student loan forgiveness

[sleewell]

kind of a hot topic right now. where you do you land?

personally i am against it. i think shit ideas like this and defund the police (which i know is not exactly what they mean) are some of the reasons that the dems didn't do as well as they could have in the last election.

i know that college is fucked. tuition goes up every year, its way too expensive. BUT you know what you are agreeing to when you sign the papers. you can't agree to repay the money, get the money, and then expect the balance to be wiped clean. doesn't work that way when you get a mortgage or car loan. doesn't seem fair to the people who paid their loans back. doesn't seem fair to the tax payers who backed the loans.

I can see the other side of the argument that it would allow those people to put that money back into the economy but that just doesn't hold enough water for me.


thoughts? change my mind?

 

[Xaios]

Here's the thing about fairness: if you're forced into a situation for which your choices are a) be exploited financially by unscrupulous lenders in order to get an education, or b) limit your earnings potential and potentially live in poverty, neither choice is really fair, especially when you consider that many who received and paid back student loans and are now grousing about how "unfair" it is did so at a time when both the cost of tuition and lending rates weren't nearly as predatory. Personal accountability means jack shit when your only choices lead you to indentured servitude for the rest of your life.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

I'm not taking my time to talk at the table mug guy for something pretty much the rest of the world has figured out ages ago.

 

[sleewell]

i disagree. go to a community college for the first two years. all of those credits transfer just same and its a fraction of the price. actually work a job while going to school. you don't have to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a degree. i worked like 35 hours a week while going to school. i could get on board with lowering the interest rates. that def has validity.


haven't other countries figured it out by imposing sky high taxes?

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Yep, sky high (but not really) taxes for healthcare, education, infrastructure, aged care, childcare, and economic freedom.

Don't need any of that. Our bootstraps and rugged individualism will raise our children and cure our cancer.

Again, the rest of the world has this one figured out. We're just stupid assholes. The perennial butt of the joke to the developed, actually free, world.

 

[Xaios]

i worked like 35 hours a week while going to school. i could get on board with lowering the interest rates. that def has validity.

Hurray for you, but guess what: that's not always an option. When I was going to college, I did homework from the time I got home to the time I went to bed, and worked on labs (and every class I had besides the math courses had weekly labs) or projects on weekends. Everyday, for years. I hardly played guitar. I didn't game. I had no social life. My "free time" was essentially going to the grocery store. To add insult to injury, my program ran a full month longer in the winter/spring semester than every other program, because it was literally cramming what was once a 3 year program into two years. The social and work life you are able to experience while in college is heavily dependent on what program you're in, so saying that everyone should just work a full time job while going to college is really shortsighted.

 

[_MonSTeR_]

I think too many people go to University for degrees that they don’t need, the U.K. calls them Mickey Mouse degrees, not sure if you have that term in the USA. They include things like degrees in surfing or gym management or historically here, the easiest degree was ‘media studies’. I know a girl who wrote her thesis on the 1989 Batman movie...

I object to paying for someone to watch films or read comic books for three years but with our NHS struggling to recruit, would have no problem with my taxes coming to pay for doctors and nurses to get their training.

I’m old enough that I got my first degree paid for by the state but got scholarships for my master’s and PhD.

 

[High Plains Drifter]

The fact that students have to pay this much to go to school is insane. The banks that prey upon them and the parents that encourage them to go to college instead of learning a trade are part of the problem imo. I don’t think student loan forgiveness is the answer and I don't feel that the rest of American society should be burdened with that debt. Screw Sallie Mae after the billions of dollars they’ve made by selling the promise of a better life through education to people that weren’t equipped to take on the burden of often times life-long student debt.

 

[SpaceDock]

I think making community college free makes sense IMO. I do not agree with university reimbursement or anything like that.

I think it is important to help out the lowest rung so they can get a blue collar trade job, but I see no way that making all college free makes sense.

 

[KnightBrolaire]

I think schools are predatory and unscrupulous with their tuition costs. When even techs/community college prices have gone up significantly, something is seriously wrong. There is a CC near my house that is at close to 6k a semester for certain programs.
Professional schools like DVM, DNP, CRNA, DDS, and MD are all well over 500k usd in a lot of places which is absolutely insane.
DVM in particular is absurd, as your earning potential is nowhere near as high as the others given the debt you're saddled with.
To really put that into perspective, there's an interview with a UMN veterinarian alum who said he managed to pay for vet school with just a part time job and total cost was something like a couple grand a year. Granted, that was in the 70s and that would be utterly impossible nowadays.

