6 ms·

What about loan companies, who definitely issued the loans, being on the hook? It's a lot simpler and it follows the chain of moral responsibility. Note: All i

What about loan companies, who definitely issued the loans, being on the hook? It's a lot simpler and it follows the chain of moral responsibility. Note: All it takes is changing the law back to the way it was before - debts forgiven in an ordinary bankruptcy.

zdragnar 5y ago
Student loans would evaporate. Full time students have no income or collateral, since the degree and knowledge and skills cant be taken away and sold to recover losses. All this would do is ensure that higher education is utterly inaccessible for anyone not rich enough to pay cash.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Student loans would evaporate. Good! Let education be paid for by grants and the student own income, most grants. Plus force the universities to make their tuition cost effective. Edit: However many years ago, public universities charged a fairly nominal tuition and survived for many doing that (financed by their respective US states). These public universities today have massively expanded their costs, primarily based on capital spending and follow the model of private universities.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Every student would with good cause declare bankruptcy immediately upon graduation, because they have debt and no assets and no job. I get where you're coming from, but this is not a workable solution.
    - lazide 5y ago
      It didn’t happen that way until many, many years after student loans started to be a thing. Some enterprising law students figuring out they could get a loan to learn how to get out of the loan - and end up with a very valuable degree out of it that could not be repossessed - and by the time they needed good credit, it would be off their records. It took awhile for word to get out, and then they banned getting out of student loans. So blame the lawyer (students) I guess?
    - threwawasy1228 5y ago
      As someone with a relative currently going through bankruptcy, I can assure you that every student would not go through this process. It is incredibly difficult, intensive, and horrible process that takes years. It is not pleasant and I think that the idea that it would be utilized in this way by students is totally coming from a place of ignorance of what modern bankruptcy actually entails.
      - bpodgursky 5y ago
        I totally understand that this is an unpleasant and long process, but I think you in turn come from a place of ignorance about what it means to live the best years of your life under hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt. It eats at you, every time you spend money, for decades. It's soul-crushing. I know people who would GLADLY throw away two years of their life in bankruptcy proceedings if it means they could be free of their crushing student debt.
  - xmprt 5y ago
    The issue is that then you gatekeep higher education to the wealthy. What's more likely? Harvard reducing tuition because underprivileged kids aren't able to attend and can't get loans. Or Harvard keeping the same tuition and only admitting the wealthy people that are able to pay it (of which there are plenty).
    - joe_the_user 5y ago
      Harvard reducing tuition because underprivileged kids aren't able to attend and can't get loans. Harvard in particular is so wealthy it always charges tuition based on ability to pay. The poor who go to Harvard pay nothing. But, of course, the poor seldom go to Harvard because they aren't admitted. Just saying. There are mid-range school where, all else being equal, your scenario might be true. But those school depend on those same lower income students and, well, I'd be in favor of them buckling and charging less.
    - Notanothertoo 5y ago
      Good thing there is a whole market of ranging degrees of education quality and price distributed a cross the US... Also there are lots and lots of programs state and private to fund low income higher Ed. It is not a dichotomy.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      Driving education policy based off anything Harvard is doing is a mistake. Pay attention to state schools only, that’s what policy should be tailored for.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - steveBK123 5y ago
      Ivys are basically majority privileged kids already anyway. There was a stat that 1% of Americans go to Private High School but 40% of Ivy admittance is from Private High Schools. Add to that: the % who go to elite selective public HS in systems like NY, the large number of full-freight paying foreign students who represent their local elite and legacy admissions.. If underprivileged kids represent anything above about 5% at Ivy's I would be shocked. One stat from Boston Globe was that only 3% of Harvard comes from the US bottom 20% economically. The Ivys do more to perpetuate the existing power dynamic than they do to raise anyone up. They are far too small and far too nepotistic to do otherwise. If you want to raise the middle/bottom up, you need to look at the large state university systems which are orders of magnitude larger.
  - spamizbad 5y ago
    Here's an article in Fortune from 1957 arguing college is too cheap. Seems like it was really taken to heart: https://fortune.com/2013/05/05/colleges-are-too-cheap-fortune-1957/ https://fortune.com/2013/05/05/colleges-are-too-cheap-fortun...
  - coryrc 5y ago
    > massively expanded their costs While I attended college, tuition costs almost doubled, but since haven't increased much per year. It wasn't massive increased spending, it was the state cutting off basically all finding. There's certainly fat to be cut, but the admin costs are mostly imposed on high.
- klipt 5y ago
  What if we put a time limit on it? Say that student loans can be discharged in bankruptcy only 10 years after graduation? Then few students would want to stay poor for ten years just to get rid of loans. But lenders would also have incentive to not back very poor career paths.
