The Student Debt You Willingly Took On Is Not My Problem To Solve

The Federalist ^ | 02/17/2020 | Margot Cleveland

[SeekAndFind]

Of all the pandering showcased during Democrats’ attempts to win back the presidency, wiping out student debt ranked at or near the top.

“I believe that education is the future for this country,” socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders barked during the first round of Democratic primary debates, explaining that’s why we must “eliminate student debt and we do that by placing a tax on Wall Street.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar spoke similarly. “I can tell you this,” the Minnesota senator demagogued, “if billionaires can pay off their yachts, students should be able to pay off their student loans.”

There can be no serious discussion of this issue, however, in 60-second sound bites. So, beyond the soak-the-rich shtick that shades every Democratic economic debate point, the candidates resorted to two tactics: shock and sob stories.

The Shock Strategy

The size of student debt provides the jolt necessary to peddle their plans to the American populace. “I got $100,000 in student loan debt myself,” California Rep. Eric Swalwell bemoaned. “College affordability is personal for us,” South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg shared, noting that his household has “six-figure student debt.” So, sure, “I believe in reducing student debt,” Buttigieg announced.

Next came the sob stories. Those student loans are suffocating a generation, the candidates suggested. After all, “40 million of us who can’t start a family,” the diaper-changing daddy Swalwell contradictorily proclaimed, adding that they “Can’t take a good idea and start a business and can’t buy our first home.”

“We can’t put people in a position where they aren’t able to go on and move on,” frontrunner Joe Biden agreed.

Tellingly, when not constrained by the debate format, these same politicians push the same narrative to garner support for bailing out student loans, all while the media provides the Democrats a free assist.

“With loans totaling more than $130,000,” Buttigieg’s household is “among the 43 million people in the United States who owe federal student loan debt,” the Associated Press reported last month, before highlighting the myriad plans to bail out student debt pushed by a cadre of presidential candidates. The AP then furthered the narrative by using statistics to shock the public into socialism:

The debtors are so numerous and the total debt so high—more than $1.447 trillion, according to federal statistics—that several of the Democratic candidates have made major policy proposals to address the crisis. Their ideas include wiping away debt, lowering interest rates, expanding programs that tie repayment terms to income and making college free or debt-free. Student loan debt is often discussed as an issue that mostly affects millennials, but it cuts across age groups. Federal statistics show that about 7.8 million people age 50 and older owe a combined $291.9 billion in student loans. People age 35 to 49, a group that covers older millennials such as Buttigieg as well as Generation X, owe $548.4 billion. That group includes more than 14 million people.

Sob Stories Reign Supreme

Then the sad tales continue the sales pitch for a government solution to student debt—a ploy that began well before the 2016 elections. Here’s one of myriad media examples.

“Shayna Pilnick, 28, would like to buy an apartment but can’t afford a mortgage. Jacqueline Mannino, 23, and her boyfriend, Benjamin Prowse, 26, want to get married. Jacob Childerson, 24, and his wife, Jennifer, 25, wish they could start a family, but they live with Jennifer’s parents,” is how USA Today opened its 2013 profile of millennials unable to obtain their dream life because they are “tethered” to “tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.”

There are many ways to counter these arguments, based on both economics and equity. But it’s hard to counter soundbites with sense, so instead, here are my inquiries for these politicians, the press, and all the students demanding relief from the burdens of their debt: Tell me your sob stories from age 12 on, not what you can’t do now, but what you couldn’t do then. Tell what you had to do then and through college to avoid what is now, to you, crushing student debt.

What time did you get up to deliver papers in junior high? How many hours a week did you work since 14 to save for college? How many toilets did you scrub? How many high school football games did you miss because you were working? What dream college did you forgo to avoid taking out student loans?

Which 8 a.m. class did you take so you could complete your major’s requirements and still work in the afternoon? Which bus line did you take to get to your job because you didn’t borrow to buy a car? What job did you work full-time while completing your MBA at night?

What did you do to afford college? What didn’t you do because of the cost of college? Were you getting tattoos and traveling your way through college? Were you pledging and partying? Did you go to your top-choice university? Maybe an out-of-state public university with higher tuition rates? Which spring break and study abroad destinations did you visit along the way?

Did you splurge on your fairytale wedding instead of paying down your student loans? What cars did you buy or lease? Where did you live? What electronics did you own? What clothing and other personal expenditures did you have? In short, show me the money and how you spent it!

None of my business? You’re right. Nor is your student debt my business or my problem.

---

Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and current adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

[Kickass Conservative]

We moved to Southern MS and we are surrounded by LSU Grads.

[gcparent]

True. But at least most big football programs make money.

[CA Conservative]

Statistically, students who work their way thru college have better GPAs and are more likely to finish college on time than those who don’t. They have more skin in the game, as it will cost them more in time and tuition if they don’t pay attention to their classwork.

My youngest son has already been told he will go to community college for his first 2 years, and then we will pay the cost of tuition for state college for the last years, but he has to work to pay for his car, gas, insurance, etc. If he wants to attend private college, go out of state, or if he takes more than 4 years to complete college, he pays the difference or he gets a scholarship and grants. And if he takes out any student loans, he pays the whole cost, and we will not be on the loan.

[Pollster1]

Using tax dollars to pay off student debt essentially means that non-college workers will be subsidizing college graduates in the long term. Only to a woke democrat with a worthless degree would that make sense.

