Encouraging everyone to go to college has been an underrated policy failure. It's driven up degree requirements for jobs, put thousands of people in tons of debt, driven up the cost of college, and enflamed the "woke" ideology that everyone hates. I thought I heard that, of adults entering the workforce in 2022, 50% had a college degree, way up from what we've seen in past decades.
I'm gonna pull some numbers straight from my ass, but it would be probably be better if only like 15% of entering workers had a college degree. College could be a lot more exclusive, and I degree would actually mean something. Employers would have to drop jobs requirements or even (gasp) train workers on their own dime.
As a consequence of colleges being limited to only the smartest 15-ish percent, they could also cut all the nonsense associated with them, as they wouldn't have to market to the marginal student anymore. We'd cut a ton of remediation as well.
I think this would bridge some of our cultural divide as well, I just don't see people saying "math is white supremacy." in a world where only 15% have a college degree.
My wife is one of these grad school borrowers. When I met my wife she owed $350k in undergrad and medical school loans. She couldn’t pay much during residency, so the interest kept accumulating. By the time she’s done she will have paid about $500k.
The result is that we have good cash flow but spend 1/3 on loans and 1/3 on taxes. We rent a cramped apartment and can’t even think about home ownership until we’re nearly 50. We pay our bills without issue but we’re behind on saving (in part because we both have graduate degrees and started our careers in our 30s).
I don’t believe we should be prioritized for relief—and it wouldn’t help us anyway, because we were coerced into refinancing by high interest rates. It’s all private and Biden can’t help us.
But it’s wrong that my wife has to pay half a million dollars. It causes a lot of pressure and stress, and if (god forbid) something happens and she can’t practice, we’re fucked.
Anyway, I favor actions to help all borrowers. Do something about high interest rates, and don’t tax us on $150k when we pay $48k to Sofi each year. This will help everyone and decrease resentment among those who have massive debt but don’t qualify for forgiveness.
These policies would also be sustainable, unlike a one-time forgiveness that doesn’t change anything.
Progressives are claiming a huge amount of spending will "help the poor" But is really just a pay off to their well-educated upper-middle class (and, yes, mostly white) base? Must be a day ending in Y.
That being said there are a lot we can do to help alleviate student loan debt. One would be to unsecure student loan debt. No one wants to do this because Banks would absolutely lose their shit over it. Can you imagine? If you could Bankrupt out of your student debt like you can every other terrible decision you make?
Right now I could buy a massively overpriced house, take out massive credit card debt, buy two cars, a jet ski and start a business selling fidget spinners (in 2022!). Look around and say "oh, I may have overextended myself. Please judge can I just have 7 years in the penalty box and start over?" The bankruptcy court would look at what I own, liquidate the things I didn't NEED and determine what I could reasonably pay back. The thing is, if I were pulling in six-figures a year the court would just say "pay your debts sir!"
For some reason, in this country, we decided that a college degree is so important that we need to make this debt special. It's a special kind of debt that you can't make go away. You can't throw yourself on the mercy of the court because a really hot girl gave you a tour of a college and you thought majoring in "19th century women's Literature" at 40,000 a year would get you laid.
Now the consequences of that would be that banks stop giving out loans for majors that they don't think would actually be an "asset." Good! Those majors would either go away (again, good!) or those majors would be drastically reduced on price once the gravy train ran out of gravy.
Colleges know this! They don't want this. They rely on super secured easily available credit for their whole business model to run. It's a literal racket. They are the racketeers.
Banks don't want this! College loans are the most secure thing they can give out! It's not like they can repossess it if you don't make payments. This is why Student loan companies don't usually negotiate "deals" like you can get with credit card companies. If you're delinquent on Credit cards they will bend over backwards to get "anything" from you. "Listen we know you owe 6000 but seriously we'll take 900! Just give us anything please!" Because you have leverage to tell them to fuck off. Yeah it affects your credit but you can literally ignore it if you want. Student loans have so much baked in power. They can attach your wages and all kinds of other stuff.
