Cancel all student debt? No.

[AJ_Katz]

Interesting that no one has brought up the very difficult prospect of bankruptcy code for student loans.  I find it appalling that our current code treats student loans essentially the same as non-dischargeable debt...

Because if the debt were dischargeable, there's one thing every student would do the day after taking out their last loan: file for bankruptcy. The hit to their credit score isn't even remotely a deterrent when you're tens of thousands of dollars in debt and aren't planning to buy a house in the next 10 years anyway. No lender would be dumb enough to make a loan under these conditions with no collateral, meaning the only students who could get student loans would be the ones who have wealthy parents co-signing.

Exactly, and that's why in the past, there were time limits where bankruptcy claims on student loans could not be made in the first five years after graduation.  Now there it is virtually impossible to get them discharged, whether 5, 10, 20, or 30+ years later.  Given the dramatic change in the cost of a secondary education, this has become an unreasonable burden for some people and they become chained to those loans for life.  Yet something like consumer debt CAN be discharged.  We're essentially treating educational loans as "priority debt" akin to child support and criminal fines which are wholly non-dischargeable.  I think this needs to change so that more cases, not just those of severe disability, would qualify to have student loans discharged.

[Anselm]

https://www.themarysue.com/twitter-federal-student-loans-interest/

[polly_mer]

We're essentially treating educational loans as "priority debt" akin to child support and criminal fines which are wholly non-dischargeable.  I think this needs to change so that more cases, not just those of severe disability, would qualify to have student loans discharged.

I would much rather put efforts into eliminating the need (and therefore the ability) to get student loans for higher ed instead of focusing on trying to keep the system the same, but somehow do some magic so that large debt amounts don't affect the students who made poor choices or got really unlucky.

When I read about student loan debt, several things jump out at me.  Because time is short for me today, I'll do one: the people affected the most by student loan debt are the large fraction of people who never complete their degrees who then default on a typical debt of under $10k.  The people who most need the bump in socioeconomic class by virtue of what they learn in college are most likely to not enroll or leave without a degree if they do enroll; academic preparation does not completely explain the discrepancy.

That seems like something that needs to be acknowledged as either better supporting the whole student so they can stay in school or doing much more realistic gatekeeping for those who don't belong in college at one particular time in their lives, but would be better served by waiting until certain conditions are met. 

Supporting the whole student may mean purposefully designing undergraduate programs to be part-time for more years.  Supporting the whole student may mean being more intentional about supporting the whole student with, say, heavily subsidized dorms for single parents and drop-in care-taking facilities (child, elder, and others) with sufficient capacity for the entire community (often by limiting the community to the capacity that can be served). 

Flat out acknowledging that the vast majority of students are not 18-22 year olds enrolled full-time in a 4-year program living on campus with a part-time job of at most 20 hours per week would go a long way.  When community college students were asked about barriers to completion, doing college level work was not in the top five.  A recent CHE article had a good synopsis of the realities for many students with:

Although I believe that a college education has enormous power to change the lives of students like this one, I started to wonder whether all of us swarming her with efforts to keep her on the campus was really the right thing to do. Given everything she was facing, maybe she needed a semester or a year off to seek solutions at home before she tried to add the challenge of succeeding at college.

Reference: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Do-You-Truly-Grasp-Why-That/247644

I'm very tired of reading about "student debt" without any real effort to understand what the problem with student debt is (i.e., merely having a lot of debt is not necessarily the problem) and how that true problem plays with the goals for higher education that we should have (i.e., education to improve one's individual life based on each individual's life goals, not checking all the boxes to get a shiny badge showing how one spent a few years).

[larryc]

I am against free public parks because why should rich people smell the flowers for free?

[Hegemony]

Yes, I'm also against libraries, because rich people have the ability to pay for their books.  And how do we know they are choosing useful books?  They might just be reading for recreation.  The taxpayer shouldn't have to support people who could pay top dollar for their books.

