This is a Republican bill.
So what's the catch?
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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It's just a Trojan horse for financially gutting public universities when we need to be getting rid of student loans altogether by using taxpayer money to support people's education
Great question tho, one people should always be asking about Republican bills
The NFL and NBA are going to be so excited about being able to buy so many training centers when the public universities that spent millions of tax dollars to build stadiums go bankrupt.
We don't need to get rid of student loans, we need to get rid of interest on student loans. The government should not be making money off of students trying to get an education.
I don't see why we need to put people into debt for an education at all... A more educated populace benefits everyone.
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.
No. Education shouldn’t be a for-profit enterprise. Just like healthcare. It’s a massive benefit when it’s accessible by everyone, and creates massive disparities when it isn’t.
Colleges will care more about repayment, only giving loans to those with stellar credit, and reducing the number of admissions.
This is a big one. It will essentially make each student a liability instead of investment. If they think you are too much risk (low income, "wrong color", etc.) then all of a sudden the school becomes a lot more upper income and white, purely by "chance".
This country, in general, does not treat students as an investment, regardless.
This country treats students as cash cows!
Which would make art school a rich person's sanctuary and universities no longer institutions of learning but job training. Which would be entirely in line with neoliberalism, why would corporations want to shoulder the cost of training their own employees?
If the study of culture and the humanities is paywalled then cultures and the humanities will all suffer for it.
Rich people can't make good art. It's not possible. They aren't coming from a relatable position. When I say I'm broke as a working man, that is an entirely different things than some shareholder saying it. I mean I don't know how I'm going to eat, they mean they don't have physical cash. The conditions the majority of us live under come with inherent risk and danger, risk and dangers that are removed from the opulent, that's why they're seen as out of touch.
A world of rich people cosplaying as artists is a world that only produces motivational posters and corporate desktop backgrounds. Just nuke us already, ffs.
Completely coincidental how this is being proposed after affirmative action was shitcanned
Actual bill is here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/6951
Off the bat:
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This would discourage colleges from offering programs that aren't typically leading to high-paying jobs (...yikes. Bye-bye humanities?)
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Alternative college accreditation based on arbitrary student success (maybe this increases the number of schools that can't get accredited, meaning more shit schools?)
This will keep poor kids from getting an education because colleges won't be accepting student debts. That the catch. It a bullshit bill.
Keep 'em poorly educated, keep 'em Republican.
College attendance used to be mandatory for only a handful of occupations, but that began to change around the 1980s when four-year degrees became compulsory for more jobs.
Since then, college tuition costs have skyrocketed.
According to Georgetown University, college tuition and fees have nearly tripled since 1980, rising by a cumulative 169%. Meanwhile, research from the Education Data Initiative found that average tuition costs are up 23 times since 1963.
The catch is Republicans want to make all education unattainable for all but the wealthy few. An ignorant populace is more easily controlled.
This problem started with Republicans' crusade to destroy the value of public education in primary schools. It continued with making good jobs unattainable unless you could afford to be a student at a higher ed institution. It now further continues by making those degrees both unaffordable and worthless without unpaid internships to go with them.
And of course, when Democrats try to undo some of this damage, Republicans will have none of that. When Betsy Devos was in charge of the Department of Education under Trump, she did all she could to keep debt from being forgiven even after those borrowers met every condition for loan forgiveness.
It's true that some college degrees aren't all that marketable outside of very narrow circumstances. So Republicans will use that excuse to further hinder universities to be able to operate within their budgets, thus affecting all degrees from those institutions and not just art history degrees (apologies to anyone with such a degree, no shade meant here).
Ruining universities, probably.
The article mentions economic benefits, so it's probably targeting gender studies or something like that.
Seems like a great way to reduce the quality of a shit tonne of schools and make sure that only the wealthy have access to quality education.
There are no downsides to this of course.
This is a good bill. Which is weird from a Republican. Maybe this is the good one.
I've heard of them before, tales told that I never believed.
In the bill, they even call it a risk sharing payment by the university for each student taking out a loan attending that institution.
It sounds good. What's happening?
I hope it goes through.
If students can become potential liability that will make colleges only admit rich white kids and leave everybody else without an education. This falls under the category of make more people uneducated because that gets more Republican voters.
That being said parts of this bill is attractive. I like itemized breakdowns of what I am paying for for anything.
Yeah, I also agree about the transparency, really excited about that.
That's a really good point about colleges only choosing kids with "good credit."
Why not rich black kids?
there's gonna be a catch or two, or twenty. there always is, especially if there's an (R) after a bill author's name.
tuition will probably increase significantly as schools have to cover loans themselves instead of the federal government, funds for loans will be limited and current credit worthiness becomes a key factor of whether you are able to attend. both of which will put higher education out-of-reach of more people--eventually producing a less-educated workforce, willing to work for scraps. republican goals
if the feds aren't backing the loans, the president or congress can't alter terms of those loans, such as pausing payment requirements, or using federal funds to reduce or eliminate the loan balances, etc. republican goals
states will have to pick up the slack by increasing funding to their state schools or offer their own student loan program, both of which will cost them money--significant money. this will reduce funds available for other social/public programs or require increases to state taxes. it will burden 'blue' states (the ones most likely to do these things) far more than the 'red' ones. republican goals
I think the " credit score" students is my most salient concern there， that could be an easy way to academically disenfranchise (can you use that word academically?) less while off students.