There is an effort to erase student loan debt and I'm mad as hell about it ...

It’s sad that people make purchases they couldn’t/shouldn’t afford. A student loan, a Lamborghini, etc. Debt forgiveness is not the American way, unless you’re a corporation.

The Chinese are buying homes left and right currently, because it’s one of the few ways to get money out of the country. That said, with America looking unstable under Trump and other tensions, I expect that money to dry up soon and a drop in home prices.

One thing I think student loan debt is doing is dropping the native-born birthrate- younger generation is priced out of families- I know I was, and I’ll never have a kid now.

Probably, we haven’t talked about because the data shows it is a myth demolished by that well know right-wing think-tank the Brookings Institute


“The newer data also deliver a powerful, visual message: the college-educated—even those with student debt—are winners in our economy.)”

My initial reaction to reading the OP (@Guap) was that his reaction was over the top. I was someone skeptical of the idea of student loan forgiveness but figured in many cases it might make sense. However, the more I look at the data and reading this thread, It is really a horrible idea to provide college debt forgiveness to college graduates. Now folks who’ve been victimized by bogus for-profit schools and walk away with nothing are a bit different.

First, it is bad public policy. It is a good thing that people are questioning the price of college. If people starting thinking it doesn’t really matter if I run up $100,0000 or $200,000 cause over 100K will be forgiven sends horrible messages to colleges about controlling cost.

But more importantly, it is very unfair, not just to people like Guap who played by the rules and paid off their debts, but more importantly to the 2/3 of American who don’t have college degrees. In order to obtain a college degree you really need three things average or above intelligence for academic subjects, grit/determination/focus to stick with it, and finally financial resource to pay for it. Most Americans lack one or more of these things.

Now it’s true that college is no longer the golden ticket to the American dream (in truth it may never have been). But even the lowest paid major is makes a good $10K a year more than a high school grad and not having a college degree is a significant barrier to success. Two out of the three of my 50±year-olds friends, who struggled to find jobs during the great recession lacked college degrees. I remember a couple of years ago we interviewed for a senior position after we decided on a candidate we noticed he didn’t have a college degree. Even though the guy was in his late 40s, we brought him back for another interview and grilled him on why didn’t he finish his degree. We hired him anyhow, but since he didn’t work out, I’m going to be even more reluctant to hire somebody without a degree.

College graduates enjoy; higher salaries, lower unemployment rates, a much higher participation labor rate, higher marriage rates, lower divorce rates, longer life expectancy, and many other advantages. They are the winners in the information age, money we spend helping them means less money to help those who are the losers.

And @Strollen misses the point of my comment completely. How does hime ownership compare to 30 or 40 years ago? How does real salaries compare to 30 or 40 years ago, how does it break down by age. The real story is the same story it has been for the last 2 decades. The hollowing out of the middle class and the stagnation of always overall.

No, I didn’t. You claimed the student loans cause people to postpone buying houses. That is false, there was virtually no difference between those with our without student debt. The big difference in home ownership is education level. It’s true that folks with a college education start families later, but I love to see some data that it is because of student loans. Or even that it is a bad thing in general.

As for your questions, google is your friend

“Home Ownership Rate in the United States increased to 63.50 percent in the third quarter of 2016 from 62.90 percent in the second quarter of 2016. Home Ownership Rate in the United States averaged 65.28 percent from 1965 until 2016, reaching an all time high of 69.20 percent in the second quarter of 2004 and a record low of 62.90 percent in the second quarter of 1965.”

So a whopping 1.8% below the average over the 50 years.

But our parents homes would be cottages today.

In addition to the much larger houses, the average household size has shrunk. So even the kids forced to live with their parents enjoy almost twice as much space per person as 40 years ago.

I’ll leave it you provide the data on salaries, but I’d suggest looking at income by education, and keep in mind that the percentage of college graduates has tripled over the last 50 years.

I can see Strollen’s point.

This is why I believe that more emphasis should be given on subsidizing low-wage earners instead of paying off college debt.

The two things I would do is make college loan debt dischargable in bankruptcy, as that would do more to weed out bad investments than anything else. I would also have a system where lower-income, highly-talented students get subsidized, particularly if they had to the NC A&Ts of the world- I’d probably use this program to prop up HBCU’s as schools designed for lower-class students to get first-class educations in forward-facing fields.

