11 ms·

Huh? You mean state/govt funded college? Or student loan debt forgiveness?

by bitexploder 4y ago

willcipriano 4y ago
Student loan debt forgiveness.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  Are you this dramatic about every form of government bailout that doesn’t directly benefit you? Edited subsidy to bailout.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    Only ones that go to extremely privileged people.
    - game-of-throws 4y ago
      By "extremely privileged", are you referring to people whose parents didn't pay for their education and so they had to take out loans?
      - willcipriano 4y ago
        People who came from backgrounds where the idea of spending a house worth of money on a piece of paper that employers aren't even interested in isn't batshit insane. Sue the school if they lied to you about the prospects of the degree. If they didn't and you went into this deal clear eyed, why am I paying for your years of partying?
      - dijit 4y ago
        "Extremely" privileged, maybe not. But I was too poor to even think of going to University in the UK, and that's not even half as bad as it is in the US; it's not just the student loans; it is also student living (rent, food, supplies), putting earnings on hold for half-a-decade and the possibility that you may not even have anything to show for it in the end (if you can't hack it or if the degree turns out to be not in-demand) it's not like you're guaranteed work. It's a gamble, and a hard one to make if you're from a lower-class blue-collar or non-working household. I'm sure I'll get a deluge of very privileged people here telling me that it would be effectively free to have an education in the UK due to certain debt forgiveness models and earning thresholds, I'm aware of those, but people would be hugely missing the point.
  - btilly 4y ago
    Student loan debt forgiveness is a stupid idea. All it will do is encourage more borrowing in the hope that there will be another future round of forgiveness. And lenders will have every incentive to offer those loans in the hope that the government pays for it. This money will enable colleges to raise tuitions more, and we get the same problem we've had, just grown more. Instead allow student loans to be disengaged in bankruptcy. Just like other debts, and just like student loans could before George "W" Bush changed the laws. Now students aren't incentivized to hope for another forgiveness round, lenders aren't either, and we aren't pouring fuel on rising tuition. Plus we'd offer ongoing assistance to those who got in the worst binds. (Unpleasant assistance to be sure. But not a one time bandaid, and very precisely targeted at those who need it most.)
    - blowski 4y ago
      In the UK, tuition was free for all UK students from 1962 - 1998. That period also saw steady economic growth. I'd cite that as evidence the relationship between tuition fees and the broader economy is complex.
      - hacym 4y ago
        Post WWII, the United States has seen massive economic growth. Tuition was not free. It’s tough to connect the two.
        blowski 4y ago
        I agree with you there. My disagreement is with the OP's very confident predictions of what would happen, when those predictions have not come true anywhere else free tuition fees have been (or are) in place.
        btilly 4y ago
        Student loan debt forgiveness is nothing like free tuition, and has very different economic effects. Countries that offer free tuition tend to pay universities directly and cap payments. That provides a strong incentive for universities to control costs. Similarly students who take advantage of the prospect of free tuition do not themselves go into debt. By contrast student loan forgiveness involves forgiving loans to students who have already gone into debt. This makes their private loans easier to pay for them. The prospect of this makes people more willing to go into debt. Nothing about this program gives universities an incentive to control costs. Rather than compare this to free tuition, it is better to compare this to other programs that make it easier for students to borrow to pay high tuition. The USA has had a lot of these programs, and the result is one of the factors driving tuition to rise faster than inflation for a half-century now. I'm just predicting that the result of this program will be the same result that we've seen for the last half-century.
  - jbay808 4y ago
    (I'm not the GP but I think there's a fair reason why someone would feel differently about loan forgiveness than other subsidies) Normally a subsidy is established in advance to incentivize some behaviour, like... manufacturing solar panels or something. A retroactive payment to only specific indebted solar panel manufacturers is called a bailout and does not have that effect, unless it was widely anticipated. It distorts the competitive landscape because it gives them a leg up over competing manufacturers who held back on investments that they would have made if they'd known the debt would be forgiven, and over new companies who are about to take loans to invest in their own factories, who now have to compete against fully-amortized equipment. So in other words, it's not really a proper subsidy unless it's also available to new students going forward. But due to the weirdness of the education market, that would probably require some form of tuition price controls too.
