The Biden administration announced Friday afternoon that it is extending the student loan repayment pause through January 2022.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1383829
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1383829
He also expressed concern that most of the benefit would go to students who attended elite private schools.
Well, maybe some. But economics have changed a lot over the last 40-50 years, and not for the better. In the case of my son, class of 2017, we stuck with state schools, in-state tuition, nothing fancy, just a great SUNY school with a good engineering department. At the end of 4 years, in 2017, my kid owed $25,000.00 and I owed $50,000.00.
When I put myself though school in the Before Time, I did it at a state school in New England, with Pell Grants, a small bank loan, and playing in bands at night, living in my own apartment, no roommates. When I graduated in 1986 I owed about $1500.00. Even allowing for inflation thatâs only about $3700.00 in 2021 dollars.
An undergraduate degree is now the new high school diploma, itâs required more than ever, and the price of even basic entry has gone up radically. Basically, if you want a college education itâs gonna cost ya, few if any easy ways out.
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So is the $10,000 forgiveness now off the table?
It seems like that would help the largest number of student loan holders not moving into high salary jobs.
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I wonder how easy it is for students to get summer jobs. I know that in Canada it isnât as easy as it used to be. Business used get financial incentives from government to hire students. In my own case I also worked part time during the school year. I paid for everything; tuition, housing, food etc. After 6 years of study I had no debts.
Hereâs the clincher. I got union wages, without having to pay union dues or government taxes. In my last industrial job as a student (1978) I made $25 
per hour. My part time job working for a French menâs fragrance company also paid that well, plus commission. Plus the models I worked with 
seriously.
I was not the only one and would like to suggest that unions, government and the private sector start realizing that the future of America, Canada and other places depend on the youth. They need to be supported for the long haul. Completely wiping out their debt would solve many problems faced post education.
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The answer is that the vast majority of those students not only have summer jobs, but year round jobs, called work study. They still graduate with debt because there is no job that a student can get that pays enough to cover tuition, room and board, fees, textbooks, supplies, etc.
People who havenât attended or paid for college in the last 10-15 years still donât realize how much more expensive even the âcheapâ public universities have gotten.
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With state governments continuing to cut education budgets (egged on by their Federal peers of the past few years and various libertarian factions), the state universities are having to make up the difference some place else, like tuition. Until/unless the governments start stepping up support again, thereâs not much hope for improvement.
Alternately, enacting some version of Bidenâs or Bernieâs vision of free/reduced-cost college would be a new way of doing things, but itâs unlikely with the current make-up of Congress and the other priorities that liberals/progressives are already juggling.
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I was able to work my way through college and almost burned out in the process⌠and that was the 1990s. Kids these days canât âworkâ through college when even state schools require $30,000+ for tuition and housing per year, even with new $15/hr minimum wage.
The student loan program is usury, pure and simple, trying to indenture an entire generation of Americans for education that our economy REQUIRES to continue to grow. Anyone in the Boomer generation with a degree should feel ashamed at what theyâve done to the worldâs greatest public higher education system that was handed to them on a silver platter. Hopefully their kids wonât be paying on student loans when it comes time for mom and dadâs assisted living they never saved for.
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My only question all day has been whether the Republicans will go bat-shit crazy over Biden wearing that tan suit.
Or maybe itâs OK for a white guy?
ETA: I just saw something that said Biden wore this suit in tribute to Obama for Obamaâs birthday this week. That might set them off. And Iâm sure Joe says âBring it, bitches.â
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Not all boomers are cheap skates or pushing for insurmountable loans. I am a younger boomer who graduated high school in the middle of the '74-'75 recession. Tuition at my state school was about $1200 per semester, not counting books, fees, etc. Minimum wage was $2.10 per hour. I worked a bunch of jobs, sometimes two or three at a time, and managed to graduate college after nine years. Also, due to that timing, my lifetime earnings were a lot lower than people who graduated in better times (just as the current crop of young people - that disadvantage follows you your entire career.)
My personal belief is that going to college should not be as difficult as what I experienced. Educated citizens contribute far more than the cost of their education to the advancement of society. However, I get really tired of having the âboomers ruined everythingâ lobbed at me and my peers, most of whom watched as the older generation stripped our benefits, cut our wages, and increased our unpaid hours and then blamed us for being too greedy. Every generation struggles to get a toe hold in the workworld and to provide for their families. If your timing is unlucky (the Depression, WWII, recessions, etc.) you may be on the short end your whole life through no fault of your own.
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Iâve mentioned this before but I went to MIZZOU 1980-1984. I had Pell grants my first two years because my older sister was also in school. So she started out with Pell loans, and the when I started we were both on grants, and once she graduated I was on Pell loans. I think our tuition alone was over $1500, but under $2000 and semester.
I recently met up with one of my college roommates. Her son is in grad school, living in a studio apartment next to campus and his rent is $1500 a month. We talked about how a college student could work a summer job, even if it was minimum wage, and still be able to afford at least tuition.
My sister talks about her loan repayment being something like $75-$80 a month. She was paying that every month while being a baby engineer in her own apartment in Miami when she worked for Florida Power & Light.
So itâs the cost of tuition, and the cost of housing, food, and gas that havenât kept up with wages.
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Is that backwards?
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Wages for typical summer jobs for collage kids have remained stagnant for close to 25 years. Meanwhile, tuition and other associated costs have more than doubled over the same period.
