  78. 78.

    Eunicecycle

    That link to the PPP site was very informative! I found out my church got over $200,000 and I never heard it mentioned. We had a school, too, though so maybe it was mostly for that. I recognized a lot of the businesses and felt they probably deserved it. Restaurants, salons etc that had to close.

  79. 79.

    trollhattan

    @trollhattan: Having plowed through the list, it’s apparent Notre Dame FCU was made rather whole by this program to the tune of $4.4M, in just our zipcode. They held the only seven-figure loans.

  80. 80.

    Baud

    @Suzanne:

    but we are also certainly driving used Hondas

     
    Harrumph. In my day, the cars had holes in the floors so we could use our feet to propel them.

  81. 81.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steeplejack:

    Hmm, odd. What I sent was a short video of the Met Opera chorus singing the “Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore. I didn’t use google search at all (my search term was youtube anvil chorus) and when I click on my link from my comment, that’s exactly where it takes me.

  83. 83.

    Alison Rose 💙🌻💛

    @HinTN: It’s interesting because my company is on there, and it shows 33 jobs reported, and um………we have nowhere near that many employees. Even if they counted part-timers and folks who work with us on a consultant basis, it still wouldn’t be close.

    Interesting.

  84. 84.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Baud:

    Well, I didn’t know that. What am I supposed to type, then?

    ETA: I mean, I’m using Safari to search, and nowhere in the process do I see the word “Google.”

  85. 85.

    Baud

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    If doesn’t matter what you type, your browser will use a search engine.  You can always change to one of the lesser known search engines, but that’s about it.

  86. 86.

    Suzanne

    @Martin:

    The NYT headlines about students with $200K aren’t wrong, but those are students that made choices about what school they *wanted* to attend that created that debt burden. If you really insist on going to USC without a scholarship, then you don’t get to complain about your $200K in debt when you could more easily have gone to SUNY or UCF or UW and graduated with $15K. 

    Everyone I know who has over $100K (and it’s a lot of people) went to in-state schools, in grad, medical, and professional programs.

  87. 87.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Baud:

    Well, Baud, here’s the thing. I searched, and linked, the same way I’ve been searching and linking stuff forever. Why all of a sudden for this one time is it a problem for people? I’m doing nothing differently. Something else has changed.

  88. 88.

    kent

    YOU MADE ME SO MAD! There’s a gross, predatory dentist in our area, the kind who will decide you need fillings and bridges that no other dentist would think you need, the kind who makes you feel bad about yourself and overcharges you for the privilege of helping you feel better … THAT guy, got over $100K in loans forgiven. Fck that noise.

  90. 90.

    Central Planning

    @Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: I wonder if they are doing some non-obvious counting, like if the loans were for 5 people in 2020 and 10 in 2021, they are reporting that as 15 people, even if it’s the same five people from 2020 in 2021.

  91. 91.

    Steeplejack

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Here’s the actual text of your link:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+anvil+chorus&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:07f1e052,vid:MdX3T_Kjcos,st:0

    I could see that you were going for the “Anvil Chorus,” but I couldn’t resist that “breaking rocks” GIF.

    Once you get to your desired YouTube video, you probably need to click “Share” and then copy the specific URL. I speak from bitter experience.

  92. 92.

    Central Planning

    @SiubhanDuinne: Unless you manually changed it, Google is the default search engine for Safari.

    When I type something in the address bar on top, Safari reminds me of that by appending ” – Search Google”

  93. 93.

    Kelly

    A couple thoughts on this.

    1. I graduated from the U of Oregon debt free in the late 1970’s. I figure government money direct to the U and grants to me covered most of the actual cost back then.
    2. I see our two largest family owned timberland and sawmill business had $7,000,000+ in payroll support loans forgiven. If I recall correctly they never shut down during the plague but maybe it was sick pay. Worth noting that both wealthy families typically donate a few million to Republican causes each election cycle.
  94. 94.

    Steeplejack

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    The problem isn’t using Google per se, it’s that once you get to your result you need to nail down the specific URL of the page. See my #90.

  95. 95.

    Geminid

    @RinaX: I think Biden struck a very good balance with his executive action. Like you say, the income based repayment changes will make a real difference. This was judicious action, and I think it will be very defensible politically.

  96. 96.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steeplejack:

    Yes. That is what I thought I did. Not sure what else I could have done.

