Student loan forgiveness: A poll

Politics & Elections
41

Heres the thing. Going to university isn’t a right. It’s a choice. A young adult decides they need to go to college for 4 years for one of two reasons. They either find the subject matter interesting and they want to get smarter on the subject, or they go to school to build a skill for future employment. If an individual wants to get smart on something, I’m cool with that, but I’m not cool with them doing it on my dime (taxes). If the basket weaving degree isn’t marketable, and they can’t gain employment and start paying taxes to chip in around here, then it’s a luxury for them and has no value to me as a citizen. I have no problem with people spending money on luxury items, I have no problem with people taking out loans to pay for luxury items, but I don’t want to pay for them to have them.

Now the kid who is going into STEM or a vocation etc… is doing it specifically to prepare for a career, a career that will pay taxes back into the system. In this case I don’t have as much of a problem shouldering some of the expense with my taxes because those folks will eventually pay them back into the system and when I’m old and unemployed I’ll need younger folks paying taxes to keep the roads maintained and fund my Medicare right?

Bottom line is all college education is not the same and they shouldn’t be treated as if they are. You want to get a degree in marine biology? Ok. But you better do some research on how likely you are to get a job as a marine biologist (spoiler alert: you most likely won’t) and if you do happen to get one you should be prepared to live mighty frugally because you aren’t going to make shit so maybe you should pass on the $100k degree then.

42

This isn’t entirely the case.

Forbearance is a trap in and of itself. The more that you earn, the greater your payments, and it’s pretty steep. I was pretty badly off when I started paying on my loans, and only had to pay a pretty small amount. As I made more, I paid more, and really ended up with very little left over until I got to where I was making full payments.

There is also the issue of credit. If you have a student loan on your head, your credit rating is going to be much lower, meaning that it is harder to get a loan, and it will be at a higher interest rate if you can. Most of the time, if someone in that situation finds themselves in need of a loan, they have little choice but to go to predatory lenders.

I have found that there are two ways that people tend to react to adversity.

The first is to make sure that no one else has to go through what they did.

The second is to make sure that everyone else has to go through what they did.

The second seems to satisfy a certain kind of personal justice, resentful bitterness even, and the first leads to a world with less adversity.

43

I’m assuming that that is a typo and you meant much lower, not much higher. Either that, or you were referring to Debt-to-Income Ratio, not credit rating.

44

Thanks for pointing that out, I fixed it in edit. I was going straight to interest rate in my head as I typed that, I think.

45

If college were simply a luxury, I’d agree, however it is really no longer, and is becoming less and less so.

There are few jobs, and fewer by the day, that one can support even a pretty frugal existence on without a college degree.

The same argument you make about college could be made for high school, or public education altogether.

Ideally, there should be public colleges that anyone can go to for free. If you want to go to a private institution, then you can either qualify for scholarships, private financial aid, or pay your own way.

I don’t think that STEM should be a requirement either. There are many jobs that add to our lives that do not come from STEM. You ever watch a TV show or movie? Those were not written by STEM majors. Do you enjoy getting news from journalists, listen to music, reading books?

We even need marine biologists. If the pay isn’t good enough to justify the degree, then that is something to be looked at as far as pay and education costs to get that qualification. It should not be seen as a reason to stop educating people in marine biology.

In some ways, the less a job compensates you, the more subsidy you should get in getting the education to qualify you for it. Otherwise, you end up with people only looking to get the high paying jobs, and no one qualified for the less glamourous work that also needs to get done.

Even though your example of basket weaving is not actually a degree, it would still be more useful than not having one at all. I know a number of people that are not using their degrees, most of them in STEM subjects, but instead have a job in a completely different field. But, having a degree at all gets you in the door where not having one would have it slammed in your face. When I was working for a particular hotel chain, I could not move up into management because I did not have a degree. It didn’t matter what it was in, I just had to have one in order to apply for a promotion.

We can either do something about this, or we can look forward to a future with a larger and larger portion of our population unqualified for the jobs that are available. I think that a lifetime of welfare probably costs significantly more than a college degree.

46

Here’s the issue with that.

  1. until a certain year, primary education was also optional. But the world has changed since then.
  2. people without a higher education are becoming less and less useful to society, and this in turns means fewer and fewer opportunities for gainful employment and honest work for them.
47

How is student loan forgiveness any different or more offensive than PPP loan forgiveness? Same exact thing when you get right down to it. Someone got a loan and now they are forgiven from paying some or all of it back at the expense of the federal government.

Let’s do both and get on with it.

