Student Loan Blues

[Skywalkre]

14 minutes ago, R011 said:

Meanwhile, most of the undergrad instruction is done by grad students being paid peanuts with no job security.

Actually, most of that teaching is being done by adjuncts who effectively make minimum wage and who don't know if they'll be teaching next semester until sometimes just days before classes start (ask me how I know this).

Hell, even if professors on tenure track aren't guaranteed big bucks.  Dr Huberman, who I highlighted over in the Health Quackery thread, has talked about when he started at Stanford he was living in his laboratory for several days a week to save on commute time and costs because he was barely getting by...

This notion of the overpaid-underwater-LGBT-basket-weaving-nongender-studies professor making big bucks is an R fantasy...

[R011]

12 minutes ago, Skywalkre said:

Actually, most of that teaching is being done by adjuncts who effectively make minimum wage and who don't know if they'll be teaching next semester until sometimes just days before classes start (ask me how I know this).

Hell, even if professors on tenure track aren't guaranteed big bucks.  Dr Huberman, who I highlighted over in the Health Quackery thread, has talked about when he started at Stanford he was living in his laboratory for several days a week to save on commute time and costs because he was barely getting by...

This notion of the overpaid-underwater-LGBT-basket-weaving-nongender-studies professor making big bucks is an R fantasy...

The bloated administration with administrator managers and senior staff getting big bucks is no fantasy, however.  The folks at the bottom doing all the work are not paid so well, though  a lot of them are just pushing paper, and they're generally treated like crap.  It used to be that a summer job would pay for tuition and books and one could go to a home town university without a loan.  That hasn't been possible for a long time.

[Skywalkre]

10 minutes ago, R011 said:

The bloated administration with administrator managers and senior staff getting big bucks is no fantasy, however.

Yep.

I have a dear friend who's seen the change over the last 20 years.  When she started administration was like a pyramid... like any normal organizational structure.  Now they're like capital i's - a lot of bloat at the top, nothing in the middle, everyone else at the bottom (and I mean... at the bottom).  It's disgraceful, shameful, and oftentimes borders on a scam (she personally had one project she spent a month putting together only to have one of these assistant deans then take it over and run it when it was complete... said dean making 10x her salary and having done none of the work to build the program).

13 minutes ago, R011 said:

It used to be that a summer job would pay for tuition and books and one could go to a home town university without a loan.  That hasn't been possible for a long time.

Yep.

I've mentioned it several times over the years but my good friend's dad paid his way through undergrad and law school by working the summer as a cook in a diner.  You can't work full time doing that same job now and be able to go to ASU here in the valley (ASU, a state school that is supposed to be as cheap and affordable as possible, costs ~$17k/year to attend).

We've talked about this countless times here on TN over the years.  The issue isn't the folks who just got this relief.  Many of those paying off these debts never even finished their degrees.  Those that did aren't necessarily making good money.  There are plenty of needed jobs out there that require a degree that pay just 'meh' wages (case in point - social worker here in the Valley).

The issue is the predatory nature of the system and our culture.  We still tell kids there only chance at making it is going to college even though many don't belong there.  We've made college stupidly expensive compared to where it was in generations past, and we've made said loans attached that almost all these kids have to take near impossible to get rid of... and the gall of some of you on here to attack the folks who get these loans.

Kids don't raise themselves... they don't put in the structures, laws, and systems that run their lives.  The least the rest of us could do is fix those systems so they're not so predatory.  Jordan Peterson, TN's favorite psychologist, has lamented that student loans are modern day indentured servitude.  Let's fix this shit... finally.

[Skywalkre]

17 hours ago, Burncycle360 said:

I'm not happy about it, but I'd be fine with it....  if combined with the elimination of student loan subsidies so we don't find ourselves in this position ever again.

We're 30+ trillion deep in mostly corporate bailouts and projects that will "generate growth and pay for themselves" so this may be a little Nero during the fall of Rome of me, but screw it, what's another 1.8 trillion to throw the unwashed masses a bone? Not going to change the downward trajectory of our economy that is the result of decades of gross fiscal management by both parties either way. We're neck deep in debt and ankles deep in inflation, and the upstream causes aren't even being talked about much less addressed.  Read the room, the whole place is going up, not smoking isn't going to change that.  Cross the bridge, then burn it.