    Anyhow, fuck it. It’s a stupid song from a stupid opera and the whole point of having a little snicker at Megan McArdle’s expense seems to have disappeared under the rubble.

  98. 98.

    RaflW

    I just did the math for a tweet, and my private university tuition has risen 5.4X the rate of inflation vs. when I started college in ’83.

    From $1,450 to over $26,000. Completely, utterly baffling how it’s gotten so expensive.

    So while I guess from polling my cohort (white guys over 45) we’re the most grumpy about loan relief, we have the least realistic idea of what students are saddled with now. That said, many of my cohort must be forking over for their kids now, so should know this?!

  99. 99.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steeplejack:

    Once you get to your desired YouTube video, you probably need to click “Share” and then copy the specific URL. I speak from bitter experience.

    This is EXACTLY what I did. This is what I ALWAYS do. I’m not sure how I can make it any plainer.

  100. 100.

    Steeplejack

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    When you did the search, did it go directly to the YouTube video or, as it did for me just now (Firefox on Win10), to a “search results” page with the YouTube video as the first item? When I clicked on that I got to the YouTube page with the “correct” URL.

    ETA: Forget it. Frustration level appears to be rising.

  101. 101.

    Alison Rose 💙🌻💛

    @Central Planning: The forgiveness date was in 2020, so I don’t know if that would apply. We do have some employees who sort of do more than one job…I wonder if they counted those as multiple jobs. Honestly, it doesn’t surprise me that this place would do some sleight of hand in this area.

  102. 102.

    Redshift

    I didn’t know until recently that there’s an idea circulating that the reason college tuition has gone up so much is that the government is backing the loans, so colleges can just charge more and more with no risk. I assume it started in the wingnut-o-sphere (like “cities in flames across the country”), but I’ve heard it repeated by people who ought to know better.

    It’s insane, but it’s something to be prepared for.

  103. 103.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steeplejack:

    It went directly to the YouTube video. Whereupon I clicked the “share” arrow, selected “copy link,” and then pasted the copied URL link into my comment.

  105. 105.

    Suzanne

    @Redshift: College has gone up in price for a few reasons, the biggest being that states are paying less. IIRC, up until something like 1980, most states covered approx. 75% of the costs at their in-state public institutions. It started dropping and now it’s closer to 10%.

    Now a lot of universities are actively recruiting international students because they pay full freight.

  107. 107.

    Ken

    @Central Planning: You are a kind-hearted person. My immediate suspicion was that the owner of the company called all his relatives and said “Do you want to be listed as working for me for the next six months? You won’t actually have to come in.”

  108. 108.

    sab

    So we have a daycare in our neighborhood that got a grant. I looked them up. That explains why that house on the corner has so many tiny children.

  109. 109.

    rikyrah

    @sab:

     

    If they don’t all look like they can be from the same family, and have the playsets in the backyard, I always think home day care..LOL

  111. 111.

    Steeplejack

    I’m begging people to take a look at Will Bunch’s thread from May, on the anniversary of Kent State. Here’s the convenient Thread Reader version. It quickly explains a lot, with useful links.

    I’d never realized how explicit is the straight line from the backlash against 1960s protest to today’s world of runaway tuition and a gob-smacking $1.75 trillion student debt, plus the growing cultural warfare between those who attend college and those who do not.

    In 1980, Reagan was elected president and ushered through cuts in federal aid to higher ed that accelerated the rise of the student-debt industrial complex. State legislatures that once boosted public universities put them on the chopping block.

    State funding of higher education shrank by $9 billion from 2010-2019.

    His book on the subject, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It, just came out.

  112. 112.

    Scout211

    @SiubhanDuinne:  I’m late to this little kerfluffle, but I will back you up to say that this same thing has happened to me a few times on my iPad. I click the link for a site on the google search page and it takes me to the site. I get ready to copy the url of the site I am on but I get a copy of a url that starts with “google” and not the url for the site I was trying to post a link to. So you are not I crazy and you are not alone.

    I have had to go back a few steps and start over and eventually I find the exact url.

    I’m not sure what the problem is but it feels like creeping google . . . 😉

    ETA for clarity.

  114. 114.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Baud:

    Harrumph. In my day, the cars had holes in the floors so we could use our feet to propel them.

    Wow, man, you had holes? They came and took ours away. Now I know where they went, you commie bastard.

