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It is too late to limit the loans. What needs to happen is to provide an escape to the students. For those already encumbered with the debt allow reasonable bankruptcy or provide other ways to clear it.
For the students yet to come substantive payment of college costs.
The Feds did this one knowingly hence the no bankruptcy condition. And that allowed the basic cost structure of the university system to vastly increase. Time they fixed it.
So when they file Bk on their student loans do they lose their degree or go on making x amouny of money a year? Plus the additional amount over a lifetime that a degree gives you. How exactly is it fair to get a degree AND the benefits that a degree gives you and you can absolve yourself of any owed money by filing Bk.
Going to college and choosing to get a degree and borrowing the money is a choice a person makes. You are not coerced into signing the loan or to go to college.
So when they file Bk on their student loans do they lose their degree or go on making x amouny of money a year? Plus the additional amount over a lifetime that a degree gives you. How exactly is it fair to get a degree AND the benefits that a degree gives you and you can absolve yourself of any owed money by filing Bk.
Going to college and choosing to get a degree and borrowing the money is a choice a person makes. You are not coerced into signing the loan or to go to college.
There is no automatic let out in bankruptcy. If you can manage to pay your debts you are required to do so. The reason they ruled out BK for these loans of course is because they understood that many of the graduates would in fact qualify for debt relief in BK.
There is not much of a choice for many. If you family is not very well off the choice is take the loans or abandon those careers requiring an advanced education. That is not really a rational trade for a smart kid.
Face it. The Feds screwed the whole area up by providing a source of funding that allowed the cost of a college education to double. Now they need to fix the problem they created.
This sounds like a "tail wagging the dog" proposition. It's an interesting perspective, but, by the same rationale, one might also bring down the cost of homes, cars and healthcare... by reducing the available flow of income and financing.
Perhaps it is instead time for the public to weigh the cost of a college education with the value provided and ask, "Does it really make sense to indebt one's self $60K+ for a basic liberal arts degree - for which there is little demand?" To me, this is more of a 'parenting' problem than a federal student loan problem.
First of all, who is to say there is little demand for a liberal arts degree. This is a myth. If everyone went to school and earned a STEM degree, the world would not function. There is a place for a liberal arts degree and studies have shown again and again that people with liberal arts degrees earn more at the height of their career, on average, than people with STEM degrees. It’s all about what you do with the degree than what the degree is. If someone has a liberal arts degree and can’t do something with it, that’s on them and not on the school. Some of the best managers at my last government job had degrees in music, which wouldn’t seem to be offhand to be all that useful, but they were great at relating to people, training others, and having a lot of interpersonal skills needed to move up the ladder.
Bright people should go into whatever field that interests them. I had one friend in another country who was encouraged to apply to college in STEM. They could apply to two colleges in their system- one public and one private. She wanted to study English, so she applied to one school in engineering and one in English and went to the school in English because she simply had no interest in engineering. If she had no interest, she probably wouldn’t have been happy in that career. Doing work in a foreign language appealed to her and she loved it.
Schools cost more for so many reasons, but this is not one of them. The value provided is from the classes and some of the other skills learned, but now schools have to have fancy dorms, gourmet meals, lots of fancy facilities... those are not necessarily needed to provide a real college experience. Most people had decent real college experiences years ago with older dorms, cheaper meals, etc.
First of all, who is to say there is little demand for a liberal arts degree. This is a myth. If everyone went to school and earned a STEM degree, the world would not function. There is a place for a liberal arts degree and studies have shown again and again that people with liberal arts degrees earn more at the height of their career, on average, than people with STEM degrees. It’s all about what you do with the degree than what the degree is. If someone has a liberal arts degree and can’t do something with it, that’s on them and not on the school. Some of the best managers at my last government job had degrees in music, which wouldn’t seem to be offhand to be all that useful, but they were great at relating to people, training others, and having a lot of interpersonal skills needed to move up the ladder.
Bright people should go into whatever field that interests them. I had one friend in another country who was encouraged to apply to college in STEM. They could apply to two colleges in their system- one public and one private. She wanted to study English, so she applied to one school in engineering and one in English and went to the school in English because she simply had no interest in engineering. If she had no interest, she probably wouldn’t have been happy in that career. Doing work in a foreign language appealed to her and she loved it.
