The Federal Reserve Bank of New York says if Congress or the President ends the pandemic emergency federal student loan forbearance program, former students won’t be able to make auto loan and credit card payments. Is this just step one in a total student loan forgiveness plan?
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28 replies on “Student Debt: End COVID-19 Forbearance and Millions May Fail to Pay Credit Card, Car Debt”
That close was perfect. Amen.
It is simple “Rights” do not need other people to pay for them. Anything else breaks my right to be free from theft.
Doing your own laundry, buying your own food …
Yeah, a lot of us did. But a LOT of the people I knew in college is that they weren’t really buying their own food. They may have SHOPPED for their own food. But it was money given to them by their parents and by the government with a “hey, when you get a real job you can pay us back” loan. Which to a college student seems like some nebulous, distant, foggy future. And that isn’t a lot different to them than someone buying their groceries for them.
I am going over to youtube shortly and electrocute a few techies.
Something else that happens when you simply forgive the debt that these students owe is you encourage the breaking of promises. Our nation is built on promises. Civilization is built on promises. Without promises, and without the obligation to fulfill a promise you make, you erode the very foundation of civilization.
And without promises or consequences, there is no value in telling the truth, either.
For those of you who follow Mike Rowe, his podcast number 225 features an interview with a 28 yr old young woman who went through his program and is a welder with Joe Gibbs Racing making 6 figures. No student loan debt. It is a good listen and gives you faith in the next generation.
I understand there is a short documentary available featuring her story as well. Her name is Chloe Hudson.
I had Ronette do a CBA of the degree she wanted to earn and what she thought would be the salary of her first job in that degree, then figure out how long to pay back the loans. then had her do it for some other “degrees”.
When she went to the bank for loans (Bank of Mom and Dad) she had a plan. My only regret is that we waited to do this in Jr year of HS. Had we done it earlier, she may have gone the path that some of her school mates did and take their english and math requirements at the local CC and gone into college as a second term sophomore. One kid actually went in as a JR having gotten is associates degree from CC a week before getting his HS diploma.
He got a 4 yr degree in only 2 years and was taking 3rd year, in major classes as an 18 year old.
Lots of ways to turn the system on its head.
I never had a student loan while pursuing my Chemical Engineering degree. (5 years) They had a co-op program, where we worked in industries that had Chemical Engineers. We got paid, and sometimes got hired by them when we graduated (but not me). Combine that with my parents saving for my education, and my working summers for Manpower when in was not in school or at my co-op job, and I paid for about half by myself. jobs were: 1) destroying old past use date medicines. 2) hanging upside down by my knees ten foot from a concrete floor putting on tape and covers on a machine before it got painted to protect parts that should not be painted then removing the coverings. All this, while I have a fear of heights.
Never mind what I did as an actual Engineer. (Climbing on heat exchanger about 6 ft up, and also going into a vessel about 4 stories high, down a rickety ladder, getting off halfway onto a stand pipe to get on another rickety ladder. And the last ladder was in the dark. Which actually helped.)
Part of the problem with student loans is there are too many loans made for an education that’s not an education. If you’re taking college courses that lead to lucrative employment (like STEM fields) then paying back the loans is not an undue hardship, nor is it an unfair exchange. Meaning that you’re paying to learn things that will make you money. You’re receiving real value for the thing you’re paying for.
If you’re getting a student loan to achieve a Master’s Degree in Eastern Mediterranean Underwater Basket Weaving, Gender Studies or any of those worthless degrees then you’re not only getting ripped off, you’re not smart enough to know you’re getting ripped off.
The long term solution is to STOP lending money for degrees that do not further the prospects of the individual for gainful employment. Because those are the loans that are difficult or impossible to pay off.
Most of those useless or nearly useless degrees hitherto were pursued by rich kids that could afford to pay for them and pursued them for reasons of their own interests aside from the prospects for employment.
