So your concept of relieving hardship only applies to financial situations?
Okay, so for a more realistic counter to your analogy.
You study every day and night, and get are getting a 4.0. Your roommate also studies every day and night, and is getting a 2.0.
Dyslexia is suddenly discovered, and your roommate is diagnosed. Now that he has responded amazingly to therapy, he is also now getting 4.0’s. As part of the diagnosis, his old grades are also retroactively changed to measure what he would have gotten, had he not had a learning disability. So he now has a 4.0 as well.
Are you aggrieved?
No, I do not consider learning to be a hardship.
If you got a 4.0, you are going to be be much better and go much further in the workplace than your slacker roommate, even if you both get a 3.0 on your transcript.
A hardship is suffering or privation. Studying is not suffering or privation. Homelessness or starvation due to unpayable student loans is.
When I went to college, I had to take out loans, and I also had to work 40+ hours a week.
Other people in my college had their parents paying their way.
I worked hard to maintain a 3.5 + GPA, all the way up until one day when I couldn’t make ends meet anymore, and I had to take a term off, then another, then…
Should I be aggrieved that I had just as much homework, but far less time to do it than my classmates. Should I be aggrieved that, even though I had a better GPA, even though I worked twice as hard as they did, ultimately, they got degrees and I got a $450 a month student loan payment?
If so, then great, tell me how to alleviate my grievances. If not, if you think I should just suck it up and realize that life sometimes gives other people things that you don’t think that they deserve, then I’d ask you to do the same.
I will also point out one more thing about your analogy, Little Omar, in your analogy, you are being taken from. Your 4.0 is being reduced to a 3.0. That doesn’t fit in with anything proposed by politicians or posters. Lets say the exact same scenario as you described, except you keep your 4.0? Still aggrieved?
I’m trying to figure out how this analogy maps to student loan forgiveness, and am failing utterly.
I think what septimus is saying is that forgiving the loans of students who had them and *chose *not to pay them, by defining them as ***unable ***to pay, is a perverse incentive. (Not the same as someone who simply *cannot *pay, period.)
Because our intuitions about fairness and societal harm are finely tuned to race and gender, having experienced many many examples of how society doesn’t treat women and people of color fairly.
My point was not that richer people are an underclass like women and POC are. It’s that giving something to one class and not another actually harms the class that doesn’t get it. This is really obvious when you consider a policy like the one I suggested.
No analogy is perfect. There are always ways that the analogy isn’t a perfect analog. But I don’t think that imperfection makes the analogy invalid for some purposes.
I honestly don’t understand how you think your analogy makes any sense at all. What is giving chemo to non-cancer patients supposed to be analogous to? Giving money to richer college graduates? How?
I am definitely in favor of debt relief for people who didn’t get a degree. They are generally the poorest of the poor. No increased earning, lots of debt, and often other problems in their life (which is what caused them to fail to get the degree they attempted) too.
But we don’t need to pay off everyone’s college loans to help those people.
That’s an argument for making college free going forward, not an argument for paying off the loans of people who already decided to take on the debt. None of the people who didn’t go to college because they didn’t want to take on the debt are helped by retroactive debt relief. Arguably, they are harmed.
I’m not sure how to parse this. Who’s going to loan money to these students if they have no obligation to pay it back?
This thread is about whether people have grounds for grievance. That’s a different question than how much we should let their grievance dictate policy, but it’s what was asked, and what I responded to.
k9bfriender, you don’t normally do shit like this but altering a poster’s name is decidedly jerkish.
You are, right now, banned from this thread. Please don’t do so again.
k9befriender:
No, it’s like he’s saying “I just bought a car. Can you pay just repay me the money I already paid for my car?” And if he’s told “no”, that is pretty unfair.
Being held accountable for stupid decisions is the essence of adulthood, since 18 year olds are adults they should be treated as such.
While college prices have gone up, the college wage premium has also gone up. Someone with a cheap STEM degree will have borrowed around 20-30K and as a result will have a credential worth and extra 20-30K per year in salary. They have made a very good investment and have no right to feel aggrieved.
A large part of the reason college is so expensive is that loans are so easy to get. For every dollar in government aid, tuition goes up 65 cents.
College loans are one of the biggest causes of the disease they are trying to cure.
It still fits, as the politicians don’t use their own money to payoff the student debt, they use mine, yours and everyone else that pays taxes.
Yes, Life gives it. Up until you try to make it policy. Then it isn’t “life” anymore, it’s you.
Bad choices should not be bailed out by the government every time some new thing is identified as making life hard. Can’t afford kids, don’t have them. Can’t afford or pay the loans you get for college, do something else.
