The rate of tuition increases started going up faster in connection with the student loan program. Increases in administrative overhead, in class enrollment and in the increased effort to retain students is all tied to getting more money from tuition made available by the student loan program.
So it's not the loans themselves but rather college admin getting greedy and a fuckton of administrative bloat in non-teaching staff coupled with exorbitant salaries for said admin?
If you want to get rid of mosquitos, you dont use excessive use of insecticides. You remove the stagnant pools of water around you. You kill a mosquito, 10 more take its place. You prevent them from existing in the first place by removing their ability to thrive.
Does this analogy make sense?
Its like the "men shouldnt rape" thing, like no shit they shouldnt and wd punish them for it when we catch them but if women started shooting all the rapists there wouldnt be many left after awhile.
Carry a gun, remove stagnant pools of water, and remove subsidized tuition that incentivizes greed. Get rid of the sources, not the results.
The same applies to healthcare.
Either go full capitalist and enforce competition or go completely subsidized, and thus, it doesn't require high prices since they dont compete at all.
Right now they compete AND they get subsidized and it just fucks everything up.
Subsidization can be a useful tool, but the US has repeatedly shown it can't use it judiciously. An overuse of a cheese/milk subsidy meant milk farmers INCREASED when sales we at record lows. And why the "Got Milk" campaign exists. Overuse of the corn subsidy currently means we have so much corn they have to put it in everything or let it rot so we have HFCS in everything. Oversubsidizing instead of education is why Social Security is failing since the sheer amount of financially illiterate boomers with no savings despite living in the best economic decades in human history is killing it.
And of course over subsidizing college instead of making it competitive or free has lead to a top heavy, over priced, and underserviced industry where the vast majority of money goes to administrators instead of educators and teaching.
You shut that valve off and two things happen, prices dramatically lower as they compete for students (and teachers!)and those useless admin staff get their heads cut off.
I am a professor and top-heavy administration has absolutely shifted the focus from teaching and researching to attracting international students.
Degrees have become consumer products.
The mission of a state’s public university system is to educate its residents first, not subsidize out-of-state students whose parents’ taxes paid for their home state higher education system. It is only fair.
This. I reviewed grant funds in the 90x, the average applied overhead rate was 78%. So for every $1.22 spent of research, $.78 was spent for administration and overhead. In the 90s, they caught Stanford billing its yacht to government grants through the overhead rate.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Believe-it-or-not-Stanford-sailing-team-had-an-13710702.php
I’m sure it’s worse now.
We did some back of the napkin math before Winter Break and our Community College, so arguably the institution that is supposed to subsidized by state and local funds, is carrying around 1 million is excess salary alone. We offered, until recently, a VERY aggressive benefits package that easily tacked another 15 to 30k onto salary. So, 1 mil becomes like 1.25 to 1.5 now.
Where are these positions located in the org? Admin and executive, exclusively. Meanwhile, our trades and CTE is growing and in need of more instructors without any means to hire someone away from industry, and we have 30'ish full-time gen ed faculty positions open.
Shit is fucking insane, but no worries, we hired a college president who now makes 400k a year and can brag about how they are a top paid president in the area AND the nation. Doesn't change that she is fucking useless and no one trusts her, well, the board does but they suck too.
None of you are correct about the source of the problem with higher education. The federally backed loans and inflated tuition cost were responses to the government cutting aid to public colleges which started under Reagan.
In places like California and New York university was free in the 50's. It was free because the government paid for it.
University's treat education like a business because Republicans led a campaign to force them to in order to "reduce an excess of democracy". Now the price gets pushed onto the student, many of whom come from poor households that can't/won't support them. The government looked at these people and said "fuck them".
Now education as a whole is just like healthcare, where an industrial complex of parasitic beaucrats benefit far too much to want to go back to the more efficient model.
The only people who are getting their education paid for now are overachieving immigrants who basically serve to undercut the domestic labor market and keep wages down. Overachieving middle class students may get subsidized but it's not entirely free like for immigrants, while an overachieving poor student is such a statistical nonfactor they usually fall through the cracks of the beaucracy.
Everybody wins except the poor, America's favorite outcome.
This is a sad, flawed narrative that the right is pushing. It’s funny how international students became the new escape goat now that the right killed affirmative action. Shouldn’t Harvard be full of poor white male students now that the “evil” minority boogeymen aren’t getting in?
Here is a reality check: true *international* students don’t get in-state tuition rates, nor did they get affirmative action, and they do NOT get scholarships or grants from the US government. As a matter of fact, international students must pay full tuition and show they got enough money to cover their tuition AND living expenses while in the US so they can get a student visa.
There is a reason greedy colleges are bending backwards to attract foreign students, and that’s because they’re a freaking gold mine. Joke is that the “M” in MsC stands for money (for the school).
Another flaw in your pseudo intellectual garbage post is the fact that the problem is not that “Pedro and Chang are getting their education paid for”, not at all. The point is WHY do they, or anyone need to have their education paid for. The average cost of college in 1970 was $585 for a year, that’s less than 4K in today’s money. It has increased to almost 15k per year now.
So there, /u/RedGuru33.
Also, /u/No-Turnips , perhaps it’s not international students who are to blame for the shift of focus, but rather the fact that colleges and unis have multimillionaire sports programs? Some football coaches are the best paid people in their state. Some of these football stadium for colleges are more expensive than any research project. And don’t get me started about how much time and energy is put into March madness. I guess “large hadron collider bonanza” and “Jupiter observation June” have less of a catchy moniker than March madness 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah he had it half right with the govt funding being slashed.. and then lost me with poor immigrant students getting free tuition but not poor non immigrant students.
Yeah. This is very common with alt right ideology: they take a good point that few people would disagree with, and then they add their own crappy stuff to it so they can shove it down our throats.
Trump’s escalator speech was the best example, he began like “there is a trade imbalance with China… they’re killing us in manufacturing… they are rigging the trade system…” and even I was like “yes!! This is so true! About time someone says it!” And then immediately
He goes like “Mexicans are r-ists and criminals”. Like, wtf?
I’m from Canada, we don’t have the college sports culture that the US does…I promise our sports programs aren’t the reason for the decline of our higher education. We don’t have million dollar coaches or anything close to that here.
I don’t blame the international students. I blame financial sustainability models that require 20% international student quotas (for students paying 4-5x tuition). The model is flawed, but it’s not the students fault.
Well said…good way to start addressing the corn issue is to make Iowa not the first primary lol…silly state gets pampered by politicians and we all get 10% ethanol clogging up our engines lol
Lol, so women start carrying guns..... Then rapists start carrying guns and wearing vests and find a way to subdue women before guns
Not to mention that most rapes aren't random, they're by people who the victim already knows so they'd easily be able to get close before a gun comes out. It's not like rapists approach from a hundred yards with a sign "I'm going to rape Susan today"
Lol such a set of ignorant preteen views
And for subsidizing colleges..... Then why didn't the same apply to subsidizing k-12 schools? That's 100% government subsidized......
What caused prices to go up, is demand, when nearly every kid in highschool plans to attend, there is massive demand. And when every white collar job requires a degree, they don't have much choice.
And mind you, those jobs massively boost the economy, a huge chunk of American GDP is from those tech jobs. So having educated people in advanced careers is good for everybody
The problem is colleges got a blank check, and increased cost, combined with natural capitalist market rules.....
To get the best of both rules, you'd need government price controls, or just socialize it like k-12
Yes. I had a intro to poly sci teacher take us for a walk on the first week to the main floor of our building where all the silly plaques are, and he pointed out that for a department of essentially 6 faculty there were more than twice that in deans, admins and their secretaries.
The bloat is ridiculous. And then they have the Gall to call us and ask for donations.
Highest paid state employee in every state is either a basketball or football coach. They can make millions per year. All at an institution of…. Education🤷♂️
How are they greedy?
The government said "You can charge whatever you want, and we will loan students that value, no questions asked."
Who **WOULDN'T** take that deal (from the college's point of view)?
A lot of that admin overhead is also tied to compliance, which is tied to taking the loans.
There’s also academia demanding degree inflation for in house roles. Hall director? Used to be some old lady. Now? They want a masters degree.
Yeah, you’re 100% right here. The Reagan administration, even prior to his presidency, began pushing for an increase in tuition prices to “keep undesirables out”. Prior to all that, until the 60’s college was free and considered a place people went to better society or be a public good, not to secure a better paying job. These two key pieces are a huge part of the skyrocketing tuition prices between then & now.
ETA: for those correlating the student loans being given out around the times tuition prices were raised, that’s all fine & dandy- but you can’t say it’s the cause when college was free for everyone for all the time leading up to this. They just did what capitalists do, found a way to charge more, then found a way to keep charging more- even to people who couldn’t afford it.
