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anon_1eeb2b426hv3y
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Yeah, I may have gone a little overboard with that one.
FC: Student loan debt surpasses $1.5 TRILLION
- Thread starter mn78psu83
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that makes sense but not retroactively. I am okay with discharge-able if a credit check and co-signor are on the loan.
It only makes sense if the relationship goes through the entire food chain
tuition
scholarships
professor compensation
etc.etc.
The market does dictate that now, and that is the problem.[if there is a problem] Art History majors with a $35,000 per year job at Starbucks with little upside vs and engineer making $100,000k with a huge upside and both owe $100,000 in student loans. That is OKAY with me just don't suggest we let the AH major off the hook. [to all i am using Art History to be illustrative and not because it is a good/bad example]
To answer bullet #2:
Because they need the courses that teach reasoning and logical thinking. My DD is also in OC therapy toughest math class required ? Stat not Calc. OC therapy gradschools need indicators that the students can process the information given to them in a quantitative and logical way physics would be the tougher math equivalent but is science based which is what the pre professional med programs are. Phys therapy by the way requires chem and physics --again indicators to succeeding in gradschool and also are weed out courses. As if Anatomy wasn't enough right?
Mile High,
That same argument goes for life in general not just student loans. Back in the day my wife and i both had good jobs and still lived with the classic money for each expense put in an envelope and when that ran out so did that item for the month. We were making together twice what many others were who were living "higher on the hog" than us and I used to say WTF is going on. Now we are all retired and we are comfortable and they are living with SS as there primary source of money.
Not saying one is better than another, there are times i say I wish we had done that when we were younger, but we all make choices and should be expected to live by them.
You are right but add parents in that as well. When my son was young he was a pretty good soccer player. Highest level travel team in the Atlanta area which has pretty good soccer. It started with one season, then went to two seasons and a week long camp then along came ODP. Olympic Development which was a lot more time and money. About half of the parents signed up drinking the cool aid that their kid would play D-1 or even better the Olympics. In soccer you play each year with your age group. We played in a tournament one year near D.C. when my son was 14 or 15 but i noticed there was a small kid that looked really young playing with the 16 year old D.C. team. When i asked they said he was 10. I told my wife maybe that kid can make it [he ended up on the US Olympic team] but anyone playing at only his own age isn't going to be on any Olympic team or likely D-1 soccer. My point is parents all have the dream for their kids and that also feeds the "we need to find a place where my kid can be a star".
Agree I cant count how many times I heard from PARENTS OF KIDS I CUT that their AAU basketball team won some tournament. It didnt matter that it was a Division 3 tournament and they were playing down. Parents living life through their kids....
A little off topic but there is a reason countries like Germany, Spain, and Denmark can provide "free" college tuition to their citizens. The reason is that US taxpayers fund their military. We pay hundreds of billions of dollars a year to protect the NATO countries. Their defense budgets are almost zero. If the NATO countries paid their fair share for their defense then we could easily provide free tuition to our citizens like they do.
In Germany, at least, not everyone gets to go to college. You have to (a) be selected to attend a college prep high school (called a Gymnasium) and (b) you have to pass your leaving exam (called an Abitur). Your grade on the latter determines which programs you can attend at university. My old penpal, for example, wanted to study medicine. She was quite smart--but that was so competitive, she did not get in. Also, until recently, a German University was closer to a graduate school. Bachelor degrees are a pretty recent thing there. Currently, only 11% of workers in Germany have passed their Abitur (ca. 2000). When I was in school there (as an exchange student) it was under 3%. It's a lot easier for a government to pay for 11% of the population to go to college than 50% or more.
Given that occupational therapy involves how the human body moves and interacts with its environment, it actually makes some sense. Learning about levers and leverage, for one, and the forces involved can be useful.
Mind you, some of this is used as a weed-out of some students.
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anon_xdc8rmuek44eq
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This is a good, valid point. The question is, is this system better than what we have?
Salaries were substantially lower then also, so in your hypothetical, it was a much larger portion of take home pay, and a primary stress factor. You have to consider all angles.
As was posted earlier, college is not mandatory; housing is a necessity. Many kids attend because they have no plan; I blame parents and universities for embracing unfruitful courses of "study" and churning out droves of unskilled (but degreed) kids that boomerang back home, with debt disproportionate to what they received. Education and knowledge/skill aren't equivalent, at least not any more.
Far too many kids attend purely for the social experience. I've seen this up close and personal with acquaintances my two daughters (one senior, one junior).
we don't have a system, maybe we should
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anon_xdc8rmuek44eq
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When the government hands out IOUs, the government pays interest on them -- to the Chinese, Japanese, the Social Security fund, etc. The current interest on the national debt is $310 billion. That is just the interest paid this fiscal year, not the debt. That makes it the fourth largest federal budget item. The only four expenses that are bigger are Social Security benefits ($987 billion), military spending ($874.4 billion), Medicare ($582 billion), and Medicaid ($400 billion). How long is that sustainable?