[polly_mer]

Yes, I'm also against libraries, because rich people have the ability to pay for their books.  And how do we know they are choosing useful books?  They might just be reading for recreation.  The taxpayer shouldn't have to support people who could pay top dollar for their books.

As someone who has stated multiple times that I don't care what people study, but I care a lot that people are making adequate progress in whatever they are claiming to do, I'm ready to pull this thread.

I'm fine with people taking education for recreation as long as those people are playing by all the rules, much the same way they would in a public library.  One problem I'm seeing with US higher ed is how few people really want to study much of anything if doing so involves putting in all the effort to truly learn and yet a lot resources in non-elite institutions go to extreme efforts to keep people from failing who aren't taking the appropriate actions to help themselves succeed.

I would cut nearly all the general education requirements and just weed on majors for most places.  Places that can fill their seats with the traditional liberal arts education (1/3 major, 1/3 general education, 1/3 electives) should continue to do so.  Based on current enrollments (i.e., students voting with their feet for what they want to do), S(elective) Liberal Arts Colleges are doing fine because enough people want that type of education; it's the S(mall) Still-Claiming-to-Be-Liberal-Arts-Colleges-in-the-Face-of-Voluminous-Contrary-Evidence that are struggling to fill seats, even with huge discount rates.

Weeding to preserve the overall endeavor so that the remaining people have flowers to smell is necessary.  Can't be bothered to do the homework in engineering?  Gone.  Can't be bothered to do all the reading in preparation for a great class discussion in African American literature?  Gone.  Can't be bothered to spend real time in the studio and therefore find no materials available the night before the final project is due (real example from reddit/college)?  Gone.  Super Dinky routinely lost the top 10% of students as transfers.  Those students flat out told us how unpleasant they found attending classes in which large numbers of their colleagues wouldn't/couldn't/didn't do the reading and that study groups couldn't form due to a lack of critical mass of people who actually care taking the specific classes.

The problem in US higher ed isn't too many people studying the "wrong things".  The problem I see is far too institutions letting people just go through the motions to check boxes instead of promoting true education coupled to large numbers of people in college not even going through the motions at a high enough level to benefit from the box-checking activity.  Close a ton of the institutions that aren't doing most of their students any good, redirect those resources to institutions that are doing good things especially with people who come from very modest beginnings, put better gatekeeping for students who really want to learn, and then see what additional resources are needed to meet that demand.  Cutting off cheap adjuncts supporting some of the checkiest box institutions also helps with this endeavor.

I will point out, though, that sometimes libraries do have to cut off patrons for being well outside the bounds of normal behavior.  .  Taking out 25-30 new books every week while returning 20-40 books makes sense to me as having been a power library user.  However, while I don't know the exact number of too many simultaneous checkouts, literally hundreds of books for years is too much. 

I am against free public parks because why should rich people smell the flowers for free?

Even if something is free, often times one must put limitations on number of entrants at a time to avoid damage to the overall endeavor.

Walker Canyon immediately comes to mind as a recent example.

Banning cars in the downtowns of major cities comes to mind.

The park is really nice, until no one can "smell the flowers" because of all the trash, human excrement, and even dead bodies littering what was once pristine because now everyone and his dog is running in the park.

[Hegemony]

Yes, I agree that the unmotivated should not be in college, and if they are in college, they should leave it. 

Back when UK university education was free, I taught at one of the lower-ranking UK universities. It may well have been the lowest ranked.  The students were almost all first-generation university students, and were very unfamiliar with how higher education worked. Some of them were smart, some of them merely hard-working.  But boy did they all work hard.  To be fair, the majority of students at my Oxbridge college worked hard too.  But these students at this lower-ranking university defined hard work.  Some of them were at sea with the material, and they didn't have a lot of experience with how to tackle material that was too much for them.  But they threw themselves at it.  They pretty much defined the word "earnest."  I see the tides of unmotivated, listless students at my current iffy public university and I shake my head.  Not all of them here are unmotivated and listless, certainly.  But a lot of them are, and I think they and I would both agree that if they had a crack at a reasonable job without having to have a college degree under their belt, that would be a much better path.  But a high school diploma guarantees so little now that to get a halfway chance of having a literate student, employers want a college degree.  It's basically a disgrace all round, and a huge waste of money and time.

