Student (College) Loans

[saevel25]

11 minutes ago, ChetlovesMer said:

Hey @saevel25

If you know anyone looking for those types of jobs, tell them to move to the Columbus or Dayton area. I have to tell you that right NOW the company I work for can't find anyone willing to take a well paying factory job. Every company I call on (Literally every one of them) is looking for factory workers, and assemblers. If you can pass a drug test, they will even train you. Around here, factory workers and assemblers are in super high demand right now. 

BUT, the number one job opening at all the companies I call on right now... WELDERS! If you can weld and pass a drug test I can get you a job tomorrow at your choice of a dozen places making more than most people with advanced degrees.

I know its a similar situation with plumbers. If you're a plumber, holy cow are you in high demand right now. 

Right now, at this exact moment, at least around here, the trades are really desperate for people. 

I get there are a few here and there. Right now, we are in a strange case were people are choosing to stay out of the work force. The math just doesn't add up when you are talking about a healthy economy with upward mobility. With more advanced automation coming down the line, you could see fast food with only one or two people on shift. Imagine if McDonalds got rid of half their employees? Imagine if every call center went fully automated. Imagine if Amazon decided to use full self driving vehicles direct from their distribution plants? 

The number of people who are going to be out of a job will be staggering. 

I agree, if people like working with their hands, become a welder. It should be something that is pushed in High School as an option. 

[ChetlovesMer]

2 minutes ago, saevel25 said:

Right now, we are in a strange case

Truer words were never spoken... er ... typed. 

[SoCal Hack]

I guess I’m not really smart enough for this topic…Im a retired plumber …my kids now run the company…I bought the company from my dad, the plumber…I leanred early in life that plumbers always work, and that plumbers live in nice houses…I pay my bills - all of them…bought a nice house in the San Fernando Valley area of LA in 1990 for about 300K…today, thru no skill of my own, they say thru comps on my street it’s worth 3 million…should any next buyer have that price “eliminated” because the LA housing market is insane? 
We were commercial plumbers - large housing tracts and big buildings…in this line, you meet a lot of contractors…more than one guy I know who couldn’t go to a traditional bank borrowed money from those in the cement business to get his 75K cement truck.  Do you know who runs the cement business in Los Angeles?  The way I see it, these students are lucky they borrowed from banks…Lou down at the union hall and his buddies in the trades that sometimes make these loans don’t do “loan forgiveness…”

not sure why just being a stand up person and paying your bills is such a controversial topic…that’s it - im back to the golf talk

 

 

[KMP]

3 hours ago, ChetlovesMer said:

Hey @saevel25

If you know anyone looking for those types of jobs, tell them to move to the Columbus or Dayton area. I have to tell you that right NOW the company I work for can't find anyone willing to take a well paying factory job. Every company I call on (Literally every one of them) is looking for factory workers, and assemblers. If you can pass a drug test, they will even train you. Around here, factory workers and assemblers are in super high demand right now. 

BUT, the number one job opening at all the companies I call on right now... WELDERS! If you can weld and pass a drug test I can get you a job tomorrow at your choice of a dozen places making more than most people with advanced degrees.

I know its a similar situation with plumbers. If you're a plumber, holy cow are you in high demand right now. 

Right now, at this exact moment, at least around here, the trades are really desperate for people. 

But most trades do not require a college degree. That goes back to the bifurcation between college prep and trade skill training.

[ChetlovesMer]

6 hours ago, SoCal Hack said:

I guess I’m not really smart enough for this topic…

You are plenty smart enough. You made a nice contribution to the topic. 

[boogielicious]

11 hours ago, Carl3 said:

Making college free is akin to a short-term Universal Basic Income system as it would give people a free ride for a number of years. Everyone could decide to go and party for a number of years on their rich uncle's (Sam) tab. A certain percentage would take it serious, but many would not. You might even see some Amish join in during their Rumspringa 😆. Trust me, I went to The Ohio State University when they took all-comers. 60% did not make it to their sophomore year. It was a huge party for many.

We do basically have free higher education in the US. If you have high enough test scores you can go for free. If you are a great athlete you can go for free.

No country that wants to be on top of the world would subsidize foolish malinvestment. The CCP would not do this. They have about 300M rich/middle class and about 1B peasants. To be a first rate country  you would do the opposite and only allow a select group to to study at a university. We use to put students on tracks in high school, but that became unpopular when we decided not to label people. You had the college track, the skilled trades, and then a group that no one knew what to do with.

80 years ago a high school education would be fairly equivalent to what a 2-year degree might be today. There is a lot of remedial classwork happening at the college level. Why not make the student go back to high school until they are ready to take calculus and until they can read at a 12th grade level? Just look at the normal distribution of intelligence and you will see that most people are below what used to be considered a minimum to do true college-level work, which is about half a standard deviation above the norm. There are about 2.5 to 3 times as many students going to a college than 50 years ago. 

