...if I imagine I'm paying off somebody's Harvard debt, I might resent it. But I'm already paying taxes to support the state school system of universities, and I end up paying federal taxes to pay off the student debts for those colleges and universities, and frankly, I'm not happy about that.This is a terrible argument https://t.co/HrNH0viYBu
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2021
Mostly because I remember when state tuition was $4 a semester hour (literally. My biggest tuition bill in college was when I took 18 hours in one semester. Tuition cost me $72. I regularly paid twice as much for books as I did for tuition.). It was cheap because it was a state school. Nowadays the cost of UT-Austin is more per semester than I paid for 7 years of college/graduate school (all at state schools, two years at UT-Austin, where the tuition was the same as the undergraduate school I attended). I took on a whopping debt for law school, which took me a decade to pay off. But it was a private school, I knew what I was getting into.
Today? The cost of public universities is an outrage. It pisses me off I'm paying taxes to support them and they're still bleeding their students white. So, yeah, it's a terrible argument; because it doesn't begin to address the problem.
And the only way out of this problem we've created for ourselves (saddling our children with debts we didn't have to pay, because we don't want to pay taxes now) is to forgive the student debt and set up a system where it isn't necessary any more (unless you just WANT to go to Harvard; and then, as I say, you know what you're getting into).
The cancellation of student debts matched with a federally subsidized apprenticeship program, perhaps?
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I'd welcome is the removal of college requirements from a huge range of jobs where not only is a degree not really needed or adequate, it seems to produce incompetence in real life. A lot of things - including being a musician - are far, far better done through apprenticeship. I was thinking of writing a 100 years after look at Thorstein Veblen's too little known book The Higher Learning in America which is a mix of still relevant practical observation and some kind of offensive elitism. I'd gone there to look at what he said about college athletics due to the recent Supreme Court ruling that said student athletes should or could be paid, along the way I found that a tiny group of schools make instead of lose money over their big-time sports programs. Even back then he noted that the head coaches and their staff were grotesquely over-paid and pampered - you wonder what he'd think of the situation today. If people wanted to really resent something that might be a better thing to be outraged over.