DoubleG
4260
And we’re not even getting some form of debt forgiveness, despite it being a campaign promise. Why should we take their word that we should wait until they have 60+ votes in the Senate?
The wording matter, much like abortion, depending on the question is worded, you can generate headlines saying that 70% support or oppose abortion.
I support forgiving $10-$20K of government and private loans for those over 25 WITHOUT college degrees.
I also support fixing the numerous programs in place, which provide student loan forgiveness for people going into public service jobs, nursing, social work etc. They never worked well and they got completely fucked up during the Trump administration.
But I oppose giving student loan forgiveness to college graduates who will make on average $1 million more than folks without college degress.
Alstein
4262
I don’t. If you can buy swing state votes right now, you do it. Things are that dire and high-stakes.
DoubleG
4263
The expense of higher education is a driver of inequality. Higher education should be free, like it is in much of the developed world, and like it was for most US universities before the 1960s. Reducing the costs of higher education retroactively through debt forgiveness advances this goal. Comprehensive reform through legislation would be better, but we should use the tools we have as part of a larger effort to solve the problem.
It’s a good move politically (most Americans support doing something, and the Democrats already promised this), and it’s a good move for equality.
Strollen
4264
The biggest driver of inequality is after 100,000 years of brawn being more important than brains, brains are now vastly more important than brawn.
1/2 the population has an IQ less than 100, and 17% under 85.
No amount of college is going to turn these folks into great AI programmers, brain surgeons, or top hedge fund managers.
We could reduce inequality a lot more by establishing programs/schools to help these people become plumbers, carpenters, semiconductor manufacturing techs, hair dressers, tennis instructors, truck drivers, home health aids, etc, rather than spending the money to help the 1/3 of Americans smart enough to really benefit from college.
DoubleG
4265
Man, if you’re going to seriously bring up eugenics you probably shouldn’t be in the Income Inequality thread.
Houngan
4266
He went pretty hard, but it does come back to the basic idea that if everyone has a college education, then no one does. Finding good fits for people according to ability and desire seems like a pretty basic Good Thing, provided we adjust compensation to increase the value of their work.
DoubleG
4267
I don’t agree with that at all. “If everyone has access to a beneficial good then no one does” is a weird take, especially if your goal is equality.
Everybody who supports free higher education includes technical education under that umbrella. And I don’t want to even get into how flawed the IQ measure is, or his “smart” definitions for different jobs. I’ve met genius HVAC techs, and I’ve met AI programmers who couldn’t do more than blindly plow datasets into Python scikit.
Houngan
4268
Which are all contextual appraisals of ability. I’m talking about the current situation where a college degree acts as a gatekeeper, regardless of relevance, for many, many jobs. If there has been a subtlety of including vocational training in these ideas it did indeed escape me.
DoubleG
4269
I agree that degrees shouldn’t be required for many jobs. But even so, getting a degree shouldn’t be a financial burden.
I highly suspect that if we ever went to free higher education, we would impose some sort of achievement and/or testing requirements to study certain disciplines, similar to the Germans. Cue complaints of lack of equality and choice under that system, too.
You’d probably spend more money figuring it out than wiping the minimally promised 10k. Either way, life ain’t fair, and IMO that would make it fairer either way.
Yes, by design, IQ fits a normal curve on the population. That is and always will be true by design. It also, by design, only models a very limited definition of intelligence.
Or, to put it in another way, I have a really hard time believing my skills of mediocre programmer are more valuable to society than, say, people doing RCM maintenance on a train or that I could easily do their tiresome job, and not only physically. Not that I need to leave IQ aside, there’s no lack of very smart teachers or non-STEM graduates whose IQ isn’t worth very much in the market. Or high IQ tech bros wasting their money on crypto or their health in letting themselves get burnt out - hardly intelligent behavior, ain’t it?
I hate feeling like I have to do this but I really feel like I have to do this. If it came down to a voting situation I’d vote for almost any version of tuition debt relief or free higher education.
