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Ron Paul Wants To End the Federal Student Loan Program
On the heels of declaring his intent to axe a few departments from the federal government, Ron Paul has revealed more plans should he become President. The_THOMAS writes "Ron Paul wants to end Federal student loans stating that the Government involvement artificially inflates the cost of a college education and that once the government is out of the situation, students will be able to work their way to a college degree. What do you think?"
Subsidies inflate pricing. I agree.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
Maybe if he had to actually work for a living at a minimum wage job, he'd stop asking those with little to no money to give up their chance to be raised up.
I hope that he includes all educational benefits given to those federal employees who work in the military sector as well, for the sake of ideological consistency and deflating the higher education bubble of course.
Would this include forgiveness of all current student loan debt from federal loans?
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
"College Conspiracy" released by NIA on YouTube
You will clearly see why we need to eliminate the federal government from student loans
Subsidized student loans are "free" money that enslaves most for a lifetime, moreso today than at any time in living memory. There was a time when working part time over the summer would be enough to pay ALL college expenses, now you have to work some 35 hours a week during the semester plus full time in the summer and over breaks. This is outrageous.
In a lot of ways, they do inflate the cost of education. However, the quality is also going down. The bigger problem is that the demand is being artificially inflated at the same time. Nearly every job requires a BS or BA...even if they don't care which subject. A University should be a place of higher learning and research, not a factory for just the next step in education.
I agree that eliminating the student loan program will help. However, there need to be a lot more changes then that.
Anyone can work through a degree when it's only a few thousand a year, like it was 20+ years ago. Today college tuition is more than the average full time annual salary. Very few students are going to be able to earn enough to pay through college and study at the same time.
Yeah stop the feds making student loans so the private companies can have no competition in how they screw you.
Typical ideologue nonsense. Luckily he's got about the same chance of being elected as an iceberg has of showing up at the equator.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Oh boy. What does Ron have as proof?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Get the federal government out my life and my wallet.
I suppose one of the benefits of the American two-party system is that people like Ron Paul won't be elected president. Even though he's running on the republican ticket, he's not "mainstream" enough for the GOP.
Free market theory is like Communism. Sounds good on paper, but when you apply it to the real world, it's a disaster.
Ron Paul would want to cut this even if there weren't an economic argument that it is inflating college costs. He just wants to cut things. The economic argument is an argument to get to his bottom line of cutting federal programs.
That said, there's an actual argument that such loans are increasing the cost of colleges in general, and there's a a whole cottage industry of for-profit colleges that have grown up which give bad educations and get most of their money off of federal loans. And the cost of college is increasing faster than the inflation rate. http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/20/pf/college/college_price.moneymag/ Part of this is probably that more and and more people want to go to college and are willing to pay whatever it takes. Another issue is that some colleges are increasing their tuition prices while being much more willing to give out scholarships, effectively engaging in a form of price discrimination so they can charge different amounts based on how much people can afford.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination. Also, some people go out of their way to go to named schools rather than local state schools for reasons of status and prestige even when the academics aren't substantially different. But some of this cost issue may be due to the student loan program, so it may make sense to actually revises or revamp the federal student loan program. However, the immediate result of cutting the loans won't be a correction of college costs, but rather simply an immediate screwing-over of the people who can't easily afford college.
I'm no republican, and at first I was thinking "here we go again - another GOPer trying to take money away from the little guy" - but I think he has a valid point.
People would only be willing to spend a hundred-grand on education if there was someone standing right there willing to easily loan them a hundred-grand to do so. I've always thought there was some odd market force that was allowing the cost of education rise in such a bizarre way - this is probably it.
If if were really up the the "free market" - i.e. there were no "special" loans, scholarships, or free-rides, people would be willing (and able) to spend a LOT less. Schools would have to come *WAY* down in price to get people in. It would be a very different landscape.
Because deregulating financial matters always ends well.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The government is definitely artificially inflating the cost of a college education but it's not just from providing loan dollars.
1. The government sets ridiculous graduation mandates for secondary schools. They mandates basically force everyone to graduate from an institution they probably should not have.
2. Once these secondary graduates, who have been coddled into believing they are successful and special enter a post-secondary institution starved for resources and cash by a system which mandates ridiculous reporting requirements and thus staff, they expect to do as "well" there as they did in HS.
3. Now that we have a bunch of loans given out to these undereducated by self and family-proclaimed geniuses, we are getting loud whines when they have to pay back their loans on an education they were never cut out for in the first place.
---
What needs to happen is a recentering of education in America. We need to reset our expectations for the vast majority (including business) and say that a HS diploma may be enough for a lot of jobs. We're already spending at rates higher than other countries and receiving far less.
Let these people fail HS and/or just barely graduate and permit colleges to turn them away at the door by simply saying, "you are not prepared in the least for post-secondary work," instead of taking them in and reeducating them with 90/900 level remedial coursework.
We have a lot of work to do and while I do not believe dumping the federal student loan program will solve it, beginning at the individual level, moving through the local and going up through the fed with a major redesign of how we handle education and its worth may be a start.
I don't want to be "that old guy" -- but I didn't qualify for student loans in the 80's & early 90's because my parents were in that bracket where they were supposed to be able to contribute, but just couldn't.
I had up to three part-time jobs while doing my undergrad, and I definitely wanted the education -- I found that as "consumer" I demanded more from my instructors for my hard earned cash.
In the end it made me who I am, and I subsequently went on to get both an MS in Software Engineering and an MBA recently -- both paid for with cash that I earned and saved.
Sure it took a little longer to finish the degree's and barring Alzheimer's, the lessons learned all around will be mine for life!
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
Maybe he is correct, but it would really suck to be one of the kids trying to go to college after federal loans end but before the market figures out the "correct" pricing. Also, what jobs does he think they will work?
I think he sounds more and more like a right-wing crackpot who has lost all touch with reality.
Taxation is a valid function of government and has been since 1787. And if the government was going to spend the money you pay in taxes solely on you, then it would hardly need to raise taxes to begin with.
Acquaint yourself with American history. Some degree of redistribution of wealth has always been part of the operation of the federal government. Now, you may disagree on particular spending, and you have a right to choose representatives who might push for change -- it's taxation with representation, a just way of doing things. But your rhetoric is out of touch with American democracy even as the Founding Fathers conceived it.
Not having worldwide military bases is "isolationist"?
Then I guess it is time we join the rest of the world in being "isolationist".
Student Loans should include two things:
1. Fixed low-rate loan (2-3% even for private loans)
2. Allowed to be paid with pre-tax income (like money put towards retirement etc)
If they want to remove the government's involvement and make it private only, these rules should still be added. We should be helping student's get through school to make this country a better place.
-SaNo
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All of the sudden all the schools cost $60,000.
Where does it say the federal government can't?
That's what governments do- they take your money and give it to other people.
Don't like that? Well- then- let's abolish the police, the military, the judges... Wouldn't you just love to have all those positions run by private corps?
Government can take your money-because that's what governments do. Now, the money they take is supposed to be an investment- to improve life, to protect your life and make life for the citizens more profitable.
You can argue whether student loans do. There is no doubt in my mind that living in an educated America (tee hee) my chances to make more money are increased than if we were a nation of uneducated labourers and swine-herds.
I think the whole education system here in the US needs a complete overhaul- and the student loan system is flawed- but overall- I consider the US investing my money in the education of others does indeed make me wealthier in the long run.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
No one lowers the price of anything these days. Once its already that high it will stay that high. They have become accustomed to that money, and will not let it go now. The damage is already done.
They added corn to gas...the price didn't go down on gas, it just made the gas people more money and gas worse for people.
Thanks for trying to help by screwing everyone Government.
He'd better have a plan for the huge bubble he's about to create in between the time when federal loans are cut off and colleges/universities actually lower their prices. It's easy to say these things on paper, but there's always a lag and that's where the problems start. See the Medicare "Donut Hole" for an example of that.
I agree in principle, the government should not be granting student loans, and I think that its involvement in that process is largely responsible for the current pricing. All that available money has created a huge market distortion that is unfair to students.
These things have to be phased out though, in the practical sense. Its not as if schools can re-price their services instantly to reflect the new lack of cheap and easy money in the hands of recent highschool grads. They have an entire expense structure around the existing revenue structure that has build up over the past two decades or more. What the government should do is leave the existing programs largely intact but reduce the percentage of the loan they back each year until lenders rates reflect the real risk and their are fewer takers. That will gradually force students to find other options and force schools to re-organize around lower prices, in slow way.
Its kinda the same issue with the immigration reform. The current system is f*&!^ed up. You can't just all of sudden shut the board though. The market can't respond instantly, well it can but nobody would like the results. There are American's willing to do farm work, but the market has been distorted for decades, the people willing to that work no longer live near the farms. They need time unwind their current situations and move back to the country. You can't commute an hour to and from the city to earn a berry pickers wage. These things take time. You have slowly turn the heat up on illegals, and let the labor cost rise gradually, giving citizens time to relocate, and producers time to provide housing and such for them.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
regulation of student loans is in poor shape.
example: student housing is inflated because loans cover dorms but not off-campus housing. dorms are now nice apartments instead of spartan (and affordable) rooms.
regulations should give correct incentives.
Verbum caro factum est
Dear Ron Paul:
I am a pharmacy technician, I make 9.00 an hour and work 30 hours a week. My rent is 450.00 a month, my car insurance is 102.00 a month, and my electricity bill runs roughly 120.00 a month. Factor in food and gas and after a year, even assuming that I don't go on dates or do anything fun at all or have anything break or have anywhere to go other than work, and the money that's left is about half of what a semester of university education costs for an in-state student.
I guess what I'm saying is, sure, I'll work at a gas station for the rest of my life. That's probably what's going to happen to all of us anyway.
Douche.
Remember when Barry Goldwater said "it was a persons own fault if he was poor", while standing in front of a department store left to him by his grandfather?
Yeah....
Poser..
TL;DR
Ron Paul yells "get off my lawn" to fence posts when he forgets his meds.
I'm pretty sure that if student loans went away, the actual costs of going to school would stay about the same. The net result would be that only the rich would get higher education, thus creating an enduring class system.
While certain degrees of government involvement might be contributing to part of today's high tuition costs, I seriously doubt that getting rid of loans would make a significant difference. All I can see happening as an immediate result is massive numbers of layoffs of college and university professors, because there are not as many people going to school.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
have student loan systems - making higher education somewhat easier for those who really want it but can't afford it - removing it will further speed the ride of America's decline
Anyone who doesn't vote for Ron Paul is a traitor to America.
He's the only candidate that supports a return to the constitution - the *only* thing that made America a good idea.
End the wars, end the fed and get this eminently sane man in the white house.
Or face another decade of corporate fascism, the removal of the last of your rights, and the constitution being made into toilet paper.
Obviously he'll be another let down once in office but at least he's better than Barry Soetoro (Change ? What f'ing change ???)
I know I'm likely to get a "you must be new here," but when did the majority of people on Slashdot become uneducated morons who are little better than those pull-string dolls that can only say "Keep your government hands off my "? Perhaps people are already not going to college and lack critical thinking skills?
Government involvement might have artificially inflated the cost of college over the past 30 years or so indirectly, but suddenly removing Federal loans and assuming it'll work itself out at the cost of the current and potentially next generation of college students is short sighted and ridiculous. Maybe some actual financial aid reform akin to the Australian or British system.
I guess the fact that higher education costs are spiraling out of control even as the jobs these degrees are supposed to help you to get have all but disappeared means nothing to you?
If you like indentured servitude so much, why don't you use your useless advanced degree to build a time machine and go back to 1720?
If the government would end it's monopoly on student loans that would be enough for me. They swooped in "protecting" everyone who is now occupying Wall St. from "predatory" banks, but now I can't shop around for student loans anymore. It's the government's way or the high way.
At least banks can't send swat teams to my house if I fail to make payments...
ron paul is to economics what creationists are to science: a deep and unshakeable blind faith in a fantastic lie
namely, that government involvement in the marketplace hurts it. ron paul and other libertarian idiots: left to its own devices, the market will naturally, i said NATURALLY, gravitate all power and wealth into the hands of a few. that this still might happen with government involved is a lesson in government being corrupted. so it is a reason to clean up government, not a reason to get government out of the way. getting government out of the way would accelerate the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, to create even more all of the abuses you worry about appearing in the marketplace. government is the only chance we have to keep the market fair and equal. left to itself, all by itself, NATURALLY, the market is abused by its largest players
why don't some of you idiots understand this? why do you persist in this complete insanity that an unregulated marketplace is somehow fair and equal and somehow it is the government screws it up? the government is the only tool we have to keep it regulated, policed, and therefore fair, where the large are prevented from using their entrenched position to cheat off the backs of the small
where does this pseudoreligious belief, in defiance of all economic history and simple logic and reason come from that an unregulated marketplace is somehow more fair?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Of course, the best solution to the shrinking middle class is to not educate the poor and lower middle class. Let them be happy with their barely literate high school education and mind-numbing menial labor jobs (which by the way are in other countries now).
Do the Republicans have any sane candidates? It makes being and independent really tough.
Every time the government or insurance (that is, large entities with deep pockets) pays for things, we see the prices of things increase as if by magic. "Milspec hammers" costing hundreds of dollars or so the fable goes. Healthcare costs are also out of control. And in states (which is pretty much all of them) the price of auto insurance has steadily increased as well.
These patterns should be obvious enough to all that it requires no proof or evidence. There are human factors and human causes [read: greed] which take advantage of human weakness [read: spending other people's money] and human need.
Google Robot Car Project Involves Large CMU Contingent:
And two years later, Carnegie Mellon's robotic SUV, Boss, won DARPA's followup race, the $2 million Urban Challenge.
As a graduate student and then a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, Urmson played key roles on the groundbreaking "Challenge" teams led by William "Red" Whittaker, director of the Field Robotics Center. Now, on leave from the institute, Urmson again has contributed to a milestone for self-driving vehicles as a member of Google Inc.'s autonomous vehicle project. Its eight cars have logged more than 1,000 miles on public roads with no human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only the slightest human help, an unprecedented achievement.
"The work we're doing out here is very exciting," Urmson said. It's an achievement he shares with a large Carnegie Mellon contingent on the roughly 15-member Google team. Eight members have current or past ties to CMU, a pioneer in autonomous navigation.
They include James Kuffner, an adjunct faculty member in the Robotics Institute; Don Burnette, a PhD robotics student on leave; Matthew McNaughton, a Google intern who has returned to finish his PhD in robotics; Nathaniel Fairfield and Michael Montemerlo, who earned PhDs in robotics in 2009 and 2003, respectively, and Philip Nemec, a 1995 computer science graduate. Sebastian Thrun, a former associate professor at Carnegie Mellon now at Stanford University, heads up Google's robot car project.
Yes, the best thing for students and education would be to stop inflating the price of education by ending federal loan subsidies, but before you do that let's make it possible to bankruptcy your way out of student debt again, too. Otherwise you're still giving creditors federally guaranteed debt slavery over students. Risk is an intrinsic part of loans. If you take away that element by making it impossible to default, it's just corporate welfare.
I came from a family that had $10 a week for groceries. I worked my way through college without a single student loan. I now own a nice-sized business that supports 80 families and provides amazing benefits. It can be done. It is not easy - nor should it be.
Of all of my friends that made it through college with student loans - most are strapped with them their entire lives and actually used the money to party their way through college.
I prefer my tax dollars not fund partying.
Of course all subsidies should be cut off. But let's start with the important ones: agriculture, metal industries, etc. And with the money we save from those we can better finance educational institutions, so that education down;t cost that much, and students don't need to take any loans. Unless of course the idea is to cut education from those not so lucky to *have* money, so that only people *with* money can be educated. Flash back: it reminds me of what Europe used to be in the 18th and early 19th century. Lots of people with no education and no hope of actually enhancing their income, which created all that political unrest... and the rest is history, as they say.As they say, middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer provide for.
The reason a broken leg costs so much to fix is that the doctor, nurse, and hospital administration are all paying student loans. On top of that doctors are having to pay for insane insurance coverage.
If getting an MD wasn't so expensive then healthcare wouldn't be so expensive. I hate that we're always talking about how we pay for healthcare instead of how to make it cheaper.
The lessons obviously didn't include the correct plural of "degree". :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The education bubble
Remember, that's a trillion dollars of debt that can't even be wiped out by bankruptcy, unlike the previous bubbles of the dot-bombs and real estate.
They should be dischargeable under bankruptcy like any other loan. While we're at it, how about making the university responsible for the 50% of the loan if it goes into default. If a university wants to get money through federal loans, then they should stand behind the education their giving. A mortgage is backed by the house you buy, an auto loan by the car. The current system just funnels federal dollars into the pockets of university administrators.
Problem is, the rest of the world kind of sucks. America must be different. We do not suck, and thanks to being so awesome that we can't keep all the awesome on our own soil, we need to annex additional territory now and then to spread it out. What's wrong with that? If you want to live in an isolationist regime like, say, Finland, no one is stopping you. There are dozens to choose from, suit yourself!
The students end up with a mortgage on their lives.
So...
Massive debt.
No Job.
No Collateral
No Bankruptcy protection. They can just about hound you till you drop.
Yeah sounds like a good deal to me. If i'm a University or, wait for it.. A banker.
Deleted
Perhaps the US should do what they do in the UK, Germany, Japan, and other countries that value education: It should include University level education for free to its citizens who demonstate themselves capable of such responsibility. I know these systems are not perfect, but it seems like education is a good way to start to resolve many of our greater social issues.
It already does. It's called the military.
How do you get them to demonstrate that without letting them try first?
And if a person fails at it, how long before you let them try again, if ever?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Taxation is a valid function of government and has been since 1787. And if the government was going to spend the money you pay in taxes solely on you, then it would hardly need to raise taxes to begin with.
Bingo!
Acquaint yourself with American history. Some degree of redistribution of wealth has always been part of the operation of the federal government.
Citation please. When did the federal government get involved in student loans? Plot federal involvement against college costs and draw conclusions (Do the same for medical costs.) Taxation is a valid function, redistribution is not. Traffic cops are not supposed to fill the gas tanks of poor people.
Now, you may disagree on particular spending, and you have a right to choose representatives who might push for change -- it's taxation with representation, a just way of doing things. But your rhetoric is out of touch with American democracy even as the Founding Fathers conceived it.
No, we have a tyranny of the majority.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Schools tailor courses to fit da money.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I don't know where you went to school, but the school I went to was certainly not starved for resources and cash and have yet managed to pull off high-single or double-digit percentage increases in tuition every year since around 1993.
(Note to University of Minnesota administrators: You didn't need to build that god-awful art museum on the East Bank. You didn't need to build that monstrosity called the alumni center, eliminating a boatload of parking. And you sure as hell didn't need to build an on-campus stadium for the Big Ten's worst football team, eliminating yet another boatload of parking spaces.)
just make the gov pay the schooling fees directly, instead of going through banksters to loan money that can never be repaid...
The Federal Student Loan program definitely increases the total cost of education... well... in a way. What it does is guarantee private (and public) businesses and departments revenue in the case of price increases.
Corporately-controlled housing is very aware of this and that's why rent is constantly and significantly going up around universities. When housing prices go up, the financial aid office figures it out, and financial aid awards are adjusted accordingly. Same with the general price of books, fuel, staff, administration, and faculty. But all that means is that when costs go up (either by choice or not), more loans are pulled out for each student and the students have to pay off even more in the future.
So yes, it's a problem. But the elimination of the Federal student loan program would only open up the field to private banks... and we already tell our students to do everything possible before getting a private bank loan. They're ruthless with their interest and pay schedules.
What's the solution? Here's a start. It just MAY be based on my experiences...
Step 1: Each public university (or uni. system) should have a salary cap on all administrators. The highest anyone should be paid for helping to run a public university should be $250,000 (at the system level. Local administrators should be capped at $150,000. Faculty should be capped at $125,000. Staff should be capped at $75,000.
Step 2: Universities should be directly involved with negotiating rent controlling the area around the university so that staff and students don't NEED so much money.
Step 3: For those universities with sufficient land, focus on on-campus housing and DO NOT make "luxury student housing". Nor luxury staff housing. Go utilitarian. Civil engineers know what people want and need. Students do not need brick portico entrances to their dorms.
On the one hand, it is not at all difficult to see the unintended consequences(or, in some cases, quietly intended consequences) of federal student loans being so widely available.
The overtly scammy private colleges(you see ads for them plastered on subway cars, among other places) that make grandiose and generally overblown claims about their "career placement" abilities and rates, are one major beneficiary of this unintended(for them) subsidy. The rate at which first-gen-to-college easy marks get played for a few semesters and then dumped without measureable increase in anything other than debt is alaring. The more traditionally respectable colleges are less overtly evil(since they can, if you play your cards right, actually offer an excellent education, and they generally avoid stooping to any explicit claims about economic advancement, in favor of letting broad cultural messages about how people without college degrees are all kinds of fucked do the job for them); but federal loan system gives them a downright beautiful price-discrimination mechanism: Just set the "price" to $$$$$, and then Oh-so-kindly reduce it to more or less exactly what they think you are capable of paying(as proven by the various documents-upon-which-perjury-is-a-bad-plan that your FAFSA will refer to). Clever, that. One also cannot refrain from speculation as to the role of our oh-so-saintly financial services sector in the creation of yet another class of debt(conveniently government backed, and non-dischargeable in bankrupcy!) to play their games with...
On the other, though, I think that he is out to lunch. The real wages to relatively unskilled workers(ie. the sort of job you are likely to be working while shooting for a college degree, not the sorts of jobs that you can get after you have one, or the sorts of jobs that require reasonably prolonged job experience('upper-blue-collar' apprentice-track stuff, say, whic can actually pay pretty well; but is not clearly compatible with the trajectory of people working themselves through college) have been treading water, or worse, for something like four decades now. The real wages and job prospects of college graduates also haven't been doing so hot(though better than those of non-graduates). Unless the magic invisible hand fairy has a plan for dealing with the unimpressive and declining availability and financial returns on basically all middle class activity, We Have A Broader Problem. Never mind, of course, that some of the purported economic gains to a college education are likely artefacts produced by the signalling function of graduating(ie, Person X can follow instructions, Person X is not a total fuckup, Person X can work with others if necessary, Person X has an IQ higher than his shoe size), rather than by intrinsic improvements provided by education.
Federal loans have certainly increased the speed at which college is able to get expensive(just as the real-estate bubble increased the speed at which McMansionites were able to pretend that their tenuous grip on affluence wasn't slipping away before their eyes); but it isn't as though that occurred in isolation. Even with the cash available, taking on a huge stack of debt and cracking books for 4 years would be a lot less popular if there weren't such a strong impression that not doing so was a one-way ticket to ditch-digger class...
I agree, how dare those who aren't rich expect to get an education beyond burger flipping. I would like to know how many on here who say they agree, took government loans to go to school.
The article makes some good points,but completely eliminating the program is probably overzealous. They point out that the cost of education is rising, that more people have college educations, yet unemployment is high. Combine that with the long-standing belief that too many people are getting college educations instead of trade educations and I see a solution forming:
We should move college loan money to trade school scholarship money.
Too many people are going to college then not using those college skills, and have no chance of paying back that debt. Just like how the US Government provides free K - 12 education, perhaps it should provide free trade schools as well. Historically, there were enough trade workers that such educations were free. A son would be trained by his father in his trade, or given to another person as an apprentice. But we have moved to a more formal system, and rarely do people enter the family business or serve as an apprentice. So let us formally institutionalize such a system.