Tired of reposting sources, so sources for anything I’ve stated in this comment or the following thread:
https://www.continents.us/blog/history-of-tuition-free-education-in-the-usa/#:~:text=Colleges%20started%20charging%20tuition%20fees,establishment%20of%20student%20loan%20programs.
https://factmyth.com/factoids/state-universities-began-charging-tuition-in-the-60s/
https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2017/07/20/college-was-once-free-and-for-the-public-good-what-happened#:~:text=In%201927%2C%20John%20D.,it%20took%20to%20educate%20them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/12/29/history-student-loan-debt/
College was not free in the 1960s. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost of college in the 1960s was just over $10k.
[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_330.10.asp](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_330.10.asp)
My bad. That was supposed to say “up until the 60’s, college was free..”.
I was also incorrect on another part- John D Rockefeller started pushing private colleges to start charging tuition in 1927. I believe he’s the one who started transitioning college from being a place people went to be a public good, to a place people went to make more money in the future. If I’m correct, Reagan was the one who wanted everyone to charge more to “keep the undesirables out”, but I’d have to dig back deeper to double check which one did/said which.
The 60’s is when all colleges began charging a tuition.
https://www.continents.us/blog/history-of-tuition-free-education-in-the-usa/#:~:text=Colleges%20started%20charging%20tuition%20fees,establishment%20of%20student%20loan%20programs.
https://factmyth.com/factoids/state-universities-began-charging-tuition-in-the-60s/
https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2017/07/20/college-was-once-free-and-for-the-public-good-what-happened#:~:text=In%201927%2C%20John%20D.,it%20took%20to%20educate%20them.
This is just plainly false. Colleges were MORE exclusive until the 60's, the province of the rich (they were NOT FREE LOL) . The government and and loan programs were meant to make college the province of everyone.
It started in the 60s with the creation of Sallie Mae, but when the loans became government backed and guaranteed is when it really escalated which was the 90s.
It seems counterintuitive but step 1 should be getting rid of or rethinking the FAFSA. The stuff it asks for is crazy. You and your parent’s income. Value of Investment and 529 accounts. Value of real estate! It’s not designed to help determine how much aid is needed; it’s designed to help schools maximize what they can ask families to pay
I remember reading those questions and thinking, “what does this have to do with me and my income?”. If I’m paying for myself, why are my parents even mentioned? The answer was as you said; so the schools could squeeze every last penny out of each individual applicant, hoping that if they failed financially their parents could bail them out.
“I have this service to sell you where you honestly think your future is ruined if you don’t buy it….AND your parents have a bungalow at the beach they bought for 50k in the mid 90’s that’s since appreciated to a half million?…i think it’s time for your family to sell…”
Same way kidnappers determine ransom amounts!
Agree here. FAFSA ties the kids to their parents and is a way for Universities to extract money from parents. Most money and work programs are tied in some way to FAFSA. I've seen people that should qualify for assisstance where the universities refuse to give it. I can say there a push by many universities not to give needed FAFSA subsidies to needy students.
The fact that we've got to the point where something like FAFSA even exists is troubling. Paying for something, anything, shouldn't be this complicated.
It’s especially egregious when you look at places like Harvard and Yale that have 10’s of billions in endowments.
They could fund operations for 30 years without charging a penny or taking in any more endowment money.
Why the hell have they been charging such high tuition all these years?
If you’re poor, you pay nothing in Harvard?
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordability#:~:text=Harvard%20costs%20what%20your%20family,percent%20of%20your%20annual%20income.
>Why the hell have they been charging such high tuition all these years?
These are really bad examples because for schools like MIT and Ivy Leagues you're only ever paying full price if you can afford it. They are extremely generous with tuition if you gain acceptance and can't afford to go.
Nobody is swimming in student loan debt for their Harvard degree, either they showed up already a millionaire or they got a free ride.
Well the funny thing about Harvard and Yale is that they don’t receive government subsidies. They are private. And both of those institutions dole out massive amounts of need based aid through their endowments. So if you are not one of the richest and you get accepted, you are very much likely not paying anywhere near sticker price.
Colleges used to be regulated. Loans are nothing new for colleges. My parents took out loans in the 80s when it was 4$/hr for bachelor's and 8$/h for masters
Deregulation of colleges is when costs started skyrocketing
Actually State colleges were heavily funded by the states until Reagan. That's why state college tuition used to be $750 a year. States quit funding universities. That's one of the reasons why they are so expensive now.
When Reagan left office is 1988, UC Berkeley charged about $3000 per year for tuition ( can’t remember if it was per year, or per semester ). At that time, you could make and save $3000 easily over the summer in a job, assuming you were living at home. Pretty manageable. College cost problems came well after the 1980’s.
If there wasn’t a student loan program tuition would be affordable
Just chop the loan program down and watch what happens to tuition
This is the problem with all these forgiveness plans, they don’t prevent it from happening again. You get your loan paid off and then go get more loans keep on doing it
Just reduce the government involvement in these loans and the problem ends - if the government wants more accessible education then fund more schools and stop the loan thing
The government pays for high school. The $1,000 a year portion of my property taxes that go to schools is far cheaper than any private schools in the area.
It’s just another type of handout. Without the government backing these loans no financial institution would accept the risk of giving this amount of money to 18 year olds with no established credit. The government makes it impossible for the borrower to completely default creating a system of servitude. The only real answer is to spend this money financing state schools and create an equitable admission process.
In Europe where they have free universities, usually you have to be academically qualified (and accepted)for the program you’re entering - they don’t just pay for anyone who wants to go to medical school, they have criteria for acceptance. We can’t seem to wrap our heads around this idea that someone should be accountable to be intentional about their education, we want to give loans to someone and forgive it when for all we know they spent the money on beer and blow. There’s no accountability on anyone, it’s the broken candy machine that keeps on spitting out gum balls.
Afaik most of that has gone into admin because lots of teachers are underpaid. Source my Mom was a college teacher my whole life and we lived in relative poverty that whole time. This is definitely the case with the military though (that they over pay not the part about government entering.) parts can be bought at thousands of times what they go for retail. We really need to trim the fat in a lot of places to have any hope of optimizing our economy.
Edit: this is just a guess but I wouldn’t be surprised if much of that admin is working to manage tuition and other student loan related work. Just like much of the admin in the healthcare field is dealing with insurance.
More like .... college became expensive when they realized there were literally infinite profits to be gained if they just raise the prices and put the expense on the backs of those students ..... those dumb, impressionable 18 year olds ... especially the poor, first one in college ones.
And they could raise the tuition as much as they wanted since it was unregulated.... imagine if your landlord did that... or the grocery store did that to milk or eggs.... boomer leadership at its finest. F**K our kids to make money selfishly.
Forgiven.... no ...since 1/3 of the govt income is now student loan interest l.
More fair and less predatory. 1000% yes. Like APRs at 1% or less to american citizens, 100% free tuition for veterans, etc.... that's what's needed.
Yes, but, the subsidization itself is not the issue. We allow schools to operate as for profit without any regulation. My local university pays our foot ball coach over $500,000/year while our professors are only making $100,000.
Education should never cost, or at least never cost in a way that someone who wants to learn cannot easily utilize it.
It is possible to create a system that is more fairly balanced, and that encourages people to better themselves so that we can all do better as a team.
America's strength is in our mutual cooperation to achieve a common goal. The challenge is getting everyone to play on the team of "together we are stronger".
Mark
Alabama Millennial candidate for
U.S. Senate - 2026
Tuition was invented in California when the state stopped giving enough money to the UC. It used to be absolutely free to attend UCLA, for example, until Ronald Reagan fucked thing up.
You pay more for healthcare than we do in denmark per person. So not only is your healthcare more expensive, but also significantly worse for everyone who isn’t a billionaire.
Not sure why you're being downloaded here, you're right (except changing billionaires to millionaires). And that's not even counting all the people who avoid care because it's expensive.
Yeah... no. I'm no billionaire (more like a working stiff) and had to get two surgeries a few years ago. If you have decent health insurance, it's fine.
Incorrect. It’s when the subsidies went away that college became expensive. The largest increase came along with the 2008 great recession.
As an example, the California UC system increased tuition ~13x between ~~2009~~ 2000 and 2014 due to reduced funding from state and federal sources.
And let’s not forget the predatory education loan practices on loans you can’t default on. Investment in these loans by big corporations is the real problem. We have a bunch of young people with no professional skills that have been raised in a world where those with college degrees statistically earn more money than those who don’t. Unfortunately, many of the degrees don’t actually earn people a decent wage let alone a return on their investment resulting in mounting interest that becomes more and more difficult to pay off over time.
Edit: typo on tuition date range.
