I remember when the feds went into the student loan business, all of a sudden you needed a degree to be a janitor. I'm sure it was a coincidence. Also, coincidentally degrees became unaffordable without them and became useless for the most part.
If I may lend my gen x perspective to this, the push for everyone to go to college began when I was a teenager. Until then, you had two tracks in high school - one was "college bound" the other not. The term "preppy" came from this. If you were on the college prep track, you were a "preppy" and if not you were "normal". The preppy kids were considered the more erudite, elitist, rich kids that were thought of as the exception not the rule.
Sometime when I was growing up, "preppy" became less of an insult and more of a positive thing and school aged society viewed the non preppy kids as "less than". By the time I was a senior in high school if you weren't going to college it was considered a let down. That was in the early 90s.
I'm also GX, the rich kids parents paid for their college, the not rich kids worked and paid for college. It wasn't pushed or expected because you could get really good jobs without degrees. Once the feds got into the game that changed drastically.
Removal or reduction of the Government loan guarantee would fix that.
The idea that a women's studies degree would ever result in a career capable of paying back a six figure student loan is damned ludicrous.
Remove the guarantee and banks will start sending back loan apps for pie in the sky coursework with Burger King employment applications stapled to them.
Then within 2 years, women's studies Professors will be extinct.
Some of these worthless majors can actually lead to absurdly lucrative careers in BS "professions" - like diversity officers in colleges and mega corporations, jobs in ideological think tanks and interest groups, political jobs, academia, etc. You would puke like the possessed kid in the Exorcist if you learned what some of them are being paid.
All Democrats want to talk about is the funding side, NEVER the cost side. This goes for medicine as well as education.
There should only be one non teaching position for every 25 professors. That includes administration, janitorial, grounds maintenance, accounts payable / receivable, and every other position.
The number of bullshit departments and degrees should be wacked down to the basics.
The bullshit general "education" requirements should slashed. Nobody should be required to take Woke 101 to get a degree in engineering.
Why do they have so many empty fucking buildings? Increase classroom usage, flatten buildings, and lower your fixed costs.
No your athletics department doesn't "make money".
They don't have to do any of this because they can cry: "Invest in "education"", "it's for the children", and everyone lines up to throw money at the morons.
YES! The cost side is never discussed and that's where the scam lies. You have extremist liberal professors teaching the most useless Marxist garbage pulling in $100-400k. It would be impossible to earn this salary anywhere else and it's only possible because of government-backed student loans. No bank would lend money to a kid to study useless trash unless they had the assurance from the government that the kid's student loans are guaranteed by the feds.
The federal government should also mandate that the financial accounts for athletics departments are kept 100% separate from educational institutions. Schools could affiliate with athletics programs but they would be separate legal entities with separate accounting books. Since schools claim athletics make money so this shouldn't be an issue. Look, I love sports but it's ridiculous that students are paying thousands of dollars in student loan funds to finance multi-million dollar salaries for head coaches. It's disgusting.
Schools shouldn't be allowed to mandate that freshman live on campus. This is just a moneymaking con job by colleges and universities. They mandate that freshman have to live in $2,000+/month dorms for the "learning" experience.
Dorm buildings should not have elite luxury amenities. Going to school shouldn't be a 4-year luxury cruise. It drives up the cost and the schools get into an arms race over amenities like luxury condo buildings. The feds should require as a condition of federal funding that luxury amenities be banned or reduced. Tuition should never be increased because the school builds a rock-climbing wall and a golf simulator in a dorm building.
Grounds maintenance is also ridiculous. Schools spend MILLIONS on flowers and hedge trimming. Government funds should pay for exactly zero of that. It's nice to have a well-appointed campus but it should never come at the expense of impoverishing your students and financially crippling their futures.
The feds should also mandate, as a condition of funding, that school provide granular and precise job statistics for graduates. So many schools engage in this smoke and mirrors act about future employment that dazzles and confuses students (who really don't know which way is up or down -- they also don't understand that a lot of people get their jobs through family connections). If the school fails to provide sufficiently comprehensive statistics, they don't get federal funding. They can't just survey the 15% of their graduates whom they know landed good jobs. Every single student must be counted (and for some period after graduation -- maybe 3-5 years). If a student did not respond to this mandatory information collection, the school would need to detail (if it wants to accept federal funding) the efforts that were made to contact the student and any deficiency in reporting would have to be disclosed in job statistics. The job statistics would also have to be presented in a uniform, easy-to-read format that parents and prospective students could understand.
