I do not think it means what you think it means.
As long as we're playing Somebody Else's Money, what are you going to do for me, Leninist? I paid off my student loan debt; is "Wall Street" going to cut me a check for a couple hundred grand or whatever it was? Or do I just get a letter robotically "signed" by you thanking me for taking one for the team, as they say? Why is government-sanctioned robbery ever a good thing?
And while I've got you, you babbling old fool, why just student loan debt, Bernie? Why not all debt, everywhere? I've got credit card debt that you'd need to sell one of your three houses to pay off, he's paying off a car, she's paying off her one and only house and $e sure as hell can't pay for $er abortion what with that Gender Studies Masters $e still owes for.
As long as we're playing Somebody Else's Money, what are you going to do for me, Leninist? I paid off my student loan debt; is "Wall Street" going to cut me a check for a couple hundred grand or whatever it was? Or do I just get a letter robotically "signed" by you thanking me for taking one for the team, as they say? Why is government-sanctioned robbery ever a good thing?
And while I've got you, you babbling old fool, why just student loan debt, Bernie? Why not all debt, everywhere? I've got credit card debt that you'd need to sell one of your three houses to pay off, he's paying off a car, she's paying off her one and only house and $e sure as hell can't pay for $er abortion what with that Gender Studies Masters $e still owes for.
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Oh, the buzzin' of the bees in the cigarette trees
The soda water fountain
Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings
In that Big Rock Candy Mountain
On a summer day in the month of May
A burly bum came a hiking
Down a shady lane through the sugar cane
He was looking for his liking
As he strolled along he sang a song of the land of milk and honey
Where a bum can stay for many a day
And he won't need any money
Oh, the buzzin' of the bees in the cigarette trees
The soda water fountain
Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings
In that Big Rock Candy Mountain
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain
The cops have wooden legs
The bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
The barns are full of hay…
Vote for Bernie!! Whoop whoop!
The bloat and inefficiency of higher education is a scandal and I'll wager the bankruptcy laws are excessively severe in re student loan debt (Megan McArdle and Donald McClarey have written on the subject). That having been said, the average student loan debtor has a balance of about $45,000. Paying off that balance over 10 years at current interest rates would require annual payments of about $6,600, which amounts to 11%-14% of the annual cash compensation paid out to a typical elementary schoolteacher or nurse, post-tax. It's an important expense, but not an insuperable one.
Then there is always doing a stint in the Service, first. My BS in Engineering was made possible by the GI Bill. I graduated without any debt. It helped that in 1972, in-state tuition was still quite reasonable.
In 2017, tuition revenue per full-time-equivalent student was a mean of just shy of $7,200 per year at public institutions. In 1980, the same measure was about $840 per year. So, it stood at 9.6% of nominal personal disposable income per capita in 1980 and 15.8% of nominal personal disposable income per capita in 2017. So, yes, more expensive for the client. What's distressing is that post-secondary schooling hoovers up a notably larger share of the youth population now than it did in 1980. Fall enrollment (FTE) in 1980 was 6.6 million, whereas it was 10.5 million in 2017. There has not been a secular increase in the size of birth cohorts in the last seventy years, though the number of resident immigrants among the late adolescent and young adult population has increased (and schools public and private also recruit on average about 3.5% of their students from abroad), but the foreign born account for only about 12.5% of those in the college-age cohorts. The thing is, the deeper you dive into that youth cohort, the more you reach students who are less capable in the classroom. It's a reasonable wager the marginal utility of that degree (measured in the PV of future earnings) is rather less pronounced among the lower strata of student. You're charging everyone more but getting students for whom the increment to their earning power is less pronounced (in raw terms if not in % terms).
AD,
College has become a big business, especially since federally-backed loans became available. Now the colleges try to keep and increase market-share and keep the revenue flowing in. For individual departments, it's all about keeping jobs and enhancing one's position within the college community. Whether or not the students can use their degrees is a minor consideration.
Whether or not the students can use their degrees is a minor consideration.
About 60% of all degrees are awarded in vocational subjects (business disciplines, schoolteaching, nursing, physical education, IT, &c). Just shy of 10% are awarded in natural sciences, mathematics, computer / information science, economics, geography, or statistics. Some of the students studying the performing arts, humanities, non-quantitative social sciences are assembling an adequate foundation for more practical post-baccalaureate education. Others, enrolled at quite selective schools, are at least assembling a satisfactory labor-market signal.
Among the real problems are that a great deal of their time is frittered away on assembling distribution credits, that departments schedule courses for faculty convenience (with students getting caught up short when a crucial course is filled up or not offered in a given semester), that curricula are commonly mapped out with the left hand (again, the imperative being what's convenient for faculty), that resources are frittered away on patronage for privileged political interests, &c. The whole degree architecture and personnel system require revamping.
NB, in 1928, about 6% of each cohort attended colleges, universities, or professional schools. Another increment attended junior colleges, teachers colleges, and hospital diploma programs for nursing. Only in discrete realms was it the case that higher education was tasked with sorting the labor market. Nowadays, it's the main mode of so doing (in part because employment testing has been all but prohibited consequent to -ur- creative interpretations of employment discrimination law. Get rid of employment discrimination law and you remove an important buttress of the system.
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