For example, I tutored a young man in Astronomy a few years ago. He had taken Astronomy as an elective to fill in his credits and discovered that he really had a love and natural talent for the subject. He liked it so much that he was considering changing his major from whatever it was to Astronomy. He wanted to work in the field after graduation. So he asked me how a person went about getting a job in Astronomy.
I told him he couldn’t afford it. Jobs that pay anything worthwhile in Astronomy are held by PHDs and under-grads in universities and government agencies like NASA. It’s a tiny field of employment. You start as a free intern and work your way up from there. This involves many years of not making a living so you have to be sufficiently wealthy to live through those years independent of wages. Even once you get a real job, you are starting out at the rock bottom and that doesn’t pay much. Then you work for more years until someone up there at the top with the job you want retires. Then you move up one notch, you don’t get the job you want you fill the next higher vacancy.
It can take 20 years or more to get to the point where you can actually live off the money you’re paid as an Astronomer. The only way to jump start that process is to be so darn good that universities will offer you a research position and even then you’re depending on grants to feed yourself. The young man in question just wasn’t that good, that’s why he needed a tutor.
Note that I’m not saying a degree in Astronomy is a worthless degree. But it’s not a realistic paying proposition either. It just isn’t and I know this because I looked into it myself. I tend to be pretty hard-nosed about things and when you put aside a love for the field and actually look into what it takes to make a real living in it … That’s just not possible except in a very narrow set of circumstances that are not available to me or the young guy I was tutoring.
So a student loan for an education resulting in a Bachelor of Science degree in Astronomy is not a paying proposition.
That being the case, consider how much more useless a BA in Gender Studies is.
Though it does not address the immediate problem of people paying back student loans the long term solution is legislation that refuses the underwriting of purely personal-interest educations and focuses on only guaranteed loans for fields where we actually need warm bodies in which to work. Anything else should be financed and the loan guaranteed by the individual colleges. Let them, not us, take the risk if they want to offer that kind of “education”.
Doing this will put a screeching halt to useless degrees financed by guaranteed government loans. It will also have the effect of not sending our kids to schools to learn things that will destroy our society.
You are correct that Astronomy jobs from which one can make a good living are few and far between. However, I remember reading an article a long time ago about how a degree in Astronomy (Astrophysics, actually) prepared the student in a very wide range of other useful disciplines. Physics, chemistry, mathematics, hydrodynamics, geology, etc. and many graduates found high-paying jobs in industries and fields unrelated to Astronomy. One of them I explicitly remember was the opportunity to make a lot of money in stock trading because astronomers and physicists were among the best qualified to understand the mathematics in derivative trading, which was somewhat of a rage at the time.
Still, you’re correct that the STEM fields are probably the most worth while fields on which to risk student loans with.
As a side note, I started college in 1969. Back then, a typical semester cost about $200. Even in today’s dollars, it wasn’t a lot of money.
Nowadays, one of the consequences that often goes unsaid regarding the effect of federal loans is that, in most colleges and universities, administrators outnumber the professors by a large margin. Schools have raised tuition so high that they can’t possibly spend it all on education so they hire more and more useless administrators.
I understand what you’re saying but Astronomy and Astrophysics (or also Cosmology) are not the same thing.
Astrophysics is a science that uses the laws of physics, chemistry and math to explain how the universe works. It’s obvious that those sorts of studies would apply to a broad range of lucrative science related disciplines. An astrophysicist rarely if ever looks through a telescope.
Astronomy is the study of things in outer space; galaxies, planets, stars, nebulae, globular clusters (also stars but why are they clustered?), asteroids, comets etc. The various types of telescope are the primary tools of an astronomer.
Side note: Cosmology is the study of the entire universe, past present and future. Also not the same thing as the previous two fields.
All these disciplines can resource each other but that’s doesn’t make them the same thing. A terrestrial nuclear physicist might be drawn to astrophysics or an astrophysicist to terrestrial nuclear physics. Being an astronomer is not a qualification for either though each might use the product of the other in their own disciplines.
