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 ...
Right about the subsidies.
Wrong about the theft from endowments. That is Soviet/Marxist confiscation. Once again, the schools with big endowments are the ones who well delivered value—that’s why they have so many competing to get in. There is no legit rationale for confiscating their endowments.
Really, how hard is that to understand?
The endowments have permitted a concentration of power in our country like no other. That concentraiton of power needs to be broken.
I am not wrong here. There are many on the right who are advocating this. Why? Because the the concentraion of power in the big endowed schools has hurt our country beyond measure.
Guy, you sound like you are going to lose your biggest clients here.
I’m not losing any clients. No skin in the game. But really university endowments are not one of the major problems with education or the country.
Nobody legitimately of the right is seeking to confiscate them.
Yes there is a movement. And it needs to happen.
It was initially seen as a tax on endowment income to help level the playing field in univeristy
Now seen as a way to help our future and help the generation that has been sold a bill of goods by these bloodsuckers.
Soviet theft.
There is no legit rationale for taxing them unless—as I would actually advocate for—the distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit organizations were removed.
But zeroing on universities with large endowments just because they have large endowments is lower than low.
And how many times do I have to point out to you—the schools with the large endowments are not the ones purportedly fleecing non-college material, if you will.
Disagree.
They are the leaders in the education industrial complex, they get huge amounts of tax payer dollars in grants and they make the policy that the complex follows.
They have influence well beyond their numerical size and they set and influence policies that are shockwaves in our culture.
see above.
imho any way to defang the left and reduce their power is good.
So pull the plug legally—with government-funded student loans and grants and research grants.
Don’t go to the illegal confiscatory level. Really, how hard is that to understand? Yet you want to go illegal pitchfork on them. That is the style of the French or Russian revolutions. Not the US of A.
This is a fine that will weaken their power.
I am not alright with the level of power the elites have.
A fine for what? It is confiscation for no legal cause.
I didnt say there was a legal cause.
But there is a moral one.
The power needs to be diluted.
The elite have concentrated it.
We disagree and never will agree on this.
Yes, I see that now.
After posting about “otiose,” I googled “odious debt,” which I had never seen before.
Odious debt is actually a legal term.
I was familiar with the concept - countries are not liable for debts created by tyrants - but I had never seen the phrase before.
Anyone know if the concept of "odious debt" can be applied to tyrannical wives and children!
It’s because high school education has been so dumbed down, and the law ruling that employers cannot give IQ tests to prospective employees that brought this about. A bachelors degree is now considered the equivalent of what a HS grad used to learn 50 years ago.
Glenn Reynolds at instapundit.com wrote a book about this years ago. Reynolds himself is a law professor in Tennessee.
“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,”
Almost without exception Government ***** up every single thing it touches. And it ***** it up very, very badly.
L
What are you talking about student loans in the 70s and 80s? Nearly every single student loan was taken out in 2005 and later, by $ 90%+ is. The way to reform student loans is to reduce Stafford loans, allow bankruptcy, limit them to major, college graduation rates, etc. The student loans for seniors are PLUS loans they took out for their kids and grandkids.
A lot of those jobs that require degrees require them because businesses can't give aptitude tests any more, so the college degree is the substitute. If businesses could give aptitude tests, they might not require a college degree for a lot of positions.
I generally agree with you, but when you have 18 years olds that their parents, teachers, counsellors, colleges, TV and websites all tell them to go into debt for college, its hard to blame the kids too much, especially since we don’t teach them personal finance in HS.
Obama doubled the limit of student loans per year, reduced the interest rate students paid and then forgave a ton of them and setup further forgiveness. Its not surprising. Take the old Stafford system pre Obama and just have Uncle Sam manage its own debt and it would have been a large profit source.
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