Why, Yes, Revisiting Student Loans again

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So, I got in a fight on X and … Look, I realize the idea of forgiving student loans irks a lot of people. I even understand why.

I just think you need to think of it by turning it around another way. Because there was so much duress all along.

Were there some assholes borrowing half a mil to study fly fishing on Mars? Undoubtedly. There are always assholes. But that was neither the majority, nor the reason we should consider forgiveness, relief of staggered forgiveness or something — though for practical reasons I’m going to back forgiveness, and THEN SHUTTING DOWN THE WHOLE SYSTEM. Throw it to the free market. Things are changing anyway, and the duress is passing. But there is a whole 20 years of people with their butts caught in a vise.

“So, their problem,” you’ll say. And sure, it is their problem, but problems that affect that many people and are that big, affect all of us. And they are.

Not only should we look again at the question for fairness and justice but we should look at it from the POV of “clean the wound and let us heal” in a timely manner, that allows for a next generation.

Look, I know I have zero influence on this. ZERO. And I know this administration is committed to making people pay the loans as a matter of optics, etc. I also think the discourse around student loans has been hard-poisoned with false ideas, so that it seems like a no brainer to insist “Pay it, deadbeat.”

The fact that it’s me telling you to take a second look, should warrant a second look, though. Because I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think it was needed.

I’m going to start from the practical side, first.

You have a lot of people between the ages of 45 and 25 not even looking at getting married, much less having kids.

Yes, I know it’s really hard to wrap your head around because everyone says we’re over populated, but we’re not. And we might — it’s hard to know because no one is telling the truth or keeping the right numbers — be on the verge of serious demographic trouble. The US almost certainly is, not sure about the world, because counting there is even harder.

There is a contingent of this generation, maybe 1/3 who are under crushing student loans and have no hope of paying them off.

Yes, there are other economic barriers to getting to where they can marry, own a home, have kids. There are many sources. BUT the loans are putting a crushing pressure on a system already tilted against the young.

Saying “Shut up and suffer, you’re young” is not a lot of fun, unless said in jest while you make kids carry heavy stuff for you (and feed them and pay them for it.) But it’s even less fun when it’s going to destroy civilization.

This is one barrier we can lift.

Then there is fairness.

“They signed. They should pay.”

Cool beans. Yes, I do understand that’s how civilization works. “My word is my bond.”

But I also understand that civilizations, nations, and heck villages (even if there it’s the law of “I give you such a kicking”) have laws, regulations and other ways to stop people who signed unfair contracts from having to be further victimized.

Were most student loans unfair.

Depends. I’m going step by step, okay?

1- They signed the contract.

They ABSOLUTELY DID. The vast majority of them were between 16 and 19. Most of them probably could read the contract they signed. (Though not all.)
Let’s assume they were all legal adults, though. Legal adults on paper. But note that the overwhelming chances — due to our anti-child labor laws and insane regulations — are these people have not worked a single day in their lives. NOT ONE DAY. They’ve never signed another contract. Not for more than “I won’t eat candy before dinner” with mom and dad. They probably have a bank account but likely it’s mostly for gifts and such. If they’ve worked at all, it was unpaid intern stuff during summer to buff their resume.

Both the concept of money and paying back money, let alone a full understanding of the bind they’d be in are at best academic concepts.

They are in fact the ideal population to be loan shark victims.

So, yeah, they signed the contract but there were extenuating circumstances.

But wait, there’s MORE!

2- Most of them signed under duress.

What duress? Well, you might not know this if you don’t have kids or have never actually had to get a pinch job without quite the right credentials, or don’t have friends who don’t have degrees, but by the 2010s it was almost impossible to get a job even in retail, even as a barista at Starbucks without at least an associate’s degree. And if you expected to go beyond entry level, you needed at least a BA.* (The * are because this is going to have footnotes.)

Yes, there were people who got somewhere without those, but it took being very special and also luck. You can’t count on luck.

So if you’re a kid who wants to get a job; don’t think that you can make a living from your tunes, or your game design that you never do, etc. you need to go to college.

Duress.

3- In addition, if you’re smarter than the average bear EVERYONE tells you to go to college. Parents (guilty), teachers, authorities, government. “Go to college. Make something of yourself.”

4- There are no scholarships. Or rather they are, but they have absolutely NOTHING to do with ability or hard work. They go to earmarked “protected classes.” You stand somewhat of a chance if you are a female of any color, with a good tear-jerking story. BUT mostly you need to be female, can tan, etc. Even male from “minority” ethnicity doesn’t really count. Because male.
There are little scholarships, hard to chase, and you can amass a number of them. Younger kid managed one. Substantial. Takes a lot of time and is hard if you’re in advanced classes. (He was.)

So that’s it for “they freely signed.” They signed because they had to**, and most of them didn’t have enough practice in financial stuff to sign anything in an informed way. The circumstances under which these contracts were signed would be ILLEGAL if it weren’t the feds doing it.

“But they have to pay or the economy crashes.” And “It’s not fair to make the little people pay for doctors and lawyers.***”

1- Bull. That money has been spent. It’s not waiting to be paid back. Obama made the government the only lender for student loans.
They then printed the money and handed it to the universities. It’s been spent.
It’s imaginary money. Like most of the money from the government. By being spent, its value was already inflated away. You already paid. I already paid. All of us already paid.

2- the way interest accumulates on these things and the fact they are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy AGAIN makes them on par with loan shark stuff.

3- People have a lot more of them than you expect, and they’re some of our more ambitious, hard driving people.

Like, for instance, if you want to enter medical school (there you have “doctors and laywers”) they prefer if someone has a masters or a doctorate. but you usually have to have at LEAST 2 BS degrees. With perfect grades. (No, it didn’t use to be like that.) But there are thousands of applicants for each medschool position.
I happen to know it’s the same with every highly desirable degree, particularly post-graduate. you have to make yourself look good. It’s a bet. Most bets don’t pay off. It costs a lot of money to bet at this table, though, and most people making that bet have been star students ALL ALONG. And most of them end up with debt they can never pay for. EVER.

We’re pulling these people straight out of the gene pool. Unless of course, they come from wealth.****

4 – A lot of the more accessible (money wise) colleges are playing games that force people to take longer to graduate, or simply make it impossible to graduate in any reasonable time. Look up the graduation rates at your local State college. Particularly for STEM. It’s easy to say “the kids are stupid now” but I’m going to beg you to believe they’re not. Most of them are not. And the ones who are, most of them aren’t aiming for STEM.
There are now scam “colleges” that work. You pay a lot of money and they get you graduated in a year. I know more than one kid whose parents had to do this. Neither the parents nor the kids are stupid, and they all work hard as heck. (No, neither are family.)

How to fix it:
FORGIVE the loans. Not like Biden did, which left so much room for fraud and also left the system up.

The only way to do it is to shut down the system of loans (it is my belief that the colleges are headed down anyway, particularly if the EO on disparate impact sticks.) If people need loans for college, let private lenders fund them. (I bet you that the price of college comes down from the stratosphere pretty fast too.

Set people free. Among other things, heck of a political statement. And who knows, might get some people to rethink their stands.

It won’t be noticed. It’s already been inflated away. And it opens the door to productivity and adulthood.

Now is that the only way to do it? No.

But what we’re doing is eating our seed corn. And when that’s done, we won’t have any more corn.

And no future corn either.

Yes I know “But they signed contract.” Consider, in the bowels of Christ that you might be mistaken.

Notes:

*This was done because they couldn’t administer literacy tests, and our schools are so floridly and obviously horrible, that you can’t tell if someone can read and write with A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA.
Now, the thing making tests impossible was “disparate impact” and it might be gone. Eh. Depending on judges. Or it might not. If it is, that is the right way to negate the need for “credentials” which is what all this idiocy is built on. Also what feeds the need for H1Bs: they are being tested abroad where it’s legal. Not the whole need, but a lot of it.
Which is why disparate impact has to go.

**Let’s dispose of “might have joined the services.” Not everyone can. A lot of kids have issues that preclude it. That’s one. Another is… well, let’s look at the last four years. or the ones from 2008 to 2016.

The other point is: the services don’t want to take every kid, do they? What would they do with them? And do you want people to only go in to get college paid for? I don’t.

***Not all doctors and lawyers make the money the envious imagine. Second they sacrifice a lot of earning time and most of them graduate under crushing loans. And they too are being undermined by “imported” workers. (A startling number of them from China.) Also they are a tiny percentage of those who owe money. Why are you concentrating on them? Leave envy to the leftists. They do it better.

**** if you want for it to be so that IN AMERICA people have to be massively wealthy to be doctors, or yes, lawyers, or higher level scientists, explain to me way.
And yes, we should be able to make medical degrees more available, etc. But that’s the institutions, etc. NOT people’s decisions.

386 thoughts on “Why, Yes, Revisiting Student Loans again”

  1. The yout’ are not utterly blameless waifs. Well, *I* wasn’t. They were wronged, yes. Got that. Forgive the loans? That’s going to cause a bunch of chaos. Lots of people that paid theirs are going to be pissed.

    And rightfully so. A generation grew up through the 90s, went to college, and hit the job market right at a recession. Another one, right before that, hit right around 2001, which was another economic hit. Each one has been getting worse.

    The government has indeed screwed us all. The problem isn’t lazy kids. The problem is idiot government, bureaucracy, and communism- and the maleducation system. The kids need jobs. Work, well, that’s an unending task in itself. One can always find things that need work. Put the two together, plus pay, and you have a job.

    The “plus pay” is the problem in this admittedly simplistic little problem.

    Just spitballing here, but the first thing I’d do is forgive all interest debt on the loan. Credit the principle with interest paid. There. That’s a start on chewing down the intractable problem. Fixing the economy will help fix the ability to pay. Even a gender studies degree can lift boxes or push carts. Getting them working will start them on the path to being productive, self sufficient citizens.

    The fixing the economy part *has* to happen. Even if all loans are forgiven, if they aren’t working because there are no jobs that will hire them, then the problem persists. That’s not going to be a quick, simple, or easy fix. It’s going to be a process.

    Reduce bureaucratic burden (fees, etc). Reduce taxes on businesses (oh, the horror!). Already started on that one- no tax on tips or OT is good. Reduce the competition from slave workshops is nice, too. There used to be manufacturing in the US, and it was competitive. Manufacturing used to be good jobs, too.

    Eh, it’d take a miracle. Maybe we’ll get one anyway.

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    2. Have to agree on the pay the remaining principle, file 13 the remaining interest. Also agree with Sarah on terminate the entire federal student loan sharking business. We should point Elon’s DOGE folks at that to dig out just how corrupt the money trail is, because I damn sure guarantee that Swamp critters are getting their tithes out of it.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. This!

          What sold me was the predatory nature of the loan terms themselves. In addition those that were tricked into consolidation or other terms that “appear better”. Paying more in interest than the loan? That is BS! That should NOT happen, ever. Not everyone is financially smart enough to avoid loans like *”Parent Plus” versions, trapping the student and the parents. We were. Others aren’t.

          So with that stated. Anyone who has paid back the loan, and more. The remaining should be forgiven.

          In addition, bring back the ability to declare student loans under bankruptcy.

          As someone who not only paid off our student **loans, way back then, but got our child through college without any loans, I can get behind both of these. Neither option is allowing the borrower to get off without consequence.

          (*) Unfortunately for those pushing these loans, both of us could do the math involved. Nope. Heck Nope.

          (**) Both simple loans that had no interest accrue until 6 months after quitting or graduation. Loan plus simple monthly or yearly, low rate interest, for 10 years ($29/month – mine, $19/quarter – hubby’s). Ten years pay back. Given we were paying both loans back in the ’80s, we did not pay them off quickly to get rid of them. Not since we were making 3x or more on simple interest in our savings than what we were paying in interest for the student loans!

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        2. Not sure about that “paid back more than the principal in interest” comment. I have a SIL who I don’t think ever paid back a dime of the money she borrowed for her undergraduate and master’s degrees. I don’t have much sympathy for her because I TOLD her that her idea of getting a “communications” degree was a bad one and that she would never recoup the investment needed to get it. I also told her NOT to take my word for it but to investigate what current “communications” graduates were doing with their degrees.

          She, of course, didn’t listen and went ahead with spending her money to get a worthless degree from a second-rate university. She then got a master’s degree in public administration, a field also vastly overcrowded. When she couldn’t get a job with two degrees, she ended up living in my basement for several years.

          If she ever paid back a dime of the money she borrowed, I’d like to know where she got it.

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    4. I don’t have student loans, but I support loan forgiveness. It was a trap, and it’s affecting the number of children being born. The children that aren’t being born might not be your retirement, but they’ll be mine. The ultimate wealth and security is always the new people taking their places in society (and making new places) making and doing things

      Children are always the future.

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      1. I do not believe that letting the government have debt slaves is a good idea. EVER. People don’t have to be blameless in their own enslaving. (Most of the slaves brought to America were war prisoners of other tribes. Not blameless in any way.) Slavery is wrong. Period.

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  2. They are predatory loans, but for those that understood their responsibility, are paying, or paid their loan, how to you explain the fairness of letting the others off the hook? That, and I spent almost fifty years paying taxes used for these loans? Where’s my compensation for the theft of my taxes?

    Universities are complicit, so are politicians and bureaucrats. That’s where the money needs to be acquired. Both have trusts, universities have large perpetuating endowments, huge amounts of money were made off the taxpayers by both, and it’s the right thing to make both pay. It’s the same justice used to confiscate money from the rest of the criminals in society.

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    1. for those that understood their responsibility, are paying, or paid their loan, how to you explain the fairness of letting the others off the hook?

      As one who paid off her loans, I don’t care.

      Loan forgiveness was already part of the program from the beginning. You had to work in a “Public service” job for a certain number of eligible years – the requirements of which kept changing so that hardly anyone could meet them, thank you Congress – and you had to have made a certain number of payments, and the loan had to be more than 10 years old.

      The only thing that the Biden regime actually did that changed any of that – contra their public statement – was to expand the definition of eligible years of public service work, so that people who had been paying, but couldn’t pay consistently, and had been working in public service jobs, but kept being told that their work didn’t count, could finally get rid of that 20 year old student loan on which they’d paid enough to pay off the principal and probably a bunch of the interest, and still had a multiple tens of thousands balance because loan consolidation is a scam too… could finally be free of their government debt.

      Which is how my mother got free of hers.

      The upshot is: The behemoth must die and if forgiving student loans accomplishes this, I’m all for it.

      The catch is that the government must stop issuing new loans either first or simultaneously. Issuing new loans to people who will expect them to be forgiven is where the problem lies.

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      1. Exactly. I had friends who had their loans “forgiven” when, under any reasonable loan, they would have paid it off plus a reasonable amount of interest. Instead, their principal was little to no lower than it had been when they started—and that’s flat-out predatory.

        Somehow, at least one of them had managed to have a family in the meantime, but they lived in an area with a low COL. And note that this is from *my* generation, where the loans were predatory and awful, but it hadn’t reached the insanity that it has in decades since.

        Shut it all down. No more federal loans. No more “not dischargeable in bankruptcy.” Have it be so any loans in the future are held by the loan originator for at least several years into the repayment period—no passing the buck—and figure out some way to have colleges get their skin in the game.

        And freaking get HR companies off the credentialism train. If you have to train a person anyway, that piece of paper is meaningless.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Honestly, I wish the older people would READ MY POST. The cost is not what your mom worked two jobs for or what you slaved and scrimped for.
          My kid would have needed to make 40k a year to pay out of pocket. (We did. Until he said no more. He has some debt. Too much debt. BUT NOT that. HOWEVER that’s what I was working for. Three books a year, plus a job with PJM. And NO savings. At one point my mom asked if we were doing drugs, because we didn’t have money to come over.)
          And he still has some loans.
          To make 40k a year he’d have to be a) full time. b) have a degree. OR 20 years experience.
          Before you ask: living at home, state school.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. My loans were for COL only since I had tuition covered by scholarships. My husband had a bit more, since he didn’t have the scholarships. This was the late 90s and we graduated into a recession.

            We never defaulted and we were never late, if only by the skin of our teeth, and we were only able to pay them off because of a refinance on the house we bought after the housing bubble burst. (At a lower cost than it had been in twenty years, mind. It’s currently “valued” at about four times that amount.) By that point, on a regular payment schedule, we were about 18 years into the “ten year” loans.

            Tuition at the college we went to is more than double our annual cost per semester. Four times the cost in 26 years. And it wasn’t cheap then—the only reason I could afford it is the aforementioned scholarships. My eldest has been flat-out told that he is not paying for college, because if they won’t pay for it, they don’t want him enough. (He is an amazing academic prospect, and yes, I know the problems he will have, but merit scholarships still exist.)

            One of my siblings—the prosperous one—was telling us that we needed to be saving for out kids’ college since it wasn’t fair to them what had happened with costs and with loans. This was when we were still paying off our loans, so it was a case of “that would be nice if we could afford it…” (She did. Her kids did not need loans.)

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            1. We started a savings plan for our son as soon as he was born. A state savings plan as soon as available (which, since Oregon was a load of c***. Did get money thanks to lawsuit on how funds were managed.) Plus using tax deductions once state plan money ran out. Son got one increasing amount scholarship, plus internship, that helped (not that he kept it all 4 years, but helped initially). What also helped were small rewards from ROTC he earned (because of program cuts by Obama, he did not contract). Not much, but enough to pay for books. Son worked summers, didn’t make a lot, but helped. Last 3 terms, fall term his summer work paid for. Winter and spring terms, saved by us summer through winter terms. Helped that he was in an apartment that required rent monthly, not a dorm that required money at beginning of school year, or quarterly (quads). He was in college ’07 – ’12. He should have been done Fall ’11, but (not news to people here) college scheduling shenanigans occurred.

