What is your opinion on student loan forgiveness?

[dismalist]

If "education" has automatic benefit to society, then why aren't music lessons, sports camps, arts lessons, and any other kind of instruction paid for by taxpayers?

My dude, our society refuses to fund health care. Your argument is not terribly persuasive here.

Who is this society that owes us something?

We have Medicare, Medicaid, employer sponsored health insurance, and now, the Affordable Care Act. Anybody not covered, about 11% of the population, write to your congress[wo]man.

[mahagonny]

We also need to take steps to make sure that we never see a recurrence of the situation some years back where huge corporate bottom-feeders like University of Phoenix conned large numbers of unprepared students into borrowing billions of dollars to attend courses that they either couldn't pass or that were of little benefit to anybody except the schools offering them.  Those poorly-regulated vocational schools were where the real large-scale waste and fraud were taking place, not the alleged worthless English lit majors and such.

But don't we need to keep U of Phoenix around to make the rest of us look reputable in comparison?

[lightning]

Someone said something fascinating upthread that makes me think that student loan forgiveness is simply the after-the-fact re-direction of government money that should have been left in place to begin with as truly state-subsidized reasonable tuition rates, so students didn't have to take out loans to begin with to pay for increasingly non-state-subsidized tuition rates.

I'm old enough to remember when students could work their way through college. Student loans that had to be taken out were very manageable. But, this was at a time when public institutions of higher learning were still properly funded, and public universities could still maintain state-subsidized tuition rates.

As states began to starve their public institutions of higher education, and increasingly so over time, schools had to make up for the shortfall with higher tuition rates, so students have been forced to borrow more and more.

They wouldn't have had to borrow so much if the tuition was truly state-subsidized in the first place. ("Reasonable" to me is if someone can hold down a part-time job during the school year and a full-time job over the summer, to pay for most of the college costs of attending an in-state public university.)

I see the forgiveness of student loan debt as re-directing public money that was supposed to fund affordable tuition for attending in-state universities in the past, and giving it back to the students today, who did not get to enjoy the state-subsized tuition rates and had to take out massive loans.

In principle, this is what I believe, but in practice, I don't even know how my thinking could apply to students who chose to go out-of-state and pay out-of-state tuition rates with loans, or go to an even more expensive private school that they could not afford, when they had an opportunity to go in-state university. Also in there is a sub-category of students who took out massive loans to fund an extravagant college lifestyle. If it were possible to separate them out, for these students who made bad choices, I say, your bailout is capped.

And then there was the clusterfvck that was UoP and their cohort of corporate higher education bad actors. I'm still not sure what to think about that. If it were possible and if the bankruptcy laws that are applied to students also applied to the for-profit universities that they attended, those corporate a$$holes should be the ones paying for the loan forgiveness of their own former students.

[kaysixteen]

What lightning says is spot on, but, again, how are you going to sell this to those 2/3 of non college grads, who are mostly GOP voters?

[marshwiggle]

What lightning says is spot on, but, again, how are you going to sell this to those 2/3 of non college grads, who are mostly GOP voters?

AKA people who don't believe you have to send thousands of dollars and several years of your life on "education" in order to live a full and productive life. (Hint: Just repeating louder and more frequently that they should isn't going to do it. Nor is calling them nasty names.)

[lightning]

What lightning says is spot on, but, again, how are you going to sell this to those 2/3 of non college grads, who are mostly GOP voters?

What I have not been able to figure out is if an authorization by Congress to allow Biden to forgive all student loans by executive order would require only a simple majority in the senate. If that's the case, there is no need to pay any attention to those 2/3 of non college grads who are mostly GOP voters.

[mahagonny]

My wife worked her way through college. In those days a lot of things were different. Colleges didn't have to make 3/4 of their decisions by taking into account the possibility of being sued. So many things were different. Just compare top administrator salaries.

ETA: Higher ed today does not even act like it wants the friendship of republicans. If it did it would abolish or seriously reign in the DEI regime. It's easy for a professor to claim that he's willing to give an A to a student who produces a well-written essay that goes against that professor's politics, and it's no doubt true a lot of the time, or would be true if the student felt safe doing that kind of work, but the Diversity mob doesn't give grades, doesn't have to read student evaluations of faculty, etc. And predictably, they're out of control with their flagrant politics.

10 minutes later: And I didn't even mention Randi Weingarten and the unions.

