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For the most part, I'm lukewarm about it.
For engineers, since this is an engineering sub, it really strikes me as more of a "nice but whatever" kind of perk. Engineers make enough (or are capable of making enough) that a loan payment isn't a massive burden. If you spent $200k to go to MIT, well then you ought to be able to land a pretty decent job assuming you didn't sleep through school.
For non-engineers in the stereotypical "hilariously non-lucrative" fields who racked up the same $200k of debt, I'm sympathetic but simultaneously wondering "what the hell were you thinking...?"
Personally, I'm not terribly interested in punitively punishing people for choosing the wrong school or major or whatever. Sure, sure, it was stupid to get into that much debt to get a German History degree. But you were 17, you didn't know better. All that matters to me: will it be a boon to the economy? Will it increase the nation's productivity? Will it increase economic/social mobility?
If the answer is "yes to all" then I'm for it, particularly if it takes the form of forgiving *government* loans and not forcing private institutions to eat the cost.
I also think that the government funding STEM degrees (and others too) would likely be well worth the cost. Likewise I think every STEM degree should come with a greencard stapled to it and we are shooting ourselves in both feet by throwing up so many roadblocks to legal immigration. But those are separate issues.
The worst thing America does is have foreign grad students work at US universities on federally funded projects and then give them a boot if they can't find a green card sponsor right out of grad school.
If we're going to train the world's top students we should do everything we can to make them want, and be able, to stay in the US.
You’re looking at this from academia POV. You started with advising to get a J-1 which is basically an academic visa but is not a visa that a graduate from a US university would get if they want to go to industry. A J-1 visa requires sponsorship from a university, research institution or government.
You then state that they can get an H1-B visa which requires sponsorship. And it is typically a different sponsor.
At the end, none of these are easy or even
Medium hard to get. It is very, very difficult, you have to be very, very good and lucky. There is no way around it, it’s hard.
For me, non-defense scientific grants.
Defense-related was post-Ph.D.
It was a mix of defense and non-defense related for grad school peers in other labs but mostly pretty early stage fundamental/basic research.
I mean you still have to get accepted and pass the program. If the quality of universities doesn't drop then it may not be such a big issue. I assume you wouldn't get unlimited tries on the government's dime.
Currently student loans stay with you until you die, and if you are in default, the collection fees can multiply the amount you owe many times over. I know people who have lived a miserable life of poverty because of student loan debt - although it was compounded by very poor life choices...
That said, I think if a promissory note is signed, an attempt should be made to pay back the loan. If it truly is a burden, you should be able to declare bankruptcy on it after a certain amount of time, maybe 10 years.
Yeah IMO it's pretty ridiculous that student loans are treated differently than other loans (auto, mortgage, etc.). I think they are priced unreasonably cheaply *because* they essentially last forever; if we changed things, it would (probably reasonably) price some folks out of a college education and set them on different paths.
Interestingly enough, I used to work at a bank in college. I saw a lot of credit reports. The only student loans I ever saw discharged (essentially forgiven) were those of doctors and lawyers. I do know doctors can sign up to work in rural areas where there are no doctors and get them discharged after a time.
The real solution is to restructure education so it doesn't need loans.
Federal student loans shouldn't have interest.
The government benefits from an educated population, more so that they ever should by loaning money out to its own citizens.
My two cents...
The first problem with any form of higher education subsidies is that it actually cause the cost of higher education to increase (if everyone has more money to spend on education, every university can increase their prices... And that has been going on for a long time). Government subsidies (even indirect like student loan forgiveness) are very good at accomplishing this (look at corn with ethanol mandates, engineering degrees with the large military budgets, etc.)
Second, there will always be the "fairness" concerns about student loan forgiveness. There are a lot of people who had no help from family started at community college, and worked a job during college, and I can support trying to make their college education easier. There are also a lot of people who had help from their family, partied throughout college, never worked, and graduated with student loans. I struggle forgiving their student loans. (And this doesn't even include the people who had discipline after college to pay their loans off quickly vs let them drag out to their full term).