Schools cost more for so many reasons, but this is not one of them. The value provided is from the classes and some of the other skills learned, but now schools have to have fancy dorms, gourmet meals, lots of fancy facilities... those are not necessarily needed to provide a real college experience. Most people had decent real college experiences years ago with older dorms, cheaper meals, etc.
Certainly there are exceptions, but, life is better managed if one is able to first, look at the world as it is, instead of how one imagines it to be. Of course, there are people with liberal arts degrees who do well in the world, but, for the most part, they are also the ones with college loans that are disproportionate to their employment. That is largely a result of parents not 'parenting' their children into a future plan. Thus, these bright young people aimlessly study whatever interests them, only to find too late that the world pays for what interests it.
No way, not unless they have no *prospects* for income. Too many degreed people have good paying jobs but whine about their student loan debt because it's a lot. I'm sure they'd rather buy a nice boat than shell out hundreds of dollars every month. But they only have that income because of the education. If they don't have adequate income then I'm ok with suspending the loan but it should not go away forever.
I don't understand how some people don't feel obligated to pay back their student loans.
The rest of us have sacrificed the boats or the nicer cars or designer clothes, etc, to pay back the money we borrowed.
That money not only went for tuition, but many borrowed extra for housing, books, cars, drinking money, vacations, etc. Even if you only make $100 a week more because of your degree, that's $5200 a year that you could pay back.
This sounds like a "tail wagging the dog" proposition. It's an interesting perspective, but, by the same rationale, one might also bring down the cost of homes, cars and healthcare... by reducing the available flow of income and financing.
Perhaps it is instead time for the public to weigh the cost of a college education with the value provided and ask, "Does it really make sense to indebt one's self $60K+ for a basic liberal arts degree - for which there is little demand?" To me, this is more of a 'parenting' problem than a federal student loan problem.
I am a military recruiter, and I can't tell you how many people a day come into my office and ask if we pay off loans (we do NOT), because they have tens of thousands in loans and NO DEGREE.
Society needs to stop making teenagers feel like college is the ONLY option. They go under duress, and don't finish. Only 40% of students finish a 4 year degree in 4 years. College can be deferred for a little work experience, trade school, military, etc. I'm not saying never go to college, I'm saying don't go at 18 if you don't know what you want to be when you grow up, because that is why people get crap degrees in crap subjects. Our culture needs to change.
Certainly there are exceptions, but, life is better managed if one is able to first, look at the world as it is, instead of how one imagines it to be. Of course, there are people with liberal arts degrees who do well in the world, but, for the most part, they are also the ones with college loans that are disproportionate to their employment. That is largely a result of parents not 'parenting' their children into a future plan. Thus, these bright young people aimlessly study whatever interests them, only to find too late that the world pays for what interests it.
They are not exceptions. There are plenty of people out there with liberal arts degrees who do fine. The world how it is TODAY is now how it is going to be 4 or 5 years (or even 8) from now when a student graduates with that coveted STEM degree or degrees and enters the workforce. Trying to pick a degree NOW on what is in demand makes no sense, because if everyone goes for the same degree, there will undoubtedly be a glut 4 or 8 years from now. The world doesn’t need a million electrical engineers or computer scientists coming out of school each year.
A degree is a TOOL. If you use it correctly, you can do a lot with your life. If you don’t know how to use it, it is worthless.
I am a military recruiter, and I can't tell you how many people a day come into my office and ask if we pay off loans (we do NOT), because they have tens of thousands in loans and NO DEGREE.
Society needs to stop making teenagers feel like college is the ONLY option. They go under duress, and don't finish. Only 40% of students finish a 4 year degree in 4 years. College can be deferred for a little work experience, trade school, military, etc. I'm not saying never go to college, I'm saying don't go at 18 if you don't know what you want to be when you grow up, because that is why people get crap degrees in crap subjects. Our culture needs to change.
I think this is an excellent point. College isn’t for everyone and parents/schools need to be supportive of that and honest with kids before they exit high school
Also I think the learning model is changing albeit really slow. Western Governors University is an all online program and the total cost for a 6 month term is under 4,000.00 all books included. In their model you can compete 1 class or 20 and it’s the same cost. I believe there are a couple of other options that price similarly
<snip>On top of that, government should only grant student loans to the upper 5th quintile. That will end the nonsense of handing out student loans to people who score 1400 on the SAT and 12 on the ACT.<snip>
Just a note to let you know that for the current version of the SAT, a 1400 out of 1600 total points puts one in the 93rd percentile.
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