I remember reading somewhere that we could make all public universities free.
If the federal government would use all the loans given to private colleges to pay for public college education, then public universities could be free.
I am not against loan forgiveness, but 50K will only help 6% public univ.
People who attended private, for profit, shouldn’t be give 50K let alone professional degrees (generally requires license to work) like Masters, Dr, PhDs, Lawyer etc.
I don’t think plumber, welders or similar trade attended for-profit private under graduate.
So question is who would be beneficiary for 50K loan forgiveness?
to add DeVry students will benefit, DeVry also owns medical schools in Caribbean that received federal money, go figure that out.
Federal loans (and Pell/SEOG) benefit the student, not the school. The student may choose to use that money at a public or a private.
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According to your chart, not sure the source, all but 6% of undergraduate students at public universities have under $50,000 in debt. 6% have 50,000 or more in debt.
I don’t think plumbers, electricians, carpenters, retail clerks, postal workers, truck drivers, factory workers, etc, whom probably didn’t go to college, should have to pay for others to go to college. I also don’t feel that the majority of people that paid for their own or their children’s college should have to pay for others college.
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I see no equity in loan forgiveness.
- Why should plumbers and electricians tax money go to forgiving student debt?
- How about everyone who has worked for years to pay off their debt?
- Public schools or private schools too?
- How about future loans?
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Same reasons that plumbers and electricians paid tax money for top 1% tax break during last administration.
This is same argument, stimulus checks in last 1 year, what is a good $ cut-off range? Certain that it can’t meet everyone’s need, but will satisfy majority need. Majority doesn’t need 50K forgiveness.
Biden said that he’s not interested in cancelling loans from students at Harvard and Yale, but I have not seen private schools excluded from the forgiveness, or even grad schools, proposals the Big 3 (Warren, Shumer, AOC) are talking about.
Of course nothing is in writing so we don’t know which loans could be included except that private loans will not be; the government isn’t going to write checks to private banks, just forgive loans made by the US government. It’s money NOT coming back into the general treasury not more money going out. The Big 3 fighting for this definitely want to include private colleges and graduate school loans as they want to forgive up to $50k. I can’t imagine there are many with $50k in undergrad-, public school- only loans.
I have two kids with loans. One went to a private college and one to a public college (although OOS). Their federal loans look exactly the same and are even serviced by the same servicer (Great Lakes). The one who went to a public school borrowed more than the one with a degree from a private school. Both are the national direct (old Stafford) loans.
Both would benefit from the forgiveness. They don’t have anywhere close to $50k in loans so aren’t in the 6%, but would benefit from ANY forgiveness - they’d no longer have to pay! How could that not be considered a benefit?
So only 6% would get the full benefit at $50k, but everyone with any amount of federal student loans will benefit from a forgiveness program.
Ok sorry I misunderstood your post.
It would be better to focus on making sure we don’t continue allowing people to get education loans that they can’t pay off in a manageable time frame.
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or stop those predatory education univ to begin with…
your infographics would have to distinguish
- based on states (Pennsylvania is going to be well above California)
- based on age group (the kids who started college in 2008 and up are in a different category due to costs rising by a lot and financial aid/merit aid being cut.
I don’t think we could have a program helping just some states but I do think we can treat the latest generation differently – Paying for college when it was $300 a semester or even when it was possible to “work your way through” is a different ballgame from now-- alongside mechanisms to prevent further problems (so, a quick fix with a long-term study and required implementations for long-term fixes.)
At some point I realized that taxes aren’t a donation - not being snide, it took me a while to figure it out.
We all pay for things we don’t benefit from. That’s why we’re a society and why taxes are one of the keystones to a nation (along with an army/a defense force and a system of governance). No one likes taxes and no one gets to choose to pay them, even if we don’t like them or don’t use all the benefits, because as a society we benefit globally and can elect rulers who will offer a cost/benefit analysis for us. We could have no sidewalks, no public utility, no public schools. I’m sure that people without kids and who drive everywhere would be okay… except, they wouldn’t… because at some point an uneducated workforce would come and bite them in the hand, and risking being hit by a car when you feel like going on a walk is no fun (this last example from a real life township that voted against sidewalks, only to have issues with pedestrians being hit.)