  - steveBK123 5y ago
    Then private loan terms would change to a max of 10 years, thereby increasing the monthly costs due to accelerated payback.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> Student loans would evaporate. Good. When I got my degree, almost nobody had student loans. The kids from lower middle income and below tried for scholarships, Pell grants, and even had jobs that slowed them down due to fewer hours available for school. Tuition was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Oh, and a couple years taking transferable courses at community college was a thing too. If you want to help the poor, then do that but dont corrupt the system the way it has been the last 25 years. Now everyone is screwed.
  - fridif 5y ago
    Not sure I understand this sentiment. I went to a good university, majored in history, took out 100k in debt totally for said degree, and have been working as a programmer ever since. Why does my outcome feel so rare? I think 100k was a fair enough price. (25k per year including food and a room).
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      Because inflation adjusted it used to be a few grand a year. It’s not like college is 10x better than it was in the 1960s or 1970s.
    - lazide 5y ago
      If you got the same degree for 10k (what it used to cost inflation adjusted), why would that not be better for everyone? Every professor or co-professor I know gets paid peanuts, gets poor support, and gets waaaay too many students. These folks are at Yale, Princeton, etc. It’s a scam and the money disappears into the machine with little accountability and a ton of hand waving.
      - fridif 5y ago
        How would it be possible for 4 years of education to cost just $10,000? The cost of my food for 4 years is higher than that alone. My tuition was around $15,000 per year. You are more than welcome to investigate where that disappears to (presumably not all to staff salary), but requiring me to pay $100,000 upfront would have killed my career before it ever started-- unless of course you convince employers that a degree isn't needed.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Which would put obscene pressure on the legislatures to re-fund the education systems they’ve been purposefully defunding for a while. Arguably this is good.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    I wouldn't want my alma mater funded entirely by the state. They went on a real estate and related spending binge while I was in school. Some of my friends worked at the alumnus center, spending all their hours calling up alumni begging for donations. Meanwhile, really useful classes that students wanted and professors wanted to teach didn't exist, because the school wouldn't fund the extra class time. In short, out of all the school's top priorities, the students were nowhere to be found. Change that, and maybe I'll change my mind too.
    - shadilay 5y ago
      I doubt the state would fund the university without oversight and forcing them to show 'value for money'.
- vkou 5y ago
  > All this would do is ensure that higher education is utterly inaccessible for anyone not rich enough to pay cash. Which would cause significant negative price pressure on that education.
  - lazide 5y ago
    It might even make it affordable (cash wise) for many people like it used to be. Wouldn’t that be scary?
mannerheim 5y ago
> What about loan companies, who definitely issued the loans, being on the hook? These days almost all student loans (90+% of the dollar amount) are being issued by the feds.
- lumost 5y ago
  I'd be skeptical of that stat, almost all of my loans 10 years ago were private ( although I'm sure there is a federal backstop )
  - mannerheim 5y ago
    This change occurred in 2010: > Prior to 2010, Federal loans included 1) direct loans originated and funded directly by the United States Department of Education and 2) loans originated and funded by private investors and guaranteed by the federal government. Guaranteed loans were eliminated in 2010 through the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act and replaced with direct loans because of a belief that guaranteed loans benefited private student loan companies at taxpayers expense, but did not reduce costs for students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_States#Federal_loans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_St... > Most student loans — about 92%, according to a June 2020 report by MeasureOne, an academic data firm — are owned by the U.S. Department of Education. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/student-loan-debt https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude... The MeasureOne link: https://www.measureone.com/resources https://www.measureone.com/resources
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  >> What about loan companies, who definitely issued the loans, being on the hook? > These days almost all student loans (90+% of the dollar amount) are being issued by the feds. Well that makes it easy. Forgive those loans and then stop issuing them. Force the universities to come up with reasonable programs with reasonable tuition. Universities have gone from institutions of learning to scams exploiting students and low-paid lecturers alike.
  - 5y ago
Notanothertoo 5y ago
This. Its their job to calculate risk, and bet on it. Let them and let em set the interest rate accordingly. This would also solve the ever inflating tuition costs and cause schools to be competitive. In general it would curb academic tomfoolery. Weird what happens when the government assumes liability. Everyone wants to blame the banks for '08, and they have some fault but it was all enabled by federal encouragement and liability. At least in the private sector the companies live and die by their decisions and the banks were held accountable /s.