Itâs just another manifestation of how one generation stole from their grandchildren so that they could pay less taxes.
After having my Pell grants dry up after my 1st year, I still managed to pay off my Stafford loans before graduation by working as a programmer before I graduated. Instead of paying $50k for kids going to Vassar we could give $10k to 5 kids going to public schools.
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Sorry
I mean that the cost of tuition is higher than rate of than what someone could earn in a summer job. Or that after graduation youâre handed this huge bill for school, but once you get your entry level job, the paycheck really canât cover repayment of loans and supporting oneself.
From 1990
OK because I never throw anything away:
My student loan repayment was $30
My rent was $295
phone was $ 20 landline, no cell phones then
Cable was $40 with 3 premium channels
And my every 2 week paycheck as a manager of a record store was $580
So what student today wouldnât want my $30 month loan payment?
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Noting that I have only an ancient handful of hours, listening to people over the last twenty years and their dealing with the cost of education, it just sounds nuts. Listening to the general trials and tribulations, I canât help but think there is something very wrong with the entire process anyway. When you consider the sums involved, the students are placed in a subordinate position in the transaction. My view is the student is the customer, the school is the business. Yet the student is not given that consideration.
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If you could document any of that bullshit it would be helpful to your case. Iâm a late Boomer and my folks paid the full fees for two years at a nice private college and then I went to the state school my dad taught at so as not to cost them money for an experience I wasnât sure was worth that much. Iâm pretty sure you get this anti-Boomer stuff out of the air around you and not from any source of factual information. A thousand pardons if thatâs unfair to you but Iâm playing the odds here.
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âSuch a move on Bidenâs part would be likely be followed by litigation.â
Litigation by whom for what reason?
It took me ten years to get a BS degree, including two years in the Army, and working full time 5 or 6 months of the year. But thanks to some help from the GI Bill and part time work, I graduated owing $70.00 and a library book. If a contemporary student could earn enough to pay typical university costs, they probably wouldnât need the schooling.
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Iâve posted this before, but instead of just cancelling existing student debt or giving money to past students we should give a fixed amount for each credit completed and it should be the same amount for everyone. It should also be enough to bring State college costs back down to a reasonable and shared burden that recognizes the public good component of an educated workforce, and if you choose to instead go to an Ivy or such then you either can afford it or will be relying on the private school funding environment (which is actually pretty well developed).
This is also the implementation mechanism for the existing student debt - you donât cancel all loans, you grant a credit to those with loans who have completed the corresponding credits. This addresses the potential complaints about âlibruls sucking at the gubbint teatâ as youâre granting the same to everyone and not punishing those of us who worked our way through so didnât have huge loans but had to forgo earnings potential because it took longer. Such folks donât have huge loans to cancel but should share the benefit being granted in recognition of the value to society of an educated workforceâŚ
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Well, as someone who worked almost 20 years in the California State university system, I can provide some details on what the boomers did in California to State funding for Higher Ed. The UC system (the research oriented arm of CA Higher Ed) has suffered the worst cuts, but the CSU has also been hit hard. To wit:
âHigher education spending accounted for 18% of the state budget in 1976â77, but by 2016â17 higher education funding had fallen to 12% of the budget. These funding cuts have been felt most strongly at the University of California, where funding per full-time-equivalent student fell from slightly more than $23,000 to about $8,000. CSU funding per student has also fallen by about 25% since 1976â77 from slightly more than $11,000 per student to slightly less than $9,000.â
In other words, we cut funding by $15,000 per year for UC students and over $2,000 per student per year in the CSU. Note, of course that these numbers donât account for inflation, so the effect is actually worse than these numbers would indicate. It should also be noted that this has led to a squeeze on costs, which has forced those costs onto the students as the system, as well as a squeeze on system budgets.
Fun fact - I worked in senior IT management for a CSU campus until I retired this year, with a focus on supporting the impact of IT on teaching and research. As some of the more active professors would point out to me, their students graduating in IT were regularly starting jobs in Silicon Valley at salaries higher than their professors, or even department heads. And donât get me started on the effect this has had on infrastructure support (IT staffing and services, facilities, etc), all of which are running on band aids, chewing gum and duct tape.
If ever you wanted to create an environment that didnât auger well for the future of the organization, this would seem to be it. Squeeze funding, rubbish professors as âlibruls sucking at the teat of gubbimentâ, force cuts in infrastructure support and force huge funding burdens onto the students. Yeah, this will end well.
At one of my previous campuses the newly arrived President looked at this environment and decided that the future was foreign students who paid full freight tuition, rather than the so-called âsubsidized local residentsâ. To capture a larger share of this market, he proposed a simple solution - the CSU campus needed to open a âshadow campusâ in China, to capture those students who could pay more than locals, but not as much as those whose family could pay full freight while living overseas in the US for four or more years.
As you can imagine, this freaked out a lot of people, who argued that it wasnât the mission of the CSU to service âthose peopleâ. He pointed out that if the State of California wanted the campus to focus on locals, then they needed to help fund those students by reversing the cuts. Sadly, we didnât get to see the final acts of this particular drama, as the President eventually moved on and last I heard, that campus still had all the funding shortfall problems every other CSU was experiencing. The problem is still festering and will eventually lead to either a reversal of funding trends, some fundamental changes in those systems or those systems dying a painful death as we lose our standing in the world.
And yes, it was the Boomer generation that set this all in motion by consistently under-funding the very system of higher education that made their own lives successful.
Source:
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