One of the ways to cut the big-spending binge engaged in by the federal government is to terminate the racket of college loans. It's counterproductive, discriminatory and a bad investment for both taxpayers and students. Posted on 06/12/2012 5:40:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
One of the ways to cut the big-spending binge engaged in by the federal government is to terminate the racket of college loans. It's counterproductive, discriminatory and a bad investment for both taxpayers and students.
College-loan debt has soared to nearly a trillion dollars, more than credit-card debt or auto-loan debt. Financial commentators are beginning to compare college-loan debt to the housing bubble that nearly brought down the banking system in 2008.
However, it's not the banks that will be the big losers if the bubble bursts. It's the taxpayers, because the government is now on the hook for the majority of student loans.
Even worse is the burden on students. The debt requires students to keep paying for a product that lacks its advertised value either in education or employment opportunities. College education has been dumbed down to enroll more and more taxpayer-subsidized students, even if they take only remedial (aka high school) courses.
College-loan debt is a powerful deterrent to marriage and to getting on with life. Students cannot discharge the debt in bankruptcy, can't get a job that justifies the loan and may have had a lousy education.
For years we've heard the propaganda line that everyone should go to college and that a college degree will improve your status in life and standard of living. Not any more. In Obamaland, 53.6 percent of young college graduates are jobless or working jobs that do not require a college degree and don't pay enough to retire the debt.
Making college loans more generous and easier to get does not make college more affordable. The easy availability of loans encourages colleges to raise tuition rates faster than inflation in order to rake in more taxpayer money, while discriminating against those thrifty enough to pay their own way.
The entire structure of college loans is discriminatory. It forces people who don't want or are not able to go to college or who work to pay their own way, to contribute taxes to support those who go to college at other people's expense, often at pricey elite colleges.
College loans seem to be based on the same pie-in-the-sky fiction that going into debt to buy a house you can't afford is a good investment and will make you a worthier citizen. That's another expensive lie told to gullible people by bankers and bureaucrats who should have known what they were doing.
Then there's the problem, as reported by the Washington Post, that nearly 30 percent of students with student loans drop out of college with debt but no degree. Of those who remain in college, the majority take five or six years, thus significantly increasing their debt.
This wastes some of what should be the most productive years of an American's life. When I went to college, carrying a full load of classes, I worked a 48-hour week to pay my own way, and I can't figure out what today's college students do with their non-study time.
Why do spokesmen of both political parties keep urging us to import more and more foreign college students and falsely tell us they are "the best and the brightest"? And why do we let jobs subsidized by U.S. taxpayers go to foreigners?
In 2010, Obama gave $300 million of his stimulus money to two Michigan plants to build electric car batteries. It turned out that the plants are owned by Koreans who outfitted their factories with Korean equipment and supplies and hired Korean workers.
Another major problem for students is that, having incurred all that indebtedness, most colleges today are a hostile environment for conservatives and Christians. A new report by the National Association of Scholars called "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California," explains that college graduates are alarmingly ignorant about history, literature and constitutional government because many professors have replaced real teaching with political indoctrination.
Another cause of higher tuition rates is paying high-salaried professors to teach worthless subjects that might justify one lecture but are not worth the price of a semester course. Let's hear demands that wealthy colleges use their extraordinary endowments to pay off college loans and thereby make restitution for teaching left-wing propaganda masquerading as education.
Obama is not doing you a favor when he gives you a college loan. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that college loans are part of Obama's policy to make as many as possible dependent on government, as well as to deceive us by keeping young people out of the unemployment statistics and in the totals of those attending college.
One of my college professors told me: “You won’t believe what they pay me. It’s ridiculous.” The guy was a great teacher. Some of my others just plain stunk.
All this is too true and cannot possibly be overstated or exaggerated!
Creating gargantuan debt for young people is NOT the answer!
Passing this default and indebtedness on to the same taxpayers, whose money paid for their ‘education’ in the first place, is shamefully unethical and absolutely punitive way to resolve the problem, when you think of what it means to working Americans who are trying harder all the time JUST to get by.
Get rid of federal financial aid and watch the cost of college plummet. Getting rid of this ridiculous notion that people who don’t go are failures will also drive down costs.
Stop me before I kill again.
If it is a state school, you can go to the library and look it up.
Are student loans sent directly to the student or the school?
A girl my son knows has been living high on the hog for the last three years with no visible means of income but we do know she gets student loans to pay for school that she never seems to attend.
She’s thrown herself a $10,000 wedding for 55 guests, they travel/vacation frequently and she goes shopping almost daily. Her husband works at Walmart so we know it isn’t HIS paycheck making all this possible!
Excellent summary.
