Seems like a good little marxist.
Posted on 12/07/2011 1:03:38 PM PST by presidio9
As part of the recent protest against CUNY's latest round of tuition hikes, a student publicly burned a debt collection letter from Sallie Mae. Burning draft cards was a ritual of the 1960's anti-war movement.
Will debt refusal become the defining act of the current student generation? Some of us think so.
The newly launched Occupy Student Debt Campaign (occupystudentdebtcampaign.org) offers debtors an alternative to suffering the agony and humiliation of default in personal isolation. If they pledge to withhold loan payments (after the numbers of fellow pledges grow to 1 million), then they will be participating in a debt strike threat.
It is difficult to believe that the government, in response, will allow one million debtors to default en masse. If it does, the blame will lie with lawmakers who have done precious little to fix the lending racket, and who have favored wars and prisons over education as national priorities.
Today, our colleges and universities are increasingly dependent on students racking up debts that are unpayable in their lifetimes. This arrangement is immoral, especially when many of the loans are predatory in nature. Student loans are among the most lucrative in the financial industry, and the largest profits roll in when debtors default, as they are currently doing on a mass scale. Without doubt, private lenders were raising their champagne glasses when student debt (fast approaching $1 trillion) surpassed consumer debt last year.
Should we allow education to continue to be used in this way as a profit engine for the lending industry? Most educators, along with the working families who are told their children must have a degree in order to be competitive, would say no.
But there is still a wall of denial around the topic. I have long known that many of my NYU students must go deep into debt so that my salary can be paid. After all, our graduates have the nation's highest debt per capita (estimated at $36,000) among nonprofit schools. The Occupy movement has now made it impossible for me to ignore their predicament.
The largest single step we could take to alleviate student debt nationwide would be to guarantee that public education is publicly funded in full, as it used to be in parts of the U.S. and as it is in many other countries less affluent than ours. The GI Bill alone gave tens of millions of Americans access to free higher education, and helped make our universities among the best in the world. It would take little more than $70 billion for the federal government to cover the tuition costs at all two-year and four-year public colleges. Put in the perspective of the federal budget, a recent audit found that the Pentagon "wastes" $70 billion in unaccountable spending every year.
And unlike consumer loans, student loans are currently offered at rates well above those of home mortgages, and far above the rates at which the government borrows money - should be interest-free. Paying for an education is not the same as buying a car or a flat screen TV.
These are widely held beliefs, but lawmakers are not responding. Refusing a debt load that is rigged against them may be the only recourse for the most indebted generation in history.
***Ross is a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and one of the organizers of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign.***
That would force colleges to charge what a degree is actually worth, which means there would be a lot of unemployed perfessers.
So I assume the good Professor is going to work gratis?
Fine. He shouldn’t get paid then...
My husband and I are such idiots. We refinanced our home in order to pay off our student loans. What fools we were but at least we can sleep at night.
I’m fine with that if the college is fine with not paying this loser.
“Professor,” my smelly Obama.
Wanna guess which marshmallow academic area this guy slept his way through his PhD in?
I believe any student loan lender who suffers a default over this would have a civil case against this professor for tortous interference with contract. Hope he gets sued in a personal capacity. (ie. don’t sue the school too so the professor has to pay his own attorney fees.)
I’m all in favor of this!
My student loans have been a freakin’ albatross around my neck since I graduated college. Sadly, I’ve paid most of it back, but it’s been a burden.
Boycott student loans!
This way, the college education bubble will burst like a pin-pricked balloon. The supporters of this move probably think that it will promote chaos (it will) to bring about the rise of socialism (it won’t). Instead, a whole bunch of colleges will have cut costs, salaries, and actually offer something that students will need to have a productive life. Some colleges will go broke. Good. I’ve been in academia most of my adult life, and the waste and fraud is on a scale that is hard to describe. The promoters of this effort apparently don’t understand economics, either. Go ahead, default on your loan.
By the way, I earned my master’s degree from a fine online school for about $8,000 - about one-third the cost of the same degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And the online classes focused on solid, useable information, not the sort of PC crap I found everywhere at UAF. Those online colleges with focused education is the future - and I didn’t need a loan for it, either.
Didn’t the health care bill fix things so that only the central government could issue student loans?
If so, this is an interesting chant we’ve heard from Occupy Obama and now this guy.
A plan emerging here?
Where to begin?
Useless professor in a useless academic field issuing useless degrees to kids who probably ought to have gone into a trade and learned a useful skill. Who is the fraud here, Prof?
I submit it is the college itself. They should be sued for selling a defective product.
The good thing is that when the debt strike happens, capital will dry up, the college will downsize or close and useless twits like this can move into their tents in Zuccotti park permanently.
Hey “kids” (yes that includes you 30 year old students)
Lissen up to the good professor and raise him one- don’t pay your TUITION, until the faculty and administration take a pay cut
Check out what the president of your college is getting paid...
Seems like a good little marxist.
Thanks to Hussein, since they have no jobs many cannot even if they wanted to.
FUBO GTFO! 409 Days until Noon Jan 20, 2013
If your loan is a Federal student loan then I believe that defaulting simply means that they can get a judgement to simply “remove” the funds from your bank account, or garnish your wages - or both.
Also - bankruptcy will not get rid of Federal student loan debt. IT stays.
So go ahead and be an idiot and stop paying it so that your credit is destroyed and you still have to pay anyway... stupid professor.
These intellectual midgets forget that if the students don’t pay the loans, the banks won’t lend money to students, and then the university won’t get paid, and then the professors won’t... Oh for crying out loud. Do we have to draw them a picture?
I’m OK with this because then student loans won’t be made and many of the unnecessary college “educations” won’t happen, so the honest trades can be filled again.
I hope he succeeds.
If bankers are burned by lending money to dopers going to college to study liberal arts twaddle, maybe bankers will start to loan money to only those students in fields that can actually repay said loans.
And it won’t be students in the “social and cultural analysis” department at NYU ... or anywhere else, for that matter.
I guess our daughter should have taken out a loan too and let it slide. She is a responsible person, and paid it all off already - three years after graduation.
Better yet boycott paying tuition
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