You are proposing tacking another 10% on to the national debt to reward a class of people that did nothing in particular to deserve it at the expense of other more responsible people. I don't get why you don't see the unfairness of that. Life happens, people make choices and live with the ramifications of those choices. Made a bad choice -- tough noogies.
Not only does he want to tack on $1.5 Trillion onto the national debt, but future students will want their debt to be forgiven too.
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As a fiscal conservative, I agree with your position generally. However, in this particular instance, the combination of this being a false choice (I don't consider "get a lesser education and never allow your reach to exceed your grasp" to be a true choice), combined with the exorbitant cost of tuition being the government's own fault in large part, causes me to believe the government should do something to correct the problem.
How about making the repayments tax deductible? How about eliminating the interest on the loans? How about even allowing the interest portion of the repayment to be deductible (student loan interest has been deductible, but has a cap of $2500 (yay...), and is taken away entirely if you make over $150k). I pay tens of thousands into federal taxes for entitlement programs I'll never use, but I can't even deduct the interest on the education loan that made it possible for me to contribute that much into those programs.
At least some of those steps would make sense to most I would think. Is it smart for our country to want to profit on loans given to make our population more educated? I would say no, so 7% interest on government loans seems counterproductive.
It would have to be part of a complete overhaul of higher education funding to eliminate or reduce this problem in the future. We will never actually forgive all the loans, I get that, but there are some steps that should be taken (see above)
If you want to eliminate the problem in the future, you need to somehow convince the universities to stop spending so much money. Not only are they spending a ton of money building new buildings, but the maintenance costs are very significant.
I was on campus over the past few days. It just blows your mind in how much they are spending on things that have nothing to do with education.
You're correct, but I believe if the government stopped handing out seemingly unlimited funds for tuition, universities would be forced to scale those building efforts back. They're happy to do it now because the government has shown they'll give out however much the school wants to charge, so it's easy to find their projects.
OTOH they types of classes could be required to protect job, the professors. Not that just because something done in Europe is correct, most college programs in Europe are one year less than in the US, they don't take a lot of stuff not related to their major. Take Occupational Therapy, in many European countries this degree can be had with 3 years of college versus 5 to 6 in the US. They can practice for 2 years in Europe and pass the US boards and now are licensed OT's in the US. Think about that, 2 less years of college is 2 more years of making money.
Bingo. Free handouts to those that are not responsible enough to manage their finances are viewed as unfair by those that have made sacrifices and decisions over the years in order to remain financially secure. The mortgage crisis was one example, tuition and loan debt might be the next. Silly us, buying things we can afford. When do I get my free money for being a responsible person?
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anon_1eeb2b426hv3y
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(hopefully) Without bringing up a discussion about porn and that whole complexity of issues, I regret the struggles she must constantly face, both psychological and practical as she pursues her profession. The First Amendment gave her a choice with obvious upsides and downsides. I hope the upsides are worth it to her in the end. I know she made a choice and hope it was as empowering and positive as the spin many have applied to her story. But as a daughter's father, I really feel sorry for what she must go through day to day. Even if she's developed a tough skin.
Sorry for responding to that and risking opening another OT dialogue.
I worked in sales for one company that was full of people without college degrees, some of whom even had criminal backgrounds and were making 6 figures. There are high paying jobs out there for all sorts of different people and skillsets, you just have to work to find them. The world isn't going to spoon-feed those that are looking.
- HS students are being told they have to go to college despite many great opportunities in the trades and other areas. One of my best friends never went to college and ended up working his butt off in real estate and I could only dream of having his lifestyle.
- College students are being given loans like candy which they accept since they are told they HAVE to go to college. My daughter's friend constantly complains about her student loan debt despite the fact she chose to go to a private college. If I have $10 in my pocket I'm going to McDonald's and not Morton's!
- Universities can continue to increase prices since applications continue to increase each year (see #1) by applicants with access to money (see #2). This is basic supply-and-demand economics. It finally dawned on me how much cash universities have today when taking my younger daughter on a college road trip and seeing UNF had a lazy river in one of the dorm complexes and a beautiful outdoor pool in the other.
- The economy has been relatively stagnant the past decade which made the increase in education far out-gain the increase in starting salaries. I graduated in the mid-80s with a Mechanical Engineering degree from PSU that cost $16K and a job starting at $19K going to $23K after six months. My older daughter graduated three years ago with an Enterprise Risk Management degree from PSU that cost $112K and a job starting around $45K.
- Now you have $1.5 trillion in student loan debt with a good percentage not able to make their monthly payments.