The distinction is important because while a bright young person with sufficient resources to get a degree in astrophysics or astronomy might have an abiding interest in either or both — Astrophysics is a degree that can result in employment paying a living wage and astronomy is generally not except as I’ve described before.
I’m not criticizing you, people tend to lump similar things together and I’m as guilty of that as anyone else. It’s just that astronomy is a lifelong interest and hobby of mine so I’m probably more intimately familiar with this area than an average person with a good education might be. I own three decent telescopes; a 6 inch Newtonian with an equatorial mount, a 6 inch Matsukov-Cassegrain with a goto mount and a great-big-mother of a light bucket 12 inch Dobsonian. I use them all fairly often, the Mat-Cass most of all because it’s the easiest to set up and get to making observations. I’m not a rich man and those scopes cost a lot of money so I didn’t just buy them on a whim.
If I set them all up and invite the neighbors over for a star party I never have a problem getting some company. Mostly though my hobby is a solitary pursuit and that suits me just fine.
As an amateur astronomer I like to look at things and try to understand their nature. That is the general appeal of astronomy. I have enough math to make that work but that’s not on the same level as an astrophysicist. Not even close.
All of that said, lumping an astrophysicist in with an astronomer is on a par with calling a Marine a soldier. Just FYI for future reference. 😉
The above initial comment was just me giving an example of how even a highly technical STEM degree may not be a paying proposition. Contrast that to a truly worthless pursuit like Gender Studies. It’s important to understand the difference between luxury and necessity.
Pursuing highly expensive personal interests that don’t pay a cash dividend are luxuries and only those sorts of people that don’t have to ask for a price on things can afford to ignore the difference. Those sorts of people also are not the ones likely to default on loans. In fact they probably don’t need loans to start with.
We need to stop treating college educations that are very expensive personal interest luxuries as necessities. By which I mean we need to be more selective in educational loan guarantees. That failure to differentiate is a really large part what has gotten us into our current dilemma because colleges are bloated cesspools of social justice warriors, snowflakes, buttercups, soy-boys, male feminists and Social Marxists that are bleeding social putrefaction into our country. We’re financing and incentivizing that, either as parents or as taxpayers, in many ways.
That needs to stop being incentivized. Years ago. You can’t train up generations of that sort of people without dire consequences and whatever else drives that, we should not be subsidizing it in any way.
Jordan Peterson said something like you did about the proportion of administrators vs. actual professors too.
He also said that because of the surplus funding pouring into universities most of the students aren’t even being taught by professors at all. They’re being taught by lower echelon educational staff that is much younger and much less experienced/knowledgeable and are being paid much, much lower salaries than a real, tenured professor would get. This results in a closing of ranks (and minds), and radicalization of instructors.
You want to radicalize our kids? Just make them sit in a classroom with an assistant instructor that gets paid -/+ $24,000 or less a year and can be replaced in a hot minute. Fired by a humanistic administrator that doesn’t agree with him, so he’d damned well better do what admin wants him to. That guy is bound to be radical and he’s going to pass that on to his students.
The problem with administrators is they believe that administration is the most vital function of their organization. Like bean counters think bean counters are the most important part of their companies and both ignore quality in that bias. Bean counters need to be reigned in or they will destroy a company by sacrificing service and quality for close range profit. (Gateway Computer Corporation being an excellent example of that.) Administrators should exist in just sufficient quantity to administer and they should be BUSY all the time because of their workload.
Administrators in education get things backwards. They want just enough educational staff to get the job done (poorly) and more administrators to ensure the job is being done the way they want it to be. It should be the reverse. More and higher quality educators and just enough administrators to get the job done.
This is the Law of Entropy and Swamp/Jungle Rules in action in our educational system and if we don’t counter it soon the price is going to be unsupportable.
I’m well aware of the distinctions between Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology and I have a fair amount of experience in all three. In my post, I made the case for ‘Astrophysics’ instead of Astronomy because it is a stronger example.