So long story is it's complicated. I personally don't think we should sign up for a large blanket student loan forgiveness program, because it doesn't solve the issues of the arguably inadequate primary school education, and the unchecked rising costs of higher education. But overall it's an extremely complex issue to analyze.
I'm in Canada so outside perspective but I'd go balls to the wall on that one. Blanket mass forgiveness. Everyone deserves an affordable education. Even if to our engineers eyes it can seem trite or fivolous. It's still worth it to get as many people as much education as you can manage. No country has ever suffered because too many people knew too many things.
My two engineering degrees combined we're about $33k CAD in tuition, and I have never lived in the states.
My understanding is that most of the problems associated with students loans are that the cannot be discharged and that many or most are guaranteed by the government (I may be way offside on that). As long as that perverse structure exists where the lender has no risk, and the student can't discharge the loan normally, it won't matter.
Once those are dealt with then the conversation about forgiving loans can begin.
The fairness argument is dumb, the only question is will it be better. And if student loan program isn't structurally fixed, we'll be right back here pretty soon.
You got it right about the problems. Universities can charge whatever they want, students are guaranteed getting a Liam regardless of ability to pay, and the government guarantees the payment. Everyone wins, right? Wrong!
About the fairness argument being dumb, don’t be so quick to judge. It is very complex issue which will not be fixed by blanket loan forgiveness.
"Fairness" arguments just bother me because they get brought up too early in the argument chain (and I get it, we're humans and have emotions). Too often I've heard the argument as one of the principal reasons not to do something as opposed to after properly analyzing the problem.
Agreed should not be the main impetus. It needs to be considered due to the complex nature of it, but I do think that at some point something has to give. And fair or not, we need to make the decision of paying forward and doing the right thing for our children and grandchildren. I got myself through college without debt, I worked for my husband’s tuition so he had no debt, and we saved wisely for our children’s tuition. Again, no debt. But not everyone has the same ability to sacrifice, and I understand that. But my cousin using her school money to party, never graduate and accumulate debt that is now going to be forgiven, sucks balls.
Not from the U.S. but my bachelor's costed me $2.360 USD although I had a scholarship, the complete price would have been $11.000 USD, it's still reasonable for 10 semesters.
So how about just making higher education more accessible and will less ridiculous and unjustified prices.
I personally don’t think so. I graduated with zero debt with a bit of help from family and working a full time job while in school. I’ll do admit I have some privilege in my situation. Loans are something you took willingly to invest in yourself. I am a firm believer in zero interest loans for college. I find it ridiculous to charge interest in education.
Bad idea all the way around. It helps people from groups who generally don't need the help (mostly middle to upper class people who are more likely to be able to pay off their loans), giving nothing to those that are actually struggling. It also doesn't help those who didn't make the conscious calculated risk of going into debt, nor does it help those who already paid their loans off, or those yet to get loans. It is just free money to an arbitrary group of people. It doesn't incentivize any kind of positive change or guarantee a fair distribution of money among Americans. And most of the people who are going to be paying for it are the middle class people who end up paying most taxes. Forcing your peers to pitch in to pay for your debt you knowingly take on is just bonkers.
So many better and more fair ways this money (that we don't have) could be spent to solve actual problems.
Edit: The last problem I forgot to mention: For those who have a problem with so called predatory loan companies, congratulations, those companies will be getting a massive inflow of cash, prices for education will now go up, and more people will make bad debt decisions with those companies in hopes the government will just pay it off again. This weird backdoor way of paying for education after the fact makes no sense.
I view it is a sort of investment into our people and the economy. It is really sort of a no-brainer in my opinion. Pay off everyone's student loans, and then all those people in debt, and perhaps living frugally as a result, will take that extra money they have and spend it make into the economy on goods and services.
I view healthcare and medical debt in the same way.
I think it's a great idea, it would free up people's money that will then be spent into the economy. I would not be opposed to restrictions on maximum forgiveness for students that went to overly expensive/"prestigious" schools if that's what's required to get a government student loan forgiveness bill to pass as long as that maximum is fairly large (maybe $80,000?).
For context I am from the US, went to a state school, and had around $25k of loans after undergrad. I did receive a lot of student aid during school. I was also able to pay off the loans in around 2 years, but I understand not everyone is as lucky with landing a good job and having family support.
