Universities built palaces and financiers made fortunes in part through a lie: that student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy. But a series of court cases is helping unravel the scam
I beat a private student loan holder in court for something like $30,000. The loan had originally been with one of the big providers, but they later sold it off to basically a collection agency. That agency eventually sued me, and since I didn't have any money anyway, I decided to fight it in court rather than just submit.
Then I did standard discovery to ask for proof that I owed the Plaintiff the money. As it turns out, there was basically no paper trail of the loan origination, just a photocopy of a ledger that couldn't possibly be authenticated by the new note holder. Still, the collection agency Plaintiff persisted, until I threatened to counter-sue them for malicious prosecution after I beat them on the debt collection action. I still had to show up in court on the day of the trial, only to find out the Plaintiff had dismissed the case at close of business the night before.
Nicely done, Michael. I did the same thing with two alleged creditors who had purchased a block of bad debt and were just firing off a pile of lawsuits because *most* people either don't show up or they think they will need an expensive lawyer. They don't. All anyone needs to do is file the right paperwork in the right order and ask to see if the plaintiff has the right to sue for this amount.
It's fun, entertaining and relatively easy to just type up legal lined requests for discovery in return to theirs. The best part is that lawyers are people and as such... statistically they'll be less smart than you and you can make them look dumb in front of a judge.
Even the greasy smart ones only have so much leeway to bargain with. They even try to intercept you before going into the courtroom and see if you'll agree to some amount.
Pff. When they haven't answered the most appropriate questions?
This literally sounds wonderful! I almost wish I were in such a situation so I could try this. It appears you've found a crack in the legal labyrinth that normally bars any ordinary citizen from access to anything approaching justice.
I used to get people off in the NYC traffic court using similar tactics. I'd bring in a pile of evidence like pictures, diagrams, statements and such and the officers would bring in bupkis. The trucking company I was working for (doing claim investigations for an independent adjuster) would occasionally pay me an hour or two to do this because their safety policy involved firing drivers on first ticket. Stupid policy, but it gave them a mercy angle of trying to get their guys off. I never lost.
Congratulations! I can only hope that I would've had the guts to do what you did in a similar situation. This also echoes one aspect of the mortgage meltdown, in which records of sold-off mortgages were improperly transferred leaving no verifiable trace.
Thanks. I'm not sure it was "guts," as much as shoulder shrugging and "wtf, might as well." But it seemed like the Plaintiff's whole shtick was to make their victory seem inevitable, even though they couldn't prove it. I'm guessing they bought the debt for pennies on the dollar.
Thanks, I appreciate that. But I have a really hard time taking any credit, because the only reason I fought it was that I had taken so many life losses in a row, I literally had nothing else to lose. I get the sense it's the same kind of feeling some people had when they thought, "Fuck it, I'm voting for Trump."
I discovered the same action. Not due to my astounding intelligence, but merely because I had learned years previously that always request original documents to prove a claim. I suspect that many student loan borrowers today could benefit from this simple business practice. I am glad you posted your experience of that fact.
You can beat them. But they will learn from their mistakes. The typical way to deal with people like you is to respond to your discovery requests with tens of thousands of pages of almost relevant material; they bury the opposition with discovery. Then they file a Rule 8 motion for sanctions.
I'm a retired lawyer, and completely agree. Several times I represented defendants in actions by collection agencies on supposedly assigned credit card debt. The same thing happened - they had a ledger but no original documents. They had no ability to prove the debt really existed.
@Matt Taibbi, is it possible that what you observed were not evictions, but foreclosures? In many states, foreclosures are a court process. I'm told they're often done in a "rocket docket." Simply being foreclosed upon doesn't evict the former owner, however. The new owner of the home still has to file and win a lawsuit if the former owner doesn't leave.
OK, yes, Wikipedia tells me you reported on rocket docket *foreclosures* back during the 2010 housing crisis. Please, please, it's an important difference. Eviction plaintiffs aren't predatory institutional lenders.
@MattTaibbi I had to look up the term "rocket docket evictions," and I'm a landlord-tenant lawyer. Also, by "note holder," do you mean the owner of the rental property? That seems impossible, because the owner, or the manager for the owner, has to be the plaintiff in the lawsuit. Maybe in whatever state you witnessed this in, there's some eviction procedure other than a lawsuit?
I'm extremely curious, because in California, absolutely any defendant who gets an attorney and fights an eviction (and free defense attorneys are easy to get) can easily make the process cost $20,000 or more to the property owner. And even before COVID, it took a few months.
Might be something to look into in the context of private student collections. This ledger was so cursory, as you say, there's no way anyone could have identified who actually owned the note, or even where it came from. Someone could have easily just made it up. And Plaintiff had the balls to sign under penalty of perjury that this was the only evidence that my loan had ever existed. I'm very sure they were just running a boiler room operation to either scare people into settling, or get defaults where they could. There's no way they could have taken my case to trial with any reasonable expectation of prevailing.
This is how Lexington Law works, in case no-one has heard of them. They make shit on your credit report disappear for $130/month and it only take a matter of 3-4 months for them to provide results. The absolute best value in legal services there is. It's astounding, really.
I can't shake the feeling that the phrase “since Christ was a corporal” was either a deliberate play on/ pun (by some clever G.I.) of a different, "original" version--- or is the result of someone's garbled, misheard rendering of a different saying,---which I suspect went, "Since Christ was corporeal."
which I suspect went, "Since Christ was corporeal."
Dude. the problem with "you as a person" is that you think that coming up with these amazing turns of phrase is so easy, but then you need to inform strangers that you don't make them yourself because you can't be bothered to care. Man, I feel bad for the people that have to deal with you in life.
As Stephan Leacock put it, "Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself--it is the occurring which is difficult."
Or, "This would-be smoking gun proof of collusion took the news world by storm for days, as the Trump-mad press went blind with eagerness, like high school boys seeing their first boobs."
It’s a good line, but isn’t actually correct. The tranche is the class a, b or c note. The student was sued by the legal entity that is the SPV issuer of the note. It isn’t quite a catchy to say it’s like being sued by the LLC that owns the entire plane.
Other victims: People like me and my wife. It was clear to us 15 years ago that something nefarious was going on, but we paid sticker price and put 4 kids through college. Prices just kept rising. (Grants and reasonable loans were not an option). Thankfully, my 4th child chose a state university and spared us more brutality.
So we worked. And worked. And fed the beast.
So, how many years of retirement did we lose in the scam? I'd estimate at least 5.
But we're still fortunate. Our kids got a fresh start, debt free. I feel terrible for others. University leaders don't. They are all pigs.
One of the saddest things is the quality of the "education" that is being offered for an outlandish price. The often clueless products should sue for malpractice. Critical thinking is now racist, actual knowledge marks you as a elitist and out of touch with "the people." Really what are you getting for your $100,000. Even STEM courses are being corrupted by the WOKE set. It won't be long before we are a nation of "educated" morons who don't know what they don't know. And are very sure of everything they don't know. This massive education wreck will be a big part of America's slide into the sewer of stupidity.
So true. Sent two of my children to St John’s, one attended the Annapolis campus, one Santa Fe. Love that school!! Great books. Western civilization. Critical thinking. Recently they CUT their tuition so more students might be able to attend
I strongly considered St John’s when I was applying to colleges 15 years ago and often wonder how my life might have been different had I gone. I envy the students who emerge from their formative years with such a formidable reading list under their belts.
I was a 50 year old successful surgeon when I sent my first child. Thought seriously about taking four years off and attending. What a wonderful school. All I did at my “ University” was memorize and regurgitate. Since then I am self taught. As my beloved Twain said “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education”.
One of our friend's daughters goes to a big name university and he was livid when he heard that the 75k/year tuition included a class where she hugged a tree and wrote about. What the actual....you get the idea :-)
Did he transfer after learning this? I'm betting the answer is no.
I've been pondering what to do with my own children. I wonder if it is worth paying for a degree from an elite institution such as Harvard or Stanford vs. paying in state tuition at a top tier public university + 200k in cash (or at least not in debt).
You would win that bet. My belief at this point is that it is most practical to send your kids to a community college for the first two years so they can work out what they want to do and then transfer to a good school. I have been told that it is even possible to transfer into the elite schools doing that, but I have no direct experience of it so couldn't swear to it.
Laura you are on point with this. I waited some years to attend college because of cost. I attended a two year community college for a liberal arts degree, got straight A's and paid my way through with no loan debt, and in the end, had Cornell sending me letters practically begging me to attend their school. There are better ways to handle getting an education then sending teenagers straight out of high school to expensive colleges for sub par educations only to rack up debt they will never be able to pay back.
I’ve made this point before, but think it’s worth making again. There are no villains in this story. We are all just pigeons pecking the button that makes the food come out. If I were a university president I would have a praetorian guard of administrators, a giant endowment and define my job as one of having lunch with wealthy people rather than attending to grubby student needs. You can’t blame schools for doing the things that enhance their own institutions’ wealth, facilities and reputations. The problem is the unlimited credit flowing to the student.
I think that you are missing the very basics -- education (or health care, or social care or police or firemen) is NOT a business for profit -- it is a social service for future. In Cuba, China, Russia, or ALL European countries -- education is NOT - for financial profit....
We live in a kleptocracy -- at ALL levels; system is rotten.
Like most political divisions, I'm confident we both want the same outcomes, and only differ on how we get there, Boris. I know you believe that the state can be effective stewards of money and resources. I, on the other hand, think that profit is the more efficient way, which is not to say I advocate for an anarcho-capitalist society. I think that government is capable of allocating money for certain shared needs, like police, fire, infrastructure, basic education, and even medicine, BUT on a local level.
Even with Norway, the example often help up as the ideal for how it could be in the US, it is often overlooked that their pension system is privately run and their education funding works on a voucher system. It is a mixed economy, and I think it would be great if California, New York, or Illinois implemented something similar, as apposed to the nonsense they currently employ. Of course, it would also mean that other states could attempt other means of governance that make more sense to them. In doing so, we could all just vote with our feet, so to speak, and at a moments notice. Federalism is awesome like that! I've never understood the argument against such governance.
Norwegians are intelligent, educated, efficient and have a low acceptance for corruption. But even under the most favorable conditions state run enterprises do not work well. It could take 6 months to get a telephone to your house when the state operated the tele company. Before the health care reform with private providers, you could wait years to get necessary surgery. Most Norwegian politicians know that you need private companies to ensure low prices and efficiency. It's different when the government encourages universities to increase tuition, without care for students ability to pay back their debt. In Norway you get your student loan through a government agency, which puts a cap on the amount of money you can borrow. The average debt is about $50 000 for a masters degree. The interest is pretty much the same as in banks. Also your debt is forgiven if you lose the ability to work. Unis and colleges get funding from the state, and are audited to prove that they that spend money according to regulations. In a small and fairly transparent country it's easier to keep things in check.
You and I are very similar in this thinking. It is the unnatural incentives throughout our society that create such distorted conditions and behavior. If the government started to offer subsidized loans for automobile purchases, where no credit checks were performed and no thought given to their ability to pay it back, there would be a lot more Ferraris and Lambos on the road, and Honda Civics would cost 50k. And I wouldn't blame the consumers or the dealerships.
Similarly, I don't blame people for not wanting to work when the government will pay them not to.
I don't blame people for leveraging their grievances for money, attention, and power.
I don't blame people for rioting and looting.
I don't blame multinational conglomerates for using the law to pay virtually zero in taxes.
I blame the government for allowing, if not outright encouraging, this behavior.
I blame the drunk divorcees that are the DNC and RNC for their one-upmanship in buying the affection of their children (constituents), rather than being good parents (leaders) who enforce boundaries and responsibilities that facilitate lasting growth and maturity. Doing otherwise produces...well, *this* - a drunken family of miscreants willing to knife their siblings in the back for a better seat at the table.
We agree about unnatural incentives throughout society being the primary driver of our ills more than the bad apple theory, but unless I am misunderstanding your list I only see one side of that equation in the failed accountability mechanism you mention. That doesn't necessarily mean you are not aware of the other side of that list. There is no requirement that everything be done in pairs.
Hmmm, I'm not even sure of what dichotomy you're referring to actually. It's a short and broad list meant to highlight left/right and poor/rich factions. I suppose I could have added several more examples in the way the wealthy exploit, but now I'm wondering if you're referring to something else I'm missing all together - do tell.
It's probably me guilty of projecting my own thoughts on to what you wrote the same way whenever someone writes anything derogatory about a Reps or Dems there will always be someone to respond "well what about x!"
For instance:
"Similarly, I don't blame people for not wanting to work when the government will pay them not to."
vs
Similarly, I don't blame those people on the bottom rung who are routinely treated like absolute dog shit by their employer and regularly told "well if you don't like it, leave" taking them up on that offer the moment they got the chance.
"I don't blame people for rioting and looting."
vs
I don't blame the police for using the minority who were rioting and looting using that as an excuse to attack the peaceful protestors when they know they can simply point to some broken windows and graffiti at the end of the day and they know the public will call whatever the did to the peaceful protestors justified, rather than asking why didn't you arrest the rioters and looters and let the peaceful protestors go on with their protest.
"I don't blame multinational conglomerates for using the law to pay virtually zero in taxes."
vs.
I don't blame people who can't afford accountants to offshore their money and play other tax games for being outraged when they are raked over the coals by the IRS for making an honest mistake within our admittedly convoluted tax system.
"I don't blame people for leveraging their grievances for money, attention, and power."
vs
I have no opposite corollary for that one. Those people are annoying.
Well, the money flows to the schools with no let or hindrance (Students saddled with lifelong debt? What? I can't hear you.) and ever-less attention is paid to the educational needs of the students. This is somewhat villainous, isn't it?
I do have some sympathy for the administrators in that they have to deal with the problem of employing so many ill-educated midwits as professors, but still...
Funny you say that. I think sociopaths excel in leadership positions in part because they aren't as bothered by lying, and that's a necessary trait to be an effective leader.
I hope this blows up spectacularly in the face of the Educational Industrial Complex. The whole thing stinks - from the absurd tuition expense to the thought police that troll the campuses these days.
I did my schooling in Canada over two decades ago when it was still reasonable. I'd never participate in this scam today. This is one of the myriad reasons why I am glad to not have kids of my own and fear for the futures of those who are here. Its such an injustice.
Actually, EIC is probably closer to the mark than you think. The vast majority of the US college system was set up as a Cold War program by the USG - specifically the 1958 NDEA. This was not the only investment into higher education the USG made in the early Cold War era. The original requirement for student loans was a loyalty declaration ala McCarthy, disavowing the violent overthrow of the federal government.
One stated objective of this system was to get specifically trained defense employees. I assert an unstated goal was indoctrinating the students in what the government wished them to believe. I'm remembering the rather famous poll that indicated that the post-Tet support of Vietnam was highest in college graduates, and grew higher depending on educational achievement. This depicted the indoctrination even in an era of student protest.
The collusion with government and serving government purposes never ended.
Blows up indeed, not least for the authors of a horrific paper I read a while ago purporting to compare explanations for the unseemly rise in tuition over the past few decades. Basically, "Too much free money!" vs. "Just the natural rise in the cost of doing business".
This is absurd on the face of it, but the guys were getting paid so they tortured their data until it screamed that whatever the truth was, you COULD NOT say it was just greed and an open spigot of taxpayer money that caused the increase. It was amazing.
Kind of beautiful, in its way. Like a hyper-realistic painting of a dog turd in grass.
With for-profit trade schools, that is kind of the way it works. They are selling you a skill which is presumed to be useful and should get you a job. But with a university, the purpose of an education is historically, supposedly, your own betterment, with no specific promise of employability in any given field.
Of course, on the other hand, you're being told that you need a degree in order to get a job. But it's not the universities which are telling you that -- it's all the media and political system.
Not entirely. The businesses are telling you the same thing. If you want a well paying job outside of the trades, try getting one without a degree. I have a friend who went into sales with a huge consumer products company without a degree 30+ years ago. He rose to be the head of sales for about 1/3 of the US until the company was sold and he was let go. That was 2 years ago and, despite 30 years of experience and high performance, he can't get a job in sales making close to half what he was making. The universal impediment, so he is told, is his lack of a degree. It's all about risk aversion. If the person has the credentials, you can't be criticized for hiring them.
SO true ! I retired from IBM Boise during the early nineties. With a college degree in other fields, I had taken night school classes at what were then called Computer Programming Schools. Six months, you were out the door. You were by no means a *programmer at that point, but you had all that you would *need, bcuz *every company had their own "shop standards" which they would teach you without being asked.
Computer programmers worked then in two fields. They were either glorified bookkeepers, (me) or they were Scientists. Hint: Scientists don't *hire computer programmers. Scientists *become computer programmers, just as a side gig to their daily job. A programmer cannot instruct a computer to do things that the programmers themselves do not comprehend.
The modern exceptions, of course, are App developers who, likewise don't need a four year degree, all they have to have is a programming language,
the ability to CODE, and what is (hopefully) a KILLER idea. (Many more ideas are duds, than are "killer" of course. ) The helpful education there is a background in electrical engineering.
