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I don't see why we need to put people into debt for an education at all... A more educated populace benefits everyone.
Except Republicans. They "love the poorly educated"
Absolutely correct. I guess the proper phrasing would be "a more educated populace results in less Republicans, which benefits everyone"
How would that work then? College professors would be government employees, paid by the government to teach? That's the current setup for K-12 and I think most people agree that teachers don't really get paid all that well.
I see nothing wrong with having higher education come with a higher price tag. If schools are charging enough tuition to afford to pay for great instructors then students are going to learn more and will be better off after graduation. There should be safeguards in place so that if your school fails you (or even if you fail your school) it doesn't ruin your life. But I see no problem with having a requirement that your repayment schedule be based on your annual pay, and if after a set amount of time (10-20 years) you have made regular payments but still owe, then the rest gets forgiven.
Public universities are supported by states and done used to offer state residents cheap or free education . The problem is that support has been dropping over the decades, with students paying more and more of the cost. We need to reverse that.
We’ve always had government supported K-12 education and community college/voTech, so why stop there? Do you really think the modern world isn’t a lot more complex? Whether we call it extended high school or community college for all, it’s about time we improved our society, all of our futures, with another two years of free education for everyone
College professors of public universities are already government employees.
Regardless of how you arrive at your conclusion I think most people would be willing to compromise to that. Repayment as a % of income for no more than 2 decades, then dismissal regardless of any remaining balance.
I disagree on merit however. Your argument is more collective investment into a person's training deserves a more proportional repayment but no outcome of specialization guaranties financial success, which is the fundamental defense of universities right now. And as we see today, tuition costs, and enormity of potential debt dissuades many, many of potential students. In actualization; the western worlds perpetual failure to produce enough doctors - which is immediately contrasted by Cuba's training and exporting highly skilled doctors, so much so that it's commonly phrases as Cuba's #1 export. We can only conclude that removing the private financial burden (that student loans create) better facilitates conditions for a collective surplus of professionals.
This is of course presupposing that we both share the opinion that having enough doctors is a good thing worth collective efforts to incentivize, rather than letting our collective fortunes play out to the, scientifically unsupported, invisible hand of the market.
In other words, if your position is that society should have enough doctors; then working backwards from the solution reveals that your strategy is detrimental to your stated goals. What's more important to you?
Beyond this specific example, no person, business or institution should have any protected right to gate keep, financially or otherwise, the culmination of our collective human experience, the summation of our ancestors, our birthright, that we recognize as knowledge. No one owns Nikola Tesla's contributions, we all do. We all make up the leading edge of humanities growth into the universe (you can visualize it like bacterial growth in a petri dish.)
Newly uncovered information (not discovered; electricity - and everything else - already existed before we could describe it) be it used to make products, such as medicines and/or intellectual property, or not used at all, should only be protected for ~ 20 years and then released into public domain, thus protecting the incentive and reward of innovation, but not allowing avarice because some people combined two or three existing technologies together in one package. Well done, sure, make yr money but keep innovating apple, wtf.
I have absolutely no issue with private schools charging whatever the hell they want. Why should a publicly funded university require that individuals be indebted for decades in order to better themselves (and society at large)? It doesn't benefit the student. It doesn't benefit the taxpayer. It doesn't even benefit the school. It benefits a small group of people who profit off of the whole thing. Look at California pre-Regan. It worked. The GOP didn't like people getting educated so they blew it up and started this propaganda campaign that people ought to pay for being educated. We do pay. It's called taxes. The people profiting off this system don't want to pay their taxes so they've pawned their responsibility off on the rest of us.
Education benefits us all. We should ALL have access. The desire to control people by strapping them down with debt should be completely severed from education.