Student Debt Nationalization: Just Add it to the National Debt
Posted by rbroberg 7 years, 1 month ago to Government
"President Obama had a great idea back in 2010: nationalize the student loan program, and its problems would soon go away. It didn't happen. Instead, more people are refusing to pay their student loans than ever before."
Much of the housing bubble can be traced through the notion that it was in the "national interest" that people own homes. This was due to the data which showed that children who live in or grew up in homes owned by their parents did better in nearly every measurement. Rather than look into root causes, it was determined by the powers and pundits that be that it was the home ownership that mattered. So that became the golden ticket to national prosperity and happiness. We see how that turned out.
The same was done with a college degree. Those with one tended to make a lot more money than those without. So clearly everyone should have one and the path to national prosperity and the end of poverty was for everyone to have one.
But in both cases it was not the owning of a home or a degree that made the difference. It was the mindset and grit it took to get those things that mattered. Children growing up in a home their parents owned were exposed to the work ethic it took to earn the money needed to buy the house. People with degrees were if more workplace value because a) degrees tended to be in the sciences more than not and b) they were not commonplace.
We've seen the housing bubble burst and the pain it caused. We are going to have to endure similar pain for the college bubble bursting. It is only a matter of when and how painful it will be. But it is coming.
Yes, the choosing to not go in the first place is coming. The college boom, largely in the "humanities" and "social/political sciences", is tied directly to the growth of government in my estimation. The government has been soaking up all these graduates with degrees in nothing productive. I see a move to stop demonizing non-college jobs and return vocational training to a first-class citizenship as one way to, longer term, cut the government. A minor one, and definitely a long term one, but that is how my mind works. Camille Paglia also has some interesting things to say about the humanities in universities.
Fortunately I saw the writing on the wall with regards to diffusion of classes (my original field was aerospace engineering) which to my young but skeptical eyes looked much like colleges trying to pad out your time there. Nothing has surface to even begin to dissuade me from that position in the last few decades.
Schools cheerfully help students sign up for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans that they benefit from, advise them to follow coursework without regard for the ability to get a job afterward and then haughtily proclaim "we are not a trade school" when asked what work they are preparing the student for. Our schools have a philosophy left over from the days when they educated the upper class for drawing room conversations. Today's students need to be able to get work.
. A good thing I didn't believe them and didn't fall for it.
2 to 1 it was a bankster that got the federal government to guarantee the loans so the banksters never lose a dime.
matters which are none of its function, and which
it does not understand.
As to tuition going through the roof, I think maybe the answer would be a nationwide boy-
cott. Maybe if those professors, etc., got it
through their skulls that nobody was willing to
buy their product, they's come down off their
high horse.
I think this is wrong now because regardless of how you're paying for it, I don't think mostly stopping working and focusing on education for many years is right. You get experience from working, and you find out what you like. Not working and going to school for many years has the risk that after spending all that money, regardless of where you got it, and finding you don't like the jobs you trained for.
I never had student loans, but if I had them now and politicians were even musing about partial forgiveness, that would make me pay the minimums on the loans and invest wealth I would have put toward retiring debt into other investments. I'd be hoping to get my debt forgiven, either for nothing, or for doing some small project involving rural broadband or something.
for." (?) If you even get those jobs in the first
place, that is.