What saddens me is that it's pitting citizenry against each other when their ire should be directed towards the state for creating the circumstances in which this was simply bound to happen.  I can give an 18 year old a pass for listening to their mentors who said "do it or you won't amount to anything;" what else were they going to do?  Fiscal responsibility is rarely taught in the home, and not at all in schools. Within their scope, the mentors thought they were giving the best advice they could to help their students succeed and had no idea what computers, globalization and the internet would do to the job market in the late 90s and early 2000s.  They also didn't anticipate wokeness spreading in academia as a result, or the bloating of universities with guaranteed taxpayer cheese.  That wasn't their wheelhouse. The congressmen and women who passed the student loan subsidies in the first place get no such pass, they should have known better what the downstream ramifications of their myopic policies would be.  Conservative or progressive, it benefits no one to saddle people with a lifetime of debt they cannot escape even through bankruptcy, and much of those loans will never be repaid even after garnishing their social security in their mid 60s. Seeing people drown in debt for nonsense degrees that don't translate to a useful skill or job may elicit a sense of schadenfreude, and maybe it's deserved,  but it's cutting off your nose to spite your face because at scale half the population being unsuccessful certainly isn't beneficial to the country no matter how you slice it.

My minimum recommendation would be to change the law so the the debt is subject to bankruptcy and eliminate all subsidies, but at this point I'd be fine with writing the debt off and eliminating all subsidies that isn't STEM / Medical related. 

Aside from the immediate short term and long term benefits of forgiving the debt, the other major side effect of this would be that universities would be forced to cut costs, and as trendy as it's been lately woke professors would be the first to be let go.  That alone is worth 1.8T to me, because it will be immeasurably beneficial over the span of generations to have fewer of those parasites in a position to influence our youth.
 

Well said... and in typical TN fashion completely ignored by most on here.

[sunday]

I have heard of some hypertrophy in the administrative side of some US Universities.

[Tim the Tank Nut]

student loans became far more predatory when they became a Federal loan.

Mike Rowe's train of thought is the answer.  Nobody is better informed on the issue of working for a living than he is.

[NickM]

3 hours ago, R011 said:

Meanwhile, most of the undergrad instruction is done by grad students being paid peanuts with no job security.

True but it's a fate I escaped thanks to my natural state of slothfulness.

[DKTanker]

Two siblings, fraternal twins.  Upon graduating high school one sibling enrolls in a plumber's apprenticeship program the other at a nearby university seeking a college education.  The apprentice plumber pays for his education through payroll deduction, the college student with government guaranteed student loans.  Twenty years later the now journeyman plumber is living a comfortable if modest life when suddenly he feels something stirring in his hip pocket.  It's his sibling trying to pick his pocket for $20 grand. 

[Harold Jones]

22 hours ago, Stargrunt6 said:

 

That's another thing, will the debtors pay taxes on what was forgiven?

No, the eo explicitly exempts the forgiveness from taxes or so I'm told.

[MiloMorai]

Republican Members of Congress Whose PPP Loans Were Forgiven:

 

Matt Gaetz (R-FL): $476,000

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA): $180,000

Greg Pence (R-IN): $79,441

Vern Buchanan (R-FL): $2.8M

Kevin Hern (R-OK): $1,070,000

Roger Williams (R-TX): $1,430,000

Brett Guthrie (R-KY): $4.3M

Ralph Norman (R-SC): $306,520

Ralph Abraham (R-LA): $38,000

Mike Kelly (R-PA): $974,100

Vicki Hartzler (R-MO): $451,200

Markwayne Mullin (R-OK): $988,700

Carol Miller (R-WV): $3.1M

[R011]

2 hours ago, MiloMorai said:

Republican Members of Congress Whose PPP Loans Were Forgiven:

 

Matt Gaetz (R-FL): $476,000

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA): $180,000

Greg Pence (R-IN): $79,441

Vern Buchanan (R-FL): $2.8M

Kevin Hern (R-OK): $1,070,000

Roger Williams (R-TX): $1,430,000

Brett Guthrie (R-KY): $4.3M

Ralph Norman (R-SC): $306,520

Ralph Abraham (R-LA): $38,000

Mike Kelly (R-PA): $974,100

Vicki Hartzler (R-MO): $451,200

Markwayne Mullin (R-OK): $988,700

Carol Miller (R-WV): $3.1M

Because having the government close or restrict a business and put people out ogf work is exactly the same as paying for something people opted to do.

