This would save young Americans from going into crippling debt, but it would also make a university degree completely unaffordable for most. However, in the age of the Internet, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t get an education.
Consider the long term impact of this. There are a lot of different ways such a situation could go, for better and for worse.
You may know everything, but no degree no luck?
Why not think a but further? Money for people that need it, free universities? Like… in the EU?
TFW Americans have an orphan crushing machine and have a full debate on the color of the machine’s knobs. 😨
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That’s not at all what OP proposed though. They want to keep tuition as is, just eliminate loans.
Not exactly. I’m saying that banning loans would lower the price of education, either through cost cutting by universities or by a new education system taking its place.
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Where does it say that?
Imagine if they made student loans illegal, with current tuition prices in America there literally arent enough people wealthy enough to afford to keep the schools full.
The schools would either have to close, or find a way to make attending them affordable. As it is they can charge an arm and a leg, convince people to take loans, its all someone elses problem in 10 years and the “someone else” isnt the school.
Better solution would be a cap on tuition imo.
But even no interest loans or at the very least let them be discharged in bankruptcy would be better than what we have.
It’s not the tuition, it’s the funding being cut by the states that’s the problem (for public universities). States used to fund universities significantly more than they do now.
It’s not the tuition? The same tuition that has risen 70% in the last 20 years? The same tuition that colleges know they can charge any amount cuz the government will give out loans regardless. That’s not the issue?
I’m not saying colleges aren’t getting less state funding but I just don’t see colleges lowering tuition if they got more state funding. They’d keep charging more cuz they know they can.
Completely nonsensical and screws everyone involved.
Student loans are supposed to be an investment the government takes in its population. If it works properly then the money that the government spent on the students tuition is both paid back monetarily by the student as well as societally because now you have an educated citizen providing ever increasing tax revenue. If you make student loans illegal you not only make it impossible for students to educate themselves beyond public school you destroy the entire post secondary school industry now that so few can afford to educate themselves.
What needs to happen is cutting out all the middleman bullshit and just making post secondary education free with your taxes, at least a couple years worth. If someone wants to be a doctor or a lawyer or someone who needs to have more than a couple years worth then sure that can be on their dime. Otherwise those first 4 years are just unnecessarily saddling people with mountains of debt that there is no guarantee they can pay back after they are done
Given the other massive catastrophic defects in the fabric of our society, making student loans illegal makes about as much sense as outlawing flat tires. The law you’ll probably write isn’t going to punish the people who need to be punished, and it won’t help the people you’re trying to help.
The loans in my country aren’t too bad.
It’s not a normal loan, it doesn’t appear on my credit checks.
It’s provided by the government and has low interest.
You only pay it back once you earn over a certain amount and they take a single digit percentage of your wages.
It’s more like a graduate tax as paying it off doesn’t matter, short of not wanting it taken from your wages.
I earn around double the national average and pay around 100 a month. Which isn’t a huge amount. Basically a decent meal out + drinks a month.
Let’s just make state owned universities and community/junior college funded by a tax on employers that require college degrees for their jobs with free tuition and free required learning materials. The issue isn’t the loans or the cost, it’s that corporations are lumping those costs on the employees and the corporations are reaping the benefits of an educated workforce without appropriately compensating their employees for their knowledge.
In my country loans are interest free. This makes them easy to pay off with destroying your life. You can also pause payments with no issue.
Loans can’t be free in a capitalist society. No one would offer them.
I presume that anywhere where interest-free loans are offered, they are offered by that country’s government. Canada, for example, as of April 1st 2023, offers federal student loans interest-free. Depending on the province, some may not have interest on provincial loans, as well.
That’s the only way it makes any sense.
with destroying your life
(͡•_ ͡• )
Sounds like he means work
I wouldn’t say outlawing loans solves anything. Capping interest rates, sure - probably even at a pretty modest figure. Making repayment reasonably flexible is also a good idea. But the underlying problem is that the tuitions themselves are insane, leading to insanity when trying to pay it all off, no matter how it’s financed. Subsidies or grants or loans (or specifically messing with any of them) seem like workarounds for the insane and largely arbitrary/“greedflated” price tag.
