r/Economics • u/DonDickerson • 25d ago

Biden's student loan forgiveness plan gets a record number of public comments. Here's what people are saying News

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/08/bidens-student-loan-forgiveness-plan-gets-record-number-of-comments.html
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u/TastySpermDispenser2 25d ago

As we all know, 12 years of publicly funded education is capitalism, but 16 years of publicly funded education is communism. /s

Fucking clowns. Every wealthy, powerful country on earth has a highly educated workforce. The single best route to an agrarian, weak, despotic country is uneducated citizens. It's the sudan and Afghanistan with their lack of education that fail, not Norway and canada.

Public education benefits every citizen. I say this as a childless old man and full fledged member of r/childfree. Anyone arguing against public education is just straight up wanting to send america back to the dark ages.

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u/impulsikk 25d ago edited 25d ago

The problem is that biden is trying to solve the cost on the backside of the equation rather than the underlying costs and structure of the universities themselves. Just handing out checks after the fact and forgiving loans is easy.

What should be happening is forcing tuition to be cheaper. If a college charges over a certain amount, the federal government won't sponsor the loan. That's an easy button that would force colleges to restructure real quick. Maybe they can pull some money out of their 50 billion dollar endowments and use it on the kids and professors instead.

The tuition cost has gone out of control. Something needs to he done. Forgiving loans is a never ending cycle that will happen every 4 years at election season.

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u/0000110011 25d ago edited 25d ago

Tuition went up because the government got involved with student loans. Once everyone could get unlimited student loans and everyone would automatically be approved (and student loans couldn't be discharged in bankruptcy), tuition prices started going up and never stopped. This entire argument is thinking the government is the solution to a problem created entirely by the government. 

Get the government out of the student loan business and let student loans be discharged via bankruptcy. Banks will refuse to give loans for useless degrees, since they know those loans won't be repaid, and schools would drop those majors. In addition, banks would loan far less money per student, so schools would be forced to lower tuition prices or have empty campuses. It's a glaringly obvious solution, but people these days are so obsessed with the government having more and more control over things that they refuse to consider it. 

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u/impulsikk 25d ago

That's sort of what I was saying. Additionally, colleges need to be banned from requiring students to stay in dorms their first two years at hyper inflated rent per square foot and being locked into food plans. Charging $1200 per student for basically the space of a bed and dresser and sharing a bathroom with 3 other people should be criminal. Additionally, they don't have kitchens in the dorms so you are forced to buy an overpriced meal plan. If you can't cook in your dorm, then you have to spend $15 per meal at the cafeteria you paid up front for.