  116. 116.

    Scout211

    @louc: love it!

    You would think an actual paid journalist would check that list and ask these Republicans about their own government loans that were forgiven. I won’t hold my breath for that.

  117. 117.

    Another Scott

    @Scout211: It may be Apple being “helpful”.  (Browsers on iPads are just a thin skin over Apple’s Safari browser, so things can behave differently there compared to other browsers).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  118. 118.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @SiubhanDuinne: In the end, I thought your bringing up the Anvil thang was pretty funny. McArgleBargle probably is smart enough to know that everyone thinks she’s a total fucking moron, but then she laughs all the way to the bank.

    I hope she steps on a rake.

  120. 120.

    Martin

    @Suzanne: Sure, but those *should* be economic decisions. Is the cost of this education going to be made up by the income I should earn off of it. And for professional degrees, that should be a no-brainer. For non-professional grad degrees, it’s not so easy. But as I noted in my comment, all grad students should be funded by the university. One thing we told every engineering undergrad: never, ever pay for grad school. Get your employer to pay for it or make sure you’re fully funded. That’s not a message that has been embraced by other disciplines.

  121. 121.

    StringOnAStick

    @Urban Suburbanite: Starbucks coffee tastes burnt to me, like the beans are over roasted just enough to give a burnt flavor.  No wonder what they really sell is sugar and lots of it (most people are getting flavored drinks, not straight, burnt coffee).

  122. 122.

    Redshift

    @Suzanne:

    College has gone up in price for a few reasons, the biggest being that states are paying less. IIRC, up until something like 1980, most states covered approx. 75% of the costs at their in-state public institutions. It started dropping and now it’s closer to 10%.

    Yeah, I know, that’s why the “greedy colleges” thing is so annoying.

    It’s also not widely known that our whole system of requiring loans to pay for college is because there was this movement to make college accessible to everyone in the 1960s/70s, and after conservatives saw campus protests and other actions, their reaction was “we didn’t really mean everybody,” and set out to make money a requirement.

    ETA: Or just read what Steeplejack said. (Thanks for the links I no longer had handy!)

  123. 123.

    Martin

    @Suzanne: There’s a few contributors. Yes, states are paying less.

    But the rising cost is principally driven by Baumol’s cost disease:

    If productivity per man hour rises cumulatively in one sector relative to its rate of growth elsewhere in the economy, while wages rise commensurately in all areas, then relative costs in the nonprogressive sectors must inevitably rise, and these costs will rise cumulatively and without limit…Thus, the very progress of the technologically progressive sectors inevitably adds to the costs of the technologically unchanging sectors of the economy, unless somehow the labor markets in these areas can be sealed off and wages held absolutely constant, a most unlikely possibility.

    In short, we’re still putting the same one professor in front of the same x students in a classroom as we were in the 1920s. There’s been no productivity gains in higher education since the Carnegie model was introduced, but the relative productivity gains in every other part of the economy then serves to drive up those costs because you’re trying to hire MDs that could earn mid 6 figures the private sector, or engineering PhDs that could earn Apple or Google money. I mean, my employer runs one of the best creative writing programs in the US, but can’t afford to hire one of its graduates to teach there because they soon run off with multi-book deals, movie rights and so on. So in a perfect public policy situation, we’d still have this problem. The only way out of it is to increase the productivity of higher education, something that the very structure of higher education prevents from happening. You have to tear down conventional universities and rebuild them to get this result, and that ain’t going to happen. And the public doesn’t like it when it does happen.

    On that journey, universities ran into two other problems:

    1. Rankings forced universities to be competitive in ways that were orthogonal to education. None of the rankings have anything to do with the quality of education, so universities engage in all kinds of other investments to remain competitive that only serve to drive up costs. If they don’t compete, they struggle to meet enrollments, which is even more harmful.
    2. As public support dried up, universities were forced to seek other funding mechanisms. This is the primary driver for the administrative bloat. Technology transfer programs needed massive investments so that in-house research could be licensed out to form a new revenue stream. Those summer camps for pre-university students need to be administered and can be a significant revenue stream. International outreach programs are also important. It’s not just that the International students bring their own money, they bring *more* than that. Our program with Saudi Arabia brought 50% more revenue than even an International student, because we added cultural programs, etc. to make sure their little princelings didn’t get exposed to too much western decadence. Yeah, we hated the idea, but it was cash when we were laying off academic administrators. Our academic (I was on the academic side of things) administrator to faculty ratio was about 1:10 which was the lowest in the institutions history. Academic administration had never been more efficient, but non-academic administration was massive. We had more staff simply managing grants than we had doing all academic functions. I mean, UCLA is one of the universities that just straight up running a hotel on premises. A lot of universities are just REITs with a tax exempt status due to having some students. That brings with it a TON of administration, but also replacement income.