So, new rip off. At one time I was sent from my employer over to the local University with instructions to "meet" with the Computer Science department. This was still in the 1980s. Turns out my employer wanted to *convince The University that they needed to start offering a 4-year Course on Computer Science. No programmer has USE for a 4-year Course in Computer Science. HALF of what you learn is *OBSOLETE by the time you graduate, and you could have built up three years experience in the *field in that time. You could burn up a year on the *history AND learn all of the coding of computer science, but that is IT, Max. No one is looking to hire you to *build Big Blue from a box !
By the time my employer filled me in on the "plan", I had been programming at what was called the Systems Analyst level for years. I was expected to "invent" a 4 year Course in the days when almost all phones were still landlines.
I was *doing this work every day. Not one programmer I knew working anywhere had a 4 year degree in Computer Science.
The only thing I could do to advance would have been to *become a scientist and have the "jump" of knowing how programming works.
Lets just say, I took early retirement in 1991. The whole thing was insane.
By the end of the nineties, I could not have had a job sweeping UP at the office of my former employer, or at any other Hi Tech job. By that time EMPTY and WORTHLESS Four Year degrees were *required by ALL APPLICANTS ! Only the Old Geezers knew that you will never NEED a 4 year degree ! You need to learn how to code, just as you need to find a point of balance on a bicycle. After THAT, you simply learn by *doing. On-the-job experience. Not another three years practice before you take off the training wheels.
But now, you *will damned-well *have a 4 year computer science degree,
or you will not enter the field ! And to those in the field, that just somehow "makes sense" ! No, it is just another scam that the work force has swallowed !
Do we imagine that scientists themselves take a four year computer science degree learning to code? NO ! They learn how to code in about six weeks MAX and they are on their way. To them, it is a Tool, not an ersatz career !
The original CS depts. were a hodge podge of people and not a discipline..that's taken a while. Yes, you would have been teaching them. One (not-to-be-named) university was teaching students to use "word" and calling it a CS degree in the 1980s.
In 1964 I went to a computer school for five weeks. After that I seemed to know about as much about how to write programs as anyone around. You had to have a degree for work at a university, because that was their thing, but anyone else would hire you if it appeared that you could do the work, as many relatively uneducated people could. To give a basic idea of the work, one day I went in to the office where I worked (for Honeywell) and was given a four-page engineering summary of how a drum they were selling at the time was supposed to work. (Predecessors of disk drives, etc.) After I read it my manager said, 'You are now the world's leading expert on this drum,' and sent me to a place that had bought one. I must have made something they liked happen, because they kept the drum. It was like that until around 1980, when they academia recovered control of the field. That didn't improve the level of the work done, but management liked it because they could say they had done the right, credentialized thing.
O I remember that early on (in libraries) we created home made online catalogs & we all learned basic programming (FORTRAN) then companies created "turn-key" systems and we were out and CS degree ppl who never knew what smart people like you understood created opaque systems not as good.
Precisely. This is just how "business bloat" settles in. It does not improve the product, it adds time to getting out the work, but, people like to hope the *degrees impress buyers. And, of course, if your competitor has bells and whistles that you don't have (IT people with 4 yr degrees), you start thinking about an IT crew made up of people with Phd Degrees. Easy to see that all of that extra money will have to load down the eventual price of your product, but you hope it impresses people, or ideally that it lands you a Government Contract where cost overrun is a "feature, not a bug" ! ;-D
Web development is like that now. The schools haven't captured it and I doubt they can - it changes too fast. By the time they get a curriculum together, the standards have galloped forward. If you are not an autodidact, you can't keep up. It's an insane learning curve.
This is NOT true, about entry points now. You can do a multi-week coding boot camp and start. Lots of people do it. I was talking with a friend of mine with an Ivy degree in CS and he said people around him do it right and left. He doesn't think his CS degree did very much for him. You just need a first job and after that it's up to. But hey he's just some 26-year-old guy in Silicon Valley making 265K a year.
When you read the original comment, did you notice it was referencing the 1980s ? Did that somehow cause you to extrapolate the original to the 2020s ?
But, yes, thank you for the update to today. What I was illustrating is how it happens that jobs which do *not require 4 yr degrees can be *made to "require" 4 yr degrees, just as a matter of setting up the scam between corporations like IBM and some "Country College" in Idaho.
Now, perhaps you can see how the original comment had nothing whatsoever to do with the "26-year-old guy in Silicon Valley making" X per anum, although I am certain that we are all thrilled for him as well.
I suspect someone making $256k a year is doing something beyond mere boot camp coding, because a lot of people can do the coding, and a lot of people want $256k a year. There might be just a bit of competition.
That’s crazy. I know multiple company owners that would give their left nut to hire a proven salesxir without a degree. I know I would. In sales you rarely are going to be promised the same pay level you had before. You have to prove yourself at every new job.
The inverse here -- as MT details in his article -- is that having a college degree can disqualify you from menial work that may be your only means of subsistence. Basically, don't stray outside of your assigned class. A BA or BS has come to be little more than a class signifier.
I actually haven't read that one, though I took a dive into Vance's work a few years back. Strangely, motivated by Gygax' bibliography in the 1st edition AD&D DMG. He was a huge fan, obviously.
Appendix N is a vast resource for anyone who hasn't already read all of Appendix N. I wish that Jack Vance had also written more realistic tales in the vein of Paul Bowles or Patricia Highsmith, but I'm also not Jack Vance, who is dead.
He might take a page from probably 30% of the resumes. Inflation is not only an economic issue. Many, many resumes are as fake as Tammie Fays eyelashes. Never checked or if writer is smart they claim degrees from schools that have closed or merged and can't be verified. This is a big problem with foreign students coming here and claiming skills and degrees that do not exist. I once got stuck with two individual who claimed to be statisticians with University degrees. Both could not do high school math and had to be dumped. Of course they sued for discrimination.
HAHA. As a grad student at a semi-prestigous engineering school, my advisor gave me the job of sifting through (literally) hundreds of resumes from prospective grad students from China. Almost all of them were #1 in their class at one of, like 6-7 well-known colleges in that country. It was laughable.
"But it's not the universities which are telling you that -- it's all the media and political system."
A fair enough point as it stands, but don't the universities benefit from what the media and political system say a young person "should" do in order to live a non-jailable life?
I admit the analogy is not exact, but it's sort of a good cop/bad cop routine. The various systems of power are in cahoots with each other, wittingly or not.
Well, of course. Of course as you they they are all in cahoots. All I'm saying is that the university itself doesn't have to be making those promises -- everybody else is doing that promotion for them.
I remember when Bush started this. It was around the same time he started pushing for minority home ownership which culminated in, with the help of the Dems in Congress, the housing bubble and crash.
There would have been no crash, at least for the economy as a whole, had home loans, not all of them of dubious quality, and not all "minority", not in turn been securitized, then had multiple naked credit default swaps placed on them and had the ratings agencies not called shit, gold.
It had been previous practice for the ratings companies to be paid a subscription fee to independently rate various securities, but that all changed, and they began to be paid on an individual basis to rate a particular security for a particular firm, the understanding being that a low and accurate rating would result in no business for them.
The book, "Al The Devils Are Here" does an excellent job of examining the 2008 crash, assigning blame where it belonged.
To be fair, lots of professions protect themselves with all sorts of credentialing requirements, which may or may not be useful, and college degrees are prerequisites.
So the message about college is being sent by the labor market.
We would all be better served if apprenticeships were more widely honored.
We're quibbling over words, of course. The college is certainly interested in its ratings in US News & World Report, and can cite the salary surveys results from its alumni. But the college is not making you any promise that you will earn a starting salary of, on average, $85,347/yr. It is in no way advertising a return on investment. What your actually salary will be depends on YOU. The colleges are letting the culture make that advertisement for them, in a manner for which they cannot be held responsible. That's how the game works.
That’s amazing: the schools will provide the education and not stand behind their degrees. Next up, Corporate America will not stand behind their products - all warranties are herby extinguished, you’re on your own folks.
I think the widespread religious belief in credentialism goes back quite a way before the modern university; maybe to the Middle Ages. When I was a teenager in the 1950s I remember questioning my elders who had been through higher education what they had actually done in college and how it related to their present life and work, and was impressed by the vacuity of their answers regardless of the fields they had entered. However, the fact that the Education Industry can do this does testify to their skill in marketing.
Yes, put the schools on the hook as lender. You’ll see real fast which degree programs they believe are worthless in the market because they won’t fund students seeking those degrees.
There is a very good reason the Founders called for uniform bankruptcy laws ahead of the power to raise an army and declare war in the US Constitution. This student loan scam is precisely what they were worried about. Regardless of the outcome of the various cases now winding their way through the courts, the bigger truth is that one line of federal code, 11 USC 523(a)(8), must be repealed, and hopefully it will be soon.
Student loans should be treated in exactly the same manner as all other loans in bankruptcy proceedings.
The only problem with just returning bankruptcy at this late date is that it will likely compel tens of millions of people to file (around 80% of all borrowers were never going to be able to repay their loans even before the pandemic).
Not sure if we want to force 20+ million people into bankruptcy for the crime of going to college. Probably better to just cancel the damned loans at this point (this could be done largely without needing any money from Treasury, and without adding anything to the national debt). Take the lending system to the bath, drown it in the tub.
Read up on the Daniel Shays Rebellion... It preceded the end of the Articles of Confederation and the adoption of the Constitution. The rebellion was triggered by debt collectors going after Revolutionary War Vets who had gone into debt because they were off fighting the war, many of whom never got paid for their Army service.
Cannot recall where I read it, but a very large population of the folks who rioted in the Capitol have money problems. Would love to see Matt dig into that deeper. How many had student debt issues? How many lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis?
History might not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.
The little party had it's start in a town close to me -Shirley, MA.
Most of the Rev War vets were out in the western part of this state farming and the banks showed up and started taking land back, kicking people off of it.
Andrew Jackson rode a wave of populism through that period the the oval office.
Are you actually conflating the "Shays Rebellion" with the behavior of the Jan 6th demonstration and vandalism of the Capitol, and of all places, in the midst of a pleasantly non-partisan discussion about a topic that our host seems to have carefully chosen to engender "Common Sense" and mutually respectful understanding.
Leaving the Jan 6th thing out, which is current and partisan, the Shays Rebellion was a pretty interesting bit of history that has been misrepresented to modern audiences, if they are even aware it happened. It's not completely orthogonal to a discussion of crippling student debt.
Indeed the not so subtle distinctions between debts owed by students through government sanctioned agency and debts owed by government to citizens for services and supplies rendered in military service are "not completely orthogonal"; but they are both equally questionable.
You might be surprised. The hardest hit states are southern, red states. States like Texas, Florida, both Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Indiana (and more) owe MORE than their entire state budgets in student loan debt. Also: 40% of everyone who goes to college never graduates. According to Pew, around 55% of people with "some college" identify as being either republican (43%) or independent (12%). So...there are probably a lot more "MAGA student loan scam victims" out there than will admit it publicly!
"MAGA students" is a dumb term and has NOTHING to do with student lending or students from Southern states who choose to attend university. This is not only dumb, it's defamatory.
Maybe so. But, it's still an ugly, divisive slur. I am heartily sick of all of the name-calling and labeling going on. And, I'm a liberal. It solves nothing and exposes the speaker as a shallow thinker who needs to use this kind of tactic to make a point.
That's very true. Student loans are the ONLY type of loan in this country to be uniquely excluded from the same bankruptcy protections that every other borrower for every other loan enjoys. My only point was that conservatives hold a tremendous amount of student loan debt, generally. These loans do not discriminate...Conservatives everywhere should be aware of this before wagging their fingers at the borrowers under the false assumption that they are all liberal. They aren't. Not by a long shot.
People who repaid their loans in years or decades past should be glad to be done. This is no longer their problem. TODAY, the reality is that over 80% will never be able to, and that is climbing quickly. The default rate for subprime home mortgages was 20%. We are looking at a default rate for student loans borrowers TODAY of something like 4X that amount.
Your question is like asking: What about all the people who had to repay SBA loans? We just doled out $1 Trillion in PPP loans that don't need to be repaid. Should we give them their money back?
If you want to talk about "fair", there is NOTHING FAIR about the federal student loan system. Now, it is catastrophically failed, and whatever your opinion on the fairness of it all, the loans WILL be cancelled, one way or another. Certainly they WILL NOT be paid.
I don't think student loan cancellation is unfair to people who've already paid off their student loans, it's unfair to those who didn't go to university at all. Statistically people without a college degree will earn less over their lifetimes to a tune of, what, some one million dollars? They'll also have a shorter life expectancy and will be walled off from certain opportunities, no matter how bright they might otherwise be. How is it fair to these people to say "you can't be a part of the club, but you have to pay for it"? No, I don't think student debt cancellation is okay. I would support the idea of free secondary education going forward, but not retroactively. Imagine working in an Amazon warehouse and shitting in diapers because you didn't have the scratch to pay for college. You spend the day boxing expensive luxury items to send to some white collar asshole doing WOF for $100,000 a year. That asshole suddenly becomes even richer because he no longer has to pay off the debt he accumulated while working his way into the professional class and now Amazon has to invest in a lot more suicide booths for their employees. Totally unfair.
ps. You also grossly mischaracterize student loan borrowers. 40% never graduated. 100% were determined to be financially needy as a precondition for getting the loans. 80% did not have the financial wherewithal to repay the loans even before the pandemic. The most successful borrowers refinance their loans OUT of the federal program and into the private market, so won't benefit from federal loan cancellation.
The sub-prime home mortgage default rate was 20%. The default rate for everyone walking around with student loan today was going to easily be 75% even before the pandemic. That you are trying to paint these people as elitist, entitled, etc. is despicable.
I challenge the 100% financially needy thing. The college knew my salary and my financial situation otherwise from my FAFSA. I could have paid cash - salary in the low $100s. In 2011 I still got offered something along the lines of $10k a year in federally guaranteed student loans, which I took and refinanced outside of the system after I graduated. I'm paying the last $2k of a top balance of $18k off by mid '22.
The whole point of the FAFSA is to determine financial need. You didnt consider yourself needy? Great. You refinanced your loans out of the system, which is what financially successfull federal student loan borrowers tend to do. So you would never have benefitted from federal loan cancellation.
First, the "college grads earn $1 million more" is a very dishonest stat. You could similarly take a poll, and find that people who took sailing lessons earned (probably) $2 million more. You could do a study and find that people who took polo lessons earned $3 million more. To say that a college degree caused that is very dishonest inference.
You want to talk about FAIR? Was it FAIR that we freed the slaves, when millions had spent their entire lives in bondage prior to 1865? Was it FAIR that we distributed insulin to the population when millions died from diabetes prior to 1922?
More to the point: Was it FAIR that 43,000 millionaires and billionaires received, on average, a $1.6 MILLION pandemic stimulus? What about the small businesses who didn't have the wherewithal to make it through the PPP application process? How is it fair to them that their competitors got all of this loan money that doesn't need to be repaid?
What about people who don't own small businesses? Was it fair that we just doled out $1 Trillion in FAKE LOANS to these businesses to the people who never started businesses? By your logic, this is unfair.
Was it FAIR that Congress weaponized the student loan system by stripping away Constitutionally enshrined bankruptcy protections UNIQUELY from student loans? Was it FAIR that Congress also stripped statutes of limitations from student loans? Fair Debt Collection Laws (also gone from student loans)? Truth in lending laws (also gone uniquely from federal student loans)?
Fair. Lol.
The lending system is catastrophically failed. No one is paying right now, and very few people will every pay again. That is the REALITY. You should inculcate that. If it makes you feel good to wag your finger at the people being crushed by this debt (over half of whom are over the age of 35, and many who have had their entire adult lives crushed by this big-government debt trap), then have at it. Wag away.
The reality remains: This lending system is finished. There is no saving it, and there should be no saving it- particularly to correct some imagined unfairness in the minds of people who never even took out the loans.
What is particularly poisonous about your argument: It serves only to defend and perpetuate the worst big-government, college-enriching, socialistic (some would argue), unconstitutional, lending SCAM in US History. Do you really want to be on that side of this argument?
If you think about the whole student loan system as a huge inflationary bubble created by the government, which it demonstrably is, the real losers here are anyone who used their own money to pay for college at all. Why not use the funny money instead and keep the debt rolling till you croak? Can't extract blood from a corpse. Well, you can, but it'll make you sick.
You may think that this debt enslavement mechanism is funny, but it's not funny to the 45.4 million people who are being wrecked by it. You can argue all you want, and as flippantly as you want to keep it rolling, but it isn't going to happen. The pandemic is the nail in the coffin of this lending system. It will evaporate via popular rejection if nothing else.
That's ridiculous. Millions of us are still paying our own way today, and it is not remotely decent to argue that such unequal treatment should persist.
I'm not down with any "solution" that in no way penalizes the schools for enriching themselves and wasting the money on things other than their purported "mission" of educating their clients.
