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I'm so frustrated at the morality around giving these kids unsustainable loans. The entire discourse is loan forgiveness, with zero effort into preventing this
by declan_roberts 2y ago
I'm so frustrated at the morality around giving these kids unsustainable loans. The entire discourse is loan forgiveness, with zero effort into preventing this crisis continuing.
- thfuran 2y agoYeah, I think loan forgiveness without doing anything to reduce tuition (and other attendance) costs or expand alternatives like trade schools is throwing fuel on the dumpster fire.
- ineedaj0b 2y agoThere’s a high likelihood the next president will change the system, one very drastically (if rumors are true).
- rescripting 2y agoCould you expand on this? As an outsider I’m unfamiliar with what might change and who might change it.
- ineedaj0b 2y agoHarris will likely offer loan forgiveness. It’ll be generous. Trump is unlikely to offer generous loan forgiveness. Has in passing mentioned plans to change the department of education (and the loan system), weakening colleges power and reducing the amount of money colleges receive from the government. Neither candidate will mention this out loud, it’s not a news story either group wants.
- whynotminot 2y agoHow will she offer it? Much of what Biden attempted to do through executive action was struck down by the Supreme Court. If Harris won’t even say it out loud, then it’s unlikely she’d be able to get it passed through Congress. Seems like wishful thinking.
- ineedaj0b 2y agoExecutive action is the only semi-viable way, I think
- whynotminot 2y agoWhich Biden already did and was slapped down by the Supreme Court. And so he’s trying smaller ways (still via executive action) to get as much forgiven as possible. So again, I ask you, how would Harris do more?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- samstave 2y agoWhat is Betsy DeVoss legacy from the dept education?
- ineedaj0b 2y agoMore ‘school choice’ for K-12 students
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- declan_roberts 2y agoLoan forgiveness only fixes one symptom of the cancer.
- jimmaswell 2y agoThe only people I've heard of having absurd payments are on private loans and/or have graduate degrees, like a dentist with a payment that looks eye popping until you realize he makes 2 million. DoE student loans have very lenient repayment options, including an income-based option with payments as low as $0. I'm in favor of making higher education free or subsidized just on principle, but I've yet to meet a person in real life actually struggling as a result of federal student loans. Their terms seem more than fair overall. https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/plans/income-driven https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/plans/income-d... And I don't know if it's the norm, but I had to take a written test proving I knew exactly what I was getting into - how long would a typical loan take to repay, what are the terms, who backs the loan, the fact it is a loan I have to repay..
- JimboOmega 2y agoI've always wondered why we don't make student loans similar to other loans; IE, dischargeable in bankruptcy, and thus force lenders to evaluate credit risk when making them. That would mean less loans are issued and schools must cut costs and borrowers must pick more economically advantageous programs. "We will pay for it, but it's a loan so not really" is a fallacy. If we decide that education is an all around good thing so we want to subsidize it, great, but let's just do that directly.
- gruez 2y agoThen people would complain that disadvantaged students are being denied high education, because such students inevitably are going to have worse academic prospects than well off students, and therefore can't get student loans.
- declan_roberts 2y agoSimple: look at the degree and future earnings, not the student.
- gruez 2y agoSo you expect private lenders to be on the hook for delinquencies and put them in charge of assessing credit risk, but then at the same time kneecap them by not allowing them to see any information about the lenders aside from what degree they're studying? Seems like a shitty regime where the smart middle class students (not rich students, because they don't need student loans) bears the burden of subsidizing all the bad students.
- sidewndr46 2y agoit would simply result in no one lending
- lapcat 2y ago> thus force lenders to evaluate credit risk when making them The lender is the federal government for almost all student loans now.
- macNchz 2y agoI think that, to most 18 year olds, the concept of tens of thousands of dollars of debt is basically too abstract to reason about clearly. I agree that the fact kids can take on this amount of debt at that age–which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, but is also guaranteed by the government such that the universities take zero risk in the transaction–is basically unconscionable.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoThe logical thing to do here would be as you correctly point out, have universities and private banks bear more of the risk vs the government. Of course, the moment that happens, enrollment would crater and the whole student loan program would be revealed as a subsidy that benefits university administrators, provosts and deans to promote 21st century grand tours, for the middle class. The reckoning is coming. The question is who pays. Kids arent paying anymore. Will it be Banks, university administrators, or low income americans? Will it be the low incoime class who finances the debt largesse of the middle class, via monetized debt and inflation?
- declan_roberts 2y agoI don't see a scenario where the people who benefit most from the corrupt system (schools) bear the cost. Very likely the cost will go right to the taxpayers.
- matt-attack 2y agoSeems to be a pretty condescending view of an 18 year old.
- bee_rider 2y agoDon’t worry we made sure they couldn’t be discharged through bankruptcy. So, we don’t have to worry about whether or not the system is sustainable. Free money for everybody, yay!
- declan_roberts 2y agoFree money for the school endowments**
- danaris 2y agoThe major part of the reason for that is the requirement for actually preventing it: Congress needs to act. Congress is divided[0], and only one party is likely to favor reducing the number of unsustainable student loans given out. (Or, to the extent that the other party might favor measures that would have that result, it would be secondary to other goals that would be antithetical to their opponents'—so either way, nothing is going to get passed.) Fundamentally, there are really only two ways forward that reduce the number and magnitude of student loans: Either make higher education[1] dramatically more affordable, by restoring a lot of the federal support from it that's been removed over the past several decades, or make it dramatically less accessible, by various kinds of measures that either outright restrict who can go to college, or condition federal funds on other less-straightforward limitations. Unfortunately, in addition to reducing the overall education level of our populace, the latter category would do little to reduce the burden on those who still want to go to college—indeed, there's reason to think it might make things worse, as the same facilities get fewer students and thus less tuition. [0] Noting that I am phrasing this extremely obliquely to try to define the problem as clearly as I can without running afoul of site guidelines on political partisanship. [1] This would, IMO, include most kinds of trade schools; I do think that providing incentives for many people to go into trades rather than colleges and universities is a sort of middle ground here, but it's far from a solution to the identified problem.