[quote=sdduuuude][quote=zk]Well, it is different from bailing out the banks. Risky investments by banks are not necessary for our country to be competitive. Availability of college, in my opinion, is.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that student loans, the way they’re currently structured, are the reason that tuition costs have gone up. What do we do to fix it? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I know what it isn’t, and that’s making college unavailable to those who can’t pay cash for it.[/quote]
In your opinion. Not every opinion should be funded by the government.
One reason why we shouldn’t bail out the banks is because it keeps weak banks alive that shouldn’t be alive. Same with students and colleges. The loans keep people going to school who simply aren’t willing to work for it and it keeps schools in business who would otherwise go broke.
You don’t have to fix it, really. In fact, stopping the attempts to fix it may fix it.
Instead of borrowing cash from Uncle Sam, people can go to school part-time and work part time, they can room together to save money, they can find employers or bosses to sponsor them, borrow from relatives, work on research projects, work as an intern, and otherwise suffer a bit to get an education they really want. Or they can attend a 2-year program, or a trade school instead of a 4-year college.
I have a friend, now an IT Vice President, who came from nothing, lived in a 20-foot trailer in Encanto while he scrapped his way through SDSU, worked while he was in school, and made it in life. We need more of that and less of debt-financed education. If you aren’t willing to do that, then maybe college isn’t for you and I just don’t see how it is the responsibility of taxpayers to fund people’s schooling who aren’t willing to make the sacrafices.
Limiting per-student loans would certainly help. Limiting to less expensive programs would help. Limiting loans to those with the best grades who attend programs in schools that produce graduates who can actually use their education to get a well-paying job would help. Blank checks don’t help.
More and more student loans is simply not a sustainable way to get more people into school. It is just like government-sponsored programs to increase home ownership, which subsequently failed once the market realized that the value of the homes hadn’t gone up – only the amount of funding.
They made it easy for people to go into debt, so people spent more on houses, and the result is housing prices went up, which made it more difficult to increase home ownership.[/quote]
I’m not advocating blank checks. And I agree that the system is broken and needs to be fixed. And I think a lot of the ideas you mention are good ones. But I think that, in the long run, after you get the system fixed, there should be a willingness to subsidize college education to a certain point. You’ll never have a perfect loan system where everyone pays every nickel back. You’ll never have a perfect university system where there’s not a nickel of waste. So those shouldn’t be our goals. Our goals should be to minimize the losses – and I agree that we have a lot of work to do there – but to continue to make college available to those who can’t pay cash for it. If it costs us some money in the short run, in the long run that money will more than be made up for in increased production and competitiveness with the rest of the world. (Whereas subsidizing risky investments by banks results in no such advantage.)