Politicians don't want this! Imagine running on the fact that you oversaw college admission go down? And you treated it as if it was a good thing? You'd get eaten alive. Except that's exactly what would happen. Admission would go down. Across the board. Colleges would close (good, we have too many). And a lot of those fancy majors that have no real world applications would become 100 dollar a month Masterclasses like they always should have been.
College should go back to being what it was always for. Specialization. It shouldn't be treated as an extra 4 years of high school with the bonus of improving your resume. "Free college" doesn't help the problem it makes it worse. Sheepskin effect and all.
It's 2022. Education is already essentially "free." (I could literally put together a syllabus of free youtube videos that would cover as much or more material than any 4 year degree!) It's degrees that have become to expensive.
Blanket forgiveness doesn't solve a single issue in higher education. It just makes the issue go a way for a bit. It'd be like going to the doctor for tennis elbow and they cut your arm off. Sure, your elbow doesn't hurt anymore but it sure would be nice to still have that arm. It did serve some use after all!
This drives me crazy. A few people try to point it out - which you have done so well - but how is THIS not the primary argument being debated. Not whether, but who and how. Also, I have not heard any simultaneous drive to change the system such that we aren’t right back here 10 years from now. The moral hazard is screaming.
Go back to the 70s when the government had minimal involvement, college living was simple, and people could declare bankruptcy if they wanted to.
But the Worst Possible Solution is to somehow cancel the debt going forward without fixing the college cost problem. It follows up one bad signal ("go to college, who cares about the cost?") with a worse one ("go to college, yeah it costs a lot but that debt will all disappear anyway").
The downside of encouraging everyone to go to college is evident now in sky-high tuition rates, a shortage of skilled labor, and a glut of highly indebted college graduates with no commercially relevant skills.
I do think that if we are going to bailing out gender studies baristas then the colleges that educated these people should share in the cost. Endowments are flush, and colleges made a lot of money on these people.
How did we get here? Why did the cost of college rise over the last 20 years at the same rate as Marlboro Lights? College is roughly 4x more expensive today than it was in 1996. Xboxes meanwhile only rose by 1.6x. RROD notwithstanding.
If an 18 year old goes to buy an $80K BMW, he will have to demonstrate to the lender how he intends to pay back the loan.
Why is there not similar underwriting for college loans? Not to knock the much maligned Gender Studies degree, but to use that as an example - certainly the world needs a few people with Gender Studies degree - shouldn't the acceptance of such programs be at least partly related to the demand for the degree?
That should be one of the most highly competitive degrees out there - make the thousands of kids hoping to borrow $80,000 to study gender go through a rigorous elimination so the 5 or 6 legitimate career spots available been pre-filtered to 10 or so of the brightest young minds ready to tackle this crucial topic. Apply similary to Engineering, Anthropology, Medicine, History, Art Theory, etc.
Additionally anyone applying for a college loan must pass a quiz where they need to complete the amortization schedule for their degree and compute the ROI (can be open note, open book).
Side note, I believe something like 10% of the money we printed for Covid relief could have wiped out 100% of all student debt. While I disagree with the use of the money for that purpose, it arguably would have had a better return on investment than our disastrous covid spending. (even a zero return on invesmtent would have been better)
I was right! My spouse and I were arguing this topic, and I expressed my skepticism that blanket student loan debt forgiveness would be the claimed panacea, but had no graphics to back up my stance. Now I can convene a followup. Thanks, Jeff!
All this discussion about the obvious hypocrisy of some liberals, and judging how loan forgiveness may or may not match progressive ideals, and not a word about whether even part of what could be a trillion dollar handout is (1) a proper role of our government or (2) a sensible thing to do in a macro economic and social context. Also, not a word about if such a move a few months before midterm elections is a fairly naked attempt to buy votes.
