Warren Student Loan Forgiveness Plan

[slash2k]

@octopus

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.

@octopus

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.

These seem to be expressing very different and even contradictory sentiments.

Consider a high school student participating in an extracurricular activity: band, a service club, feeding the homeless, tennis, whatever. Should they be rewarded (via a scholarship, extra funding for college, etc.) for participating?

Your first comment quoted above says no:if they doing it just because they want to we have no obligation to give them anything. Your second comment quoted above says yes, if they’re doing it to earn something then that is the basis of the world’s economy and they should earn something. That seems to be at best a very perverse set of incentives.

So, what is your real position? In what if any circumstances should a student be rewarded for extracurricular activities?

[octopus]

@slash2k

These seem to be expressing very different and even contradictory sentiments.

Consider a high school student participating in an extracurricular activity: band, a service club, feeding the homeless, tennis, whatever. Should they be rewarded (via a scholarship, extra funding for college, etc.) for participating?

Your first comment quoted above says no:if they doing it just because they want to we have no obligation to give them anything. Your second comment quoted above says yes, if they’re doing it to earn something then that is the basis of the world’s economy and they should earn something. That seems to be at best a very perverse set of incentives.

So, what is your real position? In what if any circumstances should a student be rewarded for extracurricular activities?

No they aren’t contradictory. One is in response to a comment about kids doing what they wish strictly for their own reasons.

Hey, I’m not the one who awards scholarships. Other people do. So if they want to award a scholarship based on activity or gender or whatever that’s up to them. I’m just saying that if kids want a particular scholarship they ought to focus their efforts on that.

Now, I think all of this is missing the big picture though. College isn’t for everyone. And dumbing down standards in education does no one any favors. Increasing money via guaranteed loans does no one any favors.

What I’d like to see is more certifications that mean something that people could study for via online tools. If you go on YouTube you can watch world class videos on all sorts of subjects. The fact that people need to spend 4-6 years and up to $200k to get a piece of paper is archaic.

[Ambivalid]

@Urbanredneck

Their are scholarships galore.

<snip>

open there wallets.

Now come on!

ETA: where did you say you got your degree from again?

[Chisquirrel]

@octopus

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.

Except UltraVires in the post I replied to. If you’re not going to follow along…

[poweroftheglory]

@puddleglum

This is the problem in a nutshell. Student loans are good on an individual level and wasteful on a societal level. Young people who are in debt for college should be upset, but they should be upset at the actual problem, the mandatory nature of college, and the subsidies the government is paying to the greedy college administrators.

A hypothetical, there is a pageant where all of the eligible maidens in a country compete for a chance to marry one of 10 aristocrat bachelors. Those who succeed will live the cushy life of a duchess and those who fail will have to live normal lives like the rest of us. Since the pageant is about beauty, someone has the idea to get plastic surgery before the pageant and then they win one of the spots. Soon everyone who competes in the contest is having lots of plastic surgery and because plastic surgeons are scarce the price is bid up 10 and 20 times what it was when only a couple of people were using plastic surgery. Many women are burdening themselves with huge amounts of debt for the plastic surgery and the vast majority are not winning the pageant anyway. So the government starts handing out loans and subsidies for plastic surgeries. The plastic surgeons see this and raise their prices accordingly.

A dishonest senator decries the situation and says that the solution is for the government to provide free plastic surgery for everyone who wants it. Others say we should do away with the pageant and stop wasting so much money on plastic surgery. Those people are called haters of beauty and asked why they don’t want poor girls to grow up and marry aristocrats.

The solution to this analogy is to murder the aristocrats and confiscate their assets.

[Oredigger77]

@Ruken

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.

Sure it is. It may no be the sole variable but it doesn’t cost the same to educate 5 kids at 10,000. Say there are 300 kids in a econ 101 lecture a and the 101 proff teaches 7 sections. If 2,100 freshmen don’t come to the school, that teacher can be fired, so can all of their grad students and we can shut down the lecture hall which probably enables us to fire a janitor. Further those kids wont go on to take 102 or 201 so we can probably fire 3 more professors and their grad students along with another janitor and at this point probably a maintenance person as well. Say the professors make 100K per year and grad students $5K and there is a grad student for every 100 students so we’ll fire 4 profs and 84 grad students janitors make 30K and the maintenance guy makes 40K. We just dropped the expenditure of the school by a million dollars per year before we even get to the other 5 classes those kids would be taking so really it’s closer to 6 million per year or about $3,000 per student.

