@bennty, I come from a poor family, I’m hardly against poor people getting an education. I am not opposed to more people getting a higher education. I do think there might be a strain on resources with an increased demand for education. It would certainly take some changes within colleges to accommodate or as you say, some would just not make the cut.
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When I was a kid, the top marginal income tax in this country was 50%, and corporate taxes were collected at a much higher rate than they are today. Rich people were rich. Trump was part of the wallpaper, partying around. Midlife crisis men drove Corvettes. We didn’t have gaggles of billionaires, but we had lots and lots of very wealthy people.
It’s hard to look at the amount of money we’ve stopped collecting, how labor protections have disintegrated since then, and what that’s meant for ordinary people in this country. It’s hard to look because you don’t even get to feeling angry: you just feel ill.
When you grow up poor with a family that’s making sure you get through in one piece, you get a lot of messages about looking after your own behind and working it off to get to places. You get that because your parents are frightened for you and they know what happens to people like them who don’t do it…in a society where nobody gives a d if you fall through the cracks.
That’s an individual solution to a large societal problem you can’t, individually, do anything about. But I don’t think the societal solution is to exhort everyone to be fit for a cruel society (that’s very pleasant for robber barons) when we already know that this isn’t going to happen anyway, and then blame the ones who don’t make it for not having made it. I’m also aware that there are plenty of people on CC who’ve come here from formerly communist countries, but seem to be unaware that there was an entire continent betwen where they came from and where they are, and that that continent is one of the places that, postwar, managed to strike a balance that works well enough that highly successful (but not particularly greedy) people there are so often aghast at how life goes here, and at this point don’t want to come here.
I also get that the cruelty and self-flagellation are in some ways baked in here. This was a colony founded by sin-obsessed religious nuts who also wanted to do their obsessions outside established authority. Self-punishment for self-measured inadequate purity is just part of America. However, again, I don’t think it’s necessary.
Public universities have been cutting fat, then muscle, then everything else they’ve got for the last 20 years. I can’t off the top of my head think of a public university system that isn’t deep in debt from just trying to stay competitive. There’s not much left to rearrange.
We have a lot of repair work to do after the 40 years of “greed is good” changes that came through starting with Reagan. Some of the holes are so deep that people won’t want to acknowledge them. This is a resilient society, though, and I think that with a substantial push back toward having a middle class, we will do very well. We have to stop beating people up for trying, though, and that’s what we’re doing when we tell 18-year-olds “click here to sign for more thousands of dollars than you can comprehend,” and they do.
I’d have to be. But from a room indoors you can sense the weather changing on the other side of the house before you go and look.
Admissions could stay the same, would those who can afford full pay lose out on some spots because a student with less means but higher stats can now afford that spot? Shouldn’t the brightest and hardest working attend college vs.those who’s parents make a lot of money?
I bet there’d be some reshuffle, but you’d still see a skew toward the money. When someone well-educated can afford to spend time sherpa-ing students through their ed from infancy to 18, and can send them around to various programs, it has an effect. You see this play out in the NYC special-schools entrance exams – the schools are free and public, but exam/life prep, not so much. If you wanted something more egalitarian you’d have to set it up that way with quotas in some form.
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Why bring the politics into the conversation? It’s really hard to follow your entire train of thought.
Yes, there have been and still are rich people in this country. Yes, taxes ebb and flow. I’d personally be happy with a flat tax, no deductions, but that’s not really the topic of this thread.
There will always be inequalities in this country. There are people that have more. Thankfully I don’t get caught up in worrying about others having more than I do. I do the best with the resources I have and it’s served me well so far. I’d rather not have more of my resources taken to cancel other people’s debt.
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I think we need a new thread about whether free college is the way to go.
That really is very different than canceling student loans.
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This isn’t really a realistic and reliable option for undergrad education, assuming one wants to complete their degree before age 30 or so.
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egalitarian = quota
That is seriously dysfunctional.
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The NYC special schools are probably among the less poor of the NYC public schools, but their FRPL rates suggest that their demographics are not especially wealthy. It may be that many of the high SES parents in NYC put their kids in private schools.
