Just to keep the poor out of studying or to get them in debt for the rest of their life, easy peasy round business…
We as an entire community, species even, let it happen.
It’s my firm belief that until we acknowledge this we are not moving forward. I’ve said this to downvotes on numerous related topics where the response is always “blame the government” or “blame the corporations” or “blame the billionaires”.
None of those excuses work because ultimately all of us are responsible for supporting a system that enables all those things and removes accountability from all but the ones who have no ability to change anything.
Collectively we need a good long look in the mirror about what is really important.
The other bigger problem is people have solutions. We’ve had solutions for decades if not centuries. Solutions no one wants to implement for a multitude of reasons of which a big one is “this is the way the system works”.
Fuck the system. The system is broken. We need to all come to that conclusion and then we can move forward.
We aren’t there yet.
One class is doing it to another.
I’ve stopped caring about shit like this because they get what? Another generation or 2 of offspring before the payback for all the shit we’ve done comes to roost? Great, some people’s kids will get to continue to believe we’re just fine while 95% of the planet burns ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
It all started when they outlawed bankruptcy discharging student loans. Cry and cry over “Lawyers will graduate from college then immediately declare bankruptcy on $5000 loans!”. Then, when they captured the students in inescapable debt, convinced everyone that college was the answer, and then Sallie May being put in charge of defaulted loans… being paid to collect… Federally guaranteed money… It’s like getting paid to get paid, perfect racket!
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My money is on government bailouts that are never gonna be payed back for the people running the institutions (not the teachers or any of the staff that actualy do things).
I am going to riot if there is another bailout, I am so sick of that shit. The government should be buying these distressed properties at fire sale prices, firing management for running it into the ground, and fining the boards for running it into the ground.
Maybe stop paying the coaches so much?
I agree, but that ain’t gonna fix $1.7 trillion in student loan debt.
this is a gross reality no one wants to admit… that the highest paid government officials in some states are coaches for state schools.
we prioritize sports and ‘revenue’ over education ever time. humans suck
In B4 TiCkEt SaLeS… as if the university couldn’t use that money for literally anything else.
Eh, that’s only an issue in D1 schools. Many elite universities don’t have that issue and they are still insanely expensive.
Ronald Reagan. That’s how this happened.
Not that simple. This got started before he took office, and it culminated long after he was out of office. Way more than one person is to blame.
https://www.tateesq.com/learn/student-loan-bankruptcy-law-history
Student loans first became nondischargeable in bankruptcy in 1976 due to an amendment in the Higher Education Act. Section 439A of this act made student loan debt non-dischargeable until five years after the start of the repayment period, except in cases of undue hardship. Over time, laws were tweaked and widened to reinforce this limitation.
This got started when he went after Berkeley as the candidate for governor of California, then became worse when he was governor, then other governors copied his playbook, then laws were enacted to roll it nationwide, then got worse when he became president. Prior to Reagan becoming governor of California all state universities were free for residents in California. Reagan hated this because it led to poor minorities being able to get an education, and he hated nothing more than he hated poor minorities.
You listened to this week’s Behind the Bastards too?
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
I was going to start watching that channel when it showed up in my feed, but then I decided against it because I don’t want to get more pissed off at everything than I already am.
It can be brutal for sure. Sometimes it’s shitheads from a while ago, so it doesn’t induce quite as much rage.
It comes to Reagan I feel bad for dementia having to be inside him.
I’m sad that he died unable to remember what a horrible person he was.
He never thought he was horrible, so instead celebrate he was confused and horrified at the end :D
Honestly I can’t think of a single other person who I heard about their dementia and thought ‘good’
Eat the rich.
Americans with income over $74,000 hold about 60% of the total public student loan debt
The holders of college debt are the rich in this scenario, lol. They’re sure a lot richer than all the taxpayers who never went to college, who will be the primary ones footing the bill for any college debt forgiveness that occurs.
$74K while they’re paying off student loans isn’t anything close to rich. Why are taxpayers who didn’t go to college footing the bill, is someone failing to make corporations and billionaires pay their fair share?
$74K while they’re paying off student loans isn’t anything close to rich.
It is compared to those not in college, and even moreso as time goes on–college grads make a million more over their lives than others.
Why are taxpayers who didn’t go to college footing the bill, is someone failing to make corporations and billionaires pay their fair share?
There’s no provision preventing the ~85% of the population who never went to college from having to pay, is there? No one’s handing only the even richer minority a bill for it.
Just like how income tax was first proposed as something only the rich would pay, but in reality the middle class pays the majority of it, this is no different.
This is such an idiotic take. It’s clear that you just want to rile people up with fear-driven rhetoric. “They’re stealing from you!” That kind of thing works with your you and your pals but not on people who understand the division in the class war waged against us doesn’t start at $74k while under a mountain of debt.
I have to pay taxes which go to government services I don’t always use. Welcome to society. That’s how it works.
By the way, could you link me to where you were screeching and whining about PPP loan forgiveness? I have a theory to test.
This is such an idiotic take.
It’s not a “take”, it’s a fact.