This way, instead of forcing a rise in college tuition costs and giving out costly loans that can never be repaid, we put people to work in an appropriate field sooner, cheaper, and without incurring enormous individual debt.
If there's a Federal program, Ron Paul wants to cut it. That's what Libertarians do. I don't subscribe to the utopian Libertarian vision but at least the guy's consistent. He believes in what he says and he doesn't change his tone just to get some votes.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I love Ron Paul. He's the most idealistic person I've ever known. He's basically lying to everyone though. Most of the things he says go like this:
1. Cut funding
2. ??? Allow free market to do it's thing ???
3. Problem solved
He doesn't mention two crucial things. One is that step 2. may take a very long time. The other is that for 2 to happen effectively, we have to equalize any unfair and corruption-driven advantages that others have gained in a crooked system over two hundred years. Once highly paid yuppies get busted for illegally claiming "expenses" as tax free money and corporations get busted for gambling with pension funds at the same rate that people get busted for stealing a piece of bread or robbing a grocery store, then we'll have a truly fair environment for the free market to do its thing. In the meantime, Ron Paul is selling pipe dreams. Awesome pipe dreams, but ultimately dreams without good plans to back them up.
Traffic cops are already an example of redistribution of wealth. Your taxes go to ensure that everyone else (rich, poor, employed, unemployed) are safe on the roads.
The government collects money and redistributes it in a way that [supposedly] improves the nation and the people in it.
Do you want to live in a nation where there are no educated people to work alongside you? Where the only college-educated folks demand a salary that unnecessarily raises the cost of goods (further increasing inflation)?
The *real* problem is that you need to invest *more than you'll make* to acquire a job that pays a wage that has any hint of ever paying a living wage. And large companies are just moving labor to countries where it's cheaper to employ people, so the investment is proving to be worthless.
Fewer and fewer jobs remain that do not require college educations, and the quality of life for these folks are poor, with few options out. It's no longer sufficient to work hard and be successful, you have to get lucky, or come from money already.
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
In California, since the 1970's, the state has subsidized less and less of the tuition for students, while student loan amounts have not been increased substantially, and yet the state universities have not gotten less expensive in the process.
Sometimes Ron Paul says things that are correct, but silly (like how we could lower health care costs by removing the requirement medical providers be licensed. Probably true, but....) Mostly though, he just says things that are incorrect and silly. His supporters piece together some sort of reality from this that makes sense to them, I guess.
There is mass transit here in the lovely MSP area. Use that instead of driving a car.
My family owns one car, always has, and we make due by relying heavily on the mass transit infrastructure here. With ~50,000 students in a college in the middle of a major metro area why would they ever want to continue to support parking instead of leaning on what is already available elsewhere?
As usual the symptoms are blamed, not the cause. Colleges have had a breakdown in funding models (used to be heavily subsidized by state government), so now they are forced into passing the costs to the students. High tuition at state colleges has resulted in there being no low cost options, necessitating very large loans be offered.
Now, in general I'd argue our colleges are broken in many other fundamental ways (same price for a much needed engineering degree and an unneeded philosophy degree? WTF?), but that is a whole different rant.
The difference between federal student loans and private loans is rather simple. Federal loans are given to people even if they can not afford to pay them back... and you are required to pay them off. The government will get their money back, period. The result is people that are already impoverished, becoming even more impoverished. Now, not only are they poor, the odds are they didn't graduate (most, irrelevant of income, do not) and now they are saddled with huge amounts of debt that they have no legal way out of.
I paid my way through college via a part time job. I didn't go to the best school, but I didn't need to. I think that needs to be the focus of everyones attention. A $200k education isn't 10x the quality of a $20k education.
Ha. Coddling of the students is a myth. Grade inflation, however, isn't.
The students in high school/college are teenagers with teeming hormones: they naturally tend to compete anyway. The problem is that they will need good grades to enter their university of choice. The parents realise that, and they pressure the school and the professors to give high grades. Which is meaningless, because reality is such that half the students are below average, no matter what you do. You just have a smaller scale on which people are graded.
This would go away if universities were forced to have entrance exams with a pre-established grading scheme -- and I mean real exams, not worthless mcqs... I used to think exams are dumb, and that continuous grading/evaluation is better. I still do, but unfortunately, it is a system way too prone to external pressure.
The Unis need to be forced, because students pay to be educated. This is fucked-up because they become customers, and what corporation wants to fail their customers? And since free education is impossible (that would be socialism -- also the base of both parties might disappear is the population became educated), you need to limit the number of entries in the system.
Now you'll tell me that this will make teachers "teach the test". But that is not necessarily the case: this depends on the nature of the test. Some tests can be designed that really test understanding. And "teaching the test" really becomes just "teaching".
I would never be where I am now without Federal student loans. And they are loans not handouts. I am now pay them back with interest, so the government is making money off the loans and with my better paying job I am paying more in taxes than I would ever had previously. I don't think the problem is the loan program but the fact that an education can cost over a hundred thousand dollars.
Where does it say the federal government can't?
The tenth amendment.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
First of all loans aren't made of your money, it's invented money that you have to pay back. Clearly, you could use a student loan to go back to school and learn how things work. It's not welfare.
Good - Maybe this will help eliminate non-serious students, and keep many out of series school debt.
As with everything else, if you can't justify a loan to a bank, why should the Govt. loan you money? If you want money for school from the Govt, join the military.
IMHO no one should go directly to college after HS. They need to work for a living, find out that not having a degree stinks, and then go part-time while working to earn a degree that will get them a job that pays better.
That - would help eliminate all the stupid worthless degrees that many party school kids get and improve society in general.
At what point do we hold the educational establishment accountable? At what point do we look at their income relative to what that income is spent on? What objective organization performs such an audit? An example: a local university wanted to build a commercial conference center and staging for commercial entertainment. They called it a business investment but they raised tuition in order to afford it. They had no need for the building since existing buildings served the student body and faculty well. At the same time, this university tells the faculty to cancel courses when there are not enough students. Yet, one will never see a management flunky laid off. The focus of universities has set education aside. The loan program is just one means by which citizens pour money down a black hole. It is time to require an outside auditor to review the total picture of income vs. expenditure for each university receiving tax-payer dollars. For every dollar not spent directly on educational services, one dollar should be deleted from the allocation from tax-payers. If that causes a few money grubbers to go out of business, so be it. The ones that concentrate on education will survive. After teaching for three colleges during a five-year period, I found that those colleges were more interested in retaining students than providing an education. Increasingly, "students" from far out to the left of the bell curve are recruited. Thus, courses have to be continually watered down to make it look like these people are passing. They get a piece of paper stamped "degree" but it is worthless. At least industry has recognized the trend. I have seen companies keep a black list of "colleges". Any resume from a place on that list is just thrown in the trash. Other companies publish a very short list of universities whose degrees are acceptable. That is at least one form of accountability.
Article 1, Section 8, the first of the enumerated powers of Congress states that collected taxes are to be used "to pay the Debts and provide for the common defence and general Welfare". That phrase has traditionally, even while the founders were still alive, had a very broad interpretation. At the time, there was no student loan program to speak of, but I'm pretty sure that sort of program would have fit with the overall goals of "providing for the general welfare" and "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts".
The student loan program really isn't "giving away" money either, as the money must be repaid -- one cannot even dispose of the debt in bankruptcy (student loan debt is the only debt you cannot discharge in that way). So the net cost, death of the student notwithstanding, is zero -- save possibly the adverse affects substantial debt has on the individual and the economy (reduced buying power, higher probability of requiring public assistance later in life, etc.).
Also, it's important to note that the government isn't giving away "your money", but rather "our money". A small chunk of that may have come from you, but how much of that chunk came from you is between you and your representatives. From the standpoint of federal law, the student loan program is on pretty decent ground as being a legitimate use of government funds. Not that Paul is wrong - I'm sure the availability of loans and grants does increase the cost of education, the schools will charge whatever they can get - but perhaps the focus on the student loan program isn't the best place for reform.
So the School counselor talks you into a liberal arts degree because "you'd find it enjoyable." So you have a fun four years, racking up $100k+ in loans. Then you graduate... and find you can't get a job with your degree. You also can't declare bankruptcy. You're now stuck making interest payments for the rest of your life. And if you default.... Well my sister-in-law can't even pay for her loans now because the collection agency keeps charging her fees equal to the payments. The clincher...my school made me spend a few hours reading about the risks and law surrounding student loans. All that information and not a word about the bankruptcy provisions.
Personally I think you'd be better off buying a house and adding the cost of your loans to the mortgage.
The 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution is a guarantee of States' rights. The Constitution designed the federal government to be a government of limited and enumerated, or listed, powers. This means that the federal government only has powers over the things that are specifically given to it in the Constitution. All other powers are reserved to the States. The 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights reads like this: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Read more: http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/10th-amendment.html#ixzz1bhwsCXgA
Except it has become impossible. The price of degrees combined with the erosion of wages for low qualification jobs has made it impossible for prospective students to do what you did. The system is truly broken.
In fact the US has become more of a class society than England. Your odds of moving either up or down in class compared to your parents are now vanishingly small.
The 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution is a guarantee of States' rights. The Constitution designed the federal government to be a government of limited and enumerated, or listed, powers. This means that the federal government only has powers over the things that are specifically given to it in the Constitution. All other powers are reserved to the States. The 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights reads like this: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Read more: http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/10th-amendment.html#ixzz1bhwsCXgA
They're not spiraling out of control because of federal loans, they're spiraling out of control because supply of seats isn't keeping up with demand. And the demand is increasing because it's getting to be really tough to support oneself and ones family without a college degree.
But, more than that, as the blue collar jobs without degree requirements get shipped overseas or downsized there's been increasing focus on getting people to go to college, whether or not they need it.
I'm sure the guaranteed loan doesn't help, but it's less of a contributing factor than the myriad scholarships that administrators assume people can get when planning the school's spending. Apart from Princeton, few schools have taken no or low loans seriously.
The Supreme Court disagrees with your interpretation of the Tenth Amendment. The Supreme Court is the body tasked with determining the legality of government action. The system is working as intended.
How ignorant of you.
So you expect people to flip burgers for the rest of their lives?
The job market sucks, but having a college degree gives you a big advantage over those who don't. It isn't totally useless.
Cthulhu will flay you for your inability to even remotely accurately spell his name.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
MBA and MS in Computing, not worthless shit like History or English.
I mean seriously what has grammar ever done for you?
The 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution is a guarantee of States' rights. The Constitution designed the federal government to be a government of limited and enumerated, or listed, powers. This means that the federal government only has powers over the things that are specifically given to it in the Constitution. All other powers are reserved to the States. The 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights reads like this: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Read more: http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/10th-amendment.html#ixzz1bhwsCXgA
God forbid that we choose America and want it to not be the world's police.
Maybe you should go choose a militaristic state that wants to push it's agenda world wide, like say Iran. There are dozens to choose from, why does it have to be the US?
The extreme right wing capitalist view seems to be, make the rich richer, and the poor dumber. Next they will want to get rid of education all together. This just leads to a new form of slavery. In areas of poverty, the better the education, the number of crimes will reduce as they learn ways to be more productive.
See what is happening in the UK. They are on the route to a 'market' experiment in higher education. This has been launched by no other than lord Browne, the CEO of BP who had to resigned in 2007, and then named at the head of a commission to review higher education finances.
Academics are waking up to the meaning of a law that has been passed without the preliminary white paper, that is, without sufficient public discussion.
They are going to cut 90% of public financing to the universities, and harnessing the student with the resulting debt. They call that: "putting the student at the center of the reform".
Stefan Collini is the foremost critic of this idea and has just published a book about this. Read this article in The Guardian (free access) to get an idea of how the UK is on the path to destroying one of the finest higher education system: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/19/university-market-white-paper
An experiment of this sort has been carried on in New Zealand in the 90's. The result has been catastrophic. Proposals of this kind, all with a libertarian/market flavor, are being proposed in legislatures all over the world at the moment. It is as if the right had found its next target.
I understand where he's coming from. It more than likely does contribute to higher demand for college educations, and thus higher prices. Cost reductions would come from lower demand... not exactly something we should be encouraging.
Eliminating the student loan program is far overdue. However Pauls idea that "oh no more loans and of course the college system will lower prices, everyone will have a need to work and there will be an obtainable goal worth doing just that for" will not be all roses and sunshine like he thinks. Unfortunately in all likely hood the college system will only knee jerk and raise prices because "OMG no more out of state loan riders OMG must raise prices to support multi-million dollar football team".
I really do agree with Paul on the goal but its going to take a much more adept hand to properly guide the transition. All that axing the program will do is put many people out of a chance to attend college, even if its a degree factory that allows them access to the upper level jobs that require said degrees.
Good idea wrong plan of action.
You're right taxation has been a part of the federal government's responsibilities since it's inception. But originally, the federal government only had the right to tax corporations, not private citizens, that only became part of the government's responsibility with the ratification of the 16th amendment.
Also, if you actually read the Constitution and the original amendments, you'll find that the Constitution is quite a limiting document as to what it can tell the citizens to do. More importantly, you'll notice that it's actually limiting the government's control over the people. The idea the founding fathers had was that government was really there just to provide infrastructure (roads, etc) so that citizens could work, produce, and succeed in their efforts. The federal government was meant to be largely hands off and the state governments were meant to have all the power. Now, we have a very large federal government, very small state government, and we have a very large mess that needs to be cleaned.
We need to reset our expectations for the vast majority (including business) and say that a HS diploma may be enough for a lot of jobs.
We cannot do that until we improve the quality of high school education. People do not even have to read beyond the level of an elementary school student to get a high school diploma. If we cannot expect someone with a high school diploma to be able to read and understand a modestly complex document, how can we expect them to do anything beyond running a cash register?
Palm trees and 8
Making student loans private would be wonderful. I can go to college, get a huge loan, spend it all on the degree, and then, and here's the key part of my plan, declare bankruptcy. Since my credit would already be shitty since I'm in college, the overall effect is negligible, and I walk away with a free piece of paper.
The problem isn't loans: it's that there are no jobs for people without a high level degree. If there were actually jobs for people that didn't have high level degrees then the cost of school would be lower. All those jobs have been outsourced by "free market forces" however, so everyone struggles to pay for/go to college, so the value of a degree goes down compared to what it costs.
Actually, we are NOT a two-party system. The problem is that republicans and democrats have conspired to cut out the other parties. In particular, when Poppa Bush lost to Clinton in no small part because of Perot, the neo-cons refused to do debates except with in news organizations. In addition, they refused to debate with other parties except for dems. The list goes on and on. The party of no is as corrupt as ever and is working hard to take us to a one party system.
The problem is, that the party of no clue, went along with it.
I had it easier than you- 90% of my schooling was paid through scholarship and grants- of the remainder my parents paid some towards my school- and I worked 35hrs a week (just one job... but year round) for the rest of it. I emerged from University with no loans.
I HAD to complete it in 4 years because of scholarships- I didn't have the option of spreading it out over more time to spread the burden. So despite major scholarships I still worked full time in order that I could live a meagre existence of 50cent microwavable mini-pizzas and TJ Maxx clearance clothes- I hit the jackpot on super cheap rent- paying only $250 a month- a great place with free cockroaches and lead paint.
Had I not had the scholarships- I couldn't have done it. Had I not had support from my parents- I couldn't have done it.
This was over a decade ago- since when costs have skyrocketed.
College now costs more than what an uneducated full-time worker makes.
You might have been able to get by in the 80s working jobs to pay your way- nowadays kids don't have that option.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Government support of student loans depresses the price of loan to the student, making more money available to the university and less money available to private banks.
If subsidised student loans were eliminated what would happen is that the cost of the loans would increase, generating more income to banks and less money would be available to universities.
While I think education costs are certainly bloated, redirecting that bloat to banks is not the choice I would make. It would be much better to come up with a mechanism that would not substitute higher loan costs for education costs.
Shit, no one is saying we should abolish everything. There's a valid discussion to be had about the unintended consequences of stuff. I posit that federal student loans have been exploited by a large number of unscrupulous corporations (for profit colleges), and the ensuing bubble has raised costs of education for everyone. The feds are in a deep stinking budget hole. The option of not cutting out everything that can be possibly cut has been long passed. Given that the student loans are not any sort of a core federal government function, they IMHO rightfully should go. The for-profit college system should collapse, and the "businesspeople" (leeches) who established it should be shamed like they deserve to be.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Um... EVERYONE qualifies for unsubsidized stafford loans... EVERYONE. You either are remembering incorrectly or don't know what you are talking about.
The answer lay within our history. Learn it, know it, live it, love it.
Subsidized student loans and grant programs seem like such a great idea.
But if you make it easier for people to pay more for their education, more money will be available, nationally, for education. That'll mean, temporarily, that more people can afford to get educated (and educated better).
But over the long haul, the increase in available money for education - which creates additional demand - places strain on the existing supply. To meet the additional demand, higher education institutions (some of questionable quality) will proliferate, and premium institutions will be able to increase what they charge at a rate well above that of inflation.
It's not as though I'm making any radical predictions. I'm just describing what we've all seen happen.
If there were a way to subsidize student loans without having the additional funds just end up as inflated professorial salaries, ballooning administrations, and a proliferation of second-rate institutions, then I'd be all for it.
But as things stand, I have to wonder if we'd all be better off without the extra bureaucracy.
Educational institutions will reduce their costs to keep students coming back.
In reality, Ron Paul doesn't KNOW this will happen, but he doesn't give a fuck either. Just as long as he gets the federal government out of another private industry.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
I like his theory, but the execution sucks. The problem isn't government backing, it's the for-profit university system. Remove the profit incentive by extending universal education through college. Ending it after grade 12 isn't any more equitable or less arbitrary than Mexico ending it after grade 6.
Furries make the internet go.
Some points to consider:
Total outstanding student loan debt recently topped $1 trillion (e.g. see link).
Student loan debt now exceeds household credit card debt (see link).
It isn't possible to escape student loans via bankruptcy - they will follow you your whole life, no matter what. This puts them in a class by themselves.
Obviously, the current system is badly broken. Why should the federal govt be in the business of hooking young adults on these onerous loans? If the goal is social leveling (a goal I can get behind), then we should be talking about grants, not loans. What we're doing is creating a new class of indentured servants.
So, instead of 14 trillion in debt, we would be 15 trillion in debt. I see what your saying, but we're broke, can't really give away another free 1 trillion dollars.
Ron Paul doesn't care about results. He doesn't care about outcomes. He just cares about maintaining a phony set of badly-articulated and poorly-thought out principles.
In reality, ending the federal student loan program will simply spur the creation of dozens of loan-shark artists who will do what they were already doing after Reagan let them into the tent -- milk helpless students and drive up the cost of EVERYTHING surrounding them. When in reality college education should be nationally funded and nationally regulated, so that we can all participate.
Ron Paul's program is geared towards creating a super-wealthy elite and keeping the rest of us desperately impoverished and powerless.
FUCK HIM RIGHT IN THE FACE with his FUCKING STUPID BACKWARDS-ASS IDEAS.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
And they mostly suck at running everything they run..
I argue it's because we're so busy pushing everyone out the door that the overall education suffers.
If we weren't so busy concerning ourselves with pretending those who refuse to learn should graduate we'd have a class of educated people who didn't cost as much to teach.
to hear someone speak of taking away a chance to have a better educated population. While it is almost a certainty that student loans have lead to some inflation of institutional costs, he completely neglects to inform (if he even knows) that the largest cause is the consistently reduced state funding in more recent years. Most private universities are increasing tuition at a yearly rate of 4.5% while public facilities average closer to 7%. Public universities have to pick up the slack somewhere. Unfotunate for students these days, they're the ones who have to shoulder much of the burden upfront. These are the people who should be innovating, opening business partnerships, getting well paying jobs to buy consumer items so the economy can continue to operate and function.
Meanwhile, many of less-taxes-less-revenue-less-government bunch that are advocating reductions to financial aid and university funding, are the same ones who suggest businesses take their factories and offices overseas, leaving them much at the helm of the problem with the lack of jobs and absence of regulations for businesses to operate ethically in the US. No jobs in the US means less people to buy all the stuff being produced which in turn means less demand from a factory which can mean either lesser wages to factory workers or less positions in factories, which means even less people to buy items. Somewhere, someone has to be willing to inject money into the system by investing in the future, that means education.
In general, loans aren't subsidies. You might argue that, because the loans are guaranteed by the DOE, and interest rates are kept low, that qualifies as a subsidy. Well, it might be subsidizing the *loans*, but it's not subsidizing the Universities.
The current student loan system is extremely broken. Since federal loans are insured by the government giving out excessive loans is actually a good idea for banks. If the student defaults the government pays them, so it's a win for the bank no matter what. The student however is stuck with a burden for a really long period of time and there is no escape by bankruptcy. That's the simple form but the idea is there, really student loans trap many students with huge bills and little extra income. I was lucky and avoided them for the most part, but the one I do have it's 7 years later and I still owe %75 of what I borrowed because right after school the job I had wasn't enough to actually pay more than the minimum payment.
Education should be affordable. No one should have to take a 20-30 year for a decent education.
I am not sending my kid to a US college at these prices when there are so many better universities and colleges in Chin, India and eastern EU at a fraction of the cost. If more people do this, the cost of education here will come down to a sane level.
The core problem: it's a pipe dream that you can educate people by edict. That's why NCLB is such a stupid idea. Education needs a culture to go with it. Parents who are educated and can guide their kids, society that places value on education and being smart, all that jazz. It's very rarely that you get people who grow up in a family or environment that did not value education at all, and become well educated with a position to show for it. Yet the politicians, and you, seem to think that just giving money to people to "get educated" will somehow fix things. No, it won't. This needs to happen over generations, and the availability of student loans has pretty much missed that point -- just like getting more women won't get a baby delivered any faster, getting more individuals educated won't make a society educated and able to advance towards less menial work.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Ron Paul believes that rising higher education costs are because of supply and demand and that government loans allow the schools to charge ever increasing prices. He's only partially correct.
It doesn't matter how much the government subsidizes (besides most loans are through private institutions and not the government), there are only so many seats in a classroom and only so many classrooms on a campus. Most major universities and colleges are near capacity. As the demand for those seats outstrips the supply, the school can charge what it wants. It doesn't matter if it is subsidized or not.
So, Ron Paul is partially correct, it is a supply and demand problem. But like most politicians, he doesn't recognize the source of the problem and comes up with the wrong solution.
Maddox, is that you?
Most of them use federal loan dollars as their primary revenue source. They probably won't survive otherwise. My guess is they will lobby as hard as they can to avoid it.
Ron Paul is right on this. I went to school full time and worked full time to pay for it. It is not that hard. Worked during the day, and went to school at night. I wanted to go to school so I paid for it. Pretty simple. My wife did the same thing. We both started making minimum wage, but we worked hard and received wage increases. We work for everything we have, period. Its sad that no one has a sense of self responsibility anymore. Same thing with health care. If I don't want to pay for health insurance and I get sick, those bills are mine. I chose not to have insurance, and my fellow citizens should not foot the bill. Moral of the story, pay for your own crap, you will appreciate it more.
As others have stated, yes, it would probably distort the cost even more. If these rules were to be enacted, a price cap would be necessary which could be based on the average salary of a graduate with that degree. However, my main point was that the government should be helping students pay off their debts instead of helping them get more money they need to pay off.
-SaNo
People value more things they pay for than things given to them for free. A university education is probably no different. What's needed is an overhaul of what universities teach. How many people complaining they can't find jobs have degrees with no marketable skills like minority struggles or medieval French literature? Schools need to teach people the foundations of useful skills, then getting a job and paying off the loan would be much easier.
