College education is already publicly funded in so far that the actual payments are increasingly being made by government blank checks, which has resulted in skyrocketing costs. Democrats response to this is to make the blank checks permanent and all encompassing.
The government needs to get out of higher education entirely. Make universities earn their tuition fees by providing actual value - real skills instead of content for more insufferable social media posts and protest posters - and watch how quickly all the sociology professors and "Inclusion Experts" are suddenly no longer vital public employees.
Also make the Universities responsible if and when their students can't repay their debt. Take the defaulted or forgiven (or whatever fancy word one chooses) amounts directly from the educational institutions and then they will be much less likely to hike tuitions and much less likely to agree to loaning absurd fees to people with little to no hope of paying them back.
I think this is really key to solving the overall problem. If universities were forced to take responsibility for the results of the education they give, they would have to be much pickier about the majors students are allowed to get degrees in. Giving students a worthless degree should come back and bite them hard.
As with all things involving government, there is no accountability. Universities have been effectively nationalized because the marginal buyer is using (unlimited) Federal taxpayer dollars. Not only do failed outcomes create no negative consequences, many in government view the leftist indoctrination that happens in substitute of a true education as a positive.
"If universities were forced to take responsibility for the results of the education they give"
I love to hate on our universities as much as anyone, but why is it the universities' fault? the schools are behaving rationally and maximizing their profit opportunities.
all the rest of us are supposed to know better, and to teach our kids better.
I say this as someone with a worthless and expensive liberal arts degree: the debt is no one's fault but my own.
Universities have been maximizing their profit opportunities by giving students a false impression of the worth of their degrees. That seems fraudulent to me.
"giving a false impression" is kind of the sum total of advertising.
fraud = deliberate deceit, and it's against the law. if you can show you were deliberately misled, that's grounds for a lawsuit.
people are responsible for choices they make, and those choices include which information to believe, which claims to verify, and how to decide based on the information at hand. if someone purposefully lied, you've got a reasonable claim. if they simply embellished and you failed to verify.... not so much.
I understand what you're saying. But if you have a much-desired career in mind, you want to believe you have the best chances, not slim chances.
And all too many students go to college without any particular career in mind, just the vague idea that ANY degree will get them a really good job. And that hasn't been true for 30+ years.
Take a look at rising tuition rates since loans were passed out like Halloween candy. After the 2008 financial.meltdown part of the Obama administration strategy was to encourage people to go to school or back to school instead of back to work. I remember the ads plastered all over social media. Fast forward 14 years and we see the toll. Universities had no incentive to control cost, rather they had incentive to grab as much of that easy money as possible. And that is what "progressive economic policy" is - spend until it hurts.
And they won't until Congress passes legislation permitting student loans, like any other loan, to be discharged through bankruptcy; then the lending institutions/colleges will be incentivized to be selective on who receives loans and in controlling administration costs.
Unspoken bottom line: Democrats are using taxpayers to fund the training of America haters. There are also many good students earning useful degrees to keep America running to a degree. But their numbers are dropping relative to the growing number of young people actively bringing the country down.
School choice would help, as would ending the demonization of charter schools. I like Ian Rowe’s approach in the Bronx. Thousands of parents are on the waiting list, because public education has failed their kids, but Rowe’s model is succeeding.
Leftist love to point out the Scandanavian countries as socialist paradises. Well, it is just one more leftist lie. They are not socialist countries. They are countries that have massive social programs but in reality, they are capitalist countries that tax the living daylights out of the citizens to pay for these social programs.
Keep electing the soon to be communist party and we will be in the category of taxing the living daylight out of our citizens.
Oh, a little footnote. the Scandanavian countries give out school vouchers so you can send your kid to any school you want, paid for of course by the government. School vouchers, gasp! Doesn't that mean, if you listen to a Democrat, the end of the world. No, it doesn't. It means the end of teachers' unions dictating school policies. Scandanavian schools are excellent.
In NYC the teachers' union run the school system. You can't fire a teacher for any infraction, even child molestation.
It should be noted that Scandinavian countries have (or have had) a shared (and very old) moral consciousness that requires a) everyone to do their best to be a productive citizen, and b) that those who *cannot* work should be helped.
The reason those systems work is because a) people don't mind paying more taxes in order to have benefits, and b) it is well-nigh unthinkable (culturally) that people who *could* work would refuse to.
It should also be noted that Scandinavian countries are experiencing horrible penalties at present for importing huge numbers of "refugees" who neither share nor respect Scandinavian culture. I fear that their systems may break down under the weight.
Why is it the university's problem? This will not resolve the root cause of this mess - personal accountability. Do these kids think before making poor choices? They can go to a community College for AP, use the library instead of buying an expensive laptop, live in a shared home with half a dozen other students, eat ramen, get a job instead of partying, apply for scholarships, think about the prospects before choosing the major etc. It can be done speaking from experience.
This is one of the most bizarre set of comments I have ever seen. People act as if somehow it is **educators** who want non-educational things at the university. And the concerns of Common Sense commentariat are about Rock Walls, DEI administrators, and Swimming Pools? How about the entire sports programs of every university? If you looked worldwide, do any other countries use their university system as the minor leagues for their professional sports teams?
How about schools like Notre Dame, which just spent $400 million on renovating their football stadium? Kansas, which is spending $350 million on their stadium? Berkeley, spending $321 M on theirs?
Why don’t we do a quick poll here on Common Sense. How many people support getting the Federal and State Governments to ban the Greek system — no more party atmosphere. Next, ban football, basketball, and the other semi-pro sports on campus, and all sports recruiting of any kind — no more scholarships for sports. Universities are academic enterprises, right? Intramural sports only, as in every country in the world. Who is going to vote for this? Will Jim Jordan, the former wrestling coach(!), go for this? Congress? State legislatures? The State of Texas? Will Common Sense members support that proposition? The primary non-academic activity on campus is sports, then partying (largely related to sports). Rock walls? They are part of having a “gym” on campus. They cost nothing, in relative terms.
The problem is not the Universities, nor Administrators, but that we have a *market*. The market has spoken, and what the market wants is competition on these lines. College sports, nicer dorms, better food, a supervised transition to adulthood in an academic environment, etc. That is not to say that the situation is perfect — it absolutely is not — but comments that suggest that there is some platonic ideal in which ascetic students will learn and have no amenities, thus driving the cost of college down is fantasy. To further imply that the problem is one where the educators are willingly choosing these non-academic expenditures, as opposed to being dragged into them is so bizarre as to be other-planetary. Faculty, almost to a person, believe that money should be spent on student education: not administrators, not games, not partying, not rock walls, etc. The more enlightened faculty recognize that to attract students, one might want to spend on those other things, etc. But *all* faculty agree that in some ideal world, no one would spend one cent on them, and 100% of all possible money would go to student education.
As an aside, something close to the ideal of “no amenities, just teaching” exists today: community college. Also, the free market means that nothing stops a university from being this kind of school. Why are there none? Guessing that doesn’t work in the market, even for state schools that are trying to stay as cheap as possible.
Question for you professor. What was the student/faculty and student/administration ratio when you began your teaching at your university vs now? I understand at PSU, enrollment stayed pretty much level but the number of admin rose significantly as did the cost of matriculation. I buy-in that there are market forces at play from students, but once the universities and lending institutions successfully removed bankruptcy on student loans, I imagine the attitude was who cares what it costs, students/parents want to attend and we'll loan them the $$$
Administration costs clearly went way up! No one is doubting that. Where people are confused is on the relative contributions to tuition increases. Administrative bloat, professor salaries increasing, better amenities for students -- all this stuff (at public/state schools) are responsible for about 25% of the total tuition increases. Administrative bloat alone? Not 100% of that total, but probably a decent fraction. Maybe 15%? Not all of the administrators are avoidable. As I have mentioned before, years ago, many schools were commuter schools; today, they are residential campuses where students live. It is not possible to run an entire dorm system, police force, etc. without any administrators. So not every single administrator could be fired. However, is there bloat? **Absolutely!**
Could "massive numbers of administrators" explain the huge growth in tuition, all by itself? Absolutely not. Most of the growth in tuition has been because State Legislatures made a decision that families would foot the bill for education rather than taxpayers (about 75% of the increase, on average).
I have addressed the issue of the "who cares what it costs" in a different post. This is simply not true. Every state school agonizes over trying to keep costs down. Tuition increases are totally fraught. At my school, we agonize over every dollar when we need to raise tuition, and we try as hard as possible not to charge for anything unnecessary (most of us try incredibly hard to keep textbook costs as low as possible, too). Do professors deserve to get COLA increases when inflation occurs? That increases costs. Do the admin assistants? What about the janitors? What about the HVAC mechanics, carpenters, and plumbers? Does anyone deserve a non-COLA based raise, ever? How do the Common Sense community think they all get paid? Tuition is the only revenue we get, other than money from the State! (We, like almost all schools, have a tiny endowment.) Parents and students care an enormous amount about the costs of higher education. This is why giving out scholarships and better financial aid matters. Every year many, many students choose to get an excellent education at more affordable State Universities rather than expensive private schools and demonstrate this.
Nice to meet you Bill. How do you come by this secret knowledge of indoctrination? I personally don’t do much indoctrination, but last time I exorcised a demon from one of my students, we imprisoned it in the campus chapel and waited for the chaplain to come kill it with holy water. You should have heard it scream! Never heard anything like it in my life. Anyway, you should stop by one day. We could find ourselves a couple of more liberals to exorcise and maybe another demon or two to chase down. If you get lucky, you’ll find some of the CRT profs — they are just full of demons! Then we can grab a beer, and you can explain all about the indoctrination rituals you know all about.
The market is skewed by unlimited student loan guarantees by the Fed. Unlimited financing means a total lack of price sensitivity and completely inelastic demand.
So instead of competing for students via lower tuition and best bang for buck, campuses compete based on who has the best amenities and most feelgood admins like Bias Response teams. And that's how tuition costs rise astronomically even as education quality declines.
This is 100% false. Do you have college age kids, or know anyone sending their kids to college right now? As a parent of a college student (with other kids approaching college), with a broad friend group all in the same boat, and as a professor who talks with prospective parents all the time, tuition costs are a ***HUGE*** driver of where students will enroll, where they apply, and of student and familial decision making. Schools give out scholarships of varying sizes to try to attract students, and those scholarships work — if you were right, they wouldn’t. Talk to any admissions officer, and the availability of scholarship money is the #1 thing that we worry about. Affordability is on everyone’s mind, and schools compete on this both directly and indirectly.
You are, frankly, talking out your ass. Particularly because the expensive schools have relatively low default rates.
17-year-old high school students can be excused for lacking wisdom and judgment. They are guided by the sea of propaganda in which they live. So yes, it is the universities' responsibility to offer real value for the astronomical fees they charge (and eliminate the swarms of diversity, equity and inclusion parasites currently drawing more and larger salaries than actual teachers), and it is the politicians' and universities' obscene collusion that has produced this mess.
The one group of people who should NOT be on the hook for this latest trillion dollar boondoggle is long-suffering, working-class, non-college-educated Americans, and they are precisely who Biden, as usual, is saddling with the burden.
@StephenLeonard: I can hear that you are angry. I think that if I thought that people were being taken advantage of in the way that you outline, I’d be pretty incensed myself.
But I have some questions for you. First, you and many others mention all the many DEI folk on campus. These numbers are highly inflated (many of the people who are counted are not full time, and if they teach part of the time, their full salary should not be counted as FT administration), but let’s forget about that for a moment. A different poster added up the maximum amount being spent on the DEI folk, and said that it was $10M or so (this is at Michigan, the worst offending school, by all accounts). Does anyone on this forum realize that UMichigan’s budget is $2.4 *Billion* per year? Michigan has about 31,000 undergraduates. Even with the rather gross misallocation of people (assuming that they are all full time when they are in fact not), firing *all* of them saves .4% of the budget, and reduces tuition by $322 per year. That still sounds high, but remember, that’s with the misallocation. And actually, campuses need at least a few people around to stop overt racism? There are actual laws in place that need to be followed, so not all of the money can even be saved.
Second, what if you found out that long-suffering, working class, non-college educated Americans are not going to be paying for almost anything that the federal government does? Would that ease your mind at all? This is totally true.
That group — assuming that we are talking about a group that is economically struggling — pays essentially no federal income tax in the first place. Right now, because of covid relief funds, etc. 57% of all taxpayers paid no Federal tax at all. That number will decline to perhaps 45% pre-pandemic levels shortly. Even after that, the bottom 50% of the income distribution owes essentially no Federal Taxes. “The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI below $44,269) faced an average income tax rate of 2.9 percent.” So, who will pay for this? Actually the rich and the relatively well-off: the top 10% of income earners pay about 71% of all income taxes to the Federal Government (AGI > 115K or so).
Would you feel differently if you knew that a lot of the people who are currently in default were those very same working class people, trying to go to school to make their lives better? That they were essentially defrauded? Should we help those working class people, many of whom never got their degrees because it was a con? Here’s a great article explaining how for-profit higher ed targeted vulnerable non-traditional students, and how these “schools” are driving the default rate. It’s old, but the numbers have actually gotten worse, not better:
So incisive. Do please continue to note which facts you disagree with and where they are wrong. In the mean time, this is what passes for “Common Sense”, huh?
One can't vote at 17 or consume alcohol, yet can take on thousands in loans. It's capitalism my friend universities are not exempt. You're right however minds are not mature at 17 so shouldn't parents be more involved? Why aren't they on the hook?
Edit: Just like loan forgiveness is funded by someone else that is not part of the equation, if universities are held responsible who do you think is footing the bill at the end of the day?
The universities rely on student loans to justify their bloated tuition schedules. Were it not for loans, they'd be forced to scale back their expectations to something that is affordable to the majority and not just the wealthy few.
That said, I agree with your points about economizing and living sensibly. Versus flying to south Florida on spring break and partying hard for 7 days when they could/should be studying, working, job hunting, etc.
Where is the evidence for “bloated tuition schedules”? Most students at Public Universities graduate with either no debt or very manageable levels of debt, and public universities account for 78% of all college students. Fewer students at private universities tend to graduate with debt, and it’s sometimes *lower* than public, because students at private universities tend to be richer. The debt crisis is largely driven by handfuls of schools, mostly for-profit schools, who prey on *working class* people. There is a separate set of students who make very bad choices about where to go to school and what to major in. That is a real problem (racking up huge debts in fields that will never have the earning potential to pay it off).
Where do you get the idea that, say, the UC system has a “bloated” tuition schedule? UTexas? SUNY? UFlorida system? These are *huge* systems of higher ed, deliver excellent education and are really affordable.
The current student loan debt (as per educationdata.org) is $1.748 trillion. Are you saying that most of that is due to for-profit schools?
Or is the "crisis" aspect due to for-profits, i.e. enticing lower-quality students to over-borrow, while over-promising outcomes? That's been in the news, and they do sound unscrupulous, but I question that public universities are so affordable.
I just checked University of California state resident tuition, fees, & living expenses:
$41,052 (for on-campus housing)
$37,352 (off-campus)
It's double for non-state residents.
My own state (Massachusetts) is somewhat lower, in the 30s including housing. I mean, if you assume the student is somehow staying at home for free, we're still talking $20K/year or more for in-state public education, and in Massachusetts, at least, there's no guarantee you'll get into the big state school in Amherst. It's competitive. From what I hear, UC is competitive as well, with the additional requirements of being a POC -- but not Asian -- Asians are quota'd, to make room for lesser qualified blacks and, I suppose, Hispanics.
Middle class families don't have $100K to $150K lying around to pay for 4 years of education. The average student is going to get by with a combination of scholarships, work-study, and loans.
As for excellence of education... yes, 30 years ago American public universities provided excellent education. It's really hard to say that's still the case, in an era when politics colors and distorts nearly every subject including the hard sciences.
It will return to you the entire Federal Data on Berkeley, the flagship of the CA system. The average cost, after aid in the form of scholarships and grants paid by students at Berkeley is $16,000 per year. This is a major misconception among many people, who confuse the sticker price with the *net tuition*. Net Tuition is the only relevant number -- it is the amount that students/families actually pay. No one but the wealthy pay full tuition.
Only 41% of Berkeley students graduated with any debt at all upon graduation. Of students graduating with debt, the amount of the debt was about $17,000 on average. Your numbers are completely and totally off. If we were to pick, say UCLA, UCSD, or Irvine, the numbers would differ a bit -- Berkeley students are a bit richer than their counterparts at Irvine. They would NOT differ dramatically.
On the second part of your comments, regarding racial preferences, you also could not be more wrong. In 1996, California passed Proposition 209, which eliminated all racial preferences in admissions for higher education. Recently, an attempt was made to repeal this, and that effort failed. The UC system not only does not quota against Asians or for other races -- it doesn't look at race at all. Berkeley publishes fact sheets about their campus, and they are nearly 40% Asian -- among the highest of any student body in the country. Berkeley's student body is only 4% black. There are no issues of the kind that you are talking about that show up in their admissions data, That isn't to say that there aren't such issues at other universities, but let's be serious -- you are cherrypicking numbers and arguments at this point.
Yes, the largest fraction of the student loan "crisis" is due to for-profit schools, and oddly, community colleges. What is happening is that marginal students are being pulled into colleges who are then either not graduating at all (but still have debt), or who have low-value degrees in fields that cost them money but add little to their earning potential (but again, added debt). This is a real problem. There are, of course, handfuls of "crazy" cases of students running up insane amounts of debt in private universities, majoring in unemployable fields, etc. and then not being able to pay that off. That is simply not the norm. Actually, graduate school is a bigger problem there (law school in particular).
The Universities also created degree programs that harvest students that otherwise would not qualify for traditional programs. It's a pretty well known fact in California that if you apply for gender studies or political science you have a significantly better chance of getting into a top institution than if you applied for engineering or business degrees - for example.
It would be great to see evidence backing up this claim. Berkeley, for example, is super-liberal and is the flagship of the CA system. Where is the evidence that it’s easier to get into Berkeley (or UCLA for that matter) applying in these fields? Once admitted, students can change major at will. If this were true, don’t you think that hyper-competitive students would lie like crazy to get an edge? A: yes they would. And it simply isn’t true.
Higher Ed has been obscuring, denying, falsifying, and wrapping itself in any and all false flags to hide their behavior. Berkeley MIT, and Harvard, as random examples, have wrapped themselves and the nation into knots pretending that their open admissions does not discriminate. Ask Asian-American students. Ask the timid US Supreme Court
to proclaim the truth. What are "legacy admissions" but naked favoritism to the Old Guard?
I don't believe admissions departments will expose the math they use to accept candidates beyond an aggregate acceptance percentage. I have lived this empirically through my own college-bound child and all his friends this and previous years. I've personally seen kids with lower metrics get into "soft" degree programs at top universities over others with considerably higher academic metrics into "hard" degree programs. Every college counselor worth their salt knows this truth. In the absence of admissions metrics per degree program in every university in NA, as you are suggesting, ask yourself.. is a "gender studies" degree program more competitive than an "engineering" or "business" or "accounting" program at a top university with a reputation for those programs?
Case in point: Cal Berkeley, the "flagship of the CA system" as you say, requires a 2.0 GPA to get into their GWS degree program (source: https://guide.berkeley.edu/undergraduate/degree-programs/gender-womens-studies/). I hardly think there is a single student admitted into the business program with a 2.0 GPA. Prove me wrong.
It's hard to imagine top students, cream of the crop, WANTING to major in Gender/Women's Studies. A dumb, made up field based on politics and fantasies, not a genuine and respectable academic subject.
"Once admitted, students can change major at will. ". I do not think so. Most schools require evidence of competence in the area of study - you know, the STEM type background. Unless you have the wherewithal you probably are going to be rejected for the transfer - or told to take some elementary courses and then the school will evaluate.
I was thinking the same thing. Apply to the gender studies program, then switch to mechanical engineering. Or do they not allow you to take college calculus and physics once you're on the gender track?
In many cases the prerequisites are missing to efficiently transfer from a program with little to no pre-requisites to a more technical degree program. To go from 'gender studies' to 'engineering' the student would likely have to go back to junior college to attend classes they should have attended in high school. If the student possessed the prerequisites in high school and applied for a gender studies degree with the intent of transferring into an engineering program, then your anecdote just proves the original point - the engineering program was too competitive to achieve acceptance.
Ah yes, because such a program will be easily navigated by those in financial despair and won't at all be lost in an infinite maze of red tape and contractual small type.
The other point Khanna makes is that job training should be covered. But here again he's a lying philistine. The problem is that the education unions control our schools and donate huge dollars to Democrats and they are responsible for the fact that our young people leave high school without any job skills - often without even rudimentary levels of math and language achievement
Part of the problem is many of our teachers are not the best and the brightest. The teaching profession is not held in high esteem and therefore not as well paid as it should be, if we truly claim to value education.
I taught high school for a dozen years. Everyone knew who the good teachers were and who the bad teachers were - and they were all paid the same. I worked my butt off and didn’t make one cent more than the teacher who showed movies all the time. If you want better performance out of your teachers, you need merit pay (like any industry that cares about excellence) - which unions of course will never allow.
Not only the unions, but the woke people in general, who unfortunately run many of the unions/schools, who don't believe in merit pay or rewarding good/better people in general, because that's racist. ugh.
This is off topic for the article, but merit pay for teaching is absolutely fraught with problems. Be very careful what you wish for. I don’t know of any school district in the country that has the statistical expertise to assess the answer to the question: what was the contribution of an individual teacher to student learning in subject X (that is *not* what the NCLB / standardized testing captures today). What if the principal doesn’t like a given teacher, and thus assigns more disruptive kids to that teacher’s class? Or assigns all the smart kids to another teacher’s class? This kind of stuff happens all the time, and needs to be dealt with statistically.
The models get more complex than any normal teacher or principal are likely to understand. Are you (or any teacher) willing to live with a test-based incentive system that you will mostly / partially understand that is run by bureaucrats at the State level where districts are teaching to a high stakes test?
That’s what is needed for merit pay. “Everyone knows who’s who” isn’t evidence. Test scores and other objective performance are evidence of learning. If not a standardized test, then some other objective standard.
Even way back in the mid-80s, when I was in college for the first time--studying at that time to be an elementary school teacher--we were made aware that in order to get a teaching certificate in California (where some of the students were from), prospective teachers had to pass a basic competency exam (reading, arithmetic, etc.). The circumstances that would inspire such a regulation are dire to imagine; and that was 35+ years ago!
When I was in grad school, I had a classmate who was picking up classes here and there to get her M.A. in English. She had already gotten her M.Ed., and she told something I have heard from many other sources since: that education degrees (even grad level ones) now have ZERO rigor.
It really is a race to the bottom when it comes to training teachers in the U.S.
When I was in college, in the late 1970s, majoring in history with a side major in premedical sciences, I took a one-semester course in Education 301. I thought it was an interesting course, though not deep. The Prof went through the history of the American education system, and threw in various topics of interest, which I almost totally have forgotten today.
Anyway, I would often stay after class to ask questions and chat about this or that thing that he said, or that I had read somewhere. He was a nice guy and would discuss with me. I was literally the only student who EVER stayed after class.
I mean maybe others went to office hours though I doubt it. They were Ed majors and appeared to be dull, non-intellectual types just ticking a requirement on their way to earning the minimal qualification to be a teacher. I felt sorry for them but did not respect them, either; they didn't seem very hard working or dedicated or passionate. Just people who probably couldn't cut it in the hard sciences or rigorous scholarly topics like history (back then, we had to read actual books and write actual papers full of thoughtful ideas).
And this was a selective, private university. I wonder what the ed majors were like at the big public state schools.
What is incredibly disheartening is that good people want to be teacher. Universities fail them by not preparing them with even the most basic classroom management skills. School administrators fail them by not having a school/work place safe from violent students (zero suspension policies) and from students’ equally violent families and friends.
It's not just that. In many states--even mine (Iowa)--you cannot become a teacher without subjecting yourself to indoctrination. In order for me to become a secondary school teacher here, I would have to take two full semesters of "education" courses. The fact that I have an M.A. and six years of teaching experience on the college level does not matter in the slightest to the requirements.
Ironically, I taught high school students one semester in a dual-enrollment course at a local high school. But without the requisite year of indoctrination, I could not be hired as high school teacher.
Barriers like these prevent highly educated and experienced people from making a transition to teaching. Which seems to be exactly the way teacher's unions want it.
Agree with what you wrote, but pointing my finger at the state government which hires experts to write the regulations that do not fit the profession of teaching and to write curriculum that does not support students. An example is a white Stanford education expert wrote the framework for equity math for African Americans (ie lowered the standards) but never sought the input of African Americans who had succeeded in the math field. What about the teachers who supported, encouraged, and taught students to exceed the expectations ...where is their valuable input? https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Stanford-professor-Karen-speaks-out-17064784.php
Agree partially. But when I ask friends and family if they can name the truly memorable and influential teachers they had at all levels - K through grad school - they can usually count them on one hand. A great and dedicated teacher is a gift to be valued. But, as I guess in life, there are far too many hacks and time punchers.
probably has been true throughout human history. You find one great teacher, and follow them around. That's pretty much what I did :)
That said, I can tell you, from living in Asia for a couple of years when young, I experienced the Asian approach to teaching -- the teachers were so dedicated and cared so much, as long as the students were willing to be obedient.
They had crap teachers over there, as well, of course, but the prestige of being a teacher seemed to offset the rock bottom pay and there were some really good people in the field.
I had a friend who said when you pay teacher what you pay professional athletes you will attract better teachers.
In Japan the teaching profession is held i very high esteem and looking at quality of students they turn out, it looks like these teachers deserve high regard.
If you paid teachers according to the performance standards required of professional athletes that might change the playing field. But, by and large, the education unions don't want that. Speaking of which, when the presidents of ed-ja-kashun yoonyuns can't even speak basic English, don't you think we have a problem, Ms. Weingarten?
ed-ja-kashun yoonyuns are big business and are driven by the bottom line. The last thing they are interested in is quality education. They are driven by keeping their stable satisfied so they can keep miking them for union dues.
Years ago teaching was one of the few professions for educated woman, and manageable while raising a family, with the husband as the main breadwinner. I can see how it might be more difficult to hire teachers at that same caliber unless they are independently wealthy.