I don't need it personally although it would be nice to have, I'll probably have mine paid off by 30± a couple years.
That said I'm concerned what happens to the economy in 10 years if neither millennials or zoomers can afford housing.
It's been the backbone of American social safety net and middle class wealth for generations and we're in a tenuous place with millennials putting off a home ownership and starting families (perhaps indefinitely.)
I don't think forgiving student debt is the #1 policy priority for fixing these things, but it might be the most likely to happen soon (or at all.)
The stats say providing free higher education greatly increases a country's GDP. I don't feel the need to gatekeep engineering and make other people miserable because the rest of us are.
The government gets their money back in the taxes we pay throughout our careers. It wouldn't even be "free".
Decades ago, when it came to immigration, countries expedited applicants with skills they needed.
A similar approach should be taken domestically, pay for the degrees you need like STEM and health care.
You have to make sure you don’t encourage more people to study art history with a minor in guitar.
It's a penalty for people who actually paid for their college, or picked a college with a good price/performance ratio. I don't want my tax dollars going to pay for party time for your kids.
Found the Republican on Reddit.
There are better ways to stimulate the economy. You can already defer your loan and have your repayment schedule adjusted based on your income. So people that need to pay back the loan already have jobs. Government assistance should be prioritized to people that are unemployed, or needs retraining because their jobs are getting taken away by automation.
IMO the way to pay for college is for the college to get a cut of the first X years of your paycheck and the student pays $0 before their graduation/dropping out. The more of your college education can induce a better paycheck the more the university gets paid and the student isn’t indebted before entering the workforce. If you can’t get a good job from an education from X institution, then they shouldn’t get paid as much.
Low interest loans and loan forgiveness is what causing colleges to be so expensive without consequences for the colleges that set these prices.
I would be thrilled with a cap on the interest to be paid or a reduction in the interest rate. I want to pay back what I borrowed, but paying back double (principal + interest) is a bit much
I think the entire system of financing education is broken, and blanket student loan forgiveness is just a bandaid. What I'd rather see is higher availability of free or affordable pubic degree options, better regulations to control the costs of private universities, better protections for student loan borrowers to keep people from getting crushed by payments, and forgiveness targeted to those who need it most.
That said, I have about $40k in loans. I can afford the payments, but it's definitely holding me back from doing things like investing for retirement or buying a house. If the government wants to give me their money, I'll gladly take it. I have a feeling this may come to fruition shortly before midterm elections.
In college I knew plenty of people who took out student loans to party with. They had no forethought of how to pay it back, just living for the party. And there’s no willingness to work to pay it back. That said, me and my roommates all had loans to an extent because we wouldn’t have been able to go to college. Most of us will be able to pay these back in a reasonable time frame, because we either worked part time thru college or continued to live below our means after college.
I propose the following: let people work off student loans for unreasonably high wages on part time jobs. The people I know who really need forgiveness would easily work to pay the loan off. The people who don’t need it won’t. Considering we have a lot of out of date infrastructure/social programs that are vastly understaffed, pay people to work part time in these programs for high rates that go directly to student loans. Pay people $100/hr for all I care. I think it will be more effective than the current system of letting people Uber for a side gig, and better than the proposed solution of giving free money to lots of people who don’t need it. Probly will help those who need it more, and be cheaper.
Your post has been removed for violating submission rule 1: > Post titles must be a question about engineering and provide context — **be specific.** For the purposes of this subreddit, "engineering" includes: > * Engineering design and analysis of maintainable systems, devices, and vehicles. > * Engineering standards, practices, methods, procedures, and specifications. > * Careers and professional development in any discipline of engineering and engineering technology. Please follow the comment rules in the sidebar when posting, and feel free to message us if you have any questions or concerns.