I think your examples is flawed. Women who were existing during the time when they could not vote did not make life decisions that suddenly became much worse when women’s suffrage passed. Suffrage had no losers in that sense.
A debt forgiveness for college debt would suddenly mean that many people had, through no fault of their own, been making dumb decisions in paying off college debt. I can agree that it is likely a good thing overall but I can also understand and sympathize with the people who feel that it screws the people who were trying to do the right thing.
How does this relate to higher education expense? Even if only 1/3rd of Americans “would benefit from higher education”, higher education is either free, and thus accessible to those that can benefit from it equally, or not free, thus creating inequality of access for those that can benefit from it.
Free college does not mean college for all. Here in Spain college is “free” (really about 1-2k per year, but there are fellowships) and yet to study Medicine you need to score in the 99.5% percentile or so in access exams.
You can have free, yet intellectually elitist higher education (I’m not sure I fully support this, mind you, but it is definitely not incompatible).
If anything, expensive college (even if you can then repay due to higher income) makes college more accessible for the wealthy but not very bright while certainly letting bright poor people slip through the cracks (even if you have programs to avoid this, it’s going to happen at some ratio).
Tl;de: a truly intellectually elitist view of higher education should strive for it to be free. Other than because practical matters (my taxes!), expensive higher education implies economic elitism in some measure.
The US has a great university system, it dominates ranking of global university, and lots of the foreign elite pay big bucks for the kids.
If you are in the top 10% of your high school, in many states you are guaranteed access to schools like UC, or the University of Texas. If you are poor or even middle class, tuition will be waived, and in many cases additional aid will be offered. A recent Chicago study found that 80% of students with a GPA over 3.75 graduated from college.
If you are in the top 1/3 of your high school class, things can get more expensive, especially if you try and get into the most selective school you can get into a go to private or out of state school. But still, most of these people do graduate, with modest debt levels.
On average kids graduate with just over $30K in student debt.
Now looking at the chart, there is $524 difference in pay between someone with bachelors degree and high school diploma. So it takes about 60 weeks to pay off student loans. Even if you ended with $100K in student debt and majored in English, somewhere after 5-10 year you are on average better off than your friend from high school who skipped college
Providing debt relief of just $10K, to every person with a student loan will cost almost 1/2 trillion dollars. One thing I really like about Joe Biden, is he is constantly talking about jobs that don’t require college, I wish people on this forum would follow Joe.
We all know that not everyone, wants to or should go to college, so why are we trying to make college even more attractive? The problem is in America, the only structured way you get training for job skills is to join the military.
So let’s take that $500 billion and spend it on providing job/skills training for kids who don’t want to go to college, instead yet another subsidy for college. If we want to reduce inequality we have to give poor people skills to earn more.
Manchin & Sinema already said “no” to this.
Hence the people talking about using just the Executive branch to get things done.
You also need to get bright poor people the chance to go to college. An 80% college graduation rate for the top 10% of students is quite bad. You are losing 20% of your brightest, and it will get worse further down the scale.
Moreover, average debt means nothing. If college is restricted to the wealthy, you would see no debt for college graduates, since everybody could pay without going into debt. That number only captures those who made it, and the level of debt they where willing to sustain when going in. That number is goi no to be more correlated to household income growth than college expenses. In fact, if college expenses have risen dramatically but average student debt less so, it follows more people are being left behind.
I agree with you college is not the end-all, but free college is important to tackle inequality, specially long term. Not that I don’t think the solution is subsidizing college at the crazy costs the US system has, but much like with healthcare, some kind of nationalization that forces the costs down might be the only way forward.
You can surely think of one you like better. Like e.g. cutting / raising the capital gains tax, which makes fools of people who made investment decisions based on what it was.
I mean, if you want to pretend that such an idea will make it through this Congress and become law, sure. But since that’s off the table, and we’re left with things that can be done through executive action, it’s off the table.
DoubleG
4279
Remember how tech companies said this post flagging was to stop political violence?