Confiscate? WTF? The constitution gives Congress the power to levy taxes.
Image a life without taxes. You'd be schooling your own children, fixing your own potholes, defending your home from intruders, taking out your own stinky garbage to the dump (oh wait, there is no dump).
Life was great in the 1820s, wasn't it?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
news: you're also stupid.
It's perfectly consistent with a whole lifetime of stances on this and similar issues. Just not news.
Paul stands for something, and that's what he's chosen to do. He stands for it, and other people who wish to stand up and be counted for it go stand with him. Good for them all; system working as designed.
And the system says that the number of the counting, every time, is barely 10% of the nation, and then everybody can go sit down again for a few years. But the standing for these "shocking" ideas is what he's been doing for a long time. Hooray. But it's still not news.
The AC post is a half hearted attempt at humor mixed with reality.
Of course the USA does not Annex any land, that would start wars. Instead we develop an agreement or pay for the land from the host Country.
As for avoiding isolationism, yes. You see, in the history of the USA, we tried isolationism back in the 1920s and half of the 1930s, and while the world was fighting around us, we stayed silent, except for businesses making money off of the wars.
There is a logical reason for why we decided to be pro-active, instead of re-active in the worlds dealings. High School should reveal this, or College if your HS was terrible at teaching.
Of course Ron Paul would rather the USA be full of ignorant people so they can be better abused by the political and economic systems.
Your education, ... [is] your responsibility, not mine.
Except that democracy cannot function if people do not understand the issues they are expected to vote on. Our public education system is supposed to ensure that all citizens have at least enough education to responsible citizens.
Ron Paul merely endorses the proper way things should be, including a very limited government and individual responsibility
Except that teachers need to be paid, and if the education system were privatized then only the wealthy would be able to afford an education. Preventing people from receiving an education is one way to prevent them from obtaining power. This is not a society where only the ruling class is allowed to be educated.
The US will fail if it continues to act on the lies of socialism, "state capitalism", and oligarchy.
No, the US will fail because the voters have no clue about what their government is up to, and just vote for whatever candidate looks best on TV. The best solution to the problem cannot be implemented if nobody understands that there is a problem to be solved.
Palm trees and 8
I think Paul might have a point here. When A subsidy is accessed by a small fraction of a market then it does not distort the market much. But when a large fraction accesses the subsidy then prices rise. Take for example the new car purchase rebate the US government offered. Dealers responded by offering less discounts. Most of the subsidy was going to the car dealers not to the consumers. This meant that anyone purchasing a car at that time without a guzzler to trade in paid more than they would have,
The same is very likely true for educational prices.
However, education is more than a market. The nation does care who gets educated. There is a conscious decision that a college education is opportunity for class advancement. We benefit as a nation if we don't have people locked generationally into lower classes and we benefit whn there are large numbers of educated people.
So even if it does cost more the question is, would those objectives be achieved if subsidies were removed and the price of education fell?
Perhaps the proper answer is to reduce subsidies till they no longer distort the market.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
One one hand, I kind of see how it could push up the cost of college.
On the other hand, I'm not sure totally pulling it is the right way to deal with that problem...
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Admittedly, one can take out a lot more money through private loans than government loans (up to $200,000). Is an undergraduate education worth that much, though?
Either it was not the case in the mid 80's or my parents couldn't co-sign.
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
Let's look at the consequences of the present system:
1. Tuition has sky-rocketed at a rate far exceeding inflation and the value of a degree.
2. A flood of degrees has essentially made a BA/BS equivalent to a high school diploma.
3. A huge portion of those with BA/BS degrees are not even working in their respective fields.
4. Numerous individuals graduating with that oh so sacred degree are unemployed.
5. Many who have earned degrees have had to take out tens of thousands in loans. And which the recent economic changes, these are near impossible to repay. Current student debt in the U.S. now exceeds $1 trillion.
6. Student loans often tend to be bad loans. They are often high interest 7%-9% with today's rates are ridiculous. They are unique in that one cannot get rid of these loans via bankruptcy. And they are very low risk for the bank's loaning the money as government pays if the student defaults. Essentially, the sole benefit is that the student gets to defer loan payments by 4 years.
7. We could offer nearly every American a degree at a fraction of the cost by having a national online university that offered you basic degrees (biology, chemistry, engineering, etc, etc). Students could pursue their degree online. And would take their exams and labs at local community colleges. While not everyone has internet access. Most areas have libraries that offer such service. And a fraction of the $$$ that .gov spends on subsidizing loans could greatly expand public/library terminals. Furthermore, you can get a laptop for about $300-$400. And now most full-size grocery stores offer WiFi cafes.
So yes, this present model which is a few decades old is no longer viable in today's society. Nor is it efficient.
Granted, the above plan of a national university would not go over well with the tenured professors who suddenly would have to get off their arses and offer a better education to justify the extra expenditure of funds - or go out of business. But heck, Yale University has a trust fund that should keep them around for another 100 years. And universities could stay in business by offering more specialized degrees. Marine science instead of biology, aeronautical engineering, etc, etc.
But anyone wanting a basic degree could get it for a mere $1K-$2K.
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Engineering
- Computer Science
- Business/Management
- Psychology/Social Science
Maybe one or two other basic BA/BS degrees. All could be done at a fraction of our present expenditure.
Hmm....yes, I think Ron Paul is right.
As a UK national who benefited from such a system, I agree 100%. I obtained a BSc under a grant which paid all the university's expenses and a fixed allowance for accommodation, books, food etc. Not everybody qualified for such grants. You had to achieve adequate grades at prior examinations (all government-funded as part of normal schooling), and if your parents were deemed wealthy, the grant would be reduced under some kind of sliding scale.
Unfortunately, that system is now gone, at least for England and Wales. Students must pay a tuition fee (which may or may not cover the university's expenses) plus all living expenses. Perhaps the worst aspect of the current system is the goal that 50% of all young people should study for a bachelor's degree. Trying to achieve this means that today's degrees are worthless unless they come from the handful of universities that have worked against this system to maintain standards; that even in those institutions the degree doesn't mean what it used to; and the old system of grants can no longer be afforded.
I feel very sorry for students today. If I were an 18-year-old in England I certainly wouldn't attend a UK university. I'd either give up on the idea, or go to some other country where university teaching hadn't been destroyed.
The story is slightly different in Scotland. There, tuition fees are paid by the government for Scottish residents.
Regarding the 10th Amendment argument that keeps on being brought up:
The whole reason there was a Constitutional Convention in 1787 was because the existing federal government, under the Articles of Confederation, was unable to function. In large part this was because if the central government needed money, the only way they could get it was to politely ask the states for cash, and the states generally responded to that by giving jack squat. This proved to be a problem when the federal government needed to try to enforce its laws, build a navy to defend US shipping from the British in particular, or do much of anything at all
Direct taxation was one of the many reasons the US Constitution exists, and any idea that it wasn't the intent of the people who signed it and advocated for it is just plain wrong.
I am officially gone from
I have often wondered if this same phenomenon is why houses cost so much more to buy than say 30 years ago. Has the rise in credit dramatically outpaced wages? Does it lead to a self perpetuating cycle which pushes up costs, and requires bigger loans? The biggest negative about federal student loans is how easily exploitable they are for the 'for profit' institutions. The drop out rate is very high, and the default rate is too, but the for profit colleges make their money regardless.
The other problem is how the Government uses this money to turn colleges into copyright police. A lot of people try to portray Ron Paul as a crazy man. (BTW a lot of his supporters are crazy... but not Ron Paul) But look at the candidates.... out of all of them which one do you actually see putting government back in control of the people other than Ron Paul?
As in most religions, it's the followers that turn people off to the religion. And Mac users are the worst.
Is that fixing this problem is not that difficult. Require accountability. When Reagan turned the student-loan program over to sharks, he failed to encourage any kind of accountability. Instead, in true dumb-shit glibertarian fashion, he simply assumed that the magic of the market would make lenders accountable. OR, alternatively, he didn't give a shit about the outcomes and simply wanted to funnel business to a special interest/campaign contributor.
EITHER WAY, Ron Paul's solution to jacking up our student loan program by giving parts of it away to unaccountable middlemen is to simply throw the program out wholesale, and to hell with the consequences to education.
I fucking hate dumb-ass right-tards and glibertarians who use complex problems as an excuse to shit down the necks of the less-fortunate in this society. IN REALITY if we simply demanded accountability from the currently-non-accountable parties in this scheme, with actual penalties and teeth in them for chicanery, I bet we could fix the student loan program without simply abandoning an entire generation to near-illiteracy and unemployability on the world job market.
But again, Ron Paul and Glibertarian/Republican fuckfaces don't care about that. They just want MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE.
Again, Fuck Ron Paul and all his fans right in the face.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
to say it has a low bar is an understatement. Most loans expect you to pay them back, have rates that aren't unattainable, so yes, of course this one will inflate pricing. Federal student loans are what, 2%? Average loans are what, triple that or more? Make this federal loan in line with traditional loan pricing and you'd see a: a lot more careful borrowing and b: our economy not going into complete debt from the loans.
People use those as equivalents to slush funds for anything because of how horribly it's set up. It doesn't have to be axed, just completely redesigned.
This must be today's "X cannot happen without a federal subsidy" article.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
That was during a time when state universities were actually funded by the state. The majority of our funding is now tuition, donations, and endowment earnings. I put myself through the university that I'm now employed while working 20 hours during the school year and full time over the summer back in the late eighties. That paid for tuition, books, food, and gas. I had no debt at graduation. There is no way I could do that now. Hell, even the discounted tuition I get for my kid is killing me.
"The federal government was meant to be largely hands off and the state governments were meant to have all the power."
That all, more or less, ended in 1865. I'm sure African Americans aren't too fond of "States Rights". The problem with almost-sovereign states is that you'll inevitably end up in a situation similar to the pre-civil war period. Things done in one state affect other states. Those same slave-owning "States Rights" advocates in the pre-civil war era demanded that *other* states recognize the legality of their slave ownership.
An escaped slave couldn't just go to Ohio or Massachusetts and suddenly be free because under the laws of those states there was no slavery - because those states had to recognize the "property rights" of Southern slave-owners (although, no small number of folk in the Underground Railroad, of course, moved those former slaves off to Canada where they could be truly free. . . as long as they never tried to visit the States, because they might have been re-taken).
We are a Union of states joined together, which means that there is a strong limit to the notion of States Rights. Yes, states do still have rights, but we do need to keep some perspective on the limits of those rights.
Dunno about the others, but in the UK we're running as fast as we can to catch up with the US in terms of charging for university education. When I started my degree (2003) it cost approx £1000 a year, with grants for poorer incomes etc, and with up to about £4000 a year student loans (which you don't start repaying until you earn more than a set threshold). Couple of years later it goes to £3000 a year tuition, and in the last couple of years got changed to a maximum £9000 a year - which is what the majority of respectable institutions are charging now.
And the SCOTUS has been the arbiter of such decisions since Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803 when the founding fathers (most of them) were still around. And before that whatever the legislator passed was considered constitutional. So if you want to know what the 10th amendment means you have to read it's language and then read the appropriate case law. You cannot simply read the words and decide personally what it means.
You are disturbing the Glibertarian Om. Only in a fact-free plane of existence where no real-world examples of their horribly misanthropic ideas can be found will Glibertarianism succeed.
You're FUCKING UP HIS GROOOVE! Finland isn't a real country anyway! Quiet!
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
It doesn't help that college education costs have risen to astronomical proportions, compared to years past. Look at the numbers.
But then again, people going to college (and their parents) need to use their brains a bit. So, students are getting expensive degrees and taking on lots of debt while hoping that they can get a well-paying job that doesn't exist in a saturated market. How does that make ANY sense at all? Now they owe lots of money and can't pay it back. So, the higher costs are compounding the problem.
The trades pay pretty well, if you're good at what you do. People need to get into these hands-on, much-needed positions, instead of pining for fancy desk jobs. Getting your hands dirty doesn't make you less of a person. In fact, I wouldn't mind getting more hands-on, instead of sitting at my desk all day... maybe that's telling me something about my own choice of career path? (Like, desk jobs aren't all they're made out to be...)
Bite my shiny metal ass!
Well, we're in a bit of a pickle as far as student loans go. The fact that they are federally subsidized means that Sallie Mae and other student loan providers can give out student loans like free candy without much worry about losses. When the infinite number of "Fine arts" majors fail to actually do anything other than bus tables for the rest of their lives, many of them start to default on their loans. Without the government subsidies, Sallie Mae and others would stand to take huge losses from these defaults. However, with the way things are currently set up, any defaults can be essentially picked up by the US Department of Education, letting the loan providers off the hook for bad loans. In other words, there is no real incentive to deny loans to those who won't pay back their $120,000 art degrees. Even worse, declaring bankruptcy as of late rarely gets rid of the student loan debt, allowing the Department of Education and collections services to garnish wages and hound you to the grave.
In addition, having extremely easy access to student loans floods the market with degrees, reducing the value of having one. In the past, most jobs only required a high school diploma, now even low-level clerical and managerial jobs are starting to require some sort of degree.
The US will fail if it continues to act on the lies of socialism, "state capitalism", and oligarchy.
LOL. Some Republicans can really twist socialism into sounding like a pointless form of charity.
Can I just point to Western Europe and Scandinavia... where tax is high, where education is practically for free (i.e. working people pay for the students to study, and live, and party, and even take a holiday). You should come and visit us socialists here... You'd be surprised - it actually works.
The US is not at all socialist. If you do it, do it right. The US just subsidizes big corporations... I think the US should go either to the real capitalist way (but then be serious about it, and drop all support), or be more socialist. But the current situation is useless.
When my taxes are being used to pay for bullshit, taxation becomes equivalent to confiscation.
Wikipedia says Ron Paul is a Christian. If he is, he's a hypocrite. His bible says pay your taxes. It's also kind of rough on the greedy and the selfish. Personally, I don't mind my tax money going to the poor; it might keep them from robbing me. I'm very much against welfare to the rich, like oil industry and farm subsidies. Giving them money never did keep them from robbing me.
Free Martian Whores!
Uh, I'm not sure where you get your information but academic grants and scholarships are available throughout the US. I know this because I went to school on a state grant.
So if you're poor, you're screwed. If mommy and daddy are rich, you're fine.
Seems like a great society to me.
When you try to hire someone and you can't find any educated people, post back. In the meantime, please don't be so damn selfish.
Taxes are what we buy civilization with. You don't want to pay taxes? Move to Somalia. I hear that's a place with a very small and ineffective central government.
- and I agree that the education system in this country (and the Health system and many others) is fundamentally flawed; over priced and needs an overhaul.
However, Ron Paul does actually want to do away with just about everything the government runs. I want government to tighten it's belt and get out of some regions... but there are some things that we need government for.
A government can't operate for the people without funds- which are taxes. Some of that must go to educating the public. An educated public ultimately pays dividends for you and I.
Yes, the federal loans are not the best option- but what would happen if they went away without any other plan?
Universities would fail to be able to cut costs enough (although they will try with mixed success)- quality brick and morter institutions will likely fail- and online universities will benefit. Not all students can thrive in this type environment- and the ones that can't won't necessily be the worst future workers.
For a generation of students at least loans will still be required. Students would be forced to turn to private enterprise to get loans- which would lead to higher rates for the students.
There is a market price for just how much students are willing to pay for education- it hasn't been hit yet, which is why costs have been going up- so downward price at universities would only be minimal... and only if the interest rates caused repayments to exceed that threshold. (which they probably will because the risk for the lender would be high- so rates would be astronomical- credit card level rates)
Bottom line is- universities would have to lower costs- students would still end up paying as much- but a higher % of that would be interest.
The only one that benefits will be the private lenders and the wealthy who can afford not to take a loan.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
government is the only chance we have to keep the market fair and equal. left to itself, all by itself, NATURALLY, the market is abused by its largest players
Government is in bed with the largest players. Now you are really, truly fucked.
You think you have a democracy? You think what you're seeing is capitalism?
No. America is a crony capitalist corporatocracy. Haven't you noticed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
Deleted
Student Loans should include two things: 1. Fixed low-rate loan (2-3% even for private loans) 2. Allowed to be paid with pre-tax income (like money put towards retirement etc)
That's exactly the system we have in Australia - if you request it, the Government pays for your tuition (to a set life-time limit, to stop abuse of the system), and you pay it back as part of your tax once you earn above the designated threshold. The interest rate is set at CPI, and you get a 10% discount if you pay back extra money (extra info here if anyone's interested).
It's a system that works fairly well - you end up with a highly-educated populace (good for the economy), and no-one goes broke trying to get there.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
I am from Finland.
I was baffled, when I met a young exchange student from Louisiana the other day.
She was 21 years old, and had way over 100k in student debt acquired at such young age.
How are you supposed to pay that back? Such a huge loan, at such young age..
I found it insane.
This summarizes the situation better than I ever could: http://www.collegescholarships.org/research/student-loans/
We need a system to help students pay for college, but the network of federally guaranteed monopolies and even the universities themselves stand to profit too much from the current arrangement.
Actually, yes it does mean it is alright. When other people "need" enough, they tend to start killing the people who call them parasites.
A bunch of parasites made the news in Libya the other day, in fact.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
It's the same as mortgages people. When you throw easy money into the hands of people who can't afford to buy the things they want, it self-perpetuates a bubble. You saw the results very clearly a few years ago with mortgages. FSLP = Fannie/Freddie, students who can't afford high tuition = homeowners who can't afford high mortgages, rising tuition = rising home prices.
As long as you keep funding the problem the cycle will continue. Until such a point when the students can't afford to pay off their loans and that bubble crashes as well. Why do you think the Occupy protestors are focusing most of their actual demands on student loans???
If I had mod points I would mod you DOWN. How is this relevant to the discussion or helpful in ANY way? Can you please give us some useful discussion? Also, the AC that says he's stupid, YOU'RE not helping the situation!!!! STOP fighting amongst yourselves and START having a discussion, it's the ONLY way we can begin fixing these problems of ours.
Come on, this is Slashdot, we do much better.
-
For students going to a public institution (e.g. state college or university, e.g. UC in California), tuition/fees should be nominal and/or means tested free. If you want to scrounge up the cash to go to a private institution (whether for profit or not), or you want to get a conventional bank loan, more power to you. The govt shouldn't be guaranteeing loans.
I can see one scenario where a government loan would be appropriate: Students who will work over the summer could conceivably commit to paying last year's fees with this summer's work, as opposed to working this summer to pay next year. Why? Because a significant number of graduating high school seniors are under 18, and because of child labor laws will have a harder time finding a job (hah.. nobody who's 18 these days finds a job anyway..)
Grants to private institutions (for profit or not) do drive up the price because it's an inflation kind of thing, and that lets public institutions jack up their fees (or, more properly, assuage their guilt at providing taxpayer support.. See, we're half the price of an Ivy!).
Back in the day (70s, 80s) one could conceivably pay your fees and room/board at UC with a summer job (fees = about $500/yr, room and board = $1500/yr). If you had a not much more than minimum wage job at $5/hr, it would take about 400 hours to make the nut. (assuming you did NO work during the year). That's about 2 1/2 months full time work at that $5/hr job, which seemed eminently practical (as witness thousands of students doing it).
Today, that would be a ludicrous opium vision. $20k/yr at UC and min wage at $8/hr
in any case, subsidizing education is a whole lot better than subsidizing prisons.
I also had the luxury of scholarships/jobs to pay for school and needed no loans. I firmly believe this is a good approach. BUT, living standards at dorms have become luxo condos level. The dorm I lived in could have been (and probably was) 2nd world war housing for troops. The walls were cinderblock, metal bunk beds, cheaply made units. It was a place to sleep and not much else. Perhaps if schools spent a little less on housing and alot less on stadiums & football coaches, maybe tuition would be less and not require so many student loans.
Loans that are funded, subsidized, or guaranteed by the government should come from state governments, not the Federal government.
In the current situation where the Federal government gives the loans and state universities set the prices of tuition, the states have an incentive to keep raising prices to capture more of the Federal loan dollars. That mostly goes away if the states are providing both the loans and the education. I expect that many states would also restrict the state-provided loan money to state universities in their own state, so the loans wouldn't inflate the cost of private university.
And if the Federal guarantee went away and student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, private lenders would be more selective about how much they lend and who they lend to. So they'd stop lending $100K to sociology and art history majors who are likely to have extreme difficulty paying off the loan, but aspiring engineers and doctors could still get the money they need (of course, lenders would have to look at data like SAT/ACT/AP scores to determine the likelihood of the applicant actually completing their stated major).
Having said that, I still think it's a good idea to subsidize university education. But loans are not the best way to do it. If I controlled the state university system, I'd do something like shrink the enrollments by half (over time, like 10-15 years), but everybody who gets in would have really cheap tuition like $1000/year. That increases the academic barrier to entry but lowers the financial barrier, and the smaller enrollment avoids creating a huge excess of graduates who aren't going to find jobs related to their degree.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
This problem is exactly the same as the mortgage/housing bubble. The availability of "free" money causes the prices of things (housing/education) to rise. If everybody "should" own a home and home loans are readily available to everyone (even those that cannot repay), then the demand for housing and consequently the prices rice.
It's the same for a college degree. Now everybody "should" get a college education, so student loans are made available to anyone. Demand for college education increases as does the cost, except the value of YOUR college education is now diluted.
And don't even get me started on cancelling student debt. I paid my dues. Now pay yours!
Federal Loans have little (if any) impact on the cost of education. Federal Loans have a big impact on the Federal Budget and the students they give loans to. The rising cost of Education has everything to do with how Universities spend their money. Ten or so years ago, the University of Michigan had a 50 million dollar surplus in their budget. If they didn't spend that money, they'd not only have to turn it back over to the federal government, but the following year they would have had their money from the Feds cut by that amount. So instead of being allowed to be fiscally responsible and saving the Feds money that year, they had to spend the money (and they did - they built a new building in Ann Arbor that year) or else risk having a budget crisis the following year.
It's not the loans that cause the problem, its our broken ass system and the people that run it.
Fuck you Ron Paul and your ideological bullshit. Do what's right and fix what's broken, not what's easy. Your argument is as rotten as the "fix the voting laws to prevent fraud". It's all ideological horseshit wrapped in bacon.
When the government makes it easier to afford something that most people want but not everyone can afford, it increases demand.
Increasing demand can raise prices a bit.
But if I have to choose between paying an extra 5-10% for education thanks to inflated demand vs. living in a society where many people who could graduate from college can't afford to even enroll, I'll gladly pay the extra 5-10%. To do otherwise hurts our economy in the long run.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
For one they need to change the way consolidation works and the way interest rates are calculated on student loans.
All student loans should be paid back based on the principle as it was at the time the loan was taken out and the current federal reserve interest rates. The whole "fixed-interest-rate" stuff has to go IMO.
Changes to the way loans are handled in bankruptcy proceedings are also necessary. What those changes are I dont know.
As for those who say the private sector should take over, why would any private sector lender lend you that much money for college given there is no guarantee of if/when the loan will be repaid So the only way to get the lenders to do it is for some sort of government involvement (e.g. subsidies, government backing up the loans and funding any that dont get repaid, laws requiring lenders to loan to students, whatever)
Ron Paul supports universal free trade with a largely non-interventionist foreign policy, which is very very different than being an isolationist. Typically countries that have really strong trade with each other don't go to war. There were good reasons we went into Afghanistan, not particularly good reasons to occupy the country for a decade. I don't agree with Ron Paul on foreign policy, but he's not an isolationist.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
The artificially inflated demand is a result of the increased number of college graduates, not merely a concurrent problem. Companies could not be requiring these degrees for secretary jobs if there wasn't an oversupply of college graduates.