    The cultural undermining of higher education accelerated the problem, but didn’t create it. It was inevitable no matter what.

    In my job I used to push the marginal cost to educate a student everywhere I could and everyone hated it because it made it so abundantly clear how fucked we were. That industry leading professor teaching a 40 seat graduate course (huge class size in many disciplines) can carry a per-student cost of $2K, just for one class. Our target course cost for undergraduates was $75/credit hour. Anything higher than that and we lose money. That’s not a lot. A $100K faculty member ($65K + benefits) needs to teach 350 students a year assuming a full course load. That’s not unsustainable, but it sure as shit doesn’t leave room for small professional programs with enrollments in the dozens rather than hundreds or thousands. If we wanted a break-even professional program, we’d need a minimum of 250 students to even consider it. Smaller than that – forget it.

    That’s really what gets a lot of institutions in trouble – they want this diversity of educational programs, but financially they can’t afford it unless they can scale really well. And if you add up all of the programs, suddenly your university needs to be massive.

  124. 124.

    Martin

    @Steeplejack: $9B sounds like a lot, but it’s kind of not. My mid-tier public had an annual budget of $4B.

    People think of big universities as being primarily undergraduate institutions, because that’s their public face. But that’s really a small and diminishing part of what they do, in part because being a purely undergraduate teaching institution is increasingly untenable economically. You have to build out these other revenue streams.

  125. 125.

    Redshift

    @Martin: From what I’ve read, the three big factors are the productivity issue you describe, cuts in state funding, and an increase in the number of layers of management.

  127. 127.

    Martin

    @Redshift: The cuts in state funding cause the university to shift focus. I’ve not seen an increase in the layers of management. When I started in .edu I was 4 jumps from the head of the institution, and that was an entry level position pretty far removed from central administration.

    But there’s a huge sprawl of management. It used to be mostly piled up in academics and now it’s not. Management of the hospital was bigger than for academics. We had a public/private partnership with businesses residing on the campus – that had a whole layer of management (paid for by the partnership). We had joint institutes with foreign universities, that had their own management (paid for by the joint institute). And on and on. UC runs three major DOE national labs, they all have their own management. You have dozens of smaller national labs. You have management of public spaces. My campus ran the county’s rideshare pilot program. Some campuses have their own K-12 schools, they have daycares. Like I mentioned above, UCLA has it’s own hotel (and are far from the only campus to do so). All of these things have management structures, but they don’t add to depth of it, just the sprawl of it.  Major universities are all turning into GE with a million divisions all doing different things, one of which is educating undergrads.

  128. 128.

    Martin

    @Redshift: Think of it a different way: That $9B in cuts spread across 50 states. That’s about $180M per state if it were evenly spread (it’s hardly evenly spread), but the per campus impact is going to be less than $180M in even the worst case (since almost every state has multiple public universities – CA has 150 of them). Texas A&M alone earns about $200M a year off of their sports programs. You’re going to build a big fucking administration around $200M in earnings, way more than you would have torn down due to the loss of $50M or so in student subsidies. Think of all the branding, merchandize and sponsorship deals, TV rights, conference bullshit, and on and on. That’s a HUGE management layer, but it’s not between leadership and academia. It’s its own entity that the academics have complete and utter disdain for. (One of the reasons why JoePa and Sandusky got away with their shit – leadership cares only about academics and tolerates and to the greatest extent possible delegates out all of the other stuff, and in many institutions uses that money to subsidize academics. One of the last things I did before retiring was setting up a handful of new programs to subsidize TA employment, which helped fund state-funded graduate students and expand instructional coverage for undergraduates. Every dollar came from international students and their governments.

    My preference would have been to never need that program, but given our budget reality, I feel like we at least got something positive out of it. Needed to hire a few administrators to run it though. Administrative costs were about 8%, which isn’t terrible.

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