First, rich people are likely to get rich anyway (as you point out). So, in reality, all forgiving their debt really costs us is they get there faster (so maybe just an income equality fix is needed)... Plus, if we're a tiny bit optimistic about the state of humanity, maybe that lawyer, free of a big student loan won't feel they need to put on white shoes and become a prick, so maybe they'll go do more community-centric things with their education instead? ... Regardless, poor people, caught up in some inevitably-overcomplex means test, will suffer their entire adult life with a student loan. You measure the relative loan values of rich vs poor people, but it's much harder to measure the relative life value a forgiven loan provides to a rich vs a poor person. Maybe the price of forgiving the debt to a few trust-fund wankers is just the negliable cost of making it seamless and easy for people in a worse position to completely change their life outcome?
And, my second thought is, what is the value of an educated population? It's hard to forcast a generation ahead, but I've never heard a single economist say "we can increase our country's wealth by making our population dumber over the next couple of decades"... Sure, there's some drop-outs and the employee advantage of an 'education' might drop as more people have one. But, is that not a good thing? Don't you want as much of your population to be bad-ass brain-boxes who can build rocket ships, and who get intellectually frustrated enough flipping burgers so they build a robot to do that job instead?
Minor point in an article I otherwise found both educational AND entertaining:
> I’d like to point out that about 13 percent of Americans holding student debt means that about 87 percent of Americans don’t give a fat frog’s ass about student debt
Firstly, it’s possible for people to give a shit about things that don’t directly affect them. Secondly, the economy as a whole would benefit if fewer people were trapped in usurious student loan repayment deals.
Apart from that, very interesting and thought-provoking article 👍🏼
"Americans take eight years to become doctors. Irishmen can do it in four, and achieve the same result. Each year of higher education at a good school – let’s say an Ivy, doctors don’t study at Podunk Community College – costs about $50,000. So American medical students are paying an extra $200,000 for…what?"
"To paraphrase Dirkson, $200,000 here, $200,000 there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money. 20,000 doctors graduate in the United States each year; that means the total yearly cost of requiring doctors to have undergraduate degrees is $4 billion. That’s most of the amount of money you’d need to house every homeless person in the country ($10,000 to house one homeless x 600,000 homeless)."
"I want to be able to say people have noticed the Irish/American discrepancy and are thinking hard about it. I can say that. Just not in the way I would like. Many of the elder doctors I talked to in Ireland wanted to switch to the American system. Not because they thought it would give them better doctors. Just because they said it was more fun working with medical students like myself who were older and a little wiser. The Irish medical students were just out of high school and hard to relate to – us foreigners were four years older than that and had one or another undergraduate subject under our belts. One of my attendings said that it was nice having me around because I’d studied Philosophy in college and that gave our team a touch of class. A touch of class!"
"This is why, despite my reservations about libertarianism, it’s not-libertarianism that really scares me. Whenever some people without skin in the game are allowed to make decisions for other people, you end up with a bunch of elderly doctors getting together, think “Yeah, things do seem a little classier around here if we make people who are not us pay $200,000, make it so,” and then there goes the money that should have housed all the homeless people in the country."
"But more important, it also destroyed my last shred of hope that the current mania for requiring college degrees for everything had a good reason behind it."
"presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed universal free college tuition."
"On the one hand, I sympathize with his goals. If you can’t get any job better than ‘fast food worker’ without a college degree, and poor people can’t afford college degrees, that’s a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor."
"On the other hand, if can’t you get married without a tulip, and poor people can’t afford tulips, that’s also a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor."
"But the solution isn’t universal tulip subsidies."
"If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care."
Rewrite all remaining loans. Recalculate remaining loans as if they had a .5 to1% interest rate and no interest added during deferment. Any amounts paid over the recalculated loans goes to principal reduction. No interest or principal payments need be made by anyone in a public service job (teachers/police/armed services etc.) and their debts fully cancelled after 7-10 years of service.
US government support/owns all student loans, buyout remaining private loans.
Change the way colleges/universities work. Tuition should be for a degree or a years successful advancement towards a degree, not for a certain number of classes. So someone could keep taking classes with no further costs until they have a years worth of successful advancement or a degree.
This is why I would favour a change to an income-based payment for college rather than a loan system.
College should be free (which is what full loan forgiveness means) if it works like high school, ie most people get it and the quality is similar* for most people, with possibly some private options that are not free.
