Student Loans

So you borrow money to buy something for which you can't afford to pay when you want it.  It's your house, a car, or maybe college tuition and expenses.  (You're a late teenager or early 20-something, you're not working, or not making a lot of money, and you just can't afford all the costs.)  And for whatever it's worth, you get accepted at, and want to attend, a university that's not state funded, or you're not an in-state student, so you have to pay the higher rate.  The deal is that you borrow the money from someone -- the government, a private lender, or someone -- and you agree to pay it back, with interest.

In general, this is a very normal transaction: you borrowed money, you knew how much you borrowed, you knew what was the interest rate, and you agreed to repay the loan.  There's a kind of relief valve, too.  If you borrowed money you eventually found you couldn't repay, you can declare bankruptcy, so your debts are cleared.  And you suffer the consequences of having declared bankruptcy.  There are consequences.  No one will give you a loan, or even issue to you a credit card, for X number of years.

There is a movement now to excuse college loans, at least the ones that have not already been repaid.  In a very superficial way, it sounds noble and accommodating, but this movement has problems.  (And in full disclosure, let me reveal that I never had college loans.  My parents were able to pay for me and my siblings to attend college and graduate schools.  But I'm most certainly not unaware of the issue, and the problem.  As a frame of reference, I attended Tufts University, which is a private university, from 1968 to 1972.  For at least one of those years, Tufts had the highest tuition in the country!  It was $3000 per year.  I know that was over 50 years ago, but today, you'd be hard pressed to find a state university or college that wasn't more expensive than that.)

Here are the problems:  For one thing, if it's a problem, some loans have already been fully repaid, at whatever stress to the borrower.  For another, many loans have been partially repaid, and no one is talking about reimbursing anyone for payments they made in full or in part.  And some graduates have had success in their careers and in life, and don't need to have their loans excused.   They can afford to repay the loans, and they will, and they should.  But the debt relief scheme, as I've read about it, is not intended to be means-tested.    There's also this problem: in this country, a college education is considered so advantageous that it almost separates one class from another to have gone to college, or not to have gone.  So there's pressure to attend college, even for people who technically don't need to have done so.  And perhaps partially in that connection, one report I heard is that a great deal of unrepaid college debt is owed by people who never finished college.  There was no clarification as to why they didn't finish, or if, in reality, they really perhaps shouldn't even have gone, except they felt pressure to do something that maybe they weren't fit to do, or maybe they didn't have to do.  (All the more reason to take a loan, if attending college isn't frankly of value or meaning to you, so you're really perhaps not that motivated anyway, except you just feel pressed to do it.)

But the biggest problem with excusing college loans is that, just as with American "health care," it offers an answer to the wrong question.  The question we ask about either education or "health care" is how, or who's going, to pay for it.  The question we ought to ask about either, which some expert I heard on the radio acknowledged about education, is why it's so expensive.  That's precisely the problem about American "health care," and it's the question almost no one tries to answer, and certainly not to confront.  To make matters worse, we don't get our exorbitant money's worth out of either education or "health care" in this country.  The reasons are the same regarding both failed efforts.

The government is failing to recognize and address what creates proper education and valuable health care.  (It's most certainly also true that way too many people are simply focused on money, and how much -- of other people's money -- they can get.)  We can talk about American "health care" some other time.  But regarding education, we don't foster families and early childhood in a way that will produce receptive and successful students.  Instead of concentrating on early childhood, preschool, ABCs, and STEM, some state governments corrupt education by trying to rewrite American history, and fighting against what they imagine they understand "Critical Race Theory" to be, or, in our state for example, proscribing the saying of "gay."  These kinds of faulty and corrupting government influences are not what anyone needs education systems to do.  Education is supposed to provide certain facts, teach creative thinking, advocate for team work, and foster other interests and talents (band/orchestra, sports, drama, languages, debate, leadership opportunities, etc).  In the old, old days, the boys took shop, and the girls took home economics.  That's anachronistic and sexist now, but it did provide other areas of proficiency some people valued.

We still overspend on education, and we spend the least where we ought to spend the most: on the teachers.  The highest paid person on many college campuses is the head football coach.  And that coach coaches students who are there on academic scholarships (you and I pay for them to be there), take fluff courses, and frankly, don't need to be in college to achieve their ambitions (most of whom won't achieve their ambitions anyway, so they'll have attended college for no reason, and gotten a scholarship they won't have to repay to do it).  The current president of the U of F is resigning/retiring, and he'll be replaced by Sen Ben Sasse (R) of Nebraska, who thinks the U of F needs to be "more conservative."  So college education in this state, like other education here, needs to be politicized?

Once we make a critical examination of where all the money goes, and stop the meaningless excesses (of education or "health care"), we can lower costs, and either the government can pay, as they do with earlier education here, or is done in most or all civilized countries, since all education is in the public interest, or costs can be low enough not to be such an ongoing burden to students, and graduates.