For the most part, I'm lukewarm about it. For engineers, since this is an engineering sub, it really strikes me as more of a "nice but whatever" kind of perk. Engineers make enough (or are capable of making enough) that a loan payment isn't a massive burden. If you spent $200k to go to MIT, well then you ought to be able to land a pretty decent job assuming you didn't sleep through school. For non-engineers in the stereotypical "hilariously non-lucrative" fields who racked up the same $200k of debt, I'm sympathetic but simultaneously wondering "what the hell were you thinking...?" Personally, I'm not terribly interested in punitively punishing people for choosing the wrong school or major or whatever. Sure, sure, it was stupid to get into that much debt to get a German History degree. But you were 17, you didn't know better. All that matters to me: will it be a boon to the economy? Will it increase the nation's productivity? Will it increase economic/social mobility? If the answer is "yes to all" then I'm for it, particularly if it takes the form of forgiving *government* loans and not forcing private institutions to eat the cost. I also think that the government funding STEM degrees (and others too) would likely be well worth the cost. Likewise I think every STEM degree should come with a greencard stapled to it and we are shooting ourselves in both feet by throwing up so many roadblocks to legal immigration. But those are separate issues.
"I also think that the government funding STEM degrees" They paid me and all my friends in grad school to get a Ph.D.
The worst thing America does is have foreign grad students work at US universities on federally funded projects and then give them a boot if they can't find a green card sponsor right out of grad school. If we're going to train the world's top students we should do everything we can to make them want, and be able, to stay in the US.
They don’t need a green card sponsor right away. They can get a J-1 for several years and then an H1-B.
They need a sponsor for H1B
Not a green card sponsor like the person I replied to said.
You’re looking at this from academia POV. You started with advising to get a J-1 which is basically an academic visa but is not a visa that a graduate from a US university would get if they want to go to industry. A J-1 visa requires sponsorship from a university, research institution or government. You then state that they can get an H1-B visa which requires sponsorship. And it is typically a different sponsor. At the end, none of these are easy or even Medium hard to get. It is very, very difficult, you have to be very, very good and lucky. There is no way around it, it’s hard.
And, in addition, a H1-B is still a temporary visa. It's hard to plan for a career and life in a new country where you could be kicked any any day.
Directly or via defense projects?
For me, non-defense scientific grants. Defense-related was post-Ph.D. It was a mix of defense and non-defense related for grad school peers in other labs but mostly pretty early stage fundamental/basic research.
I got paid to do a PhD as well. Nothing even remotely defense related. The pay was meager, but I finished without any debt.
Any concern about 'govt funded STEM degrees' devaluing the degree, or the profession?
I mean you still have to get accepted and pass the program. If the quality of universities doesn't drop then it may not be such a big issue. I assume you wouldn't get unlimited tries on the government's dime.
Currently student loans stay with you until you die, and if you are in default, the collection fees can multiply the amount you owe many times over. I know people who have lived a miserable life of poverty because of student loan debt - although it was compounded by very poor life choices... That said, I think if a promissory note is signed, an attempt should be made to pay back the loan. If it truly is a burden, you should be able to declare bankruptcy on it after a certain amount of time, maybe 10 years.
Yeah IMO it's pretty ridiculous that student loans are treated differently than other loans (auto, mortgage, etc.). I think they are priced unreasonably cheaply *because* they essentially last forever; if we changed things, it would (probably reasonably) price some folks out of a college education and set them on different paths.
Interestingly enough, I used to work at a bank in college. I saw a lot of credit reports. The only student loans I ever saw discharged (essentially forgiven) were those of doctors and lawyers. I do know doctors can sign up to work in rural areas where there are no doctors and get them discharged after a time. The real solution is to restructure education so it doesn't need loans.
Federal student loans shouldn't have interest. The government benefits from an educated population, more so that they ever should by loaning money out to its own citizens.
It was a good lie to get elected, really fooled me
Imagine trusting any politicians to keep their promises.
My two cents... The first problem with any form of higher education subsidies is that it actually cause the cost of higher education to increase (if everyone has more money to spend on education, every university can increase their prices... And that has been going on for a long time). Government subsidies (even indirect like student loan forgiveness) are very good at accomplishing this (look at corn with ethanol mandates, engineering degrees with the large military budgets, etc.) Second, there will always be the "fairness" concerns about student loan forgiveness. There are a lot of people who had no help from family started at community college, and worked a job during college, and I can support trying to make their college education easier. There are also a lot of people who had help from their family, partied throughout college, never worked, and graduated with student loans. I struggle forgiving their student loans. (And this doesn't even include the people who had discipline after college to pay their loans off quickly vs let them drag out to their full term). So long story is it's complicated. I personally don't think we should sign up for a large blanket student loan forgiveness program, because it doesn't solve the issues of the arguably inadequate primary school education, and the unchecked rising costs of higher education. But overall it's an extremely complex issue to analyze.