              We already had a hint on tuition inflation because of my back to school experience. Knew what paid ’74 – ’75, including housing. Then community college (which was not a sticker shock). Then second bachelors, where the sticker shock for tuition was “OMG” (single term tuition spiraled to what an entire year cost first round) just 10 years later (’86 – ’89). ($2k per year including living costs VS $2k/term tuition & books. Cheap by today’s standards.) A OMG OMG OMG! When our son’s term costs (state school) ran $15k – ~$28k/year before he was done (total < $100k).

              Others have worse horror stories.

              Liked by 1 person

                1. Not that he didn’t do the work and have the grades, but we were surprised son got scholarship offers too. For the same reason. White male, our financial status, and we both have degrees.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. a little older than ours, I THINK?
                    Our had scholarship offers for private schools. They didn’t want to pay the remaining tuition. Private, out of state…. Sigh.

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                    2. Yes, one scholarship was private out of state school for 1/2 tuition. About $25k/term with scholarship, plus fees, books, housing, etc.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    4. Private, out of state was the one that offered me enough in scholarship money to be able to afford it. And all of the scholarships were merit/application types, and I know for a fact that several of them had gone to guys in prior years. (One went to one of my brothers, which is how I knew it existed!)

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                    5. That type of scholarship is still available. it made the costs the same as in state.
                      The biggest issue was “living expenses.”
                      We should have moved the entire family to a large RV. Tough on the cats, but hey.

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                    6. “should have moved the entire family to a large RV.“

                      –

                      Hmmmm. We could have sold and moved (to *Arizona). Didn’t think about that. Hubby’s would have had to retire (eligible). But I could have worked remote. Granted it was my salary plus hubby working serious overtime (salary, not exempt) that put us over the hump, with the less expensive tuition as it was. Although one could argue that the last, 5th year, because shenanigans, made it more expensive in the end. Might have changed son’s job outlook too. In the end we’d go where he went (only child) within reason.

                      (*) Would have missed the trees. Pretty sure college in question wasn’t in the area Arizona has trees, although could be wrong.

                      Liked by 1 person

          2. When I got my Masters degree … uhhh… 7 years ago now? In-state architecture graduate tuition was around $4000 per semester.

            A step cousin of mine just started his undergraduate degree at the beginning on this academic year. Same school, also instate tuition.

            $4500 per semester. For Undergraduate.

            If I were in school for the same degree I already got, I’d have to pay $6000 per semester (because architecture is more expensive. For reasons.)

            A mere 7 years and the cost for my degree is …50%? higher.

            You’re not making that on summer jobs unless it’s smoke-jumping.

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    2. This.

      There is no forgiveness without repentance.
      And there is no repentance without an act of contrition.

      Forgiving the student loans? Well, it is a Jubilee. But at very least, the recipients of the forgiveness should be making public statements about how they were pressured into making a ruinous decision.
      Forgiving the debt just gives all those who profited handsomely from the exploitation more reason to keep doing so.

      The importance of formal education is practically a religion with some. There was no mathematical way that my wife would ever have been able to pay off her student loans. But it remains a rock-solid certainty for her that taking them was the right thing to do.
      There needs to be testimony.

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      1. OBVIOUSLY they should be making statements. If this doesn’t mean they’ll be ruined because the field they work in whether the one of the degree or not is fully taken over by leftists.
        There are a lot of people making those statements, too. If you listen. In the right places. And if you don’t shout them down with the presumption they did something wrong not to cash in. In a lot of places, they’re shouted down.
        But if you look for them, lots of people are speaking out. And the colleges are going down. Lower enrollments, etc.
        Here’s the thing, the system needs to be stopped BEFORE forgiveness.

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    3. Where is my compensation for the welfare fraud? (THAT was knowingly commmitted)

      Where is my compensation for the USAID fraud? (Intentional at scale siphoning of MY tax dollars for personal profit)

      Sometimes, you must recognize that the money cannot come back and choose based on what you want the outcome to be. I want the federal loan system shut down. I want a thriving economy based on free labor, not indentured.

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  3. Unless you solve the problem, the degree requirement where it’s not really needed coupled with the insane cost of obtaining one, you’ve kicked the can down the road. I was easily able to pay for my degree. The amount I paid toward each of my children’s degrees would have bought them each a cheap starter home in my then home town, and they were luckier than most of their peers. We worked hard and could afford (barely) to help.

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    1. What we need is more education. All lawyers, legislators, judges, governors, presidents, and bureaucrats need to understand statistics.

      Then, disparate impact will be laughed out of court, and business can go back to testing.

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  4. WHY are there so few ‘slots’ in medical schools? Can’t they hire more teachers?

    I’ll tell you why. Because the AMA (spit!) arbitrarily limits the number of doctors licensed to practice medicine. Because various levels of governments limit the number and size of hospitals that can be built. Smaller clinics have to obtain scarce licenses. Doctors’ offices? When was the last time you saw an actual, individual doctor with an office?

    Because if there were more doctors and nurses, more and bigger hospitals, more clinics, and even a few independent practitioners, medical services would be more available, and cost less. And the AMA and the government would have less control.

    It’s the New York ‘taxi medallion’ scam, only played with patients’ lives.

    Then 0bamacare drove thousands of doctors and nurses right out of medicine, and added hordes of bureaucrats. Making medical services even less available, and more expensive. COVIDiocy eliminated even more. Hey, if doctors and nurses don’t want to get the COVID shots, that should tell you something.

    Doctors waste far too much of their time filling out government forms, while bureaucrats practice medicine. It is insane.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. BINGO. That scam was made very plain in my healthcare administration classes. And doctors are basically screwed if they try to set up a low cost practice, because they can’t afford all the requirements the government (at the insistence of the AMA) levies on them. And you don’t even want to talk about the DEA cartel and their pharmaceutical companies.

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      1. It’s a scam, but it’s not THE KIDS scam.
        Also hint, it doesn’t cost (low side) 250k to educate a doctor. Most lecturers do it for free for the prestige. The price is to make sure they have an “investment” in the degree.

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        1. Thus the universal conflict between “cost” and “charge”. What it costs really does not have any relationship to what the institutes of higher instruction charge for that degree, since under the current distorted system “what the market will bear” is really “how much debt can we con these kids into incurring?”

          The base problem is predatory marketing by the universities, with connivance of the one and sole extremely predatory Federal Student Loan lender, our very own .gov. If the universities had any skin in the game, say guaranteeing loans for their degree holders, it would absolutely be different. But it’s not, and that debt is distorting lots of things as Sarah notes. We need a less distorted economy, so nuking the Federal Student Loan system from orbit, while flushing that debt as a painful one time fix, is an option that should be seriously considered – but it has to go after the ill-gotten-gains of the massive university endowments that are also the result as well to counterbalance some of that pain.

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    2. Worse with Veterinarian care. Even with the now tri-state veterinarian school between Idaho-Washington-Oregon. I switched from veterinarian target to forestry because no way I could beat the pre-med physician and nursing track in grades. That doesn’t count (back in ’70s) coming up with out of state tuition for veterinarian school. If I’d known about veterinarian tech track, might have gone with that instead. Ditto when switching from timber industry to programming. (When did that become a schooling option? Could I’ve handled that? IDK.)

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      1. I have a niece studying veterinary science—in London. They absolutely have the target numbers; she applied to several grad schools for that, but was very happy to get this one. I hadn’t realized how artificially competitive the field is.

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        1. I don’t know the national, or world wide, numbers, but locally there is a shortage of veterinarians. The one we use (been going there since ’85) is currently fully staffed. But won’t be long. Reason? New veterinarians can’t just open their own clinic (beyond the expense) but must join with an established veterinarian practice for a minimum of two years. What is happening is new veterinarians put in their two to 4 years, then move on to their own practices somewhere else. Our veterinarian clinic also take in veterinarians who had their own practice but now want to semi-retire. Our original veterinarian brought on a new veterinarian, then slowly over the next 10 years she bought him out as he semi-retired, and expanded the clinic. He continued to practice, but as an employee, until he died. But the upshot is, except for the veterinarian owner, the other veterinarians come and go. The veterinarian techs and front desk staff have been there for ages. What is interesting is the financial manager grew up in the business … She is the daughter of the veterinarian (was in same day care as our son).

          Liked by 2 people

  5. The problem I have with “forgive the debt and fix the problem” is that it very closely resembles the eighties and illegal immigration: forgive and fix means forgive and keep the problem going, because “fix” never happens.

    Fix. And then forgive. Preferably by putting the colleges on the hook for at least half of the forgiveness. As the above commenters have noted, the current system practically guarantees bad, top-heavy educational environments; and forgiveness fixes the first-order problem while creating a whole bunch of second-order problems. We really do need to include the people who did in fact pay off their loans in any solution, especially is the end solution is literally just “forgive” and not “forgive, but make the schools pay for it.”

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  6. never forgive ANY debt entirely … they must pay something o rthey won’t have learned a thing … then make it very difficult to get a student loan for anything other than a STEM degree … solves one side of the problem (loans for useless degrees) … then investigate the hell out of colleges and universities and force them to justify their tuition …

    The lack of marriage and babies has nothing to do with student loans … thats the end game of 70’s/80’s/90’s feminism, “modern” women and beat down men .. can’t fix that with more money in your pocket …

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    1. The lack of marriage and babies has nothing to do with student loans 

      You think so? There’s an entire movement that advises men to avoid women who come into marriage with student loan debt, on the grounds that the women are only marrying because they think that their new husband will pay off their debt for them and they’ll divorce him as soon as the debt is gone.

      Liked by 2 people

      3. I read fifteen years ago that the amount of student debt a person had was a very significant factor in dating eligibility. Lots of the guys were saying if a girl had a big student debt load, it didn’t matter how good-looking she was, she wasn’t an eligible prospect. Women, of course, made THAT decision long before.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. The lack of marriage and babies has nothing to do with student loans … thats the end game of 70’s/80’s/90’s feminism, “modern” women and beat down men .. can’t fix that with more money in your pocket …

      Bull.

      For the responsible ones, there’s debt.

      For the irresponsible, they’re sure that all the other sex are just like the idiots they hooked up with in college.

      And then you get the folks a few years older who want to both demand that women have a degree to show they’re intelligent, and insist that anyone who reproduces is stupid.

      (This gets really funny when you notice that a lot of the guys in “geeky” jobs that managed to get in without debt are the same ones actually having kids, and lots of them.)

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      1. College debt does not cause poor choices.

        Poor choices cause debt.

        I didn’t know any better is not the fault of someone else.

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        1. I’m not sure it’s realistic to expect the average, well-meaning 18-year-old to ignore the advice and expectations of every adult in his life.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. The fact that schools want the entire semester’s tuition up-front is what causes school debt.

          If a student could pay monthly, more of them would be able to work to afford it without taking a loan.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Good idea. But NO. 20k a semester for a state school is way to high to pay even by month, unless you ALREADY HAVE THE JOB.
            Now as I said, this is in the process of being solved by taking away “disparate impact.” It means they can test people, and never mind the degree. But up till now, they couldn’t. SO everything — everything — required a degree.
            My guess for why Trump hasn’t killed student loans from government on day one is optics. People would talk about his hating education.
            So, instead, he’s going about it behind the scenes.
            And until you remove “new student loans” you can’t forgive existing ones. And here we are.

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      2. My sons have married friends who are living three couples to a bedroom house because it’s that or be homeless. Even those working in their field.
        Kindly note my kids friends all have “technical, highly useful on paper” degrees.

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    3. I married my husband at 18. After overhearing my mom tell my dad that “maybe after she has a kid or two she’ll realize college is more important,” I swore that I would graduate and get a good job before having kids to show her I wasn’t going to “waste my life” as a mother.

      Twelve years later I was a licensed attorney working at a shoe store in the mall and one of my best friends was suggesting that I should get a paper divorce so I could qualify for Medicaid, because that was the only way I could afford to deliver a baby.

      The good news/ bad news on that front was that my infertility made it impossible to conceive until I had a job that did pay enough to offer me health insurance. Which is how in the span of three months, I had my 20th wedding anniversary, my 39th birthday, and the birth of my first child.

      You want people like me to raise the taxpayers for your Social Security and Medicare? Then we need help affording those new Ponzi Scheme victims.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. I thought we are raising the taxpayers for GenX SS and Medicare. Boomers are in their 70s. They might pass before the generation not born affects them.

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        1. “might pass before the generation not born affects them.“

          –

          Speak for yourself. Mom is still here at age 90. SIL’s mom is still here at age 95. I plan on another 30+ years. But then I’m not (quite) 70, yet.

          Liked by 1 person

  7. “A lot of the more accessible (money wise) colleges are playing games that force people to take longer to graduate, or simply make it impossible to graduate in any reasonable time.”

    We suspect this was going on at the community junior college, too. After two hitches in the Marines, my daughter had a go at college on the GI Bill, with two years at a community college before transferring to a state school for upper division. She loved classes, loved participating in higher ed … but they kept adding onto the list of requirements for the associates degree … necessitating more semesters trying to complete the degree. We seriously suspected that it was all just an elaborate scheme to keep those GI Bill funds flowing. She gave up on that plan, seeing that it was unattainable, and she went into real estate, instead.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. And prerequisite classes that aren’t offered every semester, so you can’t get into the class you need until a year later . . . drove my husband and I up the wall putting our two through college. Six years for BS. If you were lucky.

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        1. My brother fell victim to this just recently – he was set to graduate with his master’s in mechanical engineering this semester and was essentially told by his advisor that because he missed some deadline for paperwork or didn’t notify him early enough or something, one of the classes he took DIDN’T COUNT and he has to retake it this summer.

          Stupid. Ridiculous. But he gets a $16,000 pay bump if he finishes that degree, and his married student housing at the college is cheaper than any other place in town, so he’s retaking that class.

          He was lucky – he’ll be graduating poor, but without debt, thanks to a combination of staying at home for the first few years, scholarships, and part-time welding work.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. It’s why I avoided the UC system. Even as a teenager, I could see the silly games they were playing. Went to a private school (yay scholarships!) and got out in four years. Even my husband, of the many majors, took only four and a half years of classes. (There were some breaks in there.)

        Liked by 1 person

        1. The UC system is horrendous. younger kid was accepted to a private school, but didn’t show us because half scholarship was still expensive. In retrospect, he was an idiot, yes. BUT he was SIXTEEN.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. We knew about son’s offer. But they didn’t offer exactly what he thought he wanted. A private school. Presumption they wouldn’t play the games the local state school did. Prerequisite classes he managed to get on time. But the main class? Was always full. Then still couldn’t get in as a graduating 5th year senor fall term … which per the university rules, was suppose to be a guaranty no matter how late your registration was (we call BS, because he could not get the class!) Only offered fall and spring terms.

            Liked by 1 person

    3. I will say, if you do have someone going in, make sure they keep a copy of the course catalog and degree requirements for the year they went in.

      … assuming you can find any since everything is digital now.

      But last I knew, colleges were obligated to honor the degree requirements under which you entered a program.

      And if you remind them of this, they will usually comply, even to the extent of substituting courses for ones they’ve decided to no longer offer.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. All 3 of my degrees too. Of coarse second two rounds what they were changing were undergraduate requirements. Since those were done, I didn’t have to deal with them. I still have to laugh about the Computer Science Bachelors.

          One of the requirements was (for rounding don’t ya know) a minor. I didn’t “declare” a minor, figured the Forest Mgmt Bachelors dealt with that. It did just had to spell it out. Then got a note from the committee stating university didn’t offer forestry. My response was “No kidding. That is the ‘other state’ university. I already have the degree.” Requirement was waved.

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  8. Rip the damn band aid off and get it over with! Forgive all the loans and get out of the loan business forever. If the Republicans had any brains they would do this tomorrow. Millions of people will be happy (and might consider voting R next election). Colleges will have to cut their costs to complete making millions more happy. Some busybodies will be pissed at the very idea that someone else might be getting a better deal than they did – but they can shove their perfect world. If Trump loses the mid terms the party is over – the $1.7 trillion outstanding loans is trivial compared to the debt a D congress will cause.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. Not enough coffee to comment on This Subject. 🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵

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  10. Ultimately it is the non-dischargability that makes them so destructive. As I recall, debtors prisons are specifically barred in the US, yet we’ve gone an enacted a new one?

    Sounds like the government at work, it does.

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    1. I strongly favor making them exactly on par with credit cards, and then apply the payday loan rules to the terms.

      Because I’ve heard a lot of folks describing what they were put through on their loans and that’d get QuikCa$h on the corner investigated and charged.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. That I could see working.

        And I think making them dischargable in bankruptcy rather than straight up forgiveness would sort a lot of the resentment as well, because there would be some cost to simply walking away from them. But that cost would also be determined by the wider market, rather than the government.

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      2. That said, to have them under the payday loan rules would absolutely necessitate requiring the government to sell all of them off.

        Because the government can always exempt itself from its own rules.

        You know, I wonder if that would be the way to handle it? Require the government to sell off all of the student loan holding with the stipulation that the new loans will be dischargable in bankruptcy, though maybe with ‘First in Line’ privileges?

        That way, prospective purchasers would have the opportunity to gauge the borrowers for viability and price the loans accordingly.

        And make the gov’t sale mandatory; if no buyer of any value is found, the loan is written off completely. That way, even completely uncollectable should sell, even if only for pennies. And then there’s incentive for negotiation between borrower and lender.

        I wonder if that could work?

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      3. If you retroactively apply credit card rules and thus higher risk to the lender, do you retroactively apply the credit card high risk 20-25% interest to the borrower?

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        1. Dude, I just saw the sheer ignorant horse pucky you stated about whose loans would be forgiven.

          You need a ladder and a month’s study to get up to merely pig ignorant; there can be no benefit in responding to someone so willfuly ignorant and willing to publicly lie in support of that ignorance.

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          1. your high horse act is tiresome and unearned.

            so go fuck yourself if you want to play potty mouth games.

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            1. Oh, yes, that’s something original, projection on all vectors; you make a grand display of needing a pool noodle to keep your head above the puddle of your deep knowledge as you so graciously press it on to all and sundry, and gosh, you can type the F word! I am so impressed and persuaded.

