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On November 09 2020 22:57 KT_Elwood wrote:
Biology in general seems to be furthest away from math, coding, engineering and the typical techy STEM skillsets.
Off course the specializations into the physics and chemistry aspect of "life" are very diffrent from the ones that count brown cows in guatemala and asking how their day has been so far. :D
Anyone with a biology degree, particularly if it's at a graduate level, has to do extensive statistical analysis, coding, etc.
It's almost impossible to avoid that side of academia anymore when you are in any science-related field. Even my wife, who is getting her doctorate in psychology, has to study and then actually perform a depressing amount of statistics (she absolutely hates math of all types and I hear about it endlessly).
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On November 09 2020 09:57 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2020 09:33 Nevuk wrote:
Also, when people say STEM, they mean the TE. Science and math jobs have shit pay and worse openings. Humanities degrees frequently have higher earnings than STEM degrees.
Math majors don't really have much difficulty applying for "T" and "E" positions. The difference between a math major that can demonstrate a proficient coding background (which many do) and a CS major is pretty small as far as applying for tech jobs, especially since most "computer science" you learn in college is either a) basic development skills that can be self-taught by someone with a reasonable level of aptitude, or b) specialized applications of generalized mathematics principles that math majors will develop as part of their own major anyway. I've seen a lot of math and physics majors end up in entry-level IT or software development positions 1-2 years out of college.
True, but that's not the degree helping out. That's having self-taught yourself coding and lucking out that your degree is similar to some people's perceptions of CS degrees (unless all of these people intended to be app developers with a physics degree?).
(I'm also not grouping stats or actuarial degrees, just pure math degrees. The demand for those specifically is quite small).
I'm mostly railing against the fetishization of STEM degrees.
PS: If by Entry-level IT, you mean tech support, then I wouldn't be grouping that in with desirable jobs.
FWIW, I think philosophy is the most useful degree for application development that doesn't explicitly teach programming. It's one that explicitly deals with problem solving, which is not actually true of many STEM degrees, which do it tangentially (word problems vs dissecting word problems, basically). The logic courses required for a philosophy degree are much more useful for programming than any math past algebra 1.
Here's some data on the subject :
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economic-guide-to-picking-a-college-major/
Stem degrees do earn more, but not by a very large amount. A median earnings CS is 40$/hr vs 32$/hr for english lit (as of 2014 - I'd love to see some more recent data on the subject). The unemployment rate is slightly higher, but not greatly. The biggest exception is psychology, which was a very glutted field last I read about it.
(And many of the lowest earning degrees are science)
Philosophy and english majors have a pretty stark high/low earning divide, though, and I've read some research that they only exceed STEM degrees with a grad degree, and that they match on average since so many have Grad or Law school degrees.
The other basic sciences e.g. biology/chemistry are further away from being able to get into tech, but likewise also have inroads into medicine/healthcare (though most of those jobs like nursing/dentistry/physicians require additional schooling).
Yes, but that's true of all degrees - with 2 years of additional schooling, you can be a master's and have more doors opened. Of course, that ranges from 50k to 150k extra debt, depending on the extra degree (medical being more).
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On November 09 2020 18:54 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2020 10:20 LegalLord wrote:On November 09 2020 09:57 TheYango wrote:On November 09 2020 09:33 Nevuk wrote:
Also, when people say STEM, they mean the TE. Science and math jobs have shit pay and worse openings. Humanities degrees frequently have higher earnings than STEM degrees.
Math majors don't really have much difficulty applying for "T" and "E" positions. The difference between a math major that can demonstrate a proficient coding background (which many do) and a CS major is pretty small as far as applying for tech jobs, especially since most "computer science" you learn in college is either a) basic development skills that can be self-taught by someone with a reasonable level of aptitude, or b) specialized applications of generalized mathematics principles that math majors will develop as part of their own major anyway. I've seen a lot of math and physics majors end up in entry-level IT or software development positions 1-2 years out of college. The other basic sciences e.g. biology/chemistry are further away from being able to get into tech, but likewise also have inroads into medicine/healthcare (though most of those jobs like nursing/dentistry/physicians require additional schooling and therefore additional student debt). Working in insurance or a pivot into some meaningful specialty of software was the outcome I saw for the best of the math majors I knew. A couple stuck it out and became career academics. Some also-rans with a little programming experience went into unspecialized software like web development. Thing is, even then you have to be of the right couple of specialties, like computation or statistics. Study something like education, topology, or algebra? Tough shit, that’s going to give you little to nothing for a potential pivot to cross-field employment. Overall, the math folks I know had generally worse career outcomes than the TE ones. Medicine is a path that is more obviously narrow than “learn to code” so not much needs to be said there. As someone who works in the scientific side of the software industry, I'd say math and physics, regardless of specialization, are completely okay if they want to pivot to software engineering. In fact, physics and math majors are probably more desirable for many of the harder math jobs (e.g. anything that includes statistics or algebra) than CS majors.
From what I've seen it's a story where "the smart ones" can easily make the transition. Then again, the smartest ones would have already realized that math and physics are a career dead end and moved on to software, lol. I do know from several colleagues who did said transition that it usually came with an at least 5 year stint on the low-pay circuit before anyone was willing to offer market rate for them to write software. If they never learned the basics of software, usually longer.
All that said, it is an alarmingly common career path these days, because there aren't enough jobs to go around anywhere else. Usually a lot more efficient to start in software and not have to worry about crossing over, and with a higher success rate to boot.
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On November 09 2020 10:02 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2020 09:35 Starlightsun wrote:On November 09 2020 09:20 FlaShFTW wrote:On November 09 2020 08:57 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2020 08:41 BisuDagger wrote:On November 09 2020 08:18 KlaCkoN wrote:
Thought:
There seems to be pretty universal support in this thread for forgiving (or ending mandatory repayments, or some version thereof) student debt. This is portrayed as a leftist or progressive proposal, however the US is one of the countries in the world with the highest wage premiums for college attendance, this feel quite jarring to me.
Focusing state resources so that the professional middle class can buy single family homes a few years earlier is certainly a vote winner but it doesn't do anything about the underlying class structure. If anything I think part of the reason the old social democratic parties in Europe fell from grace is that they forgot who they were supposed to represent.
So rather than forgiving 50-200k in debt for people who already have obtained 4 year degrees what about giving 50-200k in grants or cheaply financed loans for people _without_ college degrees. This can be used to fund adult professional education in fields that are deemed in demand