Of course, that doesn’t work for a single student leaving a school but considering low income kids are currently make up about 13% of all college freshmen the other 87% leaving for paid colleges would make the cost of this project much smaller.

[Kearsen1]

@Ruken

(Some) parents spend big bucks on sports training, but I couldn’t tell you the scale.

Some anecdotal costs of ‘sports training’ would include club (travel) ball, and practices, not to mention pitching, or batting coaches, volleyball training or the agility training that is becoming more and more prevalent.

Club ball costs in excess of $12,000/year (which does not include travel expenses). Any training you do could easily run you over $400/month

All in the hopes that my snowflake(s) get a full ride to some decent college. Granted, it is also because I want my child to excel in something they are passionate about so I would pay it even without the hopeful scholarship.

But it does cost ‘big bucks’

[slash2k]

@octopus

No they aren’t contradictory. One is in response to a comment about kids doing what they wish strictly for their own reasons.

Hey, I’m not the one who awards scholarships. Other people do. So if they want to award a scholarship based on activity or gender or whatever that’s up to them. I’m just saying that if kids want a particular scholarship they ought to focus their efforts on that.

You didn’t really answer the question. A huge proportion of the scholarships and aid available comes from the colleges themselves and other parts of the government; it’s not just some random people handing out money. Should kids receive additional aid and a step up on their college funding for participating in extracurriculars?

@octopus

What I’d like to see is more certifications that mean something that people could study for via online tools. If you go on YouTube you can watch world class videos on all sorts of subjects. The fact that people need to spend 4-6 years and up to $200k to get a piece of paper is archaic.

There’s a difference between education and training, however. Sure, you can learn to do X by watching videos or reading blog posts, for many values of X (changing the oil pump on your truck, installing SQL Server on your network, filing a civil complaint and summons for a lawsuit, preparing a 1099-MISC with the IRS, etc., etc.). This is training, and you can get good training.

Education, however, is about WHY you want to do X, why X is a better choice in a particular set of circumstances, and when Y or Z is a more appropriate choice. You can learn to install a SQL server from a video, but is that even the right tool for what your clients/employers are trying to do? How do you figure out when it is better to install SQL Server locally, versus RDS on AWS versus a hosted NoSQL solution versus a pre-built COTS application? These are questions for which there is no one “right” answer that applies to everybody; you need to be able to elicit your users’ goals and business requirements and the often unstated assumptions underlying their project, to gather and synthesize information, to use what you have gathered to develop a plan, and then communicate that plan to management and to end-users. Those are skills you don’t learn from a video; those are skills that require a lot of practice and give-and-take and feedback and two-way communication with real people in the real world (especially people who don’t necessarily have the same interests and goals and knowledge as you do).

The specific software language you learn, or the specific accounting rules or the specific case law, will be outmoded or outdated before you get very far in your career, and you’ll have to learn a new language or new rules or new laws and cases. A good education, however, teaches you how to think like a programmer or an accountant or a lawyer. That education is what you are paying $200K and spending years of your life to obtain.

[octopus]

@slash2k

You didn’t really answer the question. A huge proportion of the scholarships and aid available comes from the colleges themselves and other parts of the government; it’s not just some random people handing out money. Should kids receive additional aid and a step up on their college funding for participating in extracurriculars?

There’s a difference between education and training, however. Sure, you can learn to do X by watching videos or reading blog posts, for many values of X (changing the oil pump on your truck, installing SQL Server on your network, filing a civil complaint and summons for a lawsuit, preparing a 1099-MISC with the IRS, etc., etc.). This is training, and you can get good training.