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    2. Harry,

      You REALLY think we don’t have debtor’s prisons? Check your state and see how many people are incarcerated for not paying child support after the unpaid sum reaches $10k. My bet is you’ll find lots of them. Oh yes, we most assuredly DO have debtor’s prisons.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. In Missouri, two missed payments are a misdemeanor; two missed payments plus a total arrearage more than a year’s worth of payments is a felony.

        I’m defending a couple gentlemen now who have large arrearages in part because when they were in prison on other charges, DFS expected them to keep making their normal monthly payment.

        Liked by 1 person

  11. Ultimately it is the non-dischargability that makes them so destructive. As I recall, debtors prisons are specifically barred in the US, yet we’ve gone an enacted a new one?

    Sounds like the government at work, it does.

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    1. So are “ex post facto” laws; by changing the terms of the existing student loans at the time, have we made one of those, too?

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      1. Did we make diachargable loans non-dischargable, or are we talking about the lender making them dischargable?

        If it is found that the non-discharagability is against our baseline laws, I believe that would invalidate the original contract, rather than be an ‘ex post facto’ law.

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        1. My understanding is that when Obama federalized student loans, all the loans were transferred to a government agency, and then Congress made them all non-dischargeable.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. It’s the “making existing loans non-dischargeable” that’s sketchy; any new loans, no problem, because that’s something th borrower should have been aware of.

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          2. I had a student loan at 4% interest when Obamacare took it over. They jacked up the interest to 6.7%, made undischargable, and then refused to count the payments I had already made toward my public service forgiveness. I had already paid back more than I had borrowed by that time, plus some of the interest.

            I was disgruntled, to say the least. Especially since the cost our health insurance skyrocketed on top for that.

            A private industry, bank, etc would be behind bars.

            Liked by 2 people

              1. Trump has tightened the rules on what counts as public service, yes. As a public defender, I’m still eligible. My sister, a speech pathologist in low income schools, is still eligible.

                Employees of NGOs that were helping illegal aliens break laws, not so much.

                My concern with public service loan forgiveness is whether the program will still exist in eight years when I can get the forgiveness. That’s about when Social Security will have exhausted all of the IOUs and will have to draw from the general revenue.

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  12. No, just no.

    Why? I scrimped like crazy to get my daughter through college (stem) without her having to take out loans – drive a 20 year old car that I fix myself, no vacations, no meals out. My literal neighbor’s daughter took out boat loads of loans for her public policy degree, while the parents took several European vacations and drive nice new cars. Now she gets those loans forgiven? And I get the shaft again? Where’s my vacation and new car!

    Doing this sends yet another message to anyone who tries to plan for the future and/or do this right thing – that you are a fool, a sap, an idiot – because once again the grasshoppers win.

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    1. got cut off…

      Did many of the kids overpay for useless degrees? Sure did, but take it up with the colleges that enticed them – the usual way you deal with bad contracts. Sue for damages and get your money back that way.

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      1. Biggest category of loans that would be forgiven: Ivy league law school lawyers. Last I checked, they make way more than I make.

        No.

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        1. I’m not an I’ve League lawyer, though my school was attended by both a president and a Supreme Court justice. My loan balance has doubled since graduating thanks to the interest … and I make $68K.

          The Ivy League lawyers are the ones who get jobs that can actually pay off their loans.

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          1. AGAIN this bullshit “Doctors and lawyers” is bullshit. The wealthy ones don’t have loans. Their parents were ALSO doctors and lawyers.
            It’s the scrappers and middle class kids who are reaching that you’re hitting HARD.

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          2. Which is BS. No way your loan amount should be increasing.

            Loan payments should be paying down the balance with every payment, not growing. Just like vehicles and homes. Anything else is predatory lending.

            Liked by 1 person

      1. Yep. If you haven’t looked in the last 20 years, you have NO idea what you’re talking about.
        30 years ago, medical students schlepped food at Pete’s Kitchen in Denver in their copious spare time, and kept the costs low.
        Now? It’s such a small income it doesn’t make a dent on the loans, and also THEY FORBID SIDE JOBS (Unless as a phlebotomist.) Why? I don’t know.

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    3. To be fair, one could say the same thing about any item you scrimp and save to buy, which then experiences a major price drop .

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      1. Right. That argument is an argument of REVENGE. Also, if you could scrimp and pay for your degree, you didn’t get it in the last 20 years. You just didn’t. You can’t scrimp to get it.

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  13. 2- Most of them signed under duress.

    What duress? Well, you might not know this if you don’t have kids or have never actually had to get a pinch job without quite the right credentials, or don’t have friends who don’t have degrees, but by the 2010s it was almost impossible to get a job even in retail, even as a barista at Starbucks without at least an associate’s degree. And if you expected to go beyond entry level, you needed at least a BA.* (The * are because this is going to have footnotes.)

    Holy CRUD yes– and nobody in my family tries this stuff around me, anymore, because I remember what utter crud they poured on my 17 year old head because I “wasted” my “potential” by going Navy, and dang straight I bring it up.

    Military is for losers, said the folks who either signed up or married someone who did. Nobody with real intelligence should ever go military, they must go to college.

    What for? Doesn’t matter! Any degree, you just need a degree! You’re smart, you’ll figure out something!

    MUST! HAVE! DEGREE!

    Don’t get me started on the school guidance.

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    1. I value my diploma from the Infantry School – Fort Benning. Probably used what I learned there more than anything in my degrees.

      Go skilled trade and make 50-125k early. Or do scutwork through college at minimum wage and maybe borrow the value of a house.

      Thats a choice.

      So is “I dont want to enlist”

      So is “I dont want to work a non-office job”

      etc.

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      1. My oldest would have enlisted. The military won’t take him. Asthma.

        Gee, surely he could fly drones or something without inhaling particulates! Nope. No asthma allowed.

        (TBF, they’d have to give him a waiver to skip the CS chamber, because that would kill him.)

        Second, interested in biomechanical prosthetics and genetic engineering. Well, they’d take him, right?

        Bifocals. Effectively blind without them. Possibility of getting a waiver post-degrees. Can’t blame them for not wanting to take a risk on him pre-degrees.

        So no, enlisting is not an option for a lot of kids. Two-thirds of those old enough in my family so far, the US military is uninterested in.

        Third kid is on track to throw rockets into space, preferably at small moving targets. Enlisting active duty would probably hurt him, reserves might be ok. Odds are he’ll end up a defense contractor. I’ve suggested he look at ROTC on a reserves contract.

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        1. So, oldest kid actually considered, but he considered under “I enlist AFTER getting into medschool. You cover cost, I serve for x time.”
          Problem? They moved so slow there was no point. Also, he has asthma, eczema and other interesting auto-immune issues. Also vision issues.
          Younger kid? Asthma, bifocals AND an interesting heart malformation.
          People, there was no chance, ever. (Being insane, he really wanted the Marines. BIG issue explaining to him this was impossible.)

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Same. I pestered the army for years, I wanted to go jump out of perfectly good planes. Congenital heart defects, bad vision, pacemaker, all put an end to that.

            And despite that being two decades behind, I’m still bitter and feel less of a man.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Son has no obvious medical problems. Well he has some: Allergic to bug bites is one. Eyes, left eye is physically limited on how far it can rotate up due to the hardball to that eye at age 12 (cracked the floor of the orbital bone. Did not blow it out. But delay releasing the eye caused minute scaring of the lower part of the eye.) Turns out he has some form of color blindness and thus can’t pilot (yes could have done something else, but guess what he wanted).

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          2. I worked my way through. Shared crapoy houses with 2-4 like minded folks. Lived cheap. Rode a bike most places. Took half-time class and full time work.

            Hard, yes. Impossible, no

            I owe no one a free degree. If one gets the degree loan paid, what about the rest of us who paid?

            no.

            I woukd consider updating bankruptcy to include it, provided the degree gets re-poed like cars and other assets.

            otherwise a crapload of folks are going to “borrow” money for college, then like card scoffkaws, bail out and say “can’t report my vacation/whatevers”

            get the government out of it. Prices revert to more realistic. But no mass amnesty/transfer of debt.

            No thank you.

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            1. We too did what you said. We paid off our student loans. We scrapped and saved and got son through college with no loans. By “we”, son had to scrap and save too. So yes, I understand the sentiment.

              BUT. Having loans where the terms are changed. Having loans that it is impossible to discharge is wrong too. That is where I draw the line. This is full on usury.

              Student loans used to be able to be discharged in bankruptcy. Loan terms used to be reasonable and setup to be able to pay them off. The latter appears to have been changed about the time student loans couldn’t be discharged in bankruptcy. Who’d have thought?

              Liked by 1 person

              1. FWIW. Hubby wanted son to have a small amount of student loan, to have post graduation lesson. Me? Fine in concept. But told hubby he had to find a student loan that was acceptable. He could not find one. Not a single acceptable student loan. Son did not get a student loan.

                Liked by 1 person

              2. I scraped and saved and worked my way through. We paid off Dan’s student loans.
                What it took to pay a year of my younger kid’s schooling was 40k (Including lab fees and books,e tc.)
                I KNOW because my entire income went to it for a couple three years.
                Before that they paid half of each kid’s tuition, books, etc. While they lived at home.
                I’m not including auto and health insurance etc.
                Now I realize our state university was expensive and the kids were taking science, so there’s lab fees. BUT seriously. 40k. You tell me which kids without a degree, at a time it takes a degree to get a barista job can make that. And still go to college in a serious degree.
                Yes, 11-D if it were still OUR TIME I’d be against forgiveness too.
                This is why anyone who hasn’t been through last 15 years and doesn’t have a kid who has? You don’t know. you just don’t know.

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                1. I looked up electrical engineer and actuary today on BLS occupational outlook handbook.

                  Currently, about 110k ‘average’. Now, that is maybe part way into career.

                  15 years or so ago, a local university was saying that starting undergraduate for electrical was something like 50-60k.

                  So not an apples to apples, but also inflation.

                  My eyes were trained a ways back. So 110 k looks good to me.

                  That is some sort of spatial average, I am living in a low ish cost of living place. So, if I qualified for those positions, they are not available here, and not at those wages.

                  The higher paying specialties of electrical include research, aviation, and semiconductors. Some of those jobs are relatively safe from H1Bing, if one has specialized skills in the defense contracting world.

                  I suspect that the growth forecast the BLS has for operations research, data science, and IIRC financial analysis may be sketchy.

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                    1. Yep. 65k starting in engineering is in the high cost of living area. Pay solo rent on a 1 bed, and pay a loan, and start a family? Real funny joke. Switch jobs a couple times for the raises, move to a lower col area, now you’re talking buy a house and start a family. And can talk about house loans and car loans. Have you noticed that family cars have also been driven (don’t carp me please) up in cost?

                      Liked by 1 person

                2. “because my entire income went to it for a couple three years“

                  –

                  Yes. Despite having the 529 account. Son’s savings (started as “college” account). His scholarship, while he kept it. Plus, what was our outside taxable investment account. My income went into savings or the taxable investment account (depending on exactly when needed). When he was done there was no loan. There was also no 529 account, no savings accounts, either his, ours, or the taxable investment account.

                  Another account that I was keeping for JIC was our home equity loan. Hubby wanted to refinance the house but I told him “No, the home equity is our emergency college funds.” Then the ’08 housing crisis hit. Due to that we got credit jacked on the home equity line. Where we had an open credit line for say $50k, the credit jack dropped us to just above the actual balance, about 1/3. F that. Went to hubby and told him refinance was a go. Dropped interest rate to 3.32% and payment by $600/month. Could have taken cash out of the house for emergency college backup money but ran the numbers. It was emergency money, so didn’t.

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              3. It’s not the non-dischargeability, or the interest, or any other aspect of the terms of repayment that are destructive. The lenders, namely the taxpayers, are the only ones who aren’t doing anything wrong here, and often the only ones actually paying the piper.

                It’s the principal that’s the problem, and the product it buys.

                Student loans are a sweetheart deal, as far as loans go. Unsecured loans to people with no credit history and little income, at interest rates comparable to those offered to 800+ credit score borrowers for fully collateralized mortgages.

                If you can never get out from under a loan at 6-8%, it’s because the loan was too large, or the income you were promised never materialized, or both. It isn’t because sub 10% loans to high-risk borrowers are abusive or usurious.

                Colleges are the main beneficiaries of student loans, and the driving force behind rising principals. They’re the ones recruiting students without the aptitude to succeed, and watering down the value of their degree. They’re also the only ones currently getting cash on the barrelhead and walking away like their hands are clean.

                Student loan relief needs to come out of *their* hides.

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                1. THEY ARE NOT UNSECURED LOANS. Dear Lord. It goes on and on.
                  They can garnish wages and SOCIAL SECURITY. The interest is not — So, if you have no income, and supposedly can’t pay it keeps growing. They’ll get it eventually.

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          3. Explored the “go work somewhere unpleasant?” option? Sis was offered a very major payoff of her nurse+ degree debt pile if she would work four years in nowhere/end-of-road Akaska. (And a few others much worse) It was a pretty reasonable deal. I would have dove on it to solve my disastrous choices.

            she chose to stay where she was, and died with that millstone.

            (of course I helped. Sheesh)

            I think a bankruptcy option is needed. But unless there is real pain, like losing the degree, it just becomes free ride time for the system gamers that already are well known.

            Soldiers have a nasty habit of buying 10 year old muscle cars on six year 25-33% interest. Did you know that UCMJ allows forced reenlistment to cover debts? Even after they repo the rusty hulk?

            Yeah. Idiocy. But at least a degree is useful. The deadlined Cameron won’t get you into OCS. The basket-weaving-studies degree will.

            Federal Service in Crappyville, Boonies USA, is probably how we best liquidate the debt pile, and asthma, arthritis, etc doesn’t preclude such. It also parallels the “free ride” i supposedly got for the Army College Fund.

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            2. That sounds like a “public service” job. You know… one of the ones that would have made the person who stuck with it eligible for loan forgiveness after 10 years.

              … oh wait…

              Liked by 1 person

  14. Until government granted, subidised and/or guaranteed loans are legislatively stopped loan relief fixes nothing.

    Once that is accomplished though, rewriting the existing loans to remove interest (including crediting interest already paid against principal) & fees sounds like a fair solution acceptable to the majority.

    And Griggs v Duke Power needs to be overturned. That may need to be done legislatively as well since Title VII, in its effort to prevent testing designed to look neutral but still discriminate has just enough language about unequal testing results to keep SCOTUS from abandoning that precedent. Another case of bad laws leading to bad court decisions.

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  15. I’m for a tiered system of reduction/forgiveness. Got a useless one? (problem is who determines usefulness) You’re paying back more percentage than the Med student or engineering. Also, what you pay is also determined by the school, and its ratio of Student – teacher/prof – administrators. If the school has a Fauxcahontus class where “prof Lizzy” gets 6 figures for a class she never teaches, or the school has a 10-1 administrator to student ratio, the school needs to cough back some of that cash. Also, forgive costs of useless classes forced on students. Lib Arts classes for engineers or Med students for no useful reason other than “You HAVE to take this”

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    1. The “useless” is a massive issue.

      My first department head had a degree in submersed textile manufacture– which is actually quite useful, for some situations, not so much for supervising an aircraft maintenance division, but A Degree Is Required, and this would be useful when he got out.

      Military folks and those who are familiar with them are probably perking their ears, now.

      The guy very earnestly told me he’d tried it because a chief suggested he get a degree in … a fancy way to say “underwater basket weaving.”

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      1. Who decides “useless” or “useful?” Is a nursing degree for a computer programmer useful or useless? (True example from my past…lady I worked with was a nurse, burned out, went into technical writing due to her English minor, and ended up slinging COBOL for a living.) People switch careers sometimes. My wife has a degree in German but now she’s a SAH professional freelance editor, author, and makes and sells jewelry at Ren Faires.

        We all have our ideas about useless degrees and they’re probably mostly in sync, but still. Even a useless “* studies” degree might actually be useful for, say, a historian in certain fields. I get twitchy when we start handing off the determination of “useful” vs. “useless” to the government. See “death panels.”

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        2. I had a degree in English and German. I worked, in aggregate 2 years in my degree in the last 40.
          Look, yeah degrees in puppetry are probably not essential and people could learn that outside a school. BUT still, who decides?

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          1. I have an aggregate of 4 years (over 7 years) in my first degree, forestry. Ten years if you stretch it to include the 6 programming for the company whose focus was forestry. Next 30+ years, not so much.

            Now did I use the field skills learned? Yes. Because we were involved in scouting. Thus the map and compass, plant knowledge, and other outdoor skills weren’t exactly worthless.

            A lot of people would say these days a forest management, or forest engineering (logging/roads) degrees are “worthless” given forests aren’t being managed. These days Forest Recreation & Planning would be the degree that was worth something. Back when we were in school (get off our lawn, we’re old, get over it) the Forest Recreation degree track were laughed about.

            Liked by 1 person

        3. My husband is working logistics for the national end of an international company… with a history degree. Has been doing so for a career-length period of time, simply astonishing for my generation.

          He got the original retail job that led to this because he’d worked in a warehouse during college, and had experience with shipping and receiving.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. Yeah, “Must have a degree” for Shipping manager. 15 years dealing with HazMat, high school grad but that’s all folks? Sorry, we are giving it to some schlep with a BA in advertising. (who later shipped me a pallet with one drum of Phosphoric Acid, one of Phosphonic acid, and two drums of Caustic Potash. my skin crawls just thinking about that)
        Or:
        Masters in Puppetry (what one head of Occupy Wall Street who was whinging about not finding a job and his loan needing to be dropped. He needs to be dropped on his head.)
        I recall a SloMo guys video with a Pro Wrestler who “communicated” with grunts and growls as a lizard man character, his (Masters?) degree was in like 13th century Spanish or French Romance Poetry Usefull? Maybe in some circumstances. Not as a pro wrestler. Funny though when he drops it as an aside.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. But DEGEREE!!!!