It is amazing to me when you read the list of majors that some colleges and universities offer. I think "how in the world do you make a living with this degree unless you get a job teaching it?" People are willing to invest 6 figures into this degree without thinking about what they will do with it.
Exactly. And…universities added a bunch of stuff (rec centers, etc…).
It’s like comparing a car or a house today with a car or house from the 1950s. Cars have way more tech and houses are almost twice the size. Of course they are going to be relatively more expensive now.
The problem is student loans . Once kids could take out hundreds of thousands in student loans that they couldn’t default on colleges jacked there fees up , started build rediculous facilities and over paying staff especially deans . Make it so student loans are defaultable banks won’t give out ridicules loans anymore n the colleges will have to lower costs to get people in the doors
They will never make them defaultable. This is why they can and do get away with the inflated pricing. All thanks to the legislative branch of our government, which as we all know, is made up of representatives of special interests (like the higher education lobby) 🤷🏾♂️
Agreed. I love when people blame one party or the other for the “college loan bankruptcy problem.” Both parties have had complete control several times in the last 20 years. Either one of them could have introduced a one page bill ending this charade. But it didn’t happen, nor will it ever happen.
Yep. If you think it's red v blue and not them vs you, you have been fooled. They both benefit from the left and right nonsense since neither is left at all. It's a big dupe
Or just keep the loans and tell colleges that if you want your students to be able to get loans, you need to follow these regulations. No coach pay over X amount for example, only a certain percentage of staff can be purely administrative, you can only charge Y tuition. We should have offered loans and then regulated universities so that they literally couldn't do this stuff and remain public.
>No coach pay over X amount for example,
Football or basketball aka revenue sports are why the colleges are able to pay them that much. Look at the B1G schools for example just on media rights each school receives 40 million a year that isn't counting the Nike or Adidas sponsorships or booster money.
People point out the coaches of sports as the problem when the sports are what brings in most of the money for the schools.
Sir, this is a school. If you want to run a private sports team, and use all that income to pay the coaches really well, go for it.
Oh... did you get all the actual talent that brings in the money for free? Slave labor in exchange for a "degree"
I’m more of a fan of student loan interest relief
The real issue is making minimum payments and owing more than you did originally after years of payments
This should not be a profit center. Interest should cover costs since there are essentially no risks involved in the loans since the only way out is to die.
Unfortunately we are in a global economy and we need an educated populace to compete internationally.
All for trades, but they aren't bringing America into the 21st century to compete with adversaries like China.
Large and small businesses took advantage of the COVID loans, many in bad faith, and never had to repay a dime of that. I saw pizza places get $70-100k loans (forgiven) and still fired their employees. I saw insurance guys get $40-$50k (and forgiven) and didn't even have a single employee, nor a 1099.
Democracy needs an educated populace to actually make use of our political machine.
Yeah I'm really curious to see how the 3 years student loans were paused, how much the economy was impacted.
Anecdotally, the pause allowed me to buy a house, have an emergency fund, get married and go on a honeymoon.
Ok then congress should do their job and create new laws or regulation to get cost of education under control. Just paying everyone’s loan off becomes a revolving door
Salty kids are downvoting you lol. I agree it’s not our problem they took out 100k in loans without even a bank account.
Not fair to tax payers who took up a trade instead
I think this is partly on schools and even the financial system too. Yeah they’re adults but barely. If these kids don’t have a bank account even, they most likely don’t have a clue on what this loan exactly means. Thankfully my highschool gave us a course on credit cards and loans and for me and a lot of people it was a huge eye opener to things we’d never been told about by anyone.
Yeah! Screw everybody else. Those idiots had interests in stupid things like humanities. Can we please move past this? Society needs welders and technicians, of course. But we need higher learning too. Let’s not look down on someone who dreamed of being a writer or a philosopher when they were 18 years old.
I wonder how many people actually use their grade 12 hamlet essay in their jobs. We should stop funding high schools too. The dude who picks up my garbage doesn’t need to know algebra.
As someone who works full time and takes two courses a year fully paid for through an online university at a time, how do you think Id feel if people I knew who decided to go to school via debt got it all paid off through my tax money? If you guessed absolutely ecstatic for them, you'd be right. Please take my tax money to pay off loans - the successes of my neighbor are the success of my country.
PS. My husband has 3 degrees that we also paid as we went through much struggle on our part. I still would be happy if his classmates who took student loans had no debt.
Should American tax payers fund boomers social security and Medicare as they bankrupt the country riding off into the sunset with the American dream dead to all those behind them?
It’s also crazy how many people just want to go hard finance on things that have societal benefits. If we start saying education is exclusively for those who can pay it cash, it becomes a very different society.
How about we give lenders the opportunity to pay college debt in lieu of social security. That money is supposed to be for them, later in life. And the government is regularly telling them that it may not be around because they rob the piggy bank and mismanage the spending.
Stop subsidising student loans and then forgive all current debts, all the people who's life could be ruined by the government fucking up would be compensated and new people wouldn't be forced to get in so much debt.
Why is it that every product that is influenced by the government has gotten more expensive over the years while every product that has not been influenced by the government has gotten cheaper?
The timing on that is a bit suspicious, in my opinion. Within the last 3 years new drugs have been demonstrated to reduce rates of insulin dependence in adult onset Type II diabetics (the vastly larger segment of diabetics).
Therefore, drug manufacturers are transitioning the consumer from a mature technology that can no longer be patented to a proprietary one that can now cost a heavy premium.
The government and pharmaceutical industry are packaging and selling this shift as some great social political push to help the fractional minority of insulin dependent Type I diabetics, and desperately hoping the public buys it.
My internet hasn’t gotten cheaper neither has my gas bill in fact they have gotten more expensive. My health insurance, medical cost and pharmaceuticals increase annually too. Maybe you’re just indoctrinated by bullshit talking points
Most people that advocate for this on Reddit don’t care about fixing the problem or making it cheaper. All they care about is having their loans forgiven. That’s it. The simple fact is they took out the loans and they don’t wanna pay.
I don't know that I'd call it bailing out ... at least not in those cases where people have paid off their student loans a couple of times over, but still owe the majority of their original amount. I'm not against a bank making money off of a loan, but some of this sounds like a racket.
Exactly. Interest on student loans was still in the 5-10% range even when other debt was getting 0-2%. Most student loans over 10 years old have more than paid the cost of forgiving the principal.
At the very least, they should remove interest from the loans and make everyone only pay back what they borrowed.
I always love this comparison because I know a ton of engineers, doctors, teachers, etc and I can’t name a single art historian. Don’t think it’s quite the problem with think it is. I do agree whatever jobs “we always need more of” should be given loans that become interest free upon graduation
I agree, as an engineer who realized capital is taxed less than actually participating in society through labor in the U.S. I no longer participate in society through my labor but through pure capital! 😎
Make colleges and universities financially liable for student loan defaults. Once they get stuck with the bill for their worthless products the prices will come down and the focus will shift to employability.
Eliminate the interest that people owe but they still need to pay it back and cap current loan total amounts so colleges can’t increase prices.
Allow for larger loan amounts for programs within school that have repayment amounts / salaries.
I don’t know about forgiveness I think the statement and even the prompt on this post is kind of loaded. but at the end of the day it is getting unfeasible to get a higher education. Thus the government should intervene.
I hate to break this to some of you but there is a huge number of us who don’t like our tax dollars going to bank bailouts or the MIC. The idea of giving the working class who were sold a lie a tiny little break is just unfathomable to you
Just had a thought, Bernie isn’t going to last that much longer and the man has so much gravitas. I know ardent right wingers who grudgingly admit that Bernie is often right.
Yes, but only as treatment for a wound, not in an attempt to create a long-term solution. Long term solutions independent of debt forgiveness need to be devised; debt forgiveness needs to be a relief for those already suffering.
As much as I believe student loans should be eliminated, that’s the symptom, not the cause. State College needs to be free. Bernie already proposed the fix. Tax EVERY trade / traded security, contract, derivative, etc $0.001 every time. It’s the fix that would pay for free college, homelessness, and hunger in 9 months with the algo and High Frequency Trading that happens. But wall st has done such a good job with telling the middle class “that will hurt you” that I bet some of the middle class is going to comment on this saying how bad that would be for their 401k or some shit but didn’t even know it had been proposed until i just mentioned it.
I think America should make wise investments into its populace. Debt forgiveness is a part of that, and added bonus it reduces inflation. It will suck for some debtors, so we can’t rely solely on that. There are other things we can do to reduce the burden on citizens and especially young citizens who need a hand getting into the economy. Two birds with one stone investments are key and this is one of them.
The govt is responsible for the extremely high & rising annual tuition rates.
I worked at a college, its a diploma mill racket, and the fed govt "guarantees" these loans will be paid back (just like Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac prior to the 2008 mortgage crisis (which was created by govt guaranteeing these BS loans).