The biggest problem with any college finance system is that lots of graduates never earn enough to pay off their loans, which means you need a very high interest rate to extract enough money from those who do pay them off to cover for the 20% or more than pay very little (dropouts, a small number who never get jobs, people who become disabled, people who get stuck in dead-end jobs, etc) - and that high interest rate itself means that the next tier up are also unable to cover their payments. However, people who do get high incomes pay off their loans relatively quickly and so pay far less interest than those in the middle tier. If you earn $75,000 a year, you pay off your student loans slowly with a lot of interest. If you earn $250,000 a year, you pay off sooner and pay far less interest. If you earn $20,000, you never pay the loan off.
The best solution is an income-based payment system, so people on low incomes are not endlessly negotiating over payments they clearly can't afford, people on middle incomes get payments they are able to pay, and people on high incomes make large payments.
Instead of basing the amount you pay on the amount you borrow, base the percentage of income on the amount you borrowed - so people who did expensive masters and doctoral degrees pay a bigger percentage of their later income - and then get rid of the idea of "paying off" the loan, but instead just make payments for a fixed number of years (30?). This is more like equity (or tax) than a loan. That way, a small number of very rich people will make large payments, covering for the large number of low income people who make little or no payment at all, and meaning that people on middling incomes only really have to cover their own education, rather than paying most of the interest that covers the people on low incomes.
To make this point much simpler: people on low incomes can't pay. Someone else has to. If it's paid through interest, then that's people on middle incomes (middle for graduates, that is); if it's done through a equity/tax approach, then it's people on high incomes. Some people's degrees turn out to be worth a lot more, so it seems fair to me that they are the ones who should cover for the cost of delivering the degrees to the people who don't do well out of their degree.
* I know that some high schools are better than others, but that is generally agreed to be a weakness in the high school system, whereas no-one thinks that the differences between flagship state universities and community colleges in the same state are things that should be resolved.
Encouraging everyone to go to college has been an underrated policy failure. It's driven up degree requirements for jobs, put thousands of people in tons of debt, driven up the cost of college, and enflamed the "woke" ideology that everyone hates. I thought I heard that, of adults entering the workforce in 2022, 50% had a college degree, way up from what we've seen in past decades.
I'm gonna pull some numbers straight from my ass, but it would be probably be better if only like 15% of entering workers had a college degree. College could be a lot more exclusive, and I degree would actually mean something. Employers would have to drop jobs requirements or even (gasp) train workers on their own dime.
As a consequence of colleges being limited to only the smartest 15-ish percent, they could also cut all the nonsense associated with them, as they wouldn't have to market to the marginal student anymore. We'd cut a ton of remediation as well.
I think this would bridge some of our cultural divide as well, I just don't see people saying "math is white supremacy." in a world where only 15% have a college degree.
My wife is one of these grad school borrowers. When I met my wife she owed $350k in undergrad and medical school loans. She couldn’t pay much during residency, so the interest kept accumulating. By the time she’s done she will have paid about $500k.
The result is that we have good cash flow but spend 1/3 on loans and 1/3 on taxes. We rent a cramped apartment and can’t even think about home ownership until we’re nearly 50. We pay our bills without issue but we’re behind on saving (in part because we both have graduate degrees and started our careers in our 30s).
I don’t believe we should be prioritized for relief—and it wouldn’t help us anyway, because we were coerced into refinancing by high interest rates. It’s all private and Biden can’t help us.
But it’s wrong that my wife has to pay half a million dollars. It causes a lot of pressure and stress, and if (god forbid) something happens and she can’t practice, we’re fucked.
Anyway, I favor actions to help all borrowers. Do something about high interest rates, and don’t tax us on $150k when we pay $48k to Sofi each year. This will help everyone and decrease resentment among those who have massive debt but don’t qualify for forgiveness.
These policies would also be sustainable, unlike a one-time forgiveness that doesn’t change anything.
Progressives are claiming a huge amount of spending will "help the poor" But is really just a pay off to their well-educated upper-middle class (and, yes, mostly white) base? Must be a day ending in Y.