If you seriously think that NONE of the taxpayer money being used to forgive student loans is coming from the 85% of the non-college taxpaying population, and ALL of it is being paid for by the ultra-wealthy/billionaires, you’re just delusional.
I have to pay taxes which go to government services I don’t always use. Welcome to society. That’s how it works.
So first it’s adamantly denying that the non-college majority will be paying forgiven college students’ loans, and now it’s “actually, it’s good that they do”, lol.
Student loan forgiveness is regressive, period. It’s a wealth transfer from poorer to richer.
By the way, could you link me to where you were screeching and whining
Really pathetic attempt to devalue my factual statements. Ideologue tactics 101.
about PPP loan forgiveness?
All voluntary loans should be paid back by the borrower, and no taxpayer-funded forgiveness should exist. If anything, perhaps bring the loan to 0% interest, though that’s arguably still unfair to the lender.
I bet you really thought that was a gotcha, huh? I’m not one of your stupid stereotype boogeymen, stop pretending you know me.
We do know you. You are a clown pretending that student loan forgiveness is transferring wealth from the poor to the wealthy. You want to ensure education remains unavailable for poor people so the only opportunities they have are trades.
You want to pretend that paying taxes into the government means they’re funding these directly. Delusional. You cannot even read.
I wish they still taught basic civics in schools. Then people wouldn’t have to explain the basics to you.
No, I don’t want you pretending you’re against PPP forgiveness now, I want to see where you are grumpy enough about it at the time to complain about it. It’s easy for fellows like you to be consistent for a few hours at a time.
pretending that student loan forgiveness is transferring wealth from the poor to the wealthy.
Just because it’s not the poorEST to the wealthiEST doesn’t mean it’s not regressive.
It is–the recipients of the monetary handout are receiving it primarily from those who are poorer than them on average. The majority of people whose tax money will be paying this forgiveness, already have less wealth than those getting it.
These are objective facts.
Excluding the value of education from a calculation of net worth while including debt used to finance that education is like measuring a homeowner’s wealth by subtracting their mortgage but ignoring the value of the home itself. You’d find that homeowners were poorer than renters, and that people living in mansions were the poorest members of society.
That’s clearly wrong, yet advocates for debt forgiveness make the same mistake, arguing that recent college graduates with student debt have negative wealth and are thus worse off than otherwise similar Americans who have not gone to college. Consider that the median doctor graduating from medical school in 2017 or 2018 owed $171,000 in student debt, according to the College Scorecard, the median MBA owed $46,000, the median borrower with a BA in business $25,000, and the median AA degree holder in business $18,000. The implied conclusion is that doctors are the worst-off individuals, those with the two-year AA degrees are doing far better, and richest of all are those who never went to college.
You want to pretend that paying taxes into the government means they’re funding these directly.
The government does not spend its tax revenue depending on which class of people paid those particular dollars of tax. There is zero reason to think the distribution will be any different than anything else.
If the top 1% pays 45%, the middle class pays 40%, and the lower class 15% (random numbers, not themselves relevant to the point), then every single thing the government pays for, with tax money, is 45% funded by the 1%, 40% funded by the middle class, and 15% funded by the lower class.
Unless some provision is added that there will be a tax hike ONLY on those with more wealth than the recipients of the handout, that is the case.
And people who pay taxes and never went to college should absolutely NOT be on the hook for a penny of richER people’s loans.
No, I don’t want you pretending you’re against PPP forgiveness now
This is getting sad now. Constantly saying I’m “pretending” to have certain values like you know fucking anything, lmao. It must be a simple life indeed to never have to take on the mental burden of assessing people as individuals instead of members of your pre-built stereotype-driven collectives.
And people who actually do most of the work (aka grad students) will still not get a living wage.
Support striking grad workers everyone! https://duckduckgo.com/?q=support+grad+worker+strike&ia=web
That’s actually highly variable. Some schools have come a long way in that regard
AFAIK there is no school paying a living wage (based on MIT living wage calculator) to all their grad student yet, at least not in most major cities.
JHU just won a wage that is very close to living wage, but not there yet.
Depends if you factor all the free credits in ig
The problem is that most grad students are not taking classes after the first two years, and focuses solely on research. Many with masters will finish even before the second year.
Then it doesn’t make sense to factor in the tuition for most PhD.
There’s literally no market incentives for it to be otherwise. Look at the factors.
50+ years of institutions and borrowers alike trained to believe that education debt is “good debt” that won’t hurt them.
“Club ed” arms race of expensive non-education-related amenities, targeting students. Essentially it is marketing costs passed on to the student/borrower.
Heavy subsidization of student loans by state and federal governments.
Laws to make student loans not discharged in bankruptcy.
Constant implication that growing amounts of student debts can or should be “forgiven” by federal programs.
If you are the lending institution or the college, literally all of those factors only incentivize charging more.
Driving prices down would require meaningful competition or a feasible alternative. I have encouraged hiring managers to look at alternative credentialing and training for this reason. No bachelors degree is worth going $200k+ in debt for.
Or regulation.
Driving prices down would require meaningful competition, or a feasible alternative, or regulation.