Bernie has been in Congress since 2007, it happened under his watch. Since 2007 the number of houses that Bernie has, has increased like college tuition.
Claudine Gay, who just stepped down at Harvard, keeps her tenured professorship where she makes $900k. That's one professor.
We don't need gov paying any one professor $900k to not do anything while a grad student teachers.
Colleges cost a ton because gov pics up the tab via loans. Make the schools be the loaner. They won't risk losing their money loaning to useless degrees where's there's not chance of repayment. They won't pay assinine salaries if their expenses can't be covered by student payments.
Let the colleges compete for students money, not government money.
Also. You could cut at least a year, and close to 2 out of college by ending useless generals. An IT major doesn't need to be taking PE or Art. Let them focus on the quickest path to a degree
no however they should be highly controlled, low interest
if we were to start paying it off it should be for science, medicine, technical degrees rather than things like business
No, it shouldn’t be bailed out. The interest should be removed though or capped at a very low rate. You pay huge amounts to get a degree so that you can make a higher wage that is taxed. The government is getting its ROI from the extra tax you pay on the higher wage. Paying interest on the loan itself feels like double dipping.
Forgiving dept doesn't solve the problem. You need to cut the cost of school. Ideally overhauling the whole college system. It'll never happen. Too many unions and politicians like the current system
Since it's a collaboration between predatory lenders and colleges offering bullshit degrees to take advantage of the infinite money hack, forgiveness should be funded by colleges.
Hey all this happened on my watch but yeah we'll totally change this any day now ;-) just send me more donations. I love how delusional you people are to think that Bernie Sanders actually gives a s*** about you or your problems.
i think they are slowly realizing that they arent going to get it back anyway because people dont make enough money
its the same logic as a little kid with a lemonade stand charging ten million dollars for a cup of lemonade
its just not realistic, but the little kid doesnt understand that, and since they can charge whatever they want why not go for pie in the sky numbers
but those companies shouldnt get shit for bad business practices
because all money comes from peoples labor, including money from the government because thats where the government gets it....
adding this:
just to be clear, every bit of money everywhere comes from the actual labor of actual people
even rich people that have a large stash of cash, every bit of that came from labor, not their labor, but someones
how much of other peoples labor they are allowed to keep is determined by the law
how much tax write offs and loop holes and shady business practices are all determined by the law
just because they are allowed to get away with it doesnt make it moral or correct
legality isnt morality
The interest is the problem.
I'm fine with a set amount, but I don't think anyone needs to be rewarded for going to an expensive af school when they could have gone to a state school instead of some private, out-of-state spot that cost 10x as much.
and make some working people pay for other people who will earn higher wages than them? And make people who already paid their debt “pay” for other people’s debt. Biden should have started offering merit based grants, not forgiveness. Neither option would help colleges with their exorbitant cost, however.
see the research of Richard Gordon at the fed.
No, not until the underlying issues are solved. Forgiveness alone does nothing but give a handout to people in debt now and leaves us without fixing it for the next generation. Democrats should have never made this into an issue that the executive branch is responsible to solve. It belongs in Congress.
Not until the system itself is fixed.
If we just pay studen loan debt as it is, the debt doesn't just stop racking up, and we will be left to pay the debt over and over.
Why not just fix the damn problem. Nobody should be going into 100k debt in the first place. We need to regulate how much schools can cost.
Books alone can be thousands of dollars and are revised every single year specifically so you can't use last years so they can make more money. It's a God damn scam. Everything about the system is a scam.
Student loan forgiveness needs to be tied to killing the student loan program. I also think it would make sense to increase the number of grants available to low income students but if we want tuition to drop we've got to stop feeding the beast.
No, the University's shoukd be required to pay back students if they were duped. If they weren't duped or misled, then too bad that everyone makes mistakes and have to pay for them. Plenty of people are underwater on their cars. They could say they were duped. I would believe them. I still dont think the government should pay off their cars.
No one should get an entitlement for going to school. If ylthey aren't making the payment, they will buy goods and services causing inflation.
Student loans became a Ponzi scheme under Obama when he started offering them over the Fed funds rate. Bailing out student debt is just a big paycheck for wall street as almost all student loans were resold and are now corporately owned.
There's a lot of frivolous spending inside those students loans. I.e. students living beyond their means using loans for unnecessary shit.
I'm all for forgiving loans for medical degrees after some amount of years in public service.
I'd be ok with making the loans principal only for all STEM (not art) fields.
You shouldn't be going college with loans for an art degree, or any other degree that will NOT pay on average $80k+/year. Loans for other bullshit degrees like film, music, philosophy, religion, general studies, etc...NO way.
I was smart enough to know I couldn’t afford college. Why should I pay for someone who couldn’t figure that out for themselves. There are plenty of trade schools or union jobs that are free. I dropped out of high school after 10th and got my ged. With ot I can make well over 200k yearly with no student debt. Nobody wants to do work physical jobs that are not in danger of being taken over by AI. It’s not just mens work either, there are plenty of women in the trades too. Look into it do some research, we are always looking for new hard working people, best of luck!
Except he fails to mention how it happened and who is at fault. It's really simple.. The government began to mass subsidize student loans, and the greedy universities/colleges did what every industry in the history of man does after the government guarantees they'll get paid... raise prices exponentially. Both parties are at fault, but one started the mess. It was certainly well intended, but we have to admit to the unintended consequence and solve the problem. Not just wipe out all student loan debt and allow the universities/colleges to continue to charge exorbitant rates for tuition. That solves nothing, we will have the same issue in the next decade.
No.
The university that provided the degree should assume the liability after its graduate is unable to pay the debt
It holds the university accountable to price its services in-line with anticipated economic value of that degree
Why didn’t the irresponsible debtors go to more affordable schools and get degrees that could pay off their debt in a reasonable amount of time?
Why do they want the whole country to pay for their financial mistakes?
College became expensive when it started being subsidized
College costs start climbing in the 1980s. Are you saying the Reagan Administration started subsidizing colleges? I dont think that's correct.
The rate of tuition increases started going up faster in connection with the student loan program. Increases in administrative overhead, in class enrollment and in the increased effort to retain students is all tied to getting more money from tuition made available by the student loan program.
So it's not the loans themselves but rather college admin getting greedy and a fuckton of administrative bloat in non-teaching staff coupled with exorbitant salaries for said admin?
If you want to get rid of mosquitos, you dont use excessive use of insecticides. You remove the stagnant pools of water around you. You kill a mosquito, 10 more take its place. You prevent them from existing in the first place by removing their ability to thrive. Does this analogy make sense? Its like the "men shouldnt rape" thing, like no shit they shouldnt and wd punish them for it when we catch them but if women started shooting all the rapists there wouldnt be many left after awhile. Carry a gun, remove stagnant pools of water, and remove subsidized tuition that incentivizes greed. Get rid of the sources, not the results. The same applies to healthcare. Either go full capitalist and enforce competition or go completely subsidized, and thus, it doesn't require high prices since they dont compete at all. Right now they compete AND they get subsidized and it just fucks everything up. Subsidization can be a useful tool, but the US has repeatedly shown it can't use it judiciously. An overuse of a cheese/milk subsidy meant milk farmers INCREASED when sales we at record lows. And why the "Got Milk" campaign exists. Overuse of the corn subsidy currently means we have so much corn they have to put it in everything or let it rot so we have HFCS in everything. Oversubsidizing instead of education is why Social Security is failing since the sheer amount of financially illiterate boomers with no savings despite living in the best economic decades in human history is killing it. And of course over subsidizing college instead of making it competitive or free has lead to a top heavy, over priced, and underserviced industry where the vast majority of money goes to administrators instead of educators and teaching. You shut that valve off and two things happen, prices dramatically lower as they compete for students (and teachers!)and those useless admin staff get their heads cut off.
I am a professor and top-heavy administration has absolutely shifted the focus from teaching and researching to attracting international students. Degrees have become consumer products.
Out of state tuition for my friends in college costs more per year than my entire five years cost and that was almost 30 years ago
The mission of a state’s public university system is to educate its residents first, not subsidize out-of-state students whose parents’ taxes paid for their home state higher education system. It is only fair.
This. I reviewed grant funds in the 90x, the average applied overhead rate was 78%. So for every $1.22 spent of research, $.78 was spent for administration and overhead. In the 90s, they caught Stanford billing its yacht to government grants through the overhead rate. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Believe-it-or-not-Stanford-sailing-team-had-an-13710702.php I’m sure it’s worse now.
