Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
Personally I don’t like student loan forgiveness because I think a free public university system is a better investment.
Yeah, same reason I don’t like insulin, I want a permanent cure for diabetes… In the meantime fuck diabetic people, am I right?
/S in case people are confused
In the meantime fuck diabetic people, am I right?
Student loan forgiveness with no other action is completely counter-productive. Just like allowing drug companies to charge anything they want for Insulin, and then just having the government pay them is completely counter-productive. The answer to spiraling insulin prices (when not due to a shortage of some key ingredient) is to cap prices, not just pay whatever ransom drug companies are asking.
College costs have spiraled out of control because laws were passed to prevent you from escaping student loan debt through bankruptcy. From a lender perspective there’s almost no risk to giving students as much money as they want to borrow. Colleges in turn realized they could just keep raising prices because students could “afford” pretty much any tuition price through loans. If you just “forgive” all student loan debt, you’ll just encourage colleges to jack up prices even more. Why not? Come one come all, the government is going to foot whatever the bill ends up being!
If you’re going to forgive student debt, it needs to come with 3 things:
- A hard cap on public university tuition tracking inflation
- Student loans need to go back to being forgiven as a part of bankruptcy.
- A long-term plan to make public universities “free”
You want to find a middle ground with conservatives? Make tuition free for the occupations we have a shortage of to encourage people to go to school for a degree in which there will be a job waiting when they’re done.
We need more teachers? Teaching degrees are free for the next decade. You want to be a marine biologist? You pay whatever the (reasonable) capped state tuition is.
I know people who have fully embraced that they will never be able to pay off their student loans and are just letting them default. It’s often easier to get out of wage garnishment and wrecked credit than it is trying to pay back tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So yeah, the government paying off its own loans is just kicking the can down the road. Accelerating a process that’s already happening.
Free education will make the world a better place in the future for everyone. Debt forgiveness is just for people who don’t want to pay their bills because they studied something that doesn’t pay.
Curing diabetes will make the world a better place in the future for everyone. Insuline is just for people who want to eat candy all day because they hate themselves
/S
Ps: it’s hilarious how quickly you showed the true colours you pretended to hide in your first post
I’m genuinely confused by this? I know CompSci and engineering majors that are having trouble with loans and are you saying that they should have tried a more profitable degree… What?
Free education will make the world a better place in the future for everyone.
This is true.
Debt forgiveness is just for people who don’t want to pay their bills because they studied something that doesn’t pay.
This is utter garbage. Judgemental much? Maybe your own experiences and feelings aren’t the same for everyone.
¿Por qué no los dos?
I too prefer free tertiary education. But that also does not relieve the millions saddled with predatory loans.
Not all loans were predatory, some people just made dumb choices all on their own. If anything there should be a reasonable limit on the interest rates and the loans should be refinanced.
And, as for why not both, we actually can’t afford either. Investing for the future is a better deal for society than fixing people’s personal mistakes.
What do you mean we can’t afford either? Are you telling me that somehow all other developed countries are able to afford free or cheap higher education but somehow the US cannot? We could also slowly start to cancel current student debt. Sure, it is at $1.77 trillion right now but that does not have to be wiped away all at once. Prioritize getting rid of predatory loans, then those those with financial hardship, then go from there.
But…if you think free public university is a good thing…isn’t not giving loan forgiveness analogous to saying “folks should stay in jail for trumped up marijuana charges until it’s legal Federally”? IMHO people shouldn’t have these loans in the first place.
If we can’t afford loan forgiveness, we can’t afford free public university. We can simultaneously fix the problems of the past while trying to improve things for the future.
In terms of harm done, no. Principle? Yeah? It’s best to stop further harm, but undoing past harms as well is even better.
