This may be the subject of controversy, but I have to say I fully support the cancellation of student debt
Now before you start attacking me about why someone should pay someone else’s debts, just hear me out, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Okay, calm now? It’ll all be good. Please read on…
Of course the first thought of all right (politically and morally) thinking people are going to ask who would pay for it. Why should the taxpayers shoulder this burden? Under my plan, they will not. In our society when someone steals property from you, the general remedy is restitution. The people who took the money should pay it back. Well who took that trillion+ in this case? Who are the real thieves here? I say it’s people who TAKE $80,000 per year to fill your mind with left-wing mush and (for about 90% of students) teach you nothing that you will ever use in real life.
Therefore, to pay for debt cancellation, I’d levy heavy fines for all the First Amendment and conservative suppression abuses colleges and universities enact. Let’s keep it modest, say a fine of $1,000,000 per incident. Do this until we milk dry all of the hundreds of billions worth of endowments of all private and public universities. The rest we would take out of Federal aid to colleges and universities until the debt is paid off.
And for those who pay off your student loans already or paid up front, please dig out your receipts. You will be re-imbursed as well. We may have to fire half the useless faculty (i.e. half the faculty), sell off college buildings, force professors to teach more than 1 class per year, but dag gommit we’ll get the money. So now everyone’s happy except the colleges themselves. Well maybe they’ll think about it next time they want to pay $250K a year for a “diversity and inclusion” officer.
Mischief. Managed.
6 replies on “My take on student debt”
I must confess that I find that people going into debt for graduate degrees (other than medicine and law) to be highly unusual. I get that I am of a different generation, but when I went to grad school in engineering my only expenses were living expenses: rent, food etc.) The school nominally charged tuition. My TA position paid me almost exactly what tuition was. For this boon I graded papers in one class per term. My part time job as an engineer at a local manufacturing company cover the rest.
If you are getting an advanced degree and having to pay for it, my contention is that degree is not very useful; else the school would cover it for you.
I like the idea but I’ll point out a couple refinements to it …
If you want your student debt cancelled (and subsequent fines or other mechanisms to recoup the money from those colleges where that money was wasted on that degree) then you should also have your degree rescinded.
People with profitable degrees in STEM, business management, etc. won’t want their degree rescinded and have the option to pay their debt and work in their chosen field that education prepared them for rather than have their degree nullified.
People with stupid degrees in Eastern Mediterranean Underwater Basket Weaving, Gender Studies and such who find themselves unemployable thereby will have their degrees rescinded and their debt cancelled. The institutions which took their money, I should say which stole their money, will be held accountable by nullifying the payment for those stupid degrees by whatever mechanisms are most expedient. Be it fines or whatever.
Moving forward then we’ll have a list of degrees deemed a good risk for future gainful employment and a list of degrees that do not meet that criteria. Only the good risks will be eligible for financing of any sort, the others must all pay in cash.
One field that I’ve brought up on this site before is Astronomy. It’s almost impossible to get a job in astronomy because the demand is so specialized and limited. So most people who get degrees in astronomy traditionally were pursuing their own personal interests at their own (or their family’s) expense.
I love astronomy myself and am an amatuer astronomer with decades of private participation at my own expense behind me. I understand the job prospects in this field and so taught myself and did not pursue a formal degree that would have been very expensive and had little chance of snagging me a living wage in the future.
Most of the people who actually work and get paid in astronomy are rich kids, who are very bright with a keen interest in the field. They’ve gone through decades of academic work, assistant and post graduate positions, etc. The very brightest and best of them, which I am not one, get an accelerated career path but most slog through low and no pay for their work for a very, very long time before an opening at the top affords them an opportunity at the bottom as everyone moves up in the field accordingly.
Astronomy is a legitimate science and even then it’s pretty hard to make a living at it. The opportunity is there for us with widespread personal interest to learn without formal education and at low cost by comparison.
I’m using this example to point out that if someone really is interested in Gender Studies or Eastern Mediterranean Underwater Basket Weaving they can educate themselves or they can pay cash to pursue those non-lucrative interests that appeal to them.
This doesn’t lock anyone out of anything, it keeps people from wasting their lives on things that won’t put food on the table or a roof over their heads.
So let them do what we who love astronomy did and pay for it themselves without any offer or possibility of incurring a huge financial debt for a degree that won’t even buy them a loaf of bread.
I love your well-thought response. I must confess my posting was at least partially tongue-in-cheek.
My $90K debt comes from two graduate degrees which, while I did find work from them that necessitated (unrightly) having those degrees, I don’t work in that profession any more and in hindsight would GLADLY exchange the degree (and even the employment I gained as a result of them) for the debt. My undergraduate degree, which I do make a great use of, was paid for by full scholarship 🙂
As for the useless majors it is a good point, however if the universities are paying the tab, it’s on them for even OFFERING such degrees in the first place.
I will also add that before we talk about ANY loan forgiveness, we must first address why education costs so much in the first place (I make a similar argument to those bleating about universal health care). There’s no reason why a 4-year degree should cost less than the price of a car which for many is easily payable in 5 years. If my education costs what it should have cost, the loan would have been long since paid off. It is in some cases hard to blame the 18 year olds who take these loans because they don’t have the foresight or experience to realize the magnitude of the price tag or the wisdom to know how useless the product is. If a student had to justify their loan as to how useful their degree had been, or high schools and college admissions and loan officers were doing their job, we would have far less of this too.
Too fair..sadly,it will never happen.
Good idea but, “they” would never do it.