But yes, the "costs" are never discussed because it's not in the interest of these con artist colleges and universities that promise the world but only want tuition money backed by the government.
I also like what Australia does. I think students pay 10% of their income for up to 5 years after graduation, but they only pay the 10% after a certain income threshold is achieved. If a college's students aren't meeting the threshold and if tuition can't be paid off at a 10% rate over 5 years, the college is ripping its students off and should be shut down.
Of course, there is always the option to do something like Hillsdale where you don't except federal funding and you can do whatever you like. That's the best option but federal money is too easy to resist for most.
One of the things that truly pisses me off about the athletic departments, "make money" argument is their accounting practices. These major universities have billions of dollars worth of athletic facilities. That is an asset. What rate of return is the university getting for that asset?
In other words, if they have a billion dollars in facilities, it should be returning a market rate of 7%, or a 70 million dollar a year hole before they start. How many kids can be put through school on that annual 70 million. The local state school instate tuition is about 10 grand a year. That's 7,000 local kids tuition covered before the first ball is snapped, dribbled, knocked over a fence.
Excellent point. The education industry wraps itself in a cloak of virtue and professes to seek only the common good and betterment of its students. In all of modern history, this public perception of education's charitable purpose has protected the education industry from business accountability (really, social and political accountability as well).
The broadcast rights for top-tier athletics programs are also worth millions. Same with the athletic gear contracts (e.g., Nike paid the Ohio State $252 million to provide them gear).
If schools are raking in enough cash to pay Nick Saban $8.6 million to coach ~15 football games, why are out-of-state students forced to pay $30,000+ in tuition? It's really mindboggling and the injustice seems so clear.
Consider these numbers:
Penn President Amy Gutmann made $2,930,315 in 2017.
Georgia State President Mark Becker made $2,806,517 in 2019.
TCU Chancellor Victor Boschini Jr. made $2,644,209 in 2017.
USC President CL Max Nikias made $2,404, 232 in 2017.
Columbia President Lee Bollinger made $2,211,069 in 2017.
These education businesses would shut down immediately if the spigot of taxpayer funds was twisted off. Us regular folks have a huge chunk of our paychecks siphoned off for taxes and it pays for this garbage.
But anyone who questions this grifting operation is smeared as anti-education, anti-intellectual, anti-young person, anti-minority (even though there's good evidence that ludicrous tuition pricing disproportionately harms minorities), and so on. There needs to be accountability on the cost side of the education ledger.
Good points! My question is would they fund the science programs though or would they prioritize the liberal arts? And how much would they make it more about women and minorities, thus neglecting men and keeping men away from science programs? I guess I'd be skeptical that even if they were forced to prioritize they still wouldn't do it correctly (and unfortunately most kids going to college don't want to be in science programs).
If they self funded that shit, they would have no buyers. As the idiots that want shit like that live in mommas basement and have no credit unless the feds garantee the loan.
Definitely. Also, I think each Grant should be individually approved by Congress in open vote (or at least a list, once or twice a year). Not doled out by bureaucrats
This is something even the left should support. If they actually think student loans are as bad as they say they are, they would support common sense restrictions on how much the government will lend out.
But see, getting the government to pay for higher ed is just one more brick in the wall. They also want health care to be universally free.
"Free free free and everyone pays for it (except for MEE)"
Then they start cutting access to these "free" services like universal health care and higher ed so that it's harder to access unless you live in their urban centers, but the folks outside the urban centers are still paying for it.
I concur. Deny these schools any government funding, they will be forced back into a competitive free market. Most universities have become a poor investment, given the ROI
It certainly would take government out of the equation, which I guess would appease the libertarian crowd. But what about just implementing checks&balances that work to monitor the legitimized increase in student loans across the country?
Let's get rid of those liberal cesspool schools. Only invest in careers that will give a return in money. Let's put those women's studies profs on the street
The cost of the 4 year education should be: the mean salary that the average graduate (of that program) earns, in their 3rd year after graduating.
If you get an medical doctorate, an the average graduate from that program earns $130,000 in their 3rd year of their career, that's the maximum price
If you get a lesbian dance therapy degree - and the average graduate does meth and earns $15/hr from George Soros to burn down Portland - then the maximum they can charge is 1 abortion .
I love that Biden is now saying he'd forgive student loan debt, when he's the one who sponsored and voted for the law that makes student loans unforgivable in a bankruptcy.
This is true. I don't think the concept of college is bad in itself (it's been taken over by ultra liberal crazies) and no one should be saddled with a huge debt for going. That being said, you just shouldn't go if it's not going to be worth it. The cost of most colleges is obscene and being subsidized by the American government debt machine.