Work out some way for the schools to give up some of their ill-gotten gains and I'd be a lot more comfortable with "debt forgiveness".
I'm more than happy to see the universities be put on a massive diet, and get some of their ill gotten gains clawed back. Frankly, I would like to see the government completely out of the lending business. But that's just my opinion, and open to debate. What is NOT open to debate: The lending system is in catastrophic failure. The loans WILL be cancelled, one way or another. The loans WILL NOT BE PAID. So, I'm not selling a solution here, so much as I am just stating a fact. The lending system is finished. It is vanishing into a mist of illegitimacy as we speak.
The bad thing about Stein and Hawkins' student loan cancellation proposals was that they felt compelled to "pay" for it. This is just nonsense. 87% of all student debt was already "paid for", and is now owned completely, by the taxpayers. There is no good reason for the taxpayer to have to cough up far MORE money AGAIN to pay what turns out to be far more than twice (when you factor in all the interest, and other additions to the loans).
But yeah: The Green Party was all over this going back, even, to 2012. Way ahead of their time.
Michael Hudson, "Killing the Host" would agree with you and even outlines how debt jubilees have been a feature in past civilizations. Haven't finished his book just yet but so far I find his arguments compelling.
According to George Packer (2013). The Unwinding, an inner history of the New America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. pp. 348. "In 2005, with the help of Democrats like Joe Biden and Chris Dodd and Hillary Clinton, Congress passed a law restricting the right to file for bankruptcy."
The cruelest irony, here, is that the lending system is a big-government, college-enriching beast that no true conservative should support. But in Congress, it is the republicans who bend over backwards to defend this lending system, and oppose all efforts to, say, return bankruptcy protections to the loans. They are now losing important statewide elections because of their position (like Georgia, where 1.7 million voters hold enough student loan debt to buy every farm in the state twice...and still have $15 Billion left over.
But it's not just Georgia. Over a third of US States now owe more student loan debt than their entire state budgets, and most of them are red, republican states like Florida, NS Carolina, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, etc...
Republicans should be calling for an end to this monstrosity. They are doing the opposite.
Oh make no mistake, the dems are fully onboard with it. They LOVE the lending system. It's really sort of a "good cop, bad cop" ruse. The only problem is that with republicans wearing the "bad cop" hat, they are now losing elections because of it. True conservatives should be calling both for loan cancellation, but also an end to the government being in the student loan business. GOP'ers in Congress are doing neither of those things, they are just wagging their fingers at the borrowers, and now it is making previously solidly red electorates flirt with blue, and even flip blue (Georgia being the first high profile example). This will get much worse for the republicans in Congress if they stay on this path. Dems are sitting in the catbird's seat.
Great analysis. I'm not a conservative, but realized about a decade ago there are about as many actual conservatives in this country as libertarians (perhaps 1-2 million) and 10's of millions of conservatives who belong to that brand of conservatism with different rules depending on your class. The Democrats play a similar game. I think you summed that up well.
Again, this statement is just incorrect (...and dumb, unthoughtful). Both parties are to blame for the monstrosity of the system. Moreover, liberals run most of these institutions and teach in these places and have no interest in halting the gravy train.
There is plenty of evidence to the contrary for this across multiple industries. Most are getting crushed in the woke area and are using their actual valuable endeavors to prop up the insanity for purely ideological reasons. Just look at CNN. If it was a stand alone business it would have gone bankrupt years ago. But since AT&T makes billions doing other things they prop it up. Ditto for the major sports leagues and Hollywood. All are in a freefall when it comes to customer numbers, yet they are doubling and tripling down on the things costing them money. There is no long game here. They know wokeness is a loser and they don’t care.
These are nearly all wealthy elites, plus some tokens, and their main difference will be whether they love most Hillary or Romney, and Harvard is I mean Harvard, that is pretty much the least conservative board of trustees you can find. The list from Chicago is basically hedge funders, and that from Dartmouth is bankers and businesspeople with a couple of tokens.
It cannot be otherwise: trustees are as a rule the big donors or people connected to the big donors.
It sure as f*ck doesn't sound like "Fat Cats, Inc" or "Oligarchs-R-Us". Matter of fact, it actually DOES sound like a bunch of lefties. Rich lefties, to be sure, but that's the worst kind.
Actually it does. They hire whatever sells. With an entire generation of narcissistic nihilists too drug addled and incompetent to do the math on a loan, much less look up what vocations pay, the Marxist pseudosciences are a gold mine and no brainer. Their huge cash reserves and endless tax payer handouts given by criminally corrupt politicians prove this.
* a Democrat from Huntington Woods ... appointed by President Obama in March 2011 to be an attorney-advisor to Secretary Janet Napolitano at the Department of Homeland Security. ... Regent Acker joined his family business, Goodman Acker P.C., in 2013, where he practices law and is responsible for the firm’s business development.
* a Democrat from Grand Blanc ... president and owner of the law firm of Behm & Behm.
* a Democrat from Ann Arbor. ... president and managing partner of The Sam Bernstein Law Firm, PLLC.
* a Democrat from northern Michigan ... a managing partner of eLab Ventures, a venture capital firm headquartered in Michigan with offices in Silicon Valley.
* a Republican from Okemos
* a Democrat from Bingham Farms. ... was the president of Ilitch Holdings, Inc., a privately held business that manages Little Caesar Enterprises, the Detroit Red Wings, the Detroit Tigers and Olympia Entertainment.
* founded McKinley Associates Inc., a national real estate investment company, in 1968 and was its chairman and chief executive officer until 2001. From 2001-05 under President George W. Bush, he served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Slovak Republic.
* Master’s degree in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College. ... Professor of Law at the Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. In addition, she is a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army National Guard currently serving as the Deputy Commander of the 46 Military Police Command in Lansing, MI.
Do their friends know all these people are closet lefties? :-)
What makes you say they are "closeted"? Are you saying rich kids, investment bankers, fund managers, etc., can't be lefties?? It would explain a lot, as so many actions of the .01%ers are best explicable as eruptions of irrationality caused by an excess of cognitive dissonance.
Or do the dollar signs next to the names cause some knee-jerk identification bias? An outdated bias, if so.
I'm not saying they're committed to, or even understand, anything about leftist ideology. So assign the label "leftist" as you will, but to say these people fit some 50s Fat Cat Chamber of Commerce stereotype, or monocled-and-top hatted old money Republican archetype...neh, not so much.
(This could just be a definitional argument where the core disagreement lies with the word "leftist").
Conservatives are people who want things to not change much, for example, Biden ("Nothing fundamental will change") and Obama. The Democratic Party is basically a conservative institution which has not moved for any significant changes in Federal policies since the days of Lyndon Johnson (old New Deal, endless war, etc.)
Well, the kind of conservatives who are conservative about liberal values and principles are _supposed_ to favor individual freedom, but then you have to consider the numerous self-described conservatives who wanted to conserve Jim Crow, or religious tests, or the Drug War, and so on. So that makes the word ambiguous: you have to know what the conservative wants to conserve. Biden and company want to conserve their powers and privileges, which may, as you note, require the reduction of someone else's, but then so do a lot of other people. When I refer to the Democratic Party as conservative, I'm also noting that their plans and policies haven't changed much over recent decades.
Why would I need to consider the views of people who no longer exist? Jim Crow, in any case, was an invention of the democrat party. Perhaps you weren't aware Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in face of opposition from the Democrat Party so fierce, it led to civil war.
I like religious tests. I like my religion. It informs my conscience and I vote accordingly. Christianity freed the slaves.
Conservatism isn't ambiguous. You're just desperate to change the subject. When you refer to the Democrat Party as conservative you're electing to be indiscriminate.
I am amazed that some folks imagine the business people running these university education-like operations to be liberal lefties. They’re some of the most hypocritical money grabbers imaginable.
To be fair, the trustees are in it for the bon mots and kudos. The admins are very good at pulling the wool over their eyes about what really happens on campus.
«To be fair, the trustees are in it for the bon mots and kudos. The admins are very good at pulling the wool over their eyes about what really happens on campus.»
That ridiculous handwaving is welcome given how warm it is. But trustees tend to be ferocious sharks of finance and business and sometimes politics, so not so easy to fool them, and they are sharks of business and finance because they are the big donors, or represent the interests of the big donors, and if the universities try to do something out of line, they stop donating and most universities cannot afford that.
You know, if *by definition* hypocritical money grabbers are automatically assigned to the conservative label, that's just an arbitrary assignment you are making.. You do know that, right? 2
Where did I assign a label beyond characterizing university administrators as hypocritical money grabbers? You seem to be manufacturing an argument having nothing to do what I wrote. You do know that, right?
They used to have the Graduate Library School (but closed it). I went there. Depts are quite insular and one could attend w/o being aware that John Ashcroft, Cass Sunstein, Ahmed Chalabi and Saul Bellow were there,too.
Go look at the economy of Chile once Pinochet took over and in the years afterwards and compare it to every other country in South America. Chile is a dazzling success.
I think you may want to reexamine the ideology of the Fortune 500 types that sit on these boards. You won't find near the number of conservatives there used to be.
«the ideology of the Fortune 500 types that sit on these boards. You won't find near the number of conservatives there used to be.»
It is hard to imagine that among hedge funders, Bush/Clinton administration officials, university presidents, CEOs, judges, etc. there are many neomarxist critical race theorists... :-)
Your almost homonym, Gore Vidal, from the insider Gore political dynasty, agreed with you:
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party [...] and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently [...] and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
Actually there are three wings in USA politics:
* tradcon supporters of nationalism and business and lower middle class interest as a minority in the Republicans (Perot, Buchanan, Trump).
* neoliberal supporters of globalism and finance and real estate property interests as a majority in both the Republican and the Democratic parties (Romney, Clinton).
* socialdemocrat supporters of business and lower middle class interests as a minority in the Democrats (Gabbard, Sanders).
There are explicitly conservative institutions out there, and they don't seem to be much cheaper than the liberal ones. Liberty University, for example, costs a little under $23,000 a year, which puts it smack dab in the middle of the average for public and for-profit private institutions.
For comparison, UC Berkeley, a college known for its radical leftism, is around $18,000 a year.
Totally right. Liberty U LOVES the lending system. The only college who seems to be above all of this is Hillsdale, the only college I am aware of that doesn't take federal loan money.
The federal government has also played a role in the obscene cost of college as it has subsidized the cost, which invariably caused tuition to rise. Tuition now funds things totally unrelated to the schools mission such as plush spas and other exotica to keep the kids happy and there for the long haul. Thus the cost of education has grown at about three times the rate of inflation.
Student fees pay for big name speakers that few students attend but the lecture circuit is a big give back to lots of people. Take a look at the "Speaker Series" on most any campus. These fees get rolled into students loans.
Don't forget that higher education is a class filter and thus a site of extracting class-based wealth, or rents. In addition, the student loan industry, being mostly protected from bankruptcy proceedings, places the borrowing student in a false, rich-person's class position long enough to run up an unpayable debt.
Among a rational people, the present Education Industry would undergo a radical, fundamental review of the ways in which it functions as compared to how it is supposed to function or we want it to function. The four-year liberal arts degree and the analogous degrees in science and engineering were originally designed as a sort of finishing school for upper-class gentlemen, hence everyone's degree followed four years of study, regardless of its content, because the recipe called for marinating the student for a given period of time to make sure he quoted the right authors and used the correct accent and got to know the right people. In those days, you weren't there unless you were already upper-class, so the class-filter function of today was not present, but the class indoctrination certainly was. We probably don't need this today. Some people have suggested that fields where competence is crucial should have certification tests based on the competence required, regardless of how and where it was acquired.
Yeah, about that last bit. The pedagogic shibboleth today is that "teaching" is an art that competence in other fields does not bestow. Nor does intelligence, empathy or communication skills. The only thing that makes on a fit "teacher" is a degree from an Ed school. And membership in the appropriate teacher's union.
This belief is entirely false and entirely self-serving. Teaching is certainly a skill that can be acquired or improved, but the "Ed School" and "teachers' union" parts are entirely unnecessary and the whole thing overlooks how effective people who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about their field can be as teachers.
Shes from Florida, which (at the time of her application to colleges) offered the most generous state scholarship in the country - 100% of tuition if you have a ~3.5GPA and ~28 ACT, neither particularly high. Or 75% tuition (100% to community college) if you have a ~3.0 and like 25 ACT. And the University of Florida is one of the top ranked public schools in the country.
Are college ridiculously overpriced? Definitely! Are student loans predatory and, especially for government backed loans too high of interest rate? For sure! Did the girl in this article have to go to college in NYC, when she could have gone somewhere in Florida for free?
Similiar to the story in the WSJ about the people in debt from the Columbia masters in film. "No shit, why did you choose to go there, for that degree?"
Part of the problem is that people now have a prolonged childhood, and make the very adult decision of how much money they should be borrowing when they seem to lack the maturity for it. There are lifelong consequences.
Interesting fact: The total state budget of Florida is $80 Billion. The PEOPLE of Florida owe nearly $120 Billion in student loan debt! Ron DeSantis should be calling for loan cancellation, and the end of this big-government lending monstrosity. This is the truly conservative thing to do. The lending system should be taken to the bath, and drowned in the tub.
I'm agnostic on that question, but I think it's pretty clear that the government shouldn't be in the student loan business. Probably better to directly fund schools at lower, reasonable levels (put them on a diet), and cut the terrible schools out entirely. Let them disappear. People who use the public subsidy for college can pay a special tax that is reasonable, probably based on their income or something.
"the terrible schools"? Why am I not surprised you have some targets in mind for the negative consequences of your campaign? Which schools do you have in mind for "disappearance", Alan?
Two things we can be certain of: 1) The colleges will not fix themselves; and 2) Lawmakers won't fix them.
The solution will have to come from the demand side: employers and students having less value for college degrees. If the demand dries up enough, some schools will take their rightful place in the trash heap; others will be forced to compete for students by offering better value. We can hope.
The article and many of the other posts point this out: just make it so that the student loan debt isn't (1) federally guaranteed and (2) protected from bankruptcy
you will take the artificial inflation of "free money" out of the market and you can get funding for education just fine - but lenders will be paying attention to who to actually lend to in order to get paid back. Yes, there may have to be a further iteration to prevent abuse of bankruptcy laws by graduating students. Likely there's another solution needed but it ain't the one they came up with so far, which is causing huge problems.
«<i>employers and students having less value for college degrees.</i>»
There is an enormous supply of good graduates in several offshore countries, and USA employers are largely fed up with the "unaffordable" salaries demanded by "lazy, uppity" USA graduates, unless they are "creative geniuses" from a top 10 university.
All great info, but did you check the ACT scores of the college she actually went to to see if it was likely she met those requirements? It would have taken you far less time than writing that did to see that she likely did not.
if you have to travel 1000 miles+ away to get into a school, then maybe you shouldn't get into debt to go to school. theres nothing wrong with not going to college.
Sorry, I may have misunderstood but I thought your original point was claiming that she could have gone for free, and I was saying she couldn't and that the point you made was unfair and incorrect.
This is one of the subjects about which your reporting and writing have been absolutely fantastic, but in this case the really big hat tip goes to Victor Juhasz for that utterly hilarious illustration.
I literally felt sick to my stomach as I read this article. I'm so glad I was young back in the 1970s instead of today.
Colleges like every other institution in our country have turned into a money-grubbing, self-serving scam. When I attended an ivy league college fifty years ago, tuition, room and board and fees cost less than $4,000 a year. Now tuition costs twenty times as much -- a whopping $80,000 a year. Yes. I know the general cost of living has risen during the past half century. But it merely tripled. It didn't metastasize the way college tuition did.
And what exactly do you get in return for those inflated dollars ? Many on the faculty are poorly paid adjuncts, barely surviving on $3,000 per course. Much of the money is siphoned off for the bloated administrators including the woke mobsters who oversee the useless and dangerous programs that promote CRT, transgenderism, and other horrors.
This IS the kind of subject that also gives me, @ age 73 cause to celebrate my age. Some markets truly have gone crazy. One thing that did not exist in our youth was a thing called "Citizens United", containing Looney Tunes concepts such as "Corporations are *people"
(then, by that logic, '57 Chevys must *also be "people") and MONEY in Congress is "Free Speech", not LEGALIZED bribery. ( and "War is Peace", etc. etc. we know the lines from Orwell's "1984"). We have LAWS that would make children laugh, and this entire system DARES to expect *respect ? Respect is not *demanded, respect is *earned.
Even our currency is just "funny money" now. When I came back from SE Asia in 1971, the *average cost of a house in Portland, OR for a family of four, was $18,500. I split rent with another Veteran on a nice two bedroom apartment for $55 per month each. I had a labor job paying $3.83 /per hour, and even with the lifestyle you expect of a young veteran back from war, I never *had so much *disposable income ! I partied like a madman, and *still had money left by the next payday ! By the time I went to College on the G.I. bill, life was still an economic "cake walk". Those were days when young people really *COULD "work their way thru college" ! Many of my fellow students did ! (Amazing to me to figure out - when did they ever *sleep ?) Bless the G.I. Bill, I had plenty of study time, and plenty of sleep.)