          …. my husband has barely managed to fight off being forced to functionally quit and get a degree, mostly because of hammering the credits he’s got as a side-effect of having been in the military, and then hammering on 20+ years experience in related fields. (Related being very broad.)

          Liked by 2 people

          1. Younger son doesn’t have a degree and will at some point need one to advance in his job. Despite the fact he doing the job with no degree. I’m hoping the disparate impact bullshit going away allows people to just TEST.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. So much this. I have two brothers. One does not have a degree (not even an AA because of shifting goalpost BS as noted by other commenters.) He has a decades-long career in IT, but was never able to get hired at a different company because he didn’t have a degree—which is worthless compared to the PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE he’s developed over the years.

              Utterly ridiculous. (Mind you, I think he TAUGHT at his local CC for a while as a side thing, which just underscores how stupid the whole setup is.)

              Liked by 1 person

              1. I hadn’t planned on getting my second bachelors. I went back to the local community college to go into accounting (because it would be easy). That and I did not want to commute 60 miles to downtown Portland (I thought the 40 miles between north Eugene to Oregon State on hwy 99 was a PIA. I-5 to Portland State? Oh, heck no.) Got talked into programming. Then had an employer who wanted me to have that bachelors, company would pay for it. By then in Eugene, a 15 minute walk from work to campus. Company did pay for one class a term for 8 quarters, including summers (until company moved to Portland). Then I finished up the last 6 quarters (two classes/full time), working 1/2 time at another company.

                After getting done I might have snarled at the concept of taking continuing education classes at any college. Week or two seminars I could do. Classes? No. Not happening.

                Must admit actually having my computer science bachelors helped with getting job interviews when looking for work. Not necessarily getting the job even with experience and excellent job reviews and references.

                Liked by 2 people

            2. I say we don’t just get rid of current Disparate Impact jurisprudence, we turn it on its head.

              Make direct tests of workplace tasks presumptively lawful and make degree requirements presumptively unlawful unless they can show that the degree is predictive of job performance.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Yes to the first part. Hard NO! to the second. Government mandates on business decisions are destructive, no matter how good an idea you think they are.

                “If everybody just…” getting turned into “If we just make everybody…” is the cause of oh, so many of the problems we’ve got now.

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                1. No, but they can get rid of them in the “government contractors.”
                  Though I think it’s not needed. if tests are allowed, the potemkin colleges will fall.

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    2. If we allow bankruptcy to apply, the person is -broke-. Liquidated. all assets, etc go to the creditors and you start over at zero. And note they still have the degree that supposedly earns so much money.

      Then again, credit card bankrupts still had the vacations and use of toys.

      Medical debt isnt anyone’s fault, so void that too?

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      3. took me 7? 8? years to pay off my medical debt,
        Gastroenteritis while not covered by insurance.
        The Doc and E.R. bill were soon after the event (in small installments), but the MRI I paid a bit off then when in consolidation, that wasn’t paid until last, and iirc not reduced at all, so I wasn’t taxed on it like the loan and credit cards.
        I’m more willing now on Student loans because the universities used it to make bank on nonsense, and pad out the jobs. I know people who were told “Just never pay it back.” when applying for their loans (80’s and 90’s timeframe) and were pushed to take more classes than needed for what they went for.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. In the two thousands TONS of them took more classes than needed. Because if you dropped below half time, you had to start paying. And sometimes you were waiting for the one class only offered every three years.
          It’s a SCAM.
          And medical loans are bankruptable.

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        2. Son’s Gastroenteritis tests were covered by insurance AFTER he paid his deductible and copay. His deductible was so high that he paid the entire amount that the insurance didn’t get discounted. Twice. Because of different calendar years. Insurance really helped there (NOT!).

          Co-worker ran into similar problem with medical problems for him and his family because the insurance through work was lousy. And co-worker was paying not an insignificant amount monthly for his family to have coverage. Deductible and out of pocket per year per individual (not family) was $15k.

          Hubby’s, out of pocket, *work insurance, in comparison, was never been higher that $2k per individual and $5k for the entire family (family plan). Thus my coverage (because my company paid employee’s insurance, just not family members) was always file with my company insurance, pays nothing, the file with hubby’s as secondary, which paid. Son was on the family plan until he turned 27. By the time his medical problems emerged, he was on his work plan.

          (*) Even our individual medicare advantage plans are better out of pocket max than my old work, or son’s current, work insurance. We pay nothing per month to have it.

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          1. The coverage I had after that was good, until ACA passed. Before that I had an advantage that the owner said a High Deductable was so “cheap” for him (the policy cost total what a full coverage plan cost just him, not including employee deductions), he offered them free, so the only cost was whatever you wanted to have withheld. I went for legal limit. Once ACA passed, he only passed on the additional cost to us with a HD policy (and as we acquired another company the bigger pool didn’t bump us up much, and the acquired company people actually got cheaper policies even on Full coverage (the policy went off local of the majority of workers and DFW had lower rates than Vidor TX).
            Now in big international corporation world, it is charged to me, (my policy costs me just under $1000/year) but the HSA is a matching amount from the company and I’ve maxed out that, and I think this year added a bit over the match, but not Gov’t allowed max (iirc it is a percentage. about $2500/year). My only big bill since the GE episode is a kidney stone in 2017. Tossed them the HSA Debit card and had to online pay a few small bills and one they didn’t cover I killed an old HSA from before the buyout, all by web transactions on the insurance company’s site (forget who it was, we changed since to BC/BS of Illinois and I’ve not needed it) or the Hospitals corporate site for the HSA payment not billed at walk-in.

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            1. I’ve never had good employer insurance options except when worked same job as hubby’s, even at company large international corporation. Always ultimately been covered by the insurance through hubby’s work (except when I had my own, same insurance). Hubby’s insurance coverage, as mentioned was “Family” coverage whether you were single, or married and both worked the same job for the company. What was frustrating about the latter, is we weren’t double covered “because it doesn’t work that way”. But on the others:

              • International company had “self insured”. To access it was (early ’90s), $750/month employee coverage, $1000/month family coverage. I declined to pay.
              • Second company. Employer paid for employee, had an option for employee to add family coverage. But if employee declined the insurance, then you got paid the premium they would have paid. Guess which one I chose? The out of pocket had hubby’s insurance paying anyway. I took the (separate) dental insurance one year – because they paid not an insignificant amount toward orthodontics, but only once (kid had 3 sessions).
              • Final company. Employer paid employee’s insurance. No option to opt out. Catastrophic insurance at best with high out of pocket deductible. Employee could add family members to get individual insurance, no family option (if you have a spouse and six kids, which one employee did, that is 7 policies). Employer did pay 1/2 of the insurance cost. Still not inexpensive for the employee. (Which made some interesting dynamics, pay wise. My gross salary was significantly lower because of time at the company differences. My net pay was significantly higher than employees who’d been there 6 to 8 years longer, despite maxing the Simple IRA contributions, because I had $0 going to monthly insurance policies.)

              You ask why hubby’s insurance was so much better at a relatively small company? One of the things the union was good for …

              Liked by 1 person

            2. ACA has been a disaster for us. I should be on a daily asthma meds, but our new, improved (every six months, I swear) insurance thinks I don’t need it. TBF to them, it’s 1k a month. To be unfair, this is why I live ill. (which probably costs them more in the long run.) I have continuous, baseline asthma inflamation.

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  16. Let’s do a little math.

    My kids go to the local state university and live at home (thanks to grandparents and great-grandparents, they have 529s). I have some really up to the minute data.

    Local fast food type wages are hovering about $10/hr. College is, as in-state students at what is one of the CHEAPEST state universities in the country, $4,600/semester. If you were able to work 40 hours a week, year around, with no breaks, and no taxes, you’d be left with $11,600 after paying college.

    The cheapest apartment complex in town is $495/month, students only, and they will assign you your room and podmates. You cannot get an extra roommate and double up. But it covers utilities including high speed internet.

    We are now at $5,660 for paying for your health insurance, car insurance, groceries, and incedental expenses. (Yes, you have to have a car: you have a job-three actually, to get to forty hours, no car no job.)

    Maybe you can pull it off. But I did leave out taxes. Maybe your parents will cover insurance for you.

    Maybe you can find jobs that will give you fixed schedules that allow you to attend classes and have other jobs. Probably janitorial, which pays less than fast food. But hey, you don’t need to eat that much, right?

    Oh yes, you probably won’t be able to take sixteen plus credits a semester and pass them working full time. So you’ll need at least one extra year to graduate. If the classes are offered that year. You might need two. Of course, if you get sick and don’t get at least a C in just one of your prerequisite classes the first time you take it, you’ll add another year, minimum, on, because you have strings of eight classes you have to take in that order, offered every other semester . . .

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    1. My preference is to first stop the government issuing loans, then make the loans dischargable like any other unsecured debt in bankruptcy. Treat them like credit cards.

      Those of you who want to punish kids for not knowing any better and making poor choices can rest assured that they got punished by the bankruptcy process, the credit damage, etc. There. They got punished. For being young and ignorant and trusting the adults who told them this was what they HAD to do. (And if you ever trusted an authority or expert, ever, you go do some soul searching.)

      The folks who can, by some luck, pay the loans off, will pay them off, just like those who can pay credit cards pay them off.

      First, stop the bleeding: no more government loans. Then start trying to patch up the wounded.

      Liked by 1 person

  17. Sarah, I know that you absolutely believe what you’re saying. AND, please believe that you might just have some filters here. Allow me to present a different perspective if I might.

    See, first off, you come from a college family, as does your husband, so you have that predisposition, no matter how you have attempted to grow around it, and no matter how much you realize that modern colleges and universities are a scam. You are if I remember right, at least a second gen college grad, and your kids also went to college, that gives you a perspective.

    I’m a first gen college grad, who went to college late in life (after retiring from the military, which had also given me a degree due to my schools in the Navy.) My first cousin is also a first gen college grad (she’s now a clinician at a very large hospital in Ohio.) We are the first generation ever to go to college in our extended family, and we both went after some years in the work force. It is important to note that this does not mean our family was not successful, my Grandfather was the owner of a farm a fishmarket and two car dealerships in Lima Ohio, as well as one of the big wigs at the state level in the Masonic organizations. All without a degree.

    Un like you, My kids did not go to college right away.

    My son went in to the Corps, and was medicaled out in boot, when they discovered he had too severe of a case of scoliosis. He then went into sales, and then became a techwriter for auto repair. We’re planning to help him go through and get his CPA, because that matches his particular version of the spectrum (something everyone in the family is on, by modern standards.)

    My Daughter went into social work, and is now, in her 30s pursuing a degree in that field so that she can further advance. No loans, paying as she goes. My wife tried the college straight out of high school route, (she is also a first gen college grad) and discovered that she was not mature enough for it, after a year and a half or so at Tulane. She also had student loans, which she has paid off.

    Now, you suggest that we basically offer amnesty for all the poor fools that went in to college on massive loans and can’t or won’t pay them back. Well, I first will tip the hat to Capvidieo, who rightly points out that if we pay it back and then fix it, it will never get fixed. The federal government has a 200 plus year history of “let’s slap a Band-Aid on it to stop the bleeding, and then fix the underlying problem” pause “It’s not bleeding, so there’s no problem, moving on–” Unless the problem is current and in our face, it will not get fixed. So kill the loan system and then you can talk to me about loan forgiveness!

    Further, let’s look at some of the positions, and suppositions here.

    “Because there was so much duress all along.” Uh, my daughter, while firm and grounded now, in high school was very much a weather vane. She swung with the wind, and bought into each new thing, each “you gotta do this.” And yet, she didn’t fall into that “duress.” Maybe that duress is in echo chambers only?

    We already discussed “clean the wound and let us heal.” That’s not the way the government works. More like “clean the wound, slap a Band Aide on that big gash on your thigh, oh you’re not bleeding anymore? Well lets go running. Gosh, why are you bleeding again?”

    Fairness and scholarships. You met me, I’m so white I burn under a street lamp. My kids are too. The boy received five scholarships. Five. None of them were huge, a thousand here, five hundred there, I think the biggest was five grand. It was enough to pay for a year at a community college, and they were all annual, so they could have renewed. He decided he would rather go into the military. (NO I did not pressure him, and if I had it sure wouldn’t have been to go into Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children. I’m pretty sure that was him trying to out do his old man, by going into an even tougher gig than submarines.) Now you tell me of “fairness” while asking my kids and I to allow our nation to go even further in debt to eat the loans of people who, from your perspective succumbed to peer pressure or were taken in by shysters?

    What about fairness to US? To the two thirds (if your figures are right, and I’ll postulate that for the sake of this discussion) who DIDN’T fall into that trap. And to our kids for five generations that will still be paying off these poor decisions. Yes, as you say, “it’s imaginary money.” Right up until the notes come due for all the borrowing by the government, and we see inflation that would make an Argentinian shit himself. Our national debt is ridiculous. Waving your hand and saying “it’s all pretend money, so it doesn’t matter if we print more” is how things like the Weimar Republic collapse happens. To me, this looks like just another suggestion for “lets let government do the magic, it will somehow work out. After all, nothing bad has happened yet.” (said the guy as he passed the twentieth story window on his way down.)

    “2- the way interest accumulates on these things and the fact they are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy AGAIN makes them on par with loan shark stuff.” Okay, on this we can agree, and if you want to fix THAT, I will stand with you. That’s some bullshit stuff right there.

    “3- People have a lot more of them than you expect, and they’re some of our more ambitious, hard driving people.” We travel in different circles apparently. Most of the people I know that have student loans, or who’s kids do, don’t meet that description. Most of them are more of the “looking for the easy button” types.

    “Like, for instance, if you want to enter medical school (there you have “doctors and lawyers”) they prefer if someone has a masters or a doctorate. but you usually have to have at LEAST 2 BS degrees. With perfect grades.” Uh see the afore mentioned first cuz, who, as a single mom, put herself through nursing school at Ohio State, then after a few years as a nurse, put herself through her doctorate to become a clinician in internal medicine, while raising three kids and helping her husband take care of life. Sheri is damn smart, but perfect grades, well not so much, (though I believe she graduated with honors at the clinician level)

    “We’re pulling these people straight out of the gene pool. Unless of course, they come from wealth.****

    Sheri- Mom copy editor at small town newspaper. Dad- Truck driver. Three kids.

    Me- Mom secretary, dad diesel mechanic, two kids, retired three times, just bought a farm in east Tennessee. will pay it off when I sell my house in WA.

    Daughter Amanda- getting her degree in social services, Mom- retired from the shipyard as an engineer, worked up to that through the ranks from rigger. Dad retired submarine sailor, retired cop, retired Director of Training for Fiber Optics installation and repair for the Navy, worked his way up to that from Electrician, author, and soon to be farmer. Three kids. Ain’t no “wealth” here, except that gained by hard work and perseverance. Pull the other one, it’s got bells.

    “It won’t be noticed. It’s already been inflated away. And it opens the door to productivity and adulthood.” Show me the numbers. How much are we talking about adding to the federal debt here? Is it the cost of the new Aircraft Carrier we can’t afford, while we all know we’re staring down the barrel of a war with China? Two Aircraft Carriers? More? I don’t believe that it’s all been inflated away unless you can show me the numbers, and most of the people I know with the crushing debt (and yes there are lots of them) are also working in, well shall we say, less than their degree? GS-3 in DEI for a government agency, barista, working in an NGO for a pittance because “money is not important, the spotted owl is what is important.” etc… Many of them (about 30 that I know of in my small circle) choose to work based on ideology and can’t seem to be concerned with things like making enough money to afford a kid, because “ugh, ‘breeders,’ who in their right mind would want to have a kid?”

    Nope, sorry, no sale.

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    1. Now you tell me of “fairness” while asking my kids and I to allow our nation to go even further in debt to eat the loans of people who, from your perspective succumbed to peer pressure or were taken in by shysters?

      What debt? The money doesn’t exist. There is nothing to pay back; the “loans” are a revenue line in the government budget.

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      1. The colleges and universities got the money and spent it. It’s now showing as a debt line on the US budget, part of our “accounts pending.” Writing it off, makes that deficit loss permanent. basic bookkeeping.

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        1. part of our “accounts pending.”

          Which is precisely the issue: the government has farmed themselves a crop of debt slaves who will pay wildly high taxes-by-any-other-name for most of their lives, if not their entire lives. We already have people getting close to retirement who have been paying and trying to pay down their loans the entire time, and have more debt now than they started with.

          We haven’t *yet* had demands that the loans need to be passed down to their heirs. But it is inevitable if the system isn’t torched, because the logic you are using cannot avoid going there.

          Writing it off, makes that deficit loss permanent.

          I am unwilling to burn multiple generations, burn millions of lives which will never happen, all so you can maintain the fiction that this money is totally coming back.

          And the claim that this will cause inflation doesn’t work either: if you think loan repayment dollars are being deleted from existence to counter inflation then I have this wonderful real estate opportunity to buy the entire nation of Bridglandia.

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          1. I’m going to point out because it’s germaine. Ian has no college debt. Neither do I. My kids do, but they have plans for paying it back. This might mean I never have grandkids, which makes me salty, but oh well. Given the collection of weird genes, it’s possible it wouldn’t happen anyway.
            And I’m writing to hopefully pay their debts off.
            THIS IS NOT PERSONAL. In fact, I paid half of my kids hefty expenses and I don’t expect ANYONE to feel I must be repaid.
            THIS IS BECAUSE GOVERNMENTS SHOULDN’T HAVE DEBT SLAVES. It always ends badly when they do.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. I’ll tell you the same thing I told Sarah. Show your work. I think you slipped a few million decimal points.

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        2. Hon, the debt is PAPER ONLY. The government printed the money to loan.
          The money in your pocket was already inflated away. there is no debt beyond that.
          The payments, from what I heard are supposed to prop u Obamacare…. Because they’re “free money” for the government.