As a Norwegian, I paid maybe a couple hundred USD per year in pure fees - all my student loan practically went to rent (cheap at the time) and groceries (admittedly less cheap in Norway). Was it an Ivy League whatever-the-fuck education? No, it stank - but I got out into the world with a paper that said I could do work. And in geekier lines of work, even that might not have been strictly necessary, assuming you know the craft.
Chicken and egg. The tuitions have been able to reach the insane heights due to the ready availability of these loans.
It was a lot harder to get loans thirty years ago. Almost on par with the criteria for any other personal loan. A four year CompSci degree that could be had for under $25K, in total, opened the door to a $45K to $60K entry level position for a typical graduate.
Availability of loans broke wide open, under the guise of providing opportunity, and now the same degree costs 5-10x with yet the typical entry level salary remains more or less the same, give or take a few inflation points.
I would oppose it. It would make colleges far harder for most people and severely limit access to education. In the future yeah, I don’t want to see student loans being a thing (free education) but right now I could only see the effects of that being negative
Ban, no. Cap, maybe. Completely overhaul, yes.
- Any school that receives any public funds should make school completely free to all students with a permanent address in that constituency. If my tax money is going to a school, I shouldn’t have to pay tuition for my kids to go there.
- Students who graduate and are not offered (or are laid off or fired without cause from) a job that provides them sufficient pay and benefits to get them to 300% of the local poverty level should be forgiven each month’s payment for as long as they are in that state. Not deferred or paused, forgiven.
- Anyone who graduates and takes a job with a federal, state, or local governmental entity or nonprofit organization should likewise have their student loan payment forgiven for every month they are employed.
- Anyone who takes a K12 teaching position after graduation should have their student loans forgiven at a rate of one year’s worth of payments per month of teaching.
- Student loan forgiveness should be taxed at 0% in every state and nationally.
- Student loans should be capped at a total value that would limit repayment to 10 years, while allowing a student to maintain an income after repayment of 300% of the poverty line during that time. After reaching the cap, if the student is more than 50% complete with their degree, they should be permitted to complete that degree.
- Students who do not graduate, or who change their major partially through the program, should be able to apply the value of tuition already paid, adjusted for inflation, toward eventually returning to school; or pass that credit on to a child or other family member.
This is just off-the-cuff; I haven’t thought about the implications of all of these. But I think it would help significantly.
Not without destroying Citizen United legal premise first which I am also in favor of doing.
Right now spending money == free speech
Then giving loans is free speech, too. That is the the tackle.
Ah yes, let’s make getting an accredited degree something only the wealthy can afford, that’ll do well for the working class you betcha.
Class mobility is stagnant enough, I truly cannot see any upside to this for the vast majority of people.
Generally oppose.
We would need massive structural changes in education and funding before banning student debt; you’d need to make university free, and give students a living stipend while they were there, as loans usually cover living expenses as well. I can’t see that happening in the current political climate. So if we simply outlawed educational loans, the effect would be that millions of people would no longer have access to higher education at all.
The idea that you can learn things on the internet ignores the fact that the internet is rife with misinformation–i.e., bullshit and outright lies–and it allowed people to get into thought bubbles, which higher education fights against pretty effectively.
I want to add:
Most books have never been digitized. Most information that you would learn in college is still in books and not on the Internet. You can’t replace access to information (and reading that information) in college with lack of access to information (and thus not reading that information) online.
In addition, the Internet doesn’t give you access to passionate subject-matter experts who are necessary guides to help us travel down the path of acquiring the knowledge that they have. Sure, there’s recordings of MOOC lectures, but they become outdated and you can’t ask them questions or have them help you by giving useful assignments and answer your questions and give you constructive criticism.
If higher education is going to work we would do better to pay those experts (the poor teachers) a fair living wage so that they can focus on the quality of their teaching and not be desperately trying to survive and navigate departmental politics while hoping that bureaucratic administrators don’t cut the library budget (again) while dumping money into a new football field (why is sports part of college anyway? Why can’t there be a separate and unrelated sports-academy system for the sports people so that it’s impossible to misappropriate from academic budgets in favor of sports?).
Totally agree.
In addition, the Internet doesn’t give you access to passionate subject-matter expert
You can find them on Discord servers, message boards, and YouTube channels. But knowing who is actually an SME, and who has a great line of believable bullshit, is quite challenging. In a university system, you have a group of peers that are making that determination.