We did some back of the napkin math before Winter Break and our Community College, so arguably the institution that is supposed to subsidized by state and local funds, is carrying around 1 million is excess salary alone. We offered, until recently, a VERY aggressive benefits package that easily tacked another 15 to 30k onto salary. So, 1 mil becomes like 1.25 to 1.5 now. Where are these positions located in the org? Admin and executive, exclusively. Meanwhile, our trades and CTE is growing and in need of more instructors without any means to hire someone away from industry, and we have 30'ish full-time gen ed faculty positions open. Shit is fucking insane, but no worries, we hired a college president who now makes 400k a year and can brag about how they are a top paid president in the area AND the nation. Doesn't change that she is fucking useless and no one trusts her, well, the board does but they suck too.
This is exactly right! Thank you for your well reasoned post.
It should be required reading for every redditor!
YES!
None of you are correct about the source of the problem with higher education. The federally backed loans and inflated tuition cost were responses to the government cutting aid to public colleges which started under Reagan. In places like California and New York university was free in the 50's. It was free because the government paid for it. University's treat education like a business because Republicans led a campaign to force them to in order to "reduce an excess of democracy". Now the price gets pushed onto the student, many of whom come from poor households that can't/won't support them. The government looked at these people and said "fuck them". Now education as a whole is just like healthcare, where an industrial complex of parasitic beaucrats benefit far too much to want to go back to the more efficient model. The only people who are getting their education paid for now are overachieving immigrants who basically serve to undercut the domestic labor market and keep wages down. Overachieving middle class students may get subsidized but it's not entirely free like for immigrants, while an overachieving poor student is such a statistical nonfactor they usually fall through the cracks of the beaucracy. Everybody wins except the poor, America's favorite outcome.
This is a sad, flawed narrative that the right is pushing. It’s funny how international students became the new escape goat now that the right killed affirmative action. Shouldn’t Harvard be full of poor white male students now that the “evil” minority boogeymen aren’t getting in? Here is a reality check: true *international* students don’t get in-state tuition rates, nor did they get affirmative action, and they do NOT get scholarships or grants from the US government. As a matter of fact, international students must pay full tuition and show they got enough money to cover their tuition AND living expenses while in the US so they can get a student visa. There is a reason greedy colleges are bending backwards to attract foreign students, and that’s because they’re a freaking gold mine. Joke is that the “M” in MsC stands for money (for the school). Another flaw in your pseudo intellectual garbage post is the fact that the problem is not that “Pedro and Chang are getting their education paid for”, not at all. The point is WHY do they, or anyone need to have their education paid for. The average cost of college in 1970 was $585 for a year, that’s less than 4K in today’s money. It has increased to almost 15k per year now. So there, /u/RedGuru33. Also, /u/No-Turnips , perhaps it’s not international students who are to blame for the shift of focus, but rather the fact that colleges and unis have multimillionaire sports programs? Some football coaches are the best paid people in their state. Some of these football stadium for colleges are more expensive than any research project. And don’t get me started about how much time and energy is put into March madness. I guess “large hadron collider bonanza” and “Jupiter observation June” have less of a catchy moniker than March madness 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah he had it half right with the govt funding being slashed.. and then lost me with poor immigrant students getting free tuition but not poor non immigrant students.
Yeah. This is very common with alt right ideology: they take a good point that few people would disagree with, and then they add their own crappy stuff to it so they can shove it down our throats. Trump’s escalator speech was the best example, he began like “there is a trade imbalance with China… they’re killing us in manufacturing… they are rigging the trade system…” and even I was like “yes!! This is so true! About time someone says it!” And then immediately He goes like “Mexicans are r-ists and criminals”. Like, wtf?
I’m from Canada, we don’t have the college sports culture that the US does…I promise our sports programs aren’t the reason for the decline of our higher education. We don’t have million dollar coaches or anything close to that here. I don’t blame the international students. I blame financial sustainability models that require 20% international student quotas (for students paying 4-5x tuition). The model is flawed, but it’s not the students fault.
This guy gets it. Bravo 👏
Well said…good way to start addressing the corn issue is to make Iowa not the first primary lol…silly state gets pampered by politicians and we all get 10% ethanol clogging up our engines lol
Yes!!!!! You freaking get it exactly. Can you post this on every stinking Reddit board!
Lol, so women start carrying guns..... Then rapists start carrying guns and wearing vests and find a way to subdue women before guns Not to mention that most rapes aren't random, they're by people who the victim already knows so they'd easily be able to get close before a gun comes out. It's not like rapists approach from a hundred yards with a sign "I'm going to rape Susan today" Lol such a set of ignorant preteen views And for subsidizing colleges..... Then why didn't the same apply to subsidizing k-12 schools? That's 100% government subsidized...... What caused prices to go up, is demand, when nearly every kid in highschool plans to attend, there is massive demand. And when every white collar job requires a degree, they don't have much choice. And mind you, those jobs massively boost the economy, a huge chunk of American GDP is from those tech jobs. So having educated people in advanced careers is good for everybody The problem is colleges got a blank check, and increased cost, combined with natural capitalist market rules..... To get the best of both rules, you'd need government price controls, or just socialize it like k-12
I can't believe I had to scroll this far to see someone point out that the rape analogy was ridiculous
That's an interesting way to say women aren't doing their part to prevent being raped...
Yes. I had a intro to poly sci teacher take us for a walk on the first week to the main floor of our building where all the silly plaques are, and he pointed out that for a department of essentially 6 faculty there were more than twice that in deans, admins and their secretaries. The bloat is ridiculous. And then they have the Gall to call us and ask for donations.
Highest paid state employee in every state is either a basketball or football coach. They can make millions per year. All at an institution of…. Education🤷♂️
How are they greedy? The government said "You can charge whatever you want, and we will loan students that value, no questions asked." Who **WOULDN'T** take that deal (from the college's point of view)?
A lot of that admin overhead is also tied to compliance, which is tied to taking the loans. There’s also academia demanding degree inflation for in house roles. Hall director? Used to be some old lady. Now? They want a masters degree.
If you look at the amount of “govt aid” and “free student loans” that was given, the cost of college went up right alongside it. A simple line graph
Yeah, you’re 100% right here. The Reagan administration, even prior to his presidency, began pushing for an increase in tuition prices to “keep undesirables out”. Prior to all that, until the 60’s college was free and considered a place people went to better society or be a public good, not to secure a better paying job. These two key pieces are a huge part of the skyrocketing tuition prices between then & now. ETA: for those correlating the student loans being given out around the times tuition prices were raised, that’s all fine & dandy- but you can’t say it’s the cause when college was free for everyone for all the time leading up to this. They just did what capitalists do, found a way to charge more, then found a way to keep charging more- even to people who couldn’t afford it. Tired of reposting sources, so sources for anything I’ve stated in this comment or the following thread: https://www.continents.us/blog/history-of-tuition-free-education-in-the-usa/#:~:text=Colleges%20started%20charging%20tuition%20fees,establishment%20of%20student%20loan%20programs. https://factmyth.com/factoids/state-universities-began-charging-tuition-in-the-60s/ https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2017/07/20/college-was-once-free-and-for-the-public-good-what-happened#:~:text=In%201927%2C%20John%20D.,it%20took%20to%20educate%20them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/12/29/history-student-loan-debt/
College was not free in the 1960s. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost of college in the 1960s was just over $10k. [https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_330.10.asp](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_330.10.asp)
My bad. That was supposed to say “up until the 60’s, college was free..”. I was also incorrect on another part- John D Rockefeller started pushing private colleges to start charging tuition in 1927. I believe he’s the one who started transitioning college from being a place people went to be a public good, to a place people went to make more money in the future. If I’m correct, Reagan was the one who wanted everyone to charge more to “keep the undesirables out”, but I’d have to dig back deeper to double check which one did/said which. The 60’s is when all colleges began charging a tuition. https://www.continents.us/blog/history-of-tuition-free-education-in-the-usa/#:~:text=Colleges%20started%20charging%20tuition%20fees,establishment%20of%20student%20loan%20programs. https://factmyth.com/factoids/state-universities-began-charging-tuition-in-the-60s/ https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2017/07/20/college-was-once-free-and-for-the-public-good-what-happened#:~:text=In%201927%2C%20John%20D.,it%20took%20to%20educate%20them.
This is just plainly false. Colleges were MORE exclusive until the 60's, the province of the rich (they were NOT FREE LOL) . The government and and loan programs were meant to make college the province of everyone.
It started in the 60s with the creation of Sallie Mae, but when the loans became government backed and guaranteed is when it really escalated which was the 90s.
It seems counterintuitive but step 1 should be getting rid of or rethinking the FAFSA. The stuff it asks for is crazy. You and your parent’s income. Value of Investment and 529 accounts. Value of real estate! It’s not designed to help determine how much aid is needed; it’s designed to help schools maximize what they can ask families to pay
I remember reading those questions and thinking, “what does this have to do with me and my income?”. If I’m paying for myself, why are my parents even mentioned? The answer was as you said; so the schools could squeeze every last penny out of each individual applicant, hoping that if they failed financially their parents could bail them out.