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          1. But hey we can make sure all of our other problems are insoluble and stick it to the kids while we’re at it (always the highest moral good!) so that we can maintain this nice feeling fiction that the inflation will totally be erased someday.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. William, I’m sorry. It’s like you don’t understand fiat currency. I can’t explain THAT to you.
            They created the money out of air. There was nothing to back it, so the currency inflated.
            There is nothing to pay back. You’ve already been robbed. Sorry.

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            1. At this point…… does he also think that all of the money he has paid into Social Security is sitting in a vault somewhere with his name on it?

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              1. You know Ian, I’ve been trying to keep this civil. That is obviously a challenge for you so good afternoon.

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            2. From a certain perspective, ALL money is as you describe. So, what, shall we play Weimar republic?

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      3. AND if you want someone to pay? Go ahead, repossess the spiffy real estate the universities bought and built over the last ten years.
        NOT that it’s needed, but the thought makes me feel warm all over.

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        1. Start strip mining money out of the universities. Then move to the schools, and that means putting the guidance counselors on the hook personally as well.

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          2. Taking the money from the colleges to repay the (exorbitant) loans sounds good to me. Like Willie Sutton said about banks, “That’s where the money is.”. After all, it was the colleges that benefitted from those guaranteed loans, and raised tuition and fees accordingly, and now sit smugly on billions in liquid assets.

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            1. I’m all in on this. Heck, if you guys want to add in whipping the college administrators who pay adjuncts NOTHING and increase the number of required “women’s studies” courses in engineering, give a whip, I’ll help.

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  18. There’s a lot of resentment against “idiots/freeloaders” getting out of debt free while the most decent hardworking Americans scrimped and saved for decades to avoid the trap. I get that — dh and I are paying the way for our two (2!) to graduate debt-free — hopefully both out next year. One of ours is able to get substantial scholarships, the other is screwed by biology, so we see both sides of that problem. When they graduate, dh can retire and he is already very tired. I just want to see them established solidly on their feet, then I can die in peace.

    But Sarah is not wrong. That money is already spent; we collectively already paid for it; there’s no getting it back. I see this situation as morally akin to Herod’s massacre of the Holy Innocents — an entire generation is being wiped out in the name of the evil preferences and power games of the rulers of our day. My family has the happenstancical position to protect our Innocents and “hide them” from the government program, but for all the others … Something Must Be Done or the moral murders will continue and fester for another generation.

    I propose stripping the universities of their endowments, making them live within their income, and distributing the proceeds to the debt-trapped, starting with medical school loans, then perhaps engineering, then perhaps … I’m sure there are smart people of sound morals who could come up with a working priority list. I know, I know, that could never happen … but imagine all the structural improvements that would ensue downstream … ahhhhhhh.

    And on the topic of imported expertise … I sure would prefer to have a born-and-bred American doctor, rather than yahoos like the imported hospitalist who disrespected my family when my parent was approaching the cusp of hospice care. If an American is an asshole, at least I don’t have to resent an entire culture over the incident, Lord forgive me.

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  19. Loans, yeah. Sigh.

    Okay, on the one hand, people are responsible for their own debts.

    On the other hand, coercion does most certainly have an ugly part to play in all this. Credentialism means you can’t have the Nice Job if you don’t jump through the flaming hoop like a good doggie.

    On the gripping hand, this is not a binary. There’s something else to consider.

    The government stacks the deck against debtors. They’ll NEVER be able to pay off those loans due to confiscatory taxes.

    Because it takes the same length of time for a successful physician to pay off his Harvard education (without which he would not be successful, and don’t ever doubt it, you don’t get to play if you don’t kiss the ring) as it does for him to pay off a decent house in the suburbs.

    30 years. And he has to live somewhere while he does that, so it’s 60 years. So he can’t pay it off. Not really, not and have a life. Or a family. Or even a vacation, really.

    The government takes half or more of his income in income tax, property tax, fees, interest, sales tax, licenses, and a million other little nickle-and-dime bites. And if he falls behind on any of it, they repossess his life and his property. They take it.

    Therefore the morality and responsibility part of the argument fall quite flat. They’re jacking you up, ladies and gentlemen. They’re scamming you like a Nigerian prince.

    Fight them. Before you end up like Canada.

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      1. I know a lot of doctors. Some of them are getting near retirement age and STILL HAVE LOANS because interest, inflation, and taxes stealing their substance though their whole careers.

        If you didn’t hit lucky early on with some high income and a few house flips to bring in lump sums of money (marry a man who can do electrical, plumbing and drywall, girls), you’re screwed.

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      1. Phantom, another of your compatriots is moving South ASAP. We have a guest room, and we’ll help to the limits of possible get your green card. I know there were problems before but now you have friends here.
        Consider? I worry for the Canadian Huns. All of them.

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        1. Well, having seen that show while my kids were small, I do not want to put my welfare and future into the hands of La Migra ever again.

          I actually had a green card and turned it down. Because I had been living back in Canada again after 10 years in the USA trying to get the green card. I was home and bought a house here and lived a whole freaking year, which they were well informed of, before they finally processed our uncontested and 100% legit application.

          There will have to be a shootin’ war up here before I throw myself upon the tender mercy of the US government. Even then I might not.

          However, I do strongly appreciate the sentiment. If you’re going to do Las Vegas or one of the other cons this year, I’ll see about coming down for a visit. I’m old now, I can do stuff like that. ~:D

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Know of two Canadians with dual citizenship and passports. One getting her share of the family inheritance, when their parents died, out of Canada made for some interesting stories (family farm sold in Ottawa, I think). Not as interesting as mom’s neighbors, getting inheritance money out of South Africa.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Well, a delegation from Alberta went to DC to discuss possible future US-Albertan relations before the election, and a petition for Alberta to secede reached the necessary number of signatures within 12 hours. So you could always head that direction and see if the border comes to you.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. I’m pretty happy to see Albertans standing up on their hind legs this week and saying they’re not going to take any more crap from Ottawa and #CarkMarny.

              Why should Quebec be the special princess of Confederation?

              What do they have that everyone else in Canada needs? Poutine?

              Liked by 1 person

            2. “always head that direction and see if the border comes to you. ”

              That is the only way that Alberta CA or BC, or any other piece or entirety of Canada (or Greenland for that matter) comes into the US. By the constitution and the law, the US does not force incorporation. The region, Alberta, etc., must want to join as a state. Then, only then does the legislature approve (or disapprove, I guess) the request. Otherwise, current territories would be states. Puerto Rico has turned down statehood repeatably. They also have the option to not be territories and be their own country. Not doing that either.

              Liked by 1 person

      2. Sundance at CTH has an interesting take. The anti-Trump hysteria in Canada will pretty much force them to cancel the USMCA trade agreement, which Trump wanted to get rid of in favor of bilateral (vs tri, with Mexico) negotiations. Not sure Canada would have done better with the conservative (ish–sounds like Euroright, so left of American center by a lot) candidate. The USMCA is due for review next year…

        The article: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/04/28/how-the-nafta-usmca-2016-review-underpins-president-trump-remarks-on-canada/

        $SPOUSE was born in Canada, migrated as a little. She has zero desire to return, and for the while, neither of us have passports, so not even for vacations.

        Phantom, I would love for you to come live in the USA.

        Like

          2. Not as much of a problem as it will be for us, *being* the China annex.

            You know, I sometimes miss Jean Chretien (12 year lib PM). The man was undeniably a crook, but at least he understood (mostly) that if the whole thing collapses, there is no graft to be had.

            Liked by 1 person

          1. Sadly I must report that the Canadian election system is quite secure. Yes, they really did vote that way.

            Paper ballots, counted ON SITE in the polling station by the polling station workers, observed by representatives from all parties, no computers used in the official count. You can’t cheat the the count in any meaningful way. The most a determined effort could manage would be a few polling stations.

            There is vulnerability in the advanced polls, but A) the advance polls didn’t determine the outcome this time and B) someone would have squealed by now if there were shenanigans. There’s zero credible allegations of wrongdoing, and almost no sketchy allegations.

            So yeah. They went for it. They like the high taxes, crime, corruption and outright treason. They want more. Because #OrangeManBad, and they hate Americans. That’s pretty much the justification I’ve seen being bandied about.

            Oh well. Don’t cry to me when some”refugee” gang-banger steals your car, Toronto weenies. You asked for it, you got it. Toyota.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Canada pure Democracy?

              Or like the US Representative Democracy?

              FYI “Liked” because secure elections. Not the outcome. Sorry on the outcome.

              Liked by 2 people

              1. They got what they wanted, more of the same. Democracy in action.

                I’m reminded of Winston Churchill saying that representative democracy was the worst possible form of government, except for all the other forms.

                Like

                1. Yes.

                  I don’t know which Canada does.

                  Heck. By the screaming too many of the US doesn’t know we have a representative democracy!

                  Liked by 2 people

                  1. Technically and formally, we have a representative republic, not a democracy. “Democracy” appears in none of the founding documents; it may occur in the Federalist Papers, but those aren’t foundational.

                    Yeah, I know; how pedantic can I get?😉 But it’s a fairly important difference; as founded, the only Federal position which involved direct election by the people was that of US Representative. That was one of the “checks and balances”; arguably the most important one. That got watered down (more “democracy-ish”) by the 17th Amendment, but it worked for well over a century.

                    Liked by 1 person

                    1. “representative republic, not a democracy“

                      –

                      On paper.

                      I would argue since the delegates are decided at the state level by pure democracy (grumble, looking at greater Portland, OR), not representative throughout a state, then in practice a representative democracy.

                      Like

                    2. Sure, one part of the Fed is a “pure democracy” (sort of; there are restrictions). Overall, at the Federal level, it’s not. And at the state level, the only restriction is that the states must have “a republican form of government”. Any variations within that category are allowed, from the composition of the legislature to how and where elections are held (with the election of US Senators excepted, as defined by the Consititution).

                      Screams of leftists aside, the US is not a democracy.

                      Like

  20. I feel extremely lucky because I got my degree (despite burning out the first time I went to get it, getting stuck behind a requirement firewall the second time, and finally getting a degree in 2022. In Technical Writing (where AI will be doing all that…except when they make some poor engineer who is trying to do his job and write the manual at the same time…)) free and clear because Dad worked amazing amounts of overtime, Mom invested the money wisely, and I didn’t have to take out a single loan.

    But I understand that a lot of people went into college, got “practical” degrees of one kind or another, and had to get loans because there was no way to get the job they wanted without the certificate from a four-year school.

    I would as an absolute requirement make it so that if there was loan forgiveness, that the whole loan process be reformed. Make it so that loans could be discharged by bankruptcy and the college has to put up at least half of the money initially, so that there is definite “skin in the game” for colleges to trim out fat and unnecessary perks and courses to get graduates out there earning money to get paid off as quickly as possible.

    Like

    1. They had better have people who can check the AI’s work. The best part of my job as an Army technical editor was going on, “verification.” You give the draft manual to a greensuiter of the appropriate MOS and have them perform the procedures exactly as written. Correct as needed.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I did the same thing as a manufacturing engineer. Hand my draft ECO and rework instructions to one of the production assemblers. If she needed to ask me any questions, the ECO was not complete.

        Liked by 1 person

  21. Forget the people who went to college and paid off their loans.

    Consider the people who never went to college. They are poorer than the people who got the loans. They, too, will take the hit if the loans are forgiven.

    Forcing poor people to pay for better off people is never popular.

    Like

    1. That’s the thing, though– they’re not. Better off, that is.

      New degrees haven’t correlated to significantly higher pay for some 10, 20 years– if you can get hired at all.

      Which is why they use the stats for prior generations to push it, and don’t correct for “business paid for a degree for existing worker” in the calculations.

      It’s been standard for my entire adult life to do the every changing dance.

      “You don’t have a degree? That’s why you’re poor. Oh, you’ve got a degree, and you’re still poor? You got a junk degree. You got a degree, and you are working in your specialization, and you’re still poor? Work harder.”

      Liked by 1 person

    2. They, too, will take the hit if the loans are forgiven.

      What.

      Hit.

      None of you repeating this like an NPC ever bother to explain where this increased debt magically comes from.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. >What. Hit.

        Let’s just call it a tax cut instead. Instant +6 charisma to voters on the right, and everyone knows that the budget impact of those doesn’t matter.

        —

        Tongue lodged in cheek again.

        Liked by 1 person

    1. Make them dischargable in bankruptcy. I’m guessing that the government can do this by fiat but I just don’t know.
    2. Make the colleges co-signatories. I REALLY have no idea if this can be done. Too bad; I would LOVE to see the same colleges being cut off from fed funds over DEI having to make payments on all their fake useless degrees in whiner studies.
    3. This might work: earmark tariff money for paying off non-bullshit degree loans. 😈

    Like

            1. https://www.cascadegovsoftware.com/

              Give the above link to the engineers. Will need to contact about any job openings. It has been 9 years since I worked there. Have been out of contact with anyone for a year or so now. Last I heard, still understaffed.

              Job:

              Programming and client phone support.

              To be clear. It isn’t call center type support. I learned as much about the system from the clients as I did reverse engineering and coding.

              It is now work from home. If you live in commuting distance of the Eugene office, you can work from the office.

              If you are looking for Microsoft, Google, HP, IBM, etc., engineering pay, don’t bother. Pay will not be that high. (Understatement, FWIW.) Never was.

              Owned by Black Mountain Software out of Polson, Montana

              Heck check out some of the firms owned by Black Mountain. List reads like a lot of firms like Cascade. Orphaned companies. Originator gone/retired, leaving a firm that no employees could afford to buy.

              Liked by 1 person

            2. Son has a Chemistry degree. Winter term, just before spring graduation, he had two, of 3, local companies, head hunting him for lab teams. Before he graduated, all three local companies evaporated. Bought out for their patents. The employees, including the lab lead and chemical engineer who were working with him, were scrambling for their own jobs. Of these two, one ended up on the northeast coast somewhere, and the other in Texas somewhere.

              Head hunted because both had reasons to believe with his degree (and Eagle) he’d be a good fit. (One was the brother of a neighbor, and watched him grow up. The other was a scouter with the troop son earned his Eagle out of.)

              Son works for a local cabinet shop doing custom work. Current job is work for the state capitol building renovations. Also had, and still have, jobs that going into the Portland airport renovations.

              Liked by 1 person

  23. There’s no good solution for the student loan problem that doesn’t involve shifting some of the risk to the school

    Like

  24. Make the colleges with all their billions pay. They believe in socialism right? No brainer to me, while we are at it, they want Tranny’s in sports, the can build a whole Tranny’s sports field, Male against Males, Females against Females, Trannys against Trannys, sounds fair to me. Costly and expensive but that would comply with Title Nine now wouldn’t it? Make the commie bastards at all those Universities, pay, and pay, and pay.

    Liked by 1 person

  25. I’ve had mortgage, and auto loans. Some had good rates, and others not so good. In all, the loan had compound interest, which meant I either paid the loan off early, or any extra payment at the end of the term did very little. My credit worthiness determined the interest rate, and what I bought was not mine until the loan was paid in full. Regardless of how much I paid over time, and how it was obvious the lender was now making good money on my loan, I wasn’t allowed to stop paying, and tell them they had their money back.

    I can see forgiving the student loans, but not until the principle amount is paid. Until that point is reached, expecting taxpayers to assume the debt is unconscionable. Stop the process of student loans, except by private entities, and watch the universities trim their costs.

    Like

    1. Why the principle amount, when it was already inflated away? I mean, better than this nonsense, but why other than “punish you for believing authorities”.
      It’s not the compound interest, they do some really special stuff with student loans. It’s proping up an entire edifice of bad.
      Do you know why your doctor didn’t blow the whistle during Covid? Because even doctors in their fifties are still crushed under a huge loan and can’t afford to have their salary go away.

      Like

      1. “punish you for believing authorities”

        To be fair that would be a legitimate reason.

        But if we are going there…….. oh dear. That isn’t going to go the way these people hope.

        Because The Damn Kids will get hit some. And the proverbial Boomers Of Any Age will get *creamed*.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Dr Mengele was the local medical junta lead on COVID and the not-Vax. When I told him than ($UN-NAMED doctor) told me not to get the shot, he demanded to know who it was, and guessed wrong. (OTOH, the guy who was blamed is still working at the junta, but outside Mengele’s reach.) No, I never told on the real doctor. When the start of the adverse consequences of the not-vax hit lamestream news, Dr. Mengele no longer mentioned anything COVID. (I’m still stuck with him, small county. Sigh.)

        Liked by 1 person

      3. Sarah (and others), your arguments are persuasive. I have no skin in the game; never had any college debt for BS, and work paid (in arrears) for the MS degree. $OLDEST_BROTHER had a smallish(?) loan, but that was about 60 years ago, and 7 years later when I was in college, tuition, dorm, and fees ran about $1100 a semester. Add $100-150 for books, and $10 a week for walking around money.

        (As it turns out, due to quirks in the system, there were a few hundred tuition waivers allocated to University of Redacted. I got one, so that chopped $500 a semester off the bill. I had summer work and survivor’s SS after my Dad died, so while not rich, I was well off by dorm student standards.)

        I managed to avoid scheduling problems. The EE department was big enough at the time they needed to get us through. Heard that the mechanical people usually were stuck for 5 years, and that was a somewhat smaller department. OTOH, there were rumors that AA students got screwed over with “the XXX101 course you took doesn’t meet our requirements. Take it again.” That happened to $OLDER_BROTHER, and upon advice from the school, he took a summer correspondence course. That they later disallowed. Until Mom got in the act. Protip: never piss off a senior secretary, even if she’s not employed as such. She knows where the bodies are buried, or at least knows who to ask. He graduated on time. (Just in time to be drafted and to be in Basic when the Tet Offensive hit. He did his tour in Seoul in Finance.