Why stop at student loans? Let's cancel all burdensome loads, home loans, car loans, drug dealer loans. You owe your booky 10 grand? No sweat, the ever senile Joe will pay it off.
The Democrats have shown time and time again, they are the champions of the irresponsible. Most everybody is a victim and victims need a handout. Most people would call this handout a bribe. I give you free money. You give me your vote and the money will keep flowing.
If you were subject to fraud, should you have to pay for the fraud? I’m just curious how far you would take this. For example, if your credit card were stolen, should you be responsible for the charges, no matter what they are? What about if someone elderly got suckered by a Ponzi scheme? Are those situations different in any way than a home loan or a car loan?
Many of the people who have outstanding student loan debt that is in default were effectively defrauded. In particular, the for-profit universities are somewhere between fraud and quasi-fraud type outfits. If nothing else, they are ridiculously expensive for what people are getting from them. I was just making an analogy, and asking for your view on other types of fraud. For example, Trump U was a fraud, and people paid money to that, but more recently, the government cleared the debt of about 200,000 people who had attended several schools (multiple of which are now out of business) including VoTech schools, Art Institutes, and other similar for-profit fraud centers. These groups defrauded people out of $6B worth of money that the taxpayers are now on the hook for. I am just curious whether you would feel similarly like “it’s their problem” if the same people had been defrauded in a home loan, car loan, or credit card scam.
If it is a scam, where people who set up the loan do so intending to scam people, then yes it is a scam. I don't know if this is the case with universities. However, students who are taking out student loans are fully aware of the conditions of the loan and if they don't pay that loan back, to me, that is theft. They are college students for Christ's sake. They are supposed to be the intellectual elite and smart enough to figure out how a loan works. If they graduate and get a good job and intentionally default, they are the scammers.
@Polecat, you are so angry. I wish that you would meet the people who were scammed, and you would find out that they are, perhaps, just like you, or maybe people you know. This is what changed my mind — but you need to open yourself up to data. These are not the “intellectual elite”! No! That is a completely wrong perception, which is why I keep asking you questions.
Yes, it’s from 2015. No, nothing has changed. What is different? Who’s in trouble? “For borrowers with $10,000 or less in debt, including workers who have been in the work force for years, typical income is only about $40,000.” This is the typical situation — they got suckered by a for-profit college. They were a non-traditional student — that means older than 18, perhaps 25 when they entered college, and already working. Some had kids already. These for-profit colleges lured them in with lies about high salaries and how they could get a degree on weekends and nights. At costs 10x community college rates. It’s a scam. Many never got a degree, but they have the debt. Even with the degree, the bump in salary never came along. Universities like DeVry and others exploit not the “intellectual elite”, but the working class. If we saddled most hard working families in America with another $8000-40,000 in debt for almost no increase in salary (or no degree), of course they couldn’t pay.
Is the Biden plan perfect? NO. But perhaps have some empathy?
Write to your congressperson and ask them why these for-profit universities are still in existence. Why haven’t we banned them? 47% of all graduates of for-profit universities are in default within 5 years, and that’s assuming that they graduate (and their graduation rates are lower). If you saw an auto or home loan business with a 47% default rate, wouldn’t you question their underwriting?
Should people have been more skeptical? Sure. But people should exercise, eat better, and do a lot of things. They tried to do something good for themselves, and they got scammed.
Could this plan be better designed and targeted? I think so. But perhaps you can acknowledge that, in the set of people covered are an awful lot of people you might agree are worthy of help.
In my university class, I require my students to back up their claims with evidence, usually numbers and facts. Where are yours? Perhaps you could elucidate readers, since you seem to think you know, on what fraction of the costs of higher ed are borne by the government even at Public (that is State) universities? Do you think that percentage has been going *up*?? You are completely misinformed. The rising cost of education is almost entirely driven by the fact that states have long been cutting the budgets of their state universities — doing *exactly* what you suggest. For a reference point from one of the largest and best state university systems in the country, up until 1970, the University of California system was **FREE** for in-state students; today, tuition at across the U.C. Schools runs about 14,000 per year in-state. These increases are largely driven by the fact that taxpayers used to fund about 90% of the costs of State Schools, and now generally fund more like 10%, leaving students and families to make up the difference. Because the costs rose so much, the government got into the business of guaranteeing student loans.
Since you are so well informed, perhaps you would also like to share your knowledge on how every other country in the entire world runs their system of higher education. Do they do it your way? Has that ever been a successful way to run a university?
Tuition has gone up at astonishing rates for various reasons, but government is the main one. Administration costs have exploded - and most of these are 'feel-good' positions in resonse to government mandates to 'battle' diversity, inclusion, and equity issues.
Even that right wing rag the HuffPost saw this way back in 2014:
"The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures."
Colleges have also had to compete for a shrinking pool of students after the Boomers got older. How did they do this? Climbing walls, lazy rivers, gourmet food, luxury dorms, and courses such as: (2013)
“What If Harry Potter Is Real?”
“God, Sex, Chocolate: Desire and the Spiritual Path”
University of Michigan has 82 diversity officers that combined are paid $10.6 million per year. Surely this adds nothing to runaway tuition costs in recent years.
The president of the university where I work (a CAL STATE campus) just got a 29% raise...She now makes 460K -- that is, more than the president of the U.S. Meanwhile, faculty were supposed to get a 4% raise in July, but Newsom fucked us with a last-minute budget reduction and we are getting 3% instead (CSU faculty do not get automatic COLAs; every little increase must be bargained for). Because faculty are getting such lavish increases, administrators on campus declared a budget crisis and slashed hundreds of courses a mere weeks before the fall semester began. The number of faculty is rapidly shrinking, while the number of VPs, assistant VP, and other parasitic administrative posts have exploded over the last 20 years. Not only do we have more administrators, but they get paid handsomely and retire with generous pensions.
Not, so fast, Prof. The rise in tuition correlates almost directly with the availability of student borrowing. Nor is the rise of tuition at state schools wholly related to funding cuts.
Moreover, if tuition at UC is $14K per year, the total borrowing for tuition for four years is under $60 K or less than one year at an Ivy. That also assumes no grants, scholarships, student work etc. Not saying it's as easy as when I could finance my education by summer jobs but it can be done. Moreover, the UC system provides cheap and excellent community colleges where the first two years can be done commuting from home at a very low cost (SB City, anyone?).
Tuition at UC schools may be $14,000, but room and board are another $14,000, and are real costs. When we’re talking about the cost of attending a UC school it’s actually around $35,000/year.
Am trying to be brief as I've written way too much already. But, yes and no. CA has a wonderful system of community colleges. You can live in Santa Barbara, go to City for the first two years and pay virtually nothing. Then, go to UCSB and live at home and pay $14 K. All in cost for a great education - $28K. So I really don't want to hear the crying. It's there if you really want it.
Completely agree. The problem are those going to private, or out of state, schools where the costs typically exceeds $60,000/year.
My daughter’s wanted to go to different schools (Pepperdine-$73,000/year, UNiv of Colorado -$70,000/year and Univ of AZ -$55,000). We compromised our lifestyle and have saved since their birth. We established a budget and stayed within that parameter that we set (much lower than the cost of their dream schools)
Not an honest statement or not well thought out. You choose.
If they weren't in school they'd still have room and board costs. So back that $14,000 out of your equation. And the $8,000 that got you to 35,000? Is that for travel expenses, clothing, etc? People not in school have those expenses also.
So the bottom line is, a UC school is $14,000 per year.
But if they weren't in school they could be working full-time. Since they can't realistically work 40hrs/week and keep up with studying, they often have to debt-finance living expenses.
Of course, I lived with my parents and attended my hometown college for that exact reason - I didn't want to rack up debt for 4 years of rent & groceries.
This is simply untrue. The net tuition cost at Berkeley, at least is about 16,000 per year as of last year, all in for in state tuition. You are confusing the posted tuition rate with the net tuition rate, which is the amount paid after aid and scholarships. The $16,000 per year is what the typical student pays. The average cost at UC Irvine is even lower, about $12,000 / year. 45% of UC undergraduates graduate with no debt at all. At Irvine, the average debt of the 55% who did have debt was about $20,000.
Public / State Schools are very, very affordable, and (if people choose reasonable majors), remain an excellent deal in education. Your claim is simply wrong.
My daughter attends a UC school (this is her junior year) and I pay her tuition. I think I know a little better than you regarding what it costs to send her there.
@Fade: what twisted reasoning would get you to this conclusion? Obviously not everyone pays the average — some families pay more, some pay less. You appear to be paying more, and there may be a number of reasons for that. If what you are implying is that the entire UC system is systematically lying to the government in terms of the numbers above? Just how unlikley does that sound?
To go look at the net price that UC Irvine reported to the Feds, for example. Why don’t you go do something useful and collect a bounty? Report them for their evil lies to the Feds! Surely you and your one family’s tuition prove them wrong, and you can make a mint by telling the Feds how these schools are lying.
For a forum called “Common Sense” there is near zero of it in comments like this one. I hope your daughter learns more at whatever UC school she is at. College can be expensive (my kid is in school now too), but personal experience is anecdote, not data.
Out of curiosity, will your daughter graduate with any debt?
@Bruce Millier: Public universities remain completely affordable, and they simply are not really a major contributor to the debt crisis. I’m not a proponent of making universities free, so that isn’t really my point. Some states have gone too far, and the costs of running the schools have gone up too far. What starts happening is that the schools really start looking like just private schools. That is a different issue. However, our Public Universities remain a very good deal right now. My broader point is that when people talk about the increase in tuition, they are way off base. As the article I posted indicated, absolutely some amount of increased tuition has been due to increased actual costs. But the majority (75% or more at some schools) has been due to states cutting the fraction of the costs that they cover.
This simply doesn’t seem controversial as a set of facts.
You changed the topic of discussion… universities need to cover expenses, so of course tuition increases to exactly match costs — that is how a not-for-profit operates. The question that began this remains all the people claiming that the “real” problem is as simple as “too many administrators” (usually of the DEI sort). That simply is not the case. All other cost increases are about 25% of all tuition increases over time, and many of those increases are unavoidable in a competitive market.
We agree that state universities remain a very good deal. And I would posit that coupling that with 2 yrs of community college makes the education even more affordable. College is available for those who want it badly enough. And the community college/state college option fulfills that role.
But I simply do not think you can quibble with the fact that tuition has increased at three times the rate of inflation for decades. Certainly for private schools and the publics seem to usually follow. When money is made available, the cost of goods will increase. You can't repeal the laws of economics.
You are so right Penny. Should we be subsidizing Prada bags?
I want to relate a conversation I had with an African immigrant cab driver in Buffalo. He said Americans were stupid. I asked why. He said he came here with nothing. Did his first two years at Erie Community College at almost no cost. Finished his degree at Buffalo State. Now he owns four rental properties and is buying more. He won't have to drive a cab much longer and will be in real estate management soon. Why, he asked, do Americans go into debt for degrees that can be had at a fraction of the cost? And with aid and scholarships to boot.
I'm a physician; I did my degrees at in-state public schools to keep tuition costs low. I had friends in med school who took Maximum loans so they would have spending money to gamble in casinos. They used student loan money to play poker. Meanwhile, I took the absolute minimum, knowing I'd have to pay it back.
With my kids, I'm having them even better: 2 years in community college followed by 2 years of in-state public university. It's what I should have done. Why spend 4 years in-state public univ when you can get the same diploma but save money by doing first 2 years in community college?
Correct. I graduated from Penn State with a degree in accounting. The first 2 years of school were a waist. I went to football games and partied my ass off. The second 2 years were in my major and were very valuable. I graduated and got a job in the Big 4 where I worked for 35 years then retired very comfortably.
You are absolutely right. My Grandfather said, "The only thing a college education is good for, is when you are talking to a group of men, you can tell them what school you went to."
@Penny and others: it is not that status seeking isn’t real, but this has essentially nothing to do with the issue at hand, which was student loan defaults, etc. As a second issue, this is a cultural problem that is easy to sidestep: as a family, don’t buy into the status game, just like many reasonable families don’t buy Prada or whatever brands to show off. The total enrollment of the entire Ivy League is so small that it is irrelevant to any discussion of policy. The total enrollment of all colleges that accept less than 25% of those who apply is also too small to even matter to discussion. The vast majority of college students in America attend community college and Public / State Universities (78% of undergraduates).
It is also the case that some of our largest states have particularly excellent public university systems, which motivate a lot of very smart, very capable students in those states to attend their state schools: CA, TX, NY, MI, VA to name perhaps the top several (there are quite a few more!).
Rich private schools tend to have very generous financial aid for poor people who are able to attend. For example, most of the Ivy League is almost free for anyone who is actually poor at this point. Those going into debt are doing so, as you point out, by choice, and for status, but they are also a small-ish group at this point, and the debt should be ok (at top schools and reasonable majors). Private schools tend to enroll students who come from richer families who can afford to pay, and those students graduate with less debt, not more. This isn’t a paradox, it is a selection effect. We would also find that people who own Prada and Birkin bags have less credit card debt than those without, even though they have very expensive purchases.
Asking for numbers and facts is not condescension. It is how people are supposed to debate. Shouting at one another and repeating complete misinformation is unhelpful. My comment about college classrooms was a slap in the face, sure. Our educational system teaches students to back up their claims with evidence in high school, too. Ask any HS school teacher in English or History, and they will happily tell you that is what students are supposed to be getting out of those classes as well.
Where did the country go wrong that it seems reasonable to launch a broadside set of comments, wholly devoid of facts? That should be called out by *everyone* — hey, can you provide some support for those claims? Instead, anyone who likes the conclusion just piles on: Yeah! What he/she said! Awesome! Sure! That doesn’t demonstrate that our educational system is doing a very good job. It also doesn’t show that “Common Sense” is living up to its name. Where is the “common sense”?
Sort of like gender is fluid, there are no illegal humans, women are oppressed (60% of undergrads are female), Trump colluded with Russia, etc. and other progressive articles of faith?
Asking for numbers and facts could be done in ine line. The condescension was found in the remainder of your, uh, comment -"since you seem to think you know", "[Y]ou are completely misinformed", and the sarcastic "since you are so well-informed.
I appreciate you coming here and debating the issue. I don't have the research (numbers) but I believe this is a highly complex problem. The cost of tuition has gone up, dramatically. I understand that CA has lowered the amount that it directly pays to support the CSU & UC systems, which as a CA taxpayer is unfortunate. I believe that the number of administrators and support staff have also grown at a much more rapid pace than educators; this has added to the cost of higher education. The government stepping in and providing student loans has also had an impact; I am not a researcher, so I don't know to what extent, but it has had some impact.
We need debate. We need people on all sides of the issue discussing this and other important issues. We need to respect that people will have different opinions and come from different life experiences to this.
I don't argue with people about how insurance works; I have been doing it for over 30 years and most people are just wrong about it. But, I am willing to discuss it with anyone that will a reasonable conversation; I hope you do the same.
Um, here’s some condescension for you: what field was your Ph.D. in? You obviously have no idea how the financial system works, nor how contracts operate. According to your implied principles, if someone worked hard to earn money, then specifically gifted that money for a specific purpose, say to provide for cancer research (an endowment), NCMaureen suggests that society should steal the money so endowed to pay off loans for which the money was not intended and for which it is contractually forbidden to be used. A great suggestion! Socialize the gifts of charitable endowments the way that some countries socialize industries! I’m sure that will have no effect whatsoever on future charitable gifts to any endeavor, right?
Your comment about bankruptcy trivializes how bad bankruptcy is and misunderstands why it exists. I assume you’d like to bring back debtor’s prison?
Your ignorance is exceeded only by your ignorance. Stick with studying toads, bacteria, or whatever laser beam thin slice of the universe you presumably know about.
Ok, let’s take a different approach. Let’s set aside costs at universities and how they are $funded$. Instead, let’s focus on production, output, the quantity and types of degrees that universities generate. My disappointment with the university system today is that it is producing too many degrees for the marketplace to absorb. In my opinion, if the marketplace could absorb all of the degrees and gainfully employ those people, we would not be debating about student loan forgiveness. Because those people would have jobs and would be able to repay their student loans. The numbers to support my position are, (1) the number of students loans in default (millions), and (2) the principal amount of debt (100’s of millions) at risk. There are articles you can Google to find these stats, they are readily available.
So what about my argument ?
Why do universities continue to produce something that the marketplace cannot absorb ?
This, in my opinion, is where the problem lies.
The fix, well, just have a conversation with one of your colleagues that teaches economics. They will tell you how the marketplace would react in order to correct this problem. It’s not pretty, very painful in fact.
My opinion is that higher education, as a sector, is over capacity. There is simply too much of it. If hire education were a security on an established market, I would short it. But each institution stands on its own. So this means that many of them will need to close their doors.
Excellent comment. Let me add the impact international students have on academia. Their admission is desirable because they pay full load. It doesn’t matter how much it costs, if an Asian family can get a kid into Harvard, they will come up with the money. So the incentive is to keep tuitions high.
What are universities supposed to do with their multi billion dollar endowments? Are these non taxed funds? I know they are invested in private equity. Why are they allowed to accumulate to the multi billions while tuitions balloon? I think an accounting of these funds is in order.
Harvard et al are the outliers in this discussion. The focus should be on the 95% of colleges that are overpriced and overbuilt. In the 1950's about 30% of HS grads went to college, 1960 45%, now it is 66%. When I taught (1970's) about half of the students had no business being in college - they were there to party.
The percentage of kids that start and do not finish college, I believe is in the 40% range. Those kids had no business going to college in the first place.
Another brilliant comment by the mushroom sniffer @NCMaureen.
1) Full paying students **reduce** tuition costs for everyone else, not increase it. That’s part of that “economics” thing that you so clearly don’t understand even part 1 of. Universities let in super-smart, full paying international students who contribute in many ways to campus life. In addition, by paying the very high, “rack rate tuition”, they subsidize other students who then do not have to pay as much. Since this concept seems very hard to grasp, realize that a typical university is tuition-driven: like any business, it needs to collect a certain amount of revenue to balance its costs. How the total revenue is collected doesn’t matter. So if a small number of very rich (but very smart) students are willing to pay very high prices to attend, they make up a large fraction of the total costs that need to be paid, the rest of the (domestic) students need to pay less. This is true for any rich kid who is admitted (for example, a rich alumni child who is also very smart, but who will get no financial aid).
2) @NCMaureen has one of her bugs she studies up her ass over endowments, which she also understands exactly zero. What is this, your third or fourth comment on this?
A). Endowments are charitable gifts made by hard working people to another charity (in this case the university, but churches, hospitals, and other charities can have endowments, too) for a *specific purpose*. They are a legal contract. There is an “accounting” of them, which is that they need to be spent on what they were donated for. So if, for example, someone donates money to a university to establish a fund for cancer research (not uncommon), that money is invested, and the interest on that money is used each year to fund cancer research. It CANNOT be legally used to fund scholarships or tuition — that is theft from the *donor* — not from the University.
B) @NCMaureen, as is typical, is wholly ignorant of facts. “Multi-billion dollar endowments”. How many schools have a multi-billion dollar endowment? Literally 5% of all universities in the entire country have an endowment >$1B a total of about 100 schools. What is the median endowment? About $60M — almost nothing. Even if the endowment dollars were able to be spent on student aid (and about 50% of endowment money is, in fact, spent on student financial aid), the relevant number is not the size of the endowment, but endowment per student. Bigger school? Need bigger endowment. It is much less impressive for Ohio State to have a large endowment with it’s roughly 30,000 students than for Brown to have a similar size endowment with far fewer students.
C). Why are they allowed to accumulate endowments? Because that is what endowments are for. Donors give the money so that the funding is in perpetuity. As a donor, I could not give the money, and instead set up my own charitable fund, then have the proceeds of the fund donated to the university every year. That results in a huge amount of wasted administration, particularly for smaller gifts. But @NC Maureen would take the option to give the gift to the university or other charity away from donors. Socialize!
D) At least you asked this time whether they are untaxed. Yes, they are now taxed, or at least almost all the big ones have a tax on them. Is that helpful? 48% of endowment funds go to student scholarships. Now, 1.4% of those scholarships go to the Federal Government, which can spend on anything it wants, instead. Another 11% of endowment monies directly fund faculty positions (endowed chairs). That money allows the university to keep tuition lower — but now 1.4% goes to the Feds to spend on whatever. So the Feds now get extra taxes.
Just FYI, the actual private equity firms that you appear to dislike? They, and their owners, pay a super low tax rate that was just kept super-low in the recent negotiations thanks to Sinema and *all* the republicans. For all your vitriol, you have some very bizarre priorities.
You’ve still not provided the support (link to a 3rd party study) to your assertion that 71% of student loans in default are from kids who attended for-profit institutions.
you are spot on! College has turned into an 'experience'..rather than an education. I want to see some outcomes from these schools (rather than 6 yr graduation rates...what BS!). Like % of students who have full time employment 6 months post-graduation. Average salaries for graduates from various schools within the university..i.e. schools of nursing, school of arts and sciences, etc. Let people see the FACTs.
Actually, nursing has it right. They keep the number of schools very low and 99% of their graduates get a good nursing job. There is a shortage of nurses. But the key here is that THE MARKET PLACE is demanding nurses.
10% of all students enroll in for-profit universities. Those universities account for 71% of all student loans in default. Would you say that we should shut down such universities? Sounds like this would be a good idea, right? And yet, we do not. Why don’t we? You might reflect on the fact that these universities are frequently engaged in what looks like almost if-not actual fraud (e.g., Trump U was actual fraud, but still-operating versions are just shy of that). When unsuspecting students end up getting conned, why do we allow these schools to stay in business? Before trashing the entire system of higher ed, maybe we should first deal with the most abusive players first?
I see plenty of data on line showing that default rates at for-profit schools exceed those of private and public. But I see no data on principal amounts in default in these three categories. Since for-profit school enrollment accounts for less than public and private combined, I don’t see how for-profit schools can account for 71% of defaults. Can you please point to a study that shows principal amounts in default by: for-profit, public and private institutions.
There is plenty of data by age, by state, etc…
And I agree, we should close down any and all schools that engaged in fraud, if for some reason the market fails to do so.
And yet, the ones that are actually classified as "for profit", nonetheless account for 71% of defaults, but 10% of students. So... your conclusion is? Should we start by shutting *those* down and see if that helps things?
We have 330+ million people in the US. The top 1% of earners is roughly 3.3 million people that can afford to send their kids (or Grandkids) to any college and pay full price. The top 5% is roughly 17 million people. That is is a lot of people the Universities can market to.
Why should I pay for someone else’s college education? You seem to take it as a matter of fact that this is the way it should be and if it isn’t that is some kind of problem. People don’t fund more state colleges because they don’t want to pay for it. That’s why they are upset that some folks are being given this “forgiveness” because they now have to pay for it and they get no benefit from it.
If college tuition is unaffordable, perhaps look inwards at your institution. Perhaps it’s arrogant and entitled to look outwards at society and expect them to pay for something they do not get a benefit from. More degrees make existing degrees worth less. More graduate degrees make current graduate degrees worth less. Yet the coat keeps going up, and your point is that it’s societies fault because we don’t want to pay for it? Do you think if states fully funded college education, costs would go down? I’m pretty sure they’d go up. The problem isn’t divestment from the state. The problem is these institutions expect kids (mostly kids, some adults) to make an investment in their future and them milk them for every penny they can and then, apparently, point the finger at everyone else and expect them to foot the ridiculous cost of higher education.
Please do what any overvalued, under delivering institution does and adjust. Cut costs. Reduce workforce. Stop expecting a bailout from the taxpayers. What kind of leftist are you?
Since 1980, college tuition and fees are up 1,200%, while the Consumer Price Index for all items has risen by 236%. As you say, direct education appropriations to universities have decreased since 2000, but your dramatic 90%-then to 10%-now comparison is largely due to dramatic increase in the costs (denominator).
At the same time, state funding for financial aid to students has increased steadily during that time. A 2015 study by the New York Federal Reserve demonstrated a direct “pass-through” effect of the availability of student loan credit to a contemporaneous rise in college tuition.
The subsidizing of college tuition through financial aid and guaranteed loans has substantially contributed to bloated university tuitions, it’s not “almost entirely driven” by state budget cuts.
There is not one single product in the history of the world where the cost have gone up (exponentially) and the value of said product has decreased proportionally. Yes, I’m talking about college.
"...the University of California system was **FREE** for in-state students..." One can only hope you don't teach economics. Nothing is "free". Someone pays, and in the case of taxpayer funded schools, it's either state or federal taxpayers. Maybe state taxpayers got tired of paying tuition and fees that were ever-escalating due to unlimited Federal taxpayer dollars flowing in via student loans? The outcome here is simple: Federal taxpayers (many of whom funded their own children's higher education entirely out of their own pockets) are being forced to pay for people who made bad decisions. Those decisions are thus being rewarded, and therefore perpetuated. The system is irrevocably broken.
I literally just spoke at length to a colleague in the UK (England) about their education system and her personal experience. Her daughter had to borrow thousands to get a university nursing degree. She makes 25,000 pounds/year. Her mother expects that she will never be able to fully repay her loans, which will be forgiven after 15 yrs (if I remember that # correctly). According to her, the uni system is falling apart in the UK and costs have risen dramatically. So....don't include England in the 'every other country' fact.
At Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland costs Irish, UK, and EU students nothing in tuition as do most public colleges. Any student contribution is capped at 3000 euros annually.
The world of higher education that you live in is bloated, out of touch and becoming increasingly irrelevant. The government never HAD to get in the business of guaranteeing school loans...they did it in anticipation of would ultimately morph into the train wreck being discussed here - a payoff to the people running the nations progressive incubators (previously know as colleges and universities). Cry me a river for the poor higher ed admins who are struggling to make ends meet with the anemic 1,200% increase in tuition in the U.S. since 2010. By any measure, the Biden student loan forgiveness is ill-conceived, patently unfair and probably illegal. Anyone (other than a student who buried THEMSELVES in debt) could possible think it's a good idea.
I went to the University of California in the 70s when tuition was 600/yr.
What changed? there was no DEI administration, there were no fancy dorms and facilities, and only the top 10% of high school graduates were accepted. There were no ridiculous degrees. And professors actually taught.