Better idea: charge back defaults to the schools. Imagine how bad it would look if schools were holding tens or hundreds of millions in bad debt incurred by their students.
Will never happen. It's like the Louisiana Purchase .. there were certain taxes built in to landline phones and the Bells that were supposed to be temporary and pay back for the Louisiana Purchase. To this day those taxes & fees have been renamed and we still pay it on our cell phone bills. As consumers we're accustomed to paying it so they keep charging it. Same with egregiously overpriced education prices and their $100Ms endowments
Somewhere I was hearing about Income Share Agreements (ISAs) where funding for tuition is repaid as a % on future earnings.
So both parties have aligned interest in having high future earnings.
Financers aren't going to want a large tranche of majors that don't have good ROI.
Imagine being a loan officer evaluating extending a 60k loan to someone. Do they have any collateral? No. Do they have any credit worthiness? No. Do they even have a job? No.
You wouldn't even meet with this person, the computer would probably turn down the application automatically because OF COURSE this person is a massive credit risk, in fact only a sucker would extend credit to a person like this - even with a massively inflated interest rate! Even with a co-signer you'd turn this person down.
Been saying this for 25 years. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement for the federal gov’t and higher education to enslave generations of young people. Every four years they are told if they vote for candidate X, some of their student loan debt will be forgiven.
Where is the best way to read the Federalist Papers. I tried listening on Audiobook but I just couldnt focus enough. I know they are online, but is there a best version? Or one that has some commentary on it.
I remember when the feds went into the student loan business, all of a sudden you needed a degree to be a janitor. I'm sure it was a coincidence. Also, coincidentally degrees became unaffordable without them and became useless for the most part.
And if they pass the free college deal, a bachelor's degree will become worthless as most job requirements will increase to master's degrees.
You are not wrong.
If I may lend my gen x perspective to this, the push for everyone to go to college began when I was a teenager. Until then, you had two tracks in high school - one was "college bound" the other not. The term "preppy" came from this. If you were on the college prep track, you were a "preppy" and if not you were "normal". The preppy kids were considered the more erudite, elitist, rich kids that were thought of as the exception not the rule.
Sometime when I was growing up, "preppy" became less of an insult and more of a positive thing and school aged society viewed the non preppy kids as "less than". By the time I was a senior in high school if you weren't going to college it was considered a let down. That was in the early 90s.
I'm also GX, the rich kids parents paid for their college, the not rich kids worked and paid for college. It wasn't pushed or expected because you could get really good jobs without degrees. Once the feds got into the game that changed drastically.
Removal or reduction of the Government loan guarantee would fix that.
The idea that a women's studies degree would ever result in a career capable of paying back a six figure student loan is damned ludicrous.
Remove the guarantee and banks will start sending back loan apps for pie in the sky coursework with Burger King employment applications stapled to them.
Then within 2 years, women's studies Professors will be extinct.
Some of these worthless majors can actually lead to absurdly lucrative careers in BS "professions" - like diversity officers in colleges and mega corporations, jobs in ideological think tanks and interest groups, political jobs, academia, etc. You would puke like the possessed kid in the Exorcist if you learned what some of them are being paid.
All Democrats want to talk about is the funding side, NEVER the cost side. This goes for medicine as well as education.
There should only be one non teaching position for every 25 professors. That includes administration, janitorial, grounds maintenance, accounts payable / receivable, and every other position.
The number of bullshit departments and degrees should be wacked down to the basics.
The bullshit general "education" requirements should slashed. Nobody should be required to take Woke 101 to get a degree in engineering.
Why do they have so many empty fucking buildings? Increase classroom usage, flatten buildings, and lower your fixed costs.
No your athletics department doesn't "make money".
They don't have to do any of this because they can cry: "Invest in "education"", "it's for the children", and everyone lines up to throw money at the morons.
Democrats [Communists] don't believe in money. They think it all just magically appears when you stop stealing labor from the proletariat
YES! The cost side is never discussed and that's where the scam lies. You have extremist liberal professors teaching the most useless Marxist garbage pulling in $100-400k. It would be impossible to earn this salary anywhere else and it's only possible because of government-backed student loans. No bank would lend money to a kid to study useless trash unless they had the assurance from the government that the kid's student loans are guaranteed by the feds.