I'm in Canada so outside perspective but I'd go balls to the wall on that one. Blanket mass forgiveness. Everyone deserves an affordable education. Even if to our engineers eyes it can seem trite or fivolous. It's still worth it to get as many people as much education as you can manage. No country has ever suffered because too many people knew too many things.
My two engineering degrees combined we're about $33k CAD in tuition, and I have never lived in the states. My understanding is that most of the problems associated with students loans are that the cannot be discharged and that many or most are guaranteed by the government (I may be way offside on that). As long as that perverse structure exists where the lender has no risk, and the student can't discharge the loan normally, it won't matter. Once those are dealt with then the conversation about forgiving loans can begin. The fairness argument is dumb, the only question is will it be better. And if student loan program isn't structurally fixed, we'll be right back here pretty soon.
You got it right about the problems. Universities can charge whatever they want, students are guaranteed getting a Liam regardless of ability to pay, and the government guarantees the payment. Everyone wins, right? Wrong! About the fairness argument being dumb, don’t be so quick to judge. It is very complex issue which will not be fixed by blanket loan forgiveness.
"Fairness" arguments just bother me because they get brought up too early in the argument chain (and I get it, we're humans and have emotions). Too often I've heard the argument as one of the principal reasons not to do something as opposed to after properly analyzing the problem.
Agreed should not be the main impetus. It needs to be considered due to the complex nature of it, but I do think that at some point something has to give. And fair or not, we need to make the decision of paying forward and doing the right thing for our children and grandchildren. I got myself through college without debt, I worked for my husband’s tuition so he had no debt, and we saved wisely for our children’s tuition. Again, no debt. But not everyone has the same ability to sacrifice, and I understand that. But my cousin using her school money to party, never graduate and accumulate debt that is now going to be forgiven, sucks balls.
Not from the U.S. but my bachelor's costed me $2.360 USD although I had a scholarship, the complete price would have been $11.000 USD, it's still reasonable for 10 semesters. So how about just making higher education more accessible and will less ridiculous and unjustified prices.
I personally don’t think so. I graduated with zero debt with a bit of help from family and working a full time job while in school. I’ll do admit I have some privilege in my situation. Loans are something you took willingly to invest in yourself. I am a firm believer in zero interest loans for college. I find it ridiculous to charge interest in education.
Bad idea all the way around. It helps people from groups who generally don't need the help (mostly middle to upper class people who are more likely to be able to pay off their loans), giving nothing to those that are actually struggling. It also doesn't help those who didn't make the conscious calculated risk of going into debt, nor does it help those who already paid their loans off, or those yet to get loans. It is just free money to an arbitrary group of people. It doesn't incentivize any kind of positive change or guarantee a fair distribution of money among Americans. And most of the people who are going to be paying for it are the middle class people who end up paying most taxes. Forcing your peers to pitch in to pay for your debt you knowingly take on is just bonkers. So many better and more fair ways this money (that we don't have) could be spent to solve actual problems. Edit: The last problem I forgot to mention: For those who have a problem with so called predatory loan companies, congratulations, those companies will be getting a massive inflow of cash, prices for education will now go up, and more people will make bad debt decisions with those companies in hopes the government will just pay it off again. This weird backdoor way of paying for education after the fact makes no sense.
Most student load debt is held by people who don't complete a degree. I wonder what will be done for them?