Education, however, is about WHY you want to do X, why X is a better choice in a particular set of circumstances, and when Y or Z is a more appropriate choice. You can learn to install a SQL server from a video, but is that even the right tool for what your clients/employers are trying to do? How do you figure out when it is better to install SQL Server locally, versus RDS on AWS versus a hosted NoSQL solution versus a pre-built COTS application? These are questions for which there is no one “right” answer that applies to everybody; you need to be able to elicit your users’ goals and business requirements and the often unstated assumptions underlying their project, to gather and synthesize information, to use what you have gathered to develop a plan, and then communicate that plan to management and to end-users. Those are skills you don’t learn from a video; those are skills that require a lot of practice and give-and-take and feedback and two-way communication with real people in the real world (especially people who don’t necessarily have the same interests and goals and knowledge as you do).

The specific software language you learn, or the specific accounting rules or the specific case law, will be outmoded or outdated before you get very far in your career, and you’ll have to learn a new language or new rules or new laws and cases. A good education, however, teaches you how to think like a programmer or an accountant or a lawyer. That education is what you are paying $200K and spending years of your life to obtain.

Look, I got a degree in engineering and honestly there isn’t much that went into that degree that couldn’t have been learned online. Maybe a few of the seminar classes or labs needed time at a facility but 90% didn’t. All the stuff about dealing with clients and specific solutions are typically not a huge part of an undergraduate degree program.

Colleges nowadays are in business, much like any other entrenched institution, to grow and perpetuate themselves. If it were strictly to educate people the costs could be reduced 75% or more.

[Dinsdale]

Seems to me that three parties contribute to excessive, unrepayable college debt:

1. Colleges (for profit or not) charge tuition which greatly exceeds likely earning potential following graduation. Or colleges admit students whom they know have little chance of completing the program - but they hold them on the books as long as they are able to beg/borrow/steal their tuition payments…

2. Lending institutions profit from granting these loans - simply because they obtain a secure “lien” on a young person’s lifetime earning potential, with substantial government security.

3. Students take on debt, with insufficient consideration of how they will repay it.

Which of these 3 parties ought to receive what portion of the benefit from any loan forgiveness? If I were to support ANY degree of loan forgiveness, I’d want to see CONSIDERABLE attention given to the banks and schools that profited from this situation, while not providing value commensurate with the tuition paid.

Early in the thread someone mentioned not getting in-state tuition because they were not emancipated. Well, that sounds like a choice that was made - to NOT pursue emancipation, AND to attend an out-of-state school. Other folk might attend a 4 yr residential school, instead of 2 yrs at a community college. I’m not sure what public policy goals would persuade me that “forgiving” such bad decisions is anywhere near the top of my short list for expensive gov’t programs.

I’m sorry, but the opportunity to study whatever one wants wherever one wants is not at the top of my list. Sure, if we upended everything in America, and drastically revised our priorities such as stripping defense spending and increasing taxes, we could expand access to education. But I’m not seeing that happen any time soon. So until that happens, I’m not eager to subsidize unwise spending and institutional greed.

Rather than “building more colleges,” we need to re-examine the education needed to perform various jobs. College CAN’T be for everyone, unless it is dumbed down beyond recognition. So encourage schools that offer 2-year degrees, certificate programs, apprenticeships, and the like, and give incentives to employers who hire such people rather than 4-year grads. Heck, could even give some limited incentive for employers to assist such hires in achieving higher education…

Moreover, whether or not EVERYONE gets a college degree, why should we assume the economy is going to magically create that number of decent-paying jobs which will allow loan repayment?

No, this hard left liberal is not a fan of college debt forgiveness or college for everyone.

[GIGObuster]

@Dinsdale

No, this hard left liberal is not a fan of college debt forgiveness or college for everyone.

Do I have to assume that you can be in favor of forgiveness of the debt in cases where the institutions clearly committed fraud or misled their students? What about if the forgiveness is based on the means of the individual and that the industry they wanted to get into fizzled?

