To borrow a frequent rfts trope, NNnnnnnnnnnng.
Sounds like a typical phony-baloney right-wing non-solution to a problem that right-wingers don't think is a problem anyway. Not enough people are getting rich. How to incentivize richness? I know, turn it into a contest!
The Obama Dept. of Ed. is, improbably, maybe even worse than the Bush Dept. of Ed. Go team!
I mean, there are few people (other than the obvious exceptions: owners of professional sports teams, several of my colleagues, and Hitler) that I find more loathsome than superbro Arne Duncan.
Here is my undercooked two point plan for useful federal action on higher education short of socialism:
1. make students loans super low-cost, a la this quote placed next to this image.
2. don't give them to students at for-profit schools.
Once you have 1, 2 seems sort of petty, but consider that 2 would drive students armed with cheap tuition money to community colleges.
1 would do nothing about colleges' ability to jack tuition knowing that there's always easy loan money out there, but I'm going to leave that filed with "undercooked."
If anything, the magic of the damn free market should actually be doing the same thing better. Since every college sends a missive to every one of its graduates asking for money every couple of months, we are conducting a giant experiment to see which colleges' graduates make more money and will therefore send more of it back to the old alma mater.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century: The College Years
What are the merits of making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, and penalizing schools that have too many students filing for bankruptcy? Seems like that would knock the predatory for-profit school racket on its ass. Not sure how bad community colleges would get hit, though.
My alma mater made the transition several years back from being a relatively open institution to becoming somewhat selective. Less blue collar, more middle class (or UMC).
On hearing about the proposal, one of my first thoughts was that my school was safer than it would have been by virtue of the fact that it's not taking chances on the sorts of students it used to.
But who will pay Von's salary, if the federal teat is cut off?
1) surely the measure is easily fixable so it doesn't penalize schools doing the right thing. I'm surprised everyone seems so willing to throw out all measurement & accountability.
2) I'm so out of it I didn't even know that hating on Duncan was a thing. What's that about?
It's stupid to focus on income and indebtedness. Aren't there people who do some kind of value-add measure (Mother Jones college rankings, maybe?) that could be a model? Take into account how at-risk the incoming students are, see how much that improves due to your institution.
I knew it was somehow affiliated with Kevin Drum at some point since he used to plug it on his blog every year.
Re: 10 Trumwill totally went to Northeastern.
Student loans should certainly be made at interest rates basically even with inflation plus maybe a little bit more to cover the modest administrative costs. The point of student loans is not to make a profit, it's to to educate, FFS. Student loans ought to be dischargeable in bankruptcy (perhaps subject to some sort of check and balance to ensure people aren't basically scamming the system by declaring bankruptcy right out of college and then proceeding to fix their credit slowly over the next ten years, for example).
One proposal I think might be worth considering is to index the loan repayment to future earnings. You get a loan for X amount and repay a percentage of your future earnings for say 10 years, with the percentage calculated so that X is the total repaid if you earn the median salary for college grads. That way people who go into social work end up paying less than people who go into petroleum engineering or finance, effectively subsidizing the social workers, artists, teachers and so on.
I think interest=inflation+admin isn't compatible with dischargeable since then you need to build in some of the risk to the interest rate. But it's a fucking travesty that rates are currently commercial-ish but loans are not dischargeable. Hey, let's make a risk-free profit off of poor students, what could go wrong?
That is, compatible with not being subsidized by additional gov't spending. But nothing wrong with that. Although as noted above, the easier/cheaper you make loans, the more likely colleges are to hoover up any excess, like when mortgage rates go down, prices mostly go up because people don't calculate affordability by headline price, they calculate by expected monthly payment.
20.1: I assume government spending because I am a commie. Government investment in education pays off for everyone.
Maybe the initial loan should be higher rate/dischargeable, which can be refinanced to low-rate/not dischargeable after graduation. The thought being that, upon entering the job market after graduation, you will have a much better idea about whether you are able to carry your debt load or not.
I think that would be a reasonable setup, but probably too damned complicated to work in real life...
If we're talking ideals, higher education should be free, period, with grants for costs of living. If it's a what may be achievable in the near terms, I'd be okay with dischargeable low-interest, but we should recognize that this will in fact cost money - I believe your average unsecured consumer loan will be at rates higher than student loan rates.
I think law school debt should be dischargeable, but you have to turn in your JD.