Our country will continue to struggle until we come to our senses. A society can only deny reality for so long. In addition to the high interest in free college and universal basic income (UBI) from our youth, there is also the anti-work (Google this) concepts gaining some traction. Our enemies must be enjoying all of this nonsense being lapped up by our country's youth. Goof off in high school. Take remedial classes at a university for 4 years for free, then get on the UBI bandwagon until the anti-work movement takes hold. Work is for losers.🤣

 

Interesting post, but I think we are deviating with the basic OP theme. Higher education costs too much. When I went to a private college, an engineering school, they told us at orientation that the cost of our four year’s tuition total would equal about our starting salary when we graduated and got a job. For me, that was correct. My starting salary was $28,000 in 1982 and I was at the high end of that class. Tuition summed up to that as well.

Today, the same school has a tuition of $54,000 per year. In their equivalence, the Chem E graduates would need to make $216,000. That ain’t going to happen. They are barely making back one year’s tuition. It is out of control. Even public Universities tuition has escalated far greater than inflation and these are all not-for-profit institutions.

You can say all you want about students would should or should not go on to higher education. College is not needed for everyone. But there are students who did work hard in high school, who are smart enough to be engineers, accountants, nurses, PAs, scientists, IT, etc. who do need the higher education to learn there occupations. College is absolutely needed to prepare students for those jobs. The costs become a huge financial commitment for them even with scholarships and grants.

[saevel25]

1 hour ago, boogielicious said:

Today, the same school has a tuition of $54,000 per year. In their equivalence, the Chem E graduates would need to make $216,000. That ain’t going to happen. They are barely making back one year’s tuition. It is out of control. Even public Universities tuition has escalated far greater than inflation and these are all not-for-profit institutions.

The issue is, public schools have increased the most. 

 

[ChetlovesMer]

1 hour ago, boogielicious said:

Interesting post, but I think we are deviating with the basic OP theme.

Correct.

1 hour ago, boogielicious said:

When I went to a private college, an engineering school, they told us at orientation that the cost of our four year’s tuition total would equal about our starting salary when we graduated and got a job. For me, that was correct.

I got that same speech. Only for me it was a public University for 5 years and it was 1989. ... Also engineering by the way. Can't spell geek without double E. 

 

1 hour ago, boogielicious said:

Higher education costs too much.

College is not needed for everyone.

College is absolutely needed to prepare students for those jobs. The costs become a huge financial commitment for them even with scholarships and grants.

True, true, true. 

My concern is too often when something in this country costs too much people are too quick to say "The government should pay for it." I always prefer to look first at how to reduce the cost of the process. Does it need to cost so much? Can we make the process leaner? What are we actually paying for? How can we get there without pricing out the majority of the population? How can we maintain a free market and capitalism without having certain necessities being only available to the super rich? 

BTW - I don't have the answers. I'm just posing the questions. 

[dsc123]

On 12/5/2021 at 6:57 PM, Shorty said:

Do you have a system where the loan is paid back at a certain percentage of salary once it reaches a certain level?

 

Lots of people here seem to like this idea.  Well, I have good news for you! That's exactly how it works in the US, too.  https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/plans/income-driven

 

I pay a % of my income for 20 years and if there's still a balance after that, its forgiven.  My wife works in a job that is classified as public interest so her balance is forgiven after 10 years of payments. 

[saevel25]

2 minutes ago, dsc123 said:

Lots of people here seem to like this idea.  Well, I have good news for you! That's exactly how it works in the US, too.  https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/plans/income-driven

That is only for Federal Loans right? 

[dsc123]

Just now, saevel25 said:

That is only for Federal Loans right? 

Yes, but that is the vast majority of student loans, I think.  I have an ungodly amount of student loan debt and my private loans were maybe 5% of the total.  I don't know if that's unique.

[dsc123]

You would think that the programs I mentioned would make it easy for people who are struggling to cope with the debt.  But its not that hard to understand that losing 10% of your money would be challenging.   And most jobs people get out of college are in cities and places where its more expensive to live.

The other factor is the magnitude of student loan debt.  Its like having a mortgage but no place to live.  So you pay the mortgage AND go find a place to rent. 

So one factor in the forgiveness debate is making it easier on the borrowers.  The other is freeing all that capital to be spent elsewhere and help grow the economy.

[saevel25]

30 minutes ago, dsc123 said:

But its not that hard to understand that losing 10% of your money would be challenging.   And most jobs people get out of college are in cities and places where its more expensive to live.

IDK, I spent the first 8 years after college required to put 10% into the public retirement account. It did lower my tax burden a bit, but it still is 10% off the top. 

The issue with 10% for 20 years, that is a lot of money that now delays buying a house, saving for retirement, saving for emergencies, starting a family. 

I think we need to fix the price of college first. 

[The Flush]

This article was emailed to me.  Sorry I don't have a link to it.

