You’re right, but I don’t think those private student loans are “guaranteed by the government” and actually are dischargeable in bankruptcy, which is why they are credit-based and oftentimes require a co-signer. The FFEL Program that bump was talking about ended in 2010:
The root cause is guaranteed money. It’s a lot like the housing bubble. Uncreditworthy people getting too much money for a particular asset class leads to inflation in that asset class. This cheap and easy money is a bad economic idea but it was made reality because of the politics of pandering.
So it is ok for billionaires to become multimillionaires without increasing the wages of those who do the work?
Do we live in a world where labor is global? Yes we do. Do we live in a world where there is a black market for domestic labor be it migrant or otherwise? Yes we do. Do we live in a world where capital can go to China in a blink of an eye? Yes we do. Good luck with living wage by fiat.
And billionaire to multi millionaire is a downgrade.
Private student loans are just as difficult to discharge via bankruptcy as federal student loans. Federal student loans tend to have protections like a fixed interest rate and repayment options for when repayment is really difficult. Private student loans do not have those protections but are still covered by the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.
I find my federal loans have been really easy to keep up with. I will pay them all off soon and on schedule. Private loans are where a lot of the bad stuff people associate with student loans came from.
That said, I don’t think I can entirely support a proposal to forgive student loan debt. I carry a lot of it and it really has made of a lot of challenges. However, I don’t think it is a high enough priority at the government level. I think our attention should be directed toward leveling the playing field for students in underfunded primary and secondary schools. Or like, fixing our carbon emissions. Things like that.
(I have dreamt many a time of a catastrophic fire at Sallie Mae’s headquarters ruining all of their files so that they forget I owe them money. But, alas, 'tis but a dream.)
Per this cite, undergraduate admissions have risen from 5,861 in 1997 (close to when I started there) to a whopping 7,851 in 2018. During that same period, the number of international students has nearly doubled – they don’t have a breakout for that by year but based on an anecdotal look around campus and how the population differs from when I was there, it wouldn’t surprise me if half of that 2000 student increase was padding their coffers with wealthy international students who are required to pay full price.
According to this, tuition in that same period has more than doubled. With 125,000 high schoolers graduating in the state every year, the largest university in the country could only find an additional 1% of them who were college ready?
It occurs to me after typing all of that out that we don’t disagree – you said enrollments have remained flat since 2010, and I accept that. Presumably we both agree that tuitions have increased dramatically. We both agree that colleges have students over a barrel and can apparently charge what they want.
I think that’s because there are lots of people who they’re turning away, to send to for-profit degree mills, or community colleges. The remainder are willing to pay their exorbitant fees. I think if the supply of “big state school” quality 4 year colleges were increased, there would be a lot of empty seats unless they dropped prices. I’m not sure how we find data to prove this either way, though.
This isn’t true.
Depends. What is causing the increase in productivity and profitability? Is it the workers themselves or is it the investment and technology? In the modern world, straight manufacturing type low skilled labor is fairly cheap and with automation it’s becoming less relevant. Knowledge and specialized skills are the things that are valued. So, you’d have to look at who’s wages are flat verse who’s are increasing, and why that is…and it’s generally more complicated than a mustache twirling billionaire going muhahahahhaha!!! while lighting his fine Cuban cigars on the backs of the peasantry. But the short answer is, depending on what labor we are talking about, having a static wage might be the best case…the alternative being having that job done by a robot or expert system, or be outsources or offshored to a labor market that’s a lot cheaper.
In any case there’s not a lot the government can do about the rich getting richer short of taxation (or seizing control of the means of production, I suppose), and taxation at least is off the table because if we taxed the rich more our country would maybe fail to implode.
My mistake, I meant multi billionaires.
Society does not have an equal need for all talents. The government spends more money on building bridges and airplanes than it does on filmmaking or murals, so it’s not unreasonable that it would also promote the education of engineers over artists.
We are not so far up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that the government should be funding people’s self-fulfillment.
Does that mean that the government should not fund art at all? No, probably not. But there’s a reason that the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts is dwarfed by more practical concerns, and it’s not because we don’t like the arts kids.
Also, the idea that we need to fund art students so that we’ll have someone to teach art is pretty circular. Like, I get what you’re saying, but there are better arguments out there.