(Feasible alternatives do exist, eg trades, but are not treated as viable alternatives by society)
Regarding your last point, I was an IT manager for a decade and hired many people. I saw no difference in the skill set between a community college grad with an Associate’s and a grad with a Bachelor’s from a prestigious university. The vast majority of skills simply don’t translate from university to real life, so I don’t understand why we still hold them so highly in IT. I can’t speak to other fields, though.
I very intentionally received only an associate’s degree with the plan being to immediately get a job and start learning from there. It’s worked great. Except that was 20 years ago and now many jobs “require” a bachelor’s or otherwise have the nerve to say that 4 years of on the job experience is the same as 1 year of college.
In my experience, I’ve seen the same thing. The university time kick starts things. But university lessons are so different than real on the job work.
it is time employers start telling graduates from such institutions interviewing for a job to go fuck themselves
Why don’t all these employers just need to stop hiring students from elite universities! That’ll fix… something?
that’s a good repetition of what I said.
Greed. Get ready because they’re coming for free public k-12 next.
Nah. They just want to cut funding, not cut it completely. They need the dumb kids to grow up to be dumb workers and dumb voters. And to keep their own children in private schools to continue to rule over the poors.
Ah, but cutting it completely means they could potentially go back to child labour, and they’ve already been trying to set the ground work for it
You must live in a state where charter schools aren’t part of normal political discourse. It is happening, and it is what they’re striving for. They want the private schools, yes, but the mostly want unregulated for-profit religious charter schools where there is no oversight in what kids are taught (or if they’re taught)
There’s a real and important underlying reason you’re completely missing.
People are willing to pay it, therefore they will charge it.
We badly need people in the skilled trades. The jobs pay well, are in high demand, and don’t require you go go into massive college debt.
The government also made huge student loans widely available. So government tried to narrow the wealth gap. In response, colleges just raised their prices, and students were forced to take out bigger and bigger loans.
Yep. You hand out tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who haven’t yet had to balance a bank account and it’s going to get spent en-mass. Why go to a trade school or a community college when you can go to [insert most expensive school that accepted you]?
A potential solution here is to cap the maximum amount of loan that is immune to bankruptcy discharge. This will have the effect of depressing the total amount of loans an average student has access to and force colleges to follow suit if they want to see continued enrollment.
I agree in principle, but I think that would do the opposite in practice. It would just elevate those whose families have the means to go above the maximum loan amount. So if tuition is X, they would still reach saturation if they charged X + $10k, or whatever. So the less fortunate wouldn’t have the opportunity to get a good education again, the bar would just be higher.
What they really need to do is either nationalize college education (extremely controversial), or put requirements on maximum tuition as a prereq to the loan. I.E., a school is disqualified from federal loans entirely unless tuition is under X, even if the maximum loan is X - 10k
They also are not hiring, or require someone to help you get through the door, just like everything else these days. Telling people to do trade work is incredibly tone-deaf.
For $100000 you can start your own company.
But you gotta get the loan first.
I teach electrical and we take 40 a year in my county, just electrical. We have plumbing and pipefitting and HVAC programs as well. The union program is down the road.
You just have to look for the programs, generally through a local community college. I’d gladly teach the respondent above you.
Which trades are you referring to?
I live close by to a community college that allows basically anyone to fairly quickly (1-2 yrs) get into a trade. I know several people who did. It’s not “easy” in the sense that yeah, you’re still learning a whole fucking skillset and trying to land your first adult job, but it’s definitely… extremely doable…?
Exactly. Presenting people with real solutions to their problems is important and getting into a well paying trade job is a solution the average worker can achieve if they so choose.
Yep. Trades, nursing (and related fields, lab-related medical jobs), hell, even skilled manufacturers are great paths to go into. They’re not glitzy, and you still have to like… do work. But that’s just part of living in society. Someone’s gotta clean the toilets, someone’s gotta fix the power lines.
Not to mention, most trades are “Dirty”. Thanks, but no thanks, id rather work in a clean office with nice clean AC, minimal bugs and where the sun stays TF outta my face.
On the flip side, there’s also people who see working 8 hours/day inside at a desk as a death sentence.
So saying “Just do a trade” isn’t just tone deaf, it’s as tone deaf as “Just go-to college”
The real answer is everyone should be able to take the education path best suited for them and their career choices
That’s one hell of a wise post. Good job!
Uneducated people are willing to pay that much. It should be considered predatory lending to sign up a 19 year old for $100k of debt
It got this way because younger people are willing to go into debt to get an education, and schools take advantage of that expected level of debt. I highly recommend looking up certificates that are available. One of the best ways to change this is for people to switch to alternatives.
Rich parents.
There’s really no other answer for this one. I went to a very nice university. The average person has no idea how many college students are coming from phenomenally high income families where price is essentially no issue.
It’s just a matter of how high up the top 10% is relative to everyone else. Both your parents are doctors and they have 18 years to save up - half a mill for Amy’s college bill is basically piss money.
The only problem is that these college students tend to grow up in areas where this is basically the norm. I had so many 19 year olds act flabbergasted that not only are neither of my parents doctors/lawyers/engineers… they didn’t even gasp go to college!
