Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/23/ten-years-later.html
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America’s young are just (financial) meat for the grinder.
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They have to keep those educated slaves properly chained.
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Why couldn’t modern Christians have been fanatical about Jubilee years, instead of sex and gender?
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When I looked into this and learned more about it, I realized that this was not the way to go. Also, the DeVos era is all about eliminating these programs in the first place.
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Well a lot of those student-debt-crippled grads aren’t young anymore…
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If they make a mistake and enroll you - they should own it.
Also - good to see the teacher’s union in Oklahoma pushing back. More please!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Oklahoma_teachers’_strike
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Back in the day - there were government low interest college loans. Then they got privatized.
So - while my inflation adjusted loan amount might be similar- my monthly payment wouldn’t be - and I’m sure there’s more fees being raked off too.
Get rid of privatization - but first make public college free.
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I basically wasn’t counting on this working out for me when I called them up around graduation from grad school and they couldn’t tell me any details about conditions on repayment. I’m pretty sure at one point the person I talked to literally told me that they weren’t sure what counted as public service (I was going to be working for a state university) and what sort of loan repayments counted. So I wasn’t holding my breath.
Sure enough, something like 5 years later I called to check in on things, and it turns out that I indeed had the “wrong kind” of payment plan, and something like only 2 of my payments counted because my starting salary was too high to be eligible for the program on the repayment rate I had going on. I was told I would have had to be paying my loan off at the 10-year equivalent rate in order to be eligible to have the debt waived in 10 years. Which, what?
Anyway, even despite rumblings that they were going to revise the conditions of the program to be more broadly applicable retroactively, I dumped the student loan debt into the HELOC, because the interest rates were way lower and the interest was still tax-deductible. Now interest rates are creeping up again and they’ve doubled the itemization threshold. Whee!
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I’m happy to teach at one of the few community colleges that are still free for city residents. Hopefully more will follow suit.
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It’s not like they’re worried about anyone having the money to sue them over a mistake.
“…they’re a mile away, and you’ve got their shoes.” - Jack Handey.
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I quite agree, but I suspect that tuition is not the greatest contributor to student loans. Unless you are fortunate enough to be able to live with parents or relatives, cost of living is still going to be present and going to dwarf tuition fees.
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Same story with my spouse & me. We did a few years of payments and were looking forward to the forgiveness. I thought to check & make sure we were still on track. We both work for a state university. As you noted, hard to tell if that (or anything else) qualifies as public service. And like you, we also found that in order to get the 10-year forgiveness, we needed to be on the 10-year repayment schedule. Clever program!
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No no no, there’s not a stamp on it, you see? You want Information Adjustment, this is Information Retrieval.
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Oh, it can’t be as bad as all that.
Check the fine print, I’m almost positive that they’ll let you off if you give them the soul of your firstborn or something like that.
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Oh - I know. I moved out when I went to college.
No dorms available year round - so off campus rental.
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A large part of the American economy is devoted to keeping people caught in what John Oliver called “the f*ckbarrel” with bait-and-switch tactics. Student loans have slowly been turned into the middle class’s long-game version of payday loans.
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There’s a program called “Scholarship for Service” where students study information security on the taxpayer dime in exchange for service (sadly usually at institutions like the NSA and not places like the FTC).
I recall reading that due to Trump’s hiring freeze when he was first election these bills were coming due - the students were required to obtain public employment and there was no carve out for hiring freezes.
Does anyone know what happened with that?
Makes me glad I started quoting A Beautiful Mind at the spook who tried to sell me on it at Defon many years ago:
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I was watching this yesterday. Sorry, wrong form!
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The cost of post-secondary ed is a complicated mess, but one very important part* of the tangle is that post-secondary systems are not cheap to run and both politicians and taxpayers are reluctant to fund them. I remember free and nearly-free public systems–New York State had one such when I was young–and they depended on the public being willing to bear the costs. They also depended on relatively low pay for the teachers, a growing supply of college-age kids to fill the classrooms, and a national (or at least regional) sense that access to college education was important to the health of the nation.
The privatization of the college-loan system is a separate set of pathologies, related, I think, to the intersection of the financialization of the general economy and the neocon dream of a government drowned in the bathtub.
[*] Yes, I know, the systems are also top-heavy with administrators (who think of themselves as business managers) and burdened by overbuilt physical plants. I’ve lived in the university environment for more than 50 years and watched it go agley.
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