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So you believe universities have taken advantage of students by crafting, encouraging and financing education programs with an understanding that those programs

So you believe universities have taken advantage of students by crafting, encouraging and financing education programs with an understanding that those programs would not result in jobs which would be sufficient to repay the debt needed to complete them, but you think the 18 year olds who were taken advantage of should be forced to suffer for their failure to make perfect decisions at 18. Cool. Cool.

sejje 8mo ago
So you believe uninvolved taxpayers should be on the hook when the 18 year olds make bad decisions. Cool cool.
- hparadiz 8mo ago
  Should post grad be funded by the government? Yes. Next question. Feel like I'm answering whether or not public schools should be a thing from some 19th century peasant.
  - AlexandrB 8mo ago
    It's a question of supply and demand though. Sure we should fund science post grad, I'm not so sure about humanities (supply already outstrips demand there). Saying we should fund "post grad" in general elides this complexity. Public school is as much about providing babysitters for parents that have to work as it is about education. Notice how hard it is to be expelled from public school. Grades are irrelevant. This is very different from how post secondary education operates.
    - hparadiz 8mo ago
      When compulsory education became a thing it met resistance from families that didn't wanna lose another pair of working hands on the farm. Babysitting is a 20th century post agrarian phenomenon.
- jahsome 8mo ago
  Do I believe in community, empathy, kindness toward my fellow human beings? Why, yes. Yes I do. Am I willing to pay a few bucks to put my money where my mouth yes. Why yes, yes I am.
  - shermantanktop 8mo ago
    The unfortunate reality is that your kindness and empathy is a resource that is being exploited by unseen actors. You are being taken for a ride and you feel good about it. I absolutely support maximizing access to education and I'm willing to pay for it. I'm not willing to prop up a giant unsecured-loan grift that transfers financial risk onto those least able to bear it, while universities jack up their tuition to grab their slice of this new pie.
    - jahsome 8mo ago
      You are correct and I am making a conscious choice. I'm not being taken for a ride, I'm willingly offering one, even to those who would rob me blind given the chance. Of course there are those who would exploit. But I'm not going to punish the well-deserving masses because of the unscrupulous few. It's a very small sacrifice I can make each year, which has the potential to positively impact the lives of thousands of families, and for generations to come. Were I to refuse participation in such an opportunity to "protect" myself, I'd be no less selfish and greedy than those you warned me about.
      - shermantanktop 8mo ago
        We don't have the option to "refuse participation," so that's not really the point. We can feel better or worse about it, and you feel good about it, and that's great. I feel good for the individual students who benefit but do not feel good about the institutional corruption that this system represents. If we were to finally reform the student loan process without any protections for the students themselves, it'd be a painful correction for everyone. But the current system has massive pain in the form of students taking on massive debt to go to places like the University of Phoenix, and they often don't even end up with a degree. Some of them do, of course, so maybe under the current system we end up better off as a whole. It's hard for me to know one way or the other. But it is painfully obvious who the winners and losers are. The winners are the universities, debt collectors and loan servicing companies. The losers are some percentage of low-income students who get screwed and saddled with debt, the well-meaning taxpayers who fund the loan scheme, and the middle-class parents who pay ever-rising tuition that is fueled by loan money that they don't even qualify for.
- bee_rider 8mo ago
  The decision to invent a new special type of debt for student loans was a political decision made by our representatives. To the extent that the voters/taxpayers are responsible for anything: this is our shared mess. I mean, the whole premise of representative democracy is that we’re responsible for the messes we send representatives to make. If we don’t want that responsibility, I guess we’d have to look at alternatives to representative democracy, but that’s a pretty big topic.
  - sejje 8mo ago
    I accept responsibility, let's fix it.
    - bee_rider 8mo ago
      I’d probably pause loan repayments (no need to dig a deeper hole), make student loans dischargable via bankruptcy, wait a bit for the market to figure itself out. Once we’ve figured out what the value of each degree is, we can refund the difference to everyone who’s paid. There’d be a bit of fudging as we’d need to adjust for inflation and the reputation of colleges fluctuate over time, but this seems like the fairest way to do it.
- etchalon 8mo ago
  Federal spending is not derived from revenue and it's weird people keep thinking it is.
- freejazz 8mo ago
  Why have police? Why have firefighters? Why have EMS?
paulsutter 8mo ago
No they’re saying that the schools should repay the loans, not the government

sejje 8mo ago

So you believe uninvolved taxpayers should be on the hook when the 18 year olds make bad decisions. Cool cool.