        Like

        2. My first year was $1900 for everything: Tuition, fees, books, room and board (dorm), including 3 terms of horse riding for PE requirement. Ran about $3k subsequent years as costs rose ($2k/year loan + summer work + school year work + final end year “loan” from parents as I ran out of money spring term for books). Total fall ’75 – winter ’79 loan cost < $10k (no loan first year). Interest and payments started 6 months after graduation, 5% fixed interest (I think), $29/month for 10 years. This means we were still paying on loans as I went back to school both times. Did not take any more loans out. (At 5% interest in the ’80s, does anyone think we were paying it off early, on purpose? FYI, hubby’s was $19/quarter payment for 10 years. His interest was 1.9%, original amount I don’t know. We were earning 12% on bank savings …) Yet we balked (he* no!) at 6% interest on parent plus loans for son’s college late ’00s/’10s. We did not know about the shenanigans being pulled on student loans these days. Glad we avoided that.

          Like

  26. Student loans are a tax on employment that subsidizes academia.

    1. The government makes having a college degree mandatory for most jobs by (1) screwing up high school education, making high school degrees a poor indicator of competence, and (2) preventing companies from testing applicants on their own.
    2. To meet the increased demand for degrees, the government issues widespread, predatory student loans.
    3. The “free” money spigot causes the price of tuition to skyrocket.
    4. Now you can’t get a degree in most cases without getting loans.
    5. The government takes a chunk of your income for the next ~10-20 years to pay off the loan you only needed because of the inflated price of tuition.

    So for the “privilege” of working as anything from a barista on up, you get to pay a couple decades of extra taxes that fund your university’s bloated bureaucracy. It’s racketeering.

    Liked by 3 people

    2. All of these made worse by cultural level changes such as how many children folks have, and how long they stay in the workforce.

      I am getting quite tired of folks that have been in a supervisor position since my mom was in high school trying to tell folks the best way to advance and how the only reason someone can’t get hired without a degree is that they’re not trying hard enough.

      Liked by 2 people

  27. I have been of the thought that the colleges should pay back the government for the loans. They have the money. And they are trying to teach Socialism to their students. This would be a great example.

    Like

  28. Much like a national sales tax: No – unless the income tax amendment is repealed, first. Fix the on-going problem first, then deal with the people screwed by the old system.

    Make hiring tests legal, explicitly. It’s a one page bill. If you can’t get that passed, you can’t do the rest. If some company wants all its employees to know who wrote “the gods themselves contend in vain with human stupidity” or the definition of crepuscular, more power to them.

    Shutdown all government loan programs. I’d settle for “student loans”, but all of them would be better. We have banks (with virtually no reserves) for a reason.

    Now we can talk about the existing student loans. I lean toward forgiveness just because it’s simple. Just as indefinitely furloughing federal employees and bribing them with severance pay is easier than firing them. It’s not ideal – I hear your pain, Gus, and moral hazard is a thing – but it doesn’t require an army of administrators to make happen.

    Like

    1. I think first we STOP ALL STUDENT LOANS UNLESS THEY ARE THROUGH PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS IN THE NORMAL WAY. Period.
      I fully agree with you.
      Second, burn the loan paperwork and set people free.
      Third, Obamacare can’t be financed without those payments coming in? Burn Obamacare.
      Do you see anything to object to?

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Put that way, it sounds like a threefer winner. Confiscating the universities’ bloated liquid assets they only have because of the predatory loans would be nice, too, and make it a fourfer winner.

        Yeah, I’m vindictive toward the “learning centers of excellence”. Sue me.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. 0bamacare can’t be financed with the ‘student loan’ payments either. The whole boondoggle is structurally unsustainable. Just like Social Stupidity, Medicare, welfare…

        Like

      3. Some of that loan paperwork is already gone, disappeared. Right when Biden started talking Student Loan forgiveness, some people were successfully winning lawsuits to get them discharged because the paperwork didn’t exist. Not the initial paperwork, or the payments.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. …and the government not owning up to the mess, and that they lost the information, only helped create a bigger divide between Conservatives and Liberals. Not to mention gave the Dems the ability to act all magnanimous.

            All while giving younger people the hope the forgiveness would trickle down to them.

            Like

  29. I’m of two minds about this, but in general, I’d prefer to find a way to make the colleges and universities eat these debts and be damned to them. I lucked out (graduated in 1983 before the Mindless Moloch of Ten Thousand Insatiable Tentacles started throwing money at the colleges, so my degree wasn’t nearly as expensive as they are now) but, having never been able to so much as get a foot in the door of a career-track position (I was trapped in the wrong part of the country—long story) I feel for people who’re trapped by unpayable college debt.

    A lot of young people go to college not because they’re attracted to the life of the mind, but because a college degree is an absolute requirement for any “job with a future” (and spare me the burble about trade schools; not everybody’s mechanically gifted or physically able to do those jobs). Family pressure is also a factor. But Gresham’s Law has hit college degrees, starting with the GI Bill after WWII; they weren’t sure that the Depression WAS over, and didn’t want to have hordes of veterans flooding the job market, so they got a bunch of them into colleges. This got worse during Vietnam, due to the ill-thought-out student deferments from the draft. Understandably enough, a lot of people preferred life in college to life in the Vietnam-era military, so into the colleges they flooded. The colleges created a bunch of “Mickey Mouse” courses, programs and degrees to keep these new <s>cash cows</s> students enrolled, and the value of college degrees went down further. Lowering the standards of admission (partly due to affirmative action, partly because a lot of administrators were fossil 1930s Reds—do the math; a lot of them were in grad school or beginning academic careers in the 1930s, and back then, the Communists were more respectable than they ever were before or after) also didn’t help.

    So a lot of these would-be college students get scammed into signing for these loans. It’s no different from college sports, which are even more exploitative—you’ve got these famous, admired institutions/coaches negotiating with naive kids. WHO has the advantage here?

    Make the colleges and universities liable for the student loans of students they’ve graduated who can’t get jobs. If that means they have to slash their cash-eating athletic programs, and a bunch of tweed-coat-wearing frauds get turfed out of their tenured positions to beg their bread in the gutter, that’s a plus. Higher education is a racket!

    Sorry about the rant. I’ve had friends who’ve been badly burned, and this is a very sore point with me.

    Like

  30. The problem with the notion of “forgive the loans” is that debts don’t disappear; they are merely transferred to others.

    The most deserving “others” would be the universities, since they run the rackets of creating worthless degrees and collect money from suckers (or rather, suckers’ lenders) for those. Let them absorb the loss.

    What Biden tried to do is stick “the rest of us” with the debts. That means people who paid their loans, people who avoided loans and paid up front instead, and people who never went to college in the first place. Does it make sense to make my highway department worker neighbor, or the plumber down the street, pay more taxes to cover deadbeat debt? Not in my book.

    Also, I *do* believe in the notion of “they freely signed”. They chose a major that doesn’t lead to a useful job. Want to major in philosophy? Go right ahead — but not on my dime.

    Like

    1. They already got transferred, and rewritten, and mangled, spindled, and folded to on-paper pay for Obamacare.

      There isn’t actually money coming of it, mind you, but it’s on paper.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. They can’t hear you. They refuse to hear you. They are so jealous of ANYONE who has any thing more than them. So much they can’t even recognize the blessings they have been given in life. They are as bitter about unfairness just as much as leftists whine about inequality.

        Life is NOT fair. And if they can’t recognize the blessings they had, and covet over others perceived bounty, nothing can help them. (And I say perceived, because many of these people don’t even have a degree just a big fat loan.)

        Liked by 2 people

    2. Also, I *do* believe in the notion of “they freely signed”. They chose a major that doesn’t lead to a useful job. Want to major in philosophy? Go right ahead — but not on my dime.

      About a quarter of recent graduates are employed in what they went to school for.

      That includes things like accountants and law degrees, because the jobs simply don’t actually exist.

      All the “smart, practical” degrees vanish.

      Especially when you’re going against ghost jobs and H1B.

      Like

          1. Is Elon Musk a guy who thinks it’s a magic results button? Again, if a machine can do brain surgery, please tell us what jobs won’t be automated?

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            1. Musk has hardly been the most accurate person on AI over the last few years.

              However as far as surgery robots go, why are better tools to do a job a problem?

              Like

              1. Because there won’t be a human surgeon doing a better job using the tool. You apparently don’t want to see the difference.

                As for your comment on Musk, is that an assertion without evidence I hear?

                Like

        2. We’ve already done the comparison of “new tools” vs “import cheap workers.”

          One results in higher productivity AND quality of life, while the other is iffy on long term productivity and sinks the quality of life.

          Because one doesn’t compete with a tool.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. The comparison isn’t skilled worker vs cheap worker; the comparison will be between tool and NO worker. Minimum wage 0.

            Like

              1. What other half? If a human (messy, complicated, breakdown prone) can be replaced with a reliable robot who always does it your way, it will be done.

                That’s been a goal for a long time; there have finally been enough advances in computing power and mobility / dexterity that the goal is in reach.

                Like

                1. That’s one half.

                  What do you think a job is? Or why people have them?

                  If humans are completely replaceable in work (a bs assumption but we’ll go with it), then they also don’t need jobs because their machines are how they make a living instead of selling their labor and time to an employer.

                  You do not get one without the other.

                  Liked by 1 person

            2. It’s worker with a tool, vs imported workers.

              Because AI is not actually magic, even if it’s going to revolutionize stuff on a scale similar to how machines revolutionized farming in my dad’s lifetime.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. You and Ian can make your assertions; I’ll make mine.

                Me, I’m betting on AI and robotic capabilities being at the left end of the curve, with lots of room to get better, combined with the well established demonstration that managerial types find human workers messy, untidy, and are looking for ways to turn people into widgets.

                Like

                2. Managerial types are essentially non-government bureaucrats. Their prestige depends on how many human widgets they boss around. Machines don’t need managers; they need operators and technicians.

                  Which is one of the greatest benefits of automation.

                  Like

                3. Me, I’m betting on AI and robotic capabilities being at the left end of the curve, with lots of room to get better

                  The fascinating question here is why you don’t think I’m betting on that side.

                  Like

      2. Engineers. ENGINEERS. Unless it’s a government contractor requiring clearance, they just fill it with H1B visas. This brings the pay down for everyone, btw. So even defense contractors…. not getting much.
        GUYS this is not trash degrees. It’s ALL degrees.

        Liked by 3 people

    3. The problem with the notion of “forgive the loans” is that debts don’t disappear; they are merely transferred to others.

      Yet another person asserts things they hope will become true.

      Like

      1. GPkoning, there is no debt. The debt was already inflated away. This was an elaborate way for the government to GIVE money to colleges. Who mostly went on a real estate spree.
        If you want to punish someone? TAKE THOSE BUILDINGS and sell them as condos.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Most people live with the illusion that the government accounting practices fit industry standard. Instead they’re an unholy mess. You never really know what is going to be “disappeared” and which will cause explosive side-effects. In some cases it’s both.

        I don’t blame the people who think government is magical and can make anything disappear. I also don’t think badly of those who expect gov’t to follow the standards (i.e., accointing practices) they have set.

        Oddly, both can be true at once.

        By standard accounting practices, a line in a ledger doesn’t just go away. If it is written off, the “payment” has to come from somewhere. This is not magical thinking, and it is not foolish. It is the way our world works, except for the Fed.

        Saying that the money is no longer there is also true, on a certain level. It is certain that the financial machine is not going to want that “money,” imaginary or not, to go out of their control. They will make it real.

        I personally think that getting rid of student debt (with the foregoing caveats) would solve much of the financial crisis on an individual level. Unfortunately the system relies on a continual increase in consumption, and debt is counted in that calculation. Short of a complete collapse, the consumption that student debt represents will not be allowed to go away.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Schrodinger’s debt.

          Meanwhile, reminded of the time 100 % of my time was promised to three different offices. At the same time. Yeah, each was paying for 100% of my time (and I was still underused, but that’s a different story). We eventually had a lieutenant colonel come in whose job was to clean up the mess. As usual, he thought at first we worker bees were complicit, then realized we were, at best, the victims. (That organization eventually crashed and burned, but that happened after I retired).

          Liked by 1 person

  31. In-state grad school tuition went from $100/hour in 2003 to $1200/hour in 2008. At a state college. Talk about a clear example of the problem of feds dumping money into universities through student loans. (I had saved enough to pay for grad school on my own, and got a huge scholarship for College 1.0, so no debt.)

    Further more the deponent sayeth not. (Other than WPDE for messing with login again. Again.)

    Like

  32. I’ve been looking and thinking of this for many years myself. Somewhat in agreement, somewhat not.

    1 – MOST IMPORTANT – do make them dischargeable in bankruptcy. That will take care of the worst cases, those who CANNOT ever pay, and where trying to collect will only waste even more money.

    2 – Yes, eliminate the system as it stands. But replace it (partially) with GRANTS where there is a proper social or economic reason to subsidize the education. First care medical professionals, serving the poor (with contractual obligations – say, 10% of the grant is amortized for every year of such service, with provisions for making it a regular debt if they do not complete the contract except for a documented inability to do so). Lawyers a similar (but much more carefully circumscribed) program. STEM – if the profession is actually low on people (CITIZEN people, that is) – must work in the States for a US company for that period. (Maybe a tax break for the company that hires them and does the REAL education…) Those trapped in the hole right now, and satisfying these conditions, can APPLY for forgiveness.

    3 – Audit the colleges and universities, placing THEM on the hook for those that they should NEVER have taken money for. Either the scam of taking the money and making it impossible to graduate, or taking the money and awarding a worthless piece of paper.

    4 – Those who never went to college… Well, there are a GREAT MANY things that governments at ALL levels have been and are paying for, that I personally (nor anyone I know) have not received a single benefit from, and never will. And, as you say, the money is already GONE – an account receivable is NOT money, and in governmental accounting is really not an asset, either (governments get loans based on “faith and credit” – not their balance sheets).

    Liked by 1 person

  33. First off, something most people don’t realize: You don’t just sign one loan and done, you have to get a new loan every year. Sunk cost is still a fallacy. (This is one reason why student loan consolidation is a thing. Also, basic federal loans have a flat ten year repayment – but consolidation goes longer based on size).

    Second, ever since the late 80s, there has been a movement to tell students to start at community colleges. Dirt cheap for the first half of your college, and you can pretty much knock off all the crap political graduation requirements. It also gives you an idea what you can handle.

    Third, colleges have been playing what in real estate is known as ‘the bump’ After people have seen the bare bones options, show them the place with the sybaritic options, and after all, they’re not paying for it right now (and parents are paying for a lot, with PLUS loans). The kids are the ones deciding where to go, after all. The point I’m making here is that colleges were playing the ‘buy now, pay later!’ game on the upsell – they are not innocent. That included massive superfluous departments to make certain groups feel protected – at massive cost. The colleges were con artists.

    My conclusions?

    LIMITED forgiveness. The cost of a bare bones community college to state school education. The annual Pell Grant program covers my daughters’ community college bills.

    Based upon ability to pay, interest forgiveness. The responsible colleges can be responsible for the difference – they made a fraudulent representation that their product would enable purchasers to more than pay for that product.

    Make the remainder forgivable in bankruptcy. Once again, the colleges need to be responsible for this. The catch is: Any degree or qualification received from that college is null and void. Your academic transcript no longer is valid. People need to want to repay their loans if they can.

    Going forward: any and all student loans are dischargeable in bankruptcy, under those same conditions. (This was one of the reasons they currently aren’t: freshly graduated doctors and lawyers were declaring bankruptcy in large numbers. Magically, large income with no cost! People will do what the incentives are)

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    1. Dan?
      I’d agree with you but you aren’t up to date and your number 3 is WHAT?
      2- no longer works. didn’t work by the 2010s or my kids would have done it. The school PLAIN DIDN’T ACCEPT COMMUNITY COLLEGE CREDITS. The excuse was “we have to teach it our way.”
      So, no, that wasn’t available. AT ALL. Not just “slightly.” Not at all. (Some places, I think TX it’s mandatory they take the credits, I think? But not most of the country.)
      Number 3 I DON’T GET. I think you’re thinking of people living in dorms and getting “the college experience.” Most of the people I saw doing that? The parents had saved and had college accounts.
      My kids’ friends were all living at home. Younger son rented his last two years but rented part of an apartment and really really cheap, and only because road construction made it impossible for him to get to school in under 2 hours. (Should be 40 minutes, which we were willing to eat.)
      It’s not the sybaritic options. It’s “You need this to graduate.” It keeps changing, necessitating more bullshit courses and again it doubled in the three years between kids.
      Not counting lab prices, books and PARKING. Parking at UCCS QUINTUPLED. (They had dorms empty. They really wanted people in dorms.)
      So if your view of what’s going on is correct, I’d agree with you. As is? Close the program. If people need loans, let them get them from banks and private institutions.
      AND pardon stuff people got conned into. That’s it.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. No, number three is talking about all the peripheral amenities, not necessary for a college education but alluring to those who don’t understand real cost, and for which a premium over and above costs can be charged and people will pay, with or without real means to do so. (This well-known phenomenon had a large amount to do with why the real estate bubble got so big in the early 00s). Private institutions are the worst for this, but state colleges did it, too. Big shiny new facilities, high end food, etcetera.

        Perhaps there is one redeeming fact about California – all the basic course are standardized, and the state schools are required to accept those courses as satisfying requirements. It’s been this way since the early 90s at least – that was how I knocked out all the miscellaneous business courses for my accounting degree. Hell, even the Science Fiction and Fantasy course I took for English requirements was on the standardized – must accept – list.

        With 2 daughters in community college right now, I think I’m pretty current. Maybe California is better than most of the nation in this regard – but that’s a fixable problem, at least going forward. The education industrial complex has political influence at least as large as the military industrial complex (Eisenhower talked about it right after his famous point about the military industrial complex, but for some reason the educrats don’t cover that). This power has been used to shield them from liability against fraud for at least fifty years, and it needs to be broken because the colleges need to be held accountable for that fraud.

        And yes, changing graduation requirements (and required courses only being taught in certain ways to extend time in school) has been a problem since the early 70s to my certain knowledge. It only strengthens my case that the colleges were functionally con artists, defrauding students and parents and misrepresenting the real investment.