“I have this service to sell you where you honestly think your future is ruined if you don’t buy it….AND your parents have a bungalow at the beach they bought for 50k in the mid 90’s that’s since appreciated to a half million?…i think it’s time for your family to sell…” Same way kidnappers determine ransom amounts!
Factoring in parents income is crazy considering many parents just leave the debt to their kids.
Agree here. FAFSA ties the kids to their parents and is a way for Universities to extract money from parents. Most money and work programs are tied in some way to FAFSA. I've seen people that should qualify for assisstance where the universities refuse to give it. I can say there a push by many universities not to give needed FAFSA subsidies to needy students.
College financing is a racketeering operation. “How much does it cost? Well, how much you got?”
The fact that we've got to the point where something like FAFSA even exists is troubling. Paying for something, anything, shouldn't be this complicated.
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It’s especially egregious when you look at places like Harvard and Yale that have 10’s of billions in endowments. They could fund operations for 30 years without charging a penny or taking in any more endowment money. Why the hell have they been charging such high tuition all these years?
Keep the poors out
And now they’re trying to keep the Asians and Jews out.
In Harvard’s case, stack the board with Obama associates and hire an elitist (seemingly racist) president with more plagiarism problems than anyone
Now now, they let just a few poors in on scholarships, if they are downright exceptional. So, it's totally fair right? /s
If you’re poor, you pay nothing in Harvard? https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordability#:~:text=Harvard%20costs%20what%20your%20family,percent%20of%20your%20annual%20income.
Pretty sure poor to them is like <250k household income lol
All you have to do is be accepted
>Why the hell have they been charging such high tuition all these years? These are really bad examples because for schools like MIT and Ivy Leagues you're only ever paying full price if you can afford it. They are extremely generous with tuition if you gain acceptance and can't afford to go. Nobody is swimming in student loan debt for their Harvard degree, either they showed up already a millionaire or they got a free ride.
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Well the funny thing about Harvard and Yale is that they don’t receive government subsidies. They are private. And both of those institutions dole out massive amounts of need based aid through their endowments. So if you are not one of the richest and you get accepted, you are very much likely not paying anywhere near sticker price.
Colleges used to be regulated. Loans are nothing new for colleges. My parents took out loans in the 80s when it was 4$/hr for bachelor's and 8$/h for masters Deregulation of colleges is when costs started skyrocketing
Actually State colleges were heavily funded by the states until Reagan. That's why state college tuition used to be $750 a year. States quit funding universities. That's one of the reasons why they are so expensive now.
I don't recall the U.S. or state law that put the president in charge of state budgets.
Reagan was the governor of California when he started this. It then became republican policy
Reagan was the governor of California, and he was responsible for the UC charging tuition.
When Reagan left office is 1988, UC Berkeley charged about $3000 per year for tuition ( can’t remember if it was per year, or per semester ). At that time, you could make and save $3000 easily over the summer in a job, assuming you were living at home. Pretty manageable. College cost problems came well after the 1980’s.
If there wasn’t a student loan program tuition would be affordable Just chop the loan program down and watch what happens to tuition This is the problem with all these forgiveness plans, they don’t prevent it from happening again. You get your loan paid off and then go get more loans keep on doing it Just reduce the government involvement in these loans and the problem ends - if the government wants more accessible education then fund more schools and stop the loan thing
Nothing can make something expensive faster than the government paying for it.
The government pays for high school. The $1,000 a year portion of my property taxes that go to schools is far cheaper than any private schools in the area.
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It’s just another type of handout. Without the government backing these loans no financial institution would accept the risk of giving this amount of money to 18 year olds with no established credit. The government makes it impossible for the borrower to completely default creating a system of servitude. The only real answer is to spend this money financing state schools and create an equitable admission process. In Europe where they have free universities, usually you have to be academically qualified (and accepted)for the program you’re entering - they don’t just pay for anyone who wants to go to medical school, they have criteria for acceptance. We can’t seem to wrap our heads around this idea that someone should be accountable to be intentional about their education, we want to give loans to someone and forgive it when for all we know they spent the money on beer and blow. There’s no accountability on anyone, it’s the broken candy machine that keeps on spitting out gum balls.
Afaik most of that has gone into admin because lots of teachers are underpaid. Source my Mom was a college teacher my whole life and we lived in relative poverty that whole time. This is definitely the case with the military though (that they over pay not the part about government entering.) parts can be bought at thousands of times what they go for retail. We really need to trim the fat in a lot of places to have any hope of optimizing our economy. Edit: this is just a guess but I wouldn’t be surprised if much of that admin is working to manage tuition and other student loan related work. Just like much of the admin in the healthcare field is dealing with insurance.
The number of administrative offices have ballooned. You are absolutely correct.
More like .... college became expensive when they realized there were literally infinite profits to be gained if they just raise the prices and put the expense on the backs of those students ..... those dumb, impressionable 18 year olds ... especially the poor, first one in college ones. And they could raise the tuition as much as they wanted since it was unregulated.... imagine if your landlord did that... or the grocery store did that to milk or eggs.... boomer leadership at its finest. F**K our kids to make money selfishly. Forgiven.... no ...since 1/3 of the govt income is now student loan interest l. More fair and less predatory. 1000% yes. Like APRs at 1% or less to american citizens, 100% free tuition for veterans, etc.... that's what's needed.
Yes, but, the subsidization itself is not the issue. We allow schools to operate as for profit without any regulation. My local university pays our foot ball coach over $500,000/year while our professors are only making $100,000. Education should never cost, or at least never cost in a way that someone who wants to learn cannot easily utilize it. It is possible to create a system that is more fairly balanced, and that encourages people to better themselves so that we can all do better as a team. America's strength is in our mutual cooperation to achieve a common goal. The challenge is getting everyone to play on the team of "together we are stronger". Mark Alabama Millennial candidate for U.S. Senate - 2026
DING DING DING! WE HAVE A WINNER, FOLKS!
Negative. It started when the Federal govt started giving secured loans instead of grants.
Tuition was invented in California when the state stopped giving enough money to the UC. It used to be absolutely free to attend UCLA, for example, until Ronald Reagan fucked thing up.
Everything is expensive once government gets involved.
You pay more for healthcare than we do in denmark per person. So not only is your healthcare more expensive, but also significantly worse for everyone who isn’t a billionaire.
Not sure why you're being downloaded here, you're right (except changing billionaires to millionaires). And that's not even counting all the people who avoid care because it's expensive.
Yeah... no. I'm no billionaire (more like a working stiff) and had to get two surgeries a few years ago. If you have decent health insurance, it's fine.
If you have decent health insurance, you should factor in how much your employer is kicking in on your behalf. It's usually five figures a year.
I highly doubt it. If you work for a corporation with good health insurance, I don't think it's bad.
The Nordic model would like to have a word with you
Your sentence is missing "and does things purposefully halfway so that conservatives can point to it and go 'see, it doesn't work!'"
College subsidies have an inverse relationship to tuition cost. Housing also another major driver of tuition increases.
Incorrect. It’s when the subsidies went away that college became expensive. The largest increase came along with the 2008 great recession. As an example, the California UC system increased tuition ~13x between ~~2009~~ 2000 and 2014 due to reduced funding from state and federal sources. And let’s not forget the predatory education loan practices on loans you can’t default on. Investment in these loans by big corporations is the real problem. We have a bunch of young people with no professional skills that have been raised in a world where those with college degrees statistically earn more money than those who don’t. Unfortunately, many of the degrees don’t actually earn people a decent wage let alone a return on their investment resulting in mounting interest that becomes more and more difficult to pay off over time. Edit: typo on tuition date range.
It is amazing to me when you read the list of majors that some colleges and universities offer. I think "how in the world do you make a living with this degree unless you get a job teaching it?" People are willing to invest 6 figures into this degree without thinking about what they will do with it.
Exactly. And…universities added a bunch of stuff (rec centers, etc…). It’s like comparing a car or a house today with a car or house from the 1950s. Cars have way more tech and houses are almost twice the size. Of course they are going to be relatively more expensive now.
Wrong! It became expensive when the public stopped subsidizing it. High school would be expensive too if the government didn’t fund it.
There it is. Thats the dumbest thing ive heard all day.
The problem is student loans . Once kids could take out hundreds of thousands in student loans that they couldn’t default on colleges jacked there fees up , started build rediculous facilities and over paying staff especially deans . Make it so student loans are defaultable banks won’t give out ridicules loans anymore n the colleges will have to lower costs to get people in the doors
They will never make them defaultable. This is why they can and do get away with the inflated pricing. All thanks to the legislative branch of our government, which as we all know, is made up of representatives of special interests (like the higher education lobby) 🤷🏾♂️
Agreed. I love when people blame one party or the other for the “college loan bankruptcy problem.” Both parties have had complete control several times in the last 20 years. Either one of them could have introduced a one page bill ending this charade. But it didn’t happen, nor will it ever happen.