And the State of California funded more like 90% of the budget of the schools, rather than 10%. — that’s the main thing that changed. That accounted for 75% of the increase in net tuition since you were in school, on average across Public Universities. All other increases: administrators, faculty salary increases, amenities, all the other stuff that @NCMaureen is so fond of railing about account for only 25%. Some of those other increases were, in fact, unavoidable. Some, of course, could be cut today or have been avoided in the past. But 75% of the change would not be altered.
The remainder of this comment, that fewer people went to college, etc. is a red herring, as that would affect the number of schools, not the cost to attend conditional on attending any given school. As always, no evidence whatsoever for “professors actually taught”. @NCMaureen: What is the average teaching load for professors in the UC system today vs. the 1970s? How does that square with the dual mission of teaching and research that major research universities have? How many faculty are supported on grant money or endowment funds vs. tuition? As always, long on strongly worded claims, goose egg on data or evidence.
Professors who cash in on external consulting done during academic time need to have their pay docked. This would bring down their salary and thus their pensions. Instead these professors double dip, teach one class a semester, foist their work onto grad students, get sabbaticals and summers off. I remember my graduate advisor strolling into the lab around 10am, swimming every lunch hour, and complaining about the one class a year he had to teach. As long as his grad students turned out papers he could put his name on, no one questioned anything.
I disagree. It is a totality of its parts kind of problem. Professors may be a small part of the cost, but they are still part of the problem. They seem to value themselves much higher than what they actually bring to society as a whole.
My garbage man brings more public good to society than most professors I had in college, and at least half of the professors I had in law school. My garbage man takes away the refuse the buildup of which would destroy civilized society by spreading disease, making our living areas disgusting and generally creating large eyesores of large mounds consisting of rotting garbage. Yet my garbage man makes less than a professor (and works a lot more). And my garbage man is friendlier and generally less stuck up. My garbage man never argues that we should be paying off his debt as a society even though we wouldn’t have much of a society without our garbage folks.
Professors are highly overvalued for what they actually bring to the table. And yes, that’s triply so for administrators.
Furthermore a college degree, just because of the abundance of them, is becoming more worthless (as one would expect given the simple rule of supply and demand) yet seems to cost a lot more. For some, that degree is the most expensive toilet paper known to human history. I don’t see many professors accepting their part in that. Instead, some argue that you and I should foot the bill for the rising cost of that toilet paper.
So yes, the professors are part of the problem. Among many, many others.
Professors do not make enough in most cases. And in addition, even with jacked up tuition, colleges use adjuncts to teach and pay them next to nothing. I know; I was an adjunct. Got paid $2400 per semester to teach an accounting/finance class to master’s students.
This is exactly the case. Rather than hiring professors, colleges hire adjuncts. Adjuncts are typically not allowed to work more than part-time (because that would make them eligible for various benefits), and they are hired strictly on a contract basis, which means that an adjunct cannot be sure, from semester to semester, whether they will have a job.
Part of the reason I stopped teaching as an adjunct when I did is because the head of the community college where I was teaching had a grudge against our campus (which had originally been a separate community college of its own). She wanted to bust our campus down to a mere "attendance center," which would mean getting rid of things like our library and our student services (the main campus was an hour away, btw). And this was despite the fact that our campus brought in many students who never have been able to attend the main campus, due to the distance involved.
As a result of her aim, the head wanted to replace a retiring English professor AND the only Math professor on campus with adjuncts. Even though our campus *already* had trouble hiring enough English adjuncts necessary to cover the classes (I would have taught more classes, but I wasn't allowed to teach more than part-time). But the entire faculty at both campuses revolted, demanding that the professors be replaced with professors.
Naturally, I applied for the professorship that was coming open. I had been working there for over 4 years, and I had excellent teaching reviews from my students; in fact, there were students who intentionally took classes they might not have otherwise, just so they could have me for a teacher. And as a current employee, the college policy was that I automatically merited the courtesy of an interview.
But the head associated me with the faculty revolt (even though I'd had nothing to do with it, since I could not be a union member), due to WHERE I taught and WHO had hired me to begin with. So I did not get even the courtesy of an interview. In fact, word went out that the adjuncts were to be deprived of the spare office we had been sharing.
I was done. As much as I loved teaching, I was not capable of putting my heart into a poorly paid job where I was getting ZERO respect from my boss.
Got to admit that I was more than a little pleased when, the following spring, the faculty took a no-confidence vote that went about 94% against her. The board investigated, and although they could not find adequate evidence of wrongdoing to fire her outright, she made a hasty resignation.
I had to stop teaching, despite loving it too, because I couldn't with the student attitudes anymore. Anything less than an "A" and they were complaining to admin about the class being too hard or I didn't teach it right. And mostly admin backed the students and not the teachers.
Back when I was a graduate teaching assistant (adjuncts in all but pay), one of my fellow GTAs had a student who out-and-out plagiarized a paper. She was going to give them a failing grade for the class (something we were allowed, even encouraged, to do in those circumstances). But the helicopter parents roared in, and the department forced the GTA to step back; if I remember correctly, she was able to give them a failing grade on that paper only. And the parents were still upset that their precious baby was punished.
1) Please read the article I posted. Professorial salary increases are not the largest part of the problem, by any means.
2) Paying professors less is counterproductive given the overall push on this forum toward more “practical” educational fields. Where will you find excellent educators in fields like engineering, business, and STEM who will work at a university for crappy pay rather than going into industry? Yes, I (and others like me) want to teach and give back to society, but there are obviously limits. As it stands, computer science, statistics, math, and physics departments are emptied by tech companies and Wall St who can pay 2-5x academic salaries.
3) Professors in fields like the humanities, languages, etc. are already paid very little — far, far less than you think. Average starting salary for an English professor right now is about $55,000 /year. There are no full time jobs, of course, so that is for some lucky 1/1000 who could find such a job. The actual average salary of all English professors (this is with perhaps 18 years of education / out of the workforce and whatever is the average number of years of experience) is about $75K — lower than most HS teachers in suburban districts. They typically teach hundreds of students per semester in full time teaching, plus have advising responsibilities, plus other service work around the university.
4) Most professors in the humanities/etc, are not full time; they are contingent labor who work as adjuncts, have no job security at all, may not have benefits, and get paid by the class.
5) As usual, @NCMaureen has no Earthly clue what she is talking about (her comments appear below). Focusing on the handful of tenured professors who either abuse the system or who are famous enough that they can both turn out excellent work and also have free time is anecdote, not data.
Again, read the article I posted. Yes, some savings there. Some of the administrators are *required* by law. Some are not. If a school is in an urban area and hires a new "public safety officer" (really, a chief of police), is that a new administrator? Many schools in the 60s, 70s, and 80s were commuter schools with no students living on campus. Today, students live on campus, and now the campus needs a police force. Police force needs an administrator. Law says that we need to keep track of crimes around campus and produce a report that is public and report to the government. Who creates that report? The faculty? No. Administrators. We used to call these "unfunded mandates". Just 1 example of many. Administrators remain not the biggest source of tuition increases. The largest source is states cutting budgets (for public schools, where the vast majority of students go).
We should never have allowed universities to become more than institutions of higher education. They have become expensive way stations for kids who delay adulthood, hot beds of protest and CRT, and purveyors of indoctrination.
@NCMaureen: “*we* should never have allowed universities to become…”
Really? Who is this “we”? The Government? Should “we” have allowed universities to become giant quasi-professional sports training grounds instead of academic institutions? Have you looked around the world? Does any other country on Earth use their university system as the minor league for their pro sports teams? Should most students live at home during college, the way many (if not most) students do in most countries in most of the world? If not, why not? Did you mean to include all the private universities in your comment, or were you only referring to publicly funded schools? So, schools that were privately founded should not have been “allowed” to become more than institutions of higher education, by, for example, having fraternities, sports teams, or clubs?
Yes, that makes total sense. We have many complex institutions that are effectively regulated directly by parents and taxpayers. We need something like a parent group led by someone thoughtful and with a deep knowledge base, with a good grasp of economics and policy, like you, perhaps? Maybe after you are done effectively regulating higher ed, we can have NCMaureen and MGT regulating banks! Oh yes! Can't wait to hear what new insanity will come forth from that. Maybe something like what Putin is doing, or the economy of Venezuela.
Did you respond to my question regarding sports teams? No? Too busy hanging out in your cave, trolling around?
Perhaps you have spent too many years too close to the mushrooms you study? You are supposed to wear a mask around toxic chemicals.
Why not? Because they made an agreement to pay, that's why not. Period. In my neck of the universe, that's the absolute bottom line. You don't get "youth" as an excuse. How on earth do you suppose people learn responsibility? By being responsible.
And "merciful"?? Seriously? You call "letting someone get away with not repaying a debt" merciful? Listen: It does no one any favors to accommodate the worst person they can be, to lower expectations to the point where they aren't even accountable to themselves. Personal responsibility for one's words & actions is everything. Absolutely everything. It's shocking to me that you think letting a kid wallow in this kind of irresponsibility is a kindness. It isn't. It will set the tone for the rest of that person's life.
There are a bunch of people who made interesting comments, and some who have brought pieces of evidence to bear. I regret that I don’t have the time to write a full essay addressing each of the various comments individually. However, for those who are interested, your comments fall into several categories, all of which are misconceptions about the role of cost growth in higher education. When I made my comment, I did not mean to imply that the *only* reason that tuition has increased is / was lack of state funding — obviously that is not true. It is, however, the main reason. A number of responses cite growth in administration as another reason, which sure (some of those administrators are mandated by the government, some not, by the way, and faculty are just as annoyed at the growth of administrators as taxpayers). Growth in amenities is cited. I don’t think that anyone mentioned growth in salaries, but professors are now paid more, and that is a component as well.
For those that are interested, here is a link to a very accessible article with actual data and numbers, written by a neutral / non-partisan professor of economics. It’s a bit old (2016), but nothing really has changed. In some ways, the nice part about it being written in 2016 is that it pre-dates the super-partisan culture war crap that otherwise pervades our national discourse. All the data and facts you need. TL;DR? Less than 25% of the total cost increases in higher ed have been due to all causes other than states reducing their funding.
Your argument would be unassailable EXCEPT that we have seen virtually the same increases in tuition and housing for private as well as public IHEs. I infer that competition for a diminishing number of students has played a big role in increasing costs, enabled by Big Government. As a result, we're seeing small private schools driven out of business.
Another problem we face is that there are too many people going to IHEs who don't need to. Our country desperately needs more artisans and craftsmen, plumbers and electricians, and we don't have them. We need personal care workers – for the young and for the elderly – and employers can't find them.
Professor E, I respect your demand for facts, but I'm afraid that the problems of higher ed are much more nuanced than you seem to think they are. Ultimately, affordability is a major one but not the only one. In too many cases (some documented here on CS), IHEs have drifted away from their educational mission (teaching people to think) to an indoctrinational one (teach them to think the right [Left?] thoughts). The erosion of free speech on college campuses is terrifying to me. If you can't explore ideas in the shadow of the Ivory Tower, then where can you?
"Our country desperately needs more artisans and craftsmen, plumbers and electricians, and we don't have them. "
100%
And these jobs are actually much better than most Bachelor's degree jobs. Craftsmen, plumbers and electricians are Well Paid, have a job which is in demand, & more rewarding. You have the accomplishment of directly seeing the fruits of your labor. Also you are active which is much better for your health than sitting at a desk/computer
USA also needs more skilled manufacturing workers. As we are ramping up things like SemiConductor manufacturing
John: you are changing the subject. One question is about what has caused the increases in tuition. A second question is about how increases in tuition may or may not have resulted in increased defaults on student loans. A third question, which is much broader, is a policy question about allocation of labor investment: to higher ed vs. the skilled trades and other careers for example. A further sub question is whether Higher Ed is delivering on its mission. These are all interesting topics. The basic problem is that the discussion has become like a hydra: every time something comes up and is put to rest, multiple more topics suddenly arise that are quite interesting, but now need discussion.
What this all convinces me of is this: the real problem is that people do not have a common set of facts from which they are working. I sent around one such article, which was (and is) accurate. Still some people don’t believe, so that’s a problem. Maybe Bari will start a new concept which is an in-depth policy analysis section of the website for people who really want to learn about certain topics. If people were interested, I think that I could get some writers who would contribute a neutral analysis that explained what is going on. But people would have to commit to really reading — there is simply no explaining something as complex as the problems of our educational system in 500 words.
Very interesting, and the first I've heard that. I've book marked it for later, but have trouble buying that position. I've seen other articles stating that it's admin bloating (at the expense of actual prof comp), and at least in Iowa City, I've seen the student housing currently being offered, and it's nothing like the cinder block dorms room I had in the 70s when I did my undergrad.
I’m confused as to why I’m expected to pay taxes to fund colleges at all. It seems odd to me that you expect it at all. If 2/3 of people don’t go to college, why should 2/3 of people subsidize the 1/3 who do, especially these days when the 1/3 who do are then taught that the 2/3 subsidizing their education are irredeemably racist, homophobic, bigoted and blah, blah, blah? There seems to be some kind of disconnect from reality here.
"The picture is a bit different at private schools, which do not receive state funding but have nonetheless seen substantial tuition increases. At private nonprofit colleges, the spending categories described above — student services and faculty and administrative salaries — together explain most of the tuition increase over the past two decades. Among for-profit institutions, recent research suggests that one big cause is the generosity of federal student aid: Some institutions may be raising tuition in order to capture as much government-backed money as possible."
That check wasn't worthless, I guarantee you. Out of 358 comments, my guess is that 90% are made by people who have not had any experience paying college tuition within the last 5 to 10 years.
You must love the idea that you're not only paying those fees up front but also being taxed to subsidize them and taxed again for the people who didn't pay.
See the goal of this isn't justice, it's to maximize the amount of money and power that universities give to the Democratic Party. They always help prices go up, and then demand taxpayers to pay for it while university bureaucrats get richer and richer.
Again, a lot of the people who receive this benefit were sold a bill of goods by loan companies that the students were recommended to listen to by the university itself.
College loans are prime examples of predatory lending and what's worse their target is young people without the real world experience to recognize the ramifications of the crap they're being sold.
Debt forgiveness is laudable when the debt is consistently incurred through unethical practices.
Right, I'm on board with all that, so why are we discussing taxpayers giving the money back, and not the corrupt loan companies and universities repaying the money?
There's an injustice, so we're going to fix it by punishing the innocent and letting the rich scum who arranged it keep the money and power.
And Dems praise this as a victory and then declare it should be 500% more money spent because "this is progressive." Utter madness.
1) The famous Roosevelt Institute Study is hard to find (link is to Mother Jones website, which has another link to a brief in the R.I., which goes to another summary - no details on how they reach these conclusions), and if you are going to build an argument based on someone else's research, at least it should be easy to find and assess the arguments;
2) But most importantly, even if the progressive arguments were correct (highly doubtful), any loan forgiveness just doesn't address the underlying issue - the insane inflation of a college education in the US. There is no mention on stopping the bloating administrative bureaucracies that have been burdening the system for several decades or the increases in tuition.
This is nothing but an electoral ploy by a very unpopular President to minimise the electoral defeat that is coming his way.
College students vote Democrat IF they actually go out and vote... the biggest challenge for Democrats is to get the young to the polls... This is about energising the AOC/squad base...
The Roosevelt study would also miss the point even if its conclusions are true: The real injustice is that the executive order transfers wealth to those with the highest earning potential, even if they're young and not yet especially wealthy today.
Agreed! I had trouble finding the Roosevelt Institute study and once I did it was frustrating. It's basically taking all the data from other studies and manipulating it to fit their own point. This should be a link to the PDF
"In this brief, we argue that critiques of student loan cancellation as regressive are based primarily on five empirical and conceptual errors: the inclusion of private student loans,
conditioning analyses on borrowers only, focusing primarily on income rather than
wealth distributions, highlighting the value of debt to the government rather than
benefits to households, and ignoring the racial distribution of debt" - I honestly don't know if I should laugh or I should cry... This is an exercise in reframing an argument and then finding the right statistics that support your pre-established hypothesis...
The ivory tower is running out of oxygen by the second...
Regarding the "Roosevelt Institute Study", Leftists never, and I mean NEVER, scrutinize their sources. Any link that vaguely purports to make a claim helpful to left-wing argumentation is to be accepted as infallible, and woe be unto anyone who clicks on it and discovers how utterly weak its methodology is!
Of course, any information unhelpful to their agenda also goes without scrutiny, as no scrutiny is needed to say "the source is unreliable"! At least, until your media tells you your new talking points ("It's just like PPP!").
I am no economist, but when somene claims that progressive economics somehow trumps basic math, I am skeptical. You cannot just wipe out debt with a stroke of a pen. If you can well, hell, let's do that with the national debt. It is just a matter of scale. When money is owed, someone pays. It is that simple. The government has no money of its own. It is our money, given by us or taken from us. We will all pay for this. Progressives blather on about "equity". In its new incarnation, equity has come to mean every one gets the same regardless of what they put in or how hard they work. There is a name for that: communism. What equity truly means and has always meant is fairness. Our feckless, senile president's plan is anything but fair. My daughter and her husband are paying off their college debt, steadily and on time. Why should they pay for the college debt of someone who took more than four years to complete college and obtained a degree with no meaningful practicality in the real world. This is one reason why we have this metastatic proliferation of HR personnel and diversity activists on the payroll of our higher institutions.
They know this. They know that $10k in “forgiveness” is just everyone else chipping in to give a small minority $10k. The problem is that to just say that and accept it would mean they aren’t the good, just, moral people they believe they are and they won’t be able to lord it over everyone how important they are because they are so just and moral. They HAVE to justify it somehow. It’s not an easy thing for people who think they are uniquely just to so shamelessly accept they are simply taking peoples money in the least democratic way possible, by presidential fiat.
Certainly agree, Richard. The policy of debt forgiveness is unsound, unfair and regressive on principle when compared to the more equitable solution of allowing debtors to go bankrupt on their debts. Doing that would give them leverage over their lenders in negotiating better terms on either principle, interest, or both. That is the American way. Not a giveaway.
But having said that - I've noticed on the part of a lot of commenters here and in the media alike, mostly from Republicans but from more centrist Dems as well, that the average American taxpayer, especially those who have paid off their student loans (or in the process of doing so) will foot the bill.
There is a reason this country can carry a gargantuan and impossible to imagine debt of 23 Trillion dollars - and that is because we pay only the interest (low now but surely to rise) on an annual basis on the securities we issue. When we need to retire and pay off these bonds to their owners, we issue more to fund the payout. Funny how that works.
But the interest is forever there, while the principle debt slowly goes up but remains very largely untouched since when was the last time an American government actually had a budget surplus? (Clinton's..)
This is getting a little long winded (sorry) - but the main point I'm attempting to make is that I think it's more accurate to say that Americans will pay with their taxes only the interest on the 350 Billion dollars (I think) this forgiveness program will cost. If we were to carry an interest rate of 5% on the 350 - that works out to 17.5 Billion dollars. Divide that into 325 million Americans (taxpayers and not) and we come out with an annual per capita payout of 54 dollars.
The equivalent of around nine Starbucks lattes. (But don't tell that to any Progressives who may be lurking around here..)
TY, Sir Lee. I agree with the idea about allowing debtors to go bankrupt.
You calculations on the interest look accurate. But, You know, the whole $350 B will likely hafta be paid by todays's grandchildren. I forget what the debt to GDP ratio is, but my recollection is pretty much the whole world is over 100%. That's not sustainable forever, AFAIK. TY again.
"the whole $350 B will likely hafta be paid by todays's grandchildren"
Well, can't blame the boomer generation for this one - Biden isn't a boomer and the greedy students wanting someone else to pay their debts are not boomers either.
Well said. And in this, just like all government policies, bills, laws, codes, etc - the only thing that we need to know is that the rich never take a hit and never get screwed. The regular people always do…
The rich are paying as much as 55% of their income in taxes. Please stop saying the rich don’t pay. The richest people in NYC are paying more than the rest combined.
@Richard, @LeeMorris. The basic issue that is confounding both of you is that you are confused about how the student loans currently work, how bankruptcy would work, who is in default, and therefore how debt forgiveness might play out. Do a thought experiment this way: First, do you know who owns the debt? That is, who holds the student loan debts? To whom is the money owed? If the students declared bankruptcy, whom would they be “stiffing”? The answer years ago might have been “some private lender”. Today, however, it is likely to be “the Federal Government”. The U.S. Department of the Treasury revealed in its 2020 annual report that student loans accounted for nearly 20% of all U.S. government assets.” [U.S. Department of the Treasury Bureau of the Fiscal Service. Financial Report of the United States Government, Pages 74, 95.]. So the money here is owed to “us” already. Do I like that? NO. Do you like that? I’m guessing not. But that does not solve the existing problem, which is that the US Government — that is “us”/taxpayers — are holding a lot of bad debt that is never going to be repaid.
You need to begin with that understanding. This is debt that won’t be repaid. It is in default right now. It will be in default tomorrow. And it will be in default next year.
Who is in default. See multiple of my other posts in this thread. Many of the people who are in default are working class people who were taken advantage of by for-profit colleges that are essentially fraudsters. Many didn’t even graduate. Others graduated with worthless degrees and exorbitant debt, snookered by unscrupulous scammers who are stealing from the public by providing worthless degrees.
Should we force them all to declare bankruptcy? That’s an option. Change the law. It will cost the government nearly the same amount, as the government is the lender. It will also mean that these working class people will be further harmed after being scammed. But, it will send a message to everyone — pay your debts, etc. So it’s not unreasonable. Canceling the debt is, in fact, as easy as just writing it off. The debt is owed to “us” right now anyway, and it isn’t being paid anyway. If this were a corporation, the debt would have to be acknowledged as “bad debt” and written off / aged anyway.
As I explained in a different post, since the bottom 50% of the income distribution pay essential no Federal income tax, they also are not on the hook for helping to pay off any of this at any time. Really, almost all the costs will eventually be borne by the top 10-20% of the income earners, because they pay the vast majority of Federal taxes (top 10% pays about 70% of all income taxes).
One thing I love about Common Sense is the ability to have these conversations. I will respond as a reasonably educated guy who runs a small business (medical practice) and had to figure out how to pay for my education (joined the Navy). Several points to be made. You correctly stated the government is owed that money. That's us. We are the only source of money the government has. You state that canceling debt is as easy as writing it off. I agree. But I disagree that this magically means no one is out their owed money. There is a principle at play here and principles matter. Just because the cost of this cancellation will be borne more by the upper income earners (so, you are admitting that someone pays, right?) does not make it OK. We cannot keep dipping into the so-called deep pockets forever. They won't be deep for long.
Who was responsible for this debt? My reading is that there are several parties. First the student for taking on debt without considering how it would be paid back. An 18 year old should have some sense of the value of money. That failure lies at the feet of parents and early educators. Blame predatory colleges that are more concerned with indoctrinating students in toxic ideologies than providing them with the knowledge and tools to be successful in the real world, not some imagined utopia. Blame the government for making loans so easy to get. I do not believe there are only two solutions: cancel the debt or banruptcy. In my practice, I believe that patients need to be responsible for paying for the care I provide. I see a lot of uninsured and indigent patients. Sometimes I do provide my services for free. That is my choice. Much of the time I tell the patient that I need to be paid (for my living and for their self-respect) and I tell them to discuss any financial obstacles with my office manager. She knows that I will accept any payment schedule that works for the patient, even if only a few dollars a month. Many of them spend discretionary money on such things as cigarettes, etc. and can certainly spare a few dollars for their medical needs. As their circumstances improve, I expect the payments to increase. I do not charge interest and, so long as a good faith effort is being made to pay, I leave the account open and current and do not send to collections. At the end of every year, I have my manager look at who has been paying faithfully and on schedule and I write off those debts. (years ago, I used to close out dozens of accounts. Now hardly any because so few patients make any effort to pay). We should be able to establish some program that allows indebted students to pay down their debt as they are able yet not saddle them with payments that are clearly impossible. This seems to me much better than blanket cancellation. Maybe I am being unrealistic. It just sticks in my craw to have Biden, with the stroke of a pen, decide for everyone what to do about this. I know millions feel exactly as I do. All of this presupposes that we do something meaningful to change the way college education is promoted, carried out, and financed.
Personally, I don't disagree with almost anything you wrote. Where we might find some agreement with *parts* of the current plan, or even a majority (it is actually difficult to find really good data) is on how many of the borrowers fall into the categories of "deserving" the way you have laid it out. My understanding is that many of the people who will have their debt canceled were (a) not 18 when they took the debt out (more like non-traditional students who were perhaps 25, (b) attending for-profit or community college, where they were lured by promises of degrees that would upgrade their life circumstance, (c) probably didn't belong in college at all, but the *colleges* were taking advantage of the government largess of free/easy money, and the students were just a conduit to funnel that money to them. Many never got degrees at all. (d) Many have been making what payments they could for years, but have been in and out of default.
To your point, for all such forgiveness programs, it would be interesting to know how much "forensic" or invasive investigation has been done to see where debtors could cut costs, etc. to pay the money back. I will say, however, that I am a bit more sympathetic to these folk, who were more like defrauded, than to those who owe someone like you money for services rendered. As just one example, a huge tranche of people now have outstanding debt and no degree for Corinthian College (for-profit) which simply closed its doors -- locking all the students out without a degree, and similarly for another one of the trade schools that just closed. Seems to me that we should treat those folk as having been more like they were defrauded than, as I said, if they owed someone like you (or a hospital) money.
My view is that the Administration should do a better job explaining all of this. Who is really benefiting? How long have they been paying? Put requirements on amount of time people had to be paying before forgiveness. Unless it was more like fraud -- then I think that we need different rules. But we also need to massively clamp down on the potential for bad debt in the future. This kind of one-shot plan doesn't do that, and it's not my favorite plan for that reason. On the other hand, I still wonder if it is better than nothing. I'm not sure.
One thing that bothers me a lot is people blaming Biden, or Democrats alone. Where is the Republican plan to fix all this? I haven't seen one. Simply tearing down everything is not a solution. Republicans didn't rein in lending to for-profit colleges, for example, either. Both parties are responsible for the explosion of bad debt. Where is a bi-partisan bill that would help solve these issues going forward? Or even solve the current issue in a more sensible way? I don't see why, simply because the President is a Democrat, We the People should give Republicans in Congress a pass on this any more than we should give Biden or the Dems a pass.