Look up exam prep for the specials: there have practically been wars over this for the last decade or so because in no way are the demographics representative of the city. NYC is home to many, many poor kids who also happen to be extremely bright kids. But because these schools are serious elite-U pipelines, the exam competition is intense, and the students with families who have access to intensive exam prep fare far better. That is not how public schools are supposed to work.
Yes it is. If you have to set vigorous quotas to get a reasonably egalitarian result, you know that your system is skewing hard in the direction of privilege. Definitely dysfunctional.
Please stay on topic. This thread was devolving too much into personal life circumstances. Several posts deleted.
Okay, so I have a few questions. So the current student debt in the US is currently at $1,731,307,569,796 (info via https://studentdebtcrisis.org/) and growing. What would be the rules of any amount of student debt being cancelled, because their are so many details that would have to be worked out. Let’s say that the $27,000 is used as a maximum debt forgiveness before looking for ways to control the spiraling costs of a college education in the US. We would be right back where we are today in 20 years.
What if we gave $27,000 per person (over 4 years) to use towards college as a tax break or discount on college costs? My state of Georgia already gives about that much today for a 3.0 GPA in high school to any state institution through the Hope Scholarship and even more with certain criteria through the Zell Miller scholarship. Is that enough? Should affordable in-state college costs be an individual state’s problem and not a federal one? UGA COA for a student with the Zell Miller scholarship in-state (I would estimate that over 75% of in-state students at UGA start with Zell Miller scholarship and almost every in-state incoming freshman is receiving the Hope Scholarship) was about $17,500 per year and approximately $21,000 per year with the Hope scholarship. Compare that with Penn State’s main campus COA ($32,608-35,830) and we can see that this is a more complex issue than just cancelling student loans.
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I think we’re going to have to look at forgiveness of existing loans as a kind of reparations and then just change how we fund public higher ed – meaning shift it back much closer to actually being publicly-funded – so we don’t have the same problem again. You don’t want to leave this all to the states or the usual suspects drown and you still have widening inequality.
I think that is where the argument is going to grow. For states that have lower education costs like GA, I can see them balking at helping to pay the costs of other states educational debt/costs to pay for a federally backed, publicly funded education. There are kids in my neighborhood who attend the GA state directional institution 15 minutes away and live at home tuition free right now for less than 5K a year (fees and living expenses) thanks to lottery funds. Students who attend public institutions in New York can attend tuition-free with households incomes under 125K. It is going to be very hard to fix college expenses on a federal level when states have large disparities in their costs. What stops an UGA or a SUNY school from raising the costs dramatically if the federal government is going to pay the bills? Part of the large inflation increases that are driving costs are the “easy” loan policies, so providing “easy” federal money could make things worse long-term.
One of the most shocking data points that I have seen is that among the Class of 2019, 69% of college students took out student loans, and they graduated with an average debt of $29,900, including both private and federal debt. Meanwhile, 14% of their parents took out an average of $37,200 in federal parent PLUS loans (stats from studentloanhero.com). Those parents plus loans are going to make retirement impossible for some of those families. I believe that a recession will be brought on with student loan debt being a major factor if this issue is not addressed, but there are not any easy solutions.
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I don’t actually think it’s going to be that hard. I can see a big fight over state-U structure – say many universities vs. State U, U of, and community-college network (often funded through K-12), and which one’s using the money better, but large state universities are much alike, infrastructurewise. You can deal with institutional debts separately as a bad historical mistake (national systematic mistake, not individual-state-U mistake). It’s not as though most states actually pay substantial portions of operating costs anymore. All it’s going to do is shift costs from individual students/families to everyone. The unintended consequences at universities might be that they stop throwing solid programs out the window and chasing fads like grandmas shopping at Forever 21. This would be a good thing. It takes a good decade to build and establish a serious university program; you can’t tear down and rebuild like it’s retail. And you’re free to send your kid to a private U, just as you can send the kid to private K-12, but I think you’ll find the tuition’s come down to compete with the reasonably-funded and healthy state U system where the kid can go for little or no money.
The main thing is that if students have no financial choice but to go to in-state, you don’t want a wide disparity between state Us or you’re going to exacerbate regional economic problems. Productive states already subsidize welfare-heavy states: Which States Are Givers and Which Are Takers? - The Atlantic, and most people don’t go around angry all day because they’re shipping money to Mississippi.