But like others have said, because of the woeful nature of our high schools, more schooling really is needed to make many people adequate employees. And fixing this problem will take a long time, because even if we fixed high schools today it would take decades until companies could confidently hire people without degrees.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
And who's going to pay for their free education? That's right, the rest of the country, through taxes. The money has to come from somewhere. Of course, we could kill financial aid and use that money for these free educations. But then the lower and middle classes would be complaining about how they can't afford a college education... regardless of whether or not they've "demonstrate[d] themselves capable". People WANT, regardless of what they've earned or deserve.
Bite my shiny metal ass!
Speaking as a single father, putting my daughter though college at the time, I can say the government loan I helped her get was horrible. After the 1st year I managed to pay off that expensive gov loan at a high cost to me and get out of that system. The next system was a massive downsizing of my food budget, fun budget and putting off lots of things I would have like to buy and do in my life. I was making a $35K salary and my daughter worked 15-20 hours a week. 2 years after she graduated from the university, we were both "college expenses" debt free. It was not a pleasant 4 -6 years of my life but I have recovered financially. If I had continued down that Government Loan slippery slope I suspect I'd still be paying off the loans 8 years later. Yeah, I helped my daughter a lot so she would be debt free upon graduation (or there abouts) but I certainly wasn't and still am not a rich man. My point is, the gov loan program was some of the most expensive money I've ever taken. Yes there was government aid in this whole experience...many, many scholarships and grants were applied for and some were awarded. I am extremely grateful for what "the people" of this country contributed to my daughters education.
Loans are not free money. Student will have to pay them back. Making the loans more available means there is more money available for student to go to school. More money available means higher prices. So you pay for it either way, but doing it without loans means the price will be lower. Does anyone have stats on number of college graduates AND price of tuition over the last 25 years? Ideally I suppose these would be per capita number of students and inflation adjusted tuition.
Repeating something that is irrelevant, not to mention wrong, doesn't make it relevant or right.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Removing federal loans just means private institutions will make up some the difference. The problem is that private loans will demand a higher rate (because they're looking to make a profit).
The problem is that Ron's looking at this from the student's perspective; but that's not the typical case. Most students are paying for college with help from their parents (indeed, most middle-class parents start college funds for their children earlier and earlier). Even with help from mom & dad loans are usually required.
It's not like schools are just making up tuition costs, they have bills to pay; and the price isn't just set wherever they feel like setting it; they have a budget, of which tuition and fees is only one source of income among many. If the demand suddenly decreases that likely means costs per student will increase (as many of the fixed costs are now carried by a smaller population).
Yes, there is a feedback loop, wherein a College feels free to raise its prices because the student has a portion covered by loans, leading the government to raise its loan amount, leading the College to increase yet again. No, removing the government loans from the equation will not solve this problem (at least, not entirely) but at the same time it would create several more problems. The market does not and will not fix itself.
Anytime a government subsidizes a product or service - the price will increase to match the subsidy. Period. The producers know how much the subsidy is(A), and how much a consumer can spend(B). They will always add a+b in the end because the elasticity of price can be known to support that level.
There isn't even an unknown pricing curve here - the University already knows your finances when you apply for financial aid. They can simply and easily price an education to target the population of students they want.
How many (fiscally) bankrupt universities have you seen lately? I only know of Huron University in South Dakota in 2005.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_universities_and_colleges_in_the_United_States
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Proof! And by proof I mean... not. Yes, the cost of tuition at both public and private universities have gone up dramatically. But simply blaming the federal student loan program is not proof. What you, and Ron Paul, do not understand is that the world is complex. Ron Paul, as always, blames the federal government for this problem.
Here's why that won't work. The second anyone even considers such a thing, suddenly the Republicans/Tea Partiers/Libertarians will all scream "Socialist!" and pelt that person with vodka and fish.
I think it's hilarious when someone talks about all his degrees, but can't use an apostrophe properly. It makes me doubt they even have a high school diploma.
Free Martian Whores!
He is an idiot plain and simple.
He is just as bad as Bachmann
I think you are missing a major point.
If you "include University level education for free", you are essentially passing those costs on to someone. Who? The taxpayer, of course.
Student Loans (which require repayment) are essentially a tax on college students (the exact person receiving the benefit). The government subsidizes (and/or guarantees) the loan. The student agrees to be "taxed" until it gets paid off. Your idea suggests that the costs get paid by someone - the taxpayer. And guess who that is... it's the student once they are working. Not much of a difference!
The best way to keep costs education costs down is to get rid of the middle man (the government). If you, the citizen, need to make a decision as to whether you can afford Ivy League vs. Out of State vs Private vs. In State but away from home vs. at home, and you have no middle man, I guarantee the prices for college would get competitive in a hurry. You won't pay extra for the Out of State or Private school if you can't afford it, and/or if the proven results don't justify the price.
Colleges would finally get competitive, having to prove that their value is worth the cost. They'd increase their value, or they'd decrease their cost. Period.
Right now, it's a free-for-all, with Universities all sucking off the government teat. Ron Paul is dead-on correct, on this issue.
As with any major shift in public policy, there would be a pain period for some people, and there would be a shake out (potentially causing some universities to go out of business, which would be a GOOD thing). Frankly I am sick of the local community colleges who bring people in off the street (literally the homeless), knowing that the college can get FREE government money by "educating" the homeless person, who ultimately is just a name on their role call. Many never attend a single class. Still others don't complete the courses, or they fail. But the school still gets their cash from the federal government! Great! If these schools were truly educating the homeless, that would be wonderful. But they aren't rewarded for educating the homeless. They are rewarded for getting a name onto the college application and booking them into classes.
Turn on daytime television any day of the week (like Maury), and watch commercial after commercial for these schools. As my son says "I don't think you want to go to any college that has a jingle".
I was actually talking about the second AC, not the first.
I have no idea if Ron Paul is isolationist, but it should be widely known and educated that isolationism is a bad thing for many reasons.
You're denying solid-gold Glibertarian shibboleths by interposing all of those inconvenient pesky facts, and real world things!
Stop it!
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Actually I thought he was just another Republican crackpot but I find myself actually agreeing with a lot of his positions...
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
An interesting take on the problem from zerohedge:
"Student Loan Bubble To Exceed $1 Trillion: "It's Going To Create A Generation Of Wage Slavery" And Another Taxpayer Bailout"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/student-loan-bubble-exceed-1-trillion-its-going-create-generation-wage-slavery-and-another-taxp
That is, where does the Onion on his belt and silver liberty dollars figure into this equation?
Completely agree! I lived in cheaper off-campus housing. Many schools now (including the one I went to) require that students live on campus. (so they can make more money off them).
The whole sports in school thing irks me somewhat. Now, I was born overseas in a country where college sports was something people did for fun - not a major industry- I moved to the US mid-highschool.
I understand that College sports is a social-institution here in the US and not something people would want to give up.
Americans are quick to criticise "socialised this" or "socialised that" (quite rightly in many cases)- yet fail to realise that college sports is essentially socialised sports- which is amazingly strange to me. It is sports backed with the funding power of a government institution.
Some big schools make a profit on their sports programmes- as a result, those same towns rarely have any long-term financially viable private sports teams.
My home town of about 30k had 4 semi-pro sports teams over 50 years old... you don't see that in the US because the socialised sports kills off any private teams- private teams don't live long here. Those sports profits are being taken from private enterprise.
Also, smaller schools that think that to compete with big schools they need a sports programme- so most smaller schools end up with huge net costs attributed to sporting programmes.
I don't know a solution- I know you can't just remove the sports programmes it is too much of culture over here; but the fact that it causes small schools to have higher expenses that don't see the same profits and kills private enterprise (on something which quite rightly should be private) bothers me.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
In the grand supply vs demand world. If they got rid of the student loan system there would be ridiculously fewer people getting an education and therefore less demand. So theoretically they would lower the cost of post-secondary by lots. Though at the same time that also means far fewer professors and far less research from universities. Far few educated people... in a growing world economy which has larger and larger demand for skilled workers.
What a smart idea for the usa to do. I support ron paul but sadly i dont live in the usa and hope we socialize post-secondary.
I guess the fact that higher education costs are spiraling out of control even as the jobs these degrees are supposed to help you to get have all but disappeared means nothing to you?
This means that there is a problem with higher education costs. How do you make the logical leap that the (primary? only?) cause is the Federal Student Loan Program?
What percentage of students are in the program? Unless it's "most", it seems unlikely that the program is the main cause of higher education costs.
If the government stopped the program, why would private banks not start up a similar one? And how would that not cause the same problems? (Answers should not assume that a magical hand will sprinkle free-market pixie dust and make all college prices lower, since that doesn't seem to happen in reality much.)
Regulate college costs. But ending student loans and expecting the colleges to magically lower tuition in response is ludicrous.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
My Fiancée works for a small chain of vocational schools who's tuition is pretty affordable, under $1000. However lately they've been looking into ways to be able to qualify for Federal Gov backed loans to make it 'affordable' to those who are unemployed or on welfare or just plain broke. If they're successful the plan is to raise the price of tuition by 5x-10x.
There are American's willing to do farm work, but the market has been distorted for decades, the people willing to that work no longer live near the farms.
How much of that is because last-mile telecommunications providers are unwilling to serve homes near farms?
The /. crowd is mostly so over their head when dealing with economics, that it actually is surprising.
Ron Paul is absolutely correct - government shouldn't be allowed in any financial matters in economy. Gov't shouldn't be allowed to regulate businesses and skew the market, distort the money allocation, set interest rates (price of money), counterfeit currency (Federal reserve), create imbalance in every single sector, from education and health care to energy and agriculture. Starting wars that cannot be paid for. Passing regulations that make labor too expensive and thus pushing production to other countries.
Ron Paul has been predicting this financial disaster ever since Nixon took the world (the world by proxy of USD being 'reserve currency') off the gold standard. US main exports include weapons and entertainment, but the real main export is of-course US DOLLAR.
The main export of US economy is inflation. This pushes the production out of USA and this causes a massive loss of jobs in USA. To keep the bubble of credit going, the bubble has to be inflated everywhere, from housing to medical insurance and care and to education and to money markets and wars. Nothing can be left untouched by inflation in an economy as unproductive as US economy.
Ron Paul is right of-course, never mind what economic illiterates are saying on this site.
You can't handle the truth.
Thank you, Team America!
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
Support for Ron Paul by the young and sometimes geeky has intrigued me for some time. Is it a result of reading Ayn Rand? Is it because his ideas seem so much more sensible than so many others? Is it because he does not appear beholden to any lobbyists? Is it primarily because he wants to end drug Prohibition? Possibly all of the above.
But it's also confused me because a number of the things Ron Paul wants to do away with are things that help the young find their first footholds -- things like student loans (or even grants). When I read this headline, I thought for just a second that perhaps Dr. Paul wants to throw open the universities for all, call a full education a civil right that you get to take advantage of based on merit. But I dismissed that thought before I saw the rest of the post, and I was right to do so. My response: his analysis may have some truth in it but it's so simple as to be suspect, in my view. On balance, like much of what Ron Paul says, it's too simple to be right.
Whoever thinks Ron Paul is cool, whatever lobby groups he is not beholden to, make no mistake: the über-rich and powerful wish his ideas well because their adoption would entrench and deepen the growing class divisions in America and put an end to the American dream as anything but that: a wistful dream of what expectations used to be.
Something is rotten in the way the US is going these days. For instance, in my lifetime, before 2008, I had never heard a leading politician in the US say of their president from the opposing party that they wanted him to fail. Whether you agree with Mr. Obama or not, that attitude on the part of any member of your government is pernicious. I'll stop there because the list of things going wrong is so long (most of them decades in the making) as to make this too-long post ridiculously so.
But Ron Paul is not the answer to those problems: his ideas (and incidentally those of the Tea Party) are only going to help the rich get richer and inherit the meek (and the not so meek). Do yourselves a favour, folks, and elect leaders that remember what they learned in Kindergarten (without forgetting all the things they learned since) and value their neighbours over hard lines -- internal neighbours, of course! I wouldn't advocate that you would elect the people I, your Canadian neighbour, want you to elect. I'm just confident that if, overall, you voted in line with your interests (and that may take a lot of thinking to figure out who's going to serve those best) and do well, then you won't become neighbours that we have to fear from across that longest unarmed border in the world.
be good to each other, folks...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
The problem I really see, is that Paul's solutions are all long term and there is a lot of pain involved in getting to his ultimate goal. I like the ultimate goal, but Americans are way too short sighted to look at things that way.
If he eliminates student loans, in the short term a whole lot of people will suffer. In the long term, school will have decreased enrollment and be forced to lower tuition costs in order to attract students.
In the short term, community college enrollment will skyrocket, and a lot of people will graduate from college a lot less in debt than they are now.
And there really is no reason banks can't still offer loans for college to people.
I am against him and everything that he stands for but he has a point.
The cost of college/university in the US is huge and something has to be done about this.
And giving student loans will invariably increase the cost of schooling and the US just might be so capitalistic that the student loans are the main reason that tuition is so high.
The biggest issue i see is what about those who are halfway through there education. who have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and will simply be unable to continue getting a Harvard/MIT education (because there is no way those schools will ever be in the price affordability range because they will have no trouble getting rich kids to fill in for smart poor kids).
So in general it might actually work. It could also go horribly wrong and be the quickest route to turning US into a honorary third world country with a unemployable population.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Every one of those things is done by my city's government, not the feds. A limited federal government is not synonymous with anarchy.
Most people consider him a crackpot, but he's a small-government moderate so many of his positions should be a good compromise for both sides.
There are no exceptions where the government's interference in the market doesn't distort it. Either by driving customers into a market where it otherwise would have had fewer, or by increasing prices by regulatory strain on market participants. You do go ahead and trot out an exception.
You are also wrong that a market gravitates all power and wealth to a few. This simply isn't true unless and until government gets involved.
The reason that people persist in the idea that an "unregulated" (by government) marketplace is fairer, is because such markets allow individuals to decide for themselves what is fair and not some clueless bureaucrat somewhere else whose real motivation is enriching himself or his cronies.
Besides that, it is self-evident that this is the case and not a matter of religious beliefs unlike the diatribe to which I am responding.
Flippant remarks like yours depress me when they are rated insightful. Either there is far to wealth envy on Slashdot or people are just mad and take it out anyway they can.
Look, the guy is what, seventy years old. He has made a lot of choices in his life and some of them were obviously very good.
Minimum wage jobs are not meant to be permanent, I know I have worked a few in my life including having to do some after getting out the service. Guess what, it was a lot of incentive to do better. It also meant working more than one until I could get better.
The majority of people working minimum wage are teenagers. The majority reason for getting only minimum wage is you have no job skills. Less than 2% of all adult worker earn minimum wage, two thirds of that is in food service. Part time workers are five times more likely to earn minimum wage.
So, how does having access to government loan programs raise these people up? If anything its probably going to put them further in debt and for longer with debts that cannot be discharged. Colleges, private and state, have all figured out how to exploit the market place and have done the job of convincing many people they need a degree to get anywhere. That is not true. Finally, if you get a soft degree (non engineering for example) do not expect to get paid as much as someone who worked for the better degree.
What is true is that you don't become successful overnight. You don't earn you highest salary starting out. Most people don't peak until their 40s yet today everyone wants to be in the big house with fancy cars in their 20s. Get real.
People have unreasonable expectations out of life. There is an investment. Some times things go wrong. The key is, adjust. It sucks. I spent four plus years below the poverty level but family and friends helped. I give back now.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I, like many others, feel that those coming out of highschool aren't necessarily disciplined enough. Listening to teachers in my family complain about how the system forces them to "teach to the test", discouraging actual exploration and learning, I also feel that students coming out of highschool aren't very well educated.
At the very least, having a bachelors degree demonstrates that a person has the discipline to start and finish something that they were not required by law to do, and if their GPA is reasonable, it means they probably learned something, at least unconsciously. This is why employers want a person to have a degree but don't care what the subject is.
Having a high highschool GPA may indicate that the person had the discipline to show up to class. That's good. But I don't know anyone who really respects a highschool education. Most of us feel that highschool was torment and indoctrination, and the real learning starts in college. That isn't entirely fair, of course, because a lot of what you do in pre-college school is "learn how to learn." Interestingly, it's those who actually learned something in highschool who are more likely to go to college, oftentimes because they learned in highschool _despite_ the system.
Not all undergrad degree programs are all that hot either. The college I went to (which has much improved since them) would give good grades to students who clearly did not understand the material. I know this, because I saw it happening as a student, and then after I got a job, I interviewed many graduates from this same institution. Although computer science isn't about learning programming languages, this school would graduate students who clearly did not know a single programming language. (IMHO, programming languages are generally something you should be able to learn on the fly, and you should acquire a number of them by necessity while taking courses.) The interesting effect of this is that it was easy to distinguish the smart graduates from the stupid ones, because the smart ones actually knew something about computer science, while the the rest did not. By contrast, when we went to a job fair at NCSU, every student who spoke to us, even those with math and other engineering degrees, knew computer science so well that we had no ability (or even need) to categorize people on the basis of intelligence, discipline, etc.
So, back to highschool, someone coming out of a really good prep school or other private institution (like a Montessori school) IS likely to have education and discipline (even the snobby rich kids). However, nearly all of those people will go on to college anyhow.
So if you went to a good highschool, you'll probably go to college because you're smart enough. If you went to a public school, and you managed to learn discipline and get an education anyway, you'll also go on to college. All we have left are the duds from public schools who don't go to college. McDonalds wants to make sure you can count change, and they explicitly train their employees in this, under the reasonable assumption that most of their applicants will not have learned this in school. Other employers are going to want a simple test that has a high probability of correctly filtering intelligent people from the duds, and a college degree is one such easy test.
So from the individual's perspective, it may seem unfair that employers have this "arbitrary" requirement for a degree. I've met a number of smart people who didn't get a college degree, and it's too bad that they are shut out of so many jobs they're intellectually qualified for, especially if the reason they didn't go to college was financial (as opposed to a lack of discipline).
But from the employer's perspective, you are interchangable with anyone else. They just want someone who is qualified for the position. They don't care who. They don't care about you at all. They just need a cog to perform a job. When considering candidates, they get a huge stack of resumes, and they look
Chill, dude. The market isn't so bad as that.
What you guys don't realize is that there are no activities that aren't regulated today. Everything any company does is subject to regulations at all levels of government.
When you say "activity X should be regulated" what you really mean is that "current regulations for activity X aren't working".
How is it not exploitation when state universities do the same thing?
Why don't we discuss what could happen if Ron Paul went ahead with it somehow? Discuss what could happen and why, rather than scare tactics for this or that opinion?
Here's a potential scenario, please feel free to add more:
b) Sports/admin get slashed, leaving teacher's unions/tenured profs unchanged though. Funding is hurt, but those teachers who have federal funding for research continue on. The glut of cheap grad students ends, forcing profs to actually do meaningful research instead of pump out research papers as fast as possible. America also freaks out that they don't have their precious college sports anymore, and we get back to focusing our spare time on more important issues than fantasy football.
Those colleges which get scared and try to keep their revenue stream by slashing teachers and keeping admin/sports eventually realize the no-win situation they're in and either close down or restructure. PERHAPS we even get college which drop teaching entirely and become minor league sports franchises (some of them probably already could, successfully. I'm looking at you Florida State, who has one of the worst academic records out there since you pay teachers less than beans, but has a RABID college football following)
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So you expect people to flip burgers for the rest of their lives?
You expect people with college degrees and massive student debt to do it their whole lives.
Keep your eyes closed tho.. its not like there is any evidence in the job market that indicates that this is exactly where we are right now.
"His name was James Damore."
Not going to weigh in on the matter of college loans*, but I feel like I should point out that high school is our public education system. If Ron Paul were calling for an end to public schools, your post would be a lot more on point. Also, people are already voting for whatever candidate looks best on TV. I don't think we'd have nearly as much petty mudslinging if it didn't work. This isn't really on topic either, but I wish there was something that would make our political system based less on gut feelings and more on actual analysis. For example, almost everyone on this board has already formed an opinion on whether they agree with Ron Paul on this topic or not, but how many have actually taken the time to actually figure out based on history, statistics, or simulation? My guess is not very many. The majority probably saw the words "Ron Paul" and immediately said to yourself "I love that guy" or "that moron" before you got to the actual point. *Not weighing in because I haven't done any sort of research that I wish more people would do.
A significant portion of the American population is not capable of doing anything more complex than running a cash register. The travesty is that we insist on imprisoning them in schools until they're 18 whether or not they can actually benefit from them.
For-profit colleges are basically a big scam meant to prey off the poor and the naive, including our nation's veterans. Ron Paul doesn't want to talk about that because that would be acknowledging that the free-market isn't an instant panacea for everything.
A huge issue is that people can qualify for student loans, even if they don't have the basic skills to go to college. They can't study, they don't know what they want to do, they just want some guidance counselor to fix their lives. Not going to happen. Couple that with the unrealistic expectation that "Everyone should go to college" and you're just setting people up for failure and debt. And high schools are part of the problem by pushing everyone into 4-year colleges.
We need to have a threshold to limit access to student loans for those who have a chance of succeeding. Maybe we should have a "student loan qualifying exam" where you would need something like a 900 on the SAT in order to qualify. If you don't get a 900, then you can retake the exam in another 6 months. And high schools should be letting under-performers know about options in vocational training such as trades, automotive repair, nursing, and the military.
Make my day! I'm a student at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, GA. They've already taken my Hope Scholarship away because I've exceeded 120 hours, cumulatively. Take away my loans and I've got NOTHING.
Just go public with it. I DARE YOU.
Show me some place where government money isn't flowing in that the costs just keep rising and rising and rising faster than inflation.
The same thing is happening with medical care (the only form of medical care that has decreasing costs is the cosmetic surgery industry, where neither government nor insurance money is accepted), and the same thing happened with the housing bubble (hell, as a student WITH NO JOB I got a loan to buy a house--insanity now that I think about it).
"I guess the fact that higher education costs are spiraling out of control even as the jobs these degrees are supposed to help you to get have all but disappeared means nothing to you?"
You want those jobs to come back? The answer is to fix the government's little visa program that introduces a loophole to encourage employers to give those otherwise high paying jobs to asian immigrants willing to work for next to nothing by comparison to what the job is worth.
They offer the job with huge requirements with a salary no sane american would accept, complain there's nobody willing to do the job, then get a visa in from overseas whose willing to work it because all they have to do is save up a fraction of the money and then go back to their home country where that money will go a lot further than a few months of rent.
Congratulations for working your way up. You worked hard to get where you are today, and I salute you.
But now, doing what you did is essentially impossible:
* Average annual in-state tuition, room and board at a state university, books and basic supplies - $7600+$1100+$2000=$10,700 (numbers from the College Board. Private schools are about 3 times that cost.
* US minimum wage: $7.25 per hour. After taxes, about $6.00.
* So weekly hours worked to earn your way through school: $10,700 / $6 / 52 (weeks per year) = about 35 hours per week.
* Being a student requires basically full-time hours, so schoolwork takes up about 35-40 hours per week.