ProfessorE- I have to agree with everything you said. Complex issues are not fixed with simple, stop gap solutions. I believe this move by Biden was nothing more than a political bribe to a demographic that would jump on this and, hopefully, be more inclined to vote democratic in the midterms. What's worse is I think it will work. People vote for those who give them the most free stuff.
Khanna writes "In order to truly help working- and middle-class Americans, we need to cancel up to $50,000 in student loans. This would help 95 percent of borrowers and do more to improve the lives of those struggling the most."
Proving, once again, that Khanna, like almost all Democrats, is a charlatan and a liar.
The working and middle class Americans he wails about mostly did not go to college. Neither do they own much, if any, college debt. In fact, even the leftist Brookings Institute confirms that:" Likewise, education debt is concentrated in households with high levels of educational attainment. In 2019, the new Fed data show, households with graduate degrees owed 56 percent of the outstanding education debt—an increase from 49 percent in 2016. For context, only 14 percent of adults age 25 or older hold graduate degrees. The 3 percent of adults with professional and doctorate degrees hold 20 percent of the education debt. These households have median earnings more than twice as high as the overall median ($106,000 vs. $47,000 in 2019)."
So, in truth, this is little but a scam and a plea for votes from Biden's base - and from people who don't know any better. In addition, it is blatantly illegal and unconstitutional, as any law student (another likely recipient of Biden's largess) would easily understand. Biden is not a king or potentate He is, however, a thoroughly corrupt and imbecilic plague on our nation who makes Donald Trump look like a modern day paragon of Aletheia
No shocker that progressives are confused, they sing the praises of the European system (which tracks students from a very early age) while pushing for the elimination of tracking (cause its racists as higher tracks are full of white and Asian students) wherever they get control of a system in the U.S.
That's precisely the problem. We COULD provide free college educations IF we allowed only the best and brightest to attend college. The value those students will add to the GDP would easily offset the cost of their education.
But that would require universities that focus on education instead of pouring millions into sports teams. It would require students who come to college to study and train, not to party and protest.
And it would require recognizing that not everyone is cut out to go to college. Tracking allows students who aren't cut out for college to train in lucrative--and well-respected--trades instead of suffering through their teen years in classes designed for future college students.
But tracking requires assessments of student ability. And Leftists reject that as racist...while never noticing that they themselves are engaging in the bigotry of low expectations.
Moreover, I think that the policy of "only the best and brightest are attending a college" should be strengthened anyway, this is not a kind of "alternative" to the current "pay and study", this is a must! This is the only way for the country to survive in the modern word.
All good points, Celia. But in our increasingly complex world there are many jobs that command much higher income than what the average 4 year college graduate can command.
My brother-in-law Don and I are both vets and long retired. He used the GI bill to get a forestry degree.
I used mine to accumulate 140 or so credit hours back when you could use the GI bill to study exactly what you wanted, sort of like the original definition of a liberal education, but with no resulting degree because I refused to take a trigonometry course that used the same text book that I had used in high school.
I was working as a newspaper reporter at the time, and needed to interview people who had a wide variation of specialties.
Don was not making much money as a state employee, so he accepted an apprentice job at a large naval ship yard near Seattle, where he learned how to weld various types of steel.
Don eventually became one of a very small group of people qualified to work on the nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers, including welding jobs under water.
During the 10 years prior to his retirement he hinted that his annual salary at times was nearing the mid six figures when he worked overseas, and put in many overtime hours.
Mike Rowe is spot on when he points out we need skilled trades workers in many situations more than we need college educated people.
I've told this story a couple of times in the last few days but I got my hair cut on Saturday from my Polish immigrant stylist (who charges $100 per cut). She tried helping her older daughter with law school loans, but didn't have much to provide. Now her 18 yo son, recently graduated from HS, is working in an electrician's apprenticeship program. So he'll be helping his sister pay off her loans with the new transfer of wealth. Absolutely backwards!
Both of my sons now make more than their dad. One took his experience in our local rubber-auto-parts factory and got hired by a Goodyear tire factory. The other took his A.S. degree from the local community college (mostly accomplished via dual credit in high school) and his five years doing HR-related work as a First Aid attendant in the same local factory and got a good job as an assistant HR manager.
If this vote buying scheme is allowed to happen, it will end up being the first step of a larger scheme. Bidens got two more years in office, and in 2024 be facing a challenging 2024 re-election campaign. What's to keep him from further caving to the left and forgiving the remailing debt? Rep Jayapal finally tipped her hand yesterday, along with a couple others, that the goal was to establish free college education. Imagine the implications of that. Universities, currently increasing in expense at six times the inflation rate, having full access to federal funding.
Nobody has mentioned cost constraints on universities. Once the student loan caps were lifted and graduate education was eligible there was an explosion of useless degrees. Do you think in a real world, a for profit underwriter would ever considering approving student loan for any of the 'Victim' studies programs? Or any one of the many liberals arts degrees that will never render the graduate employable? Those indoctrination programs only exist because of federal funding.
The federal government needs to be out of the student loan business. I've posted in the past that I supported a bill that would forgive all student debt, and in return terminate all federal involvement in university funding. Both sides of the aisle would get something they really want, but also, give up something the value greatly. That would be a compromise I could live with, otherwise, the current situation will only get much worse.
Over at Ruy Teixeira's SubStack, reliable leftist John Halprin is advocating the Bernie Sanders plan making all post secondary education tax payer funded. That's where this is going.
Though not getting as much air time, the changes to income-based repayment plans essentially make it free or nearly free for huge chunk of students. From the White House's site:
"For undergraduate loans, cut in half the amount that borrowers have to pay each month from 10% to 5% of discretionary income.
Raise the amount of income that is considered non-discretionary income and therefore is protected from repayment, guaranteeing that no borrower earning under 225% of the federal poverty level—about the annual equivalent of a $15 minimum wage for a single borrower—will have to make a monthly payment.
Forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments, instead of 20 years, for borrowers with original loan balances of $12,000 or less [my insert: Also eligible are people working for non-profits or government entities for 10 nonconsecutive years, regardless of debt level]. The Department of Education estimates that this reform will allow nearly all community college borrowers to be debt-free within 10 years.
Cover the borrower’s unpaid monthly interest, so that unlike other existing income-driven repayment plans, no borrower’s loan balance will grow as long as they make their monthly payments—even when that monthly payment is $0 because their income is low."
This essentially means that if you go to college and get a more or less useless degree that doesn't pay you like an engineer or software programmer out of college, you can get the vast majority of your debt forgiven after just 10 years.
It's not the first time they've done this. Remember Biden telling voters "you'll get bigger stimulus checks if you vote for me!"
I actually wonder if there are real strategy sessions of Dems sitting around discussing, "how can we break the spirit of every important check and balance while staying just legal enough to make a lawsuit worthless?"
Once upon a time, I would have benefitted from this "forgiveness." I couldn't even afford my own apartment while paying minimum balances, much less get out of debt. My degree is in writing, and here I was, struggling to write because just staying afloat required working two or three jobs (which in turn, incurred huge debt to the IRS every year.)
However, I had to face the fact that it was my credit card debt that made my student loan debt impossible to pay off. And since I couldn't forsake my credit rating by missing credit card payments, I took out forbearances on my student loans, in addition to an IBR, which merely increased the interest, taking a 32,000 education to over six figures. I have had to make peace with the fact that my incapacity to make student loan payments was related to other debt. Those payments, as I recall, were just $250 per month. The forbearances increased those payments to nearly $600 per month, again making the debt even more challenging to pay down.
And yet, at 59, I finally paid it all off. I'm debt free. My writing career was sacrificed to the two jobs that consume most of my time and energy.
If I had been making $125, 000 a year, there is no question that this debt wouldn't have been hard to pay off. I cannot even begin to fathom making that much per year and getting a break on student loans. It hurts my heart, I'm sorry. That is the salary of a wealthy person. It would be one thing if the cut in debt were applied to those truly in need -- but over a hundred grand a year? And now I get a tax increase to subsidize the WEALTHY? The income cap should be much lower (40 grand). That it's so high just goes to show how out of touch this administration is with the average American income.
Some say that Biden is trying to buy votes. This doesn't buy mine. Some comment that one shouldn't "begrudge" this charity -- and I don't, for those who, like me, have to struggle on $40 grand a year. But over a hundred grand? I can't wrap my brain around it, I just can't.
"If I had been making $125, 000 a year, there is no question that this debt wouldn't have been hard to pay off." <-- This!!!!
When I took out my student loans, I expected to get a job that would pay upwards of $60K a year. I expected to be able to repay my (low interest) loans with that income.
But I didn't get that income. In fact, our entire *household* income didn't reach $60K until a couple of years ago. And due to forbearances and capitalized interest, I now owe over twice as much as I borrowed to begin with.
"When I took out my student loans, I expected to get a job that would pay upwards of $60K a year. I expected to be able to repay my (low interest) loans with that income."
Universities routinely Lie to students, encouraging them to rack up debt & convincing them that they will easily pay off debt. I know mine did.
My parents thankfully warned me not to believe the lies & to avoid the debt trap.
Most college grads are unemployed or underemployed.
"due to forbearances and capitalized interest, I now owe over twice as much as I borrowed to begin with"
My parents' exact warnings to me. Why I avoided debt & why I warn others to avoid debt
I applaud your efforts. My sister, a year older than you went back to school at 48. Ended up with a nearly 100k/year job (after a bit of searching) and still couldn’t make it month to month. So my oldest sister (an accountant) fully took over her finances and in 5 years my youngest sister was debt free.
She then became in charge of her own finances. Within a year, she was 30k in debt with credit cards. Needless to say, she’s not happy because she thinks her current debt should be paid off because she paid her student loans off early. Yea. Right.
but you chose to get student loans, and to rent an apartment.
I strongly believe people should go back to the old model of living at home, commuting to the local university, and brown-bagging it rather than using the "food plan". People could save tens of thousands of dollars a year... money they won't need to borrow... and at least get started in life on a better footing.
When my oldest son went to college (out of town, we live in a town where the closest community college is 75 miles away), I refinanced our house, bought a small house in the college town. He lived there for three years (graduated), got a job and I sold the house. Sold for a bit more than I originally paid, took the proceeds and paid principle on the newer home loan.
I take full responsibility for the debt I took on as an emancipated adult.
Loan repayments were to start when I was 37. If it’s a “choice” to rent an apartment at that age, you’re suggesting I should have burrowed into a cardboard box on W. 32nd Street.
Biden's Student Debt Plan is terrible. Main reason why, is because we are treating symptoms while leaving underlying issue unresolved. What will happen next, in next years Universities will ramp up tuitions even higher, new students will have to take even more debt and in 5-6 years we will have even bigger issue than we have now, because all students will expect that next Democrat President will do same debt forgiveness.
This is very irresponsible fiscal policy, that will just more aggravate our national debt issues, while at same time we will have even more useless degrees that have 0 application in real world and more students will be settled with ever growing debt burden. But hay, since our universities are run as brainwash facilities for woke left, I wouldn't be surprised if this was plan all along.
Honestly, I would have not been against student loan forgiveness, if it was financed by finally abolishing tax exempt status for Universities and finally taxing those fat endowments, since they are not education institutions anymore but propaganda institution for left and thanks to endowments they have turned to hedge funds with education as side business.
Much like GM and Ford recently hiked their electric vehicle sticker prices by almost the same amount as the new federal tax credit?
(And I see that Terry and others have made the same point earlier, so I need to read all comments before piling on. But to be honest, can you blame either Ford or the schools? Someone offers you more cash, even in a roundabout manner, and you'll figure out a way to take it.)
Nothing wrong with emphasizing a point made previously :)
You'd think these Democrat policymakers (in reality, the Congressional and White House staffers who actually write these bills) were born yesterday, to judge by their naive and counter-productive initiatives.
And some Republican policymakers too, for that matter.
"What will happen next, in next years Universities will ramp up tuitions even higher, new students will have to take even more debt and in 5-6 years we will have even bigger issue than we have now, because all students will expect that next Democrat President will do same debt forgiveness."
"But most students recognize that to maximize their chances of having a good-paying job in our modern economy—including in the trades—they still need more than a high school degree." - Ah, and this is where Rep. Ro Khanna goes off the rails. Where do these "good-paying jobs" come from? Who are the employers that provide these jobs? Turns out they are the same folks that are being taxed into oblivion who satisfied their contractual obligations to pay off their education loans years ago. They are also the same folks that will be harangued by 87,000 additional IRS agents and submitted to expensive and time-consuming audits that distract from building a prosperous economy that allows for job creation. I paid off the student loans for both of my degrees and then went on to satisfy my contractual obligations to pay off my children's student loans. I have a "good-paying job" in the tech sector and employ 11 other people who also have a "good-paying job". And to think I was able to do all that and still honor my financial obligations without a government bailout.
Paid mine and then paid college tuition for my four kids and paid off the loans and expenses three took for grad school and post grad training. Any forgiveness should not be blanket but should be targeted only to special circumstances and only if repayment is impossible.
Same here, and also 4 kids. We didn't want them starting life in debt.
Also agree student loan forgiveness should be targeted. There are apparently a lot of people with student debt who never, for whatever reasons, graduated - they have the debt but no degree.
In my husband's retirement gig (because we are older parents & still have two kids in college) he works security at a private college prep high school. The school is building a new auditorium. The tiler asked my husband if he could connect him to the college counselors so he could encourage them to talk to students about the trades. He's 32 making 6 figures.....to tile. So many of our young people should be going into the trades but instead are attending college. I honestly think partying is the draw to college for many of them. Back in my day, 18 was the legal drinking age. Many of my HS friends didn't go to college. They could work their shift, learn their trade and go to the bar after work if they wanted. I realize it's a weird tie in, but we're asking people to adult at 18 but not really until they are 21.
Democrats have become the party of college educated coastal elites. Do their constituents know this yet?
How does Pelosi go from calling something illegal to a good idea?
I hope this act is found illegal. And then I hope we find a way to reform college education.
Universities need to purge their vast administrative state especially those related to DEI. They need to open their endowments to pay down student debt instead of investing them at private equity firms. Cancel worthless made-up degrees (Queer Studies) and transfer others (Hospitality) to trade schools. Lower admissions. No more spending lavishly on dorms and entertainment (LSU). More trade schools and community colleges, please. Start a PR campaign showing kids who choose a career requiring 2 yrs of college as the smart ones. And more exposure of what nonsense passes for education at universities these days. University leadership needs to be made to feel on its heels before they will get their heads out of their asses and reform.
I didn't read Sen. Scott's statement. I take it on faith he knew what he was talking about.
Rep. Khanna shows what's wrong with the D party, and what's wrong in this *country.* No wonder he comes from CA.
First off, I'll admit that my understanding is most-a the debt payoff will go to people making less than $75K a year. I wish I knew what *proportion* of their debt this would eliminate. In any event, if we were talking about *FREE MONEY,* I'd be all in favor. As long as the outrageous limits were scaled back. Funny how that number "$250K upper limit for *couples*" doesn't come up in the conversation.
But we are *not* talking about "free money." It's only free money in the eyes of people like Rep. Khanna. That's why he so blithely recommends paying off *five times* what was already outrageously offered to people who would like to pretend they didn't know they were signing a contract.
"Free money" from the working-class and people who *did* pay off their loans to go to *entitled* (and most likely Dem) people.
And, it's just typical. You give a Dem an inch (this disastrous policy) and they wanna take off an arm and a leg. Yeah, let's listen to Uncle Bernie. Free college!! Sky's the limit. As if colleges and universities didn't *already* charge like the sky's the limit! *Incentivize* them to charge twice what they're charging now.
I dunno which astounds me the most. The AUDACIOUSNESS. Or just the plain STUPIDITY of the idea.
But just shows where the D party and this country are heading in, unless something is done about it.
Jason Furman—a top economist in the Obama administration—has been one of the harshest Democratic critics of President Biden’s plan to cancel student loans. Why? “There isn’t free money out there. There are consequences. Once you frame it as 320 million people paying for a benefit for 30 million people, it makes you think a lot harder,” he told Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic. [ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/an-economists-case-against-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-plan/671259/ ] “With any public policy, you need to analyze the trade-offs. You can’t just say, ‘This person gets this, and therefore it’s good.’ It’s always better for someone to get something rather than nothing. But that’s not how it works. If you’re giving $500 billion to one group, where’s that money coming from? One possibility is that the economy grows much more quickly, and so spending that money doesn’t hurt anyone. I think that’s extremely unlikely, given the highly constrained state we are in. And so I think most of that $500 billion that one group is getting is coming at the expense of everyone else. That doesn’t make it a bad idea. If we were covering a Medicaid-coverage gap, I’d say, ‘You know what? If everyone has to pay $50 more and poor people get health insurance and the inflation rate is a tenth of a percentage point higher, I’m all for that.’ But we’re giving couples making up to $250,000, which is a lot of money, up to $40,000.”
If transferring student loan debt from the borrowers to the government will help the economy, then we should have seen that already, since loan payments have been paused for 2 years
Many countries provide funding for their citizens or economic area citizens (like the EU) to attend public university and have done so for decades. See Ireland.
Sadly, real world examples don't easily sway American citizens who would rather scream in all caps about the "audacity or stupidity" of an issue than discuss the merits of it.
What you are ignoring is the fact that those countries do not allow *everyone* to go to college. The higher education system is very different in the U.S.: colleges here are largely a four-year extension of carefree childhood, with more effort put into partying than into studying. We actually have RANKINGS for the best "party schools."
Pretty much any time politicians decide how resources should be allocated in society it spells failure. And when they create scrip to do so it's a double failure: misallocation and inflation. The final bad piece is the bad moral hazard signal. No consequence for failure to pay debts, making society even weaker than it already is.
As a person who paid on my student loans for 20 years and also used a public service forgiveness program, I think this is terrible policy. We already have loan forgiveness programs in place for people who do public service. Why wouldn't the administration urge citizens to participate? Especially when we have a huge teacher storage in this country? Yes, I know there were problems when the PSLF program matured, but I know it works! But what did I do for my part? I made sure I understood the guidelines, I asked a lot of questions, I called every six months to make sure I was on track.
This cancelation does not ask anything of the borrower. They SHOULD commit at least some labor to public service for the cancelation. But what I like least is that it does NOTHING to address the actually problem that student loans have been a cash cow for the colleges and universities, which is why tuition has skyrocketed.
Worse than nothing; it will incentivize every college in the country to raise tuition by $10K. Mark my words. One will do it, and the rest will instantly copy. Next year, $60K will become $70K.
It's just like the Green New Deal $7K credit for buying an EV. GM and Ford and others instantly announced price increases of... $7K.
Good lord, Terry, the correlation isn't that direct on either example.
College tuitions were raising at astronomical rates before this happened. How do you account for that in your $60k to $70k increase? You don't.
What are new & used cars selling for right now, Terry? Whether EV or not? Quite a bit more than normal. It has more to do with supply and the supply chain versus democrat legislation.
I have no idea how much, honestly. And if it’s a Ponzi scheme, all the more reason to correct what is happening. My frustration is that this policy doesn’t even try to correct the system. And I’m frustrated because I, as a single person, do not come close to making $125k, and I have been doing public service for over twenty years. Come on, man! My frustration would be lessened if the max had been like 50k. That high income threshold tells me who Biden really wanted to help.
Then you should have been eligible for a number of loan forgiveness vehicles due to your public service. I hope they were offered and a benefit to you.
Yeah, I said in my first post. I paid for the loans and also work hard in public service to take advantage of the PSLF. That is an agreement. Nothing was canceled wholesale without labor on my end.
This act is a shameless election year "gimme" to keep AOC and her crowd quieted down and buy votes. While this is certainly nothing new, it is the same cynical politics that has helped put us in the position we are in. I agree with both of these gentlemen that real reform of the entire system is what is needed. We will be right back here in another year or two with the graduates who drop on an overly saturated market for diversity experts and social workers. If we help anyone, how about the people who actually do something for their wages?
"At one point, I was among them, with over $100,000 in loans, having trouble making my monthly payments, and ultimately taking a year forbearance which created even more debt. I repaid my loans thanks to good fortune and opportunities,"
Yep guess what, the greatest income and wealth gap is between the young and the old and has been for 100’s of years. It’s not sex. It’s not race (though he did use his racist world view). It’s age. Older people make more and have saved more than young people.
We have a crop of young spoiled younglings which are used to mommy and daddy taking them on nice yearly vacations and now, that these kids are on their own, they realize they can’t afford it. "It’s NO FAIR. Boomers have more money them me." Their solution is to force the government to transfer the wealth of others to them.
It’s down right evil.
Don’t even get me started on what this will do to massively increase the cost of college even further, how it will reward horrible financial decisions while punishing sound decisions and increase upward pressures on inflation. Remember… it’s only transitory.
College education is already publicly funded in so far that the actual payments are increasingly being made by government blank checks, which has resulted in skyrocketing costs. Democrats response to this is to make the blank checks permanent and all encompassing.
The government needs to get out of higher education entirely. Make universities earn their tuition fees by providing actual value - real skills instead of content for more insufferable social media posts and protest posters - and watch how quickly all the sociology professors and "Inclusion Experts" are suddenly no longer vital public employees.
Also make the Universities responsible if and when their students can't repay their debt. Take the defaulted or forgiven (or whatever fancy word one chooses) amounts directly from the educational institutions and then they will be much less likely to hike tuitions and much less likely to agree to loaning absurd fees to people with little to no hope of paying them back.
I think this is really key to solving the overall problem. If universities were forced to take responsibility for the results of the education they give, they would have to be much pickier about the majors students are allowed to get degrees in. Giving students a worthless degree should come back and bite them hard.
As with all things involving government, there is no accountability. Universities have been effectively nationalized because the marginal buyer is using (unlimited) Federal taxpayer dollars. Not only do failed outcomes create no negative consequences, many in government view the leftist indoctrination that happens in substitute of a true education as a positive.
Well-said.
You nailed it. Free money and no accountability leads to this exact result every single time.
"If universities were forced to take responsibility for the results of the education they give"
I love to hate on our universities as much as anyone, but why is it the universities' fault? the schools are behaving rationally and maximizing their profit opportunities.
all the rest of us are supposed to know better, and to teach our kids better.
I say this as someone with a worthless and expensive liberal arts degree: the debt is no one's fault but my own.
Universities have been maximizing their profit opportunities by giving students a false impression of the worth of their degrees. That seems fraudulent to me.
"giving a false impression" is kind of the sum total of advertising.
fraud = deliberate deceit, and it's against the law. if you can show you were deliberately misled, that's grounds for a lawsuit.
people are responsible for choices they make, and those choices include which information to believe, which claims to verify, and how to decide based on the information at hand. if someone purposefully lied, you've got a reasonable claim. if they simply embellished and you failed to verify.... not so much.
I understand what you're saying. But if you have a much-desired career in mind, you want to believe you have the best chances, not slim chances.
And all too many students go to college without any particular career in mind, just the vague idea that ANY degree will get them a really good job. And that hasn't been true for 30+ years.
Take a look at rising tuition rates since loans were passed out like Halloween candy. After the 2008 financial.meltdown part of the Obama administration strategy was to encourage people to go to school or back to school instead of back to work. I remember the ads plastered all over social media. Fast forward 14 years and we see the toll. Universities had no incentive to control cost, rather they had incentive to grab as much of that easy money as possible. And that is what "progressive economic policy" is - spend until it hurts.
And they won't until Congress passes legislation permitting student loans, like any other loan, to be discharged through bankruptcy; then the lending institutions/colleges will be incentivized to be selective on who receives loans and in controlling administration costs.
Colleges don’t “give” education! They offer. A student is responsible for their own education or not.
Unspoken bottom line: Democrats are using taxpayers to fund the training of America haters. There are also many good students earning useful degrees to keep America running to a degree. But their numbers are dropping relative to the growing number of young people actively bringing the country down.
So true.
Exactly. The FEDERAL government should not be in the Education business at all, at any level. Close the Dept of Education!
School choice would help, as would ending the demonization of charter schools. I like Ian Rowe’s approach in the Bronx. Thousands of parents are on the waiting list, because public education has failed their kids, but Rowe’s model is succeeding.
Leftist love to point out the Scandanavian countries as socialist paradises. Well, it is just one more leftist lie. They are not socialist countries. They are countries that have massive social programs but in reality, they are capitalist countries that tax the living daylights out of the citizens to pay for these social programs.
Keep electing the soon to be communist party and we will be in the category of taxing the living daylight out of our citizens.
Oh, a little footnote. the Scandanavian countries give out school vouchers so you can send your kid to any school you want, paid for of course by the government. School vouchers, gasp! Doesn't that mean, if you listen to a Democrat, the end of the world. No, it doesn't. It means the end of teachers' unions dictating school policies. Scandanavian schools are excellent.
In NYC the teachers' union run the school system. You can't fire a teacher for any infraction, even child molestation.
It should be noted that Scandinavian countries have (or have had) a shared (and very old) moral consciousness that requires a) everyone to do their best to be a productive citizen, and b) that those who *cannot* work should be helped.
The reason those systems work is because a) people don't mind paying more taxes in order to have benefits, and b) it is well-nigh unthinkable (culturally) that people who *could* work would refuse to.
It should also be noted that Scandinavian countries are experiencing horrible penalties at present for importing huge numbers of "refugees" who neither share nor respect Scandinavian culture. I fear that their systems may break down under the weight.
Cab drivers in Norway speak better English than most Americans.
Them administrators (added overhead cost) ain't gonna pay for themselves.
100% correct. Let's educate the most vulnerable, those that are better off will find away. They always have.
Why is it the university's problem? This will not resolve the root cause of this mess - personal accountability. Do these kids think before making poor choices? They can go to a community College for AP, use the library instead of buying an expensive laptop, live in a shared home with half a dozen other students, eat ramen, get a job instead of partying, apply for scholarships, think about the prospects before choosing the major etc. It can be done speaking from experience.
Because a lot of the unnecessary costs are baked into the tuition - Bias Response Teams, rock climbing walls, etc.