This unjust aspect of govt-backed college loans is rarely considered:
-—The entire structure of college loans is discriminatory. It forces people who don’t want or are not able to go to college or who work to pay their own way, to contribute taxes to support those who go to college at other people’s expense, often at pricey elite colleges.-—
I get sick when I think that some hard-working mechanic is paying for Johnny to attend Binge-Drinking U.
Excellent summary.
The following unjust aspect of govt-backed college loans is rarely considered:
-—The entire structure of college loans is discriminatory. It forces people who don’t want or are not able to go to college or who work to pay their own way, to contribute taxes to support those who go to college at other people’s expense, often at pricey elite colleges.-—
I get sick when I think that some hard-working mechanic is paying for Johnny to attend Binge-Drinking U.
“Get rid of federal financial aid and watch the cost of college plummet. Getting rid of this ridiculous notion that people who don’t go are failures will also drive down costs.”
Watch a significant number of schools close, watch the disparate minority impact, as schools and predominant majors of minorities disappear, watch rents in university towns plummet, watch unemployment in university towns rise.
These are all inevitable results of this. I think getting rid of “easy” money in college (gov’t loan guarantees) is a good thing - but there will be a huge amount of whining that goes along with it.
Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy absolutely should apply to student loans, as it does for virtually all other debts. It will prevent both students and lenders from this sort of problem in the future.
Federal Loans are disbursed by the school to the student accounts. Once tuition and any other charges (books, room and board etc) are paid for the student gets a “refund” of the extra monies.
If you don’t need or want the full loan awarded, you can adjust the amount you take.
The government financing college loans just drives up the cost and reduces the quality of education. Just like with any other free market interference, it puts more distance between the vendor and the consumer, insulating the vendors from the proper consequences of incompetance. It also blunts the natural competition between institutions, since there is a never-ending supply of customers to go around. Also, it diminishes the value of a degree by making them more commonplace, which weighs against any potential benefit to be claimed in regards to the higher number of college graduates.
It’s a Democrat funding mechanism
Make huge loans available to students
Schools raise prices to scoop up the gravy
Schools pay legions of profs and admins excessive salaries
Liberal profs and admins donate to Democrats
and repeat
Thanks for the info!
“-—The entire structure of college loans is discriminatory. It forces people who don’t want or are not able to go to college or who work to pay their own way, to contribute taxes to support those who go to college at other people’s expense, often at pricey elite colleges.-—”
It also forces the tuition of those who pay or borrow money to go up to fund favored minorities free-rides.
I’ve been trying to arrange a meeting with the CFO of the university my son attends to underscore this and many other points. He’s agreed to meet, but is avoiding scheduling the meeting.
I have the university financials. I’m an engineer not an accountant, but even I can see that raising the price will not stem the demonstrable drop in enrollment of premium-paying out-of-state students. “Private-Public Partnerships” to provide over-priced housing are long term debt that will not be paid if they can’t continue to raise tuition by 10% per year (which requires loans forevermore), and universities simply pool tuition and room-and-board and “mandatory fees” in the end and then subtract costs.
Administrative costs, academic support always grows faster than inflation - and.....the portion of tuition-paying students that goes to “financial aid and scholarships” is steadily increasing.
That’s just one example - but I’m sure it’s widely applicable
Nobody is paying for my MBA. I am.
Think something where we start with "pay for placement."
For the time the Dept of Ed is still allowed to exist (the ultimate intent is to kill it, of course, but even Bill Bennett was able to use the Dept of Ed to publish the famous "Nation at Risk" expose of American education failures back when he served as Sec'y under Reagan), and under penalty of perjury mandate that schools report the number of students who start but never finish school at their institutions, and report post-graduation success of graduates landing a job in the student's field of study.
Assemble a data base which is available on line that ranks the success or failure of institutions. Identify the professors who teach courses with an ability for interested parties to be able drill down to personal biographies. Associate those bios with employment success rates of students who took their classes. Publish that ranking. Make schools receiving public money report the salary and total compensation of all employees, much as is done with Gov't general schedule personnel.
It will lay bare the failure rates of multicultural basket weaving degrees, those schools who schedule and market them, those professors that teach them, and how much they fleeced the system to teach them at all. Expose the liberal foundations and "nonprofits" that prop up such programs with their $.
On the flip side, incentivize schools who attract and teach students in traditional studies which include math, sciences, engineering, etc.
It's a starting place.
FReegards!
Since it's a liberal funding ploy (see my post 13), the MSM certainly isn't going to attack it.
Very little of what is taught in college can’t be done on-line, without the massive expense of a brick and mortar campus. College is largely a business that exists to provide employment for those working in the business of college.
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