That leaves, of your 168 hours in a week, 94 hours for everything that isn't working or studying. If you assume 8 hours of sleep a night, you have a total of 5 hours a day to do everything else: eating, dressing, laundry, cleaning, bathing, traveling to and from work and class, etc. Your only chance of relief would be the summer, where you might be able to live with your parents. I've worked those kind of hours for short bursts, but the human body simply can't handle that over long periods.
And of course this all assumes that minimum wage jobs are available in your area, which is probably not true at the moment.
I am officially gone from
It would be great if most college students today could have the same opportunity to pay for their own schooling as you did. But that simply is not the case anymore (for most). College tuition has risen inflation adjusted about 400% in the last 25 years (so perhaps only 300% since you were in college). So to do what you did it would take 9 part-time jobs while doing their undergrad (an exaggeration I know, but you get my point).
The availability of loans have risen prices to the point where loans are almost necessary, just like with housing and automobiles.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
will kill you and take your stuff. It's pretty much the same answer as to any question about the fundamental purpose of income redistribution in governments.
The only reason that those with "little to no money" don't just overrun your pretty house and take what they want is because we have a government (derived from the consent of the governed) which offers an attractive vision of fairness and potential upward mobility to those with "little to no money".
Now that said, student loans are a pretty mild sacrifice towards this cause--because people generally do pay them back and it helps society in mutliple ways. I, for one, think that the government should be more aggressive in basing the student loan amounts on (a) the grades/test scores of the student, and (b) the value of the degree the student is pursuing.
We do. They are called scholarships. And several states offer free tuition to all local students for the first year, especially those meeting certain grade requirements. That's how I got 2 undergraduate degrees (had to work for housing, food, and books). Afterwards I was paid to go to graduate school. It's pretty common for engineering.
Oh, and many high school students can take college credit classes for free. It's common to skip a year or two of college that way.
Low income students get financial aid that pays tuition,books, room, and board. Not extravagant, but very useful.
What is being discussed is loans to students with mediocre grades, parents that aren't poor or rich, going to an expensive school. Especially when they rack up $100,000 in debt studying some liberal arts degree with negligible chance of finding a job in that area, much less making enough to pay off the loan. Colleges make fat profits off those idiots by raising tuition because students who can tap the federal government for the loans just take out bigger loans regardless of tuition price.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The reality is that the current system transfers wealth from low wage workers to those with college degrees.
Hello! Didn't you read his comment. He got an MBA. Of course it didn't.
Demonstrating your ability to succeed is a life-long process. This means that in order to be eligible for a state paid University education, you'd have be successful in your college preparatory work. High school grades should matter. Sadly, this would eliminate many "late bloomers" including myself.
When do you get a chance to try again? Anytime you want to try again, you can pay your own way. This may also eliminate many late bloomers who would otherwise have succeeded, a cost to society as well as the individual.
But I can't imagine taking on the debt load that some of today's college students are assuming. My college education was worth every penny I spent on it, but I doubt that I'd feel the same way if I was still paying for it 25 years later with no end to the payments in sight.
Maybe overpriced schools can be omitted from loan eligibility?
If you want to trim the size of government, you must look at the budgets and see where the money is going. No president will get elected by promising to eliminate entitlements, and our current president has created new ones, but entitlement reform is where we need to start if we are to effect real change. The US monetary policy has become a joke. Nations are fleeing the dollar. If we continue to spend at the rate we are today, things will get a whole lot worse in the future.
Government borrowing is fine for big projects that provide long-term benefits to our economy. Our government(s) today are routinely borrowing money to fund their regular annual budgets. If they don't have the money today, what makes them think they'll have it (along with the loan interest) tomorrow? Inflation is the only way out of this trap, and it will diminish confidence in our currency, and our nation.
I think that the federal government's role should be limited. Sure, there needs to be someone to have the power to plan and act to move the education forward. I believe that the states should be doing it. Smaller states can and should cooperate on it (duh).
Remember: RP is about cutting the federal government to the bare minimum, in light of it being run in an entirely financially unsustainable manner. What other choice is there? Economy is, to a point, a closed system. Federal money "evaporating" does not mean that any money really evaporates. Someone, somewhere, is left with more money to spend, and that money may well go into education. Such decisions should be made at a state level, since there's no "one fits all" solution. The socioeconomic situation differs among the states, and pretty wildly at that. There's no way for central decision-making in D.C. to take care of it fairly.
For a generation of students at least loans will still be required. Students would be forced to turn to private enterprise to get loans- which would lead to higher rates for the students.
It won't work like that. Of course there will be enterprise that will offer loans, like there always was. But there also will be a great deal of belt tightening at schools, with some schools going out of business (rightly so). For some people, college is not an option, and there's nothing wrong about it IMHO.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
This, a thousand times this. Please mod up the parent!
Well, this is discussing a 'loan' program, not a 'grant' program, so the government is on the hook only if folks default on these loans.
That aside, how do you give folks who *are* motivated, and whose parents emphasize the important of education, but just aren't financially able to do so?
I have kids now, but between the loss of equity in my home, and the rising cost of living, I have no idea how I'm going to be able to afford the same opportunity my parents gave me to my kids.
I 100% agree with you though, there needs to be a emphasis on a culture of learning, and the unfunded NCLB crap forces schools to spend on these useless programs instead of programs to inspire children and parents.
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
There's a lot of clap trap in these comments trying to sum out Ron Paul by his financial policies. It completely misses the point.
Ron Paul is a constitutionalist.
He believes that the federal govt overreaches. Financially, yes, but also militarily, socially, and almost every other sphere of influence. I'm sure he'd be fine about individual states offering loans - or transport systems, or healthcare, or abortions, or ID cards, or gay marriage or whatever. But these are not the job of the federal government. It's not rocket science - he is simply the only prominent politician who takes the limitation to legislate only over "commerce among the several states" seriously.
In practise, this all means that he has the only plan that can save the USA, being as the first step to solving the financial hole is to stop digging. And that means cuts to spending. I personally hope that he would do it in such a way that individual states can take over whichever programs they want in a clean and managed way. But this man is your only hope. Vote for him.
How about we cut the Ron Paul 2012 funding program? Life is a risk ya know and if ya can't make it on yer own ya shouldn't be able to make it. So fund yer own damn campaign outta yer own damn pocket Ron. If you're really a libertarian, every man for himself kinda guy then what is that big, bold, red "DONATE NOW" button doing on your web site, you hypocrite?
The way to reduce subsidies till they no longer distort the market, is to remove them completely. Otherwise it's like saying, I'll just do a little heroin, till it no longer distorts my sense of reality.
The housing market was inflamed by lucrative tax benefits including the enlarged gains exemption (up to $500k), property tax and mortgage interest exemptions, and subsidies for the poor- FHA, VA loans. This bubble grew much faster than inflation until it burst. Lack of regulation in financial markets also contributed.
The government now funds half of health care with Medicare, Medicaid, and its huge workforce/retiree medical benefits.
Both of these sectors, as well as college costs, grew much faster than general inflation.
The fundamental problem is the belief that the Government, whichever one, has your best interests at heart. "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people" has been shortened to "Government for the people". We decide who to vote for based on who will maintain or introduce spending programs that we like.
I hate to break the news to you, but we've already passed the point where enough people contribute to provide the services we expect. That difference is called the deficit, and over time adds up to the debt. You now have two choices, spend less or more people contribute. Since I doubt seriously all the people that consider themselves "99%" are going to pay any taxes this year, you might want to add an extra couple hours overtime so you can cover them.
Things change when people change, not when in your brilliance you identify some other person that should.
But the problem is the cult status of the college education won't go away if federal student loans go away. Prices may drop a little but not by much. It is not like federal student loans have been increasing by 10% each year. I doubt there is much correlation between the two. The federal goverment needs to change how it hires people. It needs to elliminate degree requirments from jobs that don't need it. Then it needs to stop asking about education when interviewing for those jobs. As long as HR uses these bogus degrees for filtering purposes they will still be overvalued.
1.) end federal guaranteed student loans.
2. college enrollment goes down.
3. Universities blame Ron Paul. Ron Paul blames universities.
4. catch 22 persists for 250 years as the world rolls on towards "Idiocracy"...
5. In 2261, no one goes to koledge or spels*)or properly use pro-nunk-u-ay-shun.
6. Ron Paul's utopia is reality!
7. Profit?
Yeah, as if if they axe the loans the universities would reduce their tuition the next day, and lower the profs salaries, computer cos would give things to univs for free.. and..
Is this guy an idiot? This is what's wrong with the usa - idiotic presidential candidates.
After all this, theyse guys would complain how US does not have enough graduates compared to India and China, where education is heavily subsidized..
Many of you are completely missing the point, compounded by anyone criticizing Ron Paul's economics by saying it's "stupid" has utterly no understanding of economics. Net, We in the US have two choices: take a good deal of pain now (slash government expenditures - and departments), or take apocalyptic pain later. That really is the basis of the choice. I'm going to go through this pretty fast, so try to keep up.
This is the best presentation I've found that really characterizes where the US and world economy is right now. One of the worlds smartest hedge fund managers giving you a real education of the state of the world. It's really a brilliant video: Kyle Bass @ AmeriCatalyst 2010 | 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWgtzwqWh60
The economics are sound despite the 3rd grade level retorts I've read on this thread. There is clear empirical data demonstrating that the money multiplier effect from government spending and lack thereof (expenditure cuts) that support Ron Paul's plan -support data follows:
"The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks," by Christina Romer and David Romer. Working Paper version.
"An empirical characterization of the dynamic effects of changes in government spending and taxes on output", by Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2002. Online version dated July 1999.
"What are the Effects of Fiscal Policy Shocks?" by Andrew Mountford and Harald Uhlig. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 2009. Earlier Working Paper version (no charge).
Here's a higher level view for those that don't want to get into the minutiae of the data and want a MTV education of economics: Watch this:Fear the Boom and Bust then this: Fight of the Century
Then the tired argument that Ron Paul wants a gold standard is just not right: Go look at his campaign page then read this: A Free-Market Monetary System http://mises.org/daily/3204
It's really surprising really, because technology and Internet people like us should really be the most capable of understanding the Austrian economic ideas. It's a complex self organizing system like the Internet. Hayek's absolutely beautiful essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" captures it perfectly: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html
Imagine a life without taxing to put money in another's pocket, both those that refuse to work and also the globalist mega-corporation parasites that are draining this country. Taxing just to do the legitimate functions of government.
But we have public education and the problems of clueless voters is growing. Obviously, public education is failing to provide what you imagine it will
I don't want to be "that old guy" -- but I didn't qualify for student loans in the 80's & early 90's because my parents were in that bracket where they were supposed to be able to contribute, but just couldn't.
Same here. Same time period. No financial aid of any kind. 2 jobs.
It won't work like that. Of course there will be enterprise that will offer loans, like there always was. But there also will be a great deal of belt tightening at schools, with some schools going out of business (rightly so). For some people, college is not an option, and there's nothing wrong about it IMHO.
I agree not everyone should need college- for some "careers" it does nothing.
Universities will charge less- but they will still take advantage of what a student is willing to pay- and get as much as what they can.
The student will still pay the same amount.
If the average university student is willing to pay $100 a month to pay off student loans (picking 100 for simplicity sake) then the pressure on pricing is such that a student will graduate paying $100 a month. Right now only 3% of that is interest- so ignoring compound interest for simplicity- $97 of that loan goes to the uni.
If private enterprise is willing to take on the risk of the student defaulting- they will want a higher cut- perhaps an 18% interest. Universities now only get $82 from that $100 (remember students are willing to pay $100 a month in loan payments after graduating in this scenario) private loaners will be getting a bigger chunk.
(when you factor in compound interest- universities get even less and the lenders get even more).
It is how free enterprise works- companies change the amount which results in the biggest profits. They will charge however much someone is willing to pay.
MORE students will be able to get by without a loan- but the least wealthy 80% would still need loans.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Simply put, I doubt you could do the same now. Tuition costs have vastly outpaced costs of living, and wages haven't even kept up with cost of living. Could you have afforded to go to school this way if tuition was over four times higher? Because that's what it is now. Here's something for you to understand: tuition costs have increased twice as quickly as medical costs.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I like Ron Paul as the anti-congress congressman... would that be effective as president? time will tell when he's not even on the ballots again...
The issue here though is Government loans, the FASFA, co-signers, etc. The USG has made education affordable for people who can not afford it, and further will most likely not be able to afford it even after they get their "dream job" as many posters have pointed out.
I was ineligible for federal loans (damn parents having an income), so I got private loans. My wife on the other hand has federal loans. Her interest rates are nearly double mine, she has 1/3rd the principle balance I do, and her monthly payments are only $100 less than mine are. She works in the social work field with children with autism and other MR, I'm an engineer. If we were not married she would not be able to pay back her federal loans (due to my income) as she only makes $14/hr, and that is after she was job searching for 2 years with a BS and half a MS.
Same with the FHA loans, the USG continues to make expensive investments available to people who simply can not afford them. The cost of College has inflated drastically, and the "worth" of the degree on the way out has declined significantly and something needs to rock the tuition costs of college, maybe this is it.
Making housing and education available for the underprivileged is a great idea, except like most things in this country, they are abused and taken advantage of by anyone who doesn't have moral values. If you can't afford to go to college, don't go. If mommy and daddy don't pay, get a job and support yourself. Go to a trade school instead, you're better off. Don't go to college because you think it will get you a job automagically, it won't.
Federal loan don't help anyone "rise-up", except for the tuition prices and the number of students defaulting on their loan payments.
I'm sorry, but your comment is FAR from insightful, despite the +4 moderation it was currently given.
The federal student loan program is increasingly a BAD deal for those taking advantage of it to get through college. Why? For one thing, the debt owed to the Federal govt. under it is NOT possible to eliminate, even in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy situation. That means if you take out a big loan to get your college degree and then contrary to what was promised or suggested to you, you're not able to actually get a good-paying job that justifies what was spent on said degree -- you're basically screwed. Everyone else you owe from your credit cards to utility bills to a car or even home loan, you can re-negotiate with or have the existing debt forgiven/washed away with a bankruptcy filing, should you find yourself in an otherwise impossible to rectify financial situation. But not that Federal student loan debt! Just like tax money you might owe the IRS, there's no getting out of that one!
Ron Paul, IMHO, is absolutely correct on this one. What we need are regular old private bank loans for higher education, at fair and reasonable interest rates. (And when I say this, I mean Credit Unions too -- because actually, they'd seem to be the more likely lenders to cut you a fair deal.) Perhaps this would even introduce some more sanity to the student loan process, discouraging people from taking out "high risk" loans for degrees unlikely to offer a decent return on one's educational investment. I imagine the usefulness of some degrees varies quite a bit by region too. (EG. If you're interested in marine biology, it's probably more feasible if you live on the coast than in the midwest....) Your *local* bank or C.U. would hopefully be more aware of this than a Federal institution that concentrates on "treating all lenders equally under the law".
Building a bridge to the 1800's. No thanks.
... Or for what's left of it...
If by "direct taxation" you mean taxing individuals rather than states, that's not what the Constitution was about, since it didn't happen until the 16th Amendment.
Is there correlation between degree costs and the amount of federal student aid though. Do increases in one result in increases in the other. When congress cut federal student aid did prices drop? Can that be shown in the USA with statistics? Can it be shown to be true somewhere else? Is there an example of a country using this system with good results.
Didn't you hear that "wooshing" sound just now? (tip: awesome is being used sarcastically)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Hardly, I paid for my college education by working. I go to hire and most of the interviewees, products of public education, can neither speak, read, nor write at what was a high school level in the early 1970s. From my point of view they are functionally at an I.Q. of 90 or less, which had the quaint designation of a "moron" decades ago. I can prove that taxes don't buy civilization, look at the ghettos with welfare and HUD money flowing in, and out comes savages with no regard for others property or human life. The building block of society and civilization is the family. When we pay whore-bags to spread their legs for every man who comes along, and children grow up with no supervision nor leadership, we get what we see in the inner cities.
I wonder how Ron Paul thinks people will be able to go to college without loans? What are we supposed to do? Save money and then go to college or work while in college to pay for everything? No way! If this guy thinks I'm going to live below my means as an American than he is in for a big surprise during election time!
As long as the repayment terms don't change, it doesn't really matter how big the student loan gets in the UK though. It just works out at a 4-10% extra income tax for graduates, depending on their income (well, 0% for incomes under £21K). I actually have no idea how much of my student loan is left, because it doesn't matter to me (until it's paid off and I need to stop ticking the 'calculate student loans with this' button on my tax return).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Thanks Ron! As a father of three, working full-time, my salary would not afford me the opportunity to go back to college to further my education in an effort to better myself, not only for me, but for my family. Take away federal grants and federal student loans and I will not be able to finish my degree. If you are young, still living at home then you would probably be ok working a part time job to pay for your tuition and books, etc. However, if you are like me (and many of my classmates), who are displaced, trying to work toward another career while working full time and raising a family, those federal funds are necessary. I honestly believe that we can cut a lot of waste in Washington without ending programs that help people! But what the hell do I know, I'm just one of the 99%.
"I reject your reality and substitue my own." ~ Adam Savage, Mythbuster extraordinaire.
The whole higher education/financial aid/student loan system is in dire need of a massive overhaul; no one denies that. But coming out in favor of just axing the whole loan program is another example of why Ronny should be kept far away from politics.
When a system is broken you fix it, not eliminate it. Or does he expect kids to work at McDonalds or as immigrant-replacement fieldworkers until their 40s before they can afford to go to college?
Don'tcha just love it when rich white guys' ideas to "fix" the government always involves taking resources away from those that weren't born rich? Or weren't born sociopaths, which is pretty much the only way one gets rich in this country if they weren't born into money?
We could start by talking about Volvo and Saab.....
Stick a fork in him, hes done.
'work their way to a college degree' in an era of double digit unemployment? So that means an increase in undereducated people with incomes that will reduce the mean income futher, further erroding the tax base and adding dependents to the roles of social programs. That is just backward in so many ways. RP may honest, but he either did not think it through or has an agenda that I will not support. Either way he goes on the ignore list.
I see many posts in this thread referring to "government"; like "the government" should or shouldn't do this or that.
The USA is set up with multiple levels of government: Local, State, and Federal. The Federal government has certain powers enumerated by the Constitution of the United States. Ron Paul - and many others - are of the opinion that the Federal government has far exceeded the powers granted to it by our country's founding document. State governments are granted far more leeway in what they can do.
So, student loans may be a GREAT idea. Public health care may be a GREAT idea. Lots of other publicly funded programs may be super awesome. BUT, they are not (unless a Constitutional Amendment is passed) the role of the Federal government. The Federal government has seized powers that it should not have. It needs to relinquish those powers back to the States.
A strong, dominant Federal government (such as we currently have) concentrates power into fewer hands. This concentration of power eases corruption, and the repercussions of that corruption affect the entire country. /rant
- Jasen.
Lead paint is not a problem as long as you leave it alone. You can paint over it, just don't disturb it by scraping/sanding. Scholarships are very different from loans...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Philosophy, a more interesting way to poverty.
How about this one; we make subsidies available to people who care enough to deserve them.
I attend a local community college, and I have to say, if you start with unmotivated dinks, you end up with unmotivated college-educated dinks. A college degree is nothing in the hands of someone who just doesn't give a shit. Most people don't give a shit.
Subsidize the people who care; i.e., if you work hard or get excellent grades, you get to go to school. If you don't work hard and don't get good grades, no money for you.
cej
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Giving money to anyone, rich or poor, doesn't stop them from robbing you.
Dane-geld, and all that.
Or, you'd suddenly see compensation for in-demand fields plummet as there was a glut of applicants for those positions. I don't think that's the answer.
Or is it that the federal government spends billions of tax payer dollars annually on student loan programs during this time of financial crisis? [Congressional Budget Office]
The CBO cost estimates categorize federal student loans into 2 categories: Subsidized and Unsubsidized. They use the word "subsidy" over 100 times in their budget estimate documentation.
Student Loans *have* exacerbated the cost of college. You can't argue your way around this. Student loans are essentially free money for colleges. And students then feel cheated when they go to school for a major that will never get them hired (Imagine going to columbia in NY for $50K/year taking out loans and then finding out they have *no chance for a job*).
So they blame the "republicans" because the Democrats told them it would only be "fair" if their education is free. Bullshit. You want a University Degree, vote with your feet. The cheapest is usually best, although there is a large industry devoted to making people feel insecure if they don't spend $160K on a degree that has a negative ROI.
Hardly anyone requires a university degree, most people would be 100% better off going to a trade school that teaches them to get a job. That can be in done in high school, but again, people have been convinced that not only is any sort of BS/BA degree intrinsically better than a trade school, but its worth going into debt for 20 years. Colleges are complicit in this theft of your time and money, and yet you blame the Republicans.
You're intellectually lazy because you think you're owed a University education at whatever the cost to society, and you're so lazy that you won't do an ROI on the cost of that education.
Ron Paul is right, and you hate him because he doesn't speak in emotion terms, he's talking dollars and cents.
If you have two candidates that seem more-or-less equally qualified, but one has a degree, which one will you pick?
If you are hiring from a workforce full of people with degrees who are asking for the same pay as people without degrees, why not list a degree among the requirements?
Presumably, someone with a degree has shown that they can put up with a whole lot of frustration and still get the job done, and also they are often burdened by debt and as such are even more likely to put up with crap and work hard to keep their job.
Is it wrong for companies to desire candidates that are better educated and more likely to stay and want equivalent pay?
Ron Paul wants the federal government out of student loans.
States can go ahead and make as many student loans as they want.
The money comes out of our pockets anyway; the federal government just adds a layer of non-accountability and administrative overhead. Keep the money local! State-sponsored educational subsidies are OK! Ron Paul has no problem with state-run subsidies!
(In a pure libertarian sense, they are not OK, but Ron Paul is trying to limit the FEDERAL government. He has said many times that state-run programs are fine with him.)
cej
How do you get them to demonstrate that without letting them try first?
These systems typically rely on results from the last level (e.g. top n% of HS students get to go to university for undergrad, top n% of B.S. recipients get to go to grad school) or by standardized testing between levels.
And if a person fails at it, how long before you let them try again, if ever?
Never. If they can't make it with a young flexible mind, they can pay their own way for second, third, etc. tries. And knowing there's a repeat try reduces the incentive to perform the first time -- it's just a poor value proposition all around.
Parents could co-sign.
The right answer here is to encourage high-schools to have trade schools (traditionally called "Vo-Tech") that can make students productive right out of high school. With no debt to anyone. The best part is that it is effectively "free" in the sense that you're educating these young people anyway. But typically, we're gearing high school education as a "prep" school which is probably not useful to at least half the population.
Its a far more effective mechanism than sending everybody to college, pick a major and hope they can be employable.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Isn't that what the 'large educated class of people' are doing by voting in government subsidies for education?
I find it depressing that so many of our educated class that want to funnel government money into higher education (read funding sports programs and campus life) have no reasoning ability whatsoever. For the past two centuries we have had a large 'uneducated class' of voters. This middle class was the mainstay of our democracy, gaining enough of an education in primary and later secondary schools that had both high 3-R standards as well as vocational programs. University educations were for scholars, people capable of higher education, and the american equivalent of nobility.
A democracy lacking a strong grounded middle class will soon find itself crumbling because the voter's ballots will be bought with politicians shilling social programs. This has less to do with education and more to do with entitlement.....which can be found across the socioeconomic spectrum.
How ignorant of you.
Ditto
Then we have situations where the better states (northern) have to bail out the poor states (southern) in a Greece like situation. I'm generalizing, but most the states are wellfare states and if they must do more internally not only will it suck even more but they can't afford to do even basic services in many states.
