Curious about how others are feeling about "canceling" student loans

Or what if law school were like a college major leading to a bachelor’s degree (or a master’s degree if the full three years of law school were started in junior year of college)? But then the law schools may not like it, since law school is a much bigger tuition cash cow than the upper division of a bachelor’s degree (or even with one year of master’s degree tuition added).

3 Likes

Yes this isn’t going to be fixed any time soon unfortunately.

1 Like

Rates are set by the lenders and based on the amount of risk, rate of default, credit rating of borrower, rate charged by the competition.

What should a bank charged for an unsecured loan to a student who has no credit score?

I worked for a high risk lender. Our rate was around 36% (most states) for a $3000 unsecured loan. Our default rate on those loans was about 10%. Repayment started the following month, we charged late fees and bad check fees and all the other fees we could. Our borrows had decent credit scores, jobs (or other income), and we had similar loans/rates for those with security (we did some mortgages, mostly HELOC, at a lower rate but it wasn’t what you could get at a bank). We had 1000 branches in 33 states and 10,000 employees. We’d been in business for about 80 years, so someone was taking these loans.

Student loans for truly poor students without co-borrowers will not be available unless they come guaranteed by the government or at really high rates. If the students can declare bankruptcy, the rate of default will go up and the rates will rise too.

Federal banks are restricted in the amount of unsecured loans they can make since 2010. Many may remember that banks reduced credit limits on credit cards and on overdraft protection on checking accounts as all those maximums counted against the banks as ‘unsecured extensions of credit’ even if it wasn’t being used. If banks want to grow a student loan programs, they would have to cut other unsecured credit. Where do they make their profit, on student loans @8% or on credit cards @18%?

2 Likes

There are joint bachelor’s-law degree programs – 6 years in the one I know of (taking a year off the total amount of time for the separate degrees).

And you are correct about law schools being cash cows – they admit way more students than they should, but the money is hard to turn down by the institution.

1 Like

Yes.

How about if we make community college free for all and 4 year colleges tuition/fee free for families making under $125,000? That should put an end to skyrocketing tuition costs, right?

2 Likes

I think it would make tuition twice as high. Those making under $125k get to go for free so they won’t care if tuition is $5000 or $20,000, to them it is free. The schools will need to get as much tuition as they can from those who do have to pay.

7 Likes

This is very, very funny.

If I were 24 years old, going into some form of policy work, and looking for a thesis project, I’d be all over this and similar threads on CC watching well-off people guarding privilege like Kobe. It’s magical. The candor is spectacular.

I really wish some people here could take about a 400-meter walk away, turn around, and have a look at the scene.

2 Likes

It would do that, and it would force down tuitions at all but the top layer of private universities. With the reinvestment in the new Biden plan, it’d also restore a lot of quality erosion at the publics/cc over the last 40 years, which would further disincentivize expensive private ed.

There’s still problems to do with universities’ debt spending, but putting that aside for the mo.

No, but you do need a graduate degree, and for good reason. It’s medical work. If you want them injuring people, leave it at a bachelor’s.

As long as the gov’t is picking up the tab and not making the colleges charge twice as much for the others to keep their income high enough to pay bills and keep up with private colleges with what they offer in academic opportunities (stay on par vs becoming inferior).

So you couldn’t teach them what they need to know during 4 years of college? How do nursing students do it with a 4 year degree? Do they go on to a masters too?

1 Like

Highly doubtful. Government run anything never keeps costs down.

2 Likes

It’s not guarding privilege it’s the free abandon with which you’re spending people’s money without any guardrails. The government can’t run anything efficiently or cost effectively. I’m not dumping more funds into the black hole of fixing public education…that maw will just keep sucking in more and more with no accountability.

The UK tried free tuition for everyone and it didn’t work. Now it’s £9000 a year for 3 years …total of £27,000 and they’re still complaining.

4 Likes

Saillakeerie:How about if we make community college free for all and 4 year colleges tuition/fee free for families making under $125,000? That should put an end to skyrocketing tuition costs, right?

NYS offers free tuition for families who earn under $125k. Eligible families absolutely care about costs because if something unexpected happens and the family has to pay out-of-pocket for a few courses the current rate is what they’ll be paying. And they pay taxes too. The higher tuition is, the more taxes we all pay, so cost matters.

The state is paying the tuition to the schools, so the schools don’t have to get more tuition from families who are paying without grants. Tuition goes up every year in NYS, but not much. It might be a few hundred a year.

1 Like

DPT is a 3 year program; its typical prerequisites take up about 1+1/3 years of course work. It should be theoretically possible to get all of the course work into a 5 year bachelor’s or bachelor’s + master’s program (including typical college general education requirements), but that is unlikely to be in the interests of incumbent practitioners who prefer a higher barrier to entry for new entrants.

Nursing degrees and certifications come in several levels, CNA, LPN / LVN, associates (ADN / RN), bachelor’s (BSN), master’s (MSN), doctorate (DNP): Nursing Degrees: Types, Levels & Earning Potential

Note that associates and bachelor’s level nursing programs are highly competitive to get into, and some of them weed out students aggressively (e.g. 3.5 or 3.75 college GPA requirements to maintain).

So the short answer is education will continue to be very expensive for a variety of reasons. The government can forgive some debt but it’s just a small bucket of water drawn from a raging river. It will buy some good feelings but fix very little.

1 Like

Yep: education is expensive, and the more complex/vital the systems you want people to be able to work with, the longer and more expensive the education will be. There’s also what I’ll call “catch-up” educational expense in what used to be called “women’s work” and heavily devalued – complex professional jobs like teaching, admin, HR, nursing. Now that these are recognized as actual work, the training for them’s taken seriously, too.

The solution entails recognizing that if we want the society to function we have to pay for the education. The new Biden plan takes some substantial steps in that direction with the funding for pre-K-14 (through community college) and Pell boost.

The debt forgiveness, then, is about a recognition that we screwed up between about 1980 and now, pushing an increasingly privately-unsustainable cost of ed onto individual student/family backs and crushing a lot of lives in the process. It didn’t help that people who had no idea how education works (and didn’t really care all that much about it) decided that it’d be best if ed worked like a SV startup, and that others saw a bonanza in turning universities into annexes for hedge funds or developer parties. The result was a fantastical increase in ed costs and a situation that forced public universities to compete in a game they couldn’t afford, jacking tuition and drowning themselves in debt.

So if you cancel student loans and do something akin to what Biden’s proposing, you recognize that we went the wrong way, redress some of the wrongs, and wrench the whole system back onto a societally-supported path. This is going to prompt questions about what we’re educating people for, but I think that people who insist on arguing that everyone should go around being 1970s pipefitters are just going to be left at the old-folks’ table at the diner while the rest of society gets on with arranging something that more or less works.

If this is what you think I’ve been suggesting, you’re totally wrong. There are several kids who actually desire the trades as their #1 choice, but getting certified for those costs more than they can afford without loans too.

The US needs a way for all kids to be able to get to a job they like and can do which enables them to comfortably be self-sufficient adults. It may, or may not, include college.

What’s wrong is saying college (and med school or PT or trade school or whatever) is only reserved for the wealthy - anyone else needs to pay for it for eons if they want the privilege. Otherwise, fast food, low pay factories, or retail is hiring and you can sign up for subsidized housing over there.

1 Like

Describes a lot of current college graduates.

4 Likes