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I really think that if we were to pare government back down to just what's authorized in the constitution then we wouldn't have near the problems we have.
But even if we did, we'd be able to deal with them rather than being forced to sit and watch while government prevents us from acting.
Take student loans, for example.
This is a problem caused by government interference in the marketplace.
It's probably not going to be solved by the government DOING something.
It's also not going to be solved by "fuck those people".
You're not helping.
It's not going to be solved if you cannot comprehend that the conditions when your boomer ass got your degree do not, and have not, existed for a while now.
But remember what I said about the government fucking around in the marketplace?
It was their policies that drove many places to require a degree, ANY degree, in jobs that don't really require any formal education. All because the bell curve is real and too many people of a politically protected class couldn't a pre-employment aptitude test.
The degree, ANY degree, became a proxy for such testing.
A bachelor's in underwater basket weaving became as valuable as a doctorate in advanced mathematics to land one of these jobs and was a lot easier to get.
Have you noticed that you need to get a master's today to land a job that needed a bachelor's 30 years ago?
I noticed that my associate's stopped being good enough to get mechanical design jobs 20 years ago, despite ten years experience doing the job. Now that job requires a bachelor's in mechanical engineering where the engineer will never use most of what they learned.
Real engineering jobs are needing master's and getting ever more demanding of narrow specializations...
At least that was the trend when I got laid off when the ham-fisted response to 9/11 killed the contracts keeping the doors open were cancelled.
But the point is the market is distorted and requires active work to unfuck it.
I would also like to point out that while this slow motion education train-wreck was unfolding, the loudest voices opposed to any action to alleviate student loan debts said nothing.
The internet is forever. Your blog is old enough to have made mention of when it started.
You. Said. Nothing.
You were blind sided as hard as the kid who just realized that a degree in anything doesn't land a job they couldn't get before getting the degree (but without the debt).
Admit it.
The actual solution is the oldest one.
Bankruptcy.
I know why this is unthinkable, do you?
The reason it's unthinkable is the same reason you're complaining so loudly. The idea that the wealthiest debtors are getting more benefit than the poorest.
ReplyDeleteThat's true if you look at the amount borrowed.
It is not true if you compare the amount owed to the wages earned.
The people who got the easy degree because ANY degree was valuable enough to get a job that could repay the loans got trapped in a one-two punch of government aid inflating the price of a degree past what the "any degree job" could pay AND easy access to said degrees devaluing the degree and thus the earning potential of that degree.
Again, while you were silent on the issue 10, 20 or 30 years ago, you let it happen. It happened in your name. You told your kids to get that education. To get that degree. You didn't advocate for the trades, Mike Rowe knows you're lying.
All of what you say here is true. Another factor is that colleges and universities upped their tuitions in exact time with the increases in student loan availability. When I went to St. Olaf, it was considered fairly expensive at about $6000. Even with inflation, tuitions have soared unconscionably; what I used to pay for a year at St. Olaf now pays for a semester at a local no-name college for my nephew.
ReplyDeleteIf they'd used that money to improve their instructional capabilities, I might be able to understand. Instead, they added layers upon layers of useless administration, built luxurious new buildings they didn't always need, and kept deadwood faculty on-staff rather than retiring them. They also whipped up the students into frenzies over irrelevancies, pointing them at every left-wing cause the professors supported, to keep them from asking WHY, in colleges and universities that prided themselves on the world-class scholars they had on their faculties, they, the students, the people the college was SUPPOSED to be all about, were fobbed off with being taught by half-trained, overworked, paid-peanuts TAs.
I would love to make the colleges and universities eat those debts. Particularly because a lot of them deliberately sold naive 18- and 19-year-olds on majors that are unsalable in the job market. This is exploitation little different to the way they exploit their "student athletes." They dazzle naive kids with the chance to make Big Bux, whether in the job market or in "da proze," and all too often, dump them out when they're done with unusable degrees, or no degrees at all in the case of athletes who're injured.
My recollection is that in the early 90s then Senator Biden sponsored the bill that made student loan debt non-dischargeable by bankruptcy and touched off the explosion in college costs.
ReplyDeleteI'm grew up a working class kid. College out of reach until student loans made it possible. The plebes could now afford college, so the companies raised the bar; bachelor degrees became the new high school diploma. So we all got bachelor degrees. Then the companies raised the bar again, and now master degrees are the the new high school diploma.
ReplyDeleteMake higher education easier for people like me to to obtain and the they raise the bar, and raise the bar, and keep raising the bar. It's as is if they don't want peasants like me in their white collar six-figured salary club. Fine. How about bringing some back to decent paying blue color jobs, then? Oh, wait, they exported those out of the country. -JKing
Sorry to comment twice, but you CAN'T declare student loans on your bankruptcy filing. -JKing
ReplyDeleteI am aware that, at present, you cannot. That's why I'm suggesting it as a solution.
DeleteBut the shibboleth about rich people benefiting most is WHY you cannot discharge a student loan via bankruptcy. The same shibboleth we're seeing again about forgiveness.
The first thing that needs to be realized is those loans are not going to be paid back. Ever.
The second thing is the taxpayer is already paying on defaulted loans, it's just a line in the ledger saying someone owes, eventually.