That being said there are a lot we can do to help alleviate student loan debt. One would be to unsecure student loan debt. No one wants to do this because Banks would absolutely lose their shit over it. Can you imagine? If you could Bankrupt out of your student debt like you can every other terrible decision you make?
Right now I could buy a massively overpriced house, take out massive credit card debt, buy two cars, a jet ski and start a business selling fidget spinners (in 2022!). Look around and say "oh, I may have overextended myself. Please judge can I just have 7 years in the penalty box and start over?" The bankruptcy court would look at what I own, liquidate the things I didn't NEED and determine what I could reasonably pay back. The thing is, if I were pulling in six-figures a year the court would just say "pay your debts sir!"
For some reason, in this country, we decided that a college degree is so important that we need to make this debt special. It's a special kind of debt that you can't make go away. You can't throw yourself on the mercy of the court because a really hot girl gave you a tour of a college and you thought majoring in "19th century women's Literature" at 40,000 a year would get you laid.
Now the consequences of that would be that banks stop giving out loans for majors that they don't think would actually be an "asset." Good! Those majors would either go away (again, good!) or those majors would be drastically reduced on price once the gravy train ran out of gravy.
Colleges know this! They don't want this. They rely on super secured easily available credit for their whole business model to run. It's a literal racket. They are the racketeers.
Banks don't want this! College loans are the most secure thing they can give out! It's not like they can repossess it if you don't make payments. This is why Student loan companies don't usually negotiate "deals" like you can get with credit card companies. If you're delinquent on Credit cards they will bend over backwards to get "anything" from you. "Listen we know you owe 6000 but seriously we'll take 900! Just give us anything please!" Because you have leverage to tell them to fuck off. Yeah it affects your credit but you can literally ignore it if you want. Student loans have so much baked in power. They can attach your wages and all kinds of other stuff.
Politicians don't want this! Imagine running on the fact that you oversaw college admission go down? And you treated it as if it was a good thing? You'd get eaten alive. Except that's exactly what would happen. Admission would go down. Across the board. Colleges would close (good, we have too many). And a lot of those fancy majors that have no real world applications would become 100 dollar a month Masterclasses like they always should have been.
College should go back to being what it was always for. Specialization. It shouldn't be treated as an extra 4 years of high school with the bonus of improving your resume. "Free college" doesn't help the problem it makes it worse. Sheepskin effect and all.
It's 2022. Education is already essentially "free." (I could literally put together a syllabus of free youtube videos that would cover as much or more material than any 4 year degree!) It's degrees that have become to expensive.
Blanket forgiveness doesn't solve a single issue in higher education. It just makes the issue go a way for a bit. It'd be like going to the doctor for tennis elbow and they cut your arm off. Sure, your elbow doesn't hurt anymore but it sure would be nice to still have that arm. It did serve some use after all!
This drives me crazy. A few people try to point it out - which you have done so well - but how is THIS not the primary argument being debated. Not whether, but who and how. Also, I have not heard any simultaneous drive to change the system such that we aren’t right back here 10 years from now. The moral hazard is screaming.
Go back to the 70s when the government had minimal involvement, college living was simple, and people could declare bankruptcy if they wanted to.
But the Worst Possible Solution is to somehow cancel the debt going forward without fixing the college cost problem. It follows up one bad signal ("go to college, who cares about the cost?") with a worse one ("go to college, yeah it costs a lot but that debt will all disappear anyway").
The downside of encouraging everyone to go to college is evident now in sky-high tuition rates, a shortage of skilled labor, and a glut of highly indebted college graduates with no commercially relevant skills.
I do think that if we are going to bailing out gender studies baristas then the colleges that educated these people should share in the cost. Endowments are flush, and colleges made a lot of money on these people.
How did we get here? Why did the cost of college rise over the last 20 years at the same rate as Marlboro Lights? College is roughly 4x more expensive today than it was in 1996. Xboxes meanwhile only rose by 1.6x. RROD notwithstanding.
If an 18 year old goes to buy an $80K BMW, he will have to demonstrate to the lender how he intends to pay back the loan.