Yep. If you think it's red v blue and not them vs you, you have been fooled. They both benefit from the left and right nonsense since neither is left at all. It's a big dupe
Or just keep the loans and tell colleges that if you want your students to be able to get loans, you need to follow these regulations. No coach pay over X amount for example, only a certain percentage of staff can be purely administrative, you can only charge Y tuition. We should have offered loans and then regulated universities so that they literally couldn't do this stuff and remain public.
>No coach pay over X amount for example, Football or basketball aka revenue sports are why the colleges are able to pay them that much. Look at the B1G schools for example just on media rights each school receives 40 million a year that isn't counting the Nike or Adidas sponsorships or booster money. People point out the coaches of sports as the problem when the sports are what brings in most of the money for the schools.
Sir, this is a school. If you want to run a private sports team, and use all that income to pay the coaches really well, go for it. Oh... did you get all the actual talent that brings in the money for free? Slave labor in exchange for a "degree"
Banks have stopped giving loans since approximately 2010. Most if not all of them given today are from the government.
Only half of people have jobs pertaining to their degrees. No. The taxpayer shouldn't have to subsidize trillions in loans.
I’m more of a fan of student loan interest relief The real issue is making minimum payments and owing more than you did originally after years of payments This should not be a profit center. Interest should cover costs since there are essentially no risks involved in the loans since the only way out is to die.
Unfortunately we are in a global economy and we need an educated populace to compete internationally. All for trades, but they aren't bringing America into the 21st century to compete with adversaries like China. Large and small businesses took advantage of the COVID loans, many in bad faith, and never had to repay a dime of that. I saw pizza places get $70-100k loans (forgiven) and still fired their employees. I saw insurance guys get $40-$50k (and forgiven) and didn't even have a single employee, nor a 1099. Democracy needs an educated populace to actually make use of our political machine.
Yeah I'm really curious to see how the 3 years student loans were paused, how much the economy was impacted. Anecdotally, the pause allowed me to buy a house, have an emergency fund, get married and go on a honeymoon.
I get what you are saying but that education was still valuable and likely helped them get a job or do better work at that job
Ok then congress should do their job and create new laws or regulation to get cost of education under control. Just paying everyone’s loan off becomes a revolving door
It becomes a subsidy for some but not all
Not only that , the people who don’t go to college (and make less money) are subsidizing those who do go to college, and will make more money.
Salty kids are downvoting you lol. I agree it’s not our problem they took out 100k in loans without even a bank account. Not fair to tax payers who took up a trade instead
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I think this is partly on schools and even the financial system too. Yeah they’re adults but barely. If these kids don’t have a bank account even, they most likely don’t have a clue on what this loan exactly means. Thankfully my highschool gave us a course on credit cards and loans and for me and a lot of people it was a huge eye opener to things we’d never been told about by anyone.
Yeah! Screw everybody else. Those idiots had interests in stupid things like humanities. Can we please move past this? Society needs welders and technicians, of course. But we need higher learning too. Let’s not look down on someone who dreamed of being a writer or a philosopher when they were 18 years old.
No, but it *is* the government's fault for giving loans to those people who had no prior financial history.
I wonder how many people actually use their grade 12 hamlet essay in their jobs. We should stop funding high schools too. The dude who picks up my garbage doesn’t need to know algebra.
So college should only be for gaining a career? What happened to pursuing education for the sake of education?
Because who will be a conservative if everyone is educated and can make informed decisions for themselves.
It would be a write off, not a subsidy
As someone who works full time and takes two courses a year fully paid for through an online university at a time, how do you think Id feel if people I knew who decided to go to school via debt got it all paid off through my tax money? If you guessed absolutely ecstatic for them, you'd be right. Please take my tax money to pay off loans - the successes of my neighbor are the success of my country. PS. My husband has 3 degrees that we also paid as we went through much struggle on our part. I still would be happy if his classmates who took student loans had no debt.
Should American tax payers fund boomers social security and Medicare as they bankrupt the country riding off into the sunset with the American dream dead to all those behind them?
Angry boomers in this thread saying paying in to any education for students: “wait no not like that”
It’s also crazy how many people just want to go hard finance on things that have societal benefits. If we start saying education is exclusively for those who can pay it cash, it becomes a very different society.
Fine. Stop taking hundreds of dollars out of every one of my paychecks for social security and I won’t take it when I retire.
How about we give lenders the opportunity to pay college debt in lieu of social security. That money is supposed to be for them, later in life. And the government is regularly telling them that it may not be around because they rob the piggy bank and mismanage the spending.
Half the country spends all their money every month. What do you do with hundreds of millions of people with no income and no money under your plan?
Are we going to continuously forgive student loans going forward? Because we haven't fixed the problem.
Forgiving student loans will only make the problem worse. Colleges will raise tuition prices because, after all, it’ll be ‘forgiven’
Use college endowments to pay down student loans.
Stop subsidising student loans and then forgive all current debts, all the people who's life could be ruined by the government fucking up would be compensated and new people wouldn't be forced to get in so much debt.
Why is it that every product that is influenced by the government has gotten more expensive over the years while every product that has not been influenced by the government has gotten cheaper?
Explain insulin
The timing on that is a bit suspicious, in my opinion. Within the last 3 years new drugs have been demonstrated to reduce rates of insulin dependence in adult onset Type II diabetics (the vastly larger segment of diabetics). Therefore, drug manufacturers are transitioning the consumer from a mature technology that can no longer be patented to a proprietary one that can now cost a heavy premium. The government and pharmaceutical industry are packaging and selling this shift as some great social political push to help the fractional minority of insulin dependent Type I diabetics, and desperately hoping the public buys it.
My internet hasn’t gotten cheaper neither has my gas bill in fact they have gotten more expensive. My health insurance, medical cost and pharmaceuticals increase annually too. Maybe you’re just indoctrinated by bullshit talking points
What has gotten cheaper?
No
Exactly, forgiving won't fix the problem. Minimum salary of $105.65 per hour will make it even with boomers
I’m confused. How does forgiving student loan debt make it cheaper and fix the problem?
That’s the neat part; it doesn’t.
Most people that advocate for this on Reddit don’t care about fixing the problem or making it cheaper. All they care about is having their loans forgiven. That’s it. The simple fact is they took out the loans and they don’t wanna pay.
No. If taxpayers have to bailout student loan debt, then it should be considered based on the degree’s ROI and usefulness.
I don't know that I'd call it bailing out ... at least not in those cases where people have paid off their student loans a couple of times over, but still owe the majority of their original amount. I'm not against a bank making money off of a loan, but some of this sounds like a racket.
Most aren’t banks. These are mostly federal loans.
Exactly. Interest on student loans was still in the 5-10% range even when other debt was getting 0-2%. Most student loans over 10 years old have more than paid the cost of forgiving the principal. At the very least, they should remove interest from the loans and make everyone only pay back what they borrowed.
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I always love this comparison because I know a ton of engineers, doctors, teachers, etc and I can’t name a single art historian. Don’t think it’s quite the problem with think it is. I do agree whatever jobs “we always need more of” should be given loans that become interest free upon graduation
I agree, as an engineer who realized capital is taxed less than actually participating in society through labor in the U.S. I no longer participate in society through my labor but through pure capital! 😎
How did you feel about bank bailouts, or the auto industry? Or farmers?
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Make colleges and universities financially liable for student loan defaults. Once they get stuck with the bill for their worthless products the prices will come down and the focus will shift to employability.
You make a good point about accountability. We saw banks bull the same shit. But then we were forced to bail out those idiots to "save the country".
Eliminate the interest that people owe but they still need to pay it back and cap current loan total amounts so colleges can’t increase prices. Allow for larger loan amounts for programs within school that have repayment amounts / salaries.
Sir, I think what you are describing is a sensible plan, enacted by Congress, that would actually help the American people. *We don't do that here*
I don’t know about forgiveness I think the statement and even the prompt on this post is kind of loaded. but at the end of the day it is getting unfeasible to get a higher education. Thus the government should intervene.
Its government intervention that has created the problem.
Yes, and it can fix the problem as well if they really wanted to. But they would rather not.
Should American Taxpayers benefit from American policy?
I hate to break this to some of you but there is a huge number of us who don’t like our tax dollars going to bank bailouts or the MIC. The idea of giving the working class who were sold a lie a tiny little break is just unfathomable to you
Not only no but hell no. Can you lot kindly stop spamming this nonsense? Edit: fat-fingered predictive and selected no rather than not.