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        1. If the state schools …. please check they will accept your daughters’ credits. Because if they don’t, it’s extra cost for no good reason.
          And yeah, there are places that still do, but MOST don’t.
          I don’t understand that part up front. yes, the facilities improved, and the school charged more. BUT THE STUDENTS HAD NO SAY IN THAT. It was the school’s choice and doing. most of UCCS’s money was fancy fancy dorms, which our kids didn’t use.
          There were also a lot of peripherals they MADE YOU PAY FOR. Like gym. It was “other fees”. They couldn’t NOT pay, it was aggregated into the cost of attending the school. The kids didn’t use it, but HAD to pay for it.
          Again, they didn’t eat at school, etc. From when older son entered to when younger son left it was more (far more) than double tuition. Just for the tuition, books, lab fees.
          The only extra they paid for was parking, which was outrageous but I didn’t want them to park in the additional far away parking lot which was dark at night, and prone to lurkers. (That was my decision.)
          So, I’m still not 100% sure what you mean. I don’t think students chose the better buildings, etc. I mean they wanted to finish the degree they’d started.

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          1. The colleges created those things in order to lure in students who don’t understand TANSTAAFL. They were expensive, but they enhanced the attractiveness factor enough to boost charges by even more than those costs. The visually attractive is how people are lured into spending more than things are worth in everything from homes to cars to college education. The bigger the ticket, the more room to hide profit in.

            The students *did* choose those things. Maybe not the effective captive audience seeking something close to home where they could live, but those aren’t the students the university is chasing with those amenities. It’s the students who don’t understand that loans are a real cost they have to repay with interest eventually. Those looking for an adventure away from home. You and your children may have not been the target market, but because they were effectively captive, they (and you) paid. All the university had to do was attract more students *with* them than they lost because of the price increase – which they did.

            Marketing (which the colleges have abused since forever) is all about baffling with bullshit – like the fact that if the cost of something is $1 but is sold for $10, everyone else in the world calls it a 1000% markup. Marketers call it a 90% markup (really).

            I do recommend taking a marketing course for everyone, if for no other reason than to understand what they’re trying to do to you, or get you to willingly agree to.

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            1. Most of the students they lure in, with the amenities, the ones they more an more cater to? Foreign. On cash. So many of them.
              They are not our problem money wise.
              Yes, they are what drove it. As for the other stuff, in our original orientation and pushing of parent plus loans? There was ONE couple who was all in their daughter having “the college experience.” Out of state, very well off, had been saving for this and figured it would be thirty thousand additional (over the other stuff) in tuition for it. But they were paying.
              I remember driving home shaking my head.
              Maybe there are a lot of people who took loans for those amenities because they wanted this and that. The only ones I know that chose colleges like that, the parents had the money and paid. (I do have …. um… three in our acquaintance.)
              Maybe my friend group isn’t typical? But I suspect most people “Stuck” aren’t in that group. AGAIN I could be wrong, and there will be SOME. (There are always assholes and fools. It’s a rule of life.)
              As for marketing courses…. Eh. We raised the kids scraping by on thrift stores, diners and … The price of my “career” and Dan being in a highly fluctuating field. They never had “the thing” be it game console, or clothes. I’ve found that a lifetime of sticking out and never having the cool stuff is a good vaccine against “must have the super cool thing”. Perhaps that’s why I think most people going in for all the fancy stuff are the well off.
              Again I definitely could be wrong, and I know I’m not right in EVERY case. There’s always idiots. It’s just my feel of the situation.

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              1. I’d also note the kids who are in college because their parents want them there are more likely to flake off and rules lawyer their way along. Met one of those. Had no sympathy for him. Of course by then I was paying my own way, one night class at a time.

                Liked by 1 person

          2. The only extra fee I paid that I actually used was the bus fee. I couldn’t park on campus without getting a parking ticket. At first I was walking from work for “lunch” for class. Then either parked at work and took the bus, or used the park and ride near us. Only time I was on campus after dark was when I lived on campus in the dorm. My last year in college it was a constant group challenge. Had a few that insisted on meeting after dark. Refused. Answer was call me with the information I need. Note, being an older student made me a little stubborn. Not the only one either. Reason why the last group I was in, we had one person in it under 30. Not even the guys wanted to be meeting on campus after dark.

            Liked by 1 person

      2. Tell me about it.

        I had to take statistic 3x’s! Not because I had bad grades in it, I had good grades all 3 times! The second two wouldn’t take the prior statistics classes. I’ll give the community college (second school) a pass. The first statistics class was labeled “Biometrics”. Same damn material the first 6 weeks as the entire term for the “real” statistics classes at the community college, and subsequent university. Just the rest of the term we spent learning how the statistics concepts applied to various forestry practices such as scaling, different timber crusing methodologies, aerial photography, etc. The university wouldn’t take biometrics, or the community college, statistics class because of whatever.

        I retook first term calculus, because it had been 10 years. I can do math, but unlike hubby, and from what I infer, Dan and Sarah’s sons, I don’t retain mathematical concepts unless I’m using them. Took me a few years to forget volume, especially cylindrical, and log calculations because was using them almost every day, off and on, for 3+ years, first cruising then scaling. Used to be able to whip through multidimensional matrix linear math, setup and run the calculations. Can’t set it up anymore. Haven’t used it in 30 years. Same with anything beyond basic volume calculations, don’t use, so must lookup.

        Otherwise, not a lot of overlap for class requirements for the 3 degrees. Except I didn’t have to take the undergraduate writing, history, social studies, PE, etc., classes.

        I initially went straight to university forestry college because the university wouldn’t take any of the forestry classes from the local community college. Would I have been better off taking chemistry, biology, botany, writing, and math, etc., which university would have transferred, first? Oh, hell yes. Plus would have been saving money living at home. OTOH wouldn’t have met hubby first term. Didn’t date for another 4 years. But we were both active in the forestry club.

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      3. He may be thinking of scenes like I saw in Oxford, Mississippi. There are dorms and frat/sorority houses on campus which look nice from the outside. Then there’s the town square. Large upscale apartment complexes. Trendy restaurants and boutiques. Properly progressive bookstores.

        How many kids take out loans and then live like that? Or is it just the rich kids’ district? It is Mississippi and cost of living will be a bit lower, but….

        On the “this course doesn’t count unless we give it,” thing, I got hit with that when I went to grad school. I’d gone to the local community college to pick up prerequisite math courses and after I had taken them the university told me they didn’t count. OTOH, given the university course was harder and covered more material, they may have had a point in that case.

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        1. “university course was harder and covered more material“

          –

          At least you had a good foundation to work with. Can make a huge difference.

          But the cost!!!!!

          Liked by 1 person

        2. Marshall did two years in college while in high school. THE COURSES WERE WITH THE COLLEGE so they had to take most of them, but they took him as “electives” and gosh darn it, he still needed just as many electives, because they didn’t COUNT for his particular course of study.
          So we wasted that money and he wasted all the effort. Also comparing both boys’ experiences I wonder if coming in with those “credits” marked us as suckers and is why we got so much run around with that kid.

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    2. Second, ever since the late 80s, there has been a movement to tell students to start at community colleges.

      and then you go to a state college and find out that -whoops- your credits don’t transfer except as electives. Even though everyone you talked to swore up and down that they would count toward degree requirements.

      Sorry, you have to start from the beginning on your degree!

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  34. You make a lot of very valid points. I remember when Obama took over the student loans: it was a recipe for kids getting into huge debt, not being able to buy cars, appliances, homes. Then add in inflation. We never imagined kids wouldn’t get married, but here we are. My son was born ’85, he experienced the stem classes full, the college changing requirements (draining the veterans’ benefits with no degree), was too white male to get any scholarships or even into the service. When he graduated, couldn’t even get a job at McDonald’s, finally got one at Cargill, lifting 50# hot dog racks from one spot to another all night long. When our daughter hit college 7 years later, the rule that counted a farm as a cash asset was changed and the farm was counted as our home. Lots more scholarships opened up for female, even if white, but the Fed loans kicked in too. I remember my daughter calling to say she had to go into the school office every semester and turning back money that had appeared in her account for books, food, housing. Imagine the numbers of kids that just went ahead and spent the $$$? She worked and I sent every other paycheck I got to meet our fed required share. Then the government changed the terms of the loans from no interest, to having interest. She was $12,000 in debt after 5 years with a BA and a BS. For her grad school, UVA paid for all of it, plus a year because zero jobs due to COVID. She married a fellow grad student when they were post-grad who had $17,000 debt. They hope to soon pay off their loans. Sorry, TL;DR The government was acting like a seedy loan shark. We do need to think of the burden on our kids!

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    1. Our kids are five years younger (the older.) WE NEVER HAD NO INTEREST. We also didn’t get parent plus. We have friends who lost their homes to that. And with younger son, we ended up financing a lot of it out of pocket, because we were only covering him by then.
      But dear Lord, yes.
      It’s not the burden on the kids, this is not even charity. it’s the burden on our nation and culture. We’re all suffering from this, and it will get worse as we age and our kids age and there is no follow on generation.
      Look at Europe, ladies and Gentlemen. Other than the diverse goblins they’re a VAST retirement home.

      Liked by 1 person

  35. I’m just glad that I bailed in 1999 — tuition inflation was already getting bad then, compared to my first semester in the fall of 1985, and I’ve probably long since paid the principal of my student loans, and am now paying interest on interest.

    I thought I was getting a sensible degree the first time around — but I didn’t understand some things about how my brain works. The struggles and tears over timed music practice back in sixth and seventh grades should’ve been a warning about getting into work that involves filling blocks of time with Visible Busy — but none of my student jobs really held us to the clock. We had to be present during our work hours, yes, but if we had a slow period, we could study, or read, or in my case, write. No pressure to find busywork to fill those moments lest the boss feel he’s not getting his money’s worth.

    Then I got my first professional job, and a boss who held us to the clock with a rod of iron. Every minute was precious, even the bits and crumbs at the end of the day, because they “added up” — never mind they couldn’t be brought together to make a lump of useful size. And just to put the cherry on top, I was getting told that I needed to read various books I had no interest in, in order to be aware of current trends in reading, but no, I couldn’t use that to keep busy because they were “recreational reading.” Never mind those books would be chores for me to slog through, because the titles were classed as “recreational reading,” I was expected to give up what little discretionary time I had to slog through them when I really wanted to be writing.

    After that ended badly, one of my biggest criteria for going back to grad school was to get into a line of work where I’d never hear those hated words you’re not done, you have three minutes left. Where I’d actually be allowed to get done by my own effort, not by producing Visible Busy until the clock ticked out the requisite amount of time. But it wasn’t really panning out — the big warning sign was getting shunted into a research assistantship. with the archives, which was all based on working to a clock, instead of a teaching assistantship where, as long as I covered my class hours and office hours and generally carried out my responsibilities, nobody would obsess about whether I filled Every Precious Minute with busy.

    That was when I got married and left academia behind for good. I’ve spent the last 25 years paying back my loans, and by this point, having the remainder forgiven wouldn’t really make that big of a difference. As to having children, barring a literal miracle, that ship has sailed — and given the issues on both sides of the family, perhaps it’s just as well.

    But yes, kill off the student loan scam, de-bloat academia of its featherbedding administrators and makeweight courses, ensure there will be a next generation and that they can thrive, not just survive.

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  36. As one who paid off all student loans at great cost – I am broke, I’m not sure I’ll ever be un-broke again – I say end it all. If forgiving the loans will make it possible to shut the whole system down, do it.

    …And go after the universities’ administrative departments with a cleaver, not a scalpel. Until they get the idea that the featherbedding has ended.

    Liked by 2 people

  37. (From graduating a half century ago). I went to college. Because I wanted to lean. Was turned down for financial assistance. Being innocent, I went to speak to power (aka the Financial Aids Officer.). I was turned down because I reported I had $500 in savings (all the money I had in the world) on the application form. He said that that I should have not reported it. I replied, “Should I have lied”. A miracle – a few days later a letter arrived that I had a work-study position in the Chemistry Department.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. It was different half a century ago. I had a full ride for computer science with a job in the college bookshop for pocket money.
      And if you guys are saying “Aroo? computer science?”
      I DIDN’T TAKE IT and chose to go back to Portugal instead.
      Look, I was 18 and by definition dumb. SOMEONE hadn’t proposed (we hadn’t even officially dated, but he swears he actually considered proposing that night. He should have.) AND my dad was writing me heart rendering letters saying he missed me.
      NOT the biggest mistake of our lives. i’ve made many since.
      BUT yes indeed, it was different half a century ago. BIG difference.

      Liked by 1 person

  38. Don’t have a dog in his fight – last time I was in a college class I was paying something on the order of $11/sem hr. And then I was drafted. But I am hard core that one should pay off one’s just debts. Key word there – “just”.

    If one checks the graph of the rise in tuition costs against the .gov loan scam. . . well, never mind. Let’s just slice a given percentage off of the ivy schools like havard’s $53 BILLION endowment – say 50% on-going – and lesser schools pay lesser percentages say 50% of the first billion of their endowments. And half the money goes to the people who owe the debt, while the other half goes into a grant/scholarship program run outside of said school. And pigs will soon be flying. . .

    And from now on every school writes their own loans that are dischargeable if the borrower doesn’t secure a position based on the degree within one year of graduation.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. “>>> stop giving…” Oh, hell yes, that was part and parcel of the plan. Let the schools loan their own money if they want. And cut their lips off the .gov teat.

        Liked by 1 person

  39. Of all the arguments to be made one way or the other, I absolutely loathe the arguments against forgiveness that hinge on “fairness”. I’ve finally paid off my loans.* Would it be nice if I’d had them forgiven? Sure, but if other people’s loans are forgiven I will be neither the better nor the worse for it. And insisting that others suffer for the sake of “fairness” is evil.

    *Living at home and throwing a large chunk of my income at it for a couple of years helped. So did the interest pauses.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. THIS. THIS THIS THIS.
      If the kids had been working, unmarried and living with us the last 5 years, the loans would now be gone. But…. well, that’s not how it played out.

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        1. They seem very happy, and thank G-d. But I’m trying to figure out how to pay off their loans.
          Look, long run, they should have an inheritance coming (not from US) enough to wipe them out. But that will be too late for kids.
          Now it’s possible neither of them CAN have kids for other reasons, but …. I’d like them to have a chance, yes?

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  40. My attitude: government and students should jointly default on the loans, the schools should be left to sink or swim with whatever financial liability they have. People who actually paid on their loans get their payments back in the form of tax breaks over X number of years, in recognition of the heaviness of the loan burden. (Since the loan forgiveness advocates are always going on about what a burden the loans are, they shouldn’t have room to complain about the tax breaks on those who actually paid at least part of those burdens.)

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Honestly, you’re a much better advocate for student loan forgiveness than most of the would-be defaulters are. I don’t know whether it’s the hyper-emotional arguments they make or the vegan crossfitter style evangelism, but they do not tend to leave me overflowing with sympathy. However, their cause is just, so…

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        1. Most of the advocates are a tiny minority. Most of the people who are crushed have jobs, are responsible, and can’t afford to alienate people.
          I KNOW this alienates people. BUT I think someone needs to talk about it.
          It’s not even the people in trouble, it’s the moral slippery slope of giving the government debt slaves.
          And it’s the fact we are, yes, affecting birth rates and marriage rates.
          Is that the major problem? Probably not. But it is a contributing cause.
          And like Elon I think we need kids. Lots. Or the future won’t happen. Not for civilization.

          Liked by 1 person

  42. There is also the forced changing of your debt program that the Biden admin did, too. I was working along on a reduced payment program (yes, it would take longer, but we could afford it.) And then it got changed to I HAD to switch to their SAVE program. Which took everything I had paid toward a forgiveness in 10 years and tossed it out the window, so that it will now be ANOTHER 10+ years, if then. I still owe more now than the original loan. I didn’t go to college I went to a technical school (Cosmetology, and then Master Instructor of Cosmetology) and I can’t work in my degree field, because now 90% VA disabled. So, yes, they are playing silly games with even older folks’ student loans. (I also did 7 years in the Army, and was 2 courses away from finishing my BS – but we worked on hubby’s instead after I/he got out, and all my credits have expired.) So, even with the best of intentions and trying to be careful, luck and gov can go against you and there you are. We won’t even discuss hubby or the kid’s issues with schooling/loans. I agree with Sarah on this.

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  43. Late to the party, but..I have a few recommendations.

    Make all student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. No need for a judge to determine there’s “extreme hardship.” Make credits transferable. That is such a basic issue, I’m shocked educational pundits haven’t made it a core goal.

    Do away with interest on student loans. Especially if it is a loan from the government, the gov’t has a vested interest in economic growth. The gov’t could also garnish tax refunds to recoup the cost. The interest rates on student loans shocks the conscience (in my opinion), especially because the people taking on debt usually don’t have competent advisors. You’ll notice that many parents choose to pay as much as they can, and often refuse to pay to send their children to overly expensive colleges.

    One problem with forgiving all student loans is that there are people who are able to pay back the loans but choose not to, for whatever reason. I know many professionals who have high incomes, a high cost lifestyle to match, and student loans. https://hcn.health/hcn-trends-story/why-doctors-go-broke-and-how-to-avoid-it/

    Many graduates do manage to pay back student loans. There is a cost; my children knew many graduates who chose high-paying careers only because of the looming student loan debt.

    The foreign students question is tricky. They pay full whack, but in order to cater to them, the universities have to enlarge everything–larger campus, more courses, more instructors, more support staff, more housing, etc. I suspect (but don’t know) that the public universities’ capital costs are covered through issuing bonds, while the universities gain the tuition.

    The gov’t should work out a reasonable cap on college costs. I don’t know how to do it, but at present, costs have risen at a higher rate than inflation for decades.