Most of the bottom 90% could use the lift, especially now, and doesn’t that help to boost the economy? Much better idea than devising ways for billionaires to avoid taxation. I’m fed up with the fallacy of top down. Let’s try some bottom up.

And get over yourself and the it’s not fair because I paid mine. Yes, it’s true, you did, but that was then and this is now. How does someone getting a boost actually hurt YOU?

(I have no college loan debt nor PPP debt)

48

Having been through both student loans and PPP loans, there is a pretty big difference there. If nothing else, when the PPP loan was offered, it was specifically stated that if used for proper expenses, then it would be forgiven.

It was a way of quickly distributing money, and then on the backend making sure that people really qualified for it.

Getting the loan was pretty easy. I didn’t need any sort of documentation or paperwork, just pretty much my word. I was pretty amazed at how quickly it went through, actually. Took less time and paperwork than getting my student loans, that’s for sure. Getting it forgiven was a bit more work, I had to submit quite a bit of paperwork to show that it was used for qualifying expenses.

Not that I disagree with the rest of your post, or the reasoning behind it, just that this is not a particularly great comparison to use.

49

That part is going to require a cite, please.

50

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, which led to the creation of 401(k)s, was created in an effort to safeguard American workers’ retirement funds.1 When Congress introduced this legislation in the early 1970s, most major corporations and employers in America were all for it – on one condition. They told Congress that if they were not allowed to put their own stock in a company plan, then they would not offer any of the qualified plans created by the Act in any capacity! Needless to say, Congress quickly caved to their demands and allowed a loophole that permitted the purchase of “qualifying employer securities” inside an “eligible individual account” in qualified plans. This provision allows employers to push (or at least offer) their own stock to their employees while maintaining the fiduciary status that requires them to put their employees’ financial interests before their own. SOURCE

51

This isn’t the 1970’s. The companies that I’m familiar with don’t even offer single company stock funds in their 401k plans, and they lean toward targeted retirement date funds, which are broad based.

52

It is very simple. Allow student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. Some limits will apply such as the loan must be so many years old.

Thus, if you truly cant pay it off, if the loan is a huge burden, you discharge it. Fair to everyone.

53

Downside is, that if it is dischargeable in bankruptcy, rather than guaranteed by the govt and the inability to discharge it, then lenders will be far less likely to lend the money in the first place.

Like I said earlier, seems the fairest system would be to allow you to have it forgiven, and then pay a higher tax rate for the next 10 years (prorated based on how much you have paid off).

54

That ALLOWS them to do so. Only one company of the six I have worked for has done this, and only up to a certain %.

By no means is this a common everyday thing as you imply.

55

It can be both. in the past, student loans were both discharable and guaranteed .

56

Anecdotal.

My anecdote is EVERY company I have worked for that had a 401k (two in this example) had 20% of their 401k in company stocks. One company was a global company (FWIW).

As noted in my cite, when congress passed the law that brought 401ks into existence it was only done after companies were allowed to push their own stocks.

57

I only worked for one company that offered 401k’s long enough to get enrolled, and you had the option of purchasing company stock at a higher matching rate than if you bought into the other funds.

They don’t make you, but they certainly encourage you to invest in the company that you work for.

Wouldn’t that just be the govt paying them off, then?

58

This is a fallacy. The issue is not that people without a higher education are less useful to society, they are just as useful as they were 20 years ago but society doesn’t want to use them. The real issue is “requirement creep” in position descriptions. Specifically the fact that 75% or more of the reqs put out there by HR that require college degrees require them for absolutely no reason. The vast majority of finance, accounting, management, etc… ask for bachelors when any high school educated person could just as easily walk onto the job and receive the exact same OJT and perform it EXACTLY the same as the university grad. We need to reevaluate expectations for new hires and only require focused education for specialized professions. Not jobs that are easily accomplished by motivated learners of all academic levels.

Even in engineering (my field) its hard to distinguish between the smart 2 year associates technicians and dumb 4 year bachelors engineers. High performing employees comes down to motivation, intelligence and commitment, not what school they went to. So lets stop requiring college for every entry level white collar job.

59

I’m not a fan of loan forgiveness nor am I fan of these easily obtained federally guaranteed loans. They lead to inflation, they probably lead to reduced standards in college, and they definitely lead to a situation that feels like indentured servitude.

60

I agree but what else can you do?

Everyone is a first-timer at some point in their life. As an employer how do you decide which ones are worthy and which are not?

Usually that is their schooling.

Maybe an apprenticeship system would be good but the US really does not have one (I think other countries do though).