Why is there not similar underwriting for college loans? Not to knock the much maligned Gender Studies degree, but to use that as an example - certainly the world needs a few people with Gender Studies degree - shouldn't the acceptance of such programs be at least partly related to the demand for the degree?
That should be one of the most highly competitive degrees out there - make the thousands of kids hoping to borrow $80,000 to study gender go through a rigorous elimination so the 5 or 6 legitimate career spots available been pre-filtered to 10 or so of the brightest young minds ready to tackle this crucial topic. Apply similary to Engineering, Anthropology, Medicine, History, Art Theory, etc.
Additionally anyone applying for a college loan must pass a quiz where they need to complete the amortization schedule for their degree and compute the ROI (can be open note, open book).
Side note, I believe something like 10% of the money we printed for Covid relief could have wiped out 100% of all student debt. While I disagree with the use of the money for that purpose, it arguably would have had a better return on investment than our disastrous covid spending. (even a zero return on invesmtent would have been better)
I was right! My spouse and I were arguing this topic, and I expressed my skepticism that blanket student loan debt forgiveness would be the claimed panacea, but had no graphics to back up my stance. Now I can convene a followup. Thanks, Jeff!
All this discussion about the obvious hypocrisy of some liberals, and judging how loan forgiveness may or may not match progressive ideals, and not a word about whether even part of what could be a trillion dollar handout is (1) a proper role of our government or (2) a sensible thing to do in a macro economic and social context. Also, not a word about if such a move a few months before midterm elections is a fairly naked attempt to buy votes.
I had a couple of thoughts about this.
First, rich people are likely to get rich anyway (as you point out). So, in reality, all forgiving their debt really costs us is they get there faster (so maybe just an income equality fix is needed)... Plus, if we're a tiny bit optimistic about the state of humanity, maybe that lawyer, free of a big student loan won't feel they need to put on white shoes and become a prick, so maybe they'll go do more community-centric things with their education instead? ... Regardless, poor people, caught up in some inevitably-overcomplex means test, will suffer their entire adult life with a student loan. You measure the relative loan values of rich vs poor people, but it's much harder to measure the relative life value a forgiven loan provides to a rich vs a poor person. Maybe the price of forgiving the debt to a few trust-fund wankers is just the negliable cost of making it seamless and easy for people in a worse position to completely change their life outcome?
And, my second thought is, what is the value of an educated population? It's hard to forcast a generation ahead, but I've never heard a single economist say "we can increase our country's wealth by making our population dumber over the next couple of decades"... Sure, there's some drop-outs and the employee advantage of an 'education' might drop as more people have one. But, is that not a good thing? Don't you want as much of your population to be bad-ass brain-boxes who can build rocket ships, and who get intellectually frustrated enough flipping burgers so they build a robot to do that job instead?
Minor point in an article I otherwise found both educational AND entertaining:
> I’d like to point out that about 13 percent of Americans holding student debt means that about 87 percent of Americans don’t give a fat frog’s ass about student debt
Firstly, it’s possible for people to give a shit about things that don’t directly affect them. Secondly, the economy as a whole would benefit if fewer people were trapped in usurious student loan repayment deals.
Apart from that, very interesting and thought-provoking article 👍🏼
About higher education through, it's really ridiculous that it costs significant amount of money slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/
"Americans take eight years to become doctors. Irishmen can do it in four, and achieve the same result. Each year of higher education at a good school – let’s say an Ivy, doctors don’t study at Podunk Community College – costs about $50,000. So American medical students are paying an extra $200,000 for…what?"
"To paraphrase Dirkson, $200,000 here, $200,000 there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money. 20,000 doctors graduate in the United States each year; that means the total yearly cost of requiring doctors to have undergraduate degrees is $4 billion. That’s most of the amount of money you’d need to house every homeless person in the country ($10,000 to house one homeless x 600,000 homeless)."