    This may be unpopular–but many students who head to college don’t have a hope in Hades of finishing, because they can’t do the work. Supporting them drains resources that could be used to fund financial aid for the students who have the potential to finish. Financial aid funds are also being drained, reportedly, by fraudsters using AI to create fake student profiles. https://reason.com/2025/04/30/ai-bots-in-california-steal-over-10-million-in-federal-financial-aid/

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    1. That last one…. fewer than you think. NOT because they’re very prepared, but because as Harvard has proven recently, you can graduate not reading very well. So… the last is mostly an excuse for the bait and switch state colleges do. They DO graduate every foreign student, even the ones with shaky English.

      Yes, many graduates managed to pay it off. Maybe fewer since Biden modified the loans. I understand older son had to take a seriously effed up deal, because he was making 50k and couldn’t pay 3k a month in payments. The “we repay” was also yanked out from under him…. and it’s tough out there.
      He’ll probably repay, because, well, there’s family money that will probably come (PROBABLY. It’s complicated.) And if not, we’ll manage to pay them off, somehow. It’s my goal if I can get SOMEWHAT healthy. Because none of this is THEIR faults. These days? Most doctors don’t have a high life lifestyle, unless they’re generational doctors (parents were doctors) and have no bills. It…. doesn’t pay what it used to. See importing foreign doctors.
      Also “Doctors and lawyers” is a cry of envy. The vast majority of loan holders are neither. I believe the VAST majority left without a degree and are scraping by in bottom wrung occupations.
      Yes, by amount of loan, you get ivy graduates and doctors, but not BY NUMBER OF BORROWERS. That is, by number of people affected. IOW lies, damn lies and statistics.

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      1. Foreign students are a mixed bag. My most recent college graduate had stories of foreign students who were cheating, outrageously. As in, the other students suspected they had people on staff who did the work for them, based on the observed language skills in class. On the other hand, he has close friends who are foreign students who are brilliant, hard working, and came to college well prepared.

        In-class handwritten exams would flush out students who aren’t doing the work. Of course, if the administration doesn’t want to flunk or expel a significant portion of the student body, there’s no backing for professors who want to run an honest class.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Many of the foreign students are good, and many are people we would like to become Americans. There are also “foreign” students who have family ties to America. There are also students who come from families that are global, as in, they have family members across the globe. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and it reminds me of the sort of family arrangements seen in space opera.

            With foreign students and out of state students as cash cows, the universities don’t have to press for more support for in-state students. That distorts the system. There’s also the creation of multiple types of students–the students who can afford to pay for on-campus housing, and everyone else.

            I’ll also note that the “trash degree” debate is silly. Many graduates end up working in different fields, as most degrees are not vocational education. I would not assume that a “STEM” degree is better than a humanities degree; it depends on the standards of the department. There are many STEM graduates who end up working as lab techs, not making enough to repay student loans.

            Some of the income reported for STEM graduates reflect the intellectual talents that are independent of the education they received at university, such as being able to read, write and calculate. My recent college graduate reports friends with engineering degrees applying to many jobs–it’s not a guarantee of a good-paying job.

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            1. Engineering is bad right now, job availability wise. Our would be engineer jumped sideways to another field. Where he’s making about the same, and it ain’t much.

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            2. So much this!

              So, when I started at my last job (2004) it was an “entry level” position. Easily could have gone to a new graduate (in fact the prior hire was a recent graduate). I asked for what I’d been making at my last, same type of work (a little higher), job. Expecting to get less. Not as much less as what I had to settle for (less than my 1990, actual “entry level”, starting salary).

              Now someone who knows more, tell me if $30k/year is enough to pay living expenses, and still have anything less to pay for their student loans? Note, dropping interest rates were NOT fully down by then. I could take this hit. My income was second household income. It was better than $0/year as unemployment had ran out (for reasons, needed, and not because we are or were spend thrifts). Most would be seeing their loans ballooning as their “minimum” school loan payments do not cover the interest.

              Now? Yes the numbers are different. I would not be surprised if the ratio is even worse skewed because costs of colleges inflation way outstrips the inflation of wages, especially entry level.

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                1. FYI, $30k isn’t even current minimum wage in Oregon.

                  Son makes a lot more than $50k, and he lives at home. Why? Because there isn’t a landlord that will rent to him without a co-signer, be it us as parents, or a roommate or two. Why? There is a calculated monthly expenses to net salary ratio that has to be met. He can’t meet that ratio standard. If he has to have a roommate then why not roommates that he can trust. Does he pay rent? Kidding right? Only child. As the saying goes “The kid gets everything/anything left”.

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          2. The foreign students aren’t themselves BAD.

            Sorry, Sarah, but the ones openly embracing Hamas are bad, and we don’t seem to be able to get rid of them.

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            2. They are not all or even most foreign students. We also should NOT have Chinese in the sciences, because China is a’hole.
              BUT there’s a lot of students from Europe, the Americas, Africa.

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    2. “Make credits transferable. That is such a basic issue, I’m shocked educational pundits haven’t made it a core goal.“

      –

      Don’t allow credits to expire. If a class being taken depends on knowledge from a class taken years ago, the student will know quickly if they still remember that material or not. What they are saying is “No one will remember material from years ago. So those credits expire. Even if those credits have nothing to do with your degree.” Wrong on so many levels. If something is dependent on a prior class, those that need to retake will do so voluntarily. If it doesn’t matter? Count the credits toward the degree. Used to be that way. My second bachelors was dependent on carrying forward credits finished over 10 years before (second bachelors finished 10 years and 3 months, after the first one. Some credits were 15 years old.)

      We needed 204 hours total to get our forest management degrees. Last two terms I was taking fill classes to make those 204 hours. Probably some of the most fun had. Not easy “A” fun classes either. Well they were for me. But not basket weaving, etc., classes. The Geology lab, my roommate, another forester, and I, ended up teaching the Arial Photography introduction in the lab. The TA hadn’t had the class yet. Geology majors took that class as graduates. Forestry majors took that our sophomore year, and use the information regularly in subsequent classes, plus both of us had used the photos at our summer jobs. This was pre computer, using Stereoscopic.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. College credits . . . Spent 35+ years as a field(service) engineer without a college degree. I was told that in my field the .gov(that I ended my career days working for) considered every four years in a field like mine the equivalent of one year in college, so what does 35 years mean. Not that I ever cared.

        Currently the daughter is working with the graduating home-schooled granddaughter (who is mildly autistic); both of them trying figure out what she wants to do next

        Liked by 1 person

    3. Make credits transferable. That is such a basic issue, I’m shocked educational pundits haven’t made it a core goal.

      I thought of a way to do it– condition of accreditation.

      If you’re an accredited school, you have to accept transfer credits. If you turn it down, you must justify, on your dime, why it’s not accepted, and publicly post it.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. How about adding “must accept credit transfer from anyone accredited by the same organization” then “If you turn it down, you must justify, on your dime, why it’s not accepted, and publicly post it.”

        Liked by 1 person

    4. The gov’t should work out a reasonable cap on college costs. 

      The cost of college is actually one that would eventually be solved by removing federal student loans from the equation.

      Federal students loans provide a near-infinite pool of money for colleges, limited only by how many students they can enroll.

      The amounts offered to students (the student choose how much of the offered amount to take each semester) are usually on the order of a year or two worth of wages, that can only be disbursed through the university, and from which the university takes its cut for tuition and fees first, before the student sees any of it.

      Given this, there is every incentive for colleges to jack up their prices to the maximum they think they can get away with.

      And there is no incentive whatsoever to rein in what they charge, because their students are the ones on the hook for the money, because, legally, the universities aren’t party to any loans between the feds and their students.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. “The cost of college is actually one that would eventually be solved by removing federal student loans from the equation.”

        This. That’s all that’s needed. Remove student loans. Remove the need for the “paper” to get a job?

        Colleges will go back down to a reasonable price. My guess too is that they’ll become the home of true scholars.

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  44. I have ideas. We have to fix so very much of the system.A. We have administration top-heavy colleges. As in the pace of growth of administration is several times that of teaching positions. Well over half of every dollar goes to admin, NOT teaching. That isn’t sustainable.B. We make no distinction for which degrees we give out loans and aid. We should. The government keeps track of job markets – we shouldn’t fund degrees for which there is no market. Sure – you can major in underwater basket weaving – as long as YOU pay for it.C. We don’t hold colleges accountable for results. WAY too many kids have loans for unfinished degrees. We need to be looking at graduation rates and post graduation employment rates. You don’t get the kids through school, and they can’t get a job if they do get through? No eligibility for student aid for your school, then.D. And perhaps this should be first of all – FIX PUBLIC EDUCATION. You can’t have successful college students if they aren’t prepared to go. You can’t expect college remedial classes to fix the unprepared – if they need remedial education, they don’t belong there. Not yet.E. There are a whole lot of really really stupid classes out there. Again, if you want to take a class about Harry Potter or the sexual preferences of gay tap dancers – it should be on YOUR dime, no loans or gov’t aid for that. Colleges should focus on job prep, civic education, real history and science.

    F. You should be able to go for a streamlined degree without all the gen eds if they don’t directly impact your major. I.e. yes, STEM needs a certain amount of math. Medicine needs basic biology. You should be able to write standard English for any profession. They DON’T need literary analysis, art, or 90% of the rest of the gen eds.

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  45. I have ideas. We have to fix so very much of the system.A. We have administration top-heavy colleges. As in the pace of growth of administration is several times that of teaching positions. Well over half of every dollar goes to admin, NOT teaching. That isn’t sustainable.B. We make no distinction for which degrees we give out loans and aid. We should. The government keeps track of job markets – we shouldn’t fund degrees for which there is no market. Sure – you can major in underwater basket weaving – as long as YOU pay for it.C. We don’t hold colleges accountable for results. WAY too many kids have loans for unfinished degrees. We need to be looking at graduation rates and post graduation employment rates. You don’t get the kids through school, and they can’t get a job if they do get through? No eligibility for student aid for your school, then.D. And perhaps this should be first of all – FIX PUBLIC EDUCATION. You can’t have successful college students if they aren’t prepared to go. You can’t expect college remedial classes to fix the unprepared – if they need remedial education, they don’t belong there. Not yet.E. There are a whole lot of really really stupid classes out there. Again, if you want to take a class about Harry Potter or the sexual preferences of gay tap dancers – it should be on YOUR dime, no loans or gov’t aid for that. Colleges should focus on job prep, civic education, real history and science.

    F. You should be able to go for a streamlined degree without all the gen eds if they don’t directly impact your major. I.e. yes, STEM needs a certain amount of math. Medicine needs basic biology. You should be able to write standard English for any profession. They DON’T need literary analysis, art, or 90% of the rest of the gen eds.

    Liked by 1 person

  46. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » DID YOU KNOW THAT BIDEN’S “STUDENT LOAN FORGIVING” ACTUALLY WAS A SCAM: Most of what he forgave, he

  47. I agree pretty much 100% with Sarah. It’s a problem we “didn’t start”, and it’s now everyone’s problem. How to solve it? I surely don’t know, but I do know we have some pretty smart (and wise!) people who could figure something out. Off the top of my head something like “Universities pay some, outstanding borrowers pay some, paid-off borrowers get a small tax credit, and the rest goes -POOF- into the ether and we remind ourselves to never do it again.”

    I don’t care that “it’s hard”. You’re not going to teach ethical responsibility to someone who’s angry and afraid.

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    1. Please understand the debt has been paid. All the debt, including some probably not yet incurred. The way they keep altering the deal and “losing” what you just paid, the older debt slaves have already paid the principal for EVERYONE including people not born.
      EVEN if this were real money, and there were a real debt waiting to be paid.
      Instead, they’re using the payments now to prop up Obama care. That’s it.

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  48. I raised my daughter in the 90’s on $7.00 an hour and $400 a month child support. I paid my student loan.

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    1. We’re all incredibly proud of you. And you should be proud of yourself.

      But things cost less then. PARTICULARLY college tuition. Then Obama handed the the colleges piles and piles of just minted money and made it impossible to get out of those “loans” short of death for the kids used as intermediaries.
      “Weirdly” the price shot up.
      The fact you scraped and saved and got through doesn’t excuse you from noticing the government is keeping debt slaves now and making it impossible for them to escape.
      Kindly stop reading what’s written inside your eyelids, and be aware that conditions have changed. Or read the post. There’s an idea.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. So did we. It isn’t (*most) the “old” loans from the ’70s – ’90s that are the problem. It is the shenanigans they are pulling on loans now. Which frankly, is why we did not get loans for our son’s college late ’00s and early ’10s (didn’t know how bad it appears to be, but an itch that screamed “NO”!)

      When I got mine (late ’70s) the loans were consolidated on graduation (we, parents and I, tracked consolidation from get go), and (fixed) interest didn’t start until 6 months after graduation. Interest rate was the (deferred, not accumulating) interest rate when getting the first loan the first year. My “standard” payment paid accumulated interest + principle, just like a car or home. Just like a car or home, the amount of interest included in the payment decreases overtime. One can drop the principle faster by paying more than the “minimum” payment. We also had a “this is how much you need, by *date*, to pay to pay off the loan” on every statement. During the loan payment period, neither of us worked all year. For a good portion of it, I wasn’t working at all and back in school (not accumulating more loans). Hubby’s loan was scheduled the same way (lower amount, less interest percentage).

      (Reading between the lines) Sounds like loan payments that get people into trouble are ones that the minimum payments aren’t paying the interest accumulating, let alone anything toward the principle. Any “extra” payment goes toward the accumulating interest not the principle. Accumulating interest means ultimately paying interest on interest. If I had to make any comparison it would be credit card debt. Make minimum payment on a credit card and you are digging yourself a hole that the companies impossible to get out of paying the minimum payment.

      My added 2 cents, FWIW.

      (*) Most because who knows when PTB started pulling their shenanigans.

      Liked by 1 person

  49. Anyone still paying on an old loan needs to ask for the paperwork. The consolidation program was likely to cure missing paperwork. I know of a person whose college student loan was written off because the institution could not produce the signature page.

    Liked by 2 people

  50. My wife and I are 66 years old. I am a full time organic dairy farmer, I graduated the school of hard knocks and from “yes Dad” school. My wife is an occupational therapist. She graduated from OSU with a 3 year degree. almost no debt worked her way through. Today to be an OT is a 6 YEAR program, talk about INFLATION. Burn it down, confiscate the huge endowments and pay the bills. The Ivy league schools have so much money in endowments that they could pay for all of the students tuition from the interest alone.

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    1. All of this. AND Trump has done the needful and made it possible to have tests for jobs again. So let’s shut the nonsense down and move on.

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        1. I had a scholarship for them! (No, I didn’t take it. Sigh. I was, am and will remain A Nidiot. — our kid thought that An Idiot was A Nidiot and it was some kind of tribe. He was … 4? To this day we say “I am A Nidiot.” Then pound chest. “Proud Tribe.” Same kid we thought eggs were Yeggs. “give me the eggs.” …. you see the confusion? Yes, we also put Yeggs on the grocery list. being a parent breaks your mind, I swear.)

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          1. There is a video blog by a father (joined by wife for EOW for what triggered their children as “worst parents in the world” WPITW), who states “toddlers should be in charge of naming, everything”. He uses his 8 year old as a translator for the 4 year old and toddler. Occasionally the 8 year old uses the 4 year old as an intermediate translator for the toddler. Ex. Dad gives up, calls in 8 year old, 8 year old listens to 2 year old, looks at dad and says “I’ve got nothing”, so calls in the 4 year old.

            One was the 4 year old out of the blue says “we need a pickle and frog”. Dad, um, has kid repeat. Goes get pickles. Kid says “No. Pickle and frog.” Dad get 8 year old. Eight year old listens, sees dad has pickles. Obviously not pickles. Asks “what does pickle and frog do?” Four year old makes biking moves. Translation “Peletron”. Blink.

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  51. Sarah,

    I will respectfully disagree with your solution as written.

    Reagan once said the biggest mistake of his presidency was the amnesty for illegal immigrants. This was not because he was heartless, but because congress lied. It was supposed to be a compromise he game amnesty and then congress took action to stop illegal immigration. Instead he got played like a sucker and congress did nothing.

    Now I will agree with you that government needs to get out of higher education (and preferably K12 also). I agree with you that this would bring down the price to make college more affordable for everyone, but as a student of history I can’t agree to your proposal as written. If they FIRST cancel all government spending on higher education, not just student loans, I could see after 5 years cancelling all loans that are not behind in payments. But if you don’t end the spending first it will never end.

    Sincerly,

    Ed

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    1. You are missing my solution. Yes, we should forgive the loans. BUT FIRST we should get the government out of student loans and PERMANENTLY.
      Mind you, even that only because Trump has already taken the legs from out of it with taking out the disparate impact clause.
      This means in the next ten years, tests for jobs will come back in and the colleges will be irrelevant.
      OTHERWISE some idiot would invent government guaranteed student loans again.
      So I don’t think we disagree. I just didn’t make it explicit — my bad — I want the thing shut down. Actually I want it shut down NOW because people are still falling into the cement mixer.

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      1. Um. I thought you’ve been clear about what you think should happen then what probably will follow, but not by governmental requirement or prevention.

        One “adjustment” has been the temp to hire in place now for at least 30 years, even for professional positions. Doesn’t matter if going through temp agencies or not, right to work states or not. Length of time can vary too (usually 6 months through temp agencies locally).

        I avoided using temp agencies getting my last job, but did not avoid a 6 month “test period”.

        Son (’12 college graduate), with the non-degree “required” jobs he got he had to go through a temp agency. The professional degree jobs that were head hunting him also required going through a temp agency, even though the two working with him physically walked his resume into HR (not anyone’s fault that the degree jobs didn’t materialize, not when the companies evaporate!)

        Liked by 1 person

    1. I’m not. He’s lying. Taxpayers need repay nothing. This was just the government giving money to universities. There is no debt. It’s been inflated away. The debt slaves are a decoy.
      NO TAXES. Just stop whipping the debt-slaves for money they NEVER had. (And certainly didn’t receive the value of.)

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      1. Of COURSE he’s lying; he’s an Illinois Nazicrat. And I HATE Illinois Nazicrats…..

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