zdragnar 5y ago

Student loans would evaporate. Full time students have no income or collateral, since the degree and knowledge and skills cant be taken away and sold to recover losses. All this would do is ensure that higher education is utterly inaccessible for anyone not rich enough to pay cash.

joe_the_user 5y ago
Student loans would evaporate. Good! Let education be paid for by grants and the student own income, most grants. Plus force the universities to make their tuition cost effective. Edit: However many years ago, public universities charged a fairly nominal tuition and survived for many doing that (financed by their respective US states). These public universities today have massively expanded their costs, primarily based on capital spending and follow the model of private universities.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Every student would with good cause declare bankruptcy immediately upon graduation, because they have debt and no assets and no job. I get where you're coming from, but this is not a workable solution.
  - lazide 5y ago
    It didn’t happen that way until many, many years after student loans started to be a thing. Some enterprising law students figuring out they could get a loan to learn how to get out of the loan - and end up with a very valuable degree out of it that could not be repossessed - and by the time they needed good credit, it would be off their records. It took awhile for word to get out, and then they banned getting out of student loans. So blame the lawyer (students) I guess?
  - threwawasy1228 5y ago
    As someone with a relative currently going through bankruptcy, I can assure you that every student would not go through this process. It is incredibly difficult, intensive, and horrible process that takes years. It is not pleasant and I think that the idea that it would be utilized in this way by students is totally coming from a place of ignorance of what modern bankruptcy actually entails.
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      I totally understand that this is an unpleasant and long process, but I think you in turn come from a place of ignorance about what it means to live the best years of your life under hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt. It eats at you, every time you spend money, for decades. It's soul-crushing. I know people who would GLADLY throw away two years of their life in bankruptcy proceedings if it means they could be free of their crushing student debt.
- xmprt 5y ago
  The issue is that then you gatekeep higher education to the wealthy. What's more likely? Harvard reducing tuition because underprivileged kids aren't able to attend and can't get loans. Or Harvard keeping the same tuition and only admitting the wealthy people that are able to pay it (of which there are plenty).
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Harvard reducing tuition because underprivileged kids aren't able to attend and can't get loans. Harvard in particular is so wealthy it always charges tuition based on ability to pay. The poor who go to Harvard pay nothing. But, of course, the poor seldom go to Harvard because they aren't admitted. Just saying. There are mid-range school where, all else being equal, your scenario might be true. But those school depend on those same lower income students and, well, I'd be in favor of them buckling and charging less.
  - Notanothertoo 5y ago
    Good thing there is a whole market of ranging degrees of education quality and price distributed a cross the US... Also there are lots and lots of programs state and private to fund low income higher Ed. It is not a dichotomy.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Driving education policy based off anything Harvard is doing is a mistake. Pay attention to state schools only, that’s what policy should be tailored for.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - steveBK123 5y ago
    Ivys are basically majority privileged kids already anyway. There was a stat that 1% of Americans go to Private High School but 40% of Ivy admittance is from Private High Schools. Add to that: the % who go to elite selective public HS in systems like NY, the large number of full-freight paying foreign students who represent their local elite and legacy admissions.. If underprivileged kids represent anything above about 5% at Ivy's I would be shocked. One stat from Boston Globe was that only 3% of Harvard comes from the US bottom 20% economically. The Ivys do more to perpetuate the existing power dynamic than they do to raise anyone up. They are far too small and far too nepotistic to do otherwise. If you want to raise the middle/bottom up, you need to look at the large state university systems which are orders of magnitude larger.
- spamizbad 5y ago
  Here's an article in Fortune from 1957 arguing college is too cheap. Seems like it was really taken to heart: https://fortune.com/2013/05/05/colleges-are-too-cheap-fortune-1957/ https://fortune.com/2013/05/05/colleges-are-too-cheap-fortun...
- coryrc 5y ago
  > massively expanded their costs While I attended college, tuition costs almost doubled, but since haven't increased much per year. It wasn't massive increased spending, it was the state cutting off basically all finding. There's certainly fat to be cut, but the admin costs are mostly imposed on high.
klipt 5y ago
What if we put a time limit on it? Say that student loans can be discharged in bankruptcy only 10 years after graduation? Then few students would want to stay poor for ten years just to get rid of loans. But lenders would also have incentive to not back very poor career paths.
- steveBK123 5y ago
  Then private loan terms would change to a max of 10 years, thereby increasing the monthly costs due to accelerated payback.
phkahler 5y ago
>> Student loans would evaporate. Good. When I got my degree, almost nobody had student loans. The kids from lower middle income and below tried for scholarships, Pell grants, and even had jobs that slowed them down due to fewer hours available for school. Tuition was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Oh, and a couple years taking transferable courses at community college was a thing too. If you want to help the poor, then do that but dont corrupt the system the way it has been the last 25 years. Now everyone is screwed.
- fridif 5y ago
  Not sure I understand this sentiment. I went to a good university, majored in history, took out 100k in debt totally for said degree, and have been working as a programmer ever since. Why does my outcome feel so rare? I think 100k was a fair enough price. (25k per year including food and a room).
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Because inflation adjusted it used to be a few grand a year. It’s not like college is 10x better than it was in the 1960s or 1970s.
  - lazide 5y ago
    If you got the same degree for 10k (what it used to cost inflation adjusted), why would that not be better for everyone? Every professor or co-professor I know gets paid peanuts, gets poor support, and gets waaaay too many students. These folks are at Yale, Princeton, etc. It’s a scam and the money disappears into the machine with little accountability and a ton of hand waving.
    - fridif 5y ago
      How would it be possible for 4 years of education to cost just $10,000? The cost of my food for 4 years is higher than that alone. My tuition was around $15,000 per year. You are more than welcome to investigate where that disappears to (presumably not all to staff salary), but requiring me to pay $100,000 upfront would have killed my career before it ever started-- unless of course you convince employers that a degree isn't needed.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Which would put obscene pressure on the legislatures to re-fund the education systems they’ve been purposefully defunding for a while. Arguably this is good.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  I wouldn't want my alma mater funded entirely by the state. They went on a real estate and related spending binge while I was in school. Some of my friends worked at the alumnus center, spending all their hours calling up alumni begging for donations. Meanwhile, really useful classes that students wanted and professors wanted to teach didn't exist, because the school wouldn't fund the extra class time. In short, out of all the school's top priorities, the students were nowhere to be found. Change that, and maybe I'll change my mind too.
  - shadilay 5y ago
    I doubt the state would fund the university without oversight and forcing them to show 'value for money'.
vkou 5y ago
> All this would do is ensure that higher education is utterly inaccessible for anyone not rich enough to pay cash. Which would cause significant negative price pressure on that education.
- lazide 5y ago
  It might even make it affordable (cash wise) for many people like it used to be. Wouldn’t that be scary?

