I think it might be useful to examine how far you think the obligation to pay for your children’s education extends. Since you’ve mentioned 18 year olds, I assume we’re talking undergraduate here. But does it extend further?
If your kid gets their Bachelors and then says “I really want to keep going and get that Masters”, will you pay for it? And a few years later if they want to go for a PhD, will you pay for that? How about if in their late 20s they realize that their career isn’t working out and want to go back to school for a few years, do you think that’s your responsibility to pay for?
The answer to all of those questions, for you personally, might be yes. And that’s fine. And it might be that at some point you say to your kid, “Hey, I love and support you, but you’re a grownup now, and if you want to go get your nth degree, you can figure out how to pay for it”. Different people will draw that line in different places, likely based on their estimation of how valuable more education is (in general, or for the specific child in question), ability to pay, and many other factors.
If you can imagine a line where you’d tell your kid that more college is on them, it shouldn’t be that hard to understand that some people draw that line earlier than you do. Some people think college isn’t that valuable. Some people think that their kid in particular is not well served by college. And some people just literally can’t pay for it by hook or crook.
I don’t think there was anything in what I posted that said that. “Just wash our hands of them”. Not sure how you got that as my take home message.
What I said was the numbers are ore complex, and graduation rates are not the only or best metric of success.
Reasons why a CC student doesn’t graduate (from my direct experience) that are independent of the institution. While 4 year colleges may have some of these, by design CC have more students with these outcomes.
Transferred to a 4 year college before getting their AA/AS
Took a few courses and decided a different career path is right for them and signed up for vocational or certificate training
Did ESL work and became more proficient in English, but didn’t want a degree
Had to step away from college for family reasons but came back a few years later and completed (3 year rates are typically reported)
Did poorly in remedial coursework because they were working 60 hours a week (and unlike for profit places, after a few retakes we will fail them and not keep taking their money).
Childcare fell through (many CC students are working parents) so they had to step away
That’s why I suggested looking at remedial coursework completion rates, and completion rates of students who finish their first year, and not just graduation rates alone as an indicator or success.
This is a benefit of the system- it’s a place where people can take a risk and try again, even when the past is stacked against them. No one want students overburdened and not successfully completing. Its just that at CC the definition of success is much more nuanced, and the complexities of the students lives are often even more challenging.
I didn’t mean to call you out personally, and I agree it’s complex, but when I am advising a student where to go, I am always going to push them toward the school with the high completion rate–because with fewer “complicated” students and a general expectation of success, those schools have more to offer students with complicated situations. Our local CC and some of our local regionals are so incredibly difficult to navigate: if you don’t have a parent who went to college to advise you, you won’t ever find what you need, because you don’t even know what to look for. Sure, they have fancy looking forms and course plans, but they don’t have real support. And god forbid you have a hold on your record for some reason: it’s an all-day affair to find out what it’s even there for, and another day to get it removed. There are lots of great individuals, but the institution doesn’t expect success.
I hear all that- the place I am now (4 year SLAC) has an incredible (nationally recognized) first generation college student program and we have completion rates for first gen students that are the envy of any institution. First gen students, in particular, are at a liability not knowing the basics of college culture and the hidden curriculum. So many are toxically independent that it doesn’t occur to them that their professor, chair, or dean (me) can help with a problem! Or they email the president when a note to their advisor would do.
I completely agree that know how a school supports their students is very important, but for many kids, either financially or academically, CC’s are an amazing starting point. The evaluation rules are a little different and may be harder to suss out, though.
They can’t.
But (if all goes well), a 22-32 (or 22-42) year old college graduate can.
The expectation is that sometime in that general age range (very late teens to early 20s), college or no college, people become adults and stop being supported by their parents and start supporting themselves. And so college (right in that time period) can be thought of as the last big expense of raising a child or the first big expense of being an adult or some kind of split between the two, all of which are rational ways of looking at it.
Finally, if you are looking for a way to kill off economic mobility and make sure that poor kids can’t go to college, make loans only available to upper middle class and rich parents.
This is my point. You have to make the program be based around the student, not the parents in order to serve all students. Parents can still help, by taking out loans or by helping to pay, but some would-be college students without that resource would be locked out if it was all based around parents.
I would have been screwed if it worked that way. I worked, got help from my mother, and took out loans for undergrad. The help from my mother cost her a lot in terms of retirement security. I took nothing from my father, with whom I had (and have) no contact. I don’t know what I would have done if I had been required to get support from him. But it would have been more costly to me than any loan I had to repay.