Disclaimer: Like some previous posters, I have lived a frugal yet comfortable life. I live in a modest house, drive a car with 250K miles, pack my lunch every day and haven't taken many exotic vacations. These are values/traits I learned from my parents and do it so both of my girls can start life with zero student loan debt (6 years down, 2 to go). I am in the camp that if the government were to forgive student loan debt that I better be getting a 6-figure check in the mail.
To you and others against forgiveness, which I get, are you accepting of making loan payments a deduction? Zero interest? Making all interest payments deductible?
I don't even remember. I do acknowledge that the costs have gotten out of hand. But regardless of cost, anyone considering attending needs to do their due diligence and assess if the costs are worth the potential benefits. I did exactly that when I elected to enroll and that same thought process is relevant today. There are far too many students opting to go to college and take on massive debt in a major that has career prospects that will in no way enable them to pay off their loans. That is something that students can assess before ever deciding to enroll. They can estimate their cost of attendance and future earning potential ahead of time. But many enroll anyway and then afterwards it's all "woe is me!" and they act surprised at the situation they have put themselves into. These students absolutely share some of the responsibility for their dire financial situation.
Interest on college loan payments tax deductible ... absolutely.
I'm not in favor of zero interest, but would like to see better control over student loan interest rates. Implement a maximum of X percent above prime ... maybe around 2 to 3 percent above?! I feel terrible for the woman mentioned earlier paying 28% interest ... that is beyond ridiculous and more like extortion!
I think the $2500 maximum interest tax credit needs to be increased significantly, and I think there should be incentives created for early/additional payments.
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anon_1eeb2b426hv3y
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There must be a correction in the "market" (def a qualified term in this case) at some point and I've suspected for a long time that likelihood has encouraged the seemingly out-of-control increases in tuition, enrollment and investments in infrastructure. They're spending the money while it's cheap knowing there will be government intervention if/when that correction happens. They're also creating some extremely valuable real estate assets they'll be able to leverage when the time comes. And a lot of that growth is bringing in foreigners and foreign dollars which is advancing macro political and economic agendas. US-based education is a pretty hot international commodity right now.
And given the low cost of money and inevitability of inflation, it's a great move for them. At least until students re-calibrate their priorities re: four years of country-club living between childhood and adulthood. Until there's real downward pressure on incoming student bodies, why SHOULD they make a change (other than in support of the students they're supposed to be prioritizing)?
IMHO, the schools are making a good gamble on human nature.
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Way too many posts to read every one of them, so I don't know if this was already covered, but not everyone has to go to college to have a good life. There are many examples of this, but here is just one of them. One of my sons is a graduate engineer working in the construction industry. He specializes in the power plant construction group of his company and makes a nice living after his 5 years of college. The superintendents on the job sites are almost always non-college grads and were raised in the trades and earn significant six-figure salaries. Additionally, the tradesmen earn excellent money as well, and most of them have zero college loan debt with which to deal. As parents we tend to push our kids into going to college... if I had to do it over again, I might have offered them alternatives other than college. Two of my sons have paid off their college loans within 5 years of graduating as they have made a real effort to do so (both their loan totals were in the $40-50k range), one of my sons is currently going to school for engineering and blithefully racking up debt. One of my daughters has paid off about half her debt and one will likely never pay off her debt and she isn't really making any sustained effort to do so and is liberally hoping for the government to forgive the mess she has made for herself (I won't even mention the amount, but it is staggering).
As an example, here is a link to Construction Industry Service Corp list of wages and benefits for the trades...
http://cisco.org/wp-content/pdf/2017 Wage Guide Expanded.pdf
As an example, here is a link to Construction Industry Service Corp list of wages and benefits for the trades...
http://cisco.org/wp-content/pdf/2017 Wage Guide Expanded.pdf
That money you’re paying doesn’t go away, it is returned to the economy only through somebody else.the interest earned (from you) is taxable to the banks, or if paid to the government, reduces the deficit/debt. What about the people after you? Should they pay the full cost, or does their debt get forgiven too. Loan forgiveness doesn’t solve the problem-college costs are out of control
I don't know if it is better. It is different. Pros and cons for both. One of the cons for this system is that late bloomers need not apply. Also, it's harder for working class students to make it through this system--they tend more toward trades and the like. That's the opposite of our Land-Grant program which was designed, in part, to give blue collar American families the opportunity to "move up" educationally.
That's partly because their high school runs 13 years--at least in Germany. Also, remember that many European countries have mandatory military service, at least fr the men. They don't get out of school much earlier than US kids.
I think we've allowed a sense that it's somehow better to not work at jobs where your hands can get dirty. I know a lot of plumbers, carpenters, excavators, and electricians who make very nice livings who would say otherwise. Not everyone has to- or should- work in an office or sitting at their kitchen table.