That being said, Astronomy is somewhat more than you’ve given it credit for. Like you, I’ve been an amateur astronomer for nearly sixty years. I also have some very nice equipment and, over the years, I’ve even taught Astronomy at college and university levels. Even in our plain old observational astronomy classes, a significant amount of physics, chemistry, hydrodynamics, mathematics, and computer science is involved. My point is, the distinctions between these three fields are often very fuzzy in real life. Even my professional Astrophysics and Cosmologists friends consider their fields to be under the larger umbrella of Astronomy.
As a side note, I’d like to say that amateur astronomers are *extremely* important to Astronomy. They are the ones who discover nearly all of the new comets and asteroids out there.
Meanwhile, I totally agree with all your points: Stop treating college education as a right or necessity. Be more selective in loan guarantees – like using statistical analysis for one’s expected ability to pay back on a field-by-field basis.
You are also correct about classes being taught by lower echelon staff. – When I was in grad school, I remember some students coming in from big name universities saying that their classes were seldom taught by the assigned professor but, instead were taught by the professor’s doctoral students (many of whom were from China.) Furthermore, the students told me that, if they had a question, they would have to make an appointment to see their professor and, the appointments would always be weeks away, so it was pointless to even try.
Meanwhile, administrators do indeed tend to act as if the primary purpose of a university is to serve as a vehicle for which to hire more administrators. As you say, just enough staff to get the job done (poorly) but enough administrators to micro-manage everything.
I have run a few companies in my time and, my philosophy about administration was always this: The administrator’s job is to make sure the employees have everything they need to do their jobs effectively. Essentially, in my view, the administration works for the employees.
We could go back and forth on this all day. There’s a lot to cover and I think you’ll agree that my intention was not to cover all of it so … I get it but none of that was my point and we’ve gotten side tracked on something irrelevant to that point. Which is …
There aren’t a lot of decent paying jobs for people with BS Degrees in Astronomy and the ones that exist are difficult to get into. Difficult enough that unless you have other resources to hold you over until you can make a full time living at it that may not be the best career choice for someone with limited means and floating his education solely on student loans and perhaps a couple small grants. Especially in today’s academic situation where everything is way more expensive and way less effective than it should be.
I was just using an example that I had personal experience in to make that point. That was the point, not the validity or differences or anything else regarding Astronomy vs. Astrophysics vs. Cosmology etc.
As I’ve said before, and to you as well as others. It’s difficult to get everything that one might want to convey in a conversation across in the limited environment of text posted in a comment section. I tend to write exactly as I would speak in conversation when the situation is informal.
You took us off on a tangent (bringing in astrophysics, which is not what I was talking about at all) and I let you do that and participated in it … Which makes me as much at fault as you might be. It’s OK, I still enjoy the discussion or I wouldn’t participate in it. All I’m saying is that I was making a point and we’ve both strayed from it.
I’ve run a company that I owned for many years now and I agree that an administrator’s primary task is to see that everyone has what they need to get their job done. That includes clearly established goals as well as other resources. It’s more of an art form than a science to choose assignments and work loads playing to the strength of each employee. Mixed in with that is “growing” the capacity and abilities of individual employees and add to that the fact that the best person for the job might be otherwise occupied on something of greater priority. So you can’t always put the best person for the job on deck and you have to bear in mind the danger of pigeonholing people without regard to increasing their usefulness.
I know I’m risking another tangent here in getting into this but I understand what you’re saying. The thing is that in my operations quality is always a foremost concern. If we don’t do a good job it’s super easy to fire us. People just stop calling.
I don’t know what the current academic standards are for training up administrative people but looking at the end results in the educational field I don’t think quality is a top priority anymore. Unlike my field it’s comparatively difficult for a student, who is the consumer and customer, to “fire” his educators because he’s committed to that institution with substantial investments in time and financial considerations.
The student is also not a savvy, knowledgeable consumer because he really doesn’t know good from bad when it comes to what he’s being fed in the classroom. That student has to trust his institution for that and it looks to me like they’re not only letting him down, they’re ripping him off too.