The idealism just doesn't work out which is why most end up compromising their idealism-- say the Texas reps are all idealists like him-- they get voted out as their state crashes and burns (its burning already and its economy is a subsidized joke.) So the Texas reps make deals with the other states to get some money in exchange for something the other reps want to pass. Its how representative politics works.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The reality of the situation is no private firm is going to put up $100k to fund some moron to party for 3 years and drop out. But the government will (and that actually means us as the taxpayer will).
This is really just another example of collusion with big business (ie. private universities) and government to provide funding that no sane person would otherwise invest in--and there's a good reason for that. Not everyone should go to college. I know that isn't a very warm and fuzzy statement, but not everybody is a good investment when it comes to college education.
We have a housing-bubble type situation. Too much easy money available so why not charge more? Once we have a trillion in bad debt that isn't going to be paid back maybe we'll realize it wasn't such a good idea and the whole system will collapse, but Wall Street will probably manage to wrap the debt up in 30-to-1 leveraged debt and derivatives and tank a few national economies before it's all said and done, because that's what they do.
The Canadian governments (at both Federal and Provincial level) subsidize education in a very nice way.
As a result, I worked through my studies to pay for my tuition and graduated debt-free from my bachelor's in engineering. Now I'm almost through my MBA and also debt-free. It's been quite nice.
Demand for a 4-year degree has been ever-increasing, with applications/available freshman positions at a higher multiple than our current 5/1 jobs debacle. Why would prices not go up? Besides the availability of student loans, parents were able to use their houses as ATMs to support college costs, until ~2008.
There are lots of people that should not be in college, or, more accurately, would be more suited to 2-year tech programs or direct employer training IF we had the manufacturing base of yore. But NO, America is now a "service economy" that no longer makes things. A Golgafrincham colony.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
This will not help the student at all, it will help the country have less debt that probably will take longer to get paid back, however, also you will have less people going to college as we know the economy is crappy right now and jobs are few in between....so how will they pay through college if there are no jobs to be had, they just wont go....and stay in small time jobs, keeping the average individual in the US stupid because he could not get college. Now, they ARE able to get college and pay back once they have a degree, which is a minimum requirement for getting a decent job. So I see this as another way to control the population by keeping them stupid and not giving enough chances for middle and lower class to get better jobs in their futures.
Sorry dude, you aint got my vote for sure!
Do not fear men, only fear their ideas
Oh these are definitely subsidies, because the terms are so generous on the front end that no bank would offer the student loans without the government guarantee. And the legislature could not have passed the student loan program without the nasty business on the payback end that student loans cannot be cleared by bankruptcy.
They are a real nasty subsidy. They look so appealing to students who don't reckon on payback's a bitch. The schools love them because they can pad the costs and get suckers to attend, and the payback is guaranteed by the government so it doesn't matter if students get crappy degrees and can't pay back the banks -- heck, the crappier the degree, the cheaper for the university. I bet universities intentionally steer students to crappy degrees just to avoid the lab costs associated with hard degrees, at least subconsciously.
Infuriate left and right
Taxation is a valid function of government and has been since 1787. And if the government was going to spend the money you pay in taxes solely on you, then it would hardly need to raise taxes to begin with.
Acquaint yourself with American history. Some degree of redistribution of wealth has always been part of the operation of the federal government. Now, you may disagree on particular spending, and you have a right to choose representatives who might push for change -- it's taxation with representation, a just way of doing things. But your rhetoric is out of touch with American democracy even as the Founding Fathers conceived it.
You are completely wrong. The foundation of this country is minimalist control by government. The federal government has no business in my wallet, bedroom, or bank account.
The comments seem full of opinion - much of it political. Let's get a little more factual.
Can anyone explain why the cost of tuition has gone up so much, and where is all that money going?
Professors are not getting rich. The quality of education has not improved. Yet technology has provided countless areas for cost savings.
We're talking about over a five fold increase!!
Where is all that money going?
A loan is a subsidy.
It's reasonable to hypothesize that removing the cause of a problem will remove the problem as well.
Student loans are where schools get most of their money today. This has allowed them to increase attendance but it's also removed cost pressures on universities.
Increased college attendance has not had the positive effect we were hoping it would. It's made matters worse for a lot of people. We can't continue to throw good money after bad on this.
What counter argument do you have? Do you even know what the arguments are, or is that just a typical knee-jerk reaction to any suggestion that the government spends too much?
Infuriate left and right
that's some sort of personal record
i obviously struck a nerve, which speaks volumes
"methinks the lady doth protest to much" is shakespeare's sly remark on what a large outsized negative reactions really says
i guess i got your number, randroids
sorry for questioning one of the foundational delusions of your ignorant, nation destroying, economically illiterate quasireligion
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You seem to be ignoring the fact that part time work paid more and tuition was much less back then. I know because I've gone to post-secondary schools both then and in the last few years. Please try to understand that your experience has limited value when discussing this issue today.
I dunno, I think he's pretty extreme, if only because he's the one guy up there that you know means what he says. The guy doesn't budge on anything, ever, for decades on end. I'm honestly not even sure if that's good or bad.
But I'll say this for him... I'm frighteningly certain he's the only single candidate that wouldn't, given the chance, shove another human being into a wood chipper to win the presidency. Literally, not metaphorically, the only one I'd trust not to murder for the office.
Perhaps that's why he's never the one that wins.
they're spiraling out of control because supply of seats isn't keeping up with demand.
The problem with that logic is that college tuition rates were rising at a rate much higher than inflation at a time when the number of students was dropping, right after the Baby Boomers graduated from college. I entered college shortly after the last of the Baby Boomers graduated and I remember college and university officials explaining that tuition was rising because with the decreasing number of students the cost per student was going up.
There are many reasons why the cost of college education continues to rise as rapidly as it does. However, the key reason is that just about anyone who is willing to put in the effort to figure out how can come up with the money to pay for a college education (that may be mostly loans they will never be able to pay back, but they can find the money).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
All those degrees and no concept of plural vs possessive. Sheesh.
>>I guess the fact that higher education costs are spiraling out of control even as the jobs these degrees are
>>supposed to help you to get have all but disappeared means nothing to you?"
How is this proof of anything? Cops show up at accidents all the time, does that mean that they cause accidents? I think it's a SAD state of affairs that people make basely accusations ("student loans cause tuition inflation") and offer ZERO proof. ...and the last part of your post is just a crazy ad hominem personal attack.
A) Prove to me that education costs "spiraling out of control" is in ANY WAY caused student loans and not something else.
B) Prove to me that the cost of education has ANYTHING to do with the disappearance of jobs requiring a degree.
In the early eighties, Philly Community College, where I worked, got 80% or 90% of the tuition for its students from Pell Grants. We also had the best educated workforce.
Colleges raise their rates because there's more funding for more students? And here I thought there were economies of scale.
No. The right really does mean what they said a few years ago: they want to roll back the entire New Deal, and all protections for working folks (that's you and me, turkeys - ain't no millionaires reading slashdot, we all work for a paycheck), and child labor laws, and on and on. The result is described by the phrase "wage slavery"; that's where they use you till they use you up, then discard you (at least slaves had to be fed, clothed, and housed).
Take off your hats, or tug your forelocks to your masters, including Paul; otherwise, you need to learn your place...pee-on*.
mark
* Which is the only part of "trickle down" that gets to 95% of us.
Actually, someone did a study a few years back and calculated that if you earn the average salary for your education and age your whole life, you will be better off at retirement if you graduate high school and do not go to college. The calculation was based on the fact that, while your average salary would be higer with a college education, without that college education you have four more years of earning (and saving for retirement) and you do not have the college debt to pay back (I believe they also used the average student debt upon graduatin from college) so that is even more money that you can save for retirement.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
For some perverse reason, these sorts of US policy discussions always seem to just discuss the current case (and sometimes historic cases) in the US, and argue from that and from some ideological assumptions.
But the US isn't the only developed country in the world; from what I gather, the financial burden on college students elsewhere is considerably less. Could we discuss what works and doesn't work elsewhere?
What a great idea! Let's find out if this is true at the expense of a whole generation of college students.
Gimme a break. Already bankrupt University of California schools are never going to be able to reduce tuition especially as enrollment sharply declines if federal loans were revoked. I can see Ron Paul's logic but the real world doesn't work this way. The idea that costs will drop because funding gets revoked is not realistically looking at the way the market operates and where the actual costs that Universities must pay.
The communists were idealists as well.
As it turns out reality is a lot different than the ideal, and the world is a complicated place.
I go to a well known public university and can only afford to do so thanks to grants (both state and federal) and federal loans. If any were cut, I would be in serious trouble.
Even with all the complaints about student debt, the federal loans are the most forgiving around. All things considered, I wouldn't have been able to afford community college (I'm one of many lucky students to have transferred to a great 4-year institution) without it.
My field of study (very technical) has plenty of jobs (I already have a job offer and I have a year left to go!) and pays incredibly well (well over the average American income) so I doubt it would be any trouble to pay off my loans barring any unforeseen bad luck.
So why does the federal student loan program need to be removed or "fixed"? It's working exactly as it should for me. The fields that don't make much money (on average) with just an undergrad degree are pretty well known (liberal arts?). Study something that makes money and you can repay your loans no problem.
Student loan debts topping $1 trillion (not all federal I'm guessing) is alarming, but I'd like to see a study of people who pay off their student loans and how they do financially before writing off the entire system.
I was in a similar situation. Parents earned enough that I was denied aid, but I got no help from them. My dad paid his way through school back in the early 60's by only working summer jobs. To this day he still thinks kids should be able to do the same. Kids just can't pull that off anymore. Trust me. I know. I've been a professional financial planner for the past 15 years. Your kid can't earn $25,000 over the summer. Your kid can't even earn $25,000 working full time year-round. How are they supposed to apply themselves as students when 40 hours of work per week, year-round still leaves them with a deficit? I held a job every day of college, working as many hours as I could balance and still came out of school with enough debt that it took 8 years to pay off. As a student of economics I am glad to see some attention being drawn to the fact that Federal aid drives up the cost of education. It's simple economics. Schools will raise prices until they miss their enrollment target. The more money students have access to, the higher the costs will go. When I was in school I worked for the university in accounting for the catering/events/food-services department. State schools are not-for-profit, but trust me, they know what to do with excess revenue. The school was a gravy-train for a lot of people and businesses. Nepotism in contract awards was blatant. A lot of winks and nods, and a lot of unnecessary expenses. And it all comes back to the student who pays the loans and the tax-payer subsidizing the low interest rate. It's broken and needs an overhaul.
All this talk of burgers is making me VERY hungry. STOP!
Yeah. Kiss off FREETARD. "I've worked in the private sector, they expect results" -- Raymond Stanz PhD
Oh, let's not forget that whole thing about finding a means of feeding and sheltering yourself from the elements, too. Kinda high up there on the Maslow scale.
Whats the quote? Those who don't follow history are doomed to repeat it?
A few years ago there was this housing crisis (been around for awhile btw with nothing being done about it), where untrustworthy financial institutions lent money to people who could clearly not pay it back, and then transferred that debt to someone else, in the end government will have to pay the bill to save the economy, and is ultimately born by the taxpayer.
Now there is a student load crisis (been around for awhile btw with nothing being done about it), where for profit sketchy educational institutions facilitate the government to lend people money who will clearly not pay it back...
I saw a special on TV where basically these for profit schools are really just taking advantage of the US student loan program and defrauding everyone and getting away with it. People's lives are ruined, with a useless degree and no way to pay back the loans, and the US is out Trillions. Guess who wins? CEO of the school, and whoever the rich investors are. I'm pretty sure they have a pretty big political lobby as well. Funny that.
I'm not even US, but clearly you have to seen a pattern here right?
I'll put it in Slashdot terms:
Current 1% business plan
1) Loan money to someone who can't pay it back, but is backed by government loan guarantee
2) ???
3) PROFIT!
I think people like Ron Paul because he is an idealist, and as such seems honest and not corrupt like most politicians these days. His policies however are like taking a sledgehammer to open heart surgery. Or a bone saw to hang nail. Or bleach to AIDS, sure it solves the problem, but it will also kill the patient.
That's where the $2000 for room and board comes in, and the assumption that you're living with your parents when school isn't in session.
I am officially gone from
Wow, "useless advanced degree", nice! and marked "insightful", wow. You must be feeling really smart today.
P.S. No, I am not the original author. Before you start blaming him for something he didn't do, you know just because of your prejudice.
But in the short term that leaves a lot of people unable to afford their education. So they can just go and live on minimum wage right?
The availability of loans have risen prices to the point where loans are almost necessary, just like with housing and automobiles.
This is a situation where the cure is the disease. We wouldn't see 400% inflation in education, if it weren't for those subsidized loans.
We did not have as easy access to student loans as folks do now. Had to work my way through. Of course, not being a minority there was no one trying to give me any money either. Just Sayin if you are a healthy Caucasian male in America you should damn well be able to make it without a helping hand and I did.
I could believe that easy access to loans would tend to drive up enrollment numbers and also the price of school. Used to work for them admins in the college. Believe me they are very interested in raising fees and tuition as much as possible.
I say screw em, take away the loans and let the kids work for a living. If it takes you 6-7 years to get a 4 year degree because you had to earn the money then pay the school then be allowed to attend classes then graduate, you'll have less students but the ones you do end up with will be serious about graduating.
I hear Alabama is looking for some labor right about now.
Now get off my lawn.
Ah, your worthless, snarky, unhelpful comment indicates that your anwer is; "None. He has no proof. And neither do I. But I just don't like you because..." What? You have a man crush on Ron Paul?
I can easily imagine a life without Federal income tax. I already school my own children AND pay property taxes to fund the schools I don't use. My city fixes the potholes, and I pay them property and vehicle license fees for that. Ditto for the police and garbage collection, which I pay for with my property taxes.
Congress only has the ability to levy income taxes because of the Civil War through the Sixteenth Amendment, and it should have been repealed once the war was over. It's a direct violation of the intent and wording of the rest of the Constitution.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
The profit falls on the well-educated foreigners out here. When Americans have degenerated to TV-watching slobs who make a living selling burgers to each other, we can send over tourists to watch them degenerate, as a stern warning to the rest of the world.
And works out to an 80-hour work week. Sounds tough but possible.
Not to mention that you should spend the first two years at a community college doing your gen eds (cut that tuition in half), and should live at home or with a group of friends in similar circumstances (cut room and board to a quarter).
Then figure that, with half of a degree, several years of experience, and being young, you should be able to get something paying better than minimum wage (I worked manual labor for $10 an hour, then got an internship for $15 an hour. Even if you aren't majoring in CS and getting nice internships, getting up to a shift manager level at a fast food restaurant will give you $10). So that drops the amount you have to work a fair amount.
And suddenly it doesn't look so impossible. Oh, wait, it *is* really hard to be a poor person with no savings and go to college the same way someone from the upper class whose parents are paying their way goes to college. But that's a far cry from "it's impossible to go to college."
And all of this, of course, ignores military service, going to trade school first and then using that job to pay for night classes for a college degree, alternating years of work and years of school, or any of the other myriad possibilities other than "take out subsidized loans equal to twenty times your personal net worth."
Half of them were going to end up making minimum wage anyway. (See the 99%er sob stories.)
Until that process balances out, we'll have massive unemployment.
What process do you recommend for easing the short-term effect of a sudden shortage of new graduates? Perhaps if employers want a continuous flow of university graduates, they can follow hospitals' example and offer their own student loans.
Most private colleges have some sort of aid programs for students. Most of this money comes from alumni donations and government research grants. The aid programs are based on both need and academic ratings. In many cases the student can get an almost free ride (if he/she keeps his/her grades up). In most cases the required contribution of the family is based on their income, expenses, and number of children (especially when more than one are attending college at the same time). In some cases the aid takes the form of a loan (by the school NOT the government) to the student, in other cases it is an outright subsidy. Having two children (twins) applying to college at the same time has been enlightening.
I went to university with about $8000 in savings. I also got loans. There was no other way, may parents are not rich, and its my education, so I should pay for it. 5 years later (I did a full year of coop), I stood on a stage wearing a funny robe and a square hat with a tassel at first hanging to the right, then after someone hands me a nice piece of paper, I move the tassel to the left. I also had about $29965 in debts. I got a job a few months later, and spent most of the next year and a half not going out too much, eating cheap, and paying off my debts. I wouldn't have gotten the job without the paper. I don't have that job anymore, but I still have the paper, and I'm using it. Student loans were necessary. Its a nice fantasy to think 'you can work your way through college', but college is a full time job, and it doesn't begin an 9 and end at 5, it starts at 7:30 am and ends at 2:30am most days. I remember going out and drinking with housemates about 6 times (in 5 years), an average of about 1 1/5 times per year. There was no time for drinking, and no money either. My food budget was about $45 per week. Work your way through? Only if you dad gives you a job that pays $100000 a year. Ron Paul is pushing sand.
From your link,
At two-year colleges, the average cost for tuition and fees is $2,713.
So what's the problem? What is wrong with a 2-year degree if you want a start on a real job career, like plumber or electrician or other trades?
Next we end up with the issue of 4-year degrees. Well, how many people know what for they are going to be using their BSc/BA?? How many people with 4-year degrees even know the basics in math, like calculating travel time over 500m for a 4g acceleration rocket sled?
There is a notion that "I will take some classes and $250k/yr jobs will come". In reality, people take their 4-year classes, end up with $100k debt and then end up working at Walmart or some sales position or secretary. If you don't have specific goals at a university, don't go there. Universities are great for engineering or medicine or making more professors, but for majority, they are a money pit.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wouldn't be easier and with far less bureaucratic overhead to provide the funds directly to the universities and requesting by law, that from all the enrolled students, an x percentage of scholarships for low income students across the whole nation? Individualism is fine and dandy, but by definition nations are collective, is in the best interest of everyone to guarantee that every young man gets an education and hopefully, feel grateful to his nation and community.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Mod this guy up +1
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
And of course this all assumes that minimum wage jobs are available in your area, which is probably not true at the moment.
Yep. Like in Cleveland when the local McDonald's had a one day job fair and hundreds of people showed up and a handful of people ended up getting run over in the mayhem.
There is this much competition over minimum wage jobs right now. I know people with 4 year degrees that are delivering pizzas and waiting tables full-time, living at home because there are no jobs in their field and their meager paycheck gets eaten up by their student loan payments. I know people in retail that simply will not hire anyone that doesn't either have a degree or is actively pursuing one, because "people with loans are less likely to quit if they dislike the job".
Frankly, most of the people saying how "easy it is if you want it bad enough" have no idea what they're talking about. The vast majority of the people saying this did not grow up in a time period when they were either, A) directly competing with slave labor on the other side of the world, or B) directly competing with the other sad sacks like themselves that are schlepping around their degree trying to get an interview at Walmart as they nervously eye the date they need to start paying on their student loans.
Why is the government in the student loan business? **Because it turns out having a general population that does more school and studying tends to pay better taxes than a lesser one.** There are stats out there that just going by the raw numbers if an undergrad makes it out of college and secures steady employment for 30 years they will end up paying in taxes 10 times the amount they put the government "at risk" with their initial loans. The weakness, if not problem, with the scheme is that it maybe hard and getting harder to sustain 30 years of employment.
Is the problem that student loans are too freely available (supply)? Or is the problem the "labor market" has pushed to require higher level super expensive degrees for even simplistic jobs (demand)? Seems like it is a dual sided issue where both the supply and demand are driving up cost. And it is my experience that when Ron Paul talks like this it is because he is correct about some aspect, specifically that cutting student loans will force reduce colleges to reduce their fees and drive up salary and wages in the general labor market, but he also fails to realize or ignores that there are some serious and undesirable consequences. Paul likes to just hand wave away which I find wholly unsatisfying and makes it hard for me to take him seriously.
Education in the US has been under the control of the Federal government since 1980, and has steadily gotten worse since.
Absolutely true.
Your (and my) idea of a public education system would be tasked with that. The current public education system does not perform that function.
He's not talking about shutting down or de-funding education, he wants to remove the Federal government's role in it. This leaves the states to fund whatever the local government can't afford. This may mean that the states and local governments will raise property or sales taxes. But it leaves us as individuals the freedom to leave an area with crappy or expensive schools and move to an area that does a better job.
Also consider this: the US was founded by individuals who made up a majority of the population and who had an education that was *not* funded by a government. We all have incentive to educate the children in our communities; the Federal government is not the only entity that can accomplish that.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
It proves something is wrong. As for WHAT is wrong, more information is required to make that determination.
As for fixing the problem, I am certainly open to the idea that federal aid programs need some re-tuning, but there is probably a better cure for a headache than the guillotine.
A lot of posts here mention that this is a bit over the top. I just want to point out a couple things -- first of all, Ron Paul is currently trying to win the Republican base, which has a heavy TEA-party vote to factor in. Rhetorical ideas such as this sound great to them and it really doesn't matter if they are impossible -- it's what they want to hear. Every candidate (regardless of party) makes similar campaign promises to help secure the party nomination.
I could be wrong, but I think you'll see Ron Paul tone this rhetoric down quite a bet if he gets the nomination. You can't win a lot of independents with this kind of talk and you certainly won't swing anyone from the left to the right with it. Obama did the same thing. He promised some really big things that were really on the edge of possibility, and the independents ate it up in 2008. Obviously he didn't come through on a lot of these things because once you're president, you learn about reality real quick.
So, I will not rule Ron Paul out yet. He's one of the few candidates from the right that seems to at least be able to put some specifics down on what he'll do without just spewing rhetoric. I'm willing to give him a pass until he's through the primaries and see what he's like in the general election.
Full disclosure: Part of the reason I'm willing to give him a pass is because my wife seems to like him as a candidate, and I respect her very smart, reasonable thought process as much as my own. This doesn't mean he'll automatically get my vote, but it does mean I'll consider him when I would have long-since ruled out other candidates.
How many 18 year olds do you know with good enough credit to buy a car, let alone a house?
When I graduated high school, I and my peers were inundated with credit card applications. Granted some of them were really terrible offers, but some of them were quite good. Getting enough credit to buy a nice used car on the spot was no problem.
... who the hell knows what, really.
Of course, some people couldn't handle it. A friend of mine had ~$20k in debt by the time he was a year out of high school and still hasn't paid it off. A lot of people were getting credit cards who treated them as free money instead of the loans that they are. Some people spent the money on
So perhaps the credit market made the adjustment back towards sanity. However based on the last time I walked through a college campus shortly after labor day I'm not sure.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
1. Cut Student Loans ...
2.
3. PROFIT!!!
I think this works in countries like Finland for one main reason: Ethnic Non-Diversity. Everyone looks the same and has the same basic ancestry, so there wasn't any history of Exploit/Hate/Persecute The Others and the lingering after-effects. As heartbreaking as it is, elightened quasi-soclialism will never work in multi-cultural societies because of the differences and the cynical exploitation of those differences by the Sons of Machiavelli.
You start as a PSEO student in HS and the state pays your way through many of your first two years of college undergraduate credit without your taking out any loans. They count towards your HS diploma AND your college degree.
I did PSEO. It is hard to get approval to do it full-time for one year (your senior year), nearly impossible to get approval for it for two (junior + senior). And even then you'll end up taking some classes to meet your HS requirements that won't be useful for your college degree.
And of course you're also ignoring the indirect costs; students are responsible for their own transportation and food, at least the former of which is generally covered in high school.