There are certain loan forgiveness programs for medical professions already in place, but they're not eay to get. There are other option like the military, but that is definitely not a good fit for most people.
Wiping the debt is for lack of better terms a bandaid on a bullethole.
The bigger systemic issue is that schools realized they can rip off both taxpayers via federal loans, and rip off students by moving educational goalposts/making them take extra crap unrelated to their area of study.

When I was getting my BSN the school changed the filler bullshit (eg they added extra requirements where you had to take anthropology/diversity/sociology regardless of degree) for graduating three times in 4 years. I'm still mad years later about being forced to take classes that were utterly useless to me, even though my GI Bill covered most of my schooling.
That moving of goalposts to keep people trapped in school is a very real thing ime. CRNA used to be a masters program in most place, but now the CCNE has made it doctorate level (or they will by 2022). Same thing happened with Physical Therapists. It used to be a Masters level program, and is now a doctorate pretty much nationwide.
The PT one in particular is insane, as their earning potential is nowhere near worth how much debt they take on.
Yet another example is with Psychology. My cousin is engaged to a woman with a masters in psychology and she's a licensed psychologist. She's told me that the certifying board is changing so that it's only Doctorates.
Same thing is happening in teaching. You can barely get work part time in some areas if you only have a bachelors in child education. I know a number of teachers that have 2nd jobs just to make ends meet.

I feel there should be more stringent federal regulation about regulating education costs. Kids shouldn't be crippled with a useless degree (which is partly their own fault tbf) or the inability to pay it off.

An interesting thing to note is I've heard grumblings from the UK where they're having a similar issue with the moving of educational goalposts/tuition prices far outpacing earnings . So it's not just a USA problem.

 

[SpaceDock]

I thought this was an interesting read: https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/616993/

Long story short, the guy thinks that too many fancy degrees and not enough fancy jobs is a big part of our social decline as the people with qualifications and no rewards become instigators of dissent.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

I think too many people go to University for degrees that they don’t need, the U.K. calls them Mickey Mouse degrees, not sure if you have that term in the USA. They include things like degrees in surfing or gym management or historically here, the easiest degree was ‘media studies’. I know a girl who wrote her thesis on the 1989 Batman movie...

I object to paying for someone to watch films or read comic books for three years but with our NHS struggling to recruit, would have no problem with my taxes coming to pay for doctors and nurses to get their training.

I’m old enough that I got my first degree paid for by the state but got scholarships for my master’s and PhD.

Yeah, there are degrees with dubious utility and prospects but they make up such a small portion of graduates, something like less than 5% after two years, and a significant drop off after that.

 

[Demiurge]

Maybe it's coming from some manner of "privilege", but my student loans weren't much due to scholarships so the idea really doesn't bug me at all. It was a nuisance more than anything, except for when it nearly fucked by debt-to-income when I tried buying a home right out of school. Maybe if my loans were a millstone around the neck like for some, I'd feel differently. It's investment that would pay-off eventually. Young people entering the work force with more education and more purchasing power is good for society, even from a capitalist standpoint.

I agree with only making some level of it free, though. If you want to go to Fancy Pants University, pay up.

 

[_MonSTeR_]

Yeah, the U.K. used to have free university education, but it was a lot harder to get to university in the first place. In 1992 the government granted the polytechnics university status and all of a sudden there were twice as many places to go to and competition for places was a lot less fierce.

University fees started in the U.K. in 1998 and have just gone up and up ever since but they’re capped at the moment at like £10k a year.

 

[budda]

Someone make a pros and cons list for this.

 

[nightflameauto]

I do think there should be free or subsidized community college available in the states. As it is the "real" universities around here are building multi-million dollar sports centers every few years and then whining about how they can't afford to keep the lights on if they don't raise tuition. That type of shit makes me think they need some regulators shoved up their collective asses, but regulation just leads to even higher fees for the students based on history.