Now, all of that said … I cannot think of a way to force a course correction of this problem. Things seem to be straying further and further off course as time goes on and it seems to me that is a result of “the path of least resistance”. As with anything, the way to fix that is to create greater resistance on the incorrect path and less resistance on the correct one. For the life of me I have no idea how we’re going to go about accomplishing that.
Any thoughts on the matter?
Sorry if my appeal to astrophysics was a tangent.
Anyway, I really like your idea of creating greater resistance along the wrong path while greasing the correct one. These kinds of endemic problems are difficult to fix suddenly with a hammer. They more or less require helping the system drift toward the correct solution, as you suggest.
Yah, no problem. It was a tangent but I fed into it too. I should have just brought us back to the actual points in question. No biggie.
As far as grit on the bad rails and grease on the good ones … Near as I can tell that’s the best way to move a critter with the massive social mass and political inertia of the United States. That’s the idea behind tax incentives and penalties and other such prods to get things moving in the right direction.
Once you do that, the critter is so big that results don’t take an awful long time to manifest. Donald Trump managed to pull that off pretty well by just releasing many of the brakes Democrats had set and locked on the economy. It wasn’t so much that he waved any magic wands and things got better, it’s just that he was smart enough to get the hell out of the way and let nature take its course.
Of course, to make that work you have to have people that both realize there’s a problem and are willing to apply the tools to fix it that are most likely to yield the desired results.
There’s the rub.
The government needs to stop loaning money for college and let the universities fund their own students. If enough students default on their loans, maybe the universities will stop producing worthless degrees.
Yes, the government needs to get out of the student loan business entirely. Prior to the Bill Clinton administration the government owned zero student loans. Today student loans are are either “guaranteed” (equivalent to the co-signing of a private loan) or owned (and traded on the loan market) by the Federal government to the terrifying total of 93% of all student loans.
As of 2020 student loan debt accounted for nearly 20% of all U.S. Government assets. That’s a staggering figure. One fifth of the assets of the government of the United States of America are at risk of default and loss. The U.S. is a very big, very wealthy country. One fifth of all government assets is a horrifying percentage.
If for some reason The Coven of Crafty Communists, otherwise referred to as The Squad, were to find a way to “forgive” all that student debt, one fifth of the worth of the Federal government would evaporate overnight.
That would precipitate a catastrophic economic crisis and may just crash our economy completely. Especially the way it’s limping along under the current vegetable puree slowly putrefying and petrifying in the Oval Office.
Something like that could even crash the global economy. That’s a lot harder to come back from than a national crash because there’s nothing “out there” to build back up from. We can’t regenerate a healthy economy when there’s nothing and no one to trade with because they’re all in as bad or worse shape than we are.
It’s not just about the loans and what they’re used for. There’s a lot more to the story than just writing off some debt and moving on.
We are standing on a razors edge. We got here from decades of unsound policies and while the Democrats are largely at fault for that the Republicans are not without blame either. It wouldn’t take a lot for President Sock Puppet to be manipulated over the brink.
Of course the really good news (meant in my very most sarcastic manner) is that even a snake charmer like Barack Hussein Obama said of our current Potato in Chief …
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.”
Funny astronomy story:
Way back in the 80’s, a friend and I wanted to observe and record a stellar occultation of an asteroid that was going to occur. Then we would submit our measurements to a central data base. The point of doing this is so that, data taken from many locations can be used with computer tomography to generate the actual shape of the asteroid.
These measurements are done by directing the image in the telescope to a photometer, which continuously measures the total light. The light signal is passed to a chart recorder. In addition, a short wave radio is tuned to WWV and the output is connected to another channel on the chart recorder. This will produce spikes on the chart corresponding to each second. That way, the light signal can be calibrated in time.
Anyway, my friend and I loaded up his station wagon with my telescope, the university’s photometer and chart recorder plus an electric inverter which would power all of the equipment. Then we drove about 50 miles out of the city to my sister’s so that we would have a reasonably dark sky.