One of the major changes I have seen in my life since that time was the way that all U.S. businesses (business used to be defined as capitalism, returning a 10% profit. I know, how "quaint" is that ?)
There were millionaires, but not ten to every acre, and NO Billionaires. Suddenly, during the 80's, everything became GREED ! VULTURE CAPITALISM ! Part *was driven by the increase in population, but ALL was driven by GREED ! Gordon Gecko: "Greed Is good"
and sadly the entire Globe went wild from there. Suddenly, businesses could not compete with SCAMS. Giant, Global Scams ! Honest Mom & Pop operations went away with Opie's Mayberry. Suddenly business, far from "doing well", had to *KILL. And *shame was left to the animal kingdom, who have no reason for it.
Oh well, that is *my comfort during these times of boilerplate insanity in every corner. The fact that I am soon "outta here" in terms of the Third Dimension. This *will correct itself eventually, but I am just *weary with the boring, repetitive madness in the meantime.
Yes. Fifty years ago life was good, and we expected a better tomorrow. We never sensed that tomorrow would become the Black Mirror dystopia we exist in today..
Does the New York Times Corporation have freedom of the press? It's a corporation. By your logic they wouldn't. I think perhaps at your 73 years of age, you've not thought things through.
As a Vietnam Vet *and a person against the Vietnam war, as many of the troops, including the officers *were, I will share with you my "short answer" to the question "What did the Sixties deliver that lasted." It delivered the END of the Vietnam War, which NO president *knew how to END, because no president had the *slightest idea of why we went ! (Ask the CIA - they know. Ask French Intelligence - they know.). Lyndon Johnson *had to know that Gulf of Tonkin Resolution bullshit (excuse to go to war) was just that ! (We now have the *proof that it was bullshit.) If you seek *answers rather than mudballs to throw, watch the Ken Burns history "The Vietnam War". It is *not a political poop paper, it is history.
The OTHER thing The Sixties did was to FINALLY destroy the "herd mentality" that *so effectively *smothered the Fifties ! The white picket fence, Stepford wives CONFORMITY of the Fifties. You had to live it to KNOW it, bcuz even B&W TV mostly lies about it.
Yes, during the Sixties there WERE hippies in Golden Gate Park in 1967 who "burned out" there. Infinitesimal scrap book slice of the Sixties. Barely a "passing thought" anymore, or even then.
That is like the five blind men trying to describe the Elephant.
Oh, says the first as he embraces a leg. The elephant is most like a tree.
Not so, says another who grabs an ear. The elephant is most like a blanket.
You are both deceived, says a third who grabs the trunk. The elephant is most like the snake. All incorrect says the fifth man, who grabs the tail. The elephant is most like a Rope !
The BIG PICTURE of the SIXTIES was almost impossible to grasp by those who LIVED IT, and was only slightly comprehensible, as most things are, *mostly in retrospect. The further the distance in time, the more sense finally emerges regarding these things.
The "hippies" morph into the U.S. Anti-War movement. The Anti-War movement STOPS the U.S. prosecution of the Vietnam War by 1974.
Our fathers had WWII. Our Grandfathers had WWI. My generation had Vietnam. Of the three, ONLY WWII was a War that *HAD to be fought. It was our LAST legal war, in that it WAS declared by Congress.
It was not some Presidential Flim-Flam that was illegal, and so could not even be *called what it obviously WAS ! The "Korean Conflict" was not officially a "war", it was a "Police Action". The Vietnam War was not a "war", it was officially called "an armed conflict". No Shit ? Isn't that just a LOT *LIKE a WAR ? What with the 58K dead American Troops, and the well over Two Million dead Asians of ALL walks of life? In every way *Except the fact that those "actions" were NEVER legally called for by the ONLY branch that our Constitution GIVES the right to Declare War? The United States Congress.
History always swings on a "Pendulm". The arc of any Pendulum only stays in balance, in stasis, for a couple of seconds when it points straight down.
The Anti-War movement STOPPED the Vietnam War, and the representatives of that generation heavily influenced U.S. Policy in Congress for at least Thirty Years after that. Then, predictably, came the *backlash from the Right. The pendulum once again swung *back. The Fifties "belonged" to religion and Right Wingers. The Sixties and much of the Seventies belonged to the Left. The Eighties saw the Right Wing return with a *vengeance, and so it goes like two riders on a seesaw. It is a CYCLE, like the weather, not a permanent freeze.
What gives me a giggle is to listen to Right Wing Radio STILL freaking out about that handful of hippies in Golden Gate park. The Right pretended NOT to be afraid of Nuclear War with the USSR, but a few vans full of hippies STILL has Right Wing Radio "wetting down its leg" 55 years later ? Yes, because Hippies represented CHANGE from that hardcore conformity OF the Fifities. The Hippies v.s. The Hardhats as the "battle" was depicted at the time.
This, my statement, will have to be proven again and again long after my time is over in this life. This cycle has BEEN in place since LONG before recorded history. It is ancient, and truly, it is BEYOND boring by now. There is no perfect "right" or "wrong". There are just Shadow Games of Cycles. Read (do not google)
Plato's description called "The Cave Analogy" from Plato's work "The Republic" written almost 2,400 years ago by now. Do *NOT abuse yourself with an online summary, because ALL online summaries are written by people TOO IGNORANT to understand Plato even as they *read him, if they ever do ! Read it in the Original, and if you STILL don't *get it, then you may not be *ready for it yet. Plato describes a Shadow World which represents people in 3-D. Those people either *evolve out of that world, or they spiritually "ascend" and transcend that world. That explanation has not "slipped a cog" from that time to this.
«Nixon and his gang were properly evil, not just card sharks like Trump»
I once read a comment by an australian about their far-right prime minister, saying that at least the american presidents like the Bushes were proper dark lords whose strategic decisions could make the world tremble, while the australian prime minister was a deluded pissant hollering without much anybody listening.
Gotta love it. Unlimited lending with no underwriting standards, generally to people who are unemployed. What could go wrong? The NY Fed did a study a couple years back that showed that for every additional dollar of student loans made available, colleges raised tuition and costs over $.70.
Thank you for bringing this subject to light. Beneath the level on which you're reporting are far more dastardly deeds than those you are recounting, including government's willingness to throw students and their families under the school bus. The thicket began growing in the 1970s and will be worse tomorrow than it is today.
Indisputable is that the cost of post-high school education has soared at many times the general rate of inflation. Since 1995, the CPI has risen 114%; college and university costs have fattened by more than 498%. Going back to 1969, my senior year, public institutions have increased in cost by 3,009% versus 559% rise in CPI. The reason it grew so much faster than other costs is simple supply and demand.
In the long-term struggle between proponents of equal opportunity and proponents of equal outcomes, the "outcomes" side has scored a knockout punch. We acknowledged in the 1960s that education was the great leveler, and saw that people with college degrees earned more than those without. The situation was misunderstood by government, which concluded that if everyone had a college degree then everyone would earn higher wages. Wrong conclusion.
The complex economy of the U.S. needs few people with college degrees and always has. If only one out of 50 employees needed a college degree to perform his work, awarding college degrees to the other 49 wouldn't change the education needed to perform their jobs. The rapid technical advances of the last 150 years have done away with most job, meaning that where once 50 people worked to execute a function in 1870, today only one or two are required. This is nowhere more evident than in agriculture: In 1870, 75% of the US Labor Force was engaged in farming and ranching. Today, with vastly improved crop yields, sturdier and more capable machinery, and greater reliance on technology, less than two percent of the US Labor Force is required the feed the nation and much of the rest of the world. Perhaps two people on each family farm needed to know how to read, write and perform basic arithmetic functions in 1870. Today's industrial farmers and ranchers need college degrees, but there are very few of them. Fewer as a percentage of the workforce than needed basic literacy in the past.
Having failed to understand the role of education in the labor force government set about to get everybody a college degree, and poured more money into higher education. With more money available to pay for the same product, prices went up. As prices rose, government poured more money into the pot. We still need most most of the engineers graduating college, but that's a relatively low number. What we don't need in the economy is more intersectional aromatherapists. We may need them culturally, but if it is necessary to cross a stream I want an engineer on the team, and we'll advertise among the baristas in Starbucks to get a PhD aromatherapist when actually needed.
Meanwhile, we have a shortage of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, surveyors and others who can keep the lights on. Social shaming of people who skip college is both decadent and wrong.
There is a need for both. The problem is that not everyone has critical thinking and/or reading comprehension skills. Some people learn by doing. Others achieve by ruminating on large abstract problems and developing elegant solutions.
Forcing people who really can't read or comprehend what they read to take liberal arts curricula is no different from making someone without fine motor skills pick up a painter's palette, or making a tone deaf person play the trumpet.
It's the same with trades. If you can't tell the difference between a 1/8" and a 1/4" brass fitting, or don't understand the concept of freeze/thaw cycles, you probably shouldn't be in the plumbing business.
The whole debate is like watching Washington DC play with an infant's toy and try to stuff the triangle piece into the circle hole.
My wife's brother is an elevator mechanic, probably the top of the trades because he has to be top-tier in every one of them. He joined the union 47 years ago straight out of high school. He drew an hourly wage until about twelve years ago when he was hired into an executive position with one of the major global manufacturers. He rarely travels more than 40 miles from his home or office, has never attended an opera or ballet, will never know the exquisite pleasure of multi-level analysis of Finnegan's Wake.
He dedicated himself to becoming an expert elevator mechanic. When necessary he has worked around the clock to get hospital elevators up and running, or to restore service to incredibly long subway escalators, or just to put people at ease as an elevator rescue takes place. He has always made more money than I, and I'm glad he's well-off. We have nothing in common except the important things, such as long successful marriages, raising children who contribute to society as much as to family, and a dedication to using what skills we have to share with our neighbors.
He got his son into the union - this was one of the many guilds that required relationship to a member to join, with disparate impact on minorities. That's being corrected. He had to work far harder than I to learn his trade; my B.A. was in beer. No need for a four-year degree.
I beat a private student loan holder in court for something like $30,000. The loan had originally been with one of the big providers, but they later sold it off to basically a collection agency. That agency eventually sued me, and since I didn't have any money anyway, I decided to fight it in court rather than just submit.
Then I did standard discovery to ask for proof that I owed the Plaintiff the money. As it turns out, there was basically no paper trail of the loan origination, just a photocopy of a ledger that couldn't possibly be authenticated by the new note holder. Still, the collection agency Plaintiff persisted, until I threatened to counter-sue them for malicious prosecution after I beat them on the debt collection action. I still had to show up in court on the day of the trial, only to find out the Plaintiff had dismissed the case at close of business the night before.
So yeah, you can beat them.
Nicely done, Michael. I did the same thing with two alleged creditors who had purchased a block of bad debt and were just firing off a pile of lawsuits because *most* people either don't show up or they think they will need an expensive lawyer. They don't. All anyone needs to do is file the right paperwork in the right order and ask to see if the plaintiff has the right to sue for this amount.
It's fun, entertaining and relatively easy to just type up legal lined requests for discovery in return to theirs. The best part is that lawyers are people and as such... statistically they'll be less smart than you and you can make them look dumb in front of a judge.
Even the greasy smart ones only have so much leeway to bargain with. They even try to intercept you before going into the courtroom and see if you'll agree to some amount.
Pff. When they haven't answered the most appropriate questions?
I don't think so.
This literally sounds wonderful! I almost wish I were in such a situation so I could try this. It appears you've found a crack in the legal labyrinth that normally bars any ordinary citizen from access to anything approaching justice.
I used to get people off in the NYC traffic court using similar tactics. I'd bring in a pile of evidence like pictures, diagrams, statements and such and the officers would bring in bupkis. The trucking company I was working for (doing claim investigations for an independent adjuster) would occasionally pay me an hour or two to do this because their safety policy involved firing drivers on first ticket. Stupid policy, but it gave them a mercy angle of trying to get their guys off. I never lost.
Love it. Although defending a lawsuit is only fun and entertaining for certain types. Glad you were one of those.
WOW! What a great story.
Congratulations! I can only hope that I would've had the guts to do what you did in a similar situation. This also echoes one aspect of the mortgage meltdown, in which records of sold-off mortgages were improperly transferred leaving no verifiable trace.
Thanks. I'm not sure it was "guts," as much as shoulder shrugging and "wtf, might as well." But it seemed like the Plaintiff's whole shtick was to make their victory seem inevitable, even though they couldn't prove it. I'm guessing they bought the debt for pennies on the dollar.
So we make them prove injury of fact.
Are they only out $0.04 on the dollar? If so, how can the defendant pay them $0.96 extra?
What a scam.
If existong debt law required this sort of proof.....
"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose…" —Me and Bobby McGee, Kris Kristofferson
👍👍
I'm happy for you and as proud as someone can be of someone they don't know.
Thanks, I appreciate that. But I have a really hard time taking any credit, because the only reason I fought it was that I had taken so many life losses in a row, I literally had nothing else to lose. I get the sense it's the same kind of feeling some people had when they thought, "Fuck it, I'm voting for Trump."
You hit the nail on the head.
I discovered the same action. Not due to my astounding intelligence, but merely because I had learned years previously that always request original documents to prove a claim. I suspect that many student loan borrowers today could benefit from this simple business practice. I am glad you posted your experience of that fact.
You can beat them. But they will learn from their mistakes. The typical way to deal with people like you is to respond to your discovery requests with tens of thousands of pages of almost relevant material; they bury the opposition with discovery. Then they file a Rule 8 motion for sanctions.
YAY!!!!! So happy for you!!!! 🎉🎉
I think it's likely my wife's debt may have been bought and sold... Is there a way to take advantage of such a situation without defaulting?
I'm a retired lawyer, and completely agree. Several times I represented defendants in actions by collection agencies on supposedly assigned credit card debt. The same thing happened - they had a ledger but no original documents. They had no ability to prove the debt really existed.
Saw this a lot in “rocket docket” evictions. No one had any clue who the current note holder was in a bunch of the cases.
@Matt Taibbi, is it possible that what you observed were not evictions, but foreclosures? In many states, foreclosures are a court process. I'm told they're often done in a "rocket docket." Simply being foreclosed upon doesn't evict the former owner, however. The new owner of the home still has to file and win a lawsuit if the former owner doesn't leave.
OK, yes, Wikipedia tells me you reported on rocket docket *foreclosures* back during the 2010 housing crisis. Please, please, it's an important difference. Eviction plaintiffs aren't predatory institutional lenders.
Eviction plaintiffs are predators.
@MattTaibbi I had to look up the term "rocket docket evictions," and I'm a landlord-tenant lawyer. Also, by "note holder," do you mean the owner of the rental property? That seems impossible, because the owner, or the manager for the owner, has to be the plaintiff in the lawsuit. Maybe in whatever state you witnessed this in, there's some eviction procedure other than a lawsuit?
I'm extremely curious, because in California, absolutely any defendant who gets an attorney and fights an eviction (and free defense attorneys are easy to get) can easily make the process cost $20,000 or more to the property owner. And even before COVID, it took a few months.
Might be something to look into in the context of private student collections. This ledger was so cursory, as you say, there's no way anyone could have identified who actually owned the note, or even where it came from. Someone could have easily just made it up. And Plaintiff had the balls to sign under penalty of perjury that this was the only evidence that my loan had ever existed. I'm very sure they were just running a boiler room operation to either scare people into settling, or get defaults where they could. There's no way they could have taken my case to trial with any reasonable expectation of prevailing.
👍👍👍👍
This is how Lexington Law works, in case no-one has heard of them. They make shit on your credit report disappear for $130/month and it only take a matter of 3-4 months for them to provide results. The absolute best value in legal services there is. It's astounding, really.
" Gray, essentially, was being sued by a tranche of student loan debt, a little like being sued by the coach section of an airline flight."
I've worked in finance my entire life and I can verify that that line is pure unmitigated genius.
It definitely ranks up there with his description of Goldman Sachs being a "vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity." Brilliant writing.
Or, “NPR hasn’t written an article critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy.” 😆😆😆😆
I can’t get over that one. I giggle every time I think of it. Priceless.
But the actual line is “ since Christ was a corporal.”
I can't shake the feeling that the phrase “since Christ was a corporal” was either a deliberate play on/ pun (by some clever G.I.) of a different, "original" version--- or is the result of someone's garbled, misheard rendering of a different saying,---which I suspect went, "Since Christ was corporeal."
which I suspect went, "Since Christ was corporeal."
See: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/corporeal
That is hardly a Taibbi original. You’ve obviously never watched Robby Koenig commentate a Roger Federer match.
Dude. the problem with "you as a person" is that you think that coming up with these amazing turns of phrase is so easy, but then you need to inform strangers that you don't make them yourself because you can't be bothered to care. Man, I feel bad for the people that have to deal with you in life.
As Stephan Leacock put it, "Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself--it is the occurring which is difficult."
that's a good one there
Thank you for saying this. It needed to be said.
