what if student loan forgiveness was just a political football that came around every 3 years like the debt ceiling but still always got done with much hem and haw? from the students pov it’s like universal access with more paperwork
That would be a very bizarre way to provide universal access, but if that’s where you were going with that I suppose it would be a step in that type of implementation.
In such a scenario, aren’t you encouraging schools to keep jacking up tuition and for students to take on as much debt as possible if they know they aren’t going to pay for it? Why not get a private apartment instead of a dorm room if it is going to be free in the end?
this is america.
the right way to combat private tuition rise is to provide a guarantee free to you costs for a state school degree at any point in your life. that sort of competition means that $50k/yr private schools would have to offer a lot more value, or reduce prices, or work out a transparency of costs such that federal government would fit the bill for a particular student.
That’s truly remarkable, considering the most enthusiastic are proponents of universal higher education
Nah, the most enthusiastic are the ones threatening to not vote over the “issue” and otherwise become single issue voters. The people who want universal college have bigger fish to fry.
I guess Riverman could be more enthusiastic than I thought
Someone can have many higher priorities than tuition debt forgiveness and still be much more enthusiastic about it than the single issue voters who will eventually retire in luxury with or without the forgiveness
That’s not reform of the means by which education is delivered. If tertiary education is ludicrously expensive because of structural problems in how it is delivered then “but what if we make the government pay for it instead” isn’t a solution.
If higher education is truly essential and a public good, why couldn’t it be rate regulated like a utility? It’s not actually a universal truth that price controls are bad.
The whole setup of higher education is mega fucked up. Absolutely absurd tuition that finds its way to administrators pockets and developers who partner with schools to build ever more palatial “student housing” to recruit full freight students. Meanwhile you have non tenured professors making like $20k. Fuck off.
And much like health care, our dipshit politicians, democrats included, have layered a useless (except to already rich people) tax incentive and called it a day. Hey assholes, a 529 deduction is only valuable if you’re paying lots of tax to begin with, and even if you manage to stash away $5k a year or whatever, a ton of money for a normal person, it does very little relative to todays tuition rates.
The whole reason Biden is in a position to think about forgiveness is the govt does a lot to find college: state funding for public colleges, need based aid, work study.
Nah, the reason Biden is in a position to think about loan forgiveness is the Department of Education administers Federal student loans. Also because an entire generation is in financial ruins because of this nonsense and is demanding something be done about it.
Isn’t it fun to pretend like everyone else is a moron
Hey everybody get a load of this obvious thing that people organizing for universal higher education had never thought of
Drives me nuts that a whole lot of problems that exist in America have been very much figured out by other first-world (and some third-world) countries.
The number of questions I get about America from my students that are answered by an elaborate version of “Because we’re stupid” is ridiculous.
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I think a better way of explaining it is that Americans have a religious conviction that their way is better than the rest of the world, and like other religions no amount of evidence is sufficient to overcome that faith. There are actually lots of objectively smart technocrats in the US, but the culture doesn’t permit for acknowledging that the Western European or Canadian way is better.
What do the rest of the first world countries do to provide free or mostly free higher education?. Let’s just do that.
Loan forgiveness is obviously a kind of band-aid that targets demographics that turn out to vote reliably. It’s an easy political move. Fundamentally fixing college costs is a bigger problem that probably requires an ACA-level of political will.
My goal was to do a good thing while improving electoral outcomes via strategic locations. More campuses would be great, but I’d be thrilled if any happened, let alone 3-4.
The problem is this plan would do two things Democrats hate doing: help poor people and make the country more liberal.