It's not like students have the option of saying "I don't plan on using the swimming pool so I don't want to pay for it".
This is one of the most bizarre set of comments I have ever seen. People act as if somehow it is **educators** who want non-educational things at the university. And the concerns of Common Sense commentariat are about Rock Walls, DEI administrators, and Swimming Pools? How about the entire sports programs of every university? If you looked worldwide, do any other countries use their university system as the minor leagues for their professional sports teams?
How about schools like Notre Dame, which just spent $400 million on renovating their football stadium? Kansas, which is spending $350 million on their stadium? Berkeley, spending $321 M on theirs?
Why don’t we do a quick poll here on Common Sense. How many people support getting the Federal and State Governments to ban the Greek system — no more party atmosphere. Next, ban football, basketball, and the other semi-pro sports on campus, and all sports recruiting of any kind — no more scholarships for sports. Universities are academic enterprises, right? Intramural sports only, as in every country in the world. Who is going to vote for this? Will Jim Jordan, the former wrestling coach(!), go for this? Congress? State legislatures? The State of Texas? Will Common Sense members support that proposition? The primary non-academic activity on campus is sports, then partying (largely related to sports). Rock walls? They are part of having a “gym” on campus. They cost nothing, in relative terms.
The problem is not the Universities, nor Administrators, but that we have a *market*. The market has spoken, and what the market wants is competition on these lines. College sports, nicer dorms, better food, a supervised transition to adulthood in an academic environment, etc. That is not to say that the situation is perfect — it absolutely is not — but comments that suggest that there is some platonic ideal in which ascetic students will learn and have no amenities, thus driving the cost of college down is fantasy. To further imply that the problem is one where the educators are willingly choosing these non-academic expenditures, as opposed to being dragged into them is so bizarre as to be other-planetary. Faculty, almost to a person, believe that money should be spent on student education: not administrators, not games, not partying, not rock walls, etc. The more enlightened faculty recognize that to attract students, one might want to spend on those other things, etc. But *all* faculty agree that in some ideal world, no one would spend one cent on them, and 100% of all possible money would go to student education.
As an aside, something close to the ideal of “no amenities, just teaching” exists today: community college. Also, the free market means that nothing stops a university from being this kind of school. Why are there none? Guessing that doesn’t work in the market, even for state schools that are trying to stay as cheap as possible.
Question for you professor. What was the student/faculty and student/administration ratio when you began your teaching at your university vs now? I understand at PSU, enrollment stayed pretty much level but the number of admin rose significantly as did the cost of matriculation. I buy-in that there are market forces at play from students, but once the universities and lending institutions successfully removed bankruptcy on student loans, I imagine the attitude was who cares what it costs, students/parents want to attend and we'll loan them the $$$
Administration costs clearly went way up! No one is doubting that. Where people are confused is on the relative contributions to tuition increases. Administrative bloat, professor salaries increasing, better amenities for students -- all this stuff (at public/state schools) are responsible for about 25% of the total tuition increases. Administrative bloat alone? Not 100% of that total, but probably a decent fraction. Maybe 15%? Not all of the administrators are avoidable. As I have mentioned before, years ago, many schools were commuter schools; today, they are residential campuses where students live. It is not possible to run an entire dorm system, police force, etc. without any administrators. So not every single administrator could be fired. However, is there bloat? **Absolutely!**
Could "massive numbers of administrators" explain the huge growth in tuition, all by itself? Absolutely not. Most of the growth in tuition has been because State Legislatures made a decision that families would foot the bill for education rather than taxpayers (about 75% of the increase, on average).
I have addressed the issue of the "who cares what it costs" in a different post. This is simply not true. Every state school agonizes over trying to keep costs down. Tuition increases are totally fraught. At my school, we agonize over every dollar when we need to raise tuition, and we try as hard as possible not to charge for anything unnecessary (most of us try incredibly hard to keep textbook costs as low as possible, too). Do professors deserve to get COLA increases when inflation occurs? That increases costs. Do the admin assistants? What about the janitors? What about the HVAC mechanics, carpenters, and plumbers? Does anyone deserve a non-COLA based raise, ever? How do the Common Sense community think they all get paid? Tuition is the only revenue we get, other than money from the State! (We, like almost all schools, have a tiny endowment.) Parents and students care an enormous amount about the costs of higher education. This is why giving out scholarships and better financial aid matters. Every year many, many students choose to get an excellent education at more affordable State Universities rather than expensive private schools and demonstrate this.
The only thing the majority of the "faculty" support is indoctrination
Nice to meet you Bill. How do you come by this secret knowledge of indoctrination? I personally don’t do much indoctrination, but last time I exorcised a demon from one of my students, we imprisoned it in the campus chapel and waited for the chaplain to come kill it with holy water. You should have heard it scream! Never heard anything like it in my life. Anyway, you should stop by one day. We could find ourselves a couple of more liberals to exorcise and maybe another demon or two to chase down. If you get lucky, you’ll find some of the CRT profs — they are just full of demons! Then we can grab a beer, and you can explain all about the indoctrination rituals you know all about.
The market is skewed by unlimited student loan guarantees by the Fed. Unlimited financing means a total lack of price sensitivity and completely inelastic demand.
So instead of competing for students via lower tuition and best bang for buck, campuses compete based on who has the best amenities and most feelgood admins like Bias Response teams. And that's how tuition costs rise astronomically even as education quality declines.
This is 100% false. Do you have college age kids, or know anyone sending their kids to college right now? As a parent of a college student (with other kids approaching college), with a broad friend group all in the same boat, and as a professor who talks with prospective parents all the time, tuition costs are a ***HUGE*** driver of where students will enroll, where they apply, and of student and familial decision making. Schools give out scholarships of varying sizes to try to attract students, and those scholarships work — if you were right, they wouldn’t. Talk to any admissions officer, and the availability of scholarship money is the #1 thing that we worry about. Affordability is on everyone’s mind, and schools compete on this both directly and indirectly.
You are, frankly, talking out your ass. Particularly because the expensive schools have relatively low default rates.
Exactly. Schools in other countries are much more basic without amenities or in some cases housing
17-year-old high school students can be excused for lacking wisdom and judgment. They are guided by the sea of propaganda in which they live. So yes, it is the universities' responsibility to offer real value for the astronomical fees they charge (and eliminate the swarms of diversity, equity and inclusion parasites currently drawing more and larger salaries than actual teachers), and it is the politicians' and universities' obscene collusion that has produced this mess.
The one group of people who should NOT be on the hook for this latest trillion dollar boondoggle is long-suffering, working-class, non-college-educated Americans, and they are precisely who Biden, as usual, is saddling with the burden.
Yet, “they” continue to vote in year after year the very representatives that do this!
@StephenLeonard: I can hear that you are angry. I think that if I thought that people were being taken advantage of in the way that you outline, I’d be pretty incensed myself.
But I have some questions for you. First, you and many others mention all the many DEI folk on campus. These numbers are highly inflated (many of the people who are counted are not full time, and if they teach part of the time, their full salary should not be counted as FT administration), but let’s forget about that for a moment. A different poster added up the maximum amount being spent on the DEI folk, and said that it was $10M or so (this is at Michigan, the worst offending school, by all accounts). Does anyone on this forum realize that UMichigan’s budget is $2.4 *Billion* per year? Michigan has about 31,000 undergraduates. Even with the rather gross misallocation of people (assuming that they are all full time when they are in fact not), firing *all* of them saves .4% of the budget, and reduces tuition by $322 per year. That still sounds high, but remember, that’s with the misallocation. And actually, campuses need at least a few people around to stop overt racism? There are actual laws in place that need to be followed, so not all of the money can even be saved.
Second, what if you found out that long-suffering, working class, non-college educated Americans are not going to be paying for almost anything that the federal government does? Would that ease your mind at all? This is totally true.
That group — assuming that we are talking about a group that is economically struggling — pays essentially no federal income tax in the first place. Right now, because of covid relief funds, etc. 57% of all taxpayers paid no Federal tax at all. That number will decline to perhaps 45% pre-pandemic levels shortly. Even after that, the bottom 50% of the income distribution owes essentially no Federal Taxes. “The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI below $44,269) faced an average income tax rate of 2.9 percent.” So, who will pay for this? Actually the rich and the relatively well-off: the top 10% of income earners pay about 71% of all income taxes to the Federal Government (AGI > 115K or so).
Would you feel differently if you knew that a lot of the people who are currently in default were those very same working class people, trying to go to school to make their lives better? That they were essentially defrauded? Should we help those working class people, many of whom never got their degrees because it was a con? Here’s a great article explaining how for-profit higher ed targeted vulnerable non-traditional students, and how these “schools” are driving the default rate. It’s old, but the numbers have actually gotten worse, not better:
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/whos-fault-student-loan-defaults
Your cherry picking of faacts and partial truths is exactly what would be expected from a "Professor D"
So incisive. Do please continue to note which facts you disagree with and where they are wrong. In the mean time, this is what passes for “Common Sense”, huh?
One can't vote at 17 or consume alcohol, yet can take on thousands in loans. It's capitalism my friend universities are not exempt. You're right however minds are not mature at 17 so shouldn't parents be more involved? Why aren't they on the hook?
Edit: Just like loan forgiveness is funded by someone else that is not part of the equation, if universities are held responsible who do you think is footing the bill at the end of the day?
You are truly stupid. 17year olds gotta have a co-signer and the institutions are still the problem. Don’t be an idiot.
Take a chill pill dude, you don't have to get personal. If you can't post a civil comment look in the mirror.
The universities rely on student loans to justify their bloated tuition schedules. Were it not for loans, they'd be forced to scale back their expectations to something that is affordable to the majority and not just the wealthy few.
That said, I agree with your points about economizing and living sensibly. Versus flying to south Florida on spring break and partying hard for 7 days when they could/should be studying, working, job hunting, etc.
Where is the evidence for “bloated tuition schedules”? Most students at Public Universities graduate with either no debt or very manageable levels of debt, and public universities account for 78% of all college students. Fewer students at private universities tend to graduate with debt, and it’s sometimes *lower* than public, because students at private universities tend to be richer. The debt crisis is largely driven by handfuls of schools, mostly for-profit schools, who prey on *working class* people. There is a separate set of students who make very bad choices about where to go to school and what to major in. That is a real problem (racking up huge debts in fields that will never have the earning potential to pay it off).
Where do you get the idea that, say, the UC system has a “bloated” tuition schedule? UTexas? SUNY? UFlorida system? These are *huge* systems of higher ed, deliver excellent education and are really affordable.
The current student loan debt (as per educationdata.org) is $1.748 trillion. Are you saying that most of that is due to for-profit schools?
Or is the "crisis" aspect due to for-profits, i.e. enticing lower-quality students to over-borrow, while over-promising outcomes? That's been in the news, and they do sound unscrupulous, but I question that public universities are so affordable.
I just checked University of California state resident tuition, fees, & living expenses:
$41,052 (for on-campus housing)
$37,352 (off-campus)
It's double for non-state residents.
My own state (Massachusetts) is somewhat lower, in the 30s including housing. I mean, if you assume the student is somehow staying at home for free, we're still talking $20K/year or more for in-state public education, and in Massachusetts, at least, there's no guarantee you'll get into the big state school in Amherst. It's competitive. From what I hear, UC is competitive as well, with the additional requirements of being a POC -- but not Asian -- Asians are quota'd, to make room for lesser qualified blacks and, I suppose, Hispanics.
Middle class families don't have $100K to $150K lying around to pay for 4 years of education. The average student is going to get by with a combination of scholarships, work-study, and loans.
As for excellence of education... yes, 30 years ago American public universities provided excellent education. It's really hard to say that's still the case, in an era when politics colors and distorts nearly every subject including the hard sciences.
@Terry: at some point, it is important to agree on facts. You are quoting the posted tuition prices, which is the full price of attending the school, not the price that people actually pay. Google "Costs UC Berkeley" https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=costs+uc+berkeley&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
It will return to you the entire Federal Data on Berkeley, the flagship of the CA system. The average cost, after aid in the form of scholarships and grants paid by students at Berkeley is $16,000 per year. This is a major misconception among many people, who confuse the sticker price with the *net tuition*. Net Tuition is the only relevant number -- it is the amount that students/families actually pay. No one but the wealthy pay full tuition.
Only 41% of Berkeley students graduated with any debt at all upon graduation. Of students graduating with debt, the amount of the debt was about $17,000 on average. Your numbers are completely and totally off. If we were to pick, say UCLA, UCSD, or Irvine, the numbers would differ a bit -- Berkeley students are a bit richer than their counterparts at Irvine. They would NOT differ dramatically.
On the second part of your comments, regarding racial preferences, you also could not be more wrong. In 1996, California passed Proposition 209, which eliminated all racial preferences in admissions for higher education. Recently, an attempt was made to repeal this, and that effort failed. The UC system not only does not quota against Asians or for other races -- it doesn't look at race at all. Berkeley publishes fact sheets about their campus, and they are nearly 40% Asian -- among the highest of any student body in the country. Berkeley's student body is only 4% black. There are no issues of the kind that you are talking about that show up in their admissions data, That isn't to say that there aren't such issues at other universities, but let's be serious -- you are cherrypicking numbers and arguments at this point.
Yes, the largest fraction of the student loan "crisis" is due to for-profit schools, and oddly, community colleges. What is happening is that marginal students are being pulled into colleges who are then either not graduating at all (but still have debt), or who have low-value degrees in fields that cost them money but add little to their earning potential (but again, added debt). This is a real problem. There are, of course, handfuls of "crazy" cases of students running up insane amounts of debt in private universities, majoring in unemployable fields, etc. and then not being able to pay that off. That is simply not the norm. Actually, graduate school is a bigger problem there (law school in particular).
The Universities also created degree programs that harvest students that otherwise would not qualify for traditional programs. It's a pretty well known fact in California that if you apply for gender studies or political science you have a significantly better chance of getting into a top institution than if you applied for engineering or business degrees - for example.
It would be great to see evidence backing up this claim. Berkeley, for example, is super-liberal and is the flagship of the CA system. Where is the evidence that it’s easier to get into Berkeley (or UCLA for that matter) applying in these fields? Once admitted, students can change major at will. If this were true, don’t you think that hyper-competitive students would lie like crazy to get an edge? A: yes they would. And it simply isn’t true.
Higher Ed has been obscuring, denying, falsifying, and wrapping itself in any and all false flags to hide their behavior. Berkeley MIT, and Harvard, as random examples, have wrapped themselves and the nation into knots pretending that their open admissions does not discriminate. Ask Asian-American students. Ask the timid US Supreme Court
to proclaim the truth. What are "legacy admissions" but naked favoritism to the Old Guard?
I don't believe admissions departments will expose the math they use to accept candidates beyond an aggregate acceptance percentage. I have lived this empirically through my own college-bound child and all his friends this and previous years. I've personally seen kids with lower metrics get into "soft" degree programs at top universities over others with considerably higher academic metrics into "hard" degree programs. Every college counselor worth their salt knows this truth. In the absence of admissions metrics per degree program in every university in NA, as you are suggesting, ask yourself.. is a "gender studies" degree program more competitive than an "engineering" or "business" or "accounting" program at a top university with a reputation for those programs?
Case in point: Cal Berkeley, the "flagship of the CA system" as you say, requires a 2.0 GPA to get into their GWS degree program (source: https://guide.berkeley.edu/undergraduate/degree-programs/gender-womens-studies/). I hardly think there is a single student admitted into the business program with a 2.0 GPA. Prove me wrong.
It's hard to imagine top students, cream of the crop, WANTING to major in Gender/Women's Studies. A dumb, made up field based on politics and fantasies, not a genuine and respectable academic subject.
"Once admitted, students can change major at will. ". I do not think so. Most schools require evidence of competence in the area of study - you know, the STEM type background. Unless you have the wherewithal you probably are going to be rejected for the transfer - or told to take some elementary courses and then the school will evaluate.
I was thinking the same thing. Apply to the gender studies program, then switch to mechanical engineering. Or do they not allow you to take college calculus and physics once you're on the gender track?
In many cases the prerequisites are missing to efficiently transfer from a program with little to no pre-requisites to a more technical degree program. To go from 'gender studies' to 'engineering' the student would likely have to go back to junior college to attend classes they should have attended in high school. If the student possessed the prerequisites in high school and applied for a gender studies degree with the intent of transferring into an engineering program, then your anecdote just proves the original point - the engineering program was too competitive to achieve acceptance.
Wow.
AGREE
You loose your power of persuasion when you resort to such foul name calling.
Thanks, Mom. Didn't realize you were a subscriber.
By the way, not every utterance is intended to persuade. Some are to put someone in his place.
Ah yes, because such a program will be easily navigated by those in financial despair and won't at all be lost in an infinite maze of red tape and contractual small type.
The other point Khanna makes is that job training should be covered. But here again he's a lying philistine. The problem is that the education unions control our schools and donate huge dollars to Democrats and they are responsible for the fact that our young people leave high school without any job skills - often without even rudimentary levels of math and language achievement
Part of the problem is many of our teachers are not the best and the brightest. The teaching profession is not held in high esteem and therefore not as well paid as it should be, if we truly claim to value education.
I taught high school for a dozen years. Everyone knew who the good teachers were and who the bad teachers were - and they were all paid the same. I worked my butt off and didn’t make one cent more than the teacher who showed movies all the time. If you want better performance out of your teachers, you need merit pay (like any industry that cares about excellence) - which unions of course will never allow.
Not only the unions, but the woke people in general, who unfortunately run many of the unions/schools, who don't believe in merit pay or rewarding good/better people in general, because that's racist. ugh.
Don't get me started on unions.
Would it also help if the parents were more involved?
It sure would but if they go against the leftist agenda, they are called terrorists.
Since HIPPA parents have no say as far as the schools are concerned.
And those who try to be involved are called terrorists.
This is off topic for the article, but merit pay for teaching is absolutely fraught with problems. Be very careful what you wish for. I don’t know of any school district in the country that has the statistical expertise to assess the answer to the question: what was the contribution of an individual teacher to student learning in subject X (that is *not* what the NCLB / standardized testing captures today). What if the principal doesn’t like a given teacher, and thus assigns more disruptive kids to that teacher’s class? Or assigns all the smart kids to another teacher’s class? This kind of stuff happens all the time, and needs to be dealt with statistically.
The models get more complex than any normal teacher or principal are likely to understand. Are you (or any teacher) willing to live with a test-based incentive system that you will mostly / partially understand that is run by bureaucrats at the State level where districts are teaching to a high stakes test?
That’s what is needed for merit pay. “Everyone knows who’s who” isn’t evidence. Test scores and other objective performance are evidence of learning. If not a standardized test, then some other objective standard.
Even way back in the mid-80s, when I was in college for the first time--studying at that time to be an elementary school teacher--we were made aware that in order to get a teaching certificate in California (where some of the students were from), prospective teachers had to pass a basic competency exam (reading, arithmetic, etc.). The circumstances that would inspire such a regulation are dire to imagine; and that was 35+ years ago!
When I was in grad school, I had a classmate who was picking up classes here and there to get her M.A. in English. She had already gotten her M.Ed., and she told something I have heard from many other sources since: that education degrees (even grad level ones) now have ZERO rigor.
It really is a race to the bottom when it comes to training teachers in the U.S.
My sister is a professor of education at a well funded university. She agrees with this.
When I was in college, in the late 1970s, majoring in history with a side major in premedical sciences, I took a one-semester course in Education 301. I thought it was an interesting course, though not deep. The Prof went through the history of the American education system, and threw in various topics of interest, which I almost totally have forgotten today.
Anyway, I would often stay after class to ask questions and chat about this or that thing that he said, or that I had read somewhere. He was a nice guy and would discuss with me. I was literally the only student who EVER stayed after class.
I mean maybe others went to office hours though I doubt it. They were Ed majors and appeared to be dull, non-intellectual types just ticking a requirement on their way to earning the minimal qualification to be a teacher. I felt sorry for them but did not respect them, either; they didn't seem very hard working or dedicated or passionate. Just people who probably couldn't cut it in the hard sciences or rigorous scholarly topics like history (back then, we had to read actual books and write actual papers full of thoughtful ideas).
And this was a selective, private university. I wonder what the ed majors were like at the big public state schools.
And...it shows!
What is incredibly disheartening is that good people want to be teacher. Universities fail them by not preparing them with even the most basic classroom management skills. School administrators fail them by not having a school/work place safe from violent students (zero suspension policies) and from students’ equally violent families and friends.
It's not just that. In many states--even mine (Iowa)--you cannot become a teacher without subjecting yourself to indoctrination. In order for me to become a secondary school teacher here, I would have to take two full semesters of "education" courses. The fact that I have an M.A. and six years of teaching experience on the college level does not matter in the slightest to the requirements.
Ironically, I taught high school students one semester in a dual-enrollment course at a local high school. But without the requisite year of indoctrination, I could not be hired as high school teacher.
Barriers like these prevent highly educated and experienced people from making a transition to teaching. Which seems to be exactly the way teacher's unions want it.
Agree with what you wrote, but pointing my finger at the state government which hires experts to write the regulations that do not fit the profession of teaching and to write curriculum that does not support students. An example is a white Stanford education expert wrote the framework for equity math for African Americans (ie lowered the standards) but never sought the input of African Americans who had succeeded in the math field. What about the teachers who supported, encouraged, and taught students to exceed the expectations ...where is their valuable input? https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Stanford-professor-Karen-speaks-out-17064784.php
Agree partially. But when I ask friends and family if they can name the truly memorable and influential teachers they had at all levels - K through grad school - they can usually count them on one hand. A great and dedicated teacher is a gift to be valued. But, as I guess in life, there are far too many hacks and time punchers.
probably has been true throughout human history. You find one great teacher, and follow them around. That's pretty much what I did :)
That said, I can tell you, from living in Asia for a couple of years when young, I experienced the Asian approach to teaching -- the teachers were so dedicated and cared so much, as long as the students were willing to be obedient.
They had crap teachers over there, as well, of course, but the prestige of being a teacher seemed to offset the rock bottom pay and there were some really good people in the field.
PL, see my post above.
I had a friend who said when you pay teacher what you pay professional athletes you will attract better teachers.
In Japan the teaching profession is held i very high esteem and looking at quality of students they turn out, it looks like these teachers deserve high regard.
If you paid teachers according to the performance standards required of professional athletes that might change the playing field. But, by and large, the education unions don't want that. Speaking of which, when the presidents of ed-ja-kashun yoonyuns can't even speak basic English, don't you think we have a problem, Ms. Weingarten?
ed-ja-kashun yoonyuns are big business and are driven by the bottom line. The last thing they are interested in is quality education. They are driven by keeping their stable satisfied so they can keep miking them for union dues.
A powerful, self-perpetuating entity who no longer cares about it’s original goals. Now where have I heard that,
That means the teachers would have to actually compete against each other.
Might raise their game a bit
But Japan is a very homogeneous culture with high expectations of its children. We have no expectations of ours.
you are right. There is a huge cultural difference.
Sadly, many universities and school systems are lowering their standards for incoming students and teachers. It will only get worse
Years ago teaching was one of the few professions for educated woman, and manageable while raising a family, with the husband as the main breadwinner. I can see how it might be more difficult to hire teachers at that same caliber unless they are independently wealthy.
(what is a 'lying philistine'? I can't find a search result that explains this. thank you)
Why stop at student loans? Let's cancel all burdensome loads, home loans, car loans, drug dealer loans. You owe your booky 10 grand? No sweat, the ever senile Joe will pay it off.
The Democrats have shown time and time again, they are the champions of the irresponsible. Most everybody is a victim and victims need a handout. Most people would call this handout a bribe. I give you free money. You give me your vote and the money will keep flowing.
If you were subject to fraud, should you have to pay for the fraud? I’m just curious how far you would take this. For example, if your credit card were stolen, should you be responsible for the charges, no matter what they are? What about if someone elderly got suckered by a Ponzi scheme? Are those situations different in any way than a home loan or a car loan?
A home loan and a car loan isn't fraud. Am I missing your point? I don't understand.
Many of the people who have outstanding student loan debt that is in default were effectively defrauded. In particular, the for-profit universities are somewhere between fraud and quasi-fraud type outfits. If nothing else, they are ridiculously expensive for what people are getting from them. I was just making an analogy, and asking for your view on other types of fraud. For example, Trump U was a fraud, and people paid money to that, but more recently, the government cleared the debt of about 200,000 people who had attended several schools (multiple of which are now out of business) including VoTech schools, Art Institutes, and other similar for-profit fraud centers. These groups defrauded people out of $6B worth of money that the taxpayers are now on the hook for. I am just curious whether you would feel similarly like “it’s their problem” if the same people had been defrauded in a home loan, car loan, or credit card scam.
If it is a scam, where people who set up the loan do so intending to scam people, then yes it is a scam. I don't know if this is the case with universities. However, students who are taking out student loans are fully aware of the conditions of the loan and if they don't pay that loan back, to me, that is theft. They are college students for Christ's sake. They are supposed to be the intellectual elite and smart enough to figure out how a loan works. If they graduate and get a good job and intentionally default, they are the scammers.
@Polecat, you are so angry. I wish that you would meet the people who were scammed, and you would find out that they are, perhaps, just like you, or maybe people you know. This is what changed my mind — but you need to open yourself up to data. These are not the “intellectual elite”! No! That is a completely wrong perception, which is why I keep asking you questions.
Look here: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/upshot/new-data-gives-clearer-picture-of-student-debt.html
Yes, it’s from 2015. No, nothing has changed. What is different? Who’s in trouble? “For borrowers with $10,000 or less in debt, including workers who have been in the work force for years, typical income is only about $40,000.” This is the typical situation — they got suckered by a for-profit college. They were a non-traditional student — that means older than 18, perhaps 25 when they entered college, and already working. Some had kids already. These for-profit colleges lured them in with lies about high salaries and how they could get a degree on weekends and nights. At costs 10x community college rates. It’s a scam. Many never got a degree, but they have the debt. Even with the degree, the bump in salary never came along. Universities like DeVry and others exploit not the “intellectual elite”, but the working class. If we saddled most hard working families in America with another $8000-40,000 in debt for almost no increase in salary (or no degree), of course they couldn’t pay.
Is the Biden plan perfect? NO. But perhaps have some empathy?