    - blowski 4y ago
      I'd imagine most people who are in favour of student debt forgiveness are also in favour of free tuition going forwards as well. It would be odd indeed to suggest your debt should be forgiven, but not that of someone who graduates next year. One complex bit of debt forgiveness is what happens with those who have sacrificed much to already pay off much of their debt. Should they get some kind of repayment?
      - jbay808 4y ago
        Agreed on both points, but I haven't seen those policies put forward. I don't have a horse in this race but it will be interesting to see what happens.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    Why should the banks forgive instead of forcing the colleges to pay for it? -- the colleges being the ones who fraudulently baited these students into moral hazard, offering something they couldn't warranty. We need to stop treating colleges and college administrators as only the purest churches and priests. It would be a major net positive if half of all universities went bankrupt, as was already predicted by HBS professor to be in 10-15 years.
  - hacym 4y ago
    I find this one hard to get on board with… I took out students loans and struggled financially with very little help from my parents. I graduated with about $25k in debt. Ten years later, I’m finally about to pay it off completely. I’ve been very fortunate to get jobs with salaries that allowed me to do this. I realize not everyone is fortunate in this way. But, at least in America, college is a financial decision. The argument about whether or not it should be is meaningless here. People knew going in what the cost would be, and how much in loans they’d need to take out. Someone taking out $100k for an art degree made a decision that likely wasn’t very wise. Why should someone that made more responsible decisions and made sure they’d be able to pay their debts now foot the bill for those that didn’t? This isn’t like other welfare — food stamps, for example. This is someone taking out a loan for something and not being able to pay it back. It might not directly benefit me because I worked to make sure my student loan could be settled. It’s a really tough sell to anyone that has done that. Had I felt confident we would be forgiving student debt, I would have simply reconfigured my pay off so that it was over the longest possible term with the lowest possible monthly payment and just wait. If our government decides to forgive student loan debt, I’d fully expect a check in the mail for what I paid. That only seems fair.
blowski 4y ago
I think it's a snarky way of saying "if college debts are cancelled, self-taught people would thus be paying the tuition fees of those who went to college".
iratewizard 4y ago
In a sense, student loan forgiveness is making the financially responsible (self-taught, self-made, more valuable degree, worked through college) pay for the financially irresponsible.
- blowski 4y ago
  Those who work through college are more likely to have worse outcomes, and they're still likely to have a high debt. Those who went to college and have no debt are more likely to come from wealthy families. And if we say "only those who can afford it should go to college", then you are discouraging pretty much the best opportunity for social mobility.
  - iratewizard 4y ago
    College isn't an opportunity for social mobility anymore. The cost of tuition shoots up as the curriculum relaxes. It's an investment trap for people who can't do the math and listen too closely to what their midwit school teachers believe about the world.
    - bitexploder 4y ago
      And yet, you can usually go to community college and then a reasonably well regarded state school without taking on crazy debt. It is when you go out of state and live in campus housing that costs balloon.
      - iratewizard 4y ago
        Community college can be a great investment in some cases, definitely. Especially for people who struggle with setting goals and self-discipline. If you have self-discipline and know what you want to be able to do, there can be a lot of unnecessary time waste in the classroom. I would be curious to break down and audit time against 4 buckets of things you will learn. Things you "need to know", "ought to know", "don't need" and "don't actually understand". I wonder how long it takes to fill each bucket and how much faster the latter two grow. Experience is the best teacher of all and additional schooling is the biggest barrier to useful experience.

