Posted on 06/08/2019 3:29:53 AM PDT by reaganaut1
The U.S. student loan system is broken.
How broken? The numbers tell the story. Borrowers currently owe more than $1.5 trillion in student loans, an average of $34,000 per person. Over two million of them have defaulted on their loans in just the past six years, and the number grows by 1,400 a day. After years of projecting big profits from student lending, the federal government now acknowledges that taxpayers stand to lose $31.5 billion on the program over the next decade, and the losses are growing rapidly.
Meanwhile, four in 10 recent college graduates are in jobs that don’t require a degree, according to the New York Federal Reserve. And many American colleges are dropout factories: At more than a third of them, less than half of the students who enroll earn a credential within eight years, according to the think tank Third Way.
The U.S. is shoveling more and more money into a highly inefficient system that, polls find, Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with. College tuition has soared 1,375% since 1978, more than four times the rate of overall inflation, Labor Department data show. The U.S. now spends more on higher education than any other developed country (except Luxembourg)—about $30,000 a student, according to the OECD. Meanwhile, college presidents are being handsomely rewarded for the success of their enterprises: Seventy of them, including a dozen at public colleges, earned over $1 million in 2016-17, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
How did we get here?
The student loan system was built in the 1960s on the overarching belief that higher education is a safe and worthy investment for both society and the individual. At the time, the first children born after World War II—the baby boomer generation—were beginning to graduate from high school and enter college.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
That is total baloney.
You are either living in a bubble or you are part of the scam.
Care to confess any financial interest in the outcome of this?
I presume those posting here like Democrats — “Oh, look, there’s a big pile of money in college endowments, let’s take it, and if there is no legal reason to take it, let’s pass a law authorizing us to take it!” — are looking simply looking for their or their family member’s debt to miraculously be erased.
I paid mine back, my wife paid hers back, my daughter is paying hers back, and my son will eventually pay his back. It’s called personal responsibility, something like pride, which some Americans still possess. Today there is an excuse for everything. Currently their is a movement to create a more fair credit rating. Never mind the fact that some have sacrificed to pay off their debts by not living a liberal lifestyle. It’s just like urban public education, the excuse for low ACT scores is that children in poverty cannot learn. This country is NOT the country I was raised in.
Like everything government touches, you end up with an economically distorted system that benefits a few politically connected individuals (I’m looking at you Sen. Pocahontas) and economically enslaves the majority.
Once in place, it is impossible to dislodge due to political pull. These systems remain in place until they roll off the edge of the economic cliff. Student loan debt has reached that cliff.
Well, perhaps you should divest yourself of that false presumption, which appears to be a serious obstacle to your comprehension of a situation that is widely understood to be conscience-shocking and obscene.
They encouraged and enabled loans for plenty of nonsense degrees that were never going to lead to employment enabling payback of the loan.
Student loans financed the creation of millions of occupy Wall Street thugs. Mission accomplished.
It at least used to be a free country. If people wanted to study for other than a professional trade license, take their chances on being able to do well with what they chose to study, or other than the motivation of improving their hiring chances at all — that’s their business.
It was foolish of them to take on debt that they a) didn’t know they could repay and b) was by contract not covered by our bankruptcy system. And that’s the deal with freedom. You can’t have freedom without the foolish being free to be foolish.
Once more, the government should be entirely out of student loans, and then the market will take care of itself. The sorry truth is that smart people can find gainful employment almost anywhere at any time. Stupid people are exactly the ones who shouldn’t be taking out loans for college. Not only are there options for getting a college education without such loans, but they are exactly the sorts of bad risks that the private banking system wouldn’t opt to bet on either.
So what is your excuse for being a massive pinko on this issue, tossing around the term “odious” as if that makes you an expert when it really doesn’t apply here at all? If there was outright fraud, it can be handled by our legal system. But there wasn’t outright fraud. Just stupid and greedy people looking for their frivolous, six-year spring break to be paid by someone else.
And apologies, FP—it is t who loves to throw the term ‘odious’ in here as the basis of some sort of priestly knowledge.
Do tell, what is your secret for collecting money from people who don’t have any? Indentured servitude?
Unlike, AOC, I do know what that term means, and the 13th Amendment eliminated it.
Universities invested ‘wisely’? Examples, please?
One can be a conservative and still be a realist and a non arsehole.
> was by contract not covered by our bankruptcy system. And that’s the deal with freedom.
Do you even read what you write? Lifelong bondage to a contract signed the moment a person can lawfully sign a contract is the exact opposite of freedom - it’s indentured servitude.
I can’t help but notice that your sense of personal responsibility for one’s actions seems to curiously exempt the two main parties that profit from the scam: banks, which made bad loans on purpose; and colleges, who have been exploiting the system mercilessly by ramping up enrollment and tuition together.
It must be a truly bizarre world you live in, where 18-year-olds are the evil criminals and the people who run and operate a system that enslaves them are the good guys. I feel really bad for you, something big must be missing from your soul to not get this.
These debts are absolutely odious and you would have no doubt of that if you looked up what odious debt is.
Again, the idea that someone would have to look up odious to know what it means.
And of course they’re not. If there are any that are the result of actual fraud, we have a court system to handle that.
Make the kids WORK OFF THE DEBT...how about building a wall somewhere? I paid off my student loan, took six years ...thESE Snowflakes can pay theirs off like I did.
“I paid mine back, my wife paid hers back, my daughter is paying hers back, and my son will eventually pay his back. It’s called personal responsibility, something like pride, which some Americans still possess.”
That was a razor-sharp knife you just used to slice thru to the heart of the situation.
There are various ways of collecting debt. Wiping out a trillion dollars of debt owed by largely middle-class folks is totally uncalled for.
That will leave the poor taxpayer schlubs who didn’t spend educationally beyond their means to pay for those who did.
>>Once more, the government should be entirely out of student loans, and then the market will take care of itself.
I’m certainly not arguing against this. You will note my original comment said “too”, implying I agreed with what you had proposed. I’m not sure why you felt the need to belabor your earlier point.
And the fact of the matter is we have to unwind the problem that has been created. The colleges are part of that, and should be part of the solution. Yes, the students were stupid, but they were very much taken advantage of many supposedly prestigious institutions who enjoy lots of favorable FedGov treatment.
The last I knew, Harvard had an endowment worth 36 bil. That’s just Harvard. It didn’t accumulate that money in a vacuum. Neither did any of the others sitting on their chunks of change.
But rather than tax that money, how’s about we just eliminate every damn dime of federal spending to every institution of higher learning.
Would you object to that, too...?
No, that is exactly what I would advocate.
And really, Harvard didn’t perpetrate any sort of fraud on its students—or give them anything that wasn’t worth it to them, overwhelmingly, on average.
You raise a fine point. Those schools with the endowments to survive confiscation as so many leftist-when-it-comes-to-free-money-for-me Freepers on this thread want have virtually no overlap with the schools that supposedly told pigs’ ears that their schools could turn them into silk purses.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.