In other words, PSEO is a great program - I high recommend it - but it isn't the mythical free ride to half of a four-year degree you want to sell it as.
you can enter the state's community college system and live at home (working part time hopefully) while taking college courses at costs far lower than you'd spend elsewhere--especially out of state.
Here you are making the assumption that community college credits will transfer 100% to a four-year university. The system simply doesn't work that way. I knew plenty of people who were lead to believe that and ended up retaking large numbers of credits once they started at a four-year school, even when they met regularly with counselors at both institutions to ensure credit transferability.
Then you move on to an in-state four year institution, preferably close to home so you don't have to pay many boarding expenses and ride mass transit or carpool to save on driving costs.
That has enormous indirect costs. I tried that for a couple years, living in the suburbs with my parents, commuting to school, working in the suburbs to pay for everything. It was a disaster. My GPA landed me on probation more than once. Class schedules are chaotic and rarely coincide with mass transit schedules. Rush hour traffic is murder when you're already stressed out over how to pay your bills and pass your classes. Then your vehicle breaks down, you blow a tire, or the parking lots are all full, and you miss a test. All that money you saved just went straight down the toilet.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They are not only accessible to the rich. They are also accessible to the intelligent, thanks to scholarships.
Most people are getting college degrees for the wrong reason in any case; one of my faculty advisors put it best: diplomas are the modern version of a union card.
I see lots of people getting degrees in things they have no interest in, and no passion for, in order to follow the money (or where they think the money is, which is often not the same thing). Historically, this has resulted in a lot of bad doctors; around 2000, it resulted in a lot of bad programmers, and it's currently tilted toward resulting in a lot of bad lawyers. Whatever ends up being the next big ticket field, expect that 4 years later there will be a lot of bad whatevers, waving their shiny new union cards and giving the people who actually have a passion for the field a bad name.
-- Terry
At least the first part, before we get to barricades in the streets, tumbrils and public beheadings.
just a ghost in the machine.
American democracy only exists in its function to serve the American republic. It is not the people that rule, but law that rules; thus we are a democratic republic. The function of government in a democratic republic is not to serve as a monstrosity that vies with the people for control of money and resources, but in its function to service the people through sustenance of the law. And in this country - at the federal level - the law is represented by our constitution. Other forms of law, including those governing larger markets as well as individuals, are policed by smaller forms of government in order to allow more freedom to those individuals within the system. "Redistribution of wealth" occurs where the people need third-party intervention and objective influence - i.e. when law must be translated and enforced and when policing is in order, NOT when advantage is to be distributed arbitrarily using the resources taken from the people involuntarily. This is not the function of government.
Liberty arises from a system where power and control are divided by the public-fearing few who are allowed to govern. This goes for overpowerful corporations as well; a truly free market requires competition and an equal arena without third-party intervention or weighted outcomes (as in the case of government subsidization of all begging students). I enjoy Heinlein's translation of what it means to be taxed: TANSTAAFL; there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If they're going to give it to you, you've got to pay for it. And by that same reasoning, if they're going to give it somewhere then I'VE got to pay for it. And where I put my money should be my business, and my business alone.
5. CoolAid buys up FDA and declare water as a hazardous substance forcing all farmers to water their fields with it..
6. Profit...
Fixed that for you...
How about we only allow certain degrees to get loans? Why the hell is anyone funding some fuck wit taking liberal arts or women's studies or philosophy or any other number of worthless degrees? They're entirely worthless easy degrees that serve no real purpose in life outside of being a fancy piece of paper.
I'm over $30,000 in debt from college, and one thing I've noticed: Federal loans have much lower interest rates, much more lenient payment plans, and are much easier to obtain than private loans, and those private loans are the ones that have hurt me the most. I wouldn't have been able to make it through college without federal loans. I think a much better solution would be for the Federal government to put a price cap on private universities, then provide additional no-strings-attached grant money to schools that do good research or teaching.
Ron Paul did not propose to "end student loans." He proposed to break the government monopoly on student loans that was put in by Obamacare. He suggests - and he is quite right in doing so - we return to having banks loan students the money. Not the government. The government monopoly is new and was put in place to extort additional funds from young people in order to help pay for vast boondoggle and government-employee program known as Obamacare.
Ron Paul is not against student loans, he is against federally backed student loans. If there is money to be made sending kids to college then the market can do it more effectively than a federal government. I don't know the real numbers but for every student loan success story there are several tragedies, kids drop out, become history majors, get swindled by for profit colleges, and many more are chronically under-employed. A market oriented student loan program is not going to eliminate every problem but there would be good incentives to avoid producing kids with large debts and small prospects. The risk is undiscovered talent languishing without a good education, but talent usually finds a way, it might be a harder road, but no harder than life without talent and with debt.
The topic of debate is the proper role of the federal government, we all want to find a way to get an education to the kids that could use one, but what is subsidized by the government becomes overpriced and overproduced.
It took a real world war to end the airplane's patent wars. - Fâché Rouge -
I'm not sure where you are getting your info, but university education in the UK is not free to most, only those who can demonstrate a need for a bursery. Before 1997, university charges were limited to accommodation, but Labour changed that and allowed universities to charge for tuition - capped at about £2K per year. The current government has raised that cap to £9K, with some vague rules about how a percentage of that money must be redirected into more bursaries for poorer students.
My wife finished university with debt of £40K, but just 5 years on it's almost all paid back. She's a medical doctor.
I worked my way through college. I did so by making photocopies at the local Kinko's, using community college for all general ed and lower-division courses, and not insisting that Little Princess Me wasn't ENTITLED to go to an Ivy-league-grade (and Ivy-league-expense) college; state university was fine. I drove a P.O.S. VW instead of a new car, I ate rice and beans and frozen vegetables, I shared a small apartment with a roommate instead of having my own place, and we didn't have cable TV. I rode a bike whenever the weather was good, and didn't spend on unnecessary crap. And I emerged debt-free. All it took was realization that it was 5 years not 4, and that I didn't get to live to the same standard that I would be living immediately after graduating. "Living like a student" does not mean "living in luxury", but it's not like living in a third-world shantytown either. People need to have their senses of entitlement recalibrated.
Why the hell can't anyone else? It wasn't that hard!
And if you get a student loan, you're taking other people's money. You've already SPENT other people's money. Why should someone be let off the hook for taking money and not repaying it?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions". If you think about it, what you are suggesting has already been done in the house market, and we all know how that ended up. Fact of the matter is, as long as the receiving end is a business, they will always figure out a way to squeeze from you personally as much as you afford, regardless of additional government support you may receive.
The main problem, which no one is trying to fix, is that education is a business in this country.
how can we expect them to do anything beyond running a cash register?
With the FREE MARKET!
Actually it's the banks being involved that inflate the cost. It's funny to me when Paul (or anyone else for that matter) derides something GOOD the government is doing, just because they don't like government being involved. If I were a hydrophobic, I wouldn't tell everyone to stop watering their plants because I hate water. I would be able to acknowledge that water is good for some things, and would be able to admit that my fear of water doesn't really translate into "water is evil!" in real life.
Of course this is my logical brain trying to process irrationality, so of course Paul's stance doesn't make any sense to me. I like a lot of Paul's ideas, but his core stance of "eliminate all the government institutions that actually help make a positive impact!" is pure silliness to my mind.
That does not have the full 4 year load.
And that can free up room in CS for the high level stuff.
and reform the tech schools.
I went to a college where it was almost embarrassing to be on the football team. Most of the athletes on the teams said that they chose our college because they weren't good enough to go 'pro', wanted an education, and wanted to actually have a chance to get off the bench and play.
I have to take issue with the knee-jerk responses talking about the "free market" and "deregulation". What regulation are you talking about? Is the government regulating tuition prices? Is it making sure that the schools offer an education that is worth the increasing tuition costs? No, what the government is doing is insuring third-party student loans for (mostly) private schools over which they have no direct control.
Who gains? The universities, because they can charge higher tuition and the students don't feel the pain until after they graduate and realize that a Bachelor's doesn't guarantee you a good salary. And the banks, because they can charge normal interest rates without facing any of the associated risk.
Who loses? The students, who are saddled with debt just as they begin adulthood and cannot get out of it even in bankruptcy.
So what Paul is suggesting here, is to remove an artificial government intervention that favors private universities and banks. And what will happen when universities see that their enrollment rates are declining due to lack of student loans? They will lower the cost of tuition or find ways of providing their own assistance, not out of the generosity of their hearts but because they make more money that way - no magic, just basic economics.
Tuition keeps rising. The solution? Take away the ability of students to pay for some of it without resorting to private-loan extortion. What we need to do is get rid of the wall-street backed for-profit schools looking to make a huge buck off of the poor and middle-class populace looking for a better future, while in many instances, supplying a horrible education (hire bad teachers, even more profit). Case in point, my non-profit private college in Minneapolis costs about $32,000 for a computer networking degree. A similar school in the metro that provides a horrible education charges $70,000 for the same two year degree (minus the excellent teaching staff). The second issue: stop cutting investment in public universities. They're providing a huge benefit to the community; both for the public as a whole and for the business community. The "silicon valley of Texas" was created due to a boost in government investment at the University of Texas; the idea was to create a better education for the people of Texas and to fund research. Once again, Ron Paul recognizes a real problem, but is way off the mark on how it should be dealt with. I think he's just lazy; "let the market figure it out, the market can do that, it's all-knowing." Give me a break.
Federally guaranteed student loans put the federal government in charge of deciding who can and who cannot attend college. The loans are not given on the basis of financial ability to repay they are given on the basis of an interesting set of criteria that make little financial sense.
Part of the societal benefit of these loans is that they can be repaid by becoming a teacher and other several other forms of public service. This puts the federal government in the business of recruiting for these positions.
Those who do not go into public service find themselves with a large financial challenge - a set of loans that often are out of line with their working life. Some fields of study, while expensive, do not lead to lucrative careers. People in those fields will never be free of their student loan debt - their only relief will be death, or perhaps disability. This puts the federal government, in all it's benevolence, in the same position as the post-civil war plantation owner who loves his indentured workers.
State university systems for their in-state students stand the most to gain - without easy access to loans many students will be forced to choose the budget education rather than throwing caution to the winds and signing up for the much more expensive private institutions.
Your entire view of things seems stuck in the 18th-century ideals that may have inspired early politicians, but which may no longer make sense to contemporary society. Utilitarianism, for example, was first argued to a rigorous degree only after the generation of the Founding Fathers, and so they were unable to take it into account. Contemporary society, however, may subscribe to it and put it in practice. Notions of the proper function of government are something that reasonable people may disagree about.
I dunno, the US could do something sane like a massive Federal tax increase (aimed mostly at the wealthy) and spend the money guaranteeing all their citizenry who want it a post-secondary education. Oh wait, what am I saying, that has never worked for any nation in the history of mankind, right?
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
A few points:
1. Anyone working minimum wage 35 hours a week and attending school full time is likely to earn *more* after taxes due to various credits.
2. Room and board, books, and basic supplies can all go well below the average cost.
3. There are plenty of people working 80 hours a week even as older adults who can testify that the human body can absolutely handle the work load over long periods.
The real question is why the costs have gotten to the point where it is more difficult to get a college education now than it was when the OP attended and the answer, at least in part, is that people who do not value education can easily get a federally-backed student loan and attend anyway.
The end result is that employers demand at least a Bachelor's degree because even talentless hacks with no work ethic can get one. It's the educational equivalent of printing more money. Yes, we have more money, but the value of each dollar has gone down. We have more Bachelor's degrees, but each one is worth less.
They can try again anytime, but reduce the award for trying a second time (like 75% covered). Work down in tier so that it's like a 3rd try is 25%, and further attempts are needed for entry, but no government supported award is avaliable.
Lots of cowards crowing at the moon today. Seems like you people pop out of the woodwork for ever Ron Paul story across the whole internet.
I say go for it. The "edu bubble" is going to be one of the next big things to pop. I do find it odd to hear some of the Occupy members in a fervor over student loan debt. That they asked for. Not everyone should go to an expensive private college. They should be allowed to do so, if they can pay for it; but that should not be the government's concern. That is not being mean. That is just reality. My only concern about the government leaving the student loan area would be the likely uptick in "corporate apprenticeship" type programs. You could end up with a generation indebted to a Company Store rather than Uncle Sam.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn't need college degrees to change the world and become filthy rich and successful in the process.
I agree with Ron. Same thing happened in housing with the availability of Option ARM liar loans which put an artificial demand on the market, not only from the liars, but from the poor bastards who were saving up to buy next year and then panicked and bought early, sucking all future demand to the present and spiking prices. Same thing happened to housing when we went from single earner to dual earner society. Really, someone should have just stayed home. You get no more house now than you used to and now two people have to work. Same thing happens in health care when people don't shop around because insurance companies shield you from the true price. No one cares what it costs so the price goes up and every sniffle warrants a doctor's appointment.. All good examples (thank you) of how adding funds into a market will inflate prices. Problem is, we have already seen a ton of inflation in education. 20-30 years ago this would be a good idea, but seriously, where can a kid work now where they can make enough money to hope to pay for their own tuition? Good luck with that. Nice idea, but years too late. Well, I supposed we could all boycott education for a couple of decades. That will bring the price back down. Yeah--that'll show 'em!
FYI...
In Georgia, the HOPE scholarship (>=3.0 HS GPA), which 99+% students receive at the major state schools allows you to go to University for FREE! No tuition. No fees. Subsidized books/supplies.
I managed to get through 4 yrs of college living away from home on less than $50K living expenses (which my parents paid) and NO University expenses. Could have gone for free if I lived at home. ...more states should make college free!
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
The government does not give out these loans out of the goodness of its heart... the government actually makes a killing on the interest on these loans. Most of the students who take these loans end up with lousy jobs in exchange for their expensive piece of paper and can only make the minimum payments. The government knows this and loves collecting the interests. So do the big education lobbyists who use these loans to keep their system propped up. Why do you think Congress has made student loan debt illegal to discharge? The sad fact is that the artificially-inflated higher education bubble is no different from the real estate bubble. It will burst in the same fashion due to government involvement. Rep. Paul knows this and while on the surface it sounds like he is anti-education or not compassionate, he's really just facing reality, which we all should start doing.
That would be great advice if all schools and degree programs were equivalent. But consider this situation - you live in Wisconsin, and want to become an engineer. That means you pretty much need to go to UW Madison, UW Milwaukee, or Marquette. But you were born in Steven's Point, meaning that the only live at home, public transit to school opportunity is UWSP... which doesn't have an engineering program to speak of. Oh, well, sucks to be you!
I agree that too many people sign up for degree programs and schools that are not good investments. But 1) our public education does little or nothing to counsel people on the expected value of a degree program they're contemplating, or inform them AT ALL about such ways to save money on their education, and 2) there are many, many people for whom the model of "go to some cheap school in your neighbor" will simply not work.
This free market theory does not apply to education because producing quality graduates do not directly generate profit. Schools are not just raising tuition because they can. They do it to meet their budget need. PhD's get paid at least 100K annually in the industry. Professors get paid a starting wage of 50K or so. So how is an educational institute supposed to minimize their cost and maximize the profit? If you argue that every school is to be privately owned, you get in the situation where you basically get what you paid for. It will perpetuate the vicious cycle of the poor staying poor generation after generation. Because you have this basic right readily accessible to the general public, at least the poor have opportunities, albeit scarce, to move up the ladder. I want to hear him explaining how higher education institutions will minimize the cost let alone maximizing the profit. Otherwise, schools will pretty much go bankrupt if they don't get students. After that? Chinese take-over of the US and all the tea partiers will have to become guerrilla resistance militia fighting dictatorial Chinese occupation. LOL
We could return to the land of milk and honey that was the Gilded Age. Geez, I can hardly wait to return to horrific labor conditions, tainted food, and rampant criminality! Who could possibly be opposed? (I mean, except for child laborers, people who eat, etc).
tl;dr: Government intervening in society is a good thing.
Except you're falling into the exact same pitfall that many college students have fallen into. Having a college degree doesn't guarantee you ANYTHING.
Every person in my circle of friends who finished their degree is either still stuck working nigh-minimum wage years later (various layoffs and wage cuts have a tendancy to stop you from getting raises), or are working somewhere entirely different where said degree did absolutely nothing to put them there, rather 'knowing people' or work experience accounted for everything.
Have fun demanding that you be paid more because of your degree. Ask the people in the parks around of Wall Street how well that's working out for them.
Word of advice: depending on where you work, asking for more money is identical to giving them a letter saying "please lay me off or fire me for whatever arbitrary reason you can come up with, and hire someone cheaper since there's like... a thousand people who will snap up this position for far less pay".
Yeah, and high integrity nutcases are definitely who I want governing me. Definitely lots better than those flaky nutcases who are just all over the place on every issue.
Or maybe we could, you know, elect a sane person. Just a thought.
that students will be able to work toward a college degree but only the 1% will get past it.
It's not just that they're passing costs on to the students more than they once did... their costs themselves are so much higher than they once were. There's just very little incentive for university administrations to cut costs. There's very little ability for consumers to figure out what a given college program is worth, so they use price as a signal: if it costs more, it must be better. So the more it costs, the more of it people want.
How would you phase out employers requiring a four-year degree? If you'd do it by passing a law, that would interfere with freedom of contract, which would be just as bad in the minarchists' view as continuing the federal student loan programs.
Make the loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, and have the government only guarantee a portion of the loan. Then there would be some incentive from the lenders and the government to vet loan recipients and college programs a little more thorougly, rather than just showering money on anyone who shows up.
Just remember -- the president can't do a lot of things without the cooperation of congress. The things he can do are mostly limited to foreign policy; so if he is elected, the things you can expect to *actually* happen are troops being brought home from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the rest of our (cough) police actions, etc.; foreign bases being closed (the president is the commander in chief, after all) and aside from sending a bunch of paper to congress which they will ignore at the behest of the lobbyists, that's about it.
Well, and some interesting "fireside chats" which frankly I think need to happen anyway.
He can't cancel the nascent healthcare bill; he can't change the way the fed acts towards the states, or states rights in any way... he can't change how our currency is handled, he can't affect how the bill of rights is treated... heck, he can't even get someone into the supreme court when a member dies or retires without the cooperation of congress. He can't change Roe v. Wade, etc. And he can't push his crazy religious nonsense on anyone, either, any more than Bush could with his batshit insane "atheists aren't citizens" attitude.
And most of that, frankly, is why he's worth electing. We really need to be done with making war all over the map. But we don't have to worry about most of Paul's other positions unless (and this will NEVER happen) a like-minded and similarly honest congress is *also* elected.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In the same book the term TANSTAAFL is coined, Heinlein writes a character very hesitant to form generalized, overarching, preconceived viewpoints. He does not subscribe to mainstream, fringe, or even radical viewpoints; instead, he says: "Ask me a question on political policy, or my policy concerning an individual case and I will judge its rightness or wrongness for myself." (REALLY paraphrasing, but you get the idea). Do you have a specific argument against any of the definitions of the role of government I stated? Yes, some of them are old - some of them are quite a bit older than our own Founding Fathers. However, I don't believe that our current circumstances equate to the circumstances our Founding Fathers established them for. And in the circumstances that sound similar or parallel, I believe there is a possibility for generic, semi-axiomatic principles about human liberty to be formed.
It's on his site see for your self here: http://www.ronpaul2012.com/2011/10/24/ron-paul-is-not-ending-student-loans/
There are many headlines out there now stemming from his Meet the Press interview yesterday claiming that Ron Paul wants to end student loans. Well no, in fact, though he abolishes the Department of Education along with four other federal departments, the student loan part is taken out and handled elsewhere.
Everyone recognizes we have major problems with Social Security and Medicare, and yet when anyone attempts to address these problems, they are immediately accused of “ending,” “slashing” or “getting rid of” such programs. Ron Paul is not suggesting this for anyone currently reliant on these programs or for those who will be in the near future. In fact, Paul’s opt-out for Social Security in his budget plan is age 25—not exactly imminent doom for the program or those on it.
The same is true of student loans. To recognize that we are bankrupt and we must have drastic change in this country is not to say that certain programs Americans have come to rely on will be gotten rid of overnight. Paul is certainly saying no such thing.
But the costs must be addressed—and not simply what the government spends, but the massive debt incurred by those in this country who just want a college education. To be sure, the countless Americans who are now slaves to education-related debt can tell you there are substantial problems with our current system.
Ron Paul simply wants to fix them.
...don't have that option because cheap easy loans have driven up the price due to a simple supply/demand curve that students should be able to learn and apply it their first econ class.
Yeah, it's always amazing reading biographies about people who grew up before around the 1980s, namely the huge # of opportunities they had without having to go through the whole corporate/educational grind.
70's actually. The economy was more robust and stable then it is now. Manufacturing companies actually had factories. They had jobs at every level and the confidence to take the long view. In the case of Jobs, he had the further advantage of entering a very young industry. When domain experts are few and not all that expert, it is a whole lot easier for resourceful people who lack education to get in and be productive.
This is the age of "hit the ground running". There is no time to train or nurture because the opportunity that the company is exploiting may not last. It is has become the responsibility of the candidate to get the right training by whatever means and be ready precisely when that skill is needed.
The big problem with this is the online school has to be ABET accredited for your engineering degree to mean anything to anyone, and ABET seems to think that if you spend less than $30,000 your degree is worthless, regardless of what's being taught by who.
MIT and UCB are not ABET accredited. I don't think many employers are checking up on ABET accreditation. As a candidate, you get points if the your degree comes from a University they knows and have confidence in. Otherwise, you don't and you can actually lose points if you came from a school that the hiring manager dislikes, regardless of the schools accreditation.
I work for a state university, so we are non-profit by definition. Nobody is taking massive amounts of money, and you can check it all yourself, the budget is open to the public (by law). Tuition has risen quite a bit in the time I've worked here. Why? Because the state has slashed our budget over and over. We've been getting hit with a 10ish%/year cut for the last few years.
Well guess what? When they cut what they give, the money has to come from some place. Increased research grants has helped offset some of it (the university takes 50% of all grants in overhead more or less) but much of it has come from the students themselves in the form of higher tuition.
That is just how it works. If the state fully subsidized every student, there would be no tuition, it'd be free. If the state ended all subsidies, tuition would be even more expensive. There is no way around it. You could choose less services, of course. If the university paid professors less (and thus had less of them and lower quality ones), closed buildings, etc they could lower costs. However to maintain the service they provide they have to get money form somewhere. It'll be taxes or tuition.
I should mention that budgets internally have been cut. Many people have been laid off, the operations budget of the IT group I work for was cut 25% this year. It isn't as though services haven't been cut as well, but tuition increases have to happen too.
The only people I would say who are getting unfairly charged in this case are out of state students. To be fair, only in state tuition should get raised when state allocations are cut, but they raise all tuition.
Over all though, it is the choice we as a people make: We can fund schools through taxes or through the people who go there. You cannot have it for free, no matter what you try.
Well, Mr. Paul, not everybody has what it takes to be a porn star to pay and accomplish that humanistic or art degree on the side.
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No. You'd have to demonstrate that without college, these things would not occur. And you can't demonstrate that. There are many creative and inventive and educated people who never went to college -- it simply isn't actually required for the things you're talking about. For instance, I grew up poor and quit high school, yet am wealthy today, bought my home for cash, have numerous inventions and products to my credit, own my own company outright, no investors... these things do not require college. They simply require intelligence and drive, which exist with or without college.