Or the book chapter titled "Biggest asshole in the universe" (referring to Alan Greenspan)
There are so many gems like that from that era.
Or, "This would-be smoking gun proof of collusion took the news world by storm for days, as the Trump-mad press went blind with eagerness, like high school boys seeing their first boobs."
It’s a good line, but isn’t actually correct. The tranche is the class a, b or c note. The student was sued by the legal entity that is the SPV issuer of the note. It isn’t quite a catchy to say it’s like being sued by the LLC that owns the entire plane.
What a crime.
Other victims: People like me and my wife. It was clear to us 15 years ago that something nefarious was going on, but we paid sticker price and put 4 kids through college. Prices just kept rising. (Grants and reasonable loans were not an option). Thankfully, my 4th child chose a state university and spared us more brutality.
So we worked. And worked. And fed the beast.
So, how many years of retirement did we lose in the scam? I'd estimate at least 5.
But we're still fortunate. Our kids got a fresh start, debt free. I feel terrible for others. University leaders don't. They are all pigs.
One of the saddest things is the quality of the "education" that is being offered for an outlandish price. The often clueless products should sue for malpractice. Critical thinking is now racist, actual knowledge marks you as a elitist and out of touch with "the people." Really what are you getting for your $100,000. Even STEM courses are being corrupted by the WOKE set. It won't be long before we are a nation of "educated" morons who don't know what they don't know. And are very sure of everything they don't know. This massive education wreck will be a big part of America's slide into the sewer of stupidity.
So true. Sent two of my children to St John’s, one attended the Annapolis campus, one Santa Fe. Love that school!! Great books. Western civilization. Critical thinking. Recently they CUT their tuition so more students might be able to attend
I strongly considered St John’s when I was applying to colleges 15 years ago and often wonder how my life might have been different had I gone. I envy the students who emerge from their formative years with such a formidable reading list under their belts.
I was a 50 year old successful surgeon when I sent my first child. Thought seriously about taking four years off and attending. What a wonderful school. All I did at my “ University” was memorize and regurgitate. Since then I am self taught. As my beloved Twain said “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education”.
One of our friend's daughters goes to a big name university and he was livid when he heard that the 75k/year tuition included a class where she hugged a tree and wrote about. What the actual....you get the idea :-)
Did he transfer after learning this? I'm betting the answer is no.
I've been pondering what to do with my own children. I wonder if it is worth paying for a degree from an elite institution such as Harvard or Stanford vs. paying in state tuition at a top tier public university + 200k in cash (or at least not in debt).
You would win that bet. My belief at this point is that it is most practical to send your kids to a community college for the first two years so they can work out what they want to do and then transfer to a good school. I have been told that it is even possible to transfer into the elite schools doing that, but I have no direct experience of it so couldn't swear to it.
Laura you are on point with this. I waited some years to attend college because of cost. I attended a two year community college for a liberal arts degree, got straight A's and paid my way through with no loan debt, and in the end, had Cornell sending me letters practically begging me to attend their school. There are better ways to handle getting an education then sending teenagers straight out of high school to expensive colleges for sub par educations only to rack up debt they will never be able to pay back.
If you had insisted your first three go to state schools, there wouldn't have been any brutality. Your fault.
Don't know what state you live in, but have you priced a state school lately? They have generally become... uncheap. Even with in-state tuition.
Responsibility goes both ways. Conmen ought not to be left off the hook just because not everyone winds up a mark.
Helpful stuff, Biff. Very cool.
Pigs, like other non-human animals, are off the good-evil continuum entirely.
Not to mention that pigs eventually become delicious food, and so enrich the bodies and lives of human beings. Unlike university administrators.
That was funny. Cracked me up. Thanks.
You're welcome. In my world, bacon is a major food group.
Unlike university administrators.
I rather fancy they'd give one heartburn. Or worse.
I’ve made this point before, but think it’s worth making again. There are no villains in this story. We are all just pigeons pecking the button that makes the food come out. If I were a university president I would have a praetorian guard of administrators, a giant endowment and define my job as one of having lunch with wealthy people rather than attending to grubby student needs. You can’t blame schools for doing the things that enhance their own institutions’ wealth, facilities and reputations. The problem is the unlimited credit flowing to the student.
I think that you are missing the very basics -- education (or health care, or social care or police or firemen) is NOT a business for profit -- it is a social service for future. In Cuba, China, Russia, or ALL European countries -- education is NOT - for financial profit....
We live in a kleptocracy -- at ALL levels; system is rotten.
Like most political divisions, I'm confident we both want the same outcomes, and only differ on how we get there, Boris. I know you believe that the state can be effective stewards of money and resources. I, on the other hand, think that profit is the more efficient way, which is not to say I advocate for an anarcho-capitalist society. I think that government is capable of allocating money for certain shared needs, like police, fire, infrastructure, basic education, and even medicine, BUT on a local level.
Even with Norway, the example often help up as the ideal for how it could be in the US, it is often overlooked that their pension system is privately run and their education funding works on a voucher system. It is a mixed economy, and I think it would be great if California, New York, or Illinois implemented something similar, as apposed to the nonsense they currently employ. Of course, it would also mean that other states could attempt other means of governance that make more sense to them. In doing so, we could all just vote with our feet, so to speak, and at a moments notice. Federalism is awesome like that! I've never understood the argument against such governance.
Norwegians are intelligent, educated, efficient and have a low acceptance for corruption. But even under the most favorable conditions state run enterprises do not work well. It could take 6 months to get a telephone to your house when the state operated the tele company. Before the health care reform with private providers, you could wait years to get necessary surgery. Most Norwegian politicians know that you need private companies to ensure low prices and efficiency. It's different when the government encourages universities to increase tuition, without care for students ability to pay back their debt. In Norway you get your student loan through a government agency, which puts a cap on the amount of money you can borrow. The average debt is about $50 000 for a masters degree. The interest is pretty much the same as in banks. Also your debt is forgiven if you lose the ability to work. Unis and colleges get funding from the state, and are audited to prove that they that spend money according to regulations. In a small and fairly transparent country it's easier to keep things in check.
Thank you -- that education is not a "business for profit" - the rest of the world agrees with me.
We live in a kleptocracy - at ALL levels - a completely rotten system...
You and I are very similar in this thinking. It is the unnatural incentives throughout our society that create such distorted conditions and behavior. If the government started to offer subsidized loans for automobile purchases, where no credit checks were performed and no thought given to their ability to pay it back, there would be a lot more Ferraris and Lambos on the road, and Honda Civics would cost 50k. And I wouldn't blame the consumers or the dealerships.
Similarly, I don't blame people for not wanting to work when the government will pay them not to.
I don't blame people for leveraging their grievances for money, attention, and power.
I don't blame people for rioting and looting.
I don't blame multinational conglomerates for using the law to pay virtually zero in taxes.
I blame the government for allowing, if not outright encouraging, this behavior.
I blame the drunk divorcees that are the DNC and RNC for their one-upmanship in buying the affection of their children (constituents), rather than being good parents (leaders) who enforce boundaries and responsibilities that facilitate lasting growth and maturity. Doing otherwise produces...well, *this* - a drunken family of miscreants willing to knife their siblings in the back for a better seat at the table.
We agree about unnatural incentives throughout society being the primary driver of our ills more than the bad apple theory, but unless I am misunderstanding your list I only see one side of that equation in the failed accountability mechanism you mention. That doesn't necessarily mean you are not aware of the other side of that list. There is no requirement that everything be done in pairs.
Hmmm, I'm not even sure of what dichotomy you're referring to actually. It's a short and broad list meant to highlight left/right and poor/rich factions. I suppose I could have added several more examples in the way the wealthy exploit, but now I'm wondering if you're referring to something else I'm missing all together - do tell.
It's probably me guilty of projecting my own thoughts on to what you wrote the same way whenever someone writes anything derogatory about a Reps or Dems there will always be someone to respond "well what about x!"
For instance:
"Similarly, I don't blame people for not wanting to work when the government will pay them not to."
vs
Similarly, I don't blame those people on the bottom rung who are routinely treated like absolute dog shit by their employer and regularly told "well if you don't like it, leave" taking them up on that offer the moment they got the chance.
"I don't blame people for rioting and looting."
vs
I don't blame the police for using the minority who were rioting and looting using that as an excuse to attack the peaceful protestors when they know they can simply point to some broken windows and graffiti at the end of the day and they know the public will call whatever the did to the peaceful protestors justified, rather than asking why didn't you arrest the rioters and looters and let the peaceful protestors go on with their protest.
"I don't blame multinational conglomerates for using the law to pay virtually zero in taxes."
vs.
I don't blame people who can't afford accountants to offshore their money and play other tax games for being outraged when they are raked over the coals by the IRS for making an honest mistake within our admittedly convoluted tax system.
"I don't blame people for leveraging their grievances for money, attention, and power."
vs
I have no opposite corollary for that one. Those people are annoying.
Well, the money flows to the schools with no let or hindrance (Students saddled with lifelong debt? What? I can't hear you.) and ever-less attention is paid to the educational needs of the students. This is somewhat villainous, isn't it?
I do have some sympathy for the administrators in that they have to deal with the problem of employing so many ill-educated midwits as professors, but still...
It's been known for some time that people in leadership positions are more likely to exhibit traits of a sociopath.
The top two careers with the highest proportion of psychopaths are: 1) CEO and 2) (gentle ribbing) Lawyers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
It’s easy to mistake truth tellers for psychopaths.
Funny you say that. I think sociopaths excel in leadership positions in part because they aren't as bothered by lying, and that's a necessary trait to be an effective leader.
Here our monitoring sociopath is on his duty again -- "university leaders are even worse than Julian Assange -- according to our local sicko:
..."Most "university leaders" are clinically narcissistic sociopaths, or pretend to be to fit in with the many actual narcissistic sociopaths...."
Great name for a band!!
Lol!
Pure Matt Taibbi gold right here. Awesome stuff.
I hope this blows up spectacularly in the face of the Educational Industrial Complex. The whole thing stinks - from the absurd tuition expense to the thought police that troll the campuses these days.
I did my schooling in Canada over two decades ago when it was still reasonable. I'd never participate in this scam today. This is one of the myriad reasons why I am glad to not have kids of my own and fear for the futures of those who are here. Its such an injustice.
Actually, EIC is probably closer to the mark than you think. The vast majority of the US college system was set up as a Cold War program by the USG - specifically the 1958 NDEA. This was not the only investment into higher education the USG made in the early Cold War era. The original requirement for student loans was a loyalty declaration ala McCarthy, disavowing the violent overthrow of the federal government.
One stated objective of this system was to get specifically trained defense employees. I assert an unstated goal was indoctrinating the students in what the government wished them to believe. I'm remembering the rather famous poll that indicated that the post-Tet support of Vietnam was highest in college graduates, and grew higher depending on educational achievement. This depicted the indoctrination even in an era of student protest.
The collusion with government and serving government purposes never ended.
This is America. If things blow up, it's never the people who built the bomb who pay the cost.
Blows up indeed, not least for the authors of a horrific paper I read a while ago purporting to compare explanations for the unseemly rise in tuition over the past few decades. Basically, "Too much free money!" vs. "Just the natural rise in the cost of doing business".
This is absurd on the face of it, but the guys were getting paid so they tortured their data until it screamed that whatever the truth was, you COULD NOT say it was just greed and an open spigot of taxpayer money that caused the increase. It was amazing.
Kind of beautiful, in its way. Like a hyper-realistic painting of a dog turd in grass.
Perhaps the educational institutions should be financing the loans. What kind of degree programs would vanish in that case?
Or make the institution secondarily liable. If the student can't pay the school has to.
With for-profit trade schools, that is kind of the way it works. They are selling you a skill which is presumed to be useful and should get you a job. But with a university, the purpose of an education is historically, supposedly, your own betterment, with no specific promise of employability in any given field.
Of course, on the other hand, you're being told that you need a degree in order to get a job. But it's not the universities which are telling you that -- it's all the media and political system.
Not entirely. The businesses are telling you the same thing. If you want a well paying job outside of the trades, try getting one without a degree. I have a friend who went into sales with a huge consumer products company without a degree 30+ years ago. He rose to be the head of sales for about 1/3 of the US until the company was sold and he was let go. That was 2 years ago and, despite 30 years of experience and high performance, he can't get a job in sales making close to half what he was making. The universal impediment, so he is told, is his lack of a degree. It's all about risk aversion. If the person has the credentials, you can't be criticized for hiring them.
@Rob W
SO true ! I retired from IBM Boise during the early nineties. With a college degree in other fields, I had taken night school classes at what were then called Computer Programming Schools. Six months, you were out the door. You were by no means a *programmer at that point, but you had all that you would *need, bcuz *every company had their own "shop standards" which they would teach you without being asked.
Computer programmers worked then in two fields. They were either glorified bookkeepers, (me) or they were Scientists. Hint: Scientists don't *hire computer programmers. Scientists *become computer programmers, just as a side gig to their daily job. A programmer cannot instruct a computer to do things that the programmers themselves do not comprehend.
The modern exceptions, of course, are App developers who, likewise don't need a four year degree, all they have to have is a programming language,
the ability to CODE, and what is (hopefully) a KILLER idea. (Many more ideas are duds, than are "killer" of course. ) The helpful education there is a background in electrical engineering.
So, new rip off. At one time I was sent from my employer over to the local University with instructions to "meet" with the Computer Science department. This was still in the 1980s. Turns out my employer wanted to *convince The University that they needed to start offering a 4-year Course on Computer Science. No programmer has USE for a 4-year Course in Computer Science. HALF of what you learn is *OBSOLETE by the time you graduate, and you could have built up three years experience in the *field in that time. You could burn up a year on the *history AND learn all of the coding of computer science, but that is IT, Max. No one is looking to hire you to *build Big Blue from a box !
By the time my employer filled me in on the "plan", I had been programming at what was called the Systems Analyst level for years. I was expected to "invent" a 4 year Course in the days when almost all phones were still landlines.
I was *doing this work every day. Not one programmer I knew working anywhere had a 4 year degree in Computer Science.
The only thing I could do to advance would have been to *become a scientist and have the "jump" of knowing how programming works.
Lets just say, I took early retirement in 1991. The whole thing was insane.
By the end of the nineties, I could not have had a job sweeping UP at the office of my former employer, or at any other Hi Tech job. By that time EMPTY and WORTHLESS Four Year degrees were *required by ALL APPLICANTS ! Only the Old Geezers knew that you will never NEED a 4 year degree ! You need to learn how to code, just as you need to find a point of balance on a bicycle. After THAT, you simply learn by *doing. On-the-job experience. Not another three years practice before you take off the training wheels.
But now, you *will damned-well *have a 4 year computer science degree,
or you will not enter the field ! And to those in the field, that just somehow "makes sense" ! No, it is just another scam that the work force has swallowed !
Do we imagine that scientists themselves take a four year computer science degree learning to code? NO ! They learn how to code in about six weeks MAX and they are on their way. To them, it is a Tool, not an ersatz career !
The original CS depts. were a hodge podge of people and not a discipline..that's taken a while. Yes, you would have been teaching them. One (not-to-be-named) university was teaching students to use "word" and calling it a CS degree in the 1980s.
In 1964 I went to a computer school for five weeks. After that I seemed to know about as much about how to write programs as anyone around. You had to have a degree for work at a university, because that was their thing, but anyone else would hire you if it appeared that you could do the work, as many relatively uneducated people could. To give a basic idea of the work, one day I went in to the office where I worked (for Honeywell) and was given a four-page engineering summary of how a drum they were selling at the time was supposed to work. (Predecessors of disk drives, etc.) After I read it my manager said, 'You are now the world's leading expert on this drum,' and sent me to a place that had bought one. I must have made something they liked happen, because they kept the drum. It was like that until around 1980, when they academia recovered control of the field. That didn't improve the level of the work done, but management liked it because they could say they had done the right, credentialized thing.
O I remember that early on (in libraries) we created home made online catalogs & we all learned basic programming (FORTRAN) then companies created "turn-key" systems and we were out and CS degree ppl who never knew what smart people like you understood created opaque systems not as good.
@Starry Gordon
Precisely. This is just how "business bloat" settles in. It does not improve the product, it adds time to getting out the work, but, people like to hope the *degrees impress buyers. And, of course, if your competitor has bells and whistles that you don't have (IT people with 4 yr degrees), you start thinking about an IT crew made up of people with Phd Degrees. Easy to see that all of that extra money will have to load down the eventual price of your product, but you hope it impresses people, or ideally that it lands you a Government Contract where cost overrun is a "feature, not a bug" ! ;-D
Web development is like that now. The schools haven't captured it and I doubt they can - it changes too fast. By the time they get a curriculum together, the standards have galloped forward. If you are not an autodidact, you can't keep up. It's an insane learning curve.
This is NOT true, about entry points now. You can do a multi-week coding boot camp and start. Lots of people do it. I was talking with a friend of mine with an Ivy degree in CS and he said people around him do it right and left. He doesn't think his CS degree did very much for him. You just need a first job and after that it's up to. But hey he's just some 26-year-old guy in Silicon Valley making 265K a year.