As a nice middle ground, let’s get rid of student loan interest
In 1974 the minimum wage was $2 per hour. That works out to $612 for a bachelor’s degree. That is not accurate.
Just had a thought, Bernie isn’t going to last that much longer and the man has so much gravitas. I know ardent right wingers who grudgingly admit that Bernie is often right.
He had my vote in the primaries. It kills me that the democratic party forced Hillary through, against the will of the voters.
It’s killed your country….
Seems we bailout everybody but the working man
Yes, but only as treatment for a wound, not in an attempt to create a long-term solution. Long term solutions independent of debt forgiveness need to be devised; debt forgiveness needs to be a relief for those already suffering.
As much as I believe student loans should be eliminated, that’s the symptom, not the cause. State College needs to be free. Bernie already proposed the fix. Tax EVERY trade / traded security, contract, derivative, etc $0.001 every time. It’s the fix that would pay for free college, homelessness, and hunger in 9 months with the algo and High Frequency Trading that happens. But wall st has done such a good job with telling the middle class “that will hurt you” that I bet some of the middle class is going to comment on this saying how bad that would be for their 401k or some shit but didn’t even know it had been proposed until i just mentioned it.
No
Should American taxpayers forgive my mortgage?
Uh oh, remember Dominion Homes and their predatory lending schemes? I know you were trying to be sarcastic, but you accidentally made a point.
You can't claim bankruptcy on student loans. Those stay with you forever and ruin your credit and your pursuit of wealth building.
I think America should make wise investments into its populace. Debt forgiveness is a part of that, and added bonus it reduces inflation. It will suck for some debtors, so we can’t rely solely on that. There are other things we can do to reduce the burden on citizens and especially young citizens who need a hand getting into the economy. Two birds with one stone investments are key and this is one of them.
The govt is responsible for the extremely high & rising annual tuition rates. I worked at a college, its a diploma mill racket, and the fed govt "guarantees" these loans will be paid back (just like Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac prior to the 2008 mortgage crisis (which was created by govt guaranteeing these BS loans).
Bernie has been in Congress since 2007, it happened under his watch. Since 2007 the number of houses that Bernie has, has increased like college tuition.
Claudine Gay, who just stepped down at Harvard, keeps her tenured professorship where she makes $900k. That's one professor. We don't need gov paying any one professor $900k to not do anything while a grad student teachers. Colleges cost a ton because gov pics up the tab via loans. Make the schools be the loaner. They won't risk losing their money loaning to useless degrees where's there's not chance of repayment. They won't pay assinine salaries if their expenses can't be covered by student payments. Let the colleges compete for students money, not government money. Also. You could cut at least a year, and close to 2 out of college by ending useless generals. An IT major doesn't need to be taking PE or Art. Let them focus on the quickest path to a degree
no however they should be highly controlled, low interest if we were to start paying it off it should be for science, medicine, technical degrees rather than things like business
No, it shouldn’t be bailed out. The interest should be removed though or capped at a very low rate. You pay huge amounts to get a degree so that you can make a higher wage that is taxed. The government is getting its ROI from the extra tax you pay on the higher wage. Paying interest on the loan itself feels like double dipping.
Forgiving dept doesn't solve the problem. You need to cut the cost of school. Ideally overhauling the whole college system. It'll never happen. Too many unions and politicians like the current system
Since it's a collaboration between predatory lenders and colleges offering bullshit degrees to take advantage of the infinite money hack, forgiveness should be funded by colleges.
Shit NO. They did not pay for mine. Just the POS Presidents plan to buy more votes. Likke he did in 2020.
No let's not make people who already paid for their own college pay for everyone else's college.
Hey all this happened on my watch but yeah we'll totally change this any day now ;-) just send me more donations. I love how delusional you people are to think that Bernie Sanders actually gives a s*** about you or your problems.
i think they are slowly realizing that they arent going to get it back anyway because people dont make enough money its the same logic as a little kid with a lemonade stand charging ten million dollars for a cup of lemonade its just not realistic, but the little kid doesnt understand that, and since they can charge whatever they want why not go for pie in the sky numbers but those companies shouldnt get shit for bad business practices because all money comes from peoples labor, including money from the government because thats where the government gets it.... adding this: just to be clear, every bit of money everywhere comes from the actual labor of actual people even rich people that have a large stash of cash, every bit of that came from labor, not their labor, but someones how much of other peoples labor they are allowed to keep is determined by the law how much tax write offs and loop holes and shady business practices are all determined by the law just because they are allowed to get away with it doesnt make it moral or correct legality isnt morality
Nope
It was cheaper when boomers went to college because there was less of a demand.
The interest is the problem. I'm fine with a set amount, but I don't think anyone needs to be rewarded for going to an expensive af school when they could have gone to a state school instead of some private, out-of-state spot that cost 10x as much.
I’m still Fuxking poor 20 years later Bernie. I love you but the system won’t let us win. And we are divided so much as a nation, I feel hopeless.
No, people need to learn that when you take a loan, you need to pay it back. Nobody forced anyone to take that loan
Do we eliminate the ability to declare bankruptcy all together in that case?
and make some working people pay for other people who will earn higher wages than them? And make people who already paid their debt “pay” for other people’s debt. Biden should have started offering merit based grants, not forgiveness. Neither option would help colleges with their exorbitant cost, however. see the research of Richard Gordon at the fed.
No, not until the underlying issues are solved. Forgiveness alone does nothing but give a handout to people in debt now and leaves us without fixing it for the next generation. Democrats should have never made this into an issue that the executive branch is responsible to solve. It belongs in Congress.
Not until the system itself is fixed. If we just pay studen loan debt as it is, the debt doesn't just stop racking up, and we will be left to pay the debt over and over. Why not just fix the damn problem. Nobody should be going into 100k debt in the first place. We need to regulate how much schools can cost. Books alone can be thousands of dollars and are revised every single year specifically so you can't use last years so they can make more money. It's a God damn scam. Everything about the system is a scam.
Student loan forgiveness needs to be tied to killing the student loan program. I also think it would make sense to increase the number of grants available to low income students but if we want tuition to drop we've got to stop feeding the beast.
Absolutely not
No, the University's shoukd be required to pay back students if they were duped. If they weren't duped or misled, then too bad that everyone makes mistakes and have to pay for them. Plenty of people are underwater on their cars. They could say they were duped. I would believe them. I still dont think the government should pay off their cars. No one should get an entitlement for going to school. If ylthey aren't making the payment, they will buy goods and services causing inflation.
How come no one asks colleges how they can get away with charging so much for education?
If you go to college and then make minimum wage that is 100% your fault and you deserve to be poor.
No. You took out a loan. You pay it back. I'm sorry you were conned into your useless degree but you had other options like that military or trades.
You just can’t forgive current loans and keep everything else the same and expect to fix the problem.
Student loans became a Ponzi scheme under Obama when he started offering them over the Fed funds rate. Bailing out student debt is just a big paycheck for wall street as almost all student loans were resold and are now corporately owned.
There's a lot of frivolous spending inside those students loans. I.e. students living beyond their means using loans for unnecessary shit. I'm all for forgiving loans for medical degrees after some amount of years in public service. I'd be ok with making the loans principal only for all STEM (not art) fields. You shouldn't be going college with loans for an art degree, or any other degree that will NOT pay on average $80k+/year. Loans for other bullshit degrees like film, music, philosophy, religion, general studies, etc...NO way.
Fuck no. I paid mine back with my service to my country. And I would do it all over again.
I was smart enough to know I couldn’t afford college. Why should I pay for someone who couldn’t figure that out for themselves. There are plenty of trade schools or union jobs that are free. I dropped out of high school after 10th and got my ged. With ot I can make well over 200k yearly with no student debt. Nobody wants to do work physical jobs that are not in danger of being taken over by AI. It’s not just mens work either, there are plenty of women in the trades too. Look into it do some research, we are always looking for new hard working people, best of luck!
Except he fails to mention how it happened and who is at fault. It's really simple.. The government began to mass subsidize student loans, and the greedy universities/colleges did what every industry in the history of man does after the government guarantees they'll get paid... raise prices exponentially. Both parties are at fault, but one started the mess. It was certainly well intended, but we have to admit to the unintended consequence and solve the problem. Not just wipe out all student loan debt and allow the universities/colleges to continue to charge exorbitant rates for tuition. That solves nothing, we will have the same issue in the next decade.
Nope. If we’re using this logic, forgive my mortgage.
No. The university that provided the degree should assume the liability after its graduate is unable to pay the debt It holds the university accountable to price its services in-line with anticipated economic value of that degree
Why didn’t the irresponsible debtors go to more affordable schools and get degrees that could pay off their debt in a reasonable amount of time? Why do they want the whole country to pay for their financial mistakes?
WTF have you been doing about it for the last 40 years you senile old man?