- cross-posted to:
- antiwork
- cross-posted to:
- antiwork
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
Personally I don’t like student loan forgiveness because I think a free public university system is a better investment.
Yeah, same reason I don’t like insulin, I want a permanent cure for diabetes… In the meantime fuck diabetic people, am I right?
/S in case people are confused
Student loan forgiveness with no other action is completely counter-productive. Just like allowing drug companies to charge anything they want for Insulin, and then just having the government pay them is completely counter-productive. The answer to spiraling insulin prices (when not due to a shortage of some key ingredient) is to cap prices, not just pay whatever ransom drug companies are asking.
College costs have spiraled out of control because laws were passed to prevent you from escaping student loan debt through bankruptcy. From a lender perspective there’s almost no risk to giving students as much money as they want to borrow. Colleges in turn realized they could just keep raising prices because students could “afford” pretty much any tuition price through loans. If you just “forgive” all student loan debt, you’ll just encourage colleges to jack up prices even more. Why not? Come one come all, the government is going to foot whatever the bill ends up being!
If you’re going to forgive student debt, it needs to come with 3 things:
You want to find a middle ground with conservatives? Make tuition free for the occupations we have a shortage of to encourage people to go to school for a degree in which there will be a job waiting when they’re done.
We need more teachers? Teaching degrees are free for the next decade. You want to be a marine biologist? You pay whatever the (reasonable) capped state tuition is.
I know people who have fully embraced that they will never be able to pay off their student loans and are just letting them default. It’s often easier to get out of wage garnishment and wrecked credit than it is trying to pay back tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So yeah, the government paying off its own loans is just kicking the can down the road. Accelerating a process that’s already happening.
whoosh
Free education will make the world a better place in the future for everyone. Debt forgiveness is just for people who don’t want to pay their bills because they studied something that doesn’t pay.
Curing diabetes will make the world a better place in the future for everyone. Insuline is just for people who want to eat candy all day because they hate themselves
/S
Ps: it’s hilarious how quickly you showed the true colours you pretended to hide in your first post
100%
PS: Huh?
I’m genuinely confused by this? I know CompSci and engineering majors that are having trouble with loans and are you saying that they should have tried a more profitable degree… What?
I’m saying people made choices.
And I’m saying they were coerced into it because of the poor handling of public funding for universities thus making it the governments fault that sometimes people got fucked by loans no matter what degree they got.
To advocate for fixing a systemic problem and not also advocate for fixing what the systemic problem has caused is weird. Fixing these issues aren’t exclusive like you seem to think they are.
No one was coerced to do anything. Cheaper options were available at state schools, community colleges and boot camps. Many people instead chose debt and more expensive schools instead.
If we’re going to drop a trillion we really don’t have on something, I’d prefer to build for the future while you don’t want to pay your bills.
Normally we call that ‘victim blaming’; even when the victimization is financial by the univer$ity.
I get you have this “do the crime, do the time” thing for people choosing to spend on education; but aside from multi-decade reform plan that isn’t even as marketable to voters as “let’s just consolidate healthcare and save money”, what do we have that’ll help people avoid the looming debt trap that has such a chilling effect on others entering post-secondary education?
We have inflation for that. Wages will eventually go up.
And there was no crime here.
You do NOT get a choice about getting an education in a vast, vast majority of life paths in the developed world.
I know a lot of people and exactly two of them are working in the field they got degrees in. You cannot always control the direction of your life, anything from medical issues to family emergencies to economics in your region can profoundly impact your chances of landing a career in your chosen study field, or even just getting a simple job that can pay back tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars as the interest snowballs.
You absolutely have a choice.
Clearly there should be debt forgiveness for people with medical issues. Otherwise people should think ahead.
And I started all of this by saying that university should be free. I’m not the enemy here. You signed an agreement to pay those bills, now do it.
The vast majority of people are thinking ahead when they get a loan to get an education. The rest of your comment is telling people with problems “fuck you, got mine” and I’m done with it. Enjoy your block. Enjoy your blessings and enjoy being hateful to people who had different luck in life, I’m sure abandoning human decency will really help in everything you do.
I’m sorry you can’t handle when someone disagrees with you. I’m not abandoning human decency when I say things like “university should be free” and “if anything all education loans should be refinanced with a interest rate ceiling”. You are a coward.
This is true.
This is utter garbage. Judgemental much? Maybe your own experiences and feelings aren’t the same for everyone.
I do not have a degree. Still here and happy. Make better choices.
¿Por qué no los dos?
I too prefer free tertiary education. But that also does not relieve the millions saddled with predatory loans.
Not all loans were predatory, some people just made dumb choices all on their own. If anything there should be a reasonable limit on the interest rates and the loans should be refinanced.
And, as for why not both, we actually can’t afford either. Investing for the future is a better deal for society than fixing people’s personal mistakes.
What do you mean we can’t afford either? Are you telling me that somehow all other developed countries are able to afford free or cheap higher education but somehow the US cannot? We could also slowly start to cancel current student debt. Sure, it is at $1.77 trillion right now but that does not have to be wiped away all at once. Prioritize getting rid of predatory loans, then those those with financial hardship, then go from there.
Yes, we can’t afford it, because we chose to spend all of our money on the military.
This sounds like we could afford it, we just need to take that money back from the military…
Yes, but also, America. It’s not that I don’t want these things, I just think they’re politically impossible.
We could switch to Medicare for All and save a couple hundred billion a year to do it.
Overall, not without raising taxes though. The money just doesn’t stop getting spent by people and appear in the government budget without it.
If your “taxes” go up by $7 but your health insurance costs go down by $10, why the hell would you care? There are several more dollars in your pocket. Or if you are concerned about tax amount, let’s rename current health insurance fees to taxes and we can simply market Medicare for All as a massive tax cut that increases service.
They’re deliberately being contrarian. They showed their hand earlier.
Where does that math come from? I can’t think of anything that got more efficient just because the government got involved.
I love the idea of Medicare For All but it should be a choice for people who want it.
But…if you think free public university is a good thing…isn’t not giving loan forgiveness analogous to saying “folks should stay in jail for trumped up marijuana charges until it’s legal Federally”? IMHO people shouldn’t have these loans in the first place.
If we can’t afford loan forgiveness, we can’t afford free public university. We can simultaneously fix the problems of the past while trying to improve things for the future.
it would be worse actually, it would be the equivalent of federally legalizing weed, but then doing nothing for all the existing weed charges and just letting them roll out their time.
The marijuana comparison is not even close to the same thing.
Well, when you say it like that, I can only believ— wait a minute. Show me the receipts. The ‘missing middle’ is real.