@Nathan
When you read the original comment, did you notice it was referencing the 1980s ? Did that somehow cause you to extrapolate the original to the 2020s ?
But, yes, thank you for the update to today. What I was illustrating is how it happens that jobs which do *not require 4 yr degrees can be *made to "require" 4 yr degrees, just as a matter of setting up the scam between corporations like IBM and some "Country College" in Idaho.
Now, perhaps you can see how the original comment had nothing whatsoever to do with the "26-year-old guy in Silicon Valley making" X per anum, although I am certain that we are all thrilled for him as well.
I suspect someone making $256k a year is doing something beyond mere boot camp coding, because a lot of people can do the coding, and a lot of people want $256k a year. There might be just a bit of competition.
That’s crazy. I know multiple company owners that would give their left nut to hire a proven salesxir without a degree. I know I would. In sales you rarely are going to be promised the same pay level you had before. You have to prove yourself at every new job.
The inverse here -- as MT details in his article -- is that having a college degree can disqualify you from menial work that may be your only means of subsistence. Basically, don't stray outside of your assigned class. A BA or BS has come to be little more than a class signifier.
I urge any concerned to read Jack Vance's DODKIN'S JOB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodkin%27s_Job https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17864889-dodkin-s-job
When the gap between the ideal and the real becomes too great, the system breaks down. - Barbara Tuchman
I fear that there are many sincere idealists who are manipulated by false idealists. The realists are left wondering what the hell is going on.
Great quote.
I actually haven't read that one, though I took a dive into Vance's work a few years back. Strangely, motivated by Gygax' bibliography in the 1st edition AD&D DMG. He was a huge fan, obviously.
[dons robe and grognard hat]
Appendix N is a vast resource for anyone who hasn't already read all of Appendix N. I wish that Jack Vance had also written more realistic tales in the vein of Paul Bowles or Patricia Highsmith, but I'm also not Jack Vance, who is dead.
Huh. Thought I'd read nearly all of Vance. Love that guy, very dry.
He might take a page from probably 30% of the resumes. Inflation is not only an economic issue. Many, many resumes are as fake as Tammie Fays eyelashes. Never checked or if writer is smart they claim degrees from schools that have closed or merged and can't be verified. This is a big problem with foreign students coming here and claiming skills and degrees that do not exist. I once got stuck with two individual who claimed to be statisticians with University degrees. Both could not do high school math and had to be dumped. Of course they sued for discrimination.
Tammie Faye's eyelashes. Do you think many people here get that one?
Yeah I sure dated myself. Probably should have said as fake as A-Rod's love life.
If not, most soon will. The Eyes of Tammy Faye will be in theaters in about two months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMMLRnXPPJk
I infer that the commentariat here is mainly Gen-X and up. The Millennials poke their heads out every once in a while.
Nobody knows who is lurking except the lurkers.
HAHA. As a grad student at a semi-prestigous engineering school, my advisor gave me the job of sifting through (literally) hundreds of resumes from prospective grad students from China. Almost all of them were #1 in their class at one of, like 6-7 well-known colleges in that country. It was laughable.
Yep. Education and credentialing requirements are efficient sorting mechanisms and have the sheen of objective meritocracy.
We'd be better off is most job training worked with some sort of apprenticeship type system.
It it truly amazing to me how little experience is respected!!
"But it's not the universities which are telling you that -- it's all the media and political system."
A fair enough point as it stands, but don't the universities benefit from what the media and political system say a young person "should" do in order to live a non-jailable life?
I admit the analogy is not exact, but it's sort of a good cop/bad cop routine. The various systems of power are in cahoots with each other, wittingly or not.
Well, of course. Of course as you they they are all in cahoots. All I'm saying is that the university itself doesn't have to be making those promises -- everybody else is doing that promotion for them.
I remember when Bush started this. It was around the same time he started pushing for minority home ownership which culminated in, with the help of the Dems in Congress, the housing bubble and crash.
There would have been no crash, at least for the economy as a whole, had home loans, not all of them of dubious quality, and not all "minority", not in turn been securitized, then had multiple naked credit default swaps placed on them and had the ratings agencies not called shit, gold.
It had been previous practice for the ratings companies to be paid a subscription fee to independently rate various securities, but that all changed, and they began to be paid on an individual basis to rate a particular security for a particular firm, the understanding being that a low and accurate rating would result in no business for them.
The book, "Al The Devils Are Here" does an excellent job of examining the 2008 crash, assigning blame where it belonged.
Good intentions are the road to hell
To be fair, lots of professions protect themselves with all sorts of credentialing requirements, which may or may not be useful, and college degrees are prerequisites.
So the message about college is being sent by the labor market.
We would all be better served if apprenticeships were more widely honored.
We're quibbling over words, of course. The college is certainly interested in its ratings in US News & World Report, and can cite the salary surveys results from its alumni. But the college is not making you any promise that you will earn a starting salary of, on average, $85,347/yr. It is in no way advertising a return on investment. What your actually salary will be depends on YOU. The colleges are letting the culture make that advertisement for them, in a manner for which they cannot be held responsible. That's how the game works.
Speaking of over-rated, ridiculously expensive schools, I present to you the University of Texas, Austin.
@User Error,
*TOP of that category, to be certain, but lately with the competition *nipping at its heels !
That’s amazing: the schools will provide the education and not stand behind their degrees. Next up, Corporate America will not stand behind their products - all warranties are herby extinguished, you’re on your own folks.
Why would they not stand behind their products...to the degree stated in the 40 page micro-font EULA?
I think the widespread religious belief in credentialism goes back quite a way before the modern university; maybe to the Middle Ages. When I was a teenager in the 1950s I remember questioning my elders who had been through higher education what they had actually done in college and how it related to their present life and work, and was impressed by the vacuity of their answers regardless of the fields they had entered. However, the fact that the Education Industry can do this does testify to their skill in marketing.
Yes, put the schools on the hook as lender. You’ll see real fast which degree programs they believe are worthless in the market because they won’t fund students seeking those degrees.
Great article, thank you for bringing attention to yet another “venerable American institution” that has been corrupted beyond belief.
There is a very good reason the Founders called for uniform bankruptcy laws ahead of the power to raise an army and declare war in the US Constitution. This student loan scam is precisely what they were worried about. Regardless of the outcome of the various cases now winding their way through the courts, the bigger truth is that one line of federal code, 11 USC 523(a)(8), must be repealed, and hopefully it will be soon.
Student loans should be treated in exactly the same manner as all other loans in bankruptcy proceedings.
The only problem with just returning bankruptcy at this late date is that it will likely compel tens of millions of people to file (around 80% of all borrowers were never going to be able to repay their loans even before the pandemic).
Not sure if we want to force 20+ million people into bankruptcy for the crime of going to college. Probably better to just cancel the damned loans at this point (this could be done largely without needing any money from Treasury, and without adding anything to the national debt). Take the lending system to the bath, drown it in the tub.
Time for the Student Loan Jubilee.
Change.Org/CancelStudentLoans
Read up on the Daniel Shays Rebellion... It preceded the end of the Articles of Confederation and the adoption of the Constitution. The rebellion was triggered by debt collectors going after Revolutionary War Vets who had gone into debt because they were off fighting the war, many of whom never got paid for their Army service.
Cannot recall where I read it, but a very large population of the folks who rioted in the Capitol have money problems. Would love to see Matt dig into that deeper. How many had student debt issues? How many lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis?
History might not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.
The little party had it's start in a town close to me -Shirley, MA.
Most of the Rev War vets were out in the western part of this state farming and the banks showed up and started taking land back, kicking people off of it.
Andrew Jackson rode a wave of populism through that period the the oval office.
Are you actually conflating the "Shays Rebellion" with the behavior of the Jan 6th demonstration and vandalism of the Capitol, and of all places, in the midst of a pleasantly non-partisan discussion about a topic that our host seems to have carefully chosen to engender "Common Sense" and mutually respectful understanding.
As Usual,
EA
Hey, while you're here I could use a nice sofa and a love seat. Got anything in green?
Our Ethan Allan couch is 30 years old and still very comfortable and presentable, at least in dim light.
The central principal of my interior decoration ethos: dim lighting.
Leaving the Jan 6th thing out, which is current and partisan, the Shays Rebellion was a pretty interesting bit of history that has been misrepresented to modern audiences, if they are even aware it happened. It's not completely orthogonal to a discussion of crippling student debt.
Indeed the not so subtle distinctions between debts owed by students through government sanctioned agency and debts owed by government to citizens for services and supplies rendered in military service are "not completely orthogonal"; but they are both equally questionable.
Really great point.
You might be surprised. The hardest hit states are southern, red states. States like Texas, Florida, both Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Indiana (and more) owe MORE than their entire state budgets in student loan debt. Also: 40% of everyone who goes to college never graduates. According to Pew, around 55% of people with "some college" identify as being either republican (43%) or independent (12%). So...there are probably a lot more "MAGA student loan scam victims" out there than will admit it publicly!
"MAGA students" is a dumb term and has NOTHING to do with student lending or students from Southern states who choose to attend university. This is not only dumb, it's defamatory.
Follow the conversation, wokester! His was a response.
Maybe so. But, it's still an ugly, divisive slur. I am heartily sick of all of the name-calling and labeling going on. And, I'm a liberal. It solves nothing and exposes the speaker as a shallow thinker who needs to use this kind of tactic to make a point.
That's very true. Student loans are the ONLY type of loan in this country to be uniquely excluded from the same bankruptcy protections that every other borrower for every other loan enjoys. My only point was that conservatives hold a tremendous amount of student loan debt, generally. These loans do not discriminate...Conservatives everywhere should be aware of this before wagging their fingers at the borrowers under the false assumption that they are all liberal. They aren't. Not by a long shot.
" The tools used abroad to undermine popular movements are now being used against capitalism's discontents in America. "
This. They always try out their abuses overseas, then bring them home.
Sooo...would you think more, or less, of them if that number were higher? And why?
If the loans are cancelled, what about the people who actually paid for their education? Are they gonna be reimbursed? If so, by whom?
People who repaid their loans in years or decades past should be glad to be done. This is no longer their problem. TODAY, the reality is that over 80% will never be able to, and that is climbing quickly. The default rate for subprime home mortgages was 20%. We are looking at a default rate for student loans borrowers TODAY of something like 4X that amount.
Your question is like asking: What about all the people who had to repay SBA loans? We just doled out $1 Trillion in PPP loans that don't need to be repaid. Should we give them their money back?
If you want to talk about "fair", there is NOTHING FAIR about the federal student loan system. Now, it is catastrophically failed, and whatever your opinion on the fairness of it all, the loans WILL be cancelled, one way or another. Certainly they WILL NOT be paid.
I don't think student loan cancellation is unfair to people who've already paid off their student loans, it's unfair to those who didn't go to university at all. Statistically people without a college degree will earn less over their lifetimes to a tune of, what, some one million dollars? They'll also have a shorter life expectancy and will be walled off from certain opportunities, no matter how bright they might otherwise be. How is it fair to these people to say "you can't be a part of the club, but you have to pay for it"? No, I don't think student debt cancellation is okay. I would support the idea of free secondary education going forward, but not retroactively. Imagine working in an Amazon warehouse and shitting in diapers because you didn't have the scratch to pay for college. You spend the day boxing expensive luxury items to send to some white collar asshole doing WOF for $100,000 a year. That asshole suddenly becomes even richer because he no longer has to pay off the debt he accumulated while working his way into the professional class and now Amazon has to invest in a lot more suicide booths for their employees. Totally unfair.
ps. You also grossly mischaracterize student loan borrowers. 40% never graduated. 100% were determined to be financially needy as a precondition for getting the loans. 80% did not have the financial wherewithal to repay the loans even before the pandemic. The most successful borrowers refinance their loans OUT of the federal program and into the private market, so won't benefit from federal loan cancellation.
The sub-prime home mortgage default rate was 20%. The default rate for everyone walking around with student loan today was going to easily be 75% even before the pandemic. That you are trying to paint these people as elitist, entitled, etc. is despicable.
Trust me: You don't want to be in that "club".
LOL
I challenge the 100% financially needy thing. The college knew my salary and my financial situation otherwise from my FAFSA. I could have paid cash - salary in the low $100s. In 2011 I still got offered something along the lines of $10k a year in federally guaranteed student loans, which I took and refinanced outside of the system after I graduated. I'm paying the last $2k of a top balance of $18k off by mid '22.
Point being, needy I was not.
The whole point of the FAFSA is to determine financial need. You didnt consider yourself needy? Great. You refinanced your loans out of the system, which is what financially successfull federal student loan borrowers tend to do. So you would never have benefitted from federal loan cancellation.
First, the "college grads earn $1 million more" is a very dishonest stat. You could similarly take a poll, and find that people who took sailing lessons earned (probably) $2 million more. You could do a study and find that people who took polo lessons earned $3 million more. To say that a college degree caused that is very dishonest inference.
You want to talk about FAIR? Was it FAIR that we freed the slaves, when millions had spent their entire lives in bondage prior to 1865? Was it FAIR that we distributed insulin to the population when millions died from diabetes prior to 1922?
More to the point: Was it FAIR that 43,000 millionaires and billionaires received, on average, a $1.6 MILLION pandemic stimulus? What about the small businesses who didn't have the wherewithal to make it through the PPP application process? How is it fair to them that their competitors got all of this loan money that doesn't need to be repaid?
What about people who don't own small businesses? Was it fair that we just doled out $1 Trillion in FAKE LOANS to these businesses to the people who never started businesses? By your logic, this is unfair.
Was it FAIR that Congress weaponized the student loan system by stripping away Constitutionally enshrined bankruptcy protections UNIQUELY from student loans? Was it FAIR that Congress also stripped statutes of limitations from student loans? Fair Debt Collection Laws (also gone from student loans)? Truth in lending laws (also gone uniquely from federal student loans)?
Fair. Lol.
The lending system is catastrophically failed. No one is paying right now, and very few people will every pay again. That is the REALITY. You should inculcate that. If it makes you feel good to wag your finger at the people being crushed by this debt (over half of whom are over the age of 35, and many who have had their entire adult lives crushed by this big-government debt trap), then have at it. Wag away.
The reality remains: This lending system is finished. There is no saving it, and there should be no saving it- particularly to correct some imagined unfairness in the minds of people who never even took out the loans.
What is particularly poisonous about your argument: It serves only to defend and perpetuate the worst big-government, college-enriching, socialistic (some would argue), unconstitutional, lending SCAM in US History. Do you really want to be on that side of this argument?
LOL.
If you think about the whole student loan system as a huge inflationary bubble created by the government, which it demonstrably is, the real losers here are anyone who used their own money to pay for college at all. Why not use the funny money instead and keep the debt rolling till you croak? Can't extract blood from a corpse. Well, you can, but it'll make you sick.
You may think that this debt enslavement mechanism is funny, but it's not funny to the 45.4 million people who are being wrecked by it. You can argue all you want, and as flippantly as you want to keep it rolling, but it isn't going to happen. The pandemic is the nail in the coffin of this lending system. It will evaporate via popular rejection if nothing else.
Handing dumb teenagers "free" money is a never ending cycle, it's going nowhere except through the complete overthrow of the current system.
Still a piece of work.
That's ridiculous. Millions of us are still paying our own way today, and it is not remotely decent to argue that such unequal treatment should persist.
I'm not down with any "solution" that in no way penalizes the schools for enriching themselves and wasting the money on things other than their purported "mission" of educating their clients.
Work out some way for the schools to give up some of their ill-gotten gains and I'd be a lot more comfortable with "debt forgiveness".
I'm more than happy to see the universities be put on a massive diet, and get some of their ill gotten gains clawed back. Frankly, I would like to see the government completely out of the lending business. But that's just my opinion, and open to debate. What is NOT open to debate: The lending system is in catastrophic failure. The loans WILL be cancelled, one way or another. The loans WILL NOT BE PAID. So, I'm not selling a solution here, so much as I am just stating a fact. The lending system is finished. It is vanishing into a mist of illegitimacy as we speak.
One thing we can tell from all the proposed solutions: "NOT BY THE SCHOOLS".
OK, signed it. Credit where it's due: This was one of Dr. Jill Stein's platform positions as Green Party candidate for President.
The bad thing about Stein and Hawkins' student loan cancellation proposals was that they felt compelled to "pay" for it. This is just nonsense. 87% of all student debt was already "paid for", and is now owned completely, by the taxpayers. There is no good reason for the taxpayer to have to cough up far MORE money AGAIN to pay what turns out to be far more than twice (when you factor in all the interest, and other additions to the loans).
But yeah: The Green Party was all over this going back, even, to 2012. Way ahead of their time.
The ONLY presidential candidate we could endorse in 2016. Ditto for Howie Hawkins in 2020. LOL.
Michael Hudson, "Killing the Host" would agree with you and even outlines how debt jubilees have been a feature in past civilizations. Haven't finished his book just yet but so far I find his arguments compelling.