Are engineering programs typically solid at HBCU’s- I got the impression most of them at least had solid undergrad engineering and science programs.

This is one area where I do not consider myself a bog-standard Berniecrat.

I have a hard time lumping those two together. We want people to get an education. An educated, skilled populace makes for a better economy and country. It’s true that not all educations are of equal value to the individual or society at large, but most don’t fall into the ‘complete waste of money’ category.

This is exactly student debt but it is related.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/american-dream-slips-out-of-reach-for-millennials-study-finds/ar-AAlkAyv

Millennials have about a 50% chance of making more than their parents.

People aren’t taking out student loans to benefit society, so any benefit in that regard is incidental. I don’t think people should be expecting rainbows and unicorns when their education gamble doesn’t pay off.

I disagree. Maybe I just hang out with better people than you do, but many of the students I went to school with where hoping to use their education to better society. Naïve, perhaps.

Now, I should note that I rarely hung out with Business Majors in college or grad school, so maybe those are the people that @GatInDaHat is referencing.

“Recent research has examined the decline in homeownership rates among households with “heads” aged 25 to 44 years, which fell substantially between 1980 and 2000 and recovered only partially during the 2001-05 housing boom. This research indicates that a trend toward marrying later and the increase in household earnings risk that occurred after 1980 account for a large share of the decline in young homeownership.”

And
“The name “homeownership rate” can be misleading. As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner. It is not the percentage of adults that own their own home. This latter percentage will be significantly lower than the homeownership rate because many households that are owner-occupied contain adult relatives (often young adults, descendents of the owner) who do not own their own home, and because single building multi-bedroom rental units can contain more than one adult, all of whom do not own a home.”

All from Wikipedia, so research should be reviewed (it’s hard to post from my phone) but my search indicates the ownership has gone down for younger people, as incomes stagnate and more resources are spent on loans due to prior generation move funding away from education and to taxes breaks for themselves.

Just another problem for college grads to deal with.

It would be interesting to see how closely related the two things being talked about here, the cost of college and college debt and the hollowing out of the middle class, are, and in what ways. A lot of the hollowing that has occurred in the last generation has to do with the gutting of the manufacturing sector. The blue-collar jobs that sector provided, with benefits, raises, good wages, and stability, were the counterpart to the white-collar salaried positions that college-educated members of the middle class had access to. Once the manufacturing jobs went away, more of the folks who would have become blue-collar workers had to try to obtain college degrees, and thus I suspect put increasing pressure on the financial aid system; most of these folks were from families without a tradition of college education, or any real plans to fund one. I’m sure there are many other factors at work, but this scenario seems likely.

I have to agree mostly with those who say people choose to go to college for their own benefit, rather than society’s benefit. While I have taught many students who also wish to do good for others (and a few who didn’t care, for sure), every student I’ve ever taught was in college for their own financial benefit. In fact, that was often the only reason I could get out of them for why they were in college.

Hearing some of the things in this thread- I’m convinced I was a millenial in the 90s, ten years early. I had those exact same pressures, my dad’s job went away in the 90s due to technology/globalization.

I probably should have been a blue-collar worker but I was forced to chase education slightly out of my league and then graduated into a recession.

Maybe this is why I can sympathize with many millenials.

Maybe you just have some damn empathy.

Watching and failing to help with my recently graduated nephews’ and nieces’ struggles is at times infuriating, because they absolutely have some entitled nonsense in their psyches, but man. They really did get dealt a shit hand.

It’s more than just manufacturing though. Efficiency and Productivity are watchwords for needs fewer employees. Thanks to ‘telecommunication’ (a nice 80s sounding word) the number of on-site employees for all companies can be drastically reduced, even white collar positions. The start-up entrepreneurial model of Silicon Valley is all about a handful of heroic founders gathering all the winnings while keep employees as few as possible. On both sides of the spectrum then we’re seeing the evaporation of the middle-management blue/white collar job; no need for secretaries, accountants and middle managers in the factories, because the factories are gone, and much less need for the same in Silicon Valley start ups since all manufacturing is exported to overseas, leaving onshore the “brain trust” and as few people as possible - in fact all Silicon Valley wants are masses of cheap programmers, which, if you see in places like the game industry, they want to work like slaves to the detriment of their health and personal lives. And if not, hey eventually China will catch up and you can export those programming jobs as well.