And yes, this is a little boot strappy but I grow tired of everyone wanting to use my money to pay for someone else’s bad decision making.
Not quite. The idea is more that they’re protesting the differential generosity. More like “I already have a car- why do they get cars and I get nothing?”
To use an extreme example-
Let’s say that Neil and Bob both take out 50k in a 20 year student loan and graduate at the same time. Neil has been taught that debt is bad, and took it to heart, paying his loan off early in 12 years, at considerable financial sacrifice. Meanwhile, Bob has paid the bare minimum, and put in for deferments a couple of times, and still owes more than half of the loan by the time Year 13 rolls around. Some President and Congress pass an act to forgive Bob’s student loan debt later that year.
You can’t see why Neil might be a little pissed that the government came around and just paid off Bob’s debt without giving him any compensation for his loans that he took out at the same time?
In effect, Neil was penalized for paying them off early- he paid more in more ways than Bob did, because the government hooked Bob up.
That’s why people get pissed- it’s the ones who are on schedule or who are ahead of schedule who get screwed vs. the people who get deferments, can’t pay, etc…
Maybe if they paid BOTH groups in some fashion, you’d see less grumbling and outrage.
And, again, they need to pay the 3rd group as well – people who didn’t go to college because it was too expensive in the first place. Otherwise this is just a big handout to the middle-class, college-educated crowd at the expensive of the non-college crowd.
I made real and painful sacrifices to help my kids pay for their education without ending up with crushing debt. In addition, their education was more expensive than others’ , because they did not qualify for needs-based assistance. Both were fine, because under the existing deal it seemed the right choice. I believe I have a grievance if the rules are changed retroactively, especially since I will also be paying for those forgiven loans.
Now, if going forward the government decides to give any enrolled student a flat 20k/year towards tuition and beer, I might be a little sour that my kids were born too soon to get some of that, but no legit grievance. It isn’t retroactively invalidating the choices made. I could vote for someone proposing the latter. Not the former.
The latter also avoids the unfairness of those who couldn’t attend college at all.
Exactly this is an ongoing problem where I’m from.
We have a student loan scheme administered by the government. We also have a significant ex-pat community with large amounts of debt owed to the government, making it financially non viable for them to “come home” and contribute to the local economy.
There is ongoing talk about collecting on this debt (asking a foreign government for help) or “forgiveness” of the debt as an encouragement to come home and build local economic activity.
I know that I paid my own student debt, which took a fairly decent sacrifice, meanwhile I know of another person from my high-school graduating class that is hiding from her debt in a neighbouring country.
It would be annoying to me if her debt were to be wiped - I’d feel aggrieved. At the same time, I recall my old Management Science lectures and can’t help thinking of the idea of sunk costs. All that matters is the financial benefit to the country moving forwards. Would we be better off collecting the debt or is it better to have the person back here contributing to economic activity?
I know that the calculation is a whole branch of economic theory - that the concept of “fairness” and not only financial benefit influences behaviour. I know that personally, I feel tertiary education should be close to free, HOWEVER - this tends to benefit the rich most all. With tertiary education being strongly skewed towards those that can most afford to pay for it, why should I as a only “working class” tax payer contribute towards the education of a child who has more than my own do?
A policy should have a goal
The goal of policies that involve paying off student debt are to have a productive and economically engaged workforce.
What is the goal of the policy that you suggested?
Giving things to people who need those things, and not giving things to people that do not need these things. That was the entirety of that point.
As one of those people, I would agree from a selfish standpoint.
But from a practical, pragmatic, and logistical standpoint, I have to disagree that that would be the best policy.
There are many out there and in this thread who ask why they should have to pay for someone else’s poor decisions. I did not make the best possible decisions, and that was a large contributing factor to me not getting my degree. I’d imagine more than a bit of push back if that were the policy.
It also creates a perverse incentive, if you can take out loans to go to college, then drop out with one credit left to graduate, and get your loans repaid.
And honestly, even though I didn’t get a piece of paper, I did receive personal benefit. I did learn a bunch of stuff. It may not convince an employer that I am up to their standards, but it has made me a much better employer. I doubt that I’d be able to run my business nearly as well without at least some of the things that I learned in college.
That just kicks the aggrievement can down the road. Lets say that tomorrow, we make college free. Doesn’t the person who just graduated and has to pay a significant percentage of their income for the next decade or so have a legitimate grievance? It’s at least as legitimate as someone who just finished paying off their loan who objects to a new graduate’s student loan being paid off.
We should have addressed this decades ago. This should have not been a problem for the last generation.
That we are late to address this problem, however, is not a good enough excuse to continue to ignore it.