mannerheim 5y ago

> What about loan companies, who definitely issued the loans, being on the hook? These days almost all student loans (90+% of the dollar amount) are being issued by the feds.

lumost 5y ago
I'd be skeptical of that stat, almost all of my loans 10 years ago were private ( although I'm sure there is a federal backstop )
- mannerheim 5y ago
  This change occurred in 2010: > Prior to 2010, Federal loans included 1) direct loans originated and funded directly by the United States Department of Education and 2) loans originated and funded by private investors and guaranteed by the federal government. Guaranteed loans were eliminated in 2010 through the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act and replaced with direct loans because of a belief that guaranteed loans benefited private student loan companies at taxpayers expense, but did not reduce costs for students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_States#Federal_loans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_St... > Most student loans — about 92%, according to a June 2020 report by MeasureOne, an academic data firm — are owned by the U.S. Department of Education. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/student-loan-debt https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude... The MeasureOne link: https://www.measureone.com/resources https://www.measureone.com/resources
joe_the_user 5y ago
>> What about loan companies, who definitely issued the loans, being on the hook? > These days almost all student loans (90+% of the dollar amount) are being issued by the feds. Well that makes it easy. Forgive those loans and then stop issuing them. Force the universities to come up with reasonable programs with reasonable tuition. Universities have gone from institutions of learning to scams exploiting students and low-paid lecturers alike.
- 5y ago

Notanothertoo 5y ago

This. Its their job to calculate risk, and bet on it. Let them and let em set the interest rate accordingly. This would also solve the ever inflating tuition costs and cause schools to be competitive. In general it would curb academic tomfoolery. Weird what happens when the government assumes liability. Everyone wants to blame the banks for '08, and they have some fault but it was all enabled by federal encouragement and liability. At least in the private sector the companies live and die by their decisions and the banks were held accountable /s.