What I love about the “but what about” fears is that they’re all so dependent on people being utterly horrible. Like I don’t know how people even think of some of these things, and why they don’t see the obvious reasons why the alarming thing wouldn’t happen. Why wouldn’t SUNY hike tuition? I dunno, how about because it’s already got a slamming history of making tuition free for as many people as possible? If you need laws, we can do that, too. ACA as written hamstrings the hell out of insurance companies that want to raise their rates.
Fwiw, the golden age of the state U was when the most people ever were going to school subsidized heavily by the federal government in the form of pre-Reagan Pell grants and GI bill money that actually paid the whole cost of the ed. I don’t recall anyone in…well, I was going to say Connecticut, but you’ll always find a money-complainer there. Anyone in Ohio complaining that they were paying taxes to send some kid to school on a Pell grant in Wyoming.
These things seem very obvious to me, but I guess I do run into people all the time who’re very “but what about” and genuinely anxious when it comes to very normal federal and state expenditures that have only been chopped away in the US in the last few decades. Are you legitimately worried that people will, I don’t know, throw money by the bushel out the window, or lie in bed all day and flunk school because it’s free, or…what’s the worry? I’m reminded of people freaking out about ACA because they seemed to believe people would just run to the doctor all the time, being…sick for fun? And that this would bring down the economy? You get it with min wage raises, too, despite truckloads of evidence that raising the minimum wage does not either crash the economy or lead to legions of the poor wandering the streets and starving.
And insurance premiums have increased when they were promised to decrease. So the taxpayers are once again paying more to cover the subsidies. The government can only legislate costs to a certain degree. I’d also say that if schools are going to be “free” (which means they’re free to students but not to taxpayers) we should move towards a EU/UK model since those are held up as role models by the “free” college crowd. 3 years instead of 4. No all you can eat dining centers with every food type imaginable. No health centers and mental health counselors on demand. No athletic scholarships. Living at home or apartments or in uni housing where you cook for yourself.
The focus should be on education.
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I don’t know what you’re referring to here, but before insurance companies can raise rates they have to demonstrate that it’s actually necessary to their business. That was the idea: no wild jumps just because they can anymore. But I don’t think anyone ever said “your health insurance cost will not go up” – that’s not what was in the law. In any case, of course we can have laws that say “you’re receiving subsidies, you can’t increase tuition by more than x in a given year without requesting permission and going through a whole process and receiving approval.”
I’m in complete agreement with using the university model the rest of the world uses. There’s no reason for college to be a resort or summer camp. It’s education and where you make close friends.
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I don’t think that you are considering how polarized the country is on most issues, especially expensive issues. What you think is not “very hard at all” would be a radical change in how higher education is funded and would be a multi-trillion dollar solution. Besides a possible “student debt cancellation” of some amount, I have not heard of any proposals to fundamentally change how Higher education is funded in the United States.
I love how you talk about the “Golden Age” of the State U, but there are so many more people who go to college today and years of inflation has made the costs exorbitant. In 1970 14% of men and 8% of women had college degrees (It was sure easier to afford with those smaller numbers). The COA in 1970 to attend a 4 year public university ($1477 which should be $10,083 in 2021 if educational inflation was like all other inflation, but the actual 2021 costs are around ~$25,000). Today’s numbers (35% of men and 37% of women with 4 year degrees) could create an unsustainable program long term (especially if higher educational inflation continues increasing at 2.5 times all other forms of inflation).
That is why I have talked about the states separately because their are a few states that are doing very creative things to make college affordable to the constituents. I just don’t personally sense that we have reached a point where enough people in power are ready to entertain an European model to pay for higher education at the Federal level or would even consider it in the next 10 years. So what is truly feasible today?
- Can we lower interest rates?
- Can we freeze costs for some short period of time (Purdue model)
- States find other states with higher education models that your state could get behind that lower higher education costs (NY/California model with higher taxes for some or the TN/GA model with lottery funds for others as examples).
I believe that urgency will occur only when the student debt bubble actually bursts with delinquencies because our bureaucracy is more “reactive” than “proactive” these days.
P.S. If I were a SUNY, I would definitely hike tuition prices if the Federal government was paying for higher education and the state has been previously subsidizing those costs more than other states.
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