A more recent article tangential to your topic: https://michael-hudson.com/2020/03/corona-debt-jubilee/
According to George Packer (2013). The Unwinding, an inner history of the New America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. pp. 348. "In 2005, with the help of Democrats like Joe Biden and Chris Dodd and Hillary Clinton, Congress passed a law restricting the right to file for bankruptcy."
Hell yes, Taibbi. This was gutting and beautifully written. My favorite thing you've done on Substack. Kudos.
Who controls educational institutions? It's not conservatives.
The cruelest irony, here, is that the lending system is a big-government, college-enriching beast that no true conservative should support. But in Congress, it is the republicans who bend over backwards to defend this lending system, and oppose all efforts to, say, return bankruptcy protections to the loans. They are now losing important statewide elections because of their position (like Georgia, where 1.7 million voters hold enough student loan debt to buy every farm in the state twice...and still have $15 Billion left over.
But it's not just Georgia. Over a third of US States now owe more student loan debt than their entire state budgets, and most of them are red, republican states like Florida, NS Carolina, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, etc...
Republicans should be calling for an end to this monstrosity. They are doing the opposite.
Republicans are complicit but trying to lay his solely at their feet smacks of partisanship.
Oh make no mistake, the dems are fully onboard with it. They LOVE the lending system. It's really sort of a "good cop, bad cop" ruse. The only problem is that with republicans wearing the "bad cop" hat, they are now losing elections because of it. True conservatives should be calling both for loan cancellation, but also an end to the government being in the student loan business. GOP'ers in Congress are doing neither of those things, they are just wagging their fingers at the borrowers, and now it is making previously solidly red electorates flirt with blue, and even flip blue (Georgia being the first high profile example). This will get much worse for the republicans in Congress if they stay on this path. Dems are sitting in the catbird's seat.
https://studentloanjustice.medium.com/conservatives-have-a-major-student-loan-problem-e0063adc267d?postPublishedType=repub
Great analysis. I'm not a conservative, but realized about a decade ago there are about as many actual conservatives in this country as libertarians (perhaps 1-2 million) and 10's of millions of conservatives who belong to that brand of conservatism with different rules depending on your class. The Democrats play a similar game. I think you summed that up well.
Again, this statement is just incorrect (...and dumb, unthoughtful). Both parties are to blame for the monstrosity of the system. Moreover, liberals run most of these institutions and teach in these places and have no interest in halting the gravy train.
«Who controls educational institutions? It's not conservatives»
The boards of all major universities are composed largely of right-wing businesspeople, and they decide the policies.
Hmmm. Proof? Funny that these right-wingers at the top hire all left-wing professors. That doesn't make any sense to me. Does it to you, Blissex?
Only a buffoon would not do a simple web search, after stating as a a fact "it is not conservatives". As an example out of many:
https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/leadership-and-governance/board-of-overseers/
* President, Sunshine Care
* Executive Director, Boston Ballet
* Vice President for Research and Director, Policy Research Center, National Congress of American Indians
* President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
* President, Robert Morris University
* Founder and CEO, Girls Who Code
* Former Governor, Bank of England and Bank of Canada
* President and CEO, United Way for Southeastern Michigan
* Washington, DC
Policy Director, Civil Rights Corps
* Frances Willard Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, Northwestern University
* Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company, United Kingdom & Ireland
* Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities, Princeton University; 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States
* San Francisco, CA
Chief Medical Officer, Covered California
* Founding Director, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
* Regents’ Professor Emerita, Department of Neuroscience, University of Arizona
* Partner, Sidley Austin LLP
* U.S. Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
* Management and Program Analyst, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
* Artist, and President of Studio Echelman
* President and CEO, The Education Trust
* Senior Vice President, Global Affairs, and Chief Legal Officer, Google LLC
* Former Chief Executive Officer, Hudson’s Bay Company
* U. S. Circuit Judge, U. S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
* Co-Founder, FullSky Partners
* Vice Chair of Wealth Management, Senior Client Advisor and Managing Director, Morgan Stanley
* Soccer player, United States Women’s National Team and Sky Blue FC
* CEO, Cinépolis
That is really like a list of Communist Party USA members, isn't it? :-)
Sorta is, yeah. Or at least these days, these buffoons are feigning fealty towards the wokeness that has become corporate U.S.
Corporate U.S. wouldn't go "woke" if they didn't smell money in it. You're not supposed to run at a loss. Providing value to shareholders, etc.
There is plenty of evidence to the contrary for this across multiple industries. Most are getting crushed in the woke area and are using their actual valuable endeavors to prop up the insanity for purely ideological reasons. Just look at CNN. If it was a stand alone business it would have gone bankrupt years ago. But since AT&T makes billions doing other things they prop it up. Ditto for the major sports leagues and Hollywood. All are in a freefall when it comes to customer numbers, yet they are doubling and tripling down on the things costing them money. There is no long game here. They know wokeness is a loser and they don’t care.
To be fair, it's about 50/50. I am pretty sure that the 22nd Poet Laureate of the USA isn't a Mitch guy.
These are nearly all wealthy elites, plus some tokens, and their main difference will be whether they love most Hillary or Romney, and Harvard is I mean Harvard, that is pretty much the least conservative board of trustees you can find. The list from Chicago is basically hedge funders, and that from Dartmouth is bankers and businesspeople with a couple of tokens.
It cannot be otherwise: trustees are as a rule the big donors or people connected to the big donors.
Chicago and Dartmouth are two of the more right-wing campi in America.
It sure as f*ck doesn't sound like "Fat Cats, Inc" or "Oligarchs-R-Us". Matter of fact, it actually DOES sound like a bunch of lefties. Rich lefties, to be sure, but that's the worst kind.
Actually it does. They hire whatever sells. With an entire generation of narcissistic nihilists too drug addled and incompetent to do the math on a loan, much less look up what vocations pay, the Marxist pseudosciences are a gold mine and no brainer. Their huge cash reserves and endless tax payer handouts given by criminally corrupt politicians prove this.
As to handwaving buffons who can't use search engines, another example:
https://regents.umich.edu/regents/jordan-b-acker/
* a Democrat from Huntington Woods ... appointed by President Obama in March 2011 to be an attorney-advisor to Secretary Janet Napolitano at the Department of Homeland Security. ... Regent Acker joined his family business, Goodman Acker P.C., in 2013, where he practices law and is responsible for the firm’s business development.
* a Democrat from Grand Blanc ... president and owner of the law firm of Behm & Behm.
* a Democrat from Ann Arbor. ... president and managing partner of The Sam Bernstein Law Firm, PLLC.
* a Democrat from northern Michigan ... a managing partner of eLab Ventures, a venture capital firm headquartered in Michigan with offices in Silicon Valley.
* a Republican from Okemos
* a Democrat from Bingham Farms. ... was the president of Ilitch Holdings, Inc., a privately held business that manages Little Caesar Enterprises, the Detroit Red Wings, the Detroit Tigers and Olympia Entertainment.
* founded McKinley Associates Inc., a national real estate investment company, in 1968 and was its chairman and chief executive officer until 2001. From 2001-05 under President George W. Bush, he served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Slovak Republic.
* Master’s degree in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College. ... Professor of Law at the Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. In addition, she is a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army National Guard currently serving as the Deputy Commander of the 46 Military Police Command in Lansing, MI.
Do their friends know all these people are closet lefties? :-)
What makes you say they are "closeted"? Are you saying rich kids, investment bankers, fund managers, etc., can't be lefties?? It would explain a lot, as so many actions of the .01%ers are best explicable as eruptions of irrationality caused by an excess of cognitive dissonance.
Or do the dollar signs next to the names cause some knee-jerk identification bias? An outdated bias, if so.
I'm not saying they're committed to, or even understand, anything about leftist ideology. So assign the label "leftist" as you will, but to say these people fit some 50s Fat Cat Chamber of Commerce stereotype, or monocled-and-top hatted old money Republican archetype...neh, not so much.
(This could just be a definitional argument where the core disagreement lies with the word "leftist").
You rely on prejudice. Why not use your brain?
As to handwaving buffoons, here is another random board:
https://www.dartmouth.edu/trustees/biographies/
* Managing Partner The Wicks Group
* Senior Vice President of Business Development and Digital Entertainment Amazon.com
* Actor Deep Blue Productions
* Managing Partner Norwest Venture Partners
* Global Digital Policy Incubator Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law Stanford University
* Partner The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
* Partner Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky, and Popeo, P.C
* Executive Chair Wheels, Inc.
* Director, Brain Injury Stanford University School of Medicine
* Vice Chairman, Global Head of Investment Banking Morgan Stanley
* Partner Hogan Lovells Washington, D.C.
* education leader and strategist. She helps build and advise organizations, including companies in the BEMA Technologies portfolio.
A guess these are all "democratic socialists" and love Tulsi Gabbard :-).
Bullshit. They're conservatives like Obama was a great leader.
Conservatives are people who want things to not change much, for example, Biden ("Nothing fundamental will change") and Obama. The Democratic Party is basically a conservative institution which has not moved for any significant changes in Federal policies since the days of Lyndon Johnson (old New Deal, endless war, etc.)
Neither Biden nor Obama are interested in preserving individual liberties. They seek to extinguish them.
Conservatives seek to preserve the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. Conservatives are liberal. Leftists are authoritarian.
Well, the kind of conservatives who are conservative about liberal values and principles are _supposed_ to favor individual freedom, but then you have to consider the numerous self-described conservatives who wanted to conserve Jim Crow, or religious tests, or the Drug War, and so on. So that makes the word ambiguous: you have to know what the conservative wants to conserve. Biden and company want to conserve their powers and privileges, which may, as you note, require the reduction of someone else's, but then so do a lot of other people. When I refer to the Democratic Party as conservative, I'm also noting that their plans and policies haven't changed much over recent decades.
Why would I need to consider the views of people who no longer exist? Jim Crow, in any case, was an invention of the democrat party. Perhaps you weren't aware Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in face of opposition from the Democrat Party so fierce, it led to civil war.
I like religious tests. I like my religion. It informs my conscience and I vote accordingly. Christianity freed the slaves.
Conservatism isn't ambiguous. You're just desperate to change the subject. When you refer to the Democrat Party as conservative you're electing to be indiscriminate.
Oh? And is Dean Wormer still in this fictitious school you refer to?
It's a "bipartisan" cancer.
You couldn't be more mistaken.
Buffoons hand wave vigourously, but search engines lead to this, anorther of many examples
https://trustees.uchicago.edu/
* Chairman Alper Investments Inc.
* Co-Founder and Managing Partner Siris Capital Group, LLC
* Founder and Executive Chairman Dimensional Fund Advisors
* Op-Ed Columnist New York Times Company
* Chairman and CEO Ventas, Inc.
* Senior Counsel and Chair Emeritus of the Executive Committee
Sidley Austin, LLP
* Chairman and CEO Henry Crown & Company
* CEO and Chairman Sidewalk Labs
* AB’81, MBA’82
* Founding Partner and Former CEO New Holland Capital
* Retired Chairman and CEO CDW Corporation
* Co-Managing Partner Wealth Strategist Partners
* Managing Director Ingenuity International, LLC
* Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Investment Officer Valor Equity Partners
* Founder and CEO Citadel
* Chairman and CEO Quantitative Financial Strategies, Inc.
* President United Airlines
* Chairman and CEO Lazard
* President The Duchossois Family Foundation
* Senior Advisor EW Healthcare Partners
* President Water Saver Faucet Company
* Founding Partner Centerview Capital
* Publisher and CEO Minneapolis Star Tribune
* Principal KoHop Ventures
* Venture Partner New Enterprise Associates
* Partner Kirkland & Ellis, LLP
* Chairman and CEO Port Capital LLC
* Founder, President, and CEO Invenergy, LLC
* President and CEO Myrtle Potter and Company, LLC
* Executive Chairman Hyatt Hotels Corporation
* CEO and Founder Meru Capital Group
* Chairman and CEO Ariel Investments, LLC
* CEO PIMCO
* Managing Partner Guggenheim Partners
* Co-Founder and Co-Chairman The Carlyle Group
* Founder and CEO PT Arwana Citramulia Tbk
* Chairman of the Board CorpGroup
* CEO OCI N.V.
* Chairman and CEO SGS Global Holdings
* Founder and Co-Managing Director Chicago Pacific Founders
* Founder, Chairman, and CEO BDT & Company
* Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Northern Trust
* Partner Capital Group Companies
* CEO and Founder DRW
* President Lake Capital
* Chairman, Advisory Board Ortus Capital Management Ltd.
What a list of Bernie Bros! :-)
I am amazed that some folks imagine the business people running these university education-like operations to be liberal lefties. They’re some of the most hypocritical money grabbers imaginable.
Leftists are exactly what they are.
To be fair, the trustees are in it for the bon mots and kudos. The admins are very good at pulling the wool over their eyes about what really happens on campus.
«To be fair, the trustees are in it for the bon mots and kudos. The admins are very good at pulling the wool over their eyes about what really happens on campus.»
That ridiculous handwaving is welcome given how warm it is. But trustees tend to be ferocious sharks of finance and business and sometimes politics, so not so easy to fool them, and they are sharks of business and finance because they are the big donors, or represent the interests of the big donors, and if the universities try to do something out of line, they stop donating and most universities cannot afford that.
They’re ONLY in it for the bon mots and kudos. If they gave half a fuck about education, they’d be demanding fairness….to be fair.
You know, if *by definition* hypocritical money grabbers are automatically assigned to the conservative label, that's just an arbitrary assignment you are making.. You do know that, right? 2
Where did I assign a label beyond characterizing university administrators as hypocritical money grabbers? You seem to be manufacturing an argument having nothing to do what I wrote. You do know that, right?
What else would you imagine for "The Chicago School"
Bad example looking for lefty economic types...
«What else would you imagine for "The Chicago School"»
The University of Chicago is a huge place, it is not just the Department of Pinochetista Economics.
They used to have the Graduate Library School (but closed it). I went there. Depts are quite insular and one could attend w/o being aware that John Ashcroft, Cass Sunstein, Ahmed Chalabi and Saul Bellow were there,too.
Pinochetista gives away the ghost. Your blinders are as bad as the lenders'
Go look at the economy of Chile once Pinochet took over and in the years afterwards and compare it to every other country in South America. Chile is a dazzling success.
I learned the identity of your sacred cow.
I think you may want to reexamine the ideology of the Fortune 500 types that sit on these boards. You won't find near the number of conservatives there used to be.
«the ideology of the Fortune 500 types that sit on these boards. You won't find near the number of conservatives there used to be.»
It is hard to imagine that among hedge funders, Bush/Clinton administration officials, university presidents, CEOs, judges, etc. there are many neomarxist critical race theorists... :-)
I agree. But there are a ton of virtue signaling rent seekers.
+1, s'trewth!
Please review the board of the University of Texas and get back to me.
INB4: B-but those aren't *real* liberals/leftists!
Dammit, Blissex was too quick for me.
He/she/it/xir is like a greased weasel made out of lightning. Don't feel too bad.
The two parties are a joke. They are all controlled by corporate interests.
Your almost homonym, Gore Vidal, from the insider Gore political dynasty, agreed with you:
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party [...] and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently [...] and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
Actually there are three wings in USA politics:
* tradcon supporters of nationalism and business and lower middle class interest as a minority in the Republicans (Perot, Buchanan, Trump).
* neoliberal supporters of globalism and finance and real estate property interests as a majority in both the Republican and the Democratic parties (Romney, Clinton).
* socialdemocrat supporters of business and lower middle class interests as a minority in the Democrats (Gabbard, Sanders).
Gore was rather slow on economics. There has never been laissez-faire in the US, and the GOP was never for laissez-faire.
He's my almost-anagram ;) And I learned much from him. Thanks for this.
There are explicitly conservative institutions out there, and they don't seem to be much cheaper than the liberal ones. Liberty University, for example, costs a little under $23,000 a year, which puts it smack dab in the middle of the average for public and for-profit private institutions.
For comparison, UC Berkeley, a college known for its radical leftism, is around $18,000 a year.
Totally right. Liberty U LOVES the lending system. The only college who seems to be above all of this is Hillsdale, the only college I am aware of that doesn't take federal loan money.
In addition to Hillsdale, Christendom College in Virginia does not accept federal loan money, nor does Grove City College.
What a small mind. And you're completely wrong on top of it.
Like Liberty University? Utah colleges? Plenty of others.....
The federal government has also played a role in the obscene cost of college as it has subsidized the cost, which invariably caused tuition to rise. Tuition now funds things totally unrelated to the schools mission such as plush spas and other exotica to keep the kids happy and there for the long haul. Thus the cost of education has grown at about three times the rate of inflation.
Student fees pay for big name speakers that few students attend but the lecture circuit is a big give back to lots of people. Take a look at the "Speaker Series" on most any campus. These fees get rolled into students loans.
Don't forget that higher education is a class filter and thus a site of extracting class-based wealth, or rents. In addition, the student loan industry, being mostly protected from bankruptcy proceedings, places the borrowing student in a false, rich-person's class position long enough to run up an unpayable debt.