I paid off my undergrad loans in 5 years before I went back for my professional degree. Now, I’m still paying back my loans (5-figures) for my professional degree. But that investment was very much worth it. I would not have accepted help with that cost, had my mother offered – it is a debt that very much belongs with me. If I had a much wealthier family, for whom that cost was a trifle, maybe I would feel differently. But that’s not the case for me, and for a lot of other students.
I may have missed it somewhere upthread, but I don’t think anyone here has yet mentioned a very significant factor contributing to the student loan crisis: the extreme difficulty of discharging any student loan debt via bankruptcy since the laws changed in 2005.
Costs wouldn’t be spiraling out of control if the moral hazard of guaranteed loans (guaranteed because the private lenders know that there is no escape for their lendees) didn’t exist. An obvious comparison would be to the sub-prime mortgage crisis that arose around the same time (purely a coincidence, I’m sure).
I only read the first 60 posts or so, but there is no law against the kid getting the loan and the parents paying it off. Given the relatively low interest rates, that could make sense. We did that for a daughter.
Going back to the OP, the original student loan concept was
Lend money for school directly to the student at far below market interest rates that would be in essence an investment by the student in that student’s increased future earning capacity as a result of school.
Along the way the low rates disappeared as the banks were allowed to get greedy. The low tuition disappeared as the colleges were allowed to get greedy. And the kids’ drive to do succeed disappeared as they were allowed to get lazy or apply student loans to nonproductive degrees.
And here we are with a mess. We’ve greatly increased the price of college, saddled a generation with silly amounts of now high interest rate debt, and still (or once again) have priced the lower classes out of attending college.
Let’s hear it for “deregulation” to benefit business of what had been a massively beneficial social mobility program when it started.
My boss came from a Hispanic family that was conservative enough to where everyone with a job helped out grandma with her expenses (it also helped it was a large family ) it ranged from one of her sons paying her rent to even one of the grandkids on SSI giving her 20-30 bucks a month … she didn’t use that contribution because she knew hed need it later and unbeknownst to him he would "borrow " it nack
But it was assumed the 3rd and 4th generations would help out the older family members when they became old enough to not to be able to work … or help a relative of to school, of course, they expected to be paid back somehow even if it wasn’t in cash like the accountant niece that didn’t charge the family for doing their taxes because everyone pitched in to send her to school …
“Allowed to apply student loans to non-productive degrees”? Are you suggesting that at one time student loans were only available for those pursuing “productive degrees”? If so, when was this and who was deciding what was productive?
Yeah, I take exception to a few things in that summary paragraph, but that’s probably for another thread.
But the larger answer really is that the mess we see now has at its roots when the loan program, and financial aid more broadly, stopped having how best to serve the student as it’s central priority, and became more revenue conscious, primarily under Reagan.
College shouldn’t be about discovering one’s self on borrowed or gifted money. What a frivolous waste of time and money. College is about acquiring skills and credentials to improve one’s market value.
The most valuable skills you can learn in college are “soft” skills: the ability to communicate orally and in writing, to summarize and synthesize, to plan and organize and schedule, to work in groups and get the best out of each group member, etc., and those are skills you can learn studying medieval literature or cultural anthropology just as easily as in more “technical” fields. College isn’t vo-tech; a lot of the specific skills and credentials you gain in college will be essentially worthless in a few years because the world marches on and technologies and laws change, but the ability to think and to express yourself will never be outmoded.
You can learn those skills in high school or just general working as well. When one spends tens of thousands of dollars and 4-6 years on a sheet of paper it has to have a return on investment. You say it’s not vo-tech. But those who don’t treat their time and money as having a value are going to have a rougher time than those who do.
True, you can get so-called soft skills in any field. But why is it that college medieval literature increases your value in the market? A high school diploma used to increase your value in the market. Grade inflation and lax standards devalued the high school diploma. Ease of certain BS/BA degrees does the same thing to a college degree. Your education credential is nothing more than a signal to the labor market of your worth. Not all credentials are equal.
This is clearly not true. The most valuable degrees are the ones that teach hard skills doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. While you can find individuals that became the CEO of a fortune 500 company with a liberal arts degree in most cases the person who just has soft skills are the ones who are the most interchangeable. Even in the STEM world the Batchelor degrees for the hard sciences are mostly worthless because they don’t teach hard skills. A batchlors degree in chemistry qualifies you to wash bottles and it takes a masters or a PhD to learn the hard skills that make you desirable.
Nah. I never did a damn thing with my college education other than play a pedant on a message board. I still consider it a sound investment in me. Economics and market forces are overrated. Though admittedly I spent thousands rather than many tens of thousands.