[Ruken]

@Oredigger77

Sure it is. It may no be the sole variable but it doesn’t cost the same to educate 5 kids at 10,000. Say there are 300 kids in a econ 101 lecture a and the 101 proff teaches 7 sections. If 2,100 freshmen don’t come to the school, that teacher can be fired, so can all of their grad students and we can shut down the lecture hall which probably enables us to fire a janitor. Further those kids wont go on to take 102 or 201 so we can probably fire 3 more professors and their grad students along with another janitor and at this point probably a maintenance person as well. Say the professors make 100K per year and grad students $5K and there is a grad student for every 100 students so we’ll fire 4 profs and 84 grad students janitors make 30K and the maintenance guy makes 40K. We just dropped the expenditure of the school by a million dollars per year before we even get to the other 5 classes those kids would be taking so really it’s closer to 6 million per year or about $3,000 per student.

Of course, that doesn’t work for a single student leaving a school but considering low income kids are currently make up about 13% of all college freshmen the other 87% leaving for paid colleges would make the cost of this project much smaller.

If you can actually show that higher education is in the diseconomies of scale region of the cost curve, hie thee to thine nearest high-impact journal with that discovery. Just be ready to address the existing literature on the topic.

[UltraVires]

@Chisquirrel

Except UltraVires in the post I replied to. If you’re not going to follow along…

Where did I say people cannot do what they enjoy? You were the one that mentioned doing things that one enjoys.

My point was that high school students would be disincentivized from doing certain extracurricular things, which they now do to get scholarships, when college is free.

[UltraVires]

@octopus

Look, I got a degree in engineering and honestly there isn’t much that went into that degree that couldn’t have been learned online. Maybe a few of the seminar classes or labs needed time at a facility but 90% didn’t. All the stuff about dealing with clients and specific solutions are typically not a huge part of an undergraduate degree program.

Colleges nowadays are in business, much like any other entrenched institution, to grow and perpetuate themselves. If it were strictly to educate people the costs could be reduced 75% or more.

I agree. For all of the talk about how college educates people in a broad sense, so that when were are at a party we can intelligently talk about trade policy or something along those lines, when the costs are so massive, is it really worth it for that benefit?

And, if so, college is just a terrible way to go about it. I think Dave Barry said something along the lines of college was about 10% education, 10% designing new devices to smoke marijuana, 40% trying to get laid, and 40% trying to get beer out of the carpet. From my undergraduate experience, that is pretty much accurate.

I don’t know if I would go so far as you and say that people can just watch YouTube videos to learn things, but there must be a more streamlined and less wasteful method of getting the average person educated on basic things for society.

Why can high schools not do it? Why are people graduating from high schools and still so ignorant in many respects? Couldn’t the effort be directed there as we are already paying for it? I mean, we are already providing 12 years of free education. Why will 14 or 16 be objectively better?

[Airbeck]

@UltraVires

Where did I say people cannot do what they enjoy? You were the one that mentioned doing things that one enjoys.

My point was that high school students would be disincentivized from doing certain extracurricular things, which they now do to get scholarships, when college is free.

But doesn’t that free them up to do things they actually want to do rather than spending their time doing things they don’t want to do?

It also means parents don’t have to spend time and money in support of activities that are only being undertaken to be able to access college.

Frankly I don’t see the issue with this.

[Airbeck]

@UltraVires

I agree. For all of the talk about how college educates people in a broad sense, so that when were are at a party we can intelligently talk about trade policy or something along those lines, when the costs are so massive, is it really worth it for that benefit?

And, if so, college is just a terrible way to go about it. I think Dave Barry said something along the lines of college was about 10% education, 10% designing new devices to smoke marijuana, 40% trying to get laid, and 40% trying to get beer out of the carpet. From my undergraduate experience, that is pretty much accurate.

I don’t know if I would go so far as you and say that people can just watch YouTube videos to learn things, but there must be a more streamlined and less wasteful method of getting the average person educated on basic things for society.

Why can high schools not do it? Why are people graduating from high schools and still so ignorant in many respects? Couldn’t the effort be directed there as we are already paying for it? I mean, we are already providing 12 years of free education. Why will 14 or 16 be objectively better?

Humanity has been gathering knowledge for millennia. You think its possible to learn all of that in 12 years by the age of 18? Why do you want to limit humanity’s potential?

[Urbanredneck]

@Dinsdale

Seems to me that three parties contribute to excessive, unrepayable college debt:

1. Colleges (for profit or not) charge tuition which greatly exceeds likely earning potential following graduation. Or colleges admit students whom they know have little chance of completing the program - but they hold them on the books as long as they are able to beg/borrow/steal their tuition payments…

2. Lending institutions profit from granting these loans - simply because they obtain a secure “lien” on a young person’s lifetime earning potential, with substantial government security.