"I want to be able to say people have noticed the Irish/American discrepancy and are thinking hard about it. I can say that. Just not in the way I would like. Many of the elder doctors I talked to in Ireland wanted to switch to the American system. Not because they thought it would give them better doctors. Just because they said it was more fun working with medical students like myself who were older and a little wiser. The Irish medical students were just out of high school and hard to relate to – us foreigners were four years older than that and had one or another undergraduate subject under our belts. One of my attendings said that it was nice having me around because I’d studied Philosophy in college and that gave our team a touch of class. A touch of class!"
"This is why, despite my reservations about libertarianism, it’s not-libertarianism that really scares me. Whenever some people without skin in the game are allowed to make decisions for other people, you end up with a bunch of elderly doctors getting together, think “Yeah, things do seem a little classier around here if we make people who are not us pay $200,000, make it so,” and then there goes the money that should have housed all the homeless people in the country."
"But more important, it also destroyed my last shred of hope that the current mania for requiring college degrees for everything had a good reason behind it."
"presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed universal free college tuition."
"On the one hand, I sympathize with his goals. If you can’t get any job better than ‘fast food worker’ without a college degree, and poor people can’t afford college degrees, that’s a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor."
"On the other hand, if can’t you get married without a tulip, and poor people can’t afford tulips, that’s also a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor."
"But the solution isn’t universal tulip subsidies."
"If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care."
You had good tires in your TWENTIES???
Please tell me more about your life on Easy Street.
Cancel debt load for all up to 20K
Rewrite all remaining loans. Recalculate remaining loans as if they had a .5 to1% interest rate and no interest added during deferment. Any amounts paid over the recalculated loans goes to principal reduction. No interest or principal payments need be made by anyone in a public service job (teachers/police/armed services etc.) and their debts fully cancelled after 7-10 years of service.
US government support/owns all student loans, buyout remaining private loans.
Change the way colleges/universities work. Tuition should be for a degree or a years successful advancement towards a degree, not for a certain number of classes. So someone could keep taking classes with no further costs until they have a years worth of successful advancement or a degree.
This is why I would favour a change to an income-based payment for college rather than a loan system.
College should be free (which is what full loan forgiveness means) if it works like high school, ie most people get it and the quality is similar* for most people, with possibly some private options that are not free.
The biggest problem with any college finance system is that lots of graduates never earn enough to pay off their loans, which means you need a very high interest rate to extract enough money from those who do pay them off to cover for the 20% or more than pay very little (dropouts, a small number who never get jobs, people who become disabled, people who get stuck in dead-end jobs, etc) - and that high interest rate itself means that the next tier up are also unable to cover their payments. However, people who do get high incomes pay off their loans relatively quickly and so pay far less interest than those in the middle tier. If you earn $75,000 a year, you pay off your student loans slowly with a lot of interest. If you earn $250,000 a year, you pay off sooner and pay far less interest. If you earn $20,000, you never pay the loan off.
The best solution is an income-based payment system, so people on low incomes are not endlessly negotiating over payments they clearly can't afford, people on middle incomes get payments they are able to pay, and people on high incomes make large payments.
Instead of basing the amount you pay on the amount you borrow, base the percentage of income on the amount you borrowed - so people who did expensive masters and doctoral degrees pay a bigger percentage of their later income - and then get rid of the idea of "paying off" the loan, but instead just make payments for a fixed number of years (30?). This is more like equity (or tax) than a loan. That way, a small number of very rich people will make large payments, covering for the large number of low income people who make little or no payment at all, and meaning that people on middling incomes only really have to cover their own education, rather than paying most of the interest that covers the people on low incomes.
To make this point much simpler: people on low incomes can't pay. Someone else has to. If it's paid through interest, then that's people on middle incomes (middle for graduates, that is); if it's done through a equity/tax approach, then it's people on high incomes. Some people's degrees turn out to be worth a lot more, so it seems fair to me that they are the ones who should cover for the cost of delivering the degrees to the people who don't do well out of their degree.
* I know that some high schools are better than others, but that is generally agreed to be a weakness in the high school system, whereas no-one thinks that the differences between flagship state universities and community colleges in the same state are things that should be resolved.