--------------------------------------------

I thought this opinion piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education (12/13/21) was interesting, and something we've discussed before. The author does not mention that this upper-level salary inflation on the administrative side is pushed partially by the job market for upper-level leaders in all fields, but his points still hold. The Chronicle a for-pay site so consider it an early Christmas present from me. - T

Coaches and Presidents Are Robbing Us Blind: Ballooning Athletics and Administrator Salaries Are Symptoms of the Same Disease.

Earlier this fall, Michigan State University administrators begged their faculty, staff, and graduate students to volunteer to work in the campus’s dining halls, because of a severe shortage of regular workers.

A basic principle of economics is that you can retain workers who might otherwise be inclined to seek alternate employment by improving the terms of their compensation.

Michigan State’s administration had no difficulty applying that principle to its head football coach, Mel Tucker, who last month received a 10-year, $95-million, fully guaranteed contract extension. Even if MSU should at some point wish to part ways with Coach Tucker because he was no longer winning enough games, it would still owe him the remainder of his contract.

An almost identical scenario is playing out in Baton Rouge, where Louisiana State’s administration just hired Brian Kelly away from Notre Dame for an almost identical 10-year, $95-million contract (not including performance incentives). LSU has been under severe financial strain in recent years, as the state’s budget crisis has led to recurrent cuts in its flagship university’s budget.

To get some sense of how radically the economic structure of big-time college athletics has shifted, look back at a New York Times story from January 1982 reporting that Jackie Sherrill had just signed on as Texas A&M’s new football coach for the then-shocking sum of $280,000 per year. “According to the best estimates of several officials with a broad knowledge of higher-education matters,” the article notes, “no other person has ever received so much pay from an American university.”

That was almost certainly the case. A broad-based study of the compensation of college and university presidents at that time found a mean compensation of $63,501, with no president making more than $118,000. Meanwhile, Sherrill’s new salary nearly doubled the highest pay any college football coach had received to that point.

The Consumer Price Index has nearly tripled over the past 40 years, so naturally we must adjust such figures for inflation. In real, inflation-adjusted dollars, the contracts signed by Tucker and Kelly are nearly 20 times as large as Sherrill’s six-year deal for $1.7 million, which at the time sent shock waves through American higher education.

Even more striking: There are now significant numbers of administrators in America’s colleges and universities who are being paid, in real dollars, more than the highest-paid university president was receiving when I was an undergraduate, in the early 1980s — in quite a few cases, many multiples more.

Those two facts are not independent of each other. The grotesque explosion in pay for college football and men’s basketball coaches is a product of the same social forces that have resulted in some university administrators’ being paid millions of dollars per year, a rate of compensation that would have been inconceivable a generation ago, even adjusting for inflation.

And the outrageous athletics salaries can even seem to justify the administrative overpay. By a kind of perverse psychological effect, paying a college football coach $10 million per year makes paying a university president $1.5 million, a provost $800,000, and various vice provosts and vice chancellors $500,000 each seem positively parsimonious by comparison.

The capture of collegiate athletics — and of American higher education in general — by the most rapacious forms of contemporary capitalism is reflected by the extent to which making as much money as fast as possible has become the largely unquestioned goal of institutions that were created for quite different purposes. (My alma mater — the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor — provides a particularly startling illustration of those trends. The university’s endowment is now nearly 150 times as large as it was when I graduated, in 1982.)

That these institutions nevertheless continue to operate as tax-exempt charitable enterprises, while paying the athletes and contingent faculty members who generate the revenue that funds those enormous salaries little or nothing, is increasingly indefensible.

--Paul Campos

[DewSweeper09]

If you voluntarily borrow money, and sign a contract with terms to borrow money, why should you deserve that it be forgiven and you don’t pay your loan? Makes no sense.

 

it’s nothing more than a political move to buy votes.

[The Flush]

We shouldn't let businesses file bankruptcy either. They knew what they were getting into.

[boogielicious]

15 hours ago, DewSweeper09 said:

If you voluntarily borrow money, and sign a contract with terms to borrow money, why should you deserve that it be forgiven and you don’t pay your loan? Makes no sense.

 

it’s nothing more than a political move to buy votes.

Let’s leave politics out of this please. There are issues of predatory lending that have to be considered, but yes I agree that when you sign that contract you are responsible for the repayment.

[Vinsk]

17 hours ago, DewSweeper09 said:

If you voluntarily borrow money, and sign a contract with terms to borrow money, why should you deserve that it be forgiven and you don’t pay your loan? Makes no sense.

 

it’s nothing more than a political move to buy votes.

Unfortunately it’s not always that black and white. I’ve hesitated to even comment on this thread as it’s so disastrously painful. There are institutions that acted downright criminally. And good luck going against a multi-billion dollar corporation with ties to all the resources they need. It’s disgusting what they’ve gotten away with. So yeah, many of us deserve forgiveness beyond what I can even discuss here.