3. Students take on debt, with insufficient consideration of how they will repay it.

Which of these 3 parties ought to receive what portion of the benefit from any loan forgiveness? If I were to support ANY degree of loan forgiveness, I’d want to see CONSIDERABLE attention given to the banks and schools that profited from this situation, while not providing value commensurate with the tuition paid.

Early in the thread someone mentioned not getting in-state tuition because they were not emancipated. Well, that sounds like a choice that was made - to NOT pursue emancipation, AND to attend an out-of-state school. Other folk might attend a 4 yr residential school, instead of 2 yrs at a community college. I’m not sure what public policy goals would persuade me that “forgiving” such bad decisions is anywhere near the top of my short list for expensive gov’t programs.

I’m sorry, but the opportunity to study whatever one wants wherever one wants is not at the top of my list. Sure, if we upended everything in America, and drastically revised our priorities such as stripping defense spending and increasing taxes, we could expand access to education. But I’m not seeing that happen any time soon. So until that happens, I’m not eager to subsidize unwise spending and institutional greed.

Rather than “building more colleges,” we need to re-examine the education needed to perform various jobs. College CAN’T be for everyone, unless it is dumbed down beyond recognition. So encourage schools that offer 2-year degrees, certificate programs, apprenticeships, and the like, and give incentives to employers who hire such people rather than 4-year grads. Heck, could even give some limited incentive for employers to assist such hires in achieving higher education…

Moreover, whether or not EVERYONE gets a college degree, why should we assume the economy is going to magically create that number of decent-paying jobs which will allow loan repayment?

No, this hard left liberal is not a fan of college debt forgiveness or college for everyone.

I would add onto this;

1. Many if not most people are currently working outside their degree fields anyways. The best tech people I have ever known were all self taught. They learned by doing things like buying old broken computers and fixing them.

2. On your #2 post, some for profit colleges are terrible about this. I have a friend who spent about $80,000 going to Devry because they promised him a 6 figure job after graduation. I know another person who spent about $40,000 for a court reporter course and found out there were no jobs in that area. Even regular colleges back in the day would lie about employment opportunities or say things like “follow your dreams” to get students into worthless programs. This is why I like colleges likeLake Area Tech who actually can show a. how many students graduated 6 months ago b. where they are working, and c. how much they are making. Granted most colleges are way too big to allow this.

[Urbanredneck]

I would like posters from other countries that do offer free college to jump in and give their takes on these questions.

[Haldurson]

The way I look at it, we needed an educated populace, so we created free public school. Unfortunately, due to the shortages of skilled Americans, too many jobs are being outsourced. So I see sending more people to college, particularly those most at risk of continuing a cycle of poverty, as a public good, if not an actual necessity. But I do have problems with certain pieces of her platform. What I’d really rather see is a return to low-interest loans that and the kinds of scholarships and government grants that I Was able to take advantage of back when I was in college. I’d love to see more states do what my state is doing, with allowing people below a certain income threshold, to go to 2 or 4 year city and state colleges for free (they do have to agree to work within the state for at least as long as their education takes). Her Wealth tax, while in PRINCIPLE, a great idea, might, imho, backfire, driving more and more wealthy people to send their money overseas. I really do like Elizabeth Warren, but in this particular case, I think there are better ways to accomplish what she is trying to accomplish.

[Dinsdale]

@GIGObuster

Do I have to assume that you can be in favor of forgiveness of the debt in cases where the institutions clearly committed fraud or misled their students? What about if the forgiveness is based on the means of the individual and that the industry they wanted to get into fizzled?

The first - possibly. But I’d like to see action against the institutions. And as a general matter, I’m not sure the government compensates the victims of fraud.

The second, less likely. Isn’t that essentially covering someone’s bad investment? Why not bail out everyone who starts a business that fails in the 1st year?

i DO think the gov’t should allow all manner of loan consolidations and refinancing, to allow school debtors to get more favorable terms.