Huh? You mean state/govt funded college? Or student loan debt forgiveness?

willcipriano 4y ago

Student loan debt forgiveness.

bandyaboot 4y ago
Are you this dramatic about every form of government bailout that doesn’t directly benefit you? Edited subsidy to bailout.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  Only ones that go to extremely privileged people.
  - game-of-throws 4y ago
    By "extremely privileged", are you referring to people whose parents didn't pay for their education and so they had to take out loans?
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      People who came from backgrounds where the idea of spending a house worth of money on a piece of paper that employers aren't even interested in isn't batshit insane. Sue the school if they lied to you about the prospects of the degree. If they didn't and you went into this deal clear eyed, why am I paying for your years of partying?
    - dijit 4y ago
      "Extremely" privileged, maybe not. But I was too poor to even think of going to University in the UK, and that's not even half as bad as it is in the US; it's not just the student loans; it is also student living (rent, food, supplies), putting earnings on hold for half-a-decade and the possibility that you may not even have anything to show for it in the end (if you can't hack it or if the degree turns out to be not in-demand) it's not like you're guaranteed work. It's a gamble, and a hard one to make if you're from a lower-class blue-collar or non-working household. I'm sure I'll get a deluge of very privileged people here telling me that it would be effectively free to have an education in the UK due to certain debt forgiveness models and earning thresholds, I'm aware of those, but people would be hugely missing the point.
- btilly 4y ago
  Student loan debt forgiveness is a stupid idea. All it will do is encourage more borrowing in the hope that there will be another future round of forgiveness. And lenders will have every incentive to offer those loans in the hope that the government pays for it. This money will enable colleges to raise tuitions more, and we get the same problem we've had, just grown more. Instead allow student loans to be disengaged in bankruptcy. Just like other debts, and just like student loans could before George "W" Bush changed the laws. Now students aren't incentivized to hope for another forgiveness round, lenders aren't either, and we aren't pouring fuel on rising tuition. Plus we'd offer ongoing assistance to those who got in the worst binds. (Unpleasant assistance to be sure. But not a one time bandaid, and very precisely targeted at those who need it most.)
  - blowski 4y ago
    In the UK, tuition was free for all UK students from 1962 - 1998. That period also saw steady economic growth. I'd cite that as evidence the relationship between tuition fees and the broader economy is complex.
    - hacym 4y ago
      Post WWII, the United States has seen massive economic growth. Tuition was not free. It’s tough to connect the two.
      - blowski 4y ago
        I agree with you there. My disagreement is with the OP's very confident predictions of what would happen, when those predictions have not come true anywhere else free tuition fees have been (or are) in place.
        btilly 4y ago
        Student loan debt forgiveness is nothing like free tuition, and has very different economic effects. Countries that offer free tuition tend to pay universities directly and cap payments. That provides a strong incentive for universities to control costs. Similarly students who take advantage of the prospect of free tuition do not themselves go into debt. By contrast student loan forgiveness involves forgiving loans to students who have already gone into debt. This makes their private loans easier to pay for them. The prospect of this makes people more willing to go into debt. Nothing about this program gives universities an incentive to control costs. Rather than compare this to free tuition, it is better to compare this to other programs that make it easier for students to borrow to pay high tuition. The USA has had a lot of these programs, and the result is one of the factors driving tuition to rise faster than inflation for a half-century now. I'm just predicting that the result of this program will be the same result that we've seen for the last half-century.
- jbay808 4y ago
  (I'm not the GP but I think there's a fair reason why someone would feel differently about loan forgiveness than other subsidies) Normally a subsidy is established in advance to incentivize some behaviour, like... manufacturing solar panels or something. A retroactive payment to only specific indebted solar panel manufacturers is called a bailout and does not have that effect, unless it was widely anticipated. It distorts the competitive landscape because it gives them a leg up over competing manufacturers who held back on investments that they would have made if they'd known the debt would be forgiven, and over new companies who are about to take loans to invest in their own factories, who now have to compete against fully-amortized equipment. So in other words, it's not really a proper subsidy unless it's also available to new students going forward. But due to the weirdness of the education market, that would probably require some form of tuition price controls too.
  - blowski 4y ago
    I'd imagine most people who are in favour of student debt forgiveness are also in favour of free tuition going forwards as well. It would be odd indeed to suggest your debt should be forgiven, but not that of someone who graduates next year. One complex bit of debt forgiveness is what happens with those who have sacrificed much to already pay off much of their debt. Should they get some kind of repayment?
    - jbay808 4y ago
      Agreed on both points, but I haven't seen those policies put forward. I don't have a horse in this race but it will be interesting to see what happens.
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  Why should the banks forgive instead of forcing the colleges to pay for it? -- the colleges being the ones who fraudulently baited these students into moral hazard, offering something they couldn't warranty. We need to stop treating colleges and college administrators as only the purest churches and priests. It would be a major net positive if half of all universities went bankrupt, as was already predicted by HBS professor to be in 10-15 years.
- hacym 4y ago
  I find this one hard to get on board with… I took out students loans and struggled financially with very little help from my parents. I graduated with about $25k in debt. Ten years later, I’m finally about to pay it off completely. I’ve been very fortunate to get jobs with salaries that allowed me to do this. I realize not everyone is fortunate in this way. But, at least in America, college is a financial decision. The argument about whether or not it should be is meaningless here. People knew going in what the cost would be, and how much in loans they’d need to take out. Someone taking out $100k for an art degree made a decision that likely wasn’t very wise. Why should someone that made more responsible decisions and made sure they’d be able to pay their debts now foot the bill for those that didn’t? This isn’t like other welfare — food stamps, for example. This is someone taking out a loan for something and not being able to pay it back. It might not directly benefit me because I worked to make sure my student loan could be settled. It’s a really tough sell to anyone that has done that. Had I felt confident we would be forgiving student debt, I would have simply reconfigured my pay off so that it was over the longest possible term with the lowest possible monthly payment and just wait. If our government decides to forgive student loan debt, I’d fully expect a check in the mail for what I paid. That only seems fair.

blowski 4y ago

I think it's a snarky way of saying "if college debts are cancelled, self-taught people would thus be paying the tuition fees of those who went to college".

iratewizard 4y ago

In a sense, student loan forgiveness is making the financially responsible (self-taught, self-made, more valuable degree, worked through college) pay for the financially irresponsible.

blowski 4y ago
Those who work through college are more likely to have worse outcomes, and they're still likely to have a high debt. Those who went to college and have no debt are more likely to come from wealthy families. And if we say "only those who can afford it should go to college", then you are discouraging pretty much the best opportunity for social mobility.
- iratewizard 4y ago
  College isn't an opportunity for social mobility anymore. The cost of tuition shoots up as the curriculum relaxes. It's an investment trap for people who can't do the math and listen too closely to what their midwit school teachers believe about the world.
  - bitexploder 4y ago
    And yet, you can usually go to community college and then a reasonably well regarded state school without taking on crazy debt. It is when you go out of state and live in campus housing that costs balloon.
    - iratewizard 4y ago
      Community college can be a great investment in some cases, definitely. Especially for people who struggle with setting goals and self-discipline. If you have self-discipline and know what you want to be able to do, there can be a lot of unnecessary time waste in the classroom. I would be curious to break down and audit time against 4 buckets of things you will learn. Things you "need to know", "ought to know", "don't need" and "don't actually understand". I wonder how long it takes to fill each bucket and how much faster the latter two grow. Experience is the best teacher of all and additional schooling is the biggest barrier to useful experience.