And as for the education level of most Americans... look to the programming on your television, and consider the IQ Gaussian; the answer is right in front of your face. College is a sop and a time-waster in real terms; the primary value it has is social: our society is using degrees as a get-in-the-door metric to cull applicants, consequently locking out the most driven and creative types. We've also lost a great deal of our industry, while the corporations that remain are next-quarter driven and play lawyer games rather than actually innovate. Coincidence? I rather doubt it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I wasn't able to attend post-secondary because I didn't have a car.
Bullshit. That's an excuse, not a reason. I didn't have a car for my first two years of college and yet somehow I managed just fine. If you want to go to college the only thing stopping you is you and your ability (or lack thereof). Financing is absurdly easy to arrange if you bother to try. And take the freakin' bus or live on campus. Figure it out and stop whining that someone about how unfair it all is.
They're the rich fucks who have all their bills paid by mommy and daddy.
Go to hell. I've managed to put myself through both undergrad and two masters programs and the only thing I got from Mommy and Daddy was a co-signature to buy a beater car to get me there. My parents weren't rich and couldn't really do more. I paid for it myself with loans, grants and a lot of hard work. I worked through college, didn't graduate until I was 24 and got a lot of great experience along the way. And I resent losers who whine about how impossible their lot in life is. Grow up.
This from a couple weeks ago. (I saw this a few months ago..)
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/student-loan-racket-complete-infographic
This debate is irrelevant because the US government is defaulting on its huge debt via inflation.
As soon as the bond market understands this, the interest on the federal debt will climb to a huge proportion of the budget.
Then gov spending stops.
He doesn't mention two crucial things. One is that step 2. may take a very long time.
He also doesn't seem to grasp the concept of market failure. It is extremely well proven that market forces cannot solve some problems. Market forces will not build many types of infrastructure, operate a military, pay for policing, emergency services, and certainly will not operate a judiciary. We have financial regulations and regulatory bodies in place precisely because people abused the lack of those same regulations in the past.
In short, Ron Paul is an idealistic charismatic imbecile. His ideas are long on simplicity and short on reality. His "solutions" never really add up to something that will work in the real world. They play on American's (justified) distrust of government and unfortunately a lot of people think he is actually talking sense. The real world is simply more complicated than he makes it out to be.
The SlashDot article title is extremely biased, broadcasting a sound-bite his opponents picked up on instead of encouraging learning about what he's actually proposing.
He is not talking about eliminating student loans, only moving their mangement to a different department in a leaner government.
We have an election on-going here in Saskatchewan as well. The Green Party has tabled a very interesting proposal to make university and tech-school education public. Tuition paid by the government. I think that's an incredibly insightful and revolutionary proposal.
People should not need to go into debt in order to learn how to get a job.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I've gotten my hands dirty, and quite frankly most of those jobs aren't just undesirable because of the hard work, they're also undesirable because of the low pay, poor job security and the fact that ones body can't typically cope with that into old age.
It's not a matter of looking down on it, it's the fact that you're not likely to be taken care of and at some point you're going to be too sick to work a job like that, and then what do you do?
But it is a very hard problem to solve. If you stop the easy college loans now, then today's 18 year olds will be screwed. Employers will still have plenty of 22+ year old workers that received degrees when they were easy to get, so they will simply pass over those who missed out on the subsidized loans.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
of course it would be on the open market, however it adds competition and as such the prices would fall.
Pure fantasy. Absolute fantasy.
If we ramped up our production to a point where it would make a dent in oil or gasoline prices two things would happen almost instantly:
1) OPEC would immediately cut their production to "maintain" the price of oil. Since they have a fuck-ton more oil than we do, and can cut production exponentially faster than we can ramp it up, this would auto-magically neutralize and advantage we get from "growing our own" as it were. And while OPEC would eventually have to decide between A) Cutting production so far it screws up their financial plans or B) Inflating the price of oil, it would be a long period of time.
2) Even if OPEC weren't a factor, the speculators are (in many ways) an even bigger problem than OPEC, but for the same reason: They can use trillions of dollars of assets from other people (i.e. not their own money) to speculate on oil and drive the price into the stratosphere. (Or further into the stratosphere, as it were.) And since speculators can drive up the price faster than we can drive-up production, unless we somehow magically ramped-up production and kept every commodities trader on earth from finding out about it (good luck! It's their job to know,) the speculation would likewise negate any benefits from "drill baby drill." ...And we'd have ruined and polluted the areas where we drill, where we transport, and where we store oil, and be stuck with all the costs of cleaning that up AND have not saved a solitary nickel on oil or gasoline, and in fact, probably would end up paying more.
Our choices are 1) Conquer all of OPEC instantly, overnight, 2) Kill all the speculators, 3) Establish world-wide good-will so OPEC countries don't feel compelled to drive up the price of oil to their own interest or, 4)Find another source of energy.
Who did what now?
Many of these loans result from expenses which are no longer covered by grants or scholarship.
In a stroke of extreme brilliance, politicians decided money for everything but books and tuition should be taxed as income, except of course if that money is the result of loans. Without this tax change many if not most of these loans would have been grants of one sort or the other. Now that the cold war has been won, friends of a certain political party can no longer fathom paying young people in the US not to be good communists, and neither can they fathom an educated populace which will never vote for them. The result is an outright effort to eliminate the rival party by destroying the middle class. A college degree has been the ticket to middle class income and status in the US for generations. Business largely votes with one party. Business interests are the ones forever whining they can't find educated workers in the US. The party of Business wants to limit educational opportunity? What exactly is with that? Anyone who thinks this is not a war on the middle class had best look not so much at what that certain party says, but also what they are busy doing. Much of their political speak involves casting anyone who opposes them as the essence of evil. They repeat this often enough so their fanboys believe it. After awhile the they all believe it because everyone they know, now believes it. Make no mistake the middle class is the enemy here. Ron Paul and his party would destroy the US to prove his ideology. That is why this certain party cannot admit they and their polices caused the economic disaster. That is also why they cannot allow inflation to solve the problem, as it naturally would. The only way to solve the problem of too little currency because there are too many savers, and too many new consumers with no cash, is to allow M1 to increase. That party benefited hansomely from fuel, housing, and medical bubbles (inflation). Wage inflation will solve this problem. Somehow turn about is not fair play. If the problem is not going to be solved naturally with inflaton, the dept of edu should turn the loans into grants, or simply write them off. The housing debacle is going to be there until student loans are paid off. Housing cannot recover until student loans are gone. The next generation of home buyers already have a full complement of mortgages(student loans). The question is whether the party of wealth who caused this mess will agree to take the meds for the illness they caused, then move on, or will it force the US into 25 years of increasingly deep and socially catastrophic economic decline.
He makes a bald assertion with no evidence to back it up. I'm asking for his evidence. If there's good evidence showing that there's a link between rising college costs and the student loan program, then we start figuring out how to solve the problem based on the evidence.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
... many colleges effectively subsidize everyone they accept except for a select few. If you get into one of the ivies, or even one of the second tier schools, you won't be paying full tuition rates unless your parents are fabulously wealthy. So one reason to be skeptical of the claim that tuition wouldn't be so high is that most applicants to many schools will never pay the full price of tuition. Between scholarships and grants /from the school/, they will be subsidized /by the school/.
And to go back to the point raised in the subject line. My eldest daughter just applied to 12 different schools. Some had costs (tuition + dorm) north of 50k. Others had costs in the 20k-30k range. All of the state schools she applied to had costs 20k for in-state applicants. And if one considers costs of state colleges within commuting distances so that dorm fees don't apply, the costs get down to below 10k. So another reason to be skeptical of the claim that tuition would lower if it were not for federal student loans is that variation of tuition and dorm fees is higher than the amount that one can borrow straight from the feds.
So what you've got are the private for-profit colleges like DeVry and some state schools that deny in-state applicants in favor of out-of-state applicants. There may also be some mid-tier and bottom-tier colleges that exist mostly to fund the president and his associates.
Moreover, no undergrad is getting offered a 100k student loan. Even an undergrad that maxed out Stafford and Perkins loans every year for four years wouldn't get to 100k. To get to that amount at the undergrad level, you need the parents to take out a PLUS loan /or/ go into the private loan market. In either case, it isn't an 18 year old being offered apparently easy money via federal subsidies. In both the PLUS system and in the private loan market, credit scores mean everything.
But it is a very hard problem to solve. If you stop the easy college loans now, then today's 18 year olds will be screwed. Employers will still have plenty of 22+ year old workers that received degrees when they were easy to get, so they will simply pass over those who missed out on the subsidized loans.
So when does it stop? This is far from the only program like this. I'm willing to phase it out gradually, say over a decade. But it's getting worse pretty fast. Something needs to be done, and sooner is going to be less painful than later.
Because I for one have never seen a self taught one in a single industrial or constuction site. I've seen some that got there via a trade and effectively an engineering apprenticeship with a lot of time, study and hard work - but never self taught.
If you are going to use your own special definitions without telling the rest of us what they mean then those of us that speak English instead of buzzwords of company X are not going to be able to follow you and are likely to discount even correct statements as complete and utter bullshit.
So your VB programmers or something are self taught - then SAY SO?
Actually I thought he was just another Republican crackpot but I find myself actually agreeing with a lot of his positions...
You know, I'm not certain from the linked article what *exactly* is meant by "ending the Federal student loan program".
Keep in mind that, just relatively-recently, the current administration took over student loans completely from private banks and declared that all loans were to come directly from a Federal agency (dept.?).
Up until recently, the actual loans came out of a normal bank with Federal guarantees on the private loan, along with the government also handing out Federal grants, etc.
So, does he mean end the current direct Federal education loans and simply let things return to how they were for decades, or does he mean end everything...direct, indirect, loan guarantees, everything?
I would be OK with things simply returning to the former default position where students had been getting loans for decades, and some pressure was felt by colleges & universities to keep tuition costs down to compete.
Not that getting the government out of education isn't a worthwhile goal, but if he really means to end *all* Federal government involvement including the previous system of Federal student loan guarantees on loans banks make to students, it's going to take years to set up the totally-private-sector system & economic infrastructure well ahead of time to ensure there's as little interference as possible with a worthy student's ability to gain a degree.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
We're already pretty much there.
Go ahead ... Make my day!
With over 1 Trillion Dollars (2011 valuation) a defaulf of all student loans would drive the USA intio bankruptcy.
Go Ahead Ron Paul and Barak Obama, suck my dick. And pay me 60K Dollars in 1999 valuations.
Lousy perverts haven't got a brain between them.
If everybody can have everything, then nobody can have nothing
The real path to male liberation
That was no gentle "whooshing" sound. It went blaring by more like "AMERICA, FUCK YEAH"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZdJRDpLHbw
--
"(The hammer is my penis)"
There's a huge logical fallacy here.
Nissan put out the Leaf. Then Strve Jobs died. Therefore using Ron Paul's logic, the Nissan Leaf killed Steve Jobs.
This is hardly his first foray into this field of fallacy. We take the dollar off of the gold standard, then the economy collapses! Never mind the decades in between...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Doesn't work for education, since education isn't something everyone can gobble up to the same degree. Knowledge ain't money, it ain't something everyone can use and (ab)use to the same level.
Rather, if everyone has the potential to get knowledge, only the bright ones will have a degree. Since, of course, the bar will be raised, if there's 10 times the people a university can handle applying for scholarship, they will kick out the less useful applicants. And "less useful" means to a university by default those that will not allow them to brag with another batch of Nobel prize winners, i.e. the duds that, today, get in because they can afford it.
And, personally, I consider that a step forward from "only the rich ones can have one".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I wish the public could see what I see from my professorial chair. After spending years in undergraduate and graduate schools and racking up enormous expenses for my "education", I get a job that pays about half of what I thought I would be making. I drank the same Kool-aid put out by schools that say you really cannot get a decent job without a bachelors. So I got a Masters. What is more, higher ed. is now nothing but a numbers game, a business at the throat of taxpayers and students who truly believe they are getting something. Around 48% of incoming freshmen at state schools will never graduate with a degree of ANY kind. Usually these are students who were marginal at best but let in because they need to pad their numbers. I laugh every time they say "Record enrollment" knowing how many will be in remedial classes and how many will not be there the next semester. I know a man with no degree who makes $140,000 a year doing yardwork!!! I know another HVAC technician (with no degree) who make $240,000 a year. I know a plumber who makes about the same. I know a diesel mechanic who makes 6 figures. NONE have a college degree. A lot of parents who pay their student loans off see their children ready to go to college and the old "Company Store" run by the coal mines of yesteryear is still in operation under new management. There is absolutely nothing that a course in psychology, sociology, English Lit, intro to chemistry, physics, or biology that will make you valuable to a business or other employer. NOTHING! Quoting Tennessee Ernie Ford "I owe my soul to the College Bookstore"
Man - I feel so bad for you guys, that is really hard. I think the free market supporters should look outside their country and see what other people are doing. Think of Australia as being half between you guys and some government run Scandinavian country. We pay higher taxes, but our education is much cheaper - many students work to help pay their way through uni, but they don't work as hard as you poor bastards. I look at the quality of life here, job oppotunities, tax payer funded Heath care, longer life expectancies - and I suspect it is government policies, such as higher taxes and stronger regulation. I really respect the Americian ethos of independence and hard work, but my guess is that your free market policies are making things harder than they need be.
When you simply can't afford something you live without it, when you can't pay the bills you make sacrifices... sometimes in places where you don't want to..
when you are down, you look to your family first , no family ? go to the churches, not faithful? knock on uncle sam's door, join the military..
if you want it , you work hard for it, I don't want to pay 25% of my income for some kid who took sociology and wants me to pay their student debt with my hard earned tax money, and now they can't get a job, and soon maybe i'll be out of job, who will pay for it then ? i'm sure somewhere some place we need a janitor, but your too high to clean up your own crap..
I wonder what Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates did with their college educations that made them who they are today...
like nobody in the world can teach themselves how to be better, productive, responsible, people , they need the government to do that for them, nothing is ever gained from hard work, just free stuff plz is what made america the smartest country in the world has ever seen..
I want to have educated debates with all the ron paul haterz out there on slashdot , lets have an honest debate where there's no name calling, no bashing and no profanity, no wild tangents... is that even possible ?
Maybe you should go choose a militaristic state that wants to push it's agenda world wide...
ROFL!
If he doesn't want Americans to be able to obtain a college degree for 10-20 years? Sure. Let's do it.
Too many colleges have been struggling as it is finding ways to become more lean due to cuts in state funding, removing the additional revenue stream isn't going to help that problem out. One of the bigger problems with college budgets: Unions. Ron Paul wants to end student loans, he better be prepared to help on the union end to make his end goal achievable.
You think the government waved a magic wand and all that crap went away? NO! You forget about the transition from serfdom that was happening at the same time. You forget prior to that era there was often NO food, and that criminality among the nobility was endemic.
Christ, what exactly do you think it is that makes a child go to work? By the same argument, if drugs were legalized tomorrow, you would claim that everyone would run out and start doing heroin. That's just stupid.
As for food, there are plenty of PRIVATE certification organizations that could easily replace the FDA, and do a much better job at it (even giving numerical ratings rather than having a pass/fail system--I for one, don't want ANY mouse droppings in my chocolate sprinkles).
That's the problem with big government supporters--they don't think. They want someone else to do it for them.
How about teach others. Once you've gotten that far, you have a LOT of knowledge to impart on others. As a master of any trade, you can certainly help train others to do good work, too. Take on apprentices along the way. Also, I'm sure the trade's union has information about retirement and benefits. Besides, not many people stay in one job for very long anymore. So, I doubt most people would be career contractors, but you never know.
Bite my shiny metal ass!
Dude, do you seriously think that corporations of the Gilded Age were just about to voluntarily improve working conditions, stop selling adulterated products, etc? Really? What color is the sky on your planet?
-1, Strawman argument. Of course, I wouldn't claim that. I might, entirely reasonably, claim that some people would, and that those people would be harmed. Whether the benefits of drug prohibition are worth the costs is another argument that is entirely off-topic here. Relating this back to the topic at hand - no, I don't claim that getting rid of, for example, USDA meat inspections, would immediately cause all meat to spoil spontaneously. You're right, that's just stupid (which is why I don't claim it). But we know from freaking experience that without any inspection program, some companies ABSOLUTELY WILL sell tainted meat, and customers have essentially no way to know which products are safe and which are not. As a result, many people will be harmed. Unlike the drug prohibition issue, I don't think there are very many people who would argue that the benefits of the inspection program are not worth the costs.
And this is the trouble with libertarians - they substitute ideology for thinking.
I teach at a college-level institution in Europe. Here tuition is not free but nothing like what it is in the US, about ten times less. I have been partly educated at a US college (at the graduate level) so I do know the system a bit.
At age 18, people are still kids. The whole point of going to college is to get an education, not necessarily a degree. At 18 you can finally, for most of us, start making choices that will determine our careers and opportunities for a lifetime. It should be basically available to all those who want. Not just a self-appointed elite. Not only those who can work two jobs at once. College should not be a painful time where one goes from one lecture to another in between bouts of homework or nighttime jobs.
The US has the best collection of higher learning institutions in the world, by a hundred miles.Yet it is becoming increasingly unfair and unpleasant.
Right now college in the US is the surest way to get into a lifetime of debt repayment, unless one's parents are quite rich. I honestly can't see how proposals like these are going to improve the situation, rather than increase the misery of the students and their families.
But it is a very hard problem to solve. If you stop the easy college loans now, then today's 18 year olds will be screwed. Employers will still have plenty of 22+ year old workers that received degrees when they were easy to get, so they will simply pass over those who missed out on the subsidized loans.
So when does it stop? This is far from the only program like this. I'm willing to phase it out gradually, say over a decade. But it's getting worse pretty fast. Something needs to be done, and sooner is going to be less painful than later.
Well, we currently have two problems. The first is that our high schools are not turning out enough competent workers. At the moment our society really does need an oversupply of college graduates or else we would have a much less skilled workforce. Until we fix that problem, it would be detrimental to fix the problems caused by subsidized student loans.
Excessive student debt really is a problem, but at least that investment is increasing this country's human capital.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It's fruitless to solve problems in sequential order. Sooner or later you get in a race condition where problems cannot be solved individually. This is one of those cases. You point out that poor K-12 education results in more demand for colleges.
But consider how student loans play into this. Colleges and banks involved in the student loan business now have the money to politically sabotage K-12 education in order to increase demand for college education and student loans. And as you point out, if K-12 were to get fixed, then there'd be far less excuse to fix student loans than there currently is. It's convenient for many parties to hinder any resolution to these problems.
My view is that if you have a growing problem, you need to fix it (or at least mitigate it), even if the burden falls unfairly on some groups.
You might have been able to get by in the 80s working jobs to pay your way- nowadays kids don't have that option.
I can definitely confirm this. I currently work in a retail management position full-time while attending university full-time(undergrad). My tuition and(used) textbooks came to a total of over 70% of my total income. My wage level isn't great, but it is ~$8 an hour above minimum wage, which close to double what a lot of college kids are going to earn. This university would also be considered affordable compared to a great many on a national scale. I'm not even going to get into how much further an average college student's job went in previous decades than it does in this economy.
The concept that every student is going to be able to manage high-level scholarly achievement and maintain a 40hrs/week job is a bit on the ridiculous side I think. The commitment to work 40 hours a week(often in positions where you will have minimal chance to study at work), plus commuting, plus study (3 hours a credit per week, which can be on the light side), is difficult to add up without making serious social and quality of life sacrifices that I would say are beyond what should be expected as the standard.
Nevermind that the Libertarian "cure" here is worse than the disease - funny how often that happens. Right now college students can't discharge student loan debts in bankruptcy court, but they aren't paying 18% interest rates either.
And just which banks and credit unions are going to extend tens of thousands of dollars in unsecured loans to people who might not graduate college, much less get a job with their degree?
Just out of curiosity, you think someone in the food industry, or the retail industry is going to be able to work a management position without full time work?
Being a low level manager in today's typical low-wage industries (retail, fast food, etc) means extended work hours dealing with "emergencies" for an extra $1-2 an hour. I would say it's very unwise for most full time college students to pursue that kind of promotion.
Perhaps you are looking at the wrong schooling options? I have 2 kids, both in college. They started with scholarships (one has lost theirs, so is having to pay), but working at just-above-minimum wage jobs is letting them live off-campus (with roommates) and attend school full-time.
I know others around their age that went the community college route to obtain an AA (while working), and have moved into the 4-year institution with half of their schooling done. If they have any loans, they will be minimal. Yes, many are living with parents to eliminate rent and food expenses, although commuting costs dollars for gas. We made the decision that paying for gas back-and-forth didn't make sense, plus living close to campus made the rest of the college experience easier (need to go in for a study group? not a major pain to drive across town).
Can the kids afford to take summers off and backpack around Europe? No way. Usually summer is taking only one class and getting more hours at work, to save up for fall and spring classes. Am I helping? Yes, still on my car/health insurance, still a cell phone on my family plan. But, food, rent, clothes, and entertainment is all on them.
Working part time over the summer to pay all college expenses?My back of the envelope calculations say BS
Ok lets assume that the professors pull in 50K/year a bit on the low side.(we'll ignore retirement/insurance)
They teach 3 Credits/semester so each credit hour costs a class 8k bucks.
To graduate in 4 years it will take about 15CredHR/semester(multiply by 15 credit hours), and in an average class of 15 students(divide by 15 students). (these terms cancel)
So your on the hook for 8k/semester or 16K to earn over the summer part time.
Lets call summer 16 weeks, so the income needs to be >1000/week part time. Your now earning more part time than a professor full time.
So a minimum of $25/hour full time cash or $50/hour if it's a 20hr/week job.
The numbers can be twiddled quite a bit, but your still trying to figure out all the rest of college expenses. The part time summer earnings of the average students are not enough to pay the salaries of the professors, and forget ALL college expenses.
obvious troll is obvious.
or I got poe'd.
Ron Paul's plan to balance the budget keeps in student loans, it just transfers them to a different place when it closes the Dept of Ed at the federal level. However, long term he thinks indenturing our students into that level of debt to get an education is wrong and that this should be handled differently. Media has to be spinning it like this on purpose. A presidential term is only 4 years long, and his plan is a three year plan, with loans protected along with social security and medicare. You can look at it on his website.
Student loans are bad MOJO! I do not recommend getting one unless you absolutely have to. I used to be in total default on my loans. I had 2 tax returns taken away, wage garnishments, ect. The biggest problem was I actually believed that getting a degree would increase my chances to get a decent job, after 18 months, but it's all good I found out Mcdonalds is hiring. I searched for some answers and found the rogue student loan collector, and bought his E-program. I applied everything and I am no longer in any trouble. So I decided to do affiliate marketing to promote his information/strategies. My web page is simple, still under construction, and needs tweaking (IT'S MY FIRST TIME), but it will give you a lot more option's by directing you to the best info ever. Mr. Kay is a professional student loan collector and gives insights about their practices and how to navigate all of your interactions with the lenders/collections. Including how to settle for penny's on the dollar, AND STOPPING GARNISHMENTS. I truly hope this helps! www.thestudentloanninja.com
About USGS, Weather Services, and such... Straight from Ron Paul's mouth: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/3/one-year-to-go/
Note: "Functions that cannot be abolished immediately will be transferred to other departments."
I hope that you would reconsider your stance (and yes, I've notices your interest in USGS in your recent posts, but not enough to make me think that you would sell your integrity and freedom of mind for having a certain title on your business card! ;) ).
And I did like your recent petition, though both of us know that it will go nowhere whatsoever...
Just trying to win one heart at a time, and yours seems to be not all crusted,
Paul B.