Among a rational people, the present Education Industry would undergo a radical, fundamental review of the ways in which it functions as compared to how it is supposed to function or we want it to function. The four-year liberal arts degree and the analogous degrees in science and engineering were originally designed as a sort of finishing school for upper-class gentlemen, hence everyone's degree followed four years of study, regardless of its content, because the recipe called for marinating the student for a given period of time to make sure he quoted the right authors and used the correct accent and got to know the right people. In those days, you weren't there unless you were already upper-class, so the class-filter function of today was not present, but the class indoctrination certainly was. We probably don't need this today. Some people have suggested that fields where competence is crucial should have certification tests based on the competence required, regardless of how and where it was acquired.
Yeah, about that last bit. The pedagogic shibboleth today is that "teaching" is an art that competence in other fields does not bestow. Nor does intelligence, empathy or communication skills. The only thing that makes on a fit "teacher" is a degree from an Ed school. And membership in the appropriate teacher's union.
This belief is entirely false and entirely self-serving. Teaching is certainly a skill that can be acquired or improved, but the "Ed School" and "teachers' union" parts are entirely unnecessary and the whole thing overlooks how effective people who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about their field can be as teachers.
Shes from Florida, which (at the time of her application to colleges) offered the most generous state scholarship in the country - 100% of tuition if you have a ~3.5GPA and ~28 ACT, neither particularly high. Or 75% tuition (100% to community college) if you have a ~3.0 and like 25 ACT. And the University of Florida is one of the top ranked public schools in the country.
Are college ridiculously overpriced? Definitely! Are student loans predatory and, especially for government backed loans too high of interest rate? For sure! Did the girl in this article have to go to college in NYC, when she could have gone somewhere in Florida for free?
Similiar to the story in the WSJ about the people in debt from the Columbia masters in film. "No shit, why did you choose to go there, for that degree?"
Part of the problem is that people now have a prolonged childhood, and make the very adult decision of how much money they should be borrowing when they seem to lack the maturity for it. There are lifelong consequences.
Of course, this lady was in a particularly bad position because she was an orphan and may not have had anyone wise to advise her.
Interesting fact: The total state budget of Florida is $80 Billion. The PEOPLE of Florida owe nearly $120 Billion in student loan debt! Ron DeSantis should be calling for loan cancellation, and the end of this big-government lending monstrosity. This is the truly conservative thing to do. The lending system should be taken to the bath, and drowned in the tub.
Once that's accomplished, how do students' educations get funded?
I'm agnostic on that question, but I think it's pretty clear that the government shouldn't be in the student loan business. Probably better to directly fund schools at lower, reasonable levels (put them on a diet), and cut the terrible schools out entirely. Let them disappear. People who use the public subsidy for college can pay a special tax that is reasonable, probably based on their income or something.
"the terrible schools"? Why am I not surprised you have some targets in mind for the negative consequences of your campaign? Which schools do you have in mind for "disappearance", Alan?
This was 6 years ago: https://angrybearblog.com/2016/09/uva-slushfund-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg Even then, it was definitely running into the hundreds of billions.
Two things we can be certain of: 1) The colleges will not fix themselves; and 2) Lawmakers won't fix them.
The solution will have to come from the demand side: employers and students having less value for college degrees. If the demand dries up enough, some schools will take their rightful place in the trash heap; others will be forced to compete for students by offering better value. We can hope.
The article and many of the other posts point this out: just make it so that the student loan debt isn't (1) federally guaranteed and (2) protected from bankruptcy
you will take the artificial inflation of "free money" out of the market and you can get funding for education just fine - but lenders will be paying attention to who to actually lend to in order to get paid back. Yes, there may have to be a further iteration to prevent abuse of bankruptcy laws by graduating students. Likely there's another solution needed but it ain't the one they came up with so far, which is causing huge problems.
Also check out the emerging concept of "income share agreements" - lender provides funding for a % of future income
«<i>employers and students having less value for college degrees.</i>»
There is an enormous supply of good graduates in several offshore countries, and USA employers are largely fed up with the "unaffordable" salaries demanded by "lazy, uppity" USA graduates, unless they are "creative geniuses" from a top 10 university.
All great info, but did you check the ACT scores of the college she actually went to to see if it was likely she met those requirements? It would have taken you far less time than writing that did to see that she likely did not.
if you have to travel 1000 miles+ away to get into a school, then maybe you shouldn't get into debt to go to school. theres nothing wrong with not going to college.
Sorry, I may have misunderstood but I thought your original point was claiming that she could have gone for free, and I was saying she couldn't and that the point you made was unfair and incorrect.
This is one of the subjects about which your reporting and writing have been absolutely fantastic, but in this case the really big hat tip goes to Victor Juhasz for that utterly hilarious illustration.
Victor is my hero. It's been such a great thing to work with him over the years.
What is the cherub holding in his right hand? Is it burning money?
I literally felt sick to my stomach as I read this article. I'm so glad I was young back in the 1970s instead of today.
Colleges like every other institution in our country have turned into a money-grubbing, self-serving scam. When I attended an ivy league college fifty years ago, tuition, room and board and fees cost less than $4,000 a year. Now tuition costs twenty times as much -- a whopping $80,000 a year. Yes. I know the general cost of living has risen during the past half century. But it merely tripled. It didn't metastasize the way college tuition did.
And what exactly do you get in return for those inflated dollars ? Many on the faculty are poorly paid adjuncts, barely surviving on $3,000 per course. Much of the money is siphoned off for the bloated administrators including the woke mobsters who oversee the useless and dangerous programs that promote CRT, transgenderism, and other horrors.
@nancy2001
This IS the kind of subject that also gives me, @ age 73 cause to celebrate my age. Some markets truly have gone crazy. One thing that did not exist in our youth was a thing called "Citizens United", containing Looney Tunes concepts such as "Corporations are *people"
(then, by that logic, '57 Chevys must *also be "people") and MONEY in Congress is "Free Speech", not LEGALIZED bribery. ( and "War is Peace", etc. etc. we know the lines from Orwell's "1984"). We have LAWS that would make children laugh, and this entire system DARES to expect *respect ? Respect is not *demanded, respect is *earned.
Even our currency is just "funny money" now. When I came back from SE Asia in 1971, the *average cost of a house in Portland, OR for a family of four, was $18,500. I split rent with another Veteran on a nice two bedroom apartment for $55 per month each. I had a labor job paying $3.83 /per hour, and even with the lifestyle you expect of a young veteran back from war, I never *had so much *disposable income ! I partied like a madman, and *still had money left by the next payday ! By the time I went to College on the G.I. bill, life was still an economic "cake walk". Those were days when young people really *COULD "work their way thru college" ! Many of my fellow students did ! (Amazing to me to figure out - when did they ever *sleep ?) Bless the G.I. Bill, I had plenty of study time, and plenty of sleep.)
One of the major changes I have seen in my life since that time was the way that all U.S. businesses (business used to be defined as capitalism, returning a 10% profit. I know, how "quaint" is that ?)
There were millionaires, but not ten to every acre, and NO Billionaires. Suddenly, during the 80's, everything became GREED ! VULTURE CAPITALISM ! Part *was driven by the increase in population, but ALL was driven by GREED ! Gordon Gecko: "Greed Is good"
and sadly the entire Globe went wild from there. Suddenly, businesses could not compete with SCAMS. Giant, Global Scams ! Honest Mom & Pop operations went away with Opie's Mayberry. Suddenly business, far from "doing well", had to *KILL. And *shame was left to the animal kingdom, who have no reason for it.
Oh well, that is *my comfort during these times of boilerplate insanity in every corner. The fact that I am soon "outta here" in terms of the Third Dimension. This *will correct itself eventually, but I am just *weary with the boring, repetitive madness in the meantime.
Yes. Fifty years ago life was good, and we expected a better tomorrow. We never sensed that tomorrow would become the Black Mirror dystopia we exist in today..
@nancy2001
Well, we have certainly reached a bit of a "bump" in the highway, and it is planetary, rather than being restricted to a few select countries. Yes.
Does the New York Times Corporation have freedom of the press? It's a corporation. By your logic they wouldn't. I think perhaps at your 73 years of age, you've not thought things through.
@The Strongest
As a Vietnam Vet *and a person against the Vietnam war, as many of the troops, including the officers *were, I will share with you my "short answer" to the question "What did the Sixties deliver that lasted." It delivered the END of the Vietnam War, which NO president *knew how to END, because no president had the *slightest idea of why we went ! (Ask the CIA - they know. Ask French Intelligence - they know.). Lyndon Johnson *had to know that Gulf of Tonkin Resolution bullshit (excuse to go to war) was just that ! (We now have the *proof that it was bullshit.) If you seek *answers rather than mudballs to throw, watch the Ken Burns history "The Vietnam War". It is *not a political poop paper, it is history.
The OTHER thing The Sixties did was to FINALLY destroy the "herd mentality" that *so effectively *smothered the Fifties ! The white picket fence, Stepford wives CONFORMITY of the Fifties. You had to live it to KNOW it, bcuz even B&W TV mostly lies about it.
Yes, during the Sixties there WERE hippies in Golden Gate Park in 1967 who "burned out" there. Infinitesimal scrap book slice of the Sixties. Barely a "passing thought" anymore, or even then.
That is like the five blind men trying to describe the Elephant.
Oh, says the first as he embraces a leg. The elephant is most like a tree.
Not so, says another who grabs an ear. The elephant is most like a blanket.
You are both deceived, says a third who grabs the trunk. The elephant is most like the snake. All incorrect says the fifth man, who grabs the tail. The elephant is most like a Rope !
The BIG PICTURE of the SIXTIES was almost impossible to grasp by those who LIVED IT, and was only slightly comprehensible, as most things are, *mostly in retrospect. The further the distance in time, the more sense finally emerges regarding these things.
The "hippies" morph into the U.S. Anti-War movement. The Anti-War movement STOPS the U.S. prosecution of the Vietnam War by 1974.
Our fathers had WWII. Our Grandfathers had WWI. My generation had Vietnam. Of the three, ONLY WWII was a War that *HAD to be fought. It was our LAST legal war, in that it WAS declared by Congress.
It was not some Presidential Flim-Flam that was illegal, and so could not even be *called what it obviously WAS ! The "Korean Conflict" was not officially a "war", it was a "Police Action". The Vietnam War was not a "war", it was officially called "an armed conflict". No Shit ? Isn't that just a LOT *LIKE a WAR ? What with the 58K dead American Troops, and the well over Two Million dead Asians of ALL walks of life? In every way *Except the fact that those "actions" were NEVER legally called for by the ONLY branch that our Constitution GIVES the right to Declare War? The United States Congress.
History always swings on a "Pendulm". The arc of any Pendulum only stays in balance, in stasis, for a couple of seconds when it points straight down.
The Anti-War movement STOPPED the Vietnam War, and the representatives of that generation heavily influenced U.S. Policy in Congress for at least Thirty Years after that. Then, predictably, came the *backlash from the Right. The pendulum once again swung *back. The Fifties "belonged" to religion and Right Wingers. The Sixties and much of the Seventies belonged to the Left. The Eighties saw the Right Wing return with a *vengeance, and so it goes like two riders on a seesaw. It is a CYCLE, like the weather, not a permanent freeze.
What gives me a giggle is to listen to Right Wing Radio STILL freaking out about that handful of hippies in Golden Gate park. The Right pretended NOT to be afraid of Nuclear War with the USSR, but a few vans full of hippies STILL has Right Wing Radio "wetting down its leg" 55 years later ? Yes, because Hippies represented CHANGE from that hardcore conformity OF the Fifities. The Hippies v.s. The Hardhats as the "battle" was depicted at the time.
This, my statement, will have to be proven again and again long after my time is over in this life. This cycle has BEEN in place since LONG before recorded history. It is ancient, and truly, it is BEYOND boring by now. There is no perfect "right" or "wrong". There are just Shadow Games of Cycles. Read (do not google)
Plato's description called "The Cave Analogy" from Plato's work "The Republic" written almost 2,400 years ago by now. Do *NOT abuse yourself with an online summary, because ALL online summaries are written by people TOO IGNORANT to understand Plato even as they *read him, if they ever do ! Read it in the Original, and if you STILL don't *get it, then you may not be *ready for it yet. Plato describes a Shadow World which represents people in 3-D. Those people either *evolve out of that world, or they spiritually "ascend" and transcend that world. That explanation has not "slipped a cog" from that time to this.
Was there some point you were trying to make?
@Lipo Davis
If you miss the point, perhaps it wasn't *for you.
Pendulums or something. It's bullshit.
«Nixon and his gang were properly evil, not just card sharks like Trump»
I once read a comment by an australian about their far-right prime minister, saying that at least the american presidents like the Bushes were proper dark lords whose strategic decisions could make the world tremble, while the australian prime minister was a deluded pissant hollering without much anybody listening.
In 1960 my college cost about $4000 for everything. Now it is $70,000. The number of administrators has vastly increased.
Gotta love it. Unlimited lending with no underwriting standards, generally to people who are unemployed. What could go wrong? The NY Fed did a study a couple years back that showed that for every additional dollar of student loans made available, colleges raised tuition and costs over $.70.
Thank you for bringing this subject to light. Beneath the level on which you're reporting are far more dastardly deeds than those you are recounting, including government's willingness to throw students and their families under the school bus. The thicket began growing in the 1970s and will be worse tomorrow than it is today.
Indisputable is that the cost of post-high school education has soared at many times the general rate of inflation. Since 1995, the CPI has risen 114%; college and university costs have fattened by more than 498%. Going back to 1969, my senior year, public institutions have increased in cost by 3,009% versus 559% rise in CPI. The reason it grew so much faster than other costs is simple supply and demand.
In the long-term struggle between proponents of equal opportunity and proponents of equal outcomes, the "outcomes" side has scored a knockout punch. We acknowledged in the 1960s that education was the great leveler, and saw that people with college degrees earned more than those without. The situation was misunderstood by government, which concluded that if everyone had a college degree then everyone would earn higher wages. Wrong conclusion.
The complex economy of the U.S. needs few people with college degrees and always has. If only one out of 50 employees needed a college degree to perform his work, awarding college degrees to the other 49 wouldn't change the education needed to perform their jobs. The rapid technical advances of the last 150 years have done away with most job, meaning that where once 50 people worked to execute a function in 1870, today only one or two are required. This is nowhere more evident than in agriculture: In 1870, 75% of the US Labor Force was engaged in farming and ranching. Today, with vastly improved crop yields, sturdier and more capable machinery, and greater reliance on technology, less than two percent of the US Labor Force is required the feed the nation and much of the rest of the world. Perhaps two people on each family farm needed to know how to read, write and perform basic arithmetic functions in 1870. Today's industrial farmers and ranchers need college degrees, but there are very few of them. Fewer as a percentage of the workforce than needed basic literacy in the past.
Having failed to understand the role of education in the labor force government set about to get everybody a college degree, and poured more money into higher education. With more money available to pay for the same product, prices went up. As prices rose, government poured more money into the pot. We still need most most of the engineers graduating college, but that's a relatively low number. What we don't need in the economy is more intersectional aromatherapists. We may need them culturally, but if it is necessary to cross a stream I want an engineer on the team, and we'll advertise among the baristas in Starbucks to get a PhD aromatherapist when actually needed.
Meanwhile, we have a shortage of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, surveyors and others who can keep the lights on. Social shaming of people who skip college is both decadent and wrong.
There is a need for both. The problem is that not everyone has critical thinking and/or reading comprehension skills. Some people learn by doing. Others achieve by ruminating on large abstract problems and developing elegant solutions.
Forcing people who really can't read or comprehend what they read to take liberal arts curricula is no different from making someone without fine motor skills pick up a painter's palette, or making a tone deaf person play the trumpet.
It's the same with trades. If you can't tell the difference between a 1/8" and a 1/4" brass fitting, or don't understand the concept of freeze/thaw cycles, you probably shouldn't be in the plumbing business.
The whole debate is like watching Washington DC play with an infant's toy and try to stuff the triangle piece into the circle hole.
My wife's brother is an elevator mechanic, probably the top of the trades because he has to be top-tier in every one of them. He joined the union 47 years ago straight out of high school. He drew an hourly wage until about twelve years ago when he was hired into an executive position with one of the major global manufacturers. He rarely travels more than 40 miles from his home or office, has never attended an opera or ballet, will never know the exquisite pleasure of multi-level analysis of Finnegan's Wake.
He dedicated himself to becoming an expert elevator mechanic. When necessary he has worked around the clock to get hospital elevators up and running, or to restore service to incredibly long subway escalators, or just to put people at ease as an elevator rescue takes place. He has always made more money than I, and I'm glad he's well-off. We have nothing in common except the important things, such as long successful marriages, raising children who contribute to society as much as to family, and a dedication to using what skills we have to share with our neighbors.
He got his son into the union - this was one of the many guilds that required relationship to a member to join, with disparate impact on minorities. That's being corrected. He had to work far harder than I to learn his trade; my B.A. was in beer. No need for a four-year degree.