Student Loan Crisis

I didn't see a solution to the student loan crisis which would still let everyone go to college. Everyone says that education is too expensive, and it is.

 

I went with "Increase Grants" but what I meant by that is a bit more complicated.

What I really want to see is an Unconditional but taxable Basic Minimum Income Supplement paid out of five hundred dollars per month
to all three hundred and sixty or so million American citizens and legal residents.......

Then as this is paid out to ALL AMERICANS... I want to see the debt for this figure FORGIVEN
based on the precedent that I feel was set during the time of President Abraham Lincoln.


https://www.michaeljournal.org/articles/politics/item/abraham-lincoln-and-john-f-kennedy
(Melvin Sickler) :

In theory......
all of this could be financed by the Class Action Lawsuit that is brewing against China!

 

This is often true when federal government gets involved where it doesn't belong. Heck it happens even where it belongs. I prefer to leave banking to banks rather than the federal government.

 

If I had to pick between the two I would go for grants. The loan forgiveness won’t help the economy as much as grants would and it establishes a sense of dependency in our youth. We shouldn’t be teaching our supposed best and brightest college grads with a dependent view on life. It’s ethically wrong.

 

Do I detect a touch of satire/sarcasm?

 

Somewhat but not too overboard. Grants really do produce jobs. The economic impact of student loan forgiveness really is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. I would not vote for either but if forced to choose it would be grants all day.

 

I would rather do neither. Punitive measures need to be put against the schools that went crazy with the tuition.

 

I couldn't vote in this poll because there weren't nearly enough choices.

There should have been at least one choice that read something like, "The people who take out loans should pay them off -- period!"

To my knowledge, no one ever held a gun to anyone else's head and demanded that they take out a college loan...so (doh!). But, this is 21st-century America, where far too many people have great difficulty grasping even the most basic precepts....

 

Good timing by the WSJ today

‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off
Columbia and other top universities push master’s programs that fail to generate enough income for graduates to keep up with six-figure federal loans

Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.

Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.....

.....“There’s always those 2 a.m. panic attacks where you’re thinking, ‘How the hell am I ever going to pay this off?’ ” said 29-year-old Zack Morrison, of New Jersey, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in film from Columbia in 2018 and praised the quality of the program. His graduate school loan balance now stands at nearly $300,000, including accrued interest. He has been earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year from work as a Hollywood assistant and such side gigs as commercial video production and photography.

...Highly selective universities have benefited from free-flowing federal loan money, and with demand for spots far exceeding supply, the schools have been able to raise tuition largely unchecked. The power of legacy branding lets prestigious universities say, in effect, that their degrees are worth whatever they charge.

Julie Kornfeld, Columbia’s vice provost for academic programs, said master’s degrees “can and should be a revenue source” subsidizing other parts of the university. She also said grad students need more financial support...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/financ...hat-dont-pay-off-11625752773?mod=hp_lead_pos5

Oh course none of the schools can justify the tuition cost they just claim the solution is even MORE money being given to the students to pay the schools. Maybe some class actions lawsuits against these schools might be in order.

 

"‘How the hell am I ever going to pay this off?’ ” said 29-year-old Zack Morrison, of New Jersey, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in film"

Oh boy. Mystery solved.

 

It's criminal. I liken it to a get rich quick scheme. The schools are implicitly promising a certain return on investment and then not delivering. Also predatory lending means deceptively enticing people to take out loans they can't afford. Viewed through that lens, it would probably reach the level of criminality if the government itself were not complicit in the deception. Legal or not, it is morally reprehensible to put poor people into insurmountable debt while university administrators are making millions.