If one wants prices to
rise, get the government involved. If you doubt that, then explain
the roaring inflation in health care and college, where government is deeply
entrenched. For years, government has thrown money at higher
education, and it has made attending college more and more
expensive. One of the main ways government pumps money into colleges
is indirect: the guarantee of student loans. Be that as it may, when
one takes out any kind of loan, one needs to be clear about what happens if one
can't pay it back. You see, in bankruptcy court, student loan debt
is treated differently from other types of debt.
On
June 18, Forbes ran "Can
Student Loans Now Be Discharged in Bankruptcy?" by Zack
Friedman. This is a must-read article for anyone considering going
into debt to attend college. Friedman answers the question of his
headline thus: "normally, student loans are not
dischargeable." Student debt can be
discharged in a bankruptcy, but one must prove "undue
hardship." Bankruptcy usually leaves one with a ruined credit
score and still owing one's student debt. (The
prospective student might also look into this
article on bankruptcy at Student Loan Hero.)
Recently,
I reported on
the PROSPER Act, a bill that has stalled out in Congress. One of the
provisions of the
PROSPER Act is to end student loan forgiveness. Student
loan forgiveness is not bankruptcy; it's much nicer than
bankruptcy.
On
March 27, FiveThirtyEight ran "Student
Loans Are Too Expensive to Forgive" by Amanda
Palleschi. The article gives us a rundown on the Public
Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF), which gives loan forgiveness
to graduates employed by government and non-profits, including to
lawyers. PROSPER would eliminate such loan forgiveness.
The
feds can't afford student loan forgiveness. If the taxpayer is going
to pay the salaries of government employees, he shouldn't be compelled to pay
their college loans as well. If the taxpayer is going to give loan
forgiveness to public employees, why not give it to everyone with student
debt? The PSLF program should be decommissioned
forthwith. Such programs are scams; they are sops to
universities, allowing
them to keep their tuitions artificially high.
On
May 10, the Columbia Daily Tribune ran an
article by Rudi Keller about Missouri's Attorney General Josh Hawley,
who's a candidate for U.S. Senate. Should Hawley prevail in the
primary, he'll likely face incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill, who's seeking a
third term (no term limits for Claire). Hawley's most controversial
statement in the article may be this: "[c]olleges and universities should
be responsible for repaying student loans of anyone who can't find work in
their field." (This writer suggested the
same thing back in March.)
Keller
cited data in an email he received from Hawley's spokeswoman that came
from Forbes. Keller's out of the office until July 2, so I used
Google, and the article is surely this one from July 2017 by Preston Cooper:
"New
York Fed Highlights Underemployment among College Graduates." Cooper's
article is well worth reading, especially for those students who are not
pursuing professional degrees, like medicine, dentistry, law, engineering,
etc.:
Roughly
one in three college graduates (34%) are underemployed, meaning they work in
jobs that do not require a college degree. This figure has remained
remarkably stable over the past quarter-century, with no cyclical fluctuations
or identifiable long-term trends. That many members of the
college-educated workforce do not use their skills in the workplace has been
the case for a long time.
Among
recent college graduates, the underemployment rate is even
higher. Around 44% of college graduates ages 22 to 27 work in jobs
that do not require a college degree. This figure appears to rise
slightly post-recession and fall during economic booms, but over the long term
it generally stays between 40% and 50%.
What
if 34 percent of the nation's college students had decided not to
attend? Mightn't that have an effect on the price of
tuition? Perhaps American colleges would make up for the loss in
enrollment of Americans by admitting more foreigners, such as additional
Chinese students, who sometimes turn out to be spies and thieves of American
I.P. (Intellectual Property).
If
34 percent of young Americans – perhaps those who aren't interested in pursuing
the professions or who aren't very motivated – were to go on "strike"
by forgoing college and enter the job market instead, it would force colleges
to make some big adjustments. What might those changes be?
On
Feb. 7, the Kansas City Star ran "Missouri
has too many public universities. It must close campuses" by
University of Missouri-Columbia business professor Art Jago. It
seems that higher education is suffering budgetary constraints here in
Missouri. Mr. Jago writes of a UMC task force tasked with finding
solutions. Their "report identifies 27 graduate-level degree
programs and certificates that should be eliminated because of zero or near
zero enrollments." But professor Jago finds their solutions
inadequate:
With
a state the size of Missouri, there is simply no justification for having 13
public (supported by state tax) four-year colleges and universities[.] ... That
number of faculties, staff, physical facilities, administrators and overhead is
unsustainable in the current environment. The closure of entire
campuses is required.
Sounds
more like a meat cleaver than a scalpel, but sometimes a meat cleaver may be
needed. Even so, there are surely more ways colleges could cut down
on costs, such as in eliminating "bloat." On May 20
at National Review, George Will wrote about the U. of Michigan's "administrative
bloat" (italics added):
...
the ever-thickening layer of social-justice crusaders and orthodoxy enforcers
who, nationwide, live parasitically off universities whose
actual purpose is scholarship. These include Michigan's vice-provost
for equity and inclusion and the director of the Office of Student Conflict
Resolution. Such bureaucrats have professional stakes in finding
inequities to rectify and conflicts to resolve.
Universities
should fire these parasitical "crusaders" and
"enforcers" and save a bunch of money; they can't afford the
"parasites," and besides, they're not doing any education anyway.
Here's my strategy for students wanting
to stay out of debt: forget about a degree and just take the classes that you
need to get your foot in the door of a job. That's what I did
decades ago; I took two classes in COBOL at community college, and that got me
my first job in information technology, in which I toiled as a computer
programmer and analyst. Of course, the university degree I had
acquired a few years earlier probably garnered me some "brownie
points," but what sealed the deal with my first employer was the COBOL (an
ancient programming language that may now be defunct outside government
installations).
Fifty
years ago, one could graduate with a four-year degree and be
debt-free. But over the last fifty years, Americans gradually became
meekly accepting of having to go ever deeper into debt to attend
college. Folks shouldn't take it anymore. Public
universities should set for themselves the goal of undergraduates being able to
get a four-year degree and to enter the workforce debt-free. Students
should be able to work their way through college with summer jobs, etc.
Today's colleges aren't likely to make
such momentous changes unless they're backed into a corner. So the
idea of a nationwide student strike is appealing; young folks could just bypass
college until their prices come down.
Students of the world,
unite. You have nothing to lose but your bad credit scores.
Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a
programmer from Kansas City.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/on_the_financial_wisdom_of_attending_todays_colleges.html