Write to your congressperson and ask them why these for-profit universities are still in existence. Why haven’t we banned them? 47% of all graduates of for-profit universities are in default within 5 years, and that’s assuming that they graduate (and their graduation rates are lower). If you saw an auto or home loan business with a 47% default rate, wouldn’t you question their underwriting?
Should people have been more skeptical? Sure. But people should exercise, eat better, and do a lot of things. They tried to do something good for themselves, and they got scammed.
Could this plan be better designed and targeted? I think so. But perhaps you can acknowledge that, in the set of people covered are an awful lot of people you might agree are worthy of help.
In my university class, I require my students to back up their claims with evidence, usually numbers and facts. Where are yours? Perhaps you could elucidate readers, since you seem to think you know, on what fraction of the costs of higher ed are borne by the government even at Public (that is State) universities? Do you think that percentage has been going *up*?? You are completely misinformed. The rising cost of education is almost entirely driven by the fact that states have long been cutting the budgets of their state universities — doing *exactly* what you suggest. For a reference point from one of the largest and best state university systems in the country, up until 1970, the University of California system was **FREE** for in-state students; today, tuition at across the U.C. Schools runs about 14,000 per year in-state. These increases are largely driven by the fact that taxpayers used to fund about 90% of the costs of State Schools, and now generally fund more like 10%, leaving students and families to make up the difference. Because the costs rose so much, the government got into the business of guaranteeing student loans.
Since you are so well informed, perhaps you would also like to share your knowledge on how every other country in the entire world runs their system of higher education. Do they do it your way? Has that ever been a successful way to run a university?
Tuition has gone up at astonishing rates for various reasons, but government is the main one. Administration costs have exploded - and most of these are 'feel-good' positions in resonse to government mandates to 'battle' diversity, inclusion, and equity issues.
Even that right wing rag the HuffPost saw this way back in 2014:
"The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures."
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584
Colleges have also had to compete for a shrinking pool of students after the Boomers got older. How did they do this? Climbing walls, lazy rivers, gourmet food, luxury dorms, and courses such as: (2013)
“What If Harry Potter Is Real?”
“God, Sex, Chocolate: Desire and the Spiritual Path”
“GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity”
“Philosophy And Star Trek”
etc. https://www.soulask.com/20-completely-ridiculous-college-courses-being-offered-at-u-s-universities/
And the gov keeps drilling into people that they have to get a college degree to be employable.
The government-education complex is among Amercia's worst domestic problems.
University of Michigan has 82 diversity officers that combined are paid $10.6 million per year. Surely this adds nothing to runaway tuition costs in recent years.
Diversity officers - what a joke!
The joke becomes A LOT less funny if you meet one face to face. Astonishing combination of smugness, self-righteousness, and impenetrable stupidity
And many of those admin types make 6 figure salaries! 🙄
The president of the university where I work (a CAL STATE campus) just got a 29% raise...She now makes 460K -- that is, more than the president of the U.S. Meanwhile, faculty were supposed to get a 4% raise in July, but Newsom fucked us with a last-minute budget reduction and we are getting 3% instead (CSU faculty do not get automatic COLAs; every little increase must be bargained for). Because faculty are getting such lavish increases, administrators on campus declared a budget crisis and slashed hundreds of courses a mere weeks before the fall semester began. The number of faculty is rapidly shrinking, while the number of VPs, assistant VP, and other parasitic administrative posts have exploded over the last 20 years. Not only do we have more administrators, but they get paid handsomely and retire with generous pensions.
Ugh! Higher ed is just f*cked.
Not, so fast, Prof. The rise in tuition correlates almost directly with the availability of student borrowing. Nor is the rise of tuition at state schools wholly related to funding cuts.
The amount of funds provided by CA to the UC system is almost equal to the tuition and fees it receives. https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2021-22-budget-summary.pdf Public funding from New York State covers 60% of the operating budget for CUNY senior colleges and their entire capital budget. At present, student tuition provides 40%. Grant revenue, philanthropy and alumni contributions make up a small, but important portion of the budget. https://psc-cuny.org/cunys-funding-sources/#:~:text=Public%20funding%20from%20New%20York%20State%20covers%2060%25%20of%20the,important%20portion%20of%20the%20budget.
Moreover, if tuition at UC is $14K per year, the total borrowing for tuition for four years is under $60 K or less than one year at an Ivy. That also assumes no grants, scholarships, student work etc. Not saying it's as easy as when I could finance my education by summer jobs but it can be done. Moreover, the UC system provides cheap and excellent community colleges where the first two years can be done commuting from home at a very low cost (SB City, anyone?).
Tuition at UC schools may be $14,000, but room and board are another $14,000, and are real costs. When we’re talking about the cost of attending a UC school it’s actually around $35,000/year.
Ideally kids should go to a school close to home & live at home during college. It's what I did and my husband. It's what my kids are going to do.
I will NOT spend money or sign off on loans for room & board for them to party in dorms. They can drive to parties while living at home.
Am trying to be brief as I've written way too much already. But, yes and no. CA has a wonderful system of community colleges. You can live in Santa Barbara, go to City for the first two years and pay virtually nothing. Then, go to UCSB and live at home and pay $14 K. All in cost for a great education - $28K. So I really don't want to hear the crying. It's there if you really want it.
Completely agree. The problem are those going to private, or out of state, schools where the costs typically exceeds $60,000/year.
My daughter’s wanted to go to different schools (Pepperdine-$73,000/year, UNiv of Colorado -$70,000/year and Univ of AZ -$55,000). We compromised our lifestyle and have saved since their birth. We established a budget and stayed within that parameter that we set (much lower than the cost of their dream schools)
Not an honest statement or not well thought out. You choose.
If they weren't in school they'd still have room and board costs. So back that $14,000 out of your equation. And the $8,000 that got you to 35,000? Is that for travel expenses, clothing, etc? People not in school have those expenses also.
So the bottom line is, a UC school is $14,000 per year.
But if they weren't in school they could be working full-time. Since they can't realistically work 40hrs/week and keep up with studying, they often have to debt-finance living expenses.
Of course, I lived with my parents and attended my hometown college for that exact reason - I didn't want to rack up debt for 4 years of rent & groceries.
Agree to disagree. I have a daughter at a UC. It’s costing us $35,000 year.
Books are at least $2000.
This is simply untrue. The net tuition cost at Berkeley, at least is about 16,000 per year as of last year, all in for in state tuition. You are confusing the posted tuition rate with the net tuition rate, which is the amount paid after aid and scholarships. The $16,000 per year is what the typical student pays. The average cost at UC Irvine is even lower, about $12,000 / year. 45% of UC undergraduates graduate with no debt at all. At Irvine, the average debt of the 55% who did have debt was about $20,000.
Public / State Schools are very, very affordable, and (if people choose reasonable majors), remain an excellent deal in education. Your claim is simply wrong.
My daughter attends a UC school (this is her junior year) and I pay her tuition. I think I know a little better than you regarding what it costs to send her there.
@Fade: what twisted reasoning would get you to this conclusion? Obviously not everyone pays the average — some families pay more, some pay less. You appear to be paying more, and there may be a number of reasons for that. If what you are implying is that the entire UC system is systematically lying to the government in terms of the numbers above? Just how unlikley does that sound?
You can visit here: https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?id=110653#netprc
To go look at the net price that UC Irvine reported to the Feds, for example. Why don’t you go do something useful and collect a bounty? Report them for their evil lies to the Feds! Surely you and your one family’s tuition prove them wrong, and you can make a mint by telling the Feds how these schools are lying.
For a forum called “Common Sense” there is near zero of it in comments like this one. I hope your daughter learns more at whatever UC school she is at. College can be expensive (my kid is in school now too), but personal experience is anecdote, not data.
Out of curiosity, will your daughter graduate with any debt?
@Bruce Millier: Public universities remain completely affordable, and they simply are not really a major contributor to the debt crisis. I’m not a proponent of making universities free, so that isn’t really my point. Some states have gone too far, and the costs of running the schools have gone up too far. What starts happening is that the schools really start looking like just private schools. That is a different issue. However, our Public Universities remain a very good deal right now. My broader point is that when people talk about the increase in tuition, they are way off base. As the article I posted indicated, absolutely some amount of increased tuition has been due to increased actual costs. But the majority (75% or more at some schools) has been due to states cutting the fraction of the costs that they cover.
This simply doesn’t seem controversial as a set of facts.
You changed the topic of discussion… universities need to cover expenses, so of course tuition increases to exactly match costs — that is how a not-for-profit operates. The question that began this remains all the people claiming that the “real” problem is as simple as “too many administrators” (usually of the DEI sort). That simply is not the case. All other cost increases are about 25% of all tuition increases over time, and many of those increases are unavoidable in a competitive market.
We agree that state universities remain a very good deal. And I would posit that coupling that with 2 yrs of community college makes the education even more affordable. College is available for those who want it badly enough. And the community college/state college option fulfills that role.
But I simply do not think you can quibble with the fact that tuition has increased at three times the rate of inflation for decades. Certainly for private schools and the publics seem to usually follow. When money is made available, the cost of goods will increase. You can't repeal the laws of economics.
You are so right Penny. Should we be subsidizing Prada bags?
I want to relate a conversation I had with an African immigrant cab driver in Buffalo. He said Americans were stupid. I asked why. He said he came here with nothing. Did his first two years at Erie Community College at almost no cost. Finished his degree at Buffalo State. Now he owns four rental properties and is buying more. He won't have to drive a cab much longer and will be in real estate management soon. Why, he asked, do Americans go into debt for degrees that can be had at a fraction of the cost? And with aid and scholarships to boot.
I didn't have an answer.
I'm a physician; I did my degrees at in-state public schools to keep tuition costs low. I had friends in med school who took Maximum loans so they would have spending money to gamble in casinos. They used student loan money to play poker. Meanwhile, I took the absolute minimum, knowing I'd have to pay it back.
With my kids, I'm having them even better: 2 years in community college followed by 2 years of in-state public university. It's what I should have done. Why spend 4 years in-state public univ when you can get the same diploma but save money by doing first 2 years in community college?
Correct. I graduated from Penn State with a degree in accounting. The first 2 years of school were a waist. I went to football games and partied my ass off. The second 2 years were in my major and were very valuable. I graduated and got a job in the Big 4 where I worked for 35 years then retired very comfortably.
This is perfect. It’s always comforting to me when reality wins.
You are absolutely right. My Grandfather said, "The only thing a college education is good for, is when you are talking to a group of men, you can tell them what school you went to."
There is a lot of truth to that.
@Penny and others: it is not that status seeking isn’t real, but this has essentially nothing to do with the issue at hand, which was student loan defaults, etc. As a second issue, this is a cultural problem that is easy to sidestep: as a family, don’t buy into the status game, just like many reasonable families don’t buy Prada or whatever brands to show off. The total enrollment of the entire Ivy League is so small that it is irrelevant to any discussion of policy. The total enrollment of all colleges that accept less than 25% of those who apply is also too small to even matter to discussion. The vast majority of college students in America attend community college and Public / State Universities (78% of undergraduates).
It is also the case that some of our largest states have particularly excellent public university systems, which motivate a lot of very smart, very capable students in those states to attend their state schools: CA, TX, NY, MI, VA to name perhaps the top several (there are quite a few more!).
Rich private schools tend to have very generous financial aid for poor people who are able to attend. For example, most of the Ivy League is almost free for anyone who is actually poor at this point. Those going into debt are doing so, as you point out, by choice, and for status, but they are also a small-ish group at this point, and the debt should be ok (at top schools and reasonable majors). Private schools tend to enroll students who come from richer families who can afford to pay, and those students graduate with less debt, not more. This isn’t a paradox, it is a selection effect. We would also find that people who own Prada and Birkin bags have less credit card debt than those without, even though they have very expensive purchases.
Question: what was the Student to Administrator ratio in 1980? What is it today?
Lots of administrators added, largely to deal with ever increasing legislative requirements.
Same in medicine
Administrators added to deal with Obamacare legislative requirements, which add costs
Wow, you can just hear the sneering condescension.
Asking for numbers and facts is not condescension. It is how people are supposed to debate. Shouting at one another and repeating complete misinformation is unhelpful. My comment about college classrooms was a slap in the face, sure. Our educational system teaches students to back up their claims with evidence in high school, too. Ask any HS school teacher in English or History, and they will happily tell you that is what students are supposed to be getting out of those classes as well.
Where did the country go wrong that it seems reasonable to launch a broadside set of comments, wholly devoid of facts? That should be called out by *everyone* — hey, can you provide some support for those claims? Instead, anyone who likes the conclusion just piles on: Yeah! What he/she said! Awesome! Sure! That doesn’t demonstrate that our educational system is doing a very good job. It also doesn’t show that “Common Sense” is living up to its name. Where is the “common sense”?
I have a scientific PhD, so I know all about data and debate.
I also was media trained, which afforded me the ability to deliver messages with a respectful tone.
Sort of like gender is fluid, there are no illegal humans, women are oppressed (60% of undergrads are female), Trump colluded with Russia, etc. and other progressive articles of faith?
Asking for numbers and facts could be done in ine line. The condescension was found in the remainder of your, uh, comment -"since you seem to think you know", "[Y]ou are completely misinformed", and the sarcastic "since you are so well-informed.
I appreciate you coming here and debating the issue. I don't have the research (numbers) but I believe this is a highly complex problem. The cost of tuition has gone up, dramatically. I understand that CA has lowered the amount that it directly pays to support the CSU & UC systems, which as a CA taxpayer is unfortunate. I believe that the number of administrators and support staff have also grown at a much more rapid pace than educators; this has added to the cost of higher education. The government stepping in and providing student loans has also had an impact; I am not a researcher, so I don't know to what extent, but it has had some impact.
We need debate. We need people on all sides of the issue discussing this and other important issues. We need to respect that people will have different opinions and come from different life experiences to this.
I don't argue with people about how insurance works; I have been doing it for over 30 years and most people are just wrong about it. But, I am willing to discuss it with anyone that will a reasonable conversation; I hope you do the same.
Endowments need to pay off loans. Bankruptcy helps the borrower but screws the lender.
Um, here’s some condescension for you: what field was your Ph.D. in? You obviously have no idea how the financial system works, nor how contracts operate. According to your implied principles, if someone worked hard to earn money, then specifically gifted that money for a specific purpose, say to provide for cancer research (an endowment), NCMaureen suggests that society should steal the money so endowed to pay off loans for which the money was not intended and for which it is contractually forbidden to be used. A great suggestion! Socialize the gifts of charitable endowments the way that some countries socialize industries! I’m sure that will have no effect whatsoever on future charitable gifts to any endeavor, right?
Your comment about bankruptcy trivializes how bad bankruptcy is and misunderstands why it exists. I assume you’d like to bring back debtor’s prison?
Your ignorance is exceeded only by your ignorance. Stick with studying toads, bacteria, or whatever laser beam thin slice of the universe you presumably know about.
Ok, let’s take a different approach. Let’s set aside costs at universities and how they are $funded$. Instead, let’s focus on production, output, the quantity and types of degrees that universities generate. My disappointment with the university system today is that it is producing too many degrees for the marketplace to absorb. In my opinion, if the marketplace could absorb all of the degrees and gainfully employ those people, we would not be debating about student loan forgiveness. Because those people would have jobs and would be able to repay their student loans. The numbers to support my position are, (1) the number of students loans in default (millions), and (2) the principal amount of debt (100’s of millions) at risk. There are articles you can Google to find these stats, they are readily available.
So what about my argument ?
Why do universities continue to produce something that the marketplace cannot absorb ?
This, in my opinion, is where the problem lies.
The fix, well, just have a conversation with one of your colleagues that teaches economics. They will tell you how the marketplace would react in order to correct this problem. It’s not pretty, very painful in fact.
My opinion is that higher education, as a sector, is over capacity. There is simply too much of it. If hire education were a security on an established market, I would short it. But each institution stands on its own. So this means that many of them will need to close their doors.
Excellent comment. Let me add the impact international students have on academia. Their admission is desirable because they pay full load. It doesn’t matter how much it costs, if an Asian family can get a kid into Harvard, they will come up with the money. So the incentive is to keep tuitions high.
What are universities supposed to do with their multi billion dollar endowments? Are these non taxed funds? I know they are invested in private equity. Why are they allowed to accumulate to the multi billions while tuitions balloon? I think an accounting of these funds is in order.
Thank you. There is no reason that college endowments should be tax free. And yes, some of these funds should be used to defer tuition costs.
Harvard et al are the outliers in this discussion. The focus should be on the 95% of colleges that are overpriced and overbuilt. In the 1950's about 30% of HS grads went to college, 1960 45%, now it is 66%. When I taught (1970's) about half of the students had no business being in college - they were there to party.
Overbuilt, yes.
The percentage of kids that start and do not finish college, I believe is in the 40% range. Those kids had no business going to college in the first place.
They have been taught that, without a diploma, they aren’t worth much.
That needs to change.
I heard Peter Theil is enticing college students to leave and join a program he has set up to train them while paying them. More please!
Another brilliant comment by the mushroom sniffer @NCMaureen.
1) Full paying students **reduce** tuition costs for everyone else, not increase it. That’s part of that “economics” thing that you so clearly don’t understand even part 1 of. Universities let in super-smart, full paying international students who contribute in many ways to campus life. In addition, by paying the very high, “rack rate tuition”, they subsidize other students who then do not have to pay as much. Since this concept seems very hard to grasp, realize that a typical university is tuition-driven: like any business, it needs to collect a certain amount of revenue to balance its costs. How the total revenue is collected doesn’t matter. So if a small number of very rich (but very smart) students are willing to pay very high prices to attend, they make up a large fraction of the total costs that need to be paid, the rest of the (domestic) students need to pay less. This is true for any rich kid who is admitted (for example, a rich alumni child who is also very smart, but who will get no financial aid).
2) @NCMaureen has one of her bugs she studies up her ass over endowments, which she also understands exactly zero. What is this, your third or fourth comment on this?
A). Endowments are charitable gifts made by hard working people to another charity (in this case the university, but churches, hospitals, and other charities can have endowments, too) for a *specific purpose*. They are a legal contract. There is an “accounting” of them, which is that they need to be spent on what they were donated for. So if, for example, someone donates money to a university to establish a fund for cancer research (not uncommon), that money is invested, and the interest on that money is used each year to fund cancer research. It CANNOT be legally used to fund scholarships or tuition — that is theft from the *donor* — not from the University.
B) @NCMaureen, as is typical, is wholly ignorant of facts. “Multi-billion dollar endowments”. How many schools have a multi-billion dollar endowment? Literally 5% of all universities in the entire country have an endowment >$1B a total of about 100 schools. What is the median endowment? About $60M — almost nothing. Even if the endowment dollars were able to be spent on student aid (and about 50% of endowment money is, in fact, spent on student financial aid), the relevant number is not the size of the endowment, but endowment per student. Bigger school? Need bigger endowment. It is much less impressive for Ohio State to have a large endowment with it’s roughly 30,000 students than for Brown to have a similar size endowment with far fewer students.
C). Why are they allowed to accumulate endowments? Because that is what endowments are for. Donors give the money so that the funding is in perpetuity. As a donor, I could not give the money, and instead set up my own charitable fund, then have the proceeds of the fund donated to the university every year. That results in a huge amount of wasted administration, particularly for smaller gifts. But @NC Maureen would take the option to give the gift to the university or other charity away from donors. Socialize!
D) At least you asked this time whether they are untaxed. Yes, they are now taxed, or at least almost all the big ones have a tax on them. Is that helpful? 48% of endowment funds go to student scholarships. Now, 1.4% of those scholarships go to the Federal Government, which can spend on anything it wants, instead. Another 11% of endowment monies directly fund faculty positions (endowed chairs). That money allows the university to keep tuition lower — but now 1.4% goes to the Feds to spend on whatever. So the Feds now get extra taxes.
Just FYI, the actual private equity firms that you appear to dislike? They, and their owners, pay a super low tax rate that was just kept super-low in the recent negotiations thanks to Sinema and *all* the republicans. For all your vitriol, you have some very bizarre priorities.
You could try reading something like https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Understanding-College-and-University-Endowments.pdf
And learn, say, the first thing about Endowments before you continue your tirades.
You’ve still not provided the support (link to a 3rd party study) to your assertion that 71% of student loans in default are from kids who attended for-profit institutions.
you are spot on! College has turned into an 'experience'..rather than an education. I want to see some outcomes from these schools (rather than 6 yr graduation rates...what BS!). Like % of students who have full time employment 6 months post-graduation. Average salaries for graduates from various schools within the university..i.e. schools of nursing, school of arts and sciences, etc. Let people see the FACTs.
Actually, nursing has it right. They keep the number of schools very low and 99% of their graduates get a good nursing job. There is a shortage of nurses. But the key here is that THE MARKET PLACE is demanding nurses.
10% of all students enroll in for-profit universities. Those universities account for 71% of all student loans in default. Would you say that we should shut down such universities? Sounds like this would be a good idea, right? And yet, we do not. Why don’t we? You might reflect on the fact that these universities are frequently engaged in what looks like almost if-not actual fraud (e.g., Trump U was actual fraud, but still-operating versions are just shy of that). When unsuspecting students end up getting conned, why do we allow these schools to stay in business? Before trashing the entire system of higher ed, maybe we should first deal with the most abusive players first?
I see plenty of data on line showing that default rates at for-profit schools exceed those of private and public. But I see no data on principal amounts in default in these three categories. Since for-profit school enrollment accounts for less than public and private combined, I don’t see how for-profit schools can account for 71% of defaults. Can you please point to a study that shows principal amounts in default by: for-profit, public and private institutions.
There is plenty of data by age, by state, etc…
And I agree, we should close down any and all schools that engaged in fraud, if for some reason the market fails to do so.
All universities are for profit no matter what their actual status is. Let's be real.
And yet, the ones that are actually classified as "for profit", nonetheless account for 71% of defaults, but 10% of students. So... your conclusion is? Should we start by shutting *those* down and see if that helps things?
We have 330+ million people in the US. The top 1% of earners is roughly 3.3 million people that can afford to send their kids (or Grandkids) to any college and pay full price. The top 5% is roughly 17 million people. That is is a lot of people the Universities can market to.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-student-loan-statistics/
Why should I pay for someone else’s college education? You seem to take it as a matter of fact that this is the way it should be and if it isn’t that is some kind of problem. People don’t fund more state colleges because they don’t want to pay for it. That’s why they are upset that some folks are being given this “forgiveness” because they now have to pay for it and they get no benefit from it.
If college tuition is unaffordable, perhaps look inwards at your institution. Perhaps it’s arrogant and entitled to look outwards at society and expect them to pay for something they do not get a benefit from. More degrees make existing degrees worth less. More graduate degrees make current graduate degrees worth less. Yet the coat keeps going up, and your point is that it’s societies fault because we don’t want to pay for it? Do you think if states fully funded college education, costs would go down? I’m pretty sure they’d go up. The problem isn’t divestment from the state. The problem is these institutions expect kids (mostly kids, some adults) to make an investment in their future and them milk them for every penny they can and then, apparently, point the finger at everyone else and expect them to foot the ridiculous cost of higher education.
Please do what any overvalued, under delivering institution does and adjust. Cut costs. Reduce workforce. Stop expecting a bailout from the taxpayers. What kind of leftist are you?
1000 likes!
Lefties believe money grows on trees. Or that those evil (hard working, self-made) rich people should be bilked of their money.
Since 1980, college tuition and fees are up 1,200%, while the Consumer Price Index for all items has risen by 236%. As you say, direct education appropriations to universities have decreased since 2000, but your dramatic 90%-then to 10%-now comparison is largely due to dramatic increase in the costs (denominator).
At the same time, state funding for financial aid to students has increased steadily during that time. A 2015 study by the New York Federal Reserve demonstrated a direct “pass-through” effect of the availability of student loan credit to a contemporaneous rise in college tuition.
The subsidizing of college tuition through financial aid and guaranteed loans has substantially contributed to bloated university tuitions, it’s not “almost entirely driven” by state budget cuts.
There is not one single product in the history of the world where the cost have gone up (exponentially) and the value of said product has decreased proportionally. Yes, I’m talking about college.
"...the University of California system was **FREE** for in-state students..." One can only hope you don't teach economics. Nothing is "free". Someone pays, and in the case of taxpayer funded schools, it's either state or federal taxpayers. Maybe state taxpayers got tired of paying tuition and fees that were ever-escalating due to unlimited Federal taxpayer dollars flowing in via student loans? The outcome here is simple: Federal taxpayers (many of whom funded their own children's higher education entirely out of their own pockets) are being forced to pay for people who made bad decisions. Those decisions are thus being rewarded, and therefore perpetuated. The system is irrevocably broken.
I literally just spoke at length to a colleague in the UK (England) about their education system and her personal experience. Her daughter had to borrow thousands to get a university nursing degree. She makes 25,000 pounds/year. Her mother expects that she will never be able to fully repay her loans, which will be forgiven after 15 yrs (if I remember that # correctly). According to her, the uni system is falling apart in the UK and costs have risen dramatically. So....don't include England in the 'every other country' fact.
At Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland costs Irish, UK, and EU students nothing in tuition as do most public colleges. Any student contribution is capped at 3000 euros annually.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/third_level_education/fees_and_supports_for_third_level_education/fees.html
I thought college was free in the UK. That's what progressives have told me.
It was until a few years ago.
What changed? And why?
I'd have to assume the gov't is running out of money...an age old problem!
The world of higher education that you live in is bloated, out of touch and becoming increasingly irrelevant. The government never HAD to get in the business of guaranteeing school loans...they did it in anticipation of would ultimately morph into the train wreck being discussed here - a payoff to the people running the nations progressive incubators (previously know as colleges and universities). Cry me a river for the poor higher ed admins who are struggling to make ends meet with the anemic 1,200% increase in tuition in the U.S. since 2010. By any measure, the Biden student loan forgiveness is ill-conceived, patently unfair and probably illegal. Anyone (other than a student who buried THEMSELVES in debt) could possible think it's a good idea.
So what changed in 1970 to change the state funding from 90% to 10%?
I went to the University of California in the 70s when tuition was 600/yr.