However, it’s arguable that plumbers and electricians will benefit when the money dedicated to the loans gets turned into upgrading the kitchen – a rising ride lifts all boats.
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I discovered a terrible blind intersection when I was driving my kids to their new school one morning when I nearly got hit. Luckily, we made it through but when my kids started driving years later it was a prohibited route. Locals knew to avoid it or at least how much longer they needed to wait to make sure there wasn’t a car hiding in the dip to avoid an accident. Obviously, others weren’t as familiar and would get in accidents there. It was a bad enough intersection that the high school principal would make an announcement at the beginning of the year reminding new drivers to take the longer safer route. A young classmate nearly lost her life there before the kids really took the principal’s warning to heart. The intersection was finally fixed. I can tell you that although that family wishes the intersection had been fixed sooner, they are grateful it is fixed. They don’t think it’s unfair that other people have a safer journey now despite how long it took their loved one to recover.
It’s with that kind of perspective I look at student loans. I was able to pay mine back without struggle, my kids didn’t take them, but that doesn’t mean others had the same experience.
I actually disagree with the last point in the article. I think disparities are revealed (not created) through the U.S. student loan system.
The npr story posted above summed it up in this epiphany:
“We know that Black borrowers struggle with repayment independent of their institution type and whether or not they completed a degree.”
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There are good uses for tax money and there are bad ones. Loan forgiveness, IMO, is a bad one. Better terms, OK. Extending duration, fine. But, simply throwing money at individuals is not the answer. There are simply too many issues with implementing such a plan.
The idea that someone who cannot make student loan payments will, once their loan is forgiven, stimulate the economy is hopeful at best and not a reason in itself to do this.
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And what has the borrower learned from the experience in the end? That it literally pays to be a free rider. That you don’t have to be accountable for your decisions. Like all systems with free riders…it works fine until you run out of accountable, responsible people.
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I am against loan forgiveness. I could support some other proposal to assist those struggling with student debt. But I think loan forgiveness is unfair to those who made other educational choices to avoid debt or other life choices to pay off the educational debt they took on. Had those people forseen loan forgiveness, they would have chosen different colleges and made different life decisions.
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In many cases, they may not have had a choice.
First, loans are now packaged into your financial aid.
Second, it really depends on where you live - no one chooses where they’re born, it’s pure luck.
Born in California? You’ve got tons of public universities to choose from, most of them commutable, with a good financial aid system for lower and middle incomes. So, yes, getting into debt may be a choice (but you still have the federal loans packaged in).
Born in Pennsylvania? The opposite.
Born Black in Mississippi? Born in rural New Mexico or West Virginia? Not the same as being born in Florida or in Upstate NY.
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For most young people the choices are:
- Go to college and take on debt.
- Don’t go to college.
The CC crowd tends to be more savvy and have some more options, they are outliers. This school $0 debt, that one a modest amount is indicative of privileges most young people don’t have.
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I wish young people would see that they actually do have more choices than simply going off to college and incurring big debt. They could instead go to a trade school and learn a skill or they could go to the military and learn a skill while saving money towards building upon those skills in college.
Probably the worst thing would be to go to college, take on debt, and either drop out or graduate with a degree that’s hard to leverage in the workforce.
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But why should their debt be forgiven? I don’t see a reason only explanations for why they took on debt, which we all understand.
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Unfortunately my kids were born in NJ with expensive public universities and such a high COL that they are not eligible for FA. My oldest two have about $60,000 in loans, went to in state public universities and worked (my daughter had 6 roommates, my son 9). The plan was they’d graduate with degrees that would lead to good employment opportunities. Fortunately this has been the case. Hopefully this will work out for the rest of my children.