hparadiz 8mo ago
Should post grad be funded by the government? Yes. Next question. Feel like I'm answering whether or not public schools should be a thing from some 19th century peasant.
- AlexandrB 8mo ago
  It's a question of supply and demand though. Sure we should fund science post grad, I'm not so sure about humanities (supply already outstrips demand there). Saying we should fund "post grad" in general elides this complexity. Public school is as much about providing babysitters for parents that have to work as it is about education. Notice how hard it is to be expelled from public school. Grades are irrelevant. This is very different from how post secondary education operates.
  - hparadiz 8mo ago
    When compulsory education became a thing it met resistance from families that didn't wanna lose another pair of working hands on the farm. Babysitting is a 20th century post agrarian phenomenon.
jahsome 8mo ago
Do I believe in community, empathy, kindness toward my fellow human beings? Why, yes. Yes I do. Am I willing to pay a few bucks to put my money where my mouth yes. Why yes, yes I am.
- shermantanktop 8mo ago
  The unfortunate reality is that your kindness and empathy is a resource that is being exploited by unseen actors. You are being taken for a ride and you feel good about it. I absolutely support maximizing access to education and I'm willing to pay for it. I'm not willing to prop up a giant unsecured-loan grift that transfers financial risk onto those least able to bear it, while universities jack up their tuition to grab their slice of this new pie.
  - jahsome 8mo ago
    You are correct and I am making a conscious choice. I'm not being taken for a ride, I'm willingly offering one, even to those who would rob me blind given the chance. Of course there are those who would exploit. But I'm not going to punish the well-deserving masses because of the unscrupulous few. It's a very small sacrifice I can make each year, which has the potential to positively impact the lives of thousands of families, and for generations to come. Were I to refuse participation in such an opportunity to "protect" myself, I'd be no less selfish and greedy than those you warned me about.
    - shermantanktop 8mo ago
      We don't have the option to "refuse participation," so that's not really the point. We can feel better or worse about it, and you feel good about it, and that's great. I feel good for the individual students who benefit but do not feel good about the institutional corruption that this system represents. If we were to finally reform the student loan process without any protections for the students themselves, it'd be a painful correction for everyone. But the current system has massive pain in the form of students taking on massive debt to go to places like the University of Phoenix, and they often don't even end up with a degree. Some of them do, of course, so maybe under the current system we end up better off as a whole. It's hard for me to know one way or the other. But it is painfully obvious who the winners and losers are. The winners are the universities, debt collectors and loan servicing companies. The losers are some percentage of low-income students who get screwed and saddled with debt, the well-meaning taxpayers who fund the loan scheme, and the middle-class parents who pay ever-rising tuition that is fueled by loan money that they don't even qualify for.
bee_rider 8mo ago
The decision to invent a new special type of debt for student loans was a political decision made by our representatives. To the extent that the voters/taxpayers are responsible for anything: this is our shared mess. I mean, the whole premise of representative democracy is that we’re responsible for the messes we send representatives to make. If we don’t want that responsibility, I guess we’d have to look at alternatives to representative democracy, but that’s a pretty big topic.
- sejje 8mo ago
  I accept responsibility, let's fix it.
  - bee_rider 8mo ago
    I’d probably pause loan repayments (no need to dig a deeper hole), make student loans dischargable via bankruptcy, wait a bit for the market to figure itself out. Once we’ve figured out what the value of each degree is, we can refund the difference to everyone who’s paid. There’d be a bit of fudging as we’d need to adjust for inflation and the reputation of colleges fluctuate over time, but this seems like the fairest way to do it.
etchalon 8mo ago
Federal spending is not derived from revenue and it's weird people keep thinking it is.
freejazz 8mo ago
Why have police? Why have firefighters? Why have EMS?

paulsutter 8mo ago

No they’re saying that the schools should repay the loans, not the government