This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1348679
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1348679
Typical millennial, “I made a bad choice and got in over my head, mom, can you fix it for me?”
The author should at least have to state how he will personally benefit, freelance journalist probably isn’t the highest-paying gig.
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Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?
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Are you being sarcastic? Can’t tell. You don’t think any loan forgiveness - of any sort - is necessary? Both of my kids had FULL scholarships (lawyer and nurse) that did not cover living expenses and owe over 50K each. My daughter works at Legal Aid and her job will be terminated next year due to budget cuts. I’m guessing you went to school when tuition was much cheaper.
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That’s fair enough, if he does benefit, but I can reassure you that Ben has none of those Ivy League degrees you find objectionable.
Which is not to say he does not have student loans to pay off.
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Who?
The author of the article is quite young.
Replying to castor_troy.
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Do It.
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Nope. I enlisted out of high school, in part to avoid having to take on loans and earned the GI Bill to get through undergrad while working.
I definitely have empathy for people with debt, but am not at all in favor of just wiping out their choices to take that on. Reforms to cap interest rates, make it easier to trade debt for public service, discharge student debt in bankruptcy, or defer payments without a penalty are all things I can get on board with.
But nobody held a gun to any student’s head and forced them to go to college and take on a debt burden that they couldn’t handle.
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So we spend 12 years inculcating the notion in our children that higher education is a “good choice”.
But you’re saying they made a “bad choice”?
You really want to blame the kids?
I’m for forgiving the debt, making JC free and subsidized after.
Portugal has free college even for non citizens and it has a robust economy.
We don’t and we have Magats.
BTW I happily and proudly paid for my son’s 6 years of higher ed.
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Most of these kids were sixteen or seventeen when they had to make a college choice.
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Yes they were just kids and the “gun to their head” was intense peer, parental and socio-economic pressure.
They also are prohibited from filing bankruptcy for student loan debt. Thanks Obama.
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That’s interesting, because when I was 17 I had to make a choice between taking out loans to go to the university I had been accepted at, or to not take on debt and join the Army and earn the GI Bill.
I’m not asking someone to pay me for all the lost wages I could have earned going right to college and into the workforce with a degree rather than putzing around the military at lower enlisted and minimal pay. Don’t see why we’d just pay off the debts for people who chose to take them on.
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One of the immediate reforms I think should absolutely, 100% happen. Absolutely no problems with reforms and changing the system.
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It is clear after the last few years that voters who are capable of critical thinking and have some knowledge of the world beyond the place of their origin would be a good thing. There are various ways for this to be acomplished, but college is one of the primary and most accessible ones. Free higher education is in my opinion a fundamental public good. I would support some means testing, but forgiving student loans for most graduates has a very firm policy basis.
However focusing on taking care of upwardly mobile college educated folks by itself is a recipe for political disaster. Not everyone is suited for college, or wants to go. Plus, society needs (more than it tends to admit) people who work in fields where college would in many cases just be an expensive waste of time. Supporting those people has an equally firm policy grounding and is also, by the way, good politics. So if there is to be student loan forgiveness, it better be paired inseverably with commensurate aid to everyone else in the affected demographic, e.g., aspiring tradespeople, laborers, etc.
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I’m not sure it’s as simple as forgive, or don’t forgive. A poor student with debt to a for-profit college for a dental technician degree is quite different than an aspiring doctor from a wealthy family with medical school debt. It seems that somewhere there needs to be some sort of qualifying process, otherwise the rich are getting richer.
And, more importantly, what about all the young people who did not go to college at all? Their prospects are infinitely worse than graduates with debt. There needs to be a discussion about these folks.
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The best way to handle this would be on a case-by-case basis. There are some wondeful scenarios to this situation…scenarios which could benefit a lot of people.
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How come there’s no Moral Hazard issue with corn subsidies, price supports, federally funded weather forecasting, bank bailouts and the like?
Pecunia loquitur
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This is a nonsensical argument. Previous generations had highly subsidized education which meant they could support it with a part time job. That’s impossible today.
It’s even worse because the vast majority of middle class jobs today are college degree only which wasn’t the case earlier.
Further, millennials work more and are more productive than previous generations yet get a smaller share of the pie.
The reality is that previous generations had their education paid for, had opportunities made available to them, and decided to repay future generations by cutting their taxes, opportunities, benefits, and pay.
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Two thoughts:
(1) Nobody held a gun to the heads of farmers demanding that they plan too much crops (causing the prices to plummet) and yet we bail them out. Nobody held a gun to the big banks demanding they make all those shitty loans, and yet we bail them out. But when it comes to students …
(2) When most people in GenX were in college, it was -cheap-. I. Mean. Cheap. Somehow, we forget this when we look at kids these days with literally life-crushing debt. Even back then (80s) I used to point out that this would be the last generation of students who could afford to go to an Ivy League school (Cornell) and graduate to become labor organizers: Reagan was in the process of putting paid to that.
If we think that we can’t afford as a society to make college free, then just tax the wealthy: we’re a rich society, and we have the money to do this. Pretending that somehow this too must be regulated by “The Holy Market” is a conservative fetish: what matters is getting a cohort of each generation educated and productive; if doing the way we’re doing it is problematic, then fix that.
Frankly, I’m disgusted by people in my generation, who graduated with a few thousands dollars of debt (and got generous grant aid) who turn around and tut-tut the kids who are laboring under lifetimes’ worth of debt.
“Nobody put a gun to their head”, yeah right. To have a decent life in America, you must go to college. If you’re not really, really, really well-informed/mentored, you can make bad decisions, and for those bad decisions, get saddled with a lifetime’s worth of debt.
But hey, this is America.
P.S. And we haven’t even begun to talk about the for-profit “colleges”, those leeches and grifters. Yabbut, nobody held a gun to a kid’s head, told 'em to go to University of Phoenix. Yeah right.
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