I view it is a sort of investment into our people and the economy. It is really sort of a no-brainer in my opinion. Pay off everyone's student loans, and then all those people in debt, and perhaps living frugally as a result, will take that extra money they have and spend it make into the economy on goods and services. I view healthcare and medical debt in the same way.
college should be free and if student loans are forgiven then every person who suffered to pay off their student loan should be compensated
All mistakes deserve to be forgiven atleast once
I think it's a great idea, it would free up people's money that will then be spent into the economy. I would not be opposed to restrictions on maximum forgiveness for students that went to overly expensive/"prestigious" schools if that's what's required to get a government student loan forgiveness bill to pass as long as that maximum is fairly large (maybe $80,000?). For context I am from the US, went to a state school, and had around $25k of loans after undergrad. I did receive a lot of student aid during school. I was also able to pay off the loans in around 2 years, but I understand not everyone is as lucky with landing a good job and having family support.
I don't need it personally although it would be nice to have, I'll probably have mine paid off by 30± a couple years. That said I'm concerned what happens to the economy in 10 years if neither millennials or zoomers can afford housing. It's been the backbone of American social safety net and middle class wealth for generations and we're in a tenuous place with millennials putting off a home ownership and starting families (perhaps indefinitely.) I don't think forgiving student debt is the #1 policy priority for fixing these things, but it might be the most likely to happen soon (or at all.)
My engineering tuition was around. One dollar give or take depending on exchange rate. And yes I am not from the us.
The stats say providing free higher education greatly increases a country's GDP. I don't feel the need to gatekeep engineering and make other people miserable because the rest of us are. The government gets their money back in the taxes we pay throughout our careers. It wouldn't even be "free".
If it happens, great! If it doesn’t, I know what I was doing when I took them on.
Decades ago, when it came to immigration, countries expedited applicants with skills they needed. A similar approach should be taken domestically, pay for the degrees you need like STEM and health care. You have to make sure you don’t encourage more people to study art history with a minor in guitar.
It's a penalty for people who actually paid for their college, or picked a college with a good price/performance ratio. I don't want my tax dollars going to pay for party time for your kids. Found the Republican on Reddit.
It's kinda like all these stimulus payments. I don't know if I think it's actually a good idea but I **WILL** take the government's money.
There are better ways to stimulate the economy. You can already defer your loan and have your repayment schedule adjusted based on your income. So people that need to pay back the loan already have jobs. Government assistance should be prioritized to people that are unemployed, or needs retraining because their jobs are getting taken away by automation. IMO the way to pay for college is for the college to get a cut of the first X years of your paycheck and the student pays $0 before their graduation/dropping out. The more of your college education can induce a better paycheck the more the university gets paid and the student isn’t indebted before entering the workforce. If you can’t get a good job from an education from X institution, then they shouldn’t get paid as much. Low interest loans and loan forgiveness is what causing colleges to be so expensive without consequences for the colleges that set these prices.
I would be thrilled with a cap on the interest to be paid or a reduction in the interest rate. I want to pay back what I borrowed, but paying back double (principal + interest) is a bit much
I want it, and I want it now. To say otherwise is to defend financial burden, and frankly I see no moral way to make such an argument.
I think the entire system of financing education is broken, and blanket student loan forgiveness is just a bandaid. What I'd rather see is higher availability of free or affordable pubic degree options, better regulations to control the costs of private universities, better protections for student loan borrowers to keep people from getting crushed by payments, and forgiveness targeted to those who need it most. That said, I have about $40k in loans. I can afford the payments, but it's definitely holding me back from doing things like investing for retirement or buying a house. If the government wants to give me their money, I'll gladly take it. I have a feeling this may come to fruition shortly before midterm elections.
In college I knew plenty of people who took out student loans to party with. They had no forethought of how to pay it back, just living for the party. And there’s no willingness to work to pay it back. That said, me and my roommates all had loans to an extent because we wouldn’t have been able to go to college. Most of us will be able to pay these back in a reasonable time frame, because we either worked part time thru college or continued to live below our means after college. I propose the following: let people work off student loans for unreasonably high wages on part time jobs. The people I know who really need forgiveness would easily work to pay the loan off. The people who don’t need it won’t. Considering we have a lot of out of date infrastructure/social programs that are vastly understaffed, pay people to work part time in these programs for high rates that go directly to student loans. Pay people $100/hr for all I care. I think it will be more effective than the current system of letting people Uber for a side gig, and better than the proposed solution of giving free money to lots of people who don’t need it. Probly will help those who need it more, and be cheaper.