We need to stop everyone and anybody from going to college.

You shouldn't just be able to get a loan to go to any college for any field.

I cant get a loan to buy any car, I dont see why it's different.

>>We need to stop everyone and anybody from going to college.

This will do that. It is legislative lender accountability. Watch the loans dry up for non-profitable degrees. No more $30,000 loans on a online business degree. And fuck everyone who has issued crappy loans to take advantage of the current situation.

Ppen is on the right track.

There are misleading statistics that a college degree increases lifetime earnings by $1 million. That is producing all of the crazy policy surrounding college. People want to buy college at almost any cost to get that $1 million. It is a win for society and a win for the student.

But, I could use the same statistical approach to show that owners of expensive cars earn much more than owners of economy cars. All we must do is lend money so everyone can buy an expensive car! Every few years! The statistics say so.

Well, many unlucky individuals won't be able to repay the loan. We're still trying to figure out why. So, they will only need to repay 15% of their income, and the taxpayers will pick up the rest. Overall, we are all going to be rich. I'm looking at the statistics right now on my cocktail napkin.

Maybe the taxpayers can't pay. They already have to come up with between $17 trillion and $200 trillion in previous loans and political promises. Bummer.

So, we will print up the money in the back room and hand it to the car manufacturers. They have already signed up for the deal. They are true patriots who want to help the public to enjoy the success it deserves. Selling a lot of high profit, expensive cars is almost a scrifice to the common good.

Modern finance is truly wonderful. We print up pieces of paper, or create money by typing in an amount at the FedReserve, and real resources spring up to match the number. We're not sure how this works, but we aren't worrying about it. This will all work out because our investment in more cars will lead to more income for the populace, and that income will pay off the loans. The statistics say so.

We had a guy Mike who argued that there would be no significant increase in incomes. He said that we had reversed cause and effect. Funding cars would cost much money with no way to repay the investment. Expensive cars were the result of high incomes, not the cause. They are associated with high incomes, not the cause of high incomes.

Mike argued that college degrees from exclusive institutions were associated with high incomes, but actually resulted from choosing the smartest people to attend those institutions. Those smart people went on to success. The schools selected smart people, but couldn't make anyone smart. Fortunately for the statistics, the failures do not graduate, so they don't pull down the earnings average.

Motto: If you average only the successful, you get a successful average.

The last straw was Mike arguing that the housing collapse came from the same sort of misguided statistics. He said that home ownership is associated with middle class success, but it doesn't cause that success. We lent money to almost everyone for buying houses. For some reason a large number of them couldn't make the payments. If we can't trust statistics, then how are we suppposed to run things, like the world?

We never liked Mike. He didn't want to get with the program. I couldn't tell you where he is working now.

Motto: Formal education is the key and we are turning it, no matter what the cost.

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Easy Opinions - College is an expensive IQ test

The law says that a company cannot give an employment test unless it has been shown to be non-discriminatory in effect, that it doesn't screen out people of color at a different rate than people of pallor.

So, employers don't create their own tests or use standardized tests. Companies rely heavily on college degrees to give them some little information about the quality of candidates. Interviewers talk randomly about whatever they want, using personal judgment to decide if the candidate is "a good match". This is supposed to be less discriminatory than giving a test.

> And if her earnings fell below a certain
> threshold, she'd pay nothing at all until
> her income rebounded.

Last sentence on the blog post, but no afterthought, I'm certain.

I get it, m'kay?: No blood from turnips. We shouldn't be cruel to people.

But our whole country has been built that way, at least as regards policies of debt to government. People in dept to the commonweal often commit atrocities.

Heretofore, McArdle noted, unpaid student debt was a handsome exception: It would stick to you, and it would hurt you.

As costs for degrees have exploded insanely, a final bulwark may be crumbling.

Are we permitted to dream of a day when policies and programs which bring rewards to people have sharp edges? A day when fulfilling your private and civic obligations is serious fucking business?

Assholio is correct about market forces correcting the problem, eventually,

except,

that the government makes the loans and holds the paper and market forces do not apply there. The idea that Everyone can go to college, get four years of advanced indoctrination and then pay an extra ten percent income tax (for ever and and ever (world without end)) makes government happy. No matter how much it costs to get started.

I tend to agree with Ppen. . If I had stayed in teaching, I would be making a hell of lot more $ than the type of jobs where my Ex Sci MS is even 'desired.'

I'll use BA/BS tchr grads as my 'low earners', but I don't agree that it's a destitute profession.

Q: Should/could colleges charge less per credit hour for, say, tchr prep courses than it does for the hard sciences (pre-med) courses? If K-12 educators tend to "not make as much" as the MBA grad, why not just make their required EDUC courses less expensive? Elective liberal arts courses like, Gender Roles in Films or Beyonce 101 should be at bargain basement Crazy Eddy prices. Just saying.

My word. Robocars, student loan protection--seems like high-level helicopter parenting.

Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!

What could possibly go wrong?

Won't work. The individual that goes to college to get a degree in hate America studies will be unemployable and therefore will never earn enough to pay it back. Meanwhile the individual that works his butt off to get a degree in chemical engineering will have to pay more in taxes to subsidize the others. Advocates will constantly demand that we ratchet up the amount of income that is exempt from the payment plan, so that they will have a "liveable wage."

The purpose of payments is to repay a loan within a given span of time.

Repayment of a loan makes that money available to be loaned to the next borrower - generating interest income for the lender.

When loans are too slowly repaid or not repaid at all, the lender runs out of money and goes broke.

Since it's a student loan program, the government will be on the hook to support the lender who goes broke (since the lender cannot ask about majors and tie loan risk to the applicant's major).

Out of that chaos, we'll end up with the federal government directly lending to students, which will effectively become free college to anyone who can fog a mirror and get an online diploma mill to call them a student.

The reason college costs are so high is that here is so much free money in the system. So colleges raise their tuition to capture as much of that as possible. Take away the free money fountain and watch costs go down as colleges cut costs to attract students.

That'd be a big fail in my case... I stopped working entirely for five years or so!

But seriously, who wants the federal government in their paycheck???

Do they just keep paying until the principal is gone? However long that takes? What if they want to pay more to get rid of it?

As soon as enough of the Boomer generation dies off, voters will vote to repudiate the student loans. It's going to happen. The question we should be asking is: what happens after that?

And personally, I wouldn't mind going after univerisity endowments for a chunk of it. After all, the universities themselves have contributed significantly to the problem.