This can be maybe best reflected in the insanity of Apple having hundreds of billions of dollars in offshore accounts and literally nothing to spend it on; a ridiculous back-of-the-envelope calculation is something like Apple could give a million people a job with the equivalent of $100,000 in compensation for a year with that cash - i mean obviously that doesn’t work nor make sense but is a decent way of seeing the “size” of the cash pile.

I mean that’s the ultimate long-tail problem here. Eventually the ‘other’ countries’ skilled labor will catch up and that even ‘white collar’ skilled positions are exportable. All you’re left with are shell companies by their heroic founders, hundreds of thousands of people employed overseas, and a pile of a hundred billion dollars to swim in. Maybe it’s not unexpected then that these same types seem loudest at preaching about guaranteed minimum income; they still get to reap all the benefits of globalized outsourcing and don’t have to directly deal with the consequences of globalization on their own nations’ workers.

I have, for many years, predicted the Employment Armageddon. This student loan thing is yet another manifestation of what is still to come.

As others have said upthread, the issue isn’t even unemployment. It’s under-employment. As more and more mid- and senior-level jobs get outsourced or downsized, it pushes more and more people into low-paying service industry jobs. If Dad, with 20 years of relevant work experience, is forced to work at Wendy’s or drive a taxi, what hope is there for his recently graduated Son or Daughter?

And as more and more people are forced to live paycheque to paycheque, it means a rapid deterioration of the tax base. Lower paying jobs means less disposable income. Less disposable income means decreased spending. Decreased spending leads to further job cuts as CEOs push to continue to “deliver shareholder value” and the cycle only continues and accelerates.

In the late 1800s/early 1900s, the Leaders of Industry realized they needed to take care of the proletariat through secure, good paying jobs. The Carnegies and the Rockefellers and their Elite friends could live fabulous lives beyond imagination, as long as the proles were fed, clothed and housed.

The problem, as I see it, arose with the CEO Culture of the late 1990s/early 2000s. Greed and short-term thinking overtook Reason and Planning. No longer were great men building industry. CEOs were parachuted into public companies, and as long as the stock price kept rising, they kept their jobs. And the best way to maintain the stock price in the face of falling revenue is to decrease expenses – read: payroll. These CEOs care nothing about the long-term viability of the Economy. Their only concern is their summer home in Nice, and that shiny red Ferrari they have their eye on.

We are, I fear, nearing the endgame. When people have lost everything, they have nothing to lose. What is most frightening is that I don’t believe we’re talking about torches and pitchforks anymore. The US populace is heavily armed. When Trump – the Last White Hope – doesn’t (can’t?) deliver on his promises to Make American Great Again, where will this heavily armed proletariat turn?

It’s clear that unattenuated employment in a completely globalized economy is going to push down the average standard of living without cost-of-living supports; it just makes sense. If widget factory A has a labor cost of $0.50/hr in Indonesia and $15.00/hr in the US then it just follows that the widgets are going to be made in Indonesia until the value of labor in Indonesia goes up or the value of labor in the US goes down. The pressures of globalization are felt downward, not upward. What changes is the bar at which point that downward pressure is applied. That’s to some extent a pressure on educational outcomes as well.

A salient point that for some reason seems overlooked is that the American labor always seems to be evaluated as lower skilled, for some reason. You’d think that the solution to globalization is just make better widgets than Indonesia, like Japan and Germany do. But that never seems the solution here for some reason.

I’ve said before but IMO it won’t be the ‘heavily armed proletariat’ that turns against Trump; it will be the heavily globalized Blue/Democratic states of Washington, California and New York.

So did the folks during the depression. They ended up making the greatest generation ever. Lets hope the millenials or their successors can follow suit. God help us if they fail.

I doubt it will get that bad, but if it does it will be the middle class fighting the lower class. The elite will be secure in their castles with their money banked offshore.