The federal government should also mandate that the financial accounts for athletics departments are kept 100% separate from educational institutions. Schools could affiliate with athletics programs but they would be separate legal entities with separate accounting books. Since schools claim athletics make money so this shouldn't be an issue. Look, I love sports but it's ridiculous that students are paying thousands of dollars in student loan funds to finance multi-million dollar salaries for head coaches. It's disgusting.
Schools shouldn't be allowed to mandate that freshman live on campus. This is just a moneymaking con job by colleges and universities. They mandate that freshman have to live in $2,000+/month dorms for the "learning" experience.
Dorm buildings should not have elite luxury amenities. Going to school shouldn't be a 4-year luxury cruise. It drives up the cost and the schools get into an arms race over amenities like luxury condo buildings. The feds should require as a condition of federal funding that luxury amenities be banned or reduced. Tuition should never be increased because the school builds a rock-climbing wall and a golf simulator in a dorm building.
Grounds maintenance is also ridiculous. Schools spend MILLIONS on flowers and hedge trimming. Government funds should pay for exactly zero of that. It's nice to have a well-appointed campus but it should never come at the expense of impoverishing your students and financially crippling their futures.
The feds should also mandate, as a condition of funding, that school provide granular and precise job statistics for graduates. So many schools engage in this smoke and mirrors act about future employment that dazzles and confuses students (who really don't know which way is up or down -- they also don't understand that a lot of people get their jobs through family connections). If the school fails to provide sufficiently comprehensive statistics, they don't get federal funding. They can't just survey the 15% of their graduates whom they know landed good jobs. Every single student must be counted (and for some period after graduation -- maybe 3-5 years). If a student did not respond to this mandatory information collection, the school would need to detail (if it wants to accept federal funding) the efforts that were made to contact the student and any deficiency in reporting would have to be disclosed in job statistics. The job statistics would also have to be presented in a uniform, easy-to-read format that parents and prospective students could understand.
But yes, the "costs" are never discussed because it's not in the interest of these con artist colleges and universities that promise the world but only want tuition money backed by the government.
I also like what Australia does. I think students pay 10% of their income for up to 5 years after graduation, but they only pay the 10% after a certain income threshold is achieved. If a college's students aren't meeting the threshold and if tuition can't be paid off at a 10% rate over 5 years, the college is ripping its students off and should be shut down.
Of course, there is always the option to do something like Hillsdale where you don't except federal funding and you can do whatever you like. That's the best option but federal money is too easy to resist for most.
One of the things that truly pisses me off about the athletic departments, "make money" argument is their accounting practices. These major universities have billions of dollars worth of athletic facilities. That is an asset. What rate of return is the university getting for that asset?
In other words, if they have a billion dollars in facilities, it should be returning a market rate of 7%, or a 70 million dollar a year hole before they start. How many kids can be put through school on that annual 70 million. The local state school instate tuition is about 10 grand a year. That's 7,000 local kids tuition covered before the first ball is snapped, dribbled, knocked over a fence.
Excellent point. The education industry wraps itself in a cloak of virtue and professes to seek only the common good and betterment of its students. In all of modern history, this public perception of education's charitable purpose has protected the education industry from business accountability (really, social and political accountability as well).
The broadcast rights for top-tier athletics programs are also worth millions. Same with the athletic gear contracts (e.g., Nike paid the Ohio State $252 million to provide them gear).
If schools are raking in enough cash to pay Nick Saban $8.6 million to coach ~15 football games, why are out-of-state students forced to pay $30,000+ in tuition? It's really mindboggling and the injustice seems so clear.
Consider these numbers:
Penn President Amy Gutmann made $2,930,315 in 2017.
Georgia State President Mark Becker made $2,806,517 in 2019.
TCU Chancellor Victor Boschini Jr. made $2,644,209 in 2017.
USC President CL Max Nikias made $2,404, 232 in 2017.
Columbia President Lee Bollinger made $2,211,069 in 2017.
These education businesses would shut down immediately if the spigot of taxpayer funds was twisted off. Us regular folks have a huge chunk of our paychecks siphoned off for taxes and it pays for this garbage.
But anyone who questions this grifting operation is smeared as anti-education, anti-intellectual, anti-young person, anti-minority (even though there's good evidence that ludicrous tuition pricing disproportionately harms minorities), and so on. There needs to be accountability on the cost side of the education ledger.
Good points! My question is would they fund the science programs though or would they prioritize the liberal arts? And how much would they make it more about women and minorities, thus neglecting men and keeping men away from science programs? I guess I'd be skeptical that even if they were forced to prioritize they still wouldn't do it correctly (and unfortunately most kids going to college don't want to be in science programs).