I meant, that if you take out a loan to go to a fancier school, then the government and taxpayers would have no obligation to pay off your loan for you.
I could have phrased that better.
The thread is about legitimate grievance, not just hurt feelings. And in my eyes, a legitimate grievance is something that should be considered while crafting policy. Just hurt feelings, not so much.
If I buy everyone a Kia, and I offer to buy you a Kia as well, but you say, “No, I just bought a Mercedes, and I would like you to repay me the money I already paid for it”, then is that still unfair to you?
Tuition has gone up over 1100% from 1980 to 2014 (most recent year I could find such a comparison, I assume that it has gone up by more than that by now.) Pay for STEM degrees has not gone up by nearly that much.
I agree that there are some poorly thought out incentives involved in the student loan scheme. It is the fault of the colleges, it is the fault of the banks, it is the fault of businesses inflating their requirements, and it is the fault of the government for allowing this situation to continue. The one group that is not responsible for the situation are the students, who haven’t even had a chance to vote yet.
The beneficiaries of our current system are the colleges who get the money, the banks who get paid on guaranteed loans, and the businesses who get an educated workforce. The ones who have to pay for this system are the students.
I argue that the responsibility for a broken system is being put on the shoulders of those least responsible for it, and least able to afford to pay for it.
Yes, including the businesses that benefit from getting a trained workforce. Personally, I think that they should be the ones paying the bulk of educational costs.
What percentage of your pay will go to taxes to pay off student loans? Unless it is 25%, then your analogy is hyperbolic.
If we were going to use your analogy mapped onto the real world, then it would be like having your GPA reduced from 4.0 to 3.9999(999?).
The difference is, is that I do not considered going to college to be a bad decision. People are told that they must. They are told that they have to take out these lions. It is hard to see that it is a bad decision when it is your high school counselor who is telling you to fill out these forms.
I do feel as though the wrong people are punished with attitudes like you profess. “Can’t afford kids, don’t have them.” punishes the kids for something entirely out of their control. Making college only accessible to the wealthy has some effects that I would consider to be negative to our society.
If you go out and get a $50,000 cash loan and spend it all on strippers and drugs, then yeah, I see no reason to bail that out. If you take on debt because it is what society expects of you, because that is what you are told you need to do in order to move forward, then I do feel that society has an obligation to not leave you on the hook for it.
Should people also have to pay for primary and secondary education? Is providing elementary school too anti-boot strappy?
If so, then we can have that argument. If not, then why do you accept that we provide k-12, but do not provide the rest of the education that employers require?
As I said earlier in this post, the fact that people have been harmed by the broken system is not, IMHO, a justification for not fixing the system. That it should have been done long ago is no excuse for not doing it now. The longer we wait, the more people will be harmed, and the more that would be aggrieved that other people do not have to be harmed by the broken system. This reminds me of the “how do you tell a soldier that they are the last to die” arguments against pulling out of pointless wars.
I am not against paying people back 100% of all tuition payments made, say, for the entirety of your life. If you went to school in 1980, and it cost you $9k, then the govt can send you a check for $9k. That’s what I suppose we would need to do to make sure that there is no one that can say that it was unfair. I don’t know how practical that is, but if that is what is decided is needed to prevent people from punishing the next generation for their personal grievances against schools, banks and the govt, then so be it.
How far back do you think we need to go, whose debt do we have to pay off, that the resentment will not prevent us from having a productive and economically engaged workforce?
apparently I missed this sentence in editing.
Though I suppose it would actually be a worse system if college grads had to fight in the lion pits.
I think the guy who paid for college has a legitimate grievance if others get their debts paid off by the government. I think the Mercedes example is a very fair comparison. One guy already paid for it, so he is told “you don’t get the same reward as everyone else, even though you did just as much to earn it”
If you want to tackle college loan debt and the reason is that the whole system has become unfair and education is too expensive, I think the correct way to address it would be to give tax credits retroactively for money spent on college education, and the credits could reduce in value based on how long ago they were enrolled.
This way, we focus on helping all those who have paid for education, whether they are still in debt or not. Deciding whether or not to give someone a benefit based on whether or not they have already paid for that same benefit seems inherently unfair to me.
If you get an art degree and work at Starbucks and complain about paying your student loans, this is different than someone with a materials engineering degree paying San Francisco rents complaining about student loans while making Model S payments.
University attendance is certainly correlated with higher incomes, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is fit for a university education, especially if they waste bailout money on unmarketable degrees. We might 10,000 materials engineers, but how many anthropologists is there a market for?
We need to incentivize marketable degrees, if we’re going to spend our own money to do it.