[gcparent]

Latest stats from dept of ed only 42% of students finish on time in 4 years!!!!!

[gcparent]

CA has a good community college system.

[Dawgreg]

They don’t strike me as suckers.

I don’t think they are. These little pukes in these big colleges nowadays......you know, the ones run by leftists are the ones who think they are entitled.

[grey_whiskers]

There are a lot of state universities which charge somewhere in the $6K to $10K range for annual tuition and fees.

Name them. Unless you,mean per semester, in which case, yes.

[Political Junkie Too]

The problem is that universities are putting out a product that there is no demand for.

I believe it's a three-fold issue.

1. The job market isn't paying the salaries.
2. The students aren't pursuing the marketable degrees.
3. The universities are cranking out graduates without regard to whether the job market is there for the graduates. In other words, they are graduating buggy whips.

The causes for #1 are two-fold:

1. The jobs are being off-shored to lower-cost geographies.
2. The cheaper workers are being imported via H-1B visas and are displacing our graduates.

The causes for #2 are two-fold:

1. The students are choosing social-justice degrees with no anchoring in reality.
2. The K-12 schools are socially promoting students who either aren't ready for college or are better suited to trade studies.

The causes for #3 are two-fold:

1. The students have been socially indoctrinated to believe the only way to succeed is with a college degree, so everyone must now go to college.
2. The change to government-sponsored student loans has made it easy for universities to pad their enrollments in order to get the funding to sustain their tenures and research programs.

I believe that if there is a market balance between supply and demand then the price paid will equal the cost plus profit. If the universities were balancing the supply of graduates with the demand for graduates, this would mean that the graduates were being paid a salary that allowed them to pay off their loans plus their living expenses.

The fact is that the university degree market is completely unbalanced and out of whack. Young students may be making good decisions to pursue a degree, but many are too uninformed at that age to understand that the universities are glutting the market right now. The universities have built up a capital investment in professors and manufactured an inventory of graduates that can't be sold.

The university result will eventually be the same as a business selling unwanted products: their inventory of unsold graduates will lose their value (in terms of alumni donations, university brand reputation, etc.), and the university might eventually go out of business if they can't get new student enrollments because the word is out that their graduates are unemployable.

Is all of this the fault of the student loan scam? Is it the result of students making bad career decisions? Is it the fault of businesses that are looking for cheaper workers or exporting jobs? Is it the fault of universities hungry for students flush with loan cash that they keep taking them in regardless of the ability of the job market to absorb the graduates?

-PJ

[Verginius Rufus]

I'm going by The World Almanac which has hundreds of state colleges and universities in that range (for state residents). The issue I checked was 2018 so the prices have undoubtedly gone up a bit since then. It says "annual."

[Fai Mao]

Late 1990’s.

[gcparent]

Tuition at suny nys schools is 6.5k per year. The room and board is double that.

[ladyjane]

“With loans totaling more than $130,000,” Buttigieg’s household is..

Stupid and selfish

[Secret Agent Man]

No, because that will become most people’s “funding
strategy” for college.

Not how you fix the problem.

The real way is to get government out of the student loan business entirely. Not their job in the first place.

[minnesota_bound]

The college professors and presidents/ceo’s of the colleges are doing well. They are raking in the money.

[cpdiii]

I paid for my first degree in Geology totally out of my own pocket. I was a roughneck on the rigs during the summer and this paid for my education.

I made good wages as a consultant in the oilfield and it crashed and burned in 1983. We found to damn much oil and the price of oil went down the tubes.

I no longer had any marketable skills. I had some savings, but also sold my very nice house and airplane and went back to school to become a pharmacist. I was 35 years of age and thus needed a degree that offered high wages immediately upon graduation.

The last year of pharmacy school I was out of money. I took a student loan. I paid it back early.

The cost of university was very reasonable then. The vast resources of loans to students today has made university much more expensive. The University knows the student has access to great largess via loans. They have no incentive to keep costs down.

Addendum

Circa 1966 the Administrative building was about 20 offices in one wing of the Chemistry Building. It was small and efficient. Our student body was about 7000

Circa 1985 when I graduated again in pharmacy this time, The administration building was three floors that was about ten times the size of the offices back in 1966. The student population was only double of what is was in 1966.

[cuban leaf]

You can never have too many administrators. :)

BTW, in 1882 I took a $2,300 COBOL IMS DB/DC course that consisted of 10 months, four nights a week. It got me into a six figure income by the mid-90’s and carried me through to today. I’m now 66 and plan on retiring at the end of the year.

Side note: Two of the guys I worked with over the years used to be chemists. I asked them what brought them into IT. Both said, “the money”. :D

[CA Conservative]

Your GPA is only a concern A) in high school, to get into college on a scholarship or B) if you are on a scholarship or grant that requires you to maintain a certain GPA while in college to receive the funds, or C) if you are trying to graduate cum laude. Otherwise, as long as you pass all the required courses you get the same degree with a 2.0 GPA as you get with a 4.0 GPA. Most employers look for the degree and don’t pay attention to GPA. And unless you are becoming a doctor or lawyer, you are stupid to pay $200K for a college degree. You can get a degree at a state college or university for about $20-25K per year max.

[CA Conservative]

California State University is $2871 per semester for in-state tuition. The HIGHEST in-state tuition for a state university is $16k per year (Vermont and New Hampshire).

Average cost of tuition at state universities

[grey_whiskers]

1882, really? Did you say hello to Baron Trump?