[larryc]

The unmotivated can be discouraged with grades.

[Hibush]

  But a high school diploma guarantees so little now that to get a halfway chance of having a literate student, employers want a college degree.

The idea that an education guarantees anything leads to a lot of frustration. Whether high school, bachelors or doctoral, those who get the degree thinking that the credential guaranteed them anything end up being disillusioned.

I would discourage all educators and advisors from saying, or even implying, that there is such a thing.

The absence of a guarantee does not make the future bleak. Literacy and ambition are really helpful for career success, and education can be a great tool to achieve and demonstrate those things.

[Anselm]

The degree is being used as an expensive IQ test.  Many graduates will end up doing jobs that don't require a degree or did not require one years ago.  Many would do just fine with some kind of business trade school.  These were more common in the past here and I think they still have them in Europe. 

[apl68]

  But a high school diploma guarantees so little now that to get a halfway chance of having a literate student, employers want a college degree.

The idea that an education guarantees anything leads to a lot of frustration. Whether high school, bachelors or doctoral, those who get the degree thinking that the credential guaranteed them anything end up being disillusioned.

I would discourage all educators and advisors from saying, or even implying, that there is such a thing.

The absence of a guarantee does not make the future bleak. Literacy and ambition are really helpful for career success, and education can be a great tool to achieve and demonstrate those things.

I think Hegemony was referring to what the high school degree signifies to employers.  Speaking as an employer, I can't assume that an applicant having a high school degree guarantees literacy, numeracy, basic work ethic, or an ability to follow any but the simplest instructions (And then only under constant supervision).  Since we can't pay enough to attract college degrees, we still have to go with job candidates who have only a high school degree by way of formal educational credentials.  Sometimes you still get good workers with only that.  But the degree in and of itself represents virtually nothing in the way of gatekeeping.  I can see why many employers now feel that they must insist on an undergrad degree in hopes of getting something better.

That being the case, it puts students who don't have the money to pay for today's high-cost college education in a terrible bind.  Many of them have no choice but to take out loans.  Some end up, through no fault of their own, stuck with unpayable loans.  Then again, student loan fraud is a real thing.  An overly broad student loan forgiveness program could potentially create significant moral hazard in the future.

True story.  I had an undergrad classmate who came from an impoverished and dysfunctional background.  She didn't get much scholarship assistance.  Despite very hard work and frugal living, she had to take out some thousands of dollars' worth of loans.  That she didn't have to borrow more to attend our SLAC, even in the late 1980s, is a testament to how frugal she was.  In some ways she could have been a poster child for deserving, struggling students. 

Then, when she graduated, she tried to welsh on her loans.  She moved so frequently that it took the loan officers about two years to catch up with her.  She lied and claimed that she just didn't know that she would have to repay the loans, because somebody had told her that if she majored in education (Which she did, but she didn't graduate with a teaching certification) her loans would be forgiven.  The lenders weren't taken in and ordered her to pay up.  Several years of interest-only minimum payments later, she got married and moved out of state.  Some months before the wedding she suspended loan payments, thinking that if she changed her name and moved 400 miles she could surely get out of paying.  They found her in her new home within a month.  Her poor new husband had a rude shock when he learned about all that debt she hadn't told him about.  He insisted that they pay it down, which they did in two years, mostly through his effort.  Six or seven years later she left him--with thousands of dollars' worth of credit card debt she'd run up without his knowledge.

So there you have the dilemma, summed up in one student's career.  We want to give struggling, honest students a fair chance and some financial relief, without enabling frauds to take advantage of the system.  And it can be really hard to tell the deserving students and the frauds apart.

[mahagonny]

The unmotivated can be discouraged with grades.

I love the way that sounds. Not that I love giving low grades. I just enjoy thinking of all the necessary pieces being in place.

And then I ask myself, who encourages the strict grader? Who discourages them?