What changed? there was no DEI administration, there were no fancy dorms and facilities, and only the top 10% of high school graduates were accepted. There were no ridiculous degrees. And professors actually taught.
And the State of California funded more like 90% of the budget of the schools, rather than 10%. — that’s the main thing that changed. That accounted for 75% of the increase in net tuition since you were in school, on average across Public Universities. All other increases: administrators, faculty salary increases, amenities, all the other stuff that @NCMaureen is so fond of railing about account for only 25%. Some of those other increases were, in fact, unavoidable. Some, of course, could be cut today or have been avoided in the past. But 75% of the change would not be altered.
The remainder of this comment, that fewer people went to college, etc. is a red herring, as that would affect the number of schools, not the cost to attend conditional on attending any given school. As always, no evidence whatsoever for “professors actually taught”. @NCMaureen: What is the average teaching load for professors in the UC system today vs. the 1970s? How does that square with the dual mission of teaching and research that major research universities have? How many faculty are supported on grant money or endowment funds vs. tuition? As always, long on strongly worded claims, goose egg on data or evidence.
Perhaps professors make to much? That would be one way to bring down costs. Pay professors less.
The problem isn't the professors but the swarms of useless administrators and diversity deans.
Professors who cash in on external consulting done during academic time need to have their pay docked. This would bring down their salary and thus their pensions. Instead these professors double dip, teach one class a semester, foist their work onto grad students, get sabbaticals and summers off. I remember my graduate advisor strolling into the lab around 10am, swimming every lunch hour, and complaining about the one class a year he had to teach. As long as his grad students turned out papers he could put his name on, no one questioned anything.
I disagree. It is a totality of its parts kind of problem. Professors may be a small part of the cost, but they are still part of the problem. They seem to value themselves much higher than what they actually bring to society as a whole.
My garbage man brings more public good to society than most professors I had in college, and at least half of the professors I had in law school. My garbage man takes away the refuse the buildup of which would destroy civilized society by spreading disease, making our living areas disgusting and generally creating large eyesores of large mounds consisting of rotting garbage. Yet my garbage man makes less than a professor (and works a lot more). And my garbage man is friendlier and generally less stuck up. My garbage man never argues that we should be paying off his debt as a society even though we wouldn’t have much of a society without our garbage folks.
Professors are highly overvalued for what they actually bring to the table. And yes, that’s triply so for administrators.
Furthermore a college degree, just because of the abundance of them, is becoming more worthless (as one would expect given the simple rule of supply and demand) yet seems to cost a lot more. For some, that degree is the most expensive toilet paper known to human history. I don’t see many professors accepting their part in that. Instead, some argue that you and I should foot the bill for the rising cost of that toilet paper.
So yes, the professors are part of the problem. Among many, many others.
Exactly.
Professors do not make enough in most cases. And in addition, even with jacked up tuition, colleges use adjuncts to teach and pay them next to nothing. I know; I was an adjunct. Got paid $2400 per semester to teach an accounting/finance class to master’s students.
This is exactly the case. Rather than hiring professors, colleges hire adjuncts. Adjuncts are typically not allowed to work more than part-time (because that would make them eligible for various benefits), and they are hired strictly on a contract basis, which means that an adjunct cannot be sure, from semester to semester, whether they will have a job.
Part of the reason I stopped teaching as an adjunct when I did is because the head of the community college where I was teaching had a grudge against our campus (which had originally been a separate community college of its own). She wanted to bust our campus down to a mere "attendance center," which would mean getting rid of things like our library and our student services (the main campus was an hour away, btw). And this was despite the fact that our campus brought in many students who never have been able to attend the main campus, due to the distance involved.
As a result of her aim, the head wanted to replace a retiring English professor AND the only Math professor on campus with adjuncts. Even though our campus *already* had trouble hiring enough English adjuncts necessary to cover the classes (I would have taught more classes, but I wasn't allowed to teach more than part-time). But the entire faculty at both campuses revolted, demanding that the professors be replaced with professors.
Naturally, I applied for the professorship that was coming open. I had been working there for over 4 years, and I had excellent teaching reviews from my students; in fact, there were students who intentionally took classes they might not have otherwise, just so they could have me for a teacher. And as a current employee, the college policy was that I automatically merited the courtesy of an interview.
But the head associated me with the faculty revolt (even though I'd had nothing to do with it, since I could not be a union member), due to WHERE I taught and WHO had hired me to begin with. So I did not get even the courtesy of an interview. In fact, word went out that the adjuncts were to be deprived of the spare office we had been sharing.
I was done. As much as I loved teaching, I was not capable of putting my heart into a poorly paid job where I was getting ZERO respect from my boss.
Got to admit that I was more than a little pleased when, the following spring, the faculty took a no-confidence vote that went about 94% against her. The board investigated, and although they could not find adequate evidence of wrongdoing to fire her outright, she made a hasty resignation.
I had to stop teaching, despite loving it too, because I couldn't with the student attitudes anymore. Anything less than an "A" and they were complaining to admin about the class being too hard or I didn't teach it right. And mostly admin backed the students and not the teachers.
Back when I was a graduate teaching assistant (adjuncts in all but pay), one of my fellow GTAs had a student who out-and-out plagiarized a paper. She was going to give them a failing grade for the class (something we were allowed, even encouraged, to do in those circumstances). But the helicopter parents roared in, and the department forced the GTA to step back; if I remember correctly, she was able to give them a failing grade on that paper only. And the parents were still upset that their precious baby was punished.
1) Please read the article I posted. Professorial salary increases are not the largest part of the problem, by any means.
2) Paying professors less is counterproductive given the overall push on this forum toward more “practical” educational fields. Where will you find excellent educators in fields like engineering, business, and STEM who will work at a university for crappy pay rather than going into industry? Yes, I (and others like me) want to teach and give back to society, but there are obviously limits. As it stands, computer science, statistics, math, and physics departments are emptied by tech companies and Wall St who can pay 2-5x academic salaries.
3) Professors in fields like the humanities, languages, etc. are already paid very little — far, far less than you think. Average starting salary for an English professor right now is about $55,000 /year. There are no full time jobs, of course, so that is for some lucky 1/1000 who could find such a job. The actual average salary of all English professors (this is with perhaps 18 years of education / out of the workforce and whatever is the average number of years of experience) is about $75K — lower than most HS teachers in suburban districts. They typically teach hundreds of students per semester in full time teaching, plus have advising responsibilities, plus other service work around the university.
4) Most professors in the humanities/etc, are not full time; they are contingent labor who work as adjuncts, have no job security at all, may not have benefits, and get paid by the class.
5) As usual, @NCMaureen has no Earthly clue what she is talking about (her comments appear below). Focusing on the handful of tenured professors who either abuse the system or who are famous enough that they can both turn out excellent work and also have free time is anecdote, not data.
That average starting salary for an English professor is the same as it was in late 90s/early 2000s too! Yikes!
The percentage of total administrators at the schools has skyrocketed. That's where the savings can be found.
Again, read the article I posted. Yes, some savings there. Some of the administrators are *required* by law. Some are not. If a school is in an urban area and hires a new "public safety officer" (really, a chief of police), is that a new administrator? Many schools in the 60s, 70s, and 80s were commuter schools with no students living on campus. Today, students live on campus, and now the campus needs a police force. Police force needs an administrator. Law says that we need to keep track of crimes around campus and produce a report that is public and report to the government. Who creates that report? The faculty? No. Administrators. We used to call these "unfunded mandates". Just 1 example of many. Administrators remain not the biggest source of tuition increases. The largest source is states cutting budgets (for public schools, where the vast majority of students go).
NOPE.
We should never have allowed universities to become more than institutions of higher education. They have become expensive way stations for kids who delay adulthood, hot beds of protest and CRT, and purveyors of indoctrination.
@NCMaureen: “*we* should never have allowed universities to become…”
Really? Who is this “we”? The Government? Should “we” have allowed universities to become giant quasi-professional sports training grounds instead of academic institutions? Have you looked around the world? Does any other country on Earth use their university system as the minor league for their pro sports teams? Should most students live at home during college, the way many (if not most) students do in most countries in most of the world? If not, why not? Did you mean to include all the private universities in your comment, or were you only referring to publicly funded schools? So, schools that were privately founded should not have been “allowed” to become more than institutions of higher education, by, for example, having fraternities, sports teams, or clubs?
“We” are the parents and taxpayers who fund these pathetic institutions
Yes, that makes total sense. We have many complex institutions that are effectively regulated directly by parents and taxpayers. We need something like a parent group led by someone thoughtful and with a deep knowledge base, with a good grasp of economics and policy, like you, perhaps? Maybe after you are done effectively regulating higher ed, we can have NCMaureen and MGT regulating banks! Oh yes! Can't wait to hear what new insanity will come forth from that. Maybe something like what Putin is doing, or the economy of Venezuela.
Did you respond to my question regarding sports teams? No? Too busy hanging out in your cave, trolling around?
Perhaps you have spent too many years too close to the mushrooms you study? You are supposed to wear a mask around toxic chemicals.
C’mon now. You know thats not entirely true.
Why not? Because they made an agreement to pay, that's why not. Period. In my neck of the universe, that's the absolute bottom line. You don't get "youth" as an excuse. How on earth do you suppose people learn responsibility? By being responsible.
And "merciful"?? Seriously? You call "letting someone get away with not repaying a debt" merciful? Listen: It does no one any favors to accommodate the worst person they can be, to lower expectations to the point where they aren't even accountable to themselves. Personal responsibility for one's words & actions is everything. Absolutely everything. It's shocking to me that you think letting a kid wallow in this kind of irresponsibility is a kindness. It isn't. It will set the tone for the rest of that person's life.
Ha Snarling Fifi- I agree! Painful lessons are lessons learned.
Wait til their Visa bills become a “burden”
There are a bunch of people who made interesting comments, and some who have brought pieces of evidence to bear. I regret that I don’t have the time to write a full essay addressing each of the various comments individually. However, for those who are interested, your comments fall into several categories, all of which are misconceptions about the role of cost growth in higher education. When I made my comment, I did not mean to imply that the *only* reason that tuition has increased is / was lack of state funding — obviously that is not true. It is, however, the main reason. A number of responses cite growth in administration as another reason, which sure (some of those administrators are mandated by the government, some not, by the way, and faculty are just as annoyed at the growth of administrators as taxpayers). Growth in amenities is cited. I don’t think that anyone mentioned growth in salaries, but professors are now paid more, and that is a component as well.
For those that are interested, here is a link to a very accessible article with actual data and numbers, written by a neutral / non-partisan professor of economics. It’s a bit old (2016), but nothing really has changed. In some ways, the nice part about it being written in 2016 is that it pre-dates the super-partisan culture war crap that otherwise pervades our national discourse. All the data and facts you need. TL;DR? Less than 25% of the total cost increases in higher ed have been due to all causes other than states reducing their funding.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/
Your argument would be unassailable EXCEPT that we have seen virtually the same increases in tuition and housing for private as well as public IHEs. I infer that competition for a diminishing number of students has played a big role in increasing costs, enabled by Big Government. As a result, we're seeing small private schools driven out of business.
Another problem we face is that there are too many people going to IHEs who don't need to. Our country desperately needs more artisans and craftsmen, plumbers and electricians, and we don't have them. We need personal care workers – for the young and for the elderly – and employers can't find them.
Professor E, I respect your demand for facts, but I'm afraid that the problems of higher ed are much more nuanced than you seem to think they are. Ultimately, affordability is a major one but not the only one. In too many cases (some documented here on CS), IHEs have drifted away from their educational mission (teaching people to think) to an indoctrinational one (teach them to think the right [Left?] thoughts). The erosion of free speech on college campuses is terrifying to me. If you can't explore ideas in the shadow of the Ivory Tower, then where can you?
"Our country desperately needs more artisans and craftsmen, plumbers and electricians, and we don't have them. "
100%
And these jobs are actually much better than most Bachelor's degree jobs. Craftsmen, plumbers and electricians are Well Paid, have a job which is in demand, & more rewarding. You have the accomplishment of directly seeing the fruits of your labor. Also you are active which is much better for your health than sitting at a desk/computer
USA also needs more skilled manufacturing workers. As we are ramping up things like SemiConductor manufacturing
I bet I pay my cleaning lady more per hour than some college grads make.
John: you are changing the subject. One question is about what has caused the increases in tuition. A second question is about how increases in tuition may or may not have resulted in increased defaults on student loans. A third question, which is much broader, is a policy question about allocation of labor investment: to higher ed vs. the skilled trades and other careers for example. A further sub question is whether Higher Ed is delivering on its mission. These are all interesting topics. The basic problem is that the discussion has become like a hydra: every time something comes up and is put to rest, multiple more topics suddenly arise that are quite interesting, but now need discussion.
What this all convinces me of is this: the real problem is that people do not have a common set of facts from which they are working. I sent around one such article, which was (and is) accurate. Still some people don’t believe, so that’s a problem. Maybe Bari will start a new concept which is an in-depth policy analysis section of the website for people who really want to learn about certain topics. If people were interested, I think that I could get some writers who would contribute a neutral analysis that explained what is going on. But people would have to commit to really reading — there is simply no explaining something as complex as the problems of our educational system in 500 words.
Very interesting, and the first I've heard that. I've book marked it for later, but have trouble buying that position. I've seen other articles stating that it's admin bloating (at the expense of actual prof comp), and at least in Iowa City, I've seen the student housing currently being offered, and it's nothing like the cinder block dorms room I had in the 70s when I did my undergrad.
I’m confused as to why I’m expected to pay taxes to fund colleges at all. It seems odd to me that you expect it at all. If 2/3 of people don’t go to college, why should 2/3 of people subsidize the 1/3 who do, especially these days when the 1/3 who do are then taught that the 2/3 subsidizing their education are irredeemably racist, homophobic, bigoted and blah, blah, blah? There seems to be some kind of disconnect from reality here.
Great article
From article:
"The picture is a bit different at private schools, which do not receive state funding but have nonetheless seen substantial tuition increases. At private nonprofit colleges, the spending categories described above — student services and faculty and administrative salaries — together explain most of the tuition increase over the past two decades. Among for-profit institutions, recent research suggests that one big cause is the generosity of federal student aid: Some institutions may be raising tuition in order to capture as much government-backed money as possible."
Your focus on costs is misplaced.
Please see my comment above.
As a parent who just wrote the check for his child's college tuition today, this is just a partisan take based on nothing in reality.
This Common Sense idea, which was conceived as an ideal, falls incredibly short already.
Maybe it is failing because people like you choose to post worthless judgements rather than discuss content in a meaningful way?
Or, maybe the people who contribute thoughtful responses aren't the ones who think the ideal is failing?
That check wasn't worthless, I guarantee you. Out of 358 comments, my guess is that 90% are made by people who have not had any experience paying college tuition within the last 5 to 10 years.
You must love the idea that you're not only paying those fees up front but also being taxed to subsidize them and taxed again for the people who didn't pay.
See the goal of this isn't justice, it's to maximize the amount of money and power that universities give to the Democratic Party. They always help prices go up, and then demand taxpayers to pay for it while university bureaucrats get richer and richer.
Same thing they do to health care.
Again, a lot of the people who receive this benefit were sold a bill of goods by loan companies that the students were recommended to listen to by the university itself.
College loans are prime examples of predatory lending and what's worse their target is young people without the real world experience to recognize the ramifications of the crap they're being sold.
Debt forgiveness is laudable when the debt is consistently incurred through unethical practices.
Right, I'm on board with all that, so why are we discussing taxpayers giving the money back, and not the corrupt loan companies and universities repaying the money?
There's an injustice, so we're going to fix it by punishing the innocent and letting the rich scum who arranged it keep the money and power.
And Dems praise this as a victory and then declare it should be 500% more money spent because "this is progressive." Utter madness.
Franc - that's a strange comment. Why would you 'guess' the commenters here have no experience paying college tuition?
And time will tell whether your check is worthless. Hope your student does well.
Agreed
Couple of issues with Rep. Khanna's arguments:
1) The famous Roosevelt Institute Study is hard to find (link is to Mother Jones website, which has another link to a brief in the R.I., which goes to another summary - no details on how they reach these conclusions), and if you are going to build an argument based on someone else's research, at least it should be easy to find and assess the arguments;
2) But most importantly, even if the progressive arguments were correct (highly doubtful), any loan forgiveness just doesn't address the underlying issue - the insane inflation of a college education in the US. There is no mention on stopping the bloating administrative bureaucracies that have been burdening the system for several decades or the increases in tuition.
This is nothing but an electoral ploy by a very unpopular President to minimise the electoral defeat that is coming his way.
Ironically, college students and others in academia will reflexively vote Democrat no matter what. There was no need for this program.
College students vote Democrat IF they actually go out and vote... the biggest challenge for Democrats is to get the young to the polls... This is about energising the AOC/squad base...
Then it will backfire. The young will not go out to vote merely to reward the politicians for this free gift.
Experiencing and/or expressing gratitude is a rare trait amongst progressive youth - or maybe youth in general.
not just any car, either. A Tesla.
Though, she now claims she's selling it, because of some unpleasant exchanges with Elon on Twitter.
Understandable slip. She acts like she lives in CA.
The Roosevelt study would also miss the point even if its conclusions are true: The real injustice is that the executive order transfers wealth to those with the highest earning potential, even if they're young and not yet especially wealthy today.
Agreed! I had trouble finding the Roosevelt Institute study and once I did it was frustrating. It's basically taking all the data from other studies and manipulating it to fit their own point. This should be a link to the PDF
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/RI_StudentDebtCancellation_IssueBrief_202106.pdf
"In this brief, we argue that critiques of student loan cancellation as regressive are based primarily on five empirical and conceptual errors: the inclusion of private student loans,
conditioning analyses on borrowers only, focusing primarily on income rather than
wealth distributions, highlighting the value of debt to the government rather than
benefits to households, and ignoring the racial distribution of debt" - I honestly don't know if I should laugh or I should cry... This is an exercise in reframing an argument and then finding the right statistics that support your pre-established hypothesis...
The ivory tower is running out of oxygen by the second...
Thank you! I'll check it out myself... I like to give the devil his due ;-)
Regarding the "Roosevelt Institute Study", Leftists never, and I mean NEVER, scrutinize their sources. Any link that vaguely purports to make a claim helpful to left-wing argumentation is to be accepted as infallible, and woe be unto anyone who clicks on it and discovers how utterly weak its methodology is!
Of course, any information unhelpful to their agenda also goes without scrutiny, as no scrutiny is needed to say "the source is unreliable"! At least, until your media tells you your new talking points ("It's just like PPP!").
FGH, there seems to be four positive attributes to canceling student debt.
How Canceling Student Debt Would Bolster the Economic Recovery and Reduce the Racial Wealth Gap https://rooseveltinstitute.org/2021/12/08/how-canceling-student-debt-would-bolster-the-economic-recovery-and-reduce-the-racial-wealth-gap/
Student Debt Cancellation Would Promote an Equitable Recovery without Increasing Inflation https://rooseveltinstitute.org/2022/01/31/student-debt-cancellation-would-promote-an-equitable-recovery-without-increasing-inflation/
Canceling Student Debt Would Increase Wealth, Not Inflation
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/2022/08/17/canceling-student-debt-would-increase-wealth-not-inflation/
Student Debt Is a Racial Equity Issue. Here’s How Mass Debt Relief Can Address It.
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/2020/10/29/student-debt-is-a-racial-equity-issue-heres-how-mass-debt-relief-can-address-it/
Excellent, 'Just Me'
Thanks, Mark.
I am no economist, but when somene claims that progressive economics somehow trumps basic math, I am skeptical. You cannot just wipe out debt with a stroke of a pen. If you can well, hell, let's do that with the national debt. It is just a matter of scale. When money is owed, someone pays. It is that simple. The government has no money of its own. It is our money, given by us or taken from us. We will all pay for this. Progressives blather on about "equity". In its new incarnation, equity has come to mean every one gets the same regardless of what they put in or how hard they work. There is a name for that: communism. What equity truly means and has always meant is fairness. Our feckless, senile president's plan is anything but fair. My daughter and her husband are paying off their college debt, steadily and on time. Why should they pay for the college debt of someone who took more than four years to complete college and obtained a degree with no meaningful practicality in the real world. This is one reason why we have this metastatic proliferation of HR personnel and diversity activists on the payroll of our higher institutions.
"The government has no money of its own. It is our money, given by us or taken from us. "
The quote of the day. I wish this would be printed on our currency.
100% agree. and when is it actually given? I wish more people could internalize and fully understand this truth.
I prefer to call it "theft"
but that's just me.
They know this. They know that $10k in “forgiveness” is just everyone else chipping in to give a small minority $10k. The problem is that to just say that and accept it would mean they aren’t the good, just, moral people they believe they are and they won’t be able to lord it over everyone how important they are because they are so just and moral. They HAVE to justify it somehow. It’s not an easy thing for people who think they are uniquely just to so shamelessly accept they are simply taking peoples money in the least democratic way possible, by presidential fiat.
Well said Biz!
from the party that gave you "modern monetary policy"...
Certainly agree, Richard. The policy of debt forgiveness is unsound, unfair and regressive on principle when compared to the more equitable solution of allowing debtors to go bankrupt on their debts. Doing that would give them leverage over their lenders in negotiating better terms on either principle, interest, or both. That is the American way. Not a giveaway.
But having said that - I've noticed on the part of a lot of commenters here and in the media alike, mostly from Republicans but from more centrist Dems as well, that the average American taxpayer, especially those who have paid off their student loans (or in the process of doing so) will foot the bill.
There is a reason this country can carry a gargantuan and impossible to imagine debt of 23 Trillion dollars - and that is because we pay only the interest (low now but surely to rise) on an annual basis on the securities we issue. When we need to retire and pay off these bonds to their owners, we issue more to fund the payout. Funny how that works.
But the interest is forever there, while the principle debt slowly goes up but remains very largely untouched since when was the last time an American government actually had a budget surplus? (Clinton's..)
This is getting a little long winded (sorry) - but the main point I'm attempting to make is that I think it's more accurate to say that Americans will pay with their taxes only the interest on the 350 Billion dollars (I think) this forgiveness program will cost. If we were to carry an interest rate of 5% on the 350 - that works out to 17.5 Billion dollars. Divide that into 325 million Americans (taxpayers and not) and we come out with an annual per capita payout of 54 dollars.
The equivalent of around nine Starbucks lattes. (But don't tell that to any Progressives who may be lurking around here..)
The Clinton "surplus" wasn't really a surplus. Debt still went up. Accounting gimmicks re "intra" vs "inter" gubmint debt
TY, Sir Lee. I agree with the idea about allowing debtors to go bankrupt.
You calculations on the interest look accurate. But, You know, the whole $350 B will likely hafta be paid by todays's grandchildren. I forget what the debt to GDP ratio is, but my recollection is pretty much the whole world is over 100%. That's not sustainable forever, AFAIK. TY again.
"the whole $350 B will likely hafta be paid by todays's grandchildren"
Well, can't blame the boomer generation for this one - Biden isn't a boomer and the greedy students wanting someone else to pay their debts are not boomers either.
Well said. And in this, just like all government policies, bills, laws, codes, etc - the only thing that we need to know is that the rich never take a hit and never get screwed. The regular people always do…
The rich are paying as much as 55% of their income in taxes. Please stop saying the rich don’t pay. The richest people in NYC are paying more than the rest combined.
@Richard, @LeeMorris. The basic issue that is confounding both of you is that you are confused about how the student loans currently work, how bankruptcy would work, who is in default, and therefore how debt forgiveness might play out. Do a thought experiment this way: First, do you know who owns the debt? That is, who holds the student loan debts? To whom is the money owed? If the students declared bankruptcy, whom would they be “stiffing”? The answer years ago might have been “some private lender”. Today, however, it is likely to be “the Federal Government”. The U.S. Department of the Treasury revealed in its 2020 annual report that student loans accounted for nearly 20% of all U.S. government assets.” [U.S. Department of the Treasury Bureau of the Fiscal Service. Financial Report of the United States Government, Pages 74, 95.]. So the money here is owed to “us” already. Do I like that? NO. Do you like that? I’m guessing not. But that does not solve the existing problem, which is that the US Government — that is “us”/taxpayers — are holding a lot of bad debt that is never going to be repaid.
You need to begin with that understanding. This is debt that won’t be repaid. It is in default right now. It will be in default tomorrow. And it will be in default next year.
Who is in default. See multiple of my other posts in this thread. Many of the people who are in default are working class people who were taken advantage of by for-profit colleges that are essentially fraudsters. Many didn’t even graduate. Others graduated with worthless degrees and exorbitant debt, snookered by unscrupulous scammers who are stealing from the public by providing worthless degrees.
Should we force them all to declare bankruptcy? That’s an option. Change the law. It will cost the government nearly the same amount, as the government is the lender. It will also mean that these working class people will be further harmed after being scammed. But, it will send a message to everyone — pay your debts, etc. So it’s not unreasonable. Canceling the debt is, in fact, as easy as just writing it off. The debt is owed to “us” right now anyway, and it isn’t being paid anyway. If this were a corporation, the debt would have to be acknowledged as “bad debt” and written off / aged anyway.
As I explained in a different post, since the bottom 50% of the income distribution pay essential no Federal income tax, they also are not on the hook for helping to pay off any of this at any time. Really, almost all the costs will eventually be borne by the top 10-20% of the income earners, because they pay the vast majority of Federal taxes (top 10% pays about 70% of all income taxes).
One thing I love about Common Sense is the ability to have these conversations. I will respond as a reasonably educated guy who runs a small business (medical practice) and had to figure out how to pay for my education (joined the Navy). Several points to be made. You correctly stated the government is owed that money. That's us. We are the only source of money the government has. You state that canceling debt is as easy as writing it off. I agree. But I disagree that this magically means no one is out their owed money. There is a principle at play here and principles matter. Just because the cost of this cancellation will be borne more by the upper income earners (so, you are admitting that someone pays, right?) does not make it OK. We cannot keep dipping into the so-called deep pockets forever. They won't be deep for long.
