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I should clarify. When I say "rewarding bad behavior" I mean it further incentivizes the universities to keep raising prices, faster. There are myriad of reason
by pknomad 3y ago
I should clarify. When I say "rewarding bad behavior" I mean it further incentivizes the universities to keep raising prices, faster. There are myriad of reasons why college costs goes up but the biggest driver is the inelasticity of college degree. College administrators can raise prices because they see that the market will bear them. If college administrators and students see that the government will forgive student debts (btw it's not even dischargeable through bankruptcy), then the administrators will charge higher prices ("don't worry prospective students, the government will forgive the debts!") and students will also include it in their calculus for college-decision making process ("maybe there will be another loan forgiveness down the road, I can definitely take the risk"). Think how Tesla and all these EV companies display the car price with the tax break. This is what I mean.
- nerdjon 3y agoThat is very valid, and I don't want to discount the risk of that happening. However, the way that I see it. If we were to actually put some serious political pressure behind fixing our education system so that was no longer a valid risk. (I mean ideally the idea of price and school for the first 2 or 4 years wasn't even a conversation, but clearly we are not ready for that) than if/when we were able to address some of these fundamental issues, we would do something like this already. Acknowledge that due to policy failures there are students that went through school before fixing these problems and do something about the debt they are dealing with. At least getting it in line with what a current student would expect to be going through taking years of payment into account. My thing is though, why wait? Why not do something about it now. Especially given the realities of the current political climate that, frankly I am not convinced we could get anything else actually done. I fully acknowledge that risk exists and the high likelihood that there have been conversations in school boards or whoever actually makes those pricing decisions about what exactly this means. It's ridiculous that I look at some schools that have a yearly tuition inching closer and closer to $100,000. The way I see it there is no best solution. Either we do nothing, we keep things as they are, maybe we slow down tuition price increases a bit, and millions of people are still stuck with underwater loans years after graduating. Hoping that we will get the right people with the right political power to actually do something about the school system now. Or, we do something, we take that risk, we watch what happens. But also giving relief to a lot of people, who will also then have more money to be able to spend in the economy.
- pknomad 3y agoThanks for the cordial dialogue. >I mean ideally the idea of price and school for the first 2 or 4 years wasn't even a conversation, but clearly we are not ready for that What do you mean by this? I don't think I quite follow.
- nerdjon 3y agoI thought about rewriting that sentence a few times and decided against it, I probably just should have. More that I think that the first 2 or 4 years of school should just be free if you want it. Than even higher education beyond an associates or a bachelors is where you start talking about loans but with that degree you may be able to get a job matching your degree and you can work something other than minimum wage while in school. But if we can't fix the core issues with school, I am not betting on that one happening either.
- leereeves 3y agoStudents need to take some responsibility for their own finances and stop choosing the schools that cost $100k per year. Or, if that's really too much to expect from 18 year olds, then the student loan program needs reasonable price caps. It should probably be limited to the cost of in state tuition.