Talking about this subject in the states is a lot like talking about the health care conundrum. Payment by the plebes continues to climb, hospitals continue to look more and more like massive high-dollar hotels or mansions, administrators continue to whine about not being able to afford to pay doctors or nurses, and insurance industries show record profits year over year yet whine they have to raise rates to continue to pay out for service for the people that pay in. It's a massive joke that's been handled in actual civilized countries, while we continue to get jerked around by a system designed primarily to suck money out of our pockets for no return on investment.

College, at this point, appears to work much the same way. Massive debt for a degree that might net you a burger flipping job or a warehouse job. I've got a friend with a doctorate in psychology that works as a phone service person for a bank. And another friend that spent a massive amount of money to get an accounting degree working as an oil change tech at the local Ford dealership. I'm not really seeing the payoff to huge college debt for those folks.

 

[diagrammatiks]

school is a racket.

although doctorates that aren't medical professions shouldn't have any grad school debt.

 

[Necris]

I'm in favor of student loan debt forgiveness.
However, I think that the idea that there would be any significant student loan forgiveness under Biden is beyond wishful thinking.
Biden is a man who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from credit companies between 2003-2008 and enthusiastically supported a 2005 bill which stripped bankruptcy protections from students. In years prior to that Biden's name was on a number of bills which are now viewed as the origins of the current student loan debt crisis. He's never spoken against his previous record, why anyone believes he'd completely reverse his position now is beyond me.

The concept was brought up on the campaign trail as an empty talking point meant to push millennials and gen-x to the polls and the most that can be expected, in the unlikely event anything at all is even brought to the table, will be means tested to hell and back and almost no-one will qualify.

 

[nightflameauto]

I'm in favor of student loan debt forgiveness. However, I think that the idea that there would be any student loan forgiveness under Biden, the guy who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from credit companies between 2003-2008, an enthusiastic supporter of a 2005 bill which stripped bankruptcy protections from students and who had previously supported numerous bills which helped create the student loan debt crisis in the first place, is beyond wishful thinking. The concept was brought up on the campaign trail as an empty talking point meant to push millennials to the polls and the most that can be expected, in the unlikely event anything at all is even brought to the table, will be means tested to hell and back and almost no-one will qualify. Ideas the Biden camp have floated now that he's won cap debt forgiveness at $10,000 maximum and exclude federal loans.

The best we can hope for under Biden, with or without a Republican majority to block his every move, is a return to slowly and gently fucking the population rather than gang-raping them with railroad spiked baseball bats while screaming obscenities in their face.

 

[StevenC]

This is another shining example of American Stockholm Syndrome. Or American Exceptionalism as your condition euphemises it.

In the UK:

• Scotland gives free third level education to all its people in at least Scotland, and reduced fees everywhere else, plus reduced fees for UK people in general at around £2000
• Wales gives free third level education to all its people no matter where they go in the world
• England caps costs at £9k a year, but some universities are much lower
• Northern Irish people get reduced fees for our our university at around £4k that the English would pay £9k for, and similar fees at our other university
• Northern Irish students are also eligible for almost free third level education in the Republic of Ireland
• Republic of Ireland gives free third level education to Irish citizens in its universities
• You do not have to make loan repayments until you are making over £21k a year and there are different rates depending on income as well
• All student debt disappears when at 40 or 45 regardless of how much you've paid
• The upshot of this is you need to make an average of about £75k a year after you leave university to pay off your entire loan in the 20-ish years allotted
• Did I mention it takes 3 years to get a Bachelor's degree, an additional for a Master's, 3 additional years (usually) to get a PhD, 4 years (total) to become a lawyer, 5 years to become a dentist and 5 years to become a medical doctor (6 at Cambridge, but you graduate after 3 years with an additional biomedical science BSc)

The caveat for this is you only get 4 years of student loans.

Other parts of the world give free university to everyone.

Additionally, where I come from, we have one of the best education systems in the world, and I went to the best high school in my country for 7 years for free. The second best was just down the street, also free, and both in a town of approximately 15,000 people.

My cousin is a doctor and worked in America for a while. His fellow junior doctors did not believe him that he became a doctor for about $1000 at 23. My best friend has a BSc, MD and just got her MRCS (surgeon, now called Miss not Dr) at 25.