Your whole post is so out of touch and condescending i don’t even know where to begin.
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What year did you take out your loans though? The tilt of the stacking of the deck has gotten markedly more steep in just the last few years.
(I’m not a huge fan of MJ as they skew things as much as any other rag, but it’s the only page I can find on short notice with all the charts and the numbers in them are reasonably accurate even if you don’t read the article.)
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Absolutely correct. Every holder of a useless degree that I’ve ever met got it as a conscious decision because it was the cheapest and it made exactly the same difference in their employment prospects.
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“We’re going to get rid of that taxation because those who earn more already pay more tax and we want to encourage people to follow the path of lifetime education, not put spikes in the road.”
Hmmm while I don’t think that graduates should be expected to cover all of the costs of their further education, I do think that people who go to university should make some sort of direct contribution to the cost of that additional education over and above the additional income tax they pay.
In their late 20s, graduates in the UK earn about 35% more than school leavers (source), about £12/h vs £9/h in 2015. Based on 37.5h per week a graduate is paying an additional £1.9k per year in tax but is taking home an additional £4k after tax.
If £9k tuition fees represent the annual cost of a graduate education, that’s a lot of subsidy being paid to graduates (largely but not exclusively from wealthier backgrounds) by non-graduates (the reverse).
ETA: obviously the additional income tax is paid over many years but university costs are only accrued over 3 or 4 years.
Did you get the merit badge?
Responsible adults aren’t the ones who justify their selfishness like its an honor and then attempt to rub their fortune in the face of those with less.
I got loans and a degree and paid them back too, but that proves nothing about what “kind” of adult I am. Plenty of fine responsible upstanding people find themselves in situations where repayment isn’t possible. There but for the grace of God go I, is what a responsible adult says.
she gets it:
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Don’t know about the UK, but in the US I think people who want tax dollars to cover it all don’t remember that back in the day it was quite elitist. You’re taxing blue collar workers so that their “betters” can get an education and go on to make more money than them. Throw in a large dose of “who decides who gets to go, and tracking is bad” and it’s a shit show same as now. A mix is probably best for all.
It’s the new generation’s equivalent of “back in my day I worked nights and weekends to put myself through school”. I think that possibility ended sometime in the 90s, depending on the school/state.
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If a loan is taken out where the borrower is deceived as to its terms, and there is no reasonable way it is likely to be paid back, the responsibility is on the lender for such predatory underwriting practices. Caveat Emptor only assumes the buyer is in possession of enough information to make a reasonable choice.
When poor underwriting practices and predatory lending become the norm for loans, then prices go up accordingly and the need for the loan becomes greater. It generates its own need for existence. Borrower responsibility has nothing to do with such situations.
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You want to lower the cost of higher education, make student loans dischargable in bankruptcy. Force the student lenders to pay dearly for predatory lending policies with defaults and major losses of revenue.
When there is less easy student loan money around, schools dependent on middle class students drop tuition to keep posteriors in seats. Much like how housing prices dropped when mortgage loans became more sanely underwritten.
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The idea I keep hearing about in the UK is a graduate tax, where only graduates earning a certain amount pay the tax. If you haven’t been to university or are earning below the cap then you don’t pay a penny.
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Actually Ivy league Schools had the lowest rate of tuition increases out of American colleges. Largely due to the lack of dependence on student loan money from its wealthier students. Its the schools catering to the middle classes which had the most ridiculous increases. Much of it due to the decline of state subsidies for public universities (thank you GOP for screwing over the Middle class) and the availability of predatory student lending.
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That’s kind of how the existing system works. You pay 9% on anything earned over about £18k and after 30 years any remaining is written off.
What if there were some way we could directly tax people who make a lot of money more, since they obviously benefited from the systems of the society, but tax people with less income less, as they benefited less?
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The big difference would be that you wouldn’t get harassing letters if you aren’t paying the debt and the money would be going to the tax fund (where it can be put towards any number of things such as welfare) rather than to the loan companies.
I know someone who is disabled and kept getting letters telling her to pay up, even though she was on benefits and exempt. Answering those letters within the time limit (debt collection agencies don’t give a fuck about whether you should be paying or not) used up energy that she couldn’t really afford and left her barely fuctioning for weeks. Eventually she got the debt written off when her doctor wrote a letter saying that she was extremely unlikely to be able to pay anything before 30 years was up.
Also the economists who I have talked to about it were suggesting a minimum income far higher than £18k.
Graduate tax is in addition to income tax, not instead of it
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Wow. This is a great idea! We should call it something like “tax brackets”. 
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“He’s a Philosophy Graduate, so this would of happened any ways.”
I like this approach.
I wish there was some kind of such promise we could make about health care in the US to make the various players realize they will face huge losses if they don’t cooperate to make healthcare affordable.
But what would it be? In a sense Sanders is threatening the Insurance industry by advocating single payer, as well as threatening the hospitals and care givers & drug companies with the prospect of a single tough negotiation, but he does not have the inevitability of a future admin behind the threats.
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I am sure that almost everyone that has a loan is in favor of loan forgiveness. Probably those who have better financial prospects are less desperate for loan forgiveness.
Of course my perspective is from the US system. I have one at university, and my wife was clever enough to plan financially for most of the expenses, with scholarships taking care of the rest. Even so, during the undergraduate registration process, we were filtered into the financial aid office, where they started talking about “grants” that my son had qualified for. But she was talking about loans, even though she never used the word. It is a deliberately deceptive practice, and I wondered what the school gets out of it.
Of course my son will have to pay his scholarship back in the form of service in the military once he gets his MD. And the 539 accounts we funded were not always easy to pay into.
But it sounds to a cynic that Labour got a focus group together, and tried to come up with what promises they could make to various groups in order to secure their support. The prospect of someone erasing your debts is a strong motivator. The realities of actually following through with the promises are less simple.
Does she? Her notebook says “Today education = no job”, yet she still chose to pursue two degrees and the associated debt that comes with them. I wish she would have indicated which degrees she pursued; it would have provided better context. Did she pursue two degrees that are historically unemployable or did she choose degrees in professional fields that are currently experiencing a shortage of workers (of which there are many)? I agree that tuition rates are getting out of control but I wonder how many of today’s students are doing a basic ROI analysis when selecting a field of study.
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Sort of. If you made the top 1% pay (with their 60% of the wealth) their 30% you wouldn’t need to tax her and the working/middle class at 60%.
I’m in favor of government subsidized education. Far better investment than wasteful wars and walls. But education should also be restructured. As it is, it’s both poorly equipped to prepare young adults for the modern world and reinforces a class system where most of those who go to tier one and two schools are wealthy and connected to good patronage, with only a handful admitted on merit alone or as indentured servants for the professional athletic programs schools pretend aren’t pro organizations.
Nor am I saying simply change the admittance standards of top universities, though that would help some. I’m saying look at why the rest of higher education is not preparing their customers (or their children for those whose parents are lucky enough to avoid crushing student loans). It doesn’t have to change overnight, but higher education needs fundamental structural reorganization.
What is not a solution is simply deleting a large part of the debt economy. Whether that debt is owned by private or central banks, it’s got to be paid down and the loan companies closed or forbidden from selling new debt. So if you want debt forgiveness, use taxes to fund it. Merely deleting it will hurt the health of the economy, with ripples that will disproportionately hurt the shrinking middle and working classes while the wealthy take shelter and wait to pick up the pieces.
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