[DougRichards]

From an outsider to the US system (ie, Australia).... the ideas of student loans soaring to the $millions seems absurd in the first place

Having said that we have a parallel system that is not referred to as a student loan, but as a Higher Education Contribution, that is dealt with though the national taxation system.  If one has such a debt, then when your income exceeds a certain level then you are taxed a certain amount towards that debt.  It seems to work here, but then again even if someone drops out of one course and then starts another, and other and then another etc, then the debt would never grow to anything like the million $$ level mentioned here. 

But then again, we don't have sports scholarships at our universities...... so someone's tuition fees do not go toward paying for someone else's tuition fees just because that person may be good at sport, or music, or cheerleading or whatever...

Perhaps if the USA started taxing at an appropriate level the huge amounts that professional sports people receive after they graduate from sports scholarships then the question of tuition fees may be better addressed.

[DougRichards]

This paragraph provides a partial answer

 

American university tuition fees are substantially higher than in most other rich countries, and US consumers carry $1.75 trillion in student loan debt, most of it held by the federal government.

[Rick]

16 hours ago, Skywalkre said:

Actually, most of that teaching is being done by adjuncts who effectively make minimum wage and who don't know if they'll be teaching next semester until sometimes just days before classes start (ask me how I know this).

Hell, even if professors on tenure track aren't guaranteed big bucks.  Dr Huberman, who I highlighted over in the Health Quackery thread, has talked about when he started at Stanford he was living in his laboratory for several days a week to save on commute time and costs because he was barely getting by...

This notion of the overpaid-underwater-LGBT-basket-weaving-nongender-studies professor making big bucks is an R fantasy...

The question is why are there "overpaid-underwater-LGBT-basket-weaving-nongender-studies" and other such useless courses in the first place 

[DB]

I think that anyone who takes such a payment should first sign a legally binding declaration that they will never blame boomers for the state of the housing market, the price of anything and all of that Millennial whining and bitching ever again.

The UK system doesn't have a cap, but university fees are government controlled for UK based students so the debt would likely be more governed by your living costs. Your salary is garnished automatically when it rises above a threshold using the PAYE system. If you haven't completed repayment after a certain number of years (30, maybe?) then the debt is cancelled. They still whine about it.

Also, student debt is explicitly excluded from credit scores in the UK.

[Rick]

17 hours ago, Skywalkre said:

Well said... and in typical TN fashion completely ignored by most on here.

Not ignored, intelligently justifying individual responsibility on may levels. 

[Yama]

On 8/27/2022 at 10:01 AM, DougRichards said:

From an outsider to the US system (ie, Australia).... the ideas of student loans soaring to the $millions seems absurd in the first place

Yeah, both the problem and the solution feels very alien to European perspective. My student loan (government guaranteed) was 9000 euros, and I had no problems paying it back. Obviously I wasn't in what would be called a 'elite university' on international level (no such things here anyway), but still.

Saw this Marco Rubio news where he cites his own experience and agrees that the system is 'broken', Biden plan is just  wrong way to fix it.

[Wobbly Head]

On 8/27/2022 at 6:33 AM, Rick said:

The question is why are there "overpaid-underwater-LGBT-basket-weaving-nongender-studies" and other such useless courses in the first place 

The same reason you can buy a blow up Hillary Clinton doll. Because people will pay for it.

 One big problem is education has become a bigger business than a place to learn. Even trade schools. There is one so called trade school where the local electricians will hire right of the street rather than use this trade school graduates.

[rmgill]

23 minutes ago, Wobbly Head said:

The same reason you can buy a blow up Hillary Clinton doll. Because people will pay for it.