This was like a really big deal for us. We’d been planning it for weeks. We got to my sister’s and set everything up. We aligned the polar axis of the telescope and located the star. We got the chart recorder connected and running. We tuned in WWV and got the spikes appearing on the chart recorder. Then, when it came time to connect the photometer, we discoved that we left it at home and the whole thing was a bust. We were very embarrassed.
The best laid plans, as they say.
Ha! That’s the way it always seems to go, isn’t it?
For years and years I lived in Los Angeles County, where any sort of astral observations are near impossible due to light pollution. So I would drive out to the Buzzard Springs quadrangle on BLM land in the Mojave desert when seasonal conditions permitted. Not a human being in a 50 mile radius except for maybe a meth lab somewhere even more isolated. Pitch black skies out there and almost always crystal clear.
I would plan those trips just as you describe and pile everything I needed in a corner as I thought of it. As soon as it occurred to me in the pile it would go. Then I’d check and double check my inventory before leaving. So I got out to the Mojave on one of those trips and I had everything I needed and a dark sky above me but …
No water.
I went thirsty for the night and the next morning flew back down the goat trails and non-roads to the gravel roads to the paved roads and went to my cousin’s house in Palm Springs to top up my water.
Another time I was out there with my cousin’s husband and I got stuck in a dry wash. Buried the wheels on my 2WD Blazer down to the axles. I know how to handle that but my cousin’s husband, who btw claims to be a serious outdoorsman, was useless. So I had to get unstuck with a minimum of help but … It’s over 100 degrees in the early afternoon and I’m busting my hump jacking up the vehicle, putting rocks under the wheels, etc. and I smell smoke.
I turned around and in that heat my cousin’s husband had a blazing fire going with scrap wood he had scrounged up. There’s almost no burnable fuel out there and the little bit that was available was blazing merrily away.
I said “Why the fire?”
He looked at me and said in a manner that clearly conveyed his opinion of my profound ignorance “That’s the first thing you do when you get stranded or lost.”
I said “You realize it’s going to get down near freezing tonight and if I don’t get this truck un-stuck we’re probably going to want that wood that is right now doing nothing but adding heat and smoke to the hot desert wind? If we don’t come back in time there are people who will come looking for us but it would be kind of helpful if we were still alive when they found us. Just sayin’.”
It’s always something, isn’t it?
Biden’s economy where rents and mortgages are astronomical, gas prices are as well, even used cars are pricey, and small businesses are struggling to make enough money to hire new employees, subsidizing student loans is only smart if politically motivated. You take away one overdue bill and the voter will forget why everything else is so crummy in Democrat’s “caring” management of the country.
That said, why not make rent, gas, cars, and school free? We aren’t living in reality (economically) anyway. We’ll never pay back the national debt, not as long as we are the default world’s currency.
If clicking the YT upward thumb causes pain to those blue-haired 22 year-old leftist “fact” checkers, then imagine what *destruction* is wreaked upon that YT environment when one provides a positive Rumble on the rumble.com site.
HAH!
It would be . . .
I couldn’t afford college so I got an ROTC scholarship in the fall of 2000. By the time I commissioned four years later, we were fighting two wars. I got a turn in each one. I am unsympathetic to the “plight” of indebted young people who have useless degrees. Period.
Thank you for your service. My son did the same thing. He graduated with no debt and had a good job waiting for him flying for the Air Force. My other son, by the way, has a girlfriend with $200,000 in student loan debt and not a job connected in any way to the two master’s degrees she is paying so dearly for.
you fellas do a fine service!! thanks
Bill made a point about paying for the students debt and then having them censor your content when they get out of school. I left California 11 years ago for the same reason. why feed the beast that is trying to devour you while you’
‘r feeding it?
Then why shouldn’t we compel teachers to work for free?
Does anyone know how much Father Guido Sarducci is charging these days?
I have conservative case for student loan forgiveness – why not fleece the party most responsible for the mess?