Who was responsible for this debt? My reading is that there are several parties. First the student for taking on debt without considering how it would be paid back. An 18 year old should have some sense of the value of money. That failure lies at the feet of parents and early educators. Blame predatory colleges that are more concerned with indoctrinating students in toxic ideologies than providing them with the knowledge and tools to be successful in the real world, not some imagined utopia. Blame the government for making loans so easy to get. I do not believe there are only two solutions: cancel the debt or banruptcy. In my practice, I believe that patients need to be responsible for paying for the care I provide. I see a lot of uninsured and indigent patients. Sometimes I do provide my services for free. That is my choice. Much of the time I tell the patient that I need to be paid (for my living and for their self-respect) and I tell them to discuss any financial obstacles with my office manager. She knows that I will accept any payment schedule that works for the patient, even if only a few dollars a month. Many of them spend discretionary money on such things as cigarettes, etc. and can certainly spare a few dollars for their medical needs. As their circumstances improve, I expect the payments to increase. I do not charge interest and, so long as a good faith effort is being made to pay, I leave the account open and current and do not send to collections. At the end of every year, I have my manager look at who has been paying faithfully and on schedule and I write off those debts. (years ago, I used to close out dozens of accounts. Now hardly any because so few patients make any effort to pay). We should be able to establish some program that allows indebted students to pay down their debt as they are able yet not saddle them with payments that are clearly impossible. This seems to me much better than blanket cancellation. Maybe I am being unrealistic. It just sticks in my craw to have Biden, with the stroke of a pen, decide for everyone what to do about this. I know millions feel exactly as I do. All of this presupposes that we do something meaningful to change the way college education is promoted, carried out, and financed.
Personally, I don't disagree with almost anything you wrote. Where we might find some agreement with *parts* of the current plan, or even a majority (it is actually difficult to find really good data) is on how many of the borrowers fall into the categories of "deserving" the way you have laid it out. My understanding is that many of the people who will have their debt canceled were (a) not 18 when they took the debt out (more like non-traditional students who were perhaps 25, (b) attending for-profit or community college, where they were lured by promises of degrees that would upgrade their life circumstance, (c) probably didn't belong in college at all, but the *colleges* were taking advantage of the government largess of free/easy money, and the students were just a conduit to funnel that money to them. Many never got degrees at all. (d) Many have been making what payments they could for years, but have been in and out of default.
To your point, for all such forgiveness programs, it would be interesting to know how much "forensic" or invasive investigation has been done to see where debtors could cut costs, etc. to pay the money back. I will say, however, that I am a bit more sympathetic to these folk, who were more like defrauded, than to those who owe someone like you money for services rendered. As just one example, a huge tranche of people now have outstanding debt and no degree for Corinthian College (for-profit) which simply closed its doors -- locking all the students out without a degree, and similarly for another one of the trade schools that just closed. Seems to me that we should treat those folk as having been more like they were defrauded than, as I said, if they owed someone like you (or a hospital) money.
My view is that the Administration should do a better job explaining all of this. Who is really benefiting? How long have they been paying? Put requirements on amount of time people had to be paying before forgiveness. Unless it was more like fraud -- then I think that we need different rules. But we also need to massively clamp down on the potential for bad debt in the future. This kind of one-shot plan doesn't do that, and it's not my favorite plan for that reason. On the other hand, I still wonder if it is better than nothing. I'm not sure.
One thing that bothers me a lot is people blaming Biden, or Democrats alone. Where is the Republican plan to fix all this? I haven't seen one. Simply tearing down everything is not a solution. Republicans didn't rein in lending to for-profit colleges, for example, either. Both parties are responsible for the explosion of bad debt. Where is a bi-partisan bill that would help solve these issues going forward? Or even solve the current issue in a more sensible way? I don't see why, simply because the President is a Democrat, We the People should give Republicans in Congress a pass on this any more than we should give Biden or the Dems a pass.
ProfessorE- I have to agree with everything you said. Complex issues are not fixed with simple, stop gap solutions. I believe this move by Biden was nothing more than a political bribe to a demographic that would jump on this and, hopefully, be more inclined to vote democratic in the midterms. What's worse is I think it will work. People vote for those who give them the most free stuff.
Khanna writes "In order to truly help working- and middle-class Americans, we need to cancel up to $50,000 in student loans. This would help 95 percent of borrowers and do more to improve the lives of those struggling the most."
Proving, once again, that Khanna, like almost all Democrats, is a charlatan and a liar.
The working and middle class Americans he wails about mostly did not go to college. Neither do they own much, if any, college debt. In fact, even the leftist Brookings Institute confirms that:" Likewise, education debt is concentrated in households with high levels of educational attainment. In 2019, the new Fed data show, households with graduate degrees owed 56 percent of the outstanding education debt—an increase from 49 percent in 2016. For context, only 14 percent of adults age 25 or older hold graduate degrees. The 3 percent of adults with professional and doctorate degrees hold 20 percent of the education debt. These households have median earnings more than twice as high as the overall median ($106,000 vs. $47,000 in 2019)."
So, in truth, this is little but a scam and a plea for votes from Biden's base - and from people who don't know any better. In addition, it is blatantly illegal and unconstitutional, as any law student (another likely recipient of Biden's largess) would easily understand. Biden is not a king or potentate He is, however, a thoroughly corrupt and imbecilic plague on our nation who makes Donald Trump look like a modern day paragon of Aletheia
Has Biden got a base? One never really ever sees any evidence of one or maybe it’s antifi based voters
You're always so spot on Bruce!
Gee thanks
No shocker that progressives are confused, they sing the praises of the European system (which tracks students from a very early age) while pushing for the elimination of tracking (cause its racists as higher tracks are full of white and Asian students) wherever they get control of a system in the U.S.
That's precisely the problem. We COULD provide free college educations IF we allowed only the best and brightest to attend college. The value those students will add to the GDP would easily offset the cost of their education.
But that would require universities that focus on education instead of pouring millions into sports teams. It would require students who come to college to study and train, not to party and protest.
And it would require recognizing that not everyone is cut out to go to college. Tracking allows students who aren't cut out for college to train in lucrative--and well-respected--trades instead of suffering through their teen years in classes designed for future college students.
But tracking requires assessments of student ability. And Leftists reject that as racist...while never noticing that they themselves are engaging in the bigotry of low expectations.
You are 101% right!
Moreover, I think that the policy of "only the best and brightest are attending a college" should be strengthened anyway, this is not a kind of "alternative" to the current "pay and study", this is a must! This is the only way for the country to survive in the modern word.
All good points, Celia. But in our increasingly complex world there are many jobs that command much higher income than what the average 4 year college graduate can command.
My brother-in-law Don and I are both vets and long retired. He used the GI bill to get a forestry degree.
I used mine to accumulate 140 or so credit hours back when you could use the GI bill to study exactly what you wanted, sort of like the original definition of a liberal education, but with no resulting degree because I refused to take a trigonometry course that used the same text book that I had used in high school.
I was working as a newspaper reporter at the time, and needed to interview people who had a wide variation of specialties.
Don was not making much money as a state employee, so he accepted an apprentice job at a large naval ship yard near Seattle, where he learned how to weld various types of steel.
Don eventually became one of a very small group of people qualified to work on the nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers, including welding jobs under water.
During the 10 years prior to his retirement he hinted that his annual salary at times was nearing the mid six figures when he worked overseas, and put in many overtime hours.
Mike Rowe is spot on when he points out we need skilled trades workers in many situations more than we need college educated people.
I've told this story a couple of times in the last few days but I got my hair cut on Saturday from my Polish immigrant stylist (who charges $100 per cut). She tried helping her older daughter with law school loans, but didn't have much to provide. Now her 18 yo son, recently graduated from HS, is working in an electrician's apprenticeship program. So he'll be helping his sister pay off her loans with the new transfer of wealth. Absolutely backwards!
Both of my sons now make more than their dad. One took his experience in our local rubber-auto-parts factory and got hired by a Goodyear tire factory. The other took his A.S. degree from the local community college (mostly accomplished via dual credit in high school) and his five years doing HR-related work as a First Aid attendant in the same local factory and got a good job as an assistant HR manager.
If this vote buying scheme is allowed to happen, it will end up being the first step of a larger scheme. Bidens got two more years in office, and in 2024 be facing a challenging 2024 re-election campaign. What's to keep him from further caving to the left and forgiving the remailing debt? Rep Jayapal finally tipped her hand yesterday, along with a couple others, that the goal was to establish free college education. Imagine the implications of that. Universities, currently increasing in expense at six times the inflation rate, having full access to federal funding.
Nobody has mentioned cost constraints on universities. Once the student loan caps were lifted and graduate education was eligible there was an explosion of useless degrees. Do you think in a real world, a for profit underwriter would ever considering approving student loan for any of the 'Victim' studies programs? Or any one of the many liberals arts degrees that will never render the graduate employable? Those indoctrination programs only exist because of federal funding.
The federal government needs to be out of the student loan business. I've posted in the past that I supported a bill that would forgive all student debt, and in return terminate all federal involvement in university funding. Both sides of the aisle would get something they really want, but also, give up something the value greatly. That would be a compromise I could live with, otherwise, the current situation will only get much worse.
Once you accept that the government can just keep printing more money, the sky's the limit.
Over at Ruy Teixeira's SubStack, reliable leftist John Halprin is advocating the Bernie Sanders plan making all post secondary education tax payer funded. That's where this is going.
Yeah, saw that. Was first article of theirs I've seen that's 180° in the wrong direction.
Though not getting as much air time, the changes to income-based repayment plans essentially make it free or nearly free for huge chunk of students. From the White House's site:
"For undergraduate loans, cut in half the amount that borrowers have to pay each month from 10% to 5% of discretionary income.
Raise the amount of income that is considered non-discretionary income and therefore is protected from repayment, guaranteeing that no borrower earning under 225% of the federal poverty level—about the annual equivalent of a $15 minimum wage for a single borrower—will have to make a monthly payment.
Forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments, instead of 20 years, for borrowers with original loan balances of $12,000 or less [my insert: Also eligible are people working for non-profits or government entities for 10 nonconsecutive years, regardless of debt level]. The Department of Education estimates that this reform will allow nearly all community college borrowers to be debt-free within 10 years.
Cover the borrower’s unpaid monthly interest, so that unlike other existing income-driven repayment plans, no borrower’s loan balance will grow as long as they make their monthly payments—even when that monthly payment is $0 because their income is low."
This essentially means that if you go to college and get a more or less useless degree that doesn't pay you like an engineer or software programmer out of college, you can get the vast majority of your debt forgiven after just 10 years.
Not only have I not heard about most of this, a lot of it doesn't help me at all. :(
It's not the first time they've done this. Remember Biden telling voters "you'll get bigger stimulus checks if you vote for me!"
I actually wonder if there are real strategy sessions of Dems sitting around discussing, "how can we break the spirit of every important check and balance while staying just legal enough to make a lawsuit worthless?"
Once upon a time, I would have benefitted from this "forgiveness." I couldn't even afford my own apartment while paying minimum balances, much less get out of debt. My degree is in writing, and here I was, struggling to write because just staying afloat required working two or three jobs (which in turn, incurred huge debt to the IRS every year.)
However, I had to face the fact that it was my credit card debt that made my student loan debt impossible to pay off. And since I couldn't forsake my credit rating by missing credit card payments, I took out forbearances on my student loans, in addition to an IBR, which merely increased the interest, taking a 32,000 education to over six figures. I have had to make peace with the fact that my incapacity to make student loan payments was related to other debt. Those payments, as I recall, were just $250 per month. The forbearances increased those payments to nearly $600 per month, again making the debt even more challenging to pay down.
And yet, at 59, I finally paid it all off. I'm debt free. My writing career was sacrificed to the two jobs that consume most of my time and energy.
If I had been making $125, 000 a year, there is no question that this debt wouldn't have been hard to pay off. I cannot even begin to fathom making that much per year and getting a break on student loans. It hurts my heart, I'm sorry. That is the salary of a wealthy person. It would be one thing if the cut in debt were applied to those truly in need -- but over a hundred grand a year? And now I get a tax increase to subsidize the WEALTHY? The income cap should be much lower (40 grand). That it's so high just goes to show how out of touch this administration is with the average American income.
Some say that Biden is trying to buy votes. This doesn't buy mine. Some comment that one shouldn't "begrudge" this charity -- and I don't, for those who, like me, have to struggle on $40 grand a year. But over a hundred grand? I can't wrap my brain around it, I just can't.
"If I had been making $125, 000 a year, there is no question that this debt wouldn't have been hard to pay off." <-- This!!!!
When I took out my student loans, I expected to get a job that would pay upwards of $60K a year. I expected to be able to repay my (low interest) loans with that income.
But I didn't get that income. In fact, our entire *household* income didn't reach $60K until a couple of years ago. And due to forbearances and capitalized interest, I now owe over twice as much as I borrowed to begin with.
"When I took out my student loans, I expected to get a job that would pay upwards of $60K a year. I expected to be able to repay my (low interest) loans with that income."
Universities routinely Lie to students, encouraging them to rack up debt & convincing them that they will easily pay off debt. I know mine did.
My parents thankfully warned me not to believe the lies & to avoid the debt trap.
Most college grads are unemployed or underemployed.
"due to forbearances and capitalized interest, I now owe over twice as much as I borrowed to begin with"
My parents' exact warnings to me. Why I avoided debt & why I warn others to avoid debt
I applaud your efforts. My sister, a year older than you went back to school at 48. Ended up with a nearly 100k/year job (after a bit of searching) and still couldn’t make it month to month. So my oldest sister (an accountant) fully took over her finances and in 5 years my youngest sister was debt free.
She then became in charge of her own finances. Within a year, she was 30k in debt with credit cards. Needless to say, she’s not happy because she thinks her current debt should be paid off because she paid her student loans off early. Yea. Right.
but you chose to get student loans, and to rent an apartment.
I strongly believe people should go back to the old model of living at home, commuting to the local university, and brown-bagging it rather than using the "food plan". People could save tens of thousands of dollars a year... money they won't need to borrow... and at least get started in life on a better footing.
100%
what I did, what my husband did, & what our kids will be doing
Will I contribute to dorms & food plans? No. Over my dead body. They are living at home.
When my oldest son went to college (out of town, we live in a town where the closest community college is 75 miles away), I refinanced our house, bought a small house in the college town. He lived there for three years (graduated), got a job and I sold the house. Sold for a bit more than I originally paid, took the proceeds and paid principle on the newer home loan.
I take full responsibility for the debt I took on as an emancipated adult.
Loan repayments were to start when I was 37. If it’s a “choice” to rent an apartment at that age, you’re suggesting I should have burrowed into a cardboard box on W. 32nd Street.
Okay.
Biden's Student Debt Plan is terrible. Main reason why, is because we are treating symptoms while leaving underlying issue unresolved. What will happen next, in next years Universities will ramp up tuitions even higher, new students will have to take even more debt and in 5-6 years we will have even bigger issue than we have now, because all students will expect that next Democrat President will do same debt forgiveness.
This is very irresponsible fiscal policy, that will just more aggravate our national debt issues, while at same time we will have even more useless degrees that have 0 application in real world and more students will be settled with ever growing debt burden. But hay, since our universities are run as brainwash facilities for woke left, I wouldn't be surprised if this was plan all along.
Honestly, I would have not been against student loan forgiveness, if it was financed by finally abolishing tax exempt status for Universities and finally taxing those fat endowments, since they are not education institutions anymore but propaganda institution for left and thanks to endowments they have turned to hedge funds with education as side business.
College tuition has escalated at three times the rate of inflation for decades. Student loans started in the late1960s.
Connection?
Duh.
If this thing passes, guaranteed that in a year or so, tuitions will shoot up $10K. I'll lay money on it.
Much like GM and Ford recently hiked their electric vehicle sticker prices by almost the same amount as the new federal tax credit?
(And I see that Terry and others have made the same point earlier, so I need to read all comments before piling on. But to be honest, can you blame either Ford or the schools? Someone offers you more cash, even in a roundabout manner, and you'll figure out a way to take it.)
Nothing wrong with emphasizing a point made previously :)
You'd think these Democrat policymakers (in reality, the Congressional and White House staffers who actually write these bills) were born yesterday, to judge by their naive and counter-productive initiatives.
And some Republican policymakers too, for that matter.
(Dammit, Terry, just saw your other note about incentives. Get out of my head! :)
"What will happen next, in next years Universities will ramp up tuitions even higher, new students will have to take even more debt and in 5-6 years we will have even bigger issue than we have now, because all students will expect that next Democrat President will do same debt forgiveness."
YES!!
"But most students recognize that to maximize their chances of having a good-paying job in our modern economy—including in the trades—they still need more than a high school degree." - Ah, and this is where Rep. Ro Khanna goes off the rails. Where do these "good-paying jobs" come from? Who are the employers that provide these jobs? Turns out they are the same folks that are being taxed into oblivion who satisfied their contractual obligations to pay off their education loans years ago. They are also the same folks that will be harangued by 87,000 additional IRS agents and submitted to expensive and time-consuming audits that distract from building a prosperous economy that allows for job creation. I paid off the student loans for both of my degrees and then went on to satisfy my contractual obligations to pay off my children's student loans. I have a "good-paying job" in the tech sector and employ 11 other people who also have a "good-paying job". And to think I was able to do all that and still honor my financial obligations without a government bailout.
Agreed.
Paid mine and then paid college tuition for my four kids and paid off the loans and expenses three took for grad school and post grad training. Any forgiveness should not be blanket but should be targeted only to special circumstances and only if repayment is impossible.
Same here, and also 4 kids. We didn't want them starting life in debt.
Also agree student loan forgiveness should be targeted. There are apparently a lot of people with student debt who never, for whatever reasons, graduated - they have the debt but no degree.
In my husband's retirement gig (because we are older parents & still have two kids in college) he works security at a private college prep high school. The school is building a new auditorium. The tiler asked my husband if he could connect him to the college counselors so he could encourage them to talk to students about the trades. He's 32 making 6 figures.....to tile. So many of our young people should be going into the trades but instead are attending college. I honestly think partying is the draw to college for many of them. Back in my day, 18 was the legal drinking age. Many of my HS friends didn't go to college. They could work their shift, learn their trade and go to the bar after work if they wanted. I realize it's a weird tie in, but we're asking people to adult at 18 but not really until they are 21.
Democrats have become the party of college educated coastal elites. Do their constituents know this yet?
How does Pelosi go from calling something illegal to a good idea?
I hope this act is found illegal. And then I hope we find a way to reform college education.
Universities need to purge their vast administrative state especially those related to DEI. They need to open their endowments to pay down student debt instead of investing them at private equity firms. Cancel worthless made-up degrees (Queer Studies) and transfer others (Hospitality) to trade schools. Lower admissions. No more spending lavishly on dorms and entertainment (LSU). More trade schools and community colleges, please. Start a PR campaign showing kids who choose a career requiring 2 yrs of college as the smart ones. And more exposure of what nonsense passes for education at universities these days. University leadership needs to be made to feel on its heels before they will get their heads out of their asses and reform.
One quick sentence, when the midterms come vote out the Democrats.
I didn't read Sen. Scott's statement. I take it on faith he knew what he was talking about.
Rep. Khanna shows what's wrong with the D party, and what's wrong in this *country.* No wonder he comes from CA.
First off, I'll admit that my understanding is most-a the debt payoff will go to people making less than $75K a year. I wish I knew what *proportion* of their debt this would eliminate. In any event, if we were talking about *FREE MONEY,* I'd be all in favor. As long as the outrageous limits were scaled back. Funny how that number "$250K upper limit for *couples*" doesn't come up in the conversation.
But we are *not* talking about "free money." It's only free money in the eyes of people like Rep. Khanna. That's why he so blithely recommends paying off *five times* what was already outrageously offered to people who would like to pretend they didn't know they were signing a contract.
"Free money" from the working-class and people who *did* pay off their loans to go to *entitled* (and most likely Dem) people.
And, it's just typical. You give a Dem an inch (this disastrous policy) and they wanna take off an arm and a leg. Yeah, let's listen to Uncle Bernie. Free college!! Sky's the limit. As if colleges and universities didn't *already* charge like the sky's the limit! *Incentivize* them to charge twice what they're charging now.
I dunno which astounds me the most. The AUDACIOUSNESS. Or just the plain STUPIDITY of the idea.
But just shows where the D party and this country are heading in, unless something is done about it.
“Free money” ie inflation is a tax on the poor. The democrats don’t care.
Yup.
This from The Dispatch this morning:
Jason Furman—a top economist in the Obama administration—has been one of the harshest Democratic critics of President Biden’s plan to cancel student loans. Why? “There isn’t free money out there. There are consequences. Once you frame it as 320 million people paying for a benefit for 30 million people, it makes you think a lot harder,” he told Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic. [ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/an-economists-case-against-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-plan/671259/ ] “With any public policy, you need to analyze the trade-offs. You can’t just say, ‘This person gets this, and therefore it’s good.’ It’s always better for someone to get something rather than nothing. But that’s not how it works. If you’re giving $500 billion to one group, where’s that money coming from? One possibility is that the economy grows much more quickly, and so spending that money doesn’t hurt anyone. I think that’s extremely unlikely, given the highly constrained state we are in. And so I think most of that $500 billion that one group is getting is coming at the expense of everyone else. That doesn’t make it a bad idea. If we were covering a Medicaid-coverage gap, I’d say, ‘You know what? If everyone has to pay $50 more and poor people get health insurance and the inflation rate is a tenth of a percentage point higher, I’m all for that.’ But we’re giving couples making up to $250,000, which is a lot of money, up to $40,000.”
If transferring student loan debt from the borrowers to the government will help the economy, then we should have seen that already, since loan payments have been paused for 2 years
I'm gonna guess that the 300+billion will be as judiciously doled out as was the Covid PPP billions, i.e. another slush fund for fraudsters
No doubt.
Well articulated.
TY Sir. Appreciate.
Many countries provide funding for their citizens or economic area citizens (like the EU) to attend public university and have done so for decades. See Ireland.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/third_level_education/fees_and_supports_for_third_level_education/fees.html
Sadly, real world examples don't easily sway American citizens who would rather scream in all caps about the "audacity or stupidity" of an issue than discuss the merits of it.
TY. You condescension has been duly noted.
What you are ignoring is the fact that those countries do not allow *everyone* to go to college. The higher education system is very different in the U.S.: colleges here are largely a four-year extension of carefree childhood, with more effort put into partying than into studying. We actually have RANKINGS for the best "party schools."
College enrollment rates of secondary graduates(high school) in Ireland is inline with or higher than US college attendance rates.
Is that why college is no longer free there?
Horrible horrible policy.
Pretty much any time politicians decide how resources should be allocated in society it spells failure. And when they create scrip to do so it's a double failure: misallocation and inflation. The final bad piece is the bad moral hazard signal. No consequence for failure to pay debts, making society even weaker than it already is.
They don't care. They're just trying to buy votes, to make it through the next election.
We are raising a generation of deadbeats who will expect the taxpayer to bail them out of every bad decision they make.
As a person who paid on my student loans for 20 years and also used a public service forgiveness program, I think this is terrible policy. We already have loan forgiveness programs in place for people who do public service. Why wouldn't the administration urge citizens to participate? Especially when we have a huge teacher storage in this country? Yes, I know there were problems when the PSLF program matured, but I know it works! But what did I do for my part? I made sure I understood the guidelines, I asked a lot of questions, I called every six months to make sure I was on track.
This cancelation does not ask anything of the borrower. They SHOULD commit at least some labor to public service for the cancelation. But what I like least is that it does NOTHING to address the actually problem that student loans have been a cash cow for the colleges and universities, which is why tuition has skyrocketed.
Worse than nothing; it will incentivize every college in the country to raise tuition by $10K. Mark my words. One will do it, and the rest will instantly copy. Next year, $60K will become $70K.
It's just like the Green New Deal $7K credit for buying an EV. GM and Ford and others instantly announced price increases of... $7K.
Good lord, Terry, the correlation isn't that direct on either example.
College tuitions were raising at astronomical rates before this happened. How do you account for that in your $60k to $70k increase? You don't.
What are new & used cars selling for right now, Terry? Whether EV or not? Quite a bit more than normal. It has more to do with supply and the supply chain versus democrat legislation.
I believe tuitions have been rising this fast over the past few decades precisely because of easy access to student loans.
The EV price increases were announced last week, right after the Inflation Act passed. Obviously it’s a direct correlation.
How much interest did you pay over 20 years?
Student loans are a ponzi scheme that prey on American youth.
I have no idea how much, honestly. And if it’s a Ponzi scheme, all the more reason to correct what is happening. My frustration is that this policy doesn’t even try to correct the system. And I’m frustrated because I, as a single person, do not come close to making $125k, and I have been doing public service for over twenty years. Come on, man! My frustration would be lessened if the max had been like 50k. That high income threshold tells me who Biden really wanted to help.
Word.
Then you should have been eligible for a number of loan forgiveness vehicles due to your public service. I hope they were offered and a benefit to you.
Yeah, I said in my first post. I paid for the loans and also work hard in public service to take advantage of the PSLF. That is an agreement. Nothing was canceled wholesale without labor on my end.
This act is a shameless election year "gimme" to keep AOC and her crowd quieted down and buy votes. While this is certainly nothing new, it is the same cynical politics that has helped put us in the position we are in. I agree with both of these gentlemen that real reform of the entire system is what is needed. We will be right back here in another year or two with the graduates who drop on an overly saturated market for diversity experts and social workers. If we help anyone, how about the people who actually do something for their wages?
remember, we need one social worker to replace each de-funded cop.
Ro Khanna is seriously out of touch with reality.
"At one point, I was among them, with over $100,000 in loans, having trouble making my monthly payments, and ultimately taking a year forbearance which created even more debt. I repaid my loans thanks to good fortune and opportunities,"
Yep guess what, the greatest income and wealth gap is between the young and the old and has been for 100’s of years. It’s not sex. It’s not race (though he did use his racist world view). It’s age. Older people make more and have saved more than young people.
We have a crop of young spoiled younglings which are used to mommy and daddy taking them on nice yearly vacations and now, that these kids are on their own, they realize they can’t afford it. "It’s NO FAIR. Boomers have more money them me." Their solution is to force the government to transfer the wealth of others to them.
It’s down right evil.
Don’t even get me started on what this will do to massively increase the cost of college even further, how it will reward horrible financial decisions while punishing sound decisions and increase upward pressures on inflation. Remember… it’s only transitory.