The penalty, that’s my question. Others answered already.
2 Likes
All i see from that is “I want everyone else to suffer because i got mine”. Even if i had my current student loan debt paid off i would 100% never wish the stress of it on any other human being, it’s been a god damn nightmare and i’m glad i’m in a current position where i can regularly pay on it. That said it eats up a big part of my paychecks, i don’t complain about it but i literally have no savings but i’m working on it.
I do have friends that i can say with complete honesty that their student loans and the accompanying stress has severely impacted their physical and mental health. Again i would never wish that on anyone and i really hope the loan forgiveness will be a thing, as it is right now it takes extraordinary effort to get it forgiven, and more so to pay it off.
18 Likes
Well, private universities are not within the purview of the bill proposal (other than the loan forgiveness provision), so let’s set them aside. We can also set aside food, since no doubt your son would be eating whatever he was doing, and probably not considerably cheaper than a meal plan. Let’s also set aside books, since it is now technologically possible to structure a class to minimize or avoid book expense altogether (although, let’s face it, few are doing that). What that leaves us with is housing and tuition.
I doubt that the amount being charged at state schools is wildly different than the market rate in adjacent neighborhoods (the argument for requiring students to live on campus is spurious, though, and should be banned for state-run schools.) And due to the paucity of decent transit across the country, commuting from a cheaper neighborhood just shifts the cost to auto maintenance, which introduces a second set of problems. I think the real underlying problem here is a general lack of affordable housing. It is absolutely a crisis that needs to be addressed, just not in this proposal.
As for tuition, inferring from your own accounting I’m assuming it’s about 10K, which is what my alma mater (U Texas) costs today. At the risk of making a parent cry, you know what tuition was when I started? $4/ch. Even with fees it came to less than $400 for the year. So the cost of attending UT has risen 10x over the expected rate of inflation since I went there, which I would think outstrips even housing expenses in Austin.
That’s the crisis being addressed in the proposal, and I think in this case dealing with it in isolation is justified.
1 Like
It’s probably the corruption of watching Star Trek as a kid, but I would like to live in an educated society, where the collective focus is on problem solving, music, art, and the betterment of mankind. When I saw this policy proposal today I didn’t think about all the money I paid for my education, I though about how making education more accessible brings all of us up.
22 Likes
It sounds nice but this might sink her campaign. The age group that would benefit most from this plan also happens to have the lowest voter turnout. The largest voting group, the baby boomers, is the group most likely to say “I worked hard to pay back my student loans, why should these youngsters be able to weasel out on their promise to pay for the education they already received?”
Baby boomers have never missed an opportunity to screw over later generations regardless of the standard-bearer of fairness.
12 Likes
I really hope people catch Warren doing 1-on-1 interviews, especially when she is responding spontaneously because she comes across REALLY intelligent, where her stump speeches unfortunately just make her sound like everyone else and a “typical politician” (and that weird “get a beer” thing in her announcement commercial, why?)
She’s one smart cookie. In the past that would typically doom a candidate but she’s made it this far so that makes me hope for a chance. If nothing else I hope she inspires other women to run in the future.
4 Likes
I don’t think it can be said enough that a lot of so-called “radical” plans are actually just proposals to set things to a previous era’s more humanistic standard.
18 Likes
Really!!??!! I’m a Baby Boomer and my grown children are Millennials. Do you actually believe I would want to “screw over” my own children? NO!! Stop blaming Baby Boomers for problems that aren’t under our control! I went back to college at 30 and graduated at 35. I’m still paying off my student loans!
4 Likes
(Cory, glad for the support, but… are you legally allowed to be a donor to US campaigns? )
1 Like
My bumper sticker
5 Likes
Actually, I like the analogy upthread (although posted as “isn’t this ridiculous”) comparing Warren’ s proposal to “curing cancer would be unfair to those who have suffered with it in the past.” That is pretty much what these sound like. Don’t you dare make life better for my children! They need to suffer like I did! Incident, his idea that this ignores “costs imposed on others” has never looked at what cancer therapy costs. And I am not certain what “moral hazard” he is concerned about.
11 Likes
Typical meal plan food is a bit less than eating at a restaurant, but definitely a lot more than making your own meals. Some schools are getting better about having groceries available on meal plans, but others, not so much. There are also minimums at many schools, so if you’re a light eater and/or make your own meals, you fail to reach the minimum. Most kids at college are spending more on food than they would on their own, at least, if they are sensible about it.
8 Likes
Philip Klein: Millenials (sic) They are already past college age
What an idiot. It’s not the effing armed forces. ANY 
AGE IS COLLEGE AGE , if you pass the entrance exam.
Ableist/ageist asshole.
17 Likes
What does she think this is, the 1950s?
Note: as a Boomer, I had free (or nearly so) college. Fees were something like $300 per semester, room, board, registration, and books totalled less than $1600 per year as a freshman (I kept track of every penny.)
Yes, inflation. But not that much.
Since $HERSELF and I were undergrads, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the AZ constitutional clause requiring that postsecondary education be “free or as nearly free as possible” could be interpreted as meaning, roughly, “anything less than Harvard.”
8 Likes
Same. I kept my nose to the grindstone and paid off mine 3 years early. No skin off my nose.
1 Like
It’s OK, he’s not Russian, Chinese, Muslim or anything like that.
1 Like
How a 20% increase in cost and a 25% decrease in funding “adds up” to a 200% increase in tuition:
From:
3 Likes
Yep. Most hard science gives you a stipend. It was ~23k/yr in chem back at the turn of the century when I went. Contrast that to the ~20k/yr I was paying when I did my masters in the humanities.
5 Likes
Assuming 1959 and using the inflation calculator, that $1600 is a hair under $14k in today’s dollars.
Apparently, in 2018, the average tuition cost in state colleges for state residents was about $10k, and when you add room and board, books, etc., I’m pretty sure it’s over what you paid back then.
And for out-of-state students in state colleges, tuition costs a lot more. And private colleges are even more expensive…
3 Likes
