If you are pumping money into the economy, it doesn’t really matter whether that money is going to students who are buying books and computers, or to schools who are buying books and computers, or to new instructors who are buying books and computers; the actual inflationary impact is pretty much the same.
It does matter where the money goes…
If the government offered grants to public universities to build larger academic buildings and more dorms, hire more professors and they actually did that. The schools would need to lower tuition rates in order to attract more students to fill the larger capacity of enrollment.
If you just give more accessible money to students the demand at the universities will go up as more students are applying. The university knows that this is likely a temporary increase in demand because your can’t count of the Federal guarantees of student loans to be permanent, so they don’t expand their class building, dorms, hire more professors…they just raise tuition because they can due to the increased demand. And from those funds they build new football stadiums etc.
I’m not sure that’s a true statement. They might have excess demand at current pricing and could maintain (or raise) that pricing once capacity was increased.
I’m in favor of student loan forgiveness, especially for technical schooling, bachelor’s degrees, medical degrees, or anything useful to society. But I have no sympathy for financing a doctorate in HR (hard to believe that such a thing even exists).
Why would that necessarily be true? You’ve got massive amounts of extra money floating around: those contractors who built the buildings can now afford to send their kids to college, as can the people selling the building materials, the new professors you hired, etc.
Moreover, we’re still talking about public universities and colleges here; most don’t get to set their own tuition rates anyway, but instead have their rates set by their governing bodies (legislature, board of regents, whoever). What’s the impetus for the legislature to lower tuition rates, when they can leave tuition the same (or even raise it) and use the excess elsewhere in the state budget or cut taxes?
For sure. We know that direct aid to parents with small children for child care and health care has a good multiple when it comes back. We know that tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy does not.
I’m not sure what the multiple would be for direct federal funding to schools, and whether the government would be able to stop the problem that federal funding often seems to come with bloat and waste, when it goes to large organizations like the military or (I would think) schools. I also don’t know what the multiple is for grants and loans to students.
Is this thread a point and laugh at the person who threw away tons of money for a bullshit degree from a bullshit for-profit school? Or is it a serious conversation about how we should run the economy, or at least the secondary education part of it?
My Dad grew up extremely poor, and couldn’t even afford to go to the free CCNY. That didn’t stop him from supporting my education.
I hope the Guardian vetted this person, because it sounds to me like a fake example made up by a right wing think tank.