[Diogenes]

On top of the loans not being able to be discharged in bankruptcy, the interest rates for public loans are locked in at 6-7%. Student's can't refinance without converting into private loans which then locks them out of most any loan forgiveness or reimbursement program.

[Diogenes]

Interesting that no one has brought up the very difficult prospect of bankruptcy code for student loans.  I find it appalling that our current code treats student loans essentially the same as non-dischargeable debt...

Because if the debt were dischargeable, there's one thing every student would do the day after taking out their last loan: file for bankruptcy. The hit to their credit score isn't even remotely a deterrent when you're tens of thousands of dollars in debt and aren't planning to buy a house in the next 10 years anyway. No lender would be dumb enough to make a loan under these conditions with no collateral, meaning the only students who could get student loans would be the ones who have wealthy parents co-signing.

I heard that was happening at first, but it wasn't the downtrodden doing it. Is was the recent law school and med school grads that knew they were walking into six figure jobs and could brush off the mild inconvenience of bad credit for 7 years because of the bankruptcy. Poor people don't bounce back from bankruptcies.

[Kron3007]

  But a high school diploma guarantees so little now that to get a halfway chance of having a literate student, employers want a college degree.

The idea that an education guarantees anything leads to a lot of frustration. Whether high school, bachelors or doctoral, those who get the degree thinking that the credential guaranteed them anything end up being disillusioned.

I would discourage all educators and advisors from saying, or even implying, that there is such a thing.

The absence of a guarantee does not make the future bleak. Literacy and ambition are really helpful for career success, and education can be a great tool to achieve and demonstrate those things.

I think Hegemony was referring to what the high school degree signifies to employers.  Speaking as an employer, I can't assume that an applicant having a high school degree guarantees literacy, numeracy, basic work ethic, or an ability to follow any but the simplest instructions (And then only under constant supervision).  Since we can't pay enough to attract college degrees, we still have to go with job candidates who have only a high school degree by way of formal educational credentials.  Sometimes you still get good workers with only that.  But the degree in and of itself represents virtually nothing in the way of gatekeeping.  I can see why many employers now feel that they must insist on an undergrad degree in hopes of getting something better.

That being the case, it puts students who don't have the money to pay for today's high-cost college education in a terrible bind.  Many of them have no choice but to take out loans.  Some end up, through no fault of their own, stuck with unpayable loans.  Then again, student loan fraud is a real thing.  An overly broad student loan forgiveness program could potentially create significant moral hazard in the future.

True story.  I had an undergrad classmate who came from an impoverished and dysfunctional background.  She didn't get much scholarship assistance.  Despite very hard work and frugal living, she had to take out some thousands of dollars' worth of loans.  That she didn't have to borrow more to attend our SLAC, even in the late 1980s, is a testament to how frugal she was.  In some ways she could have been a poster child for deserving, struggling students. 

Then, when she graduated, she tried to welsh on her loans.  She moved so frequently that it took the loan officers about two years to catch up with her.  She lied and claimed that she just didn't know that she would have to repay the loans, because somebody had told her that if she majored in education (Which she did, but she didn't graduate with a teaching certification) her loans would be forgiven.  The lenders weren't taken in and ordered her to pay up.  Several years of interest-only minimum payments later, she got married and moved out of state.  Some months before the wedding she suspended loan payments, thinking that if she changed her name and moved 400 miles she could surely get out of paying.  They found her in her new home within a month.  Her poor new husband had a rude shock when he learned about all that debt she hadn't told him about.  He insisted that they pay it down, which they did in two years, mostly through his effort.  Six or seven years later she left him--with thousands of dollars' worth of credit card debt she'd run up without his knowledge.

So there you have the dilemma, summed up in one student's career.  We want to give struggling, honest students a fair chance and some financial relief, without enabling frauds to take advantage of the system.  And it can be really hard to tell the deserving students and the frauds apart.

Yes, programs can be taken advantage of.  Just like some people would take advantage of universal healthcare, but that doesn't mean you should get rid of it.....oh wait, this is the US we are talking about...