I think UCBearcats is getting support from what Pew research found recently:
If we set up a system where the federal government will pay for degrees in X, Y, and Z, but not P or Q, then isn’t that basically the federal government picking winners and losers? The students with aptitude in X/Y/Z benefit, and so do the programs that teach X/Y/Z, the professors who work in those programs, and the whole economy around X/Y/Z, to the detriment of the economy surrounding P/Q. How is that any different than the feds creating policies to favor coal over natural gas, or electric cars over gas-powered, or any number of other economic decisions favoring one side versus another?
Is the government’s track record really that good that we trust them to pick the winners accurately?
In modern America, most people will change careers several times; the days of going to work at one company at age 18 or 22 and working there continuously at the same job until retirement are long gone. Taking college courses solely as “job training” ignores this fact. A GOOD college education (not that they are all good) teaches you how to think, how to weigh evidence, how to summarize an argument, and how to write your conclusions. For example, mass media and communications regularly make the list of low-pay, high-unemployment majors, but the ability to write well and to communicate messages are sought-after skills, and the right set of internships and leads can result in a very good job. You can learn those skills in any number of different majors, and the reading/writing/summarizing/distilling skills you learned getting a philosophy degree will be valuable long after the computer science world has moved on from whatever language you learned in those classes. (In fact, comp sci is an excellent example of a changing world: the routine coding is increasingly done in India and China, so the skills most sought in the American job market are things such as business analysis and project management, which involve a lot more “soft skills.”)
Yes, whopping. That’s a 34% increase.
But they do for the years I mentioned above. Of the 11k new Columbus undergrad seats created, only about 2500 went to international students.
Oh please do tell us more. How do people look? Less “American”? More . . . brown, perhaps? Something about their eyes?
Looks like it might be a quarter.
This question is nonsensical. We had a poster a few years back who thought we could solve… something, by cloning famous schools like Harvard and closing the others? Was that you?
I’m a fan of the idea.
I know a lot of Boomers are poo-pooing the idea, but Boomers need to step back and remember that they will one day be financially dependent on Millennials. Over the the next decade, millions of Boomers will be retiring and downsizing. The few that are lucky have liquid assets, but a shitload do not. All their savings are tied up in brick and mortar. Are Millennials going to be buying up big-ass suburban homes if they are juggling student loan debt AND outrageous rental costs? So I think forgiving at least some portion of student loan debt will benefit everyone.
How many Boomers and Gen Xers are subsidizing their kids’ living expenses because of student debt? Lots of 20-somethings are living at home so they can throw their whole paycheck at their debt. Maybe that’s not the worse thing in the world, but I gotta wonder about the opportunity costs on both sides.
That said, I don’t think a blanket forgiveness program would be fair or wise (note: I have no idea if this is what Warren is proposing). I think someone who took out $300K to pay for two Ivy League degrees should not have their slate wiped just as clean as the person who who took out a $50K loan for undergrad at a state school.
There and elsewhere. I am familiar with the topic. But my pay package comprises more than my wage, as that article explains. And the pay of the “average person”, over time, is not same as the as the average pay over time. The average person, i.e., an individual, sees year-over-year increases.
And that’s before we get to demographic changes. Skilled boomers retiring and being replaced by new, less experienced workers. Immigration. Etc.
And then there’s the matter of whether CPI accurately reflects changes in purchasing power. A simple sniff test is thinking about living in 19__ on $X vs the CPI-adjusted amount today.
A lot of thinking… for very little counter arguments or cites.
Yeah, most of them are Asian. Shocker. My wife and I participated in an outreach program through some Christian ministry to host international students attending OSU. We spent a lot of time with them, got to know several pretty well, are still friends with some. All from China, which may say more about the Christian ministry’s connections overseas than the actual demographics.
But crucially, they were all wealthy. The university caters to them in terms of amenities because they pay full sticker, effectively subsidizing several Ohio residents each. But some of the cost of those amenities does get passed on to students who aren’t wealthy. When I was there it was all dive bars and convenience stores, now I don’t know how anyone can go there unless they’re loaded. Rent has gone through the roof.
As it is in many if not most college towns.
Other countries dont have the assortment of private and public colleges spread all over the states like we do. Also colleges in other countries are not funded the same way as different ones here. For example some states subsidize colleges more heavily, some colleges have massive endowments, some like our local community college, have local taxpayer money.
Also in Europe money doesnt go to college football teams.