So a guy age 30 who never had any designs on going to college and was satisfied taking over his father’s farm gets his “tuition” reimbursed, but a 36 year old with loans outstanding does not?
Maybe you should consider running for President. One more candidate, with common sense no less, couldn’t hurt.
Maybe we make people swear under oath that they would have gone to college if tuition hadn’t been so high and give them an amount of money equal to difference in wages between their actually career path and their projected (college educated) career path for the rest of their lives.
This is all getting pretty ridiculous 
Guess what? No one is stopping them from doing what they want. However, society shouldn’t be obligated to pay for other people’s short sightedness or to indulge pointless hobbies.
Your comment doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the comment you quoted. Chisquirrel is talking about kids participating in extracurricular activities (debate team, German club, track and field, volunteer work, etc., etc.) solely or primarily for the purpose of having something to write on their scholarship forms. How does that relate to what you wrote?
I think Warren’s proposal is pretty ridiculous and the patch kits that are proposed to be applied to it to make it work even somewhat are making it moreso. Respectfully, yours is like that.
So, what if this farmer swears, under penalty of perjury, that if tuition had not been so high, he would have been a brain surgeon. Not just any regular brain surgeon, mind you, but the best damn brain surgeon in the world and he estimates, conservatively, that he would have been a multi-millionaire.
First, how would you ever prove that he swore falsely? Second, how do you estimate his career salary? What if he says he would have moved to (pick locality where income for brain surgeon is the highest)? I mean, his mother swears she remembers him talking about that! He always complained that he never wanted to be a farmer! I swear!
Because doing something in demand to earn something you’d like is the whole basis of the world’s economy. No one is arguing against people doing what they enjoy.
Woosh
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Well since the federally guaranteed student loan program is the root cause of the skyrocketing tuition cost, maybe the government should be part of the solution. Washing away all of the student loan debt doesn’t seem to me be the solution though. I’m big on personal accountability. Since the amount and terms of these loans was known by the individuals that borrowed the money, I have little sympathy. And, yes I was opposed to the bank bail outs as well.
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The federal government providing incentives to state governments to construct more universities, or increase enrollment at existing universities might be a good solution. By creating more supply to offset the demand created by the guaranteed student loan program, tuition rates should come down.
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And it’s not the fluff degrees that some students get that is the problem. It’s that 65% of students that start college never finish. So the majority of these people that have student loan debt, have no degree. It’s like borrowing money to buy a car or a house, and you never receive it. Again, it comes back to personal accountability. Don’t enroll in college and rack up student loans if you don’t have the where-with-all to follow through.
I haven’t read the whole thread(only the most recent conversations) so forgive me if this has already been mentioned. If I understand correctly your concern is that if college is free why would high school students try hard in academics or sports if it’s all free? The answer could be that not all schools would accept you if you have poor grades or do not have some other extracurricular achievement. There would be a free college that would have to accept you, but similar to private high schools, there would be better schools that can have admission requirements. Those could be free or paid.
The way it seems to me that “free college” should work would be just an extension of high school. Albeit “free college” in this scenario is a little different than just an extension of high school. Choosing a college would largely be the same as it is now. Except there are a sub-set of colleges that would be free.
If a student had the money or academic achievement they could pay(or get scholarships) to more prestigious colleges. Paid colleges would still work the same as they do now.
As I said above, the current college drop out rate is 65%. If all college was free, I would expect that rate to increase substantially, especially if paying for college isn’t an incentive to stay and finish.
What a waste of educational resources.
You got me.
Then what have we accomplished by paying for the “free” college? Businesses will look at the free college as an “extension of high school” and on job listings instead of saying “bachelor’s degree required” it will say “non-free college degree required.”
You will still hear the cries about how rich kids get to go to good schools, but poor people are stuck with the shitty free ones. What happens when middle class kids take out loans so that they don’t have to go to the free schools? We are right back where we started, except we have paid a metric shitton of money to make some schools “free.”
Sorry for missing it, but about your point of how students would try because there are minimum acceptance requirements, that was what I meant. Not just the minimum to pass high school, but the minimum to be accepted to college. No need to try any harder because there are now no such thing as scholarships since it is all free anyways.
You’ve accomplished the same thing that “cheap” colleges and community colleges currently accomplishing. People still go to those today. Except that they’re now accessible to everyone. The world is more complex than terrible college on one side and golden perfect college on the other. As I mentioned this is basically the situations high schools are in right now. If you want to send your kid to a great high school it will cost a lot but will probably give them an advantage. If you can’t afford it at least you can still go to a “free” high school.
I disagree that all students would go to paid colleges. I think with free colleges being an option the value proposition for paid colleges would change and taking out loans would be less attractive. With their being a substantially cheaper option for college the market could decide the price of the paid colleges. Currently if you NEED a college degree to get any sort of reasonably good job you’re forced to get a degree. So you’re essentially a captured customer forced to pay whatever. This is inherently non-capitalistic and thus the price can spiral out of control. Providing a set of free colleges would at least mitigate this some.
Obviously some people would still take out loans to go to better schools. But plenty of people would use the free colleges and be perfectly fine. I went to a not very good college and got a fairly good job. There would plenty of room for people getting degrees from not great schools.
The free colleges wouldn’t have acceptance requirements but the paid ones could. And there would still be scholarships for the paid colleges.
Obviously there would be a lot of details but I could imagine better free colleges that do have acceptance requirements. Maybe there is some terrible ramification of that but at first I don’t see why there couldn’t be.
I didn’t get the part that loan forgiveness equals free tuition. I thought people got loans for a portion of the cost of college and paid the rest.
I don’t think that this argument works. If rich kids are going to paid schools and middleclass kids are taking out loans to go to paid school then the free college shouldn’t cost a metric shitton since very few people would be left to go to free college. We also wouldn’t be no where we would have effectively means tested free college and given poor kids a better education.
Really, i think there are two separate issues being discussed in the thread free college and student loan forgiveness. I think that the government should provide its citizens enough education that they can take care of themselves. It doesn’t seem like a high school graduate has the skills to take care of themselves. I would guess that an AA degree or some trade school would be the minimum so I’d support that being free. Beyond that I’d like to see states fund higher education better. It’s embarrassing that CU Boulder only receives 4.5% of its funding from the state of Colorado and I would support another Morrill Act. That’s not free college though.
Separate from that is what to do about the student loan crisis. I think were going to have a major economic problem as millennials are leeching off boomers to deal with their massive debt. We’re seeing major milestones being delayed like marriage or buying a house due to the debt load. I’m not sure that moving individual debt to societal debt really helps the situation though. The millennials already have a lot of the previous generations debts coming due so I generally don’t think this will help.
You really need to step up your dot-connecting game if you think that supports your stated assertion.
Which part(s) of my assertion do you feel are yet unsupported?
Walk us through that one? The cost of college is not a function of how many people are attending, if that’s what you’re suggesting.