If they self funded that shit, they would have no buyers. As the idiots that want shit like that live in mommas basement and have no credit unless the feds garantee the loan.
There are plenty of Americans who get science degrees. Most I know had to move into tech to be employed. There are no science jobs and floods of H1-Bs
At the very least, the schools should be forced to hold the debt. Not banks backed by the taxpayer.
Right. Why should taxpayers fund schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. that have billion-dollar endowments? It's a scam.
I have been saying this for 15 years. Make colleges compete for students and put real value into education.
1000% support this. Get government out of higher education except for actual research grants
Definitely. Also, I think each Grant should be individually approved by Congress in open vote (or at least a list, once or twice a year). Not doled out by bureaucrats
This is something even the left should support. If they actually think student loans are as bad as they say they are, they would support common sense restrictions on how much the government will lend out.
But see, getting the government to pay for higher ed is just one more brick in the wall. They also want health care to be universally free.
"Free free free and everyone pays for it (except for MEE)"
Then they start cutting access to these "free" services like universal health care and higher ed so that it's harder to access unless you live in their urban centers, but the folks outside the urban centers are still paying for it.
And there you have your vassal states.
Anything that the federal government gets involved with becomes extremely expensive and corrupt.
Like how Biden says the only way to manage the covid response is to create a new government bureaucracy to manage it at the federal level?
I concur. Deny these schools any government funding, they will be forced back into a competitive free market. Most universities have become a poor investment, given the ROI
While we are at it get the government out of home mortgage bullshit - unless it is to help veterans.
It certainly would take government out of the equation, which I guess would appease the libertarian crowd. But what about just implementing checks&balances that work to monitor the legitimized increase in student loans across the country?
Absolutely. It is the worst program and is the reason, the direct reason for skyrocketing college education costs.
Just going to drop this truth bomb here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXgCG50YoWs
Let's get rid of those liberal cesspool schools. Only invest in careers that will give a return in money. Let's put those women's studies profs on the street
The cost of the 4 year education should be: the mean salary that the average graduate (of that program) earns, in their 3rd year after graduating.
If you get an medical doctorate, an the average graduate from that program earns $130,000 in their 3rd year of their career, that's the maximum price
If you get a lesbian dance therapy degree - and the average graduate does meth and earns $15/hr from George Soros to burn down Portland - then the maximum they can charge is 1 abortion .
I love that Biden is now saying he'd forgive student loan debt, when he's the one who sponsored and voted for the law that makes student loans unforgivable in a bankruptcy.
There has NEVER been a market correction to the overinflated Big Ed machine.
This is true. I don't think the concept of college is bad in itself (it's been taken over by ultra liberal crazies) and no one should be saddled with a huge debt for going. That being said, you just shouldn't go if it's not going to be worth it. The cost of most colleges is obscene and being subsidized by the American government debt machine.
Better idea: charge back defaults to the schools. Imagine how bad it would look if schools were holding tens or hundreds of millions in bad debt incurred by their students.
This
Will never happen. It's like the Louisiana Purchase .. there were certain taxes built in to landline phones and the Bells that were supposed to be temporary and pay back for the Louisiana Purchase. To this day those taxes & fees have been renamed and we still pay it on our cell phone bills. As consumers we're accustomed to paying it so they keep charging it. Same with egregiously overpriced education prices and their $100Ms endowments
Somewhere I was hearing about Income Share Agreements (ISAs) where funding for tuition is repaid as a % on future earnings.
So both parties have aligned interest in having high future earnings.
Financers aren't going to want a large tranche of majors that don't have good ROI.
No, make the universities pay off the loans with their crazy billion dollar endowment funds
Socialist/Communist professors should not be allowed to be paid....I mean that is what they spew....live by it.
Imagine being a loan officer evaluating extending a 60k loan to someone. Do they have any collateral? No. Do they have any credit worthiness? No. Do they even have a job? No.
You wouldn't even meet with this person, the computer would probably turn down the application automatically because OF COURSE this person is a massive credit risk, in fact only a sucker would extend credit to a person like this - even with a massively inflated interest rate! Even with a co-signer you'd turn this person down.
Been saying this for 25 years. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement for the federal gov’t and higher education to enslave generations of young people. Every four years they are told if they vote for candidate X, some of their student loan debt will be forgiven.
Everything the government touches are absurdly overpriced: education, healthcare, military
Where is the best way to read the Federalist Papers. I tried listening on Audiobook but I just couldnt focus enough. I know they are online, but is there a best version? Or one that has some commentary on it.