[mahagonny]

What lightning says is spot on, but, again, how are you going to sell this to those 2/3 of non college grads, who are mostly GOP voters?

What I have not been able to figure out is if an authorization by Congress to allow Biden to forgive all student loans by executive order would require only a simple majority in the senate. If that's the case, there is no need to pay any attention to those 2/3 of non college grads who are mostly GOP voters.

Then again, November is coming.

[Parasaurolophus]

What lightning says is spot on, but, again, how are you going to sell this to those 2/3 of non college grads, who are mostly GOP voters?

What I have not been able to figure out is if an authorization by Congress to allow Biden to forgive all student loans by executive order would require only a simple majority in the senate. If that's the case, there is no need to pay any attention to those 2/3 of non college grads who are mostly GOP voters.

Given his reticence to forgive any federal loan debt, which he can just do at any time, I expect a Congressional authorization would go nowhere even if it only required (and survived) a simple majority vote in the Senate.

[dismalist]

This is somewhat surprising:

In a letter dated Thursday [March 28th], 21 Senators and 75 members of the House urged Biden to push back the May 1 date when federal student loan repayment is scheduled to restart. Biden most recently extended the pause in December. Biden's chief of staff said in a recent interview that the administration is considering extending the pause a fifth time. [This has since happened.]

The legislators also pressed Biden, a fellow Democrat, to "provide meaningful student debt cancellation."

"Although there may be different ideas about the best way to structure cancellation, we all agree that you should cancel student debt now," they wrote in the letter.

From https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/03/31/student-loans-congress-payment-pause-cancel-debt/7232434001/

The 21 Senators and 75 Members of the House are all Democrats. Given the generality of the letter, that is an amazingly small number. Can anybody figure out why?

[Anon1787]

The unwillingness or inability of a substantial portion of borrowers to pay back their student loans is an indicator that there is too much time and money being spent on higher education. If any significant portion of student loan debt is to be written off, then there should be stricter criteria for college admissions and more financial controls like what was imposed for previous bank bailouts.

Majority Leader Schumer's short-term political calculation may be that the constitutionally dubious practice of Congress surrendering the power of the purse to the president (at least when a Democrat is in the White House) is fine in order to buy some middle class and progressive votes, but the political calculation of Democratic senators up for re-election in swing and red states is clearly quite different.

[lightning]

Well, it happened. A version of a blanket student loan forgiveness program is going to be enacted.

I didn't come here to continue the conversation. Rather, I'm glad we discussed the topic here, for my sake, because the hyperbole lighting up the boards and social media pages right now, is not giving me much optimism for reasoned discourse on the topic of student loan forgiveness.

[dismalist]

Well, it happened. A version of a blanket student loan forgiveness program is going to be enacted.

I didn't come here to continue the conversation. Rather, I'm glad we discussed the topic here, for my sake, because the hyperbole lighting up the boards and social media pages right now, is not giving me much optimism for reasoned discourse on the topic of student loan forgiveness.

A rational policy would be to correct the non-bankruptcy provisions of federal student loan programs. Treat them just like all other loans.

Forgiveness? For what? This is totally regressive. The poorer helping the richer.

[kaysixteen]

Exactly right.  Make the student loan borrower able to go bankrupt.   Just like Donald Trump. 

Of course, this still doesn't address: 1) the vastly overpriced nature of American higher ed 2) the fact that many states have largely gotten out of the business of underwriting public institutions of higher ed, unlike the deal Baby Boomer students got, and 3) many Americans in the white working class, mostly GOP voters these days, have been bamboozled into hating the very idea of going to college, and will resent any help for college debtors, even (likely) allowing them to go bankrupt.

[dismalist]

Exactly right.  Make the student loan borrower able to go bankrupt.   Just like Donald Trump. 

Of course, this still doesn't address: 1) the vastly overpriced nature of American higher ed 2) the fact that many states have largely gotten out of the business of underwriting public institutions of higher ed, unlike the deal Baby Boomer students got, and 3) many Americans in the white working class, mostly GOP voters these days, have been bamboozled into hating the very idea of going to college, and will resent any help for college debtors, even (likely) allowing them to go bankrupt.

I completely agree with 1). Too much signaling and too little content. Fix that and higher ed will nevertheless shrink.

2) States should get out of financing institutions. If they want, it's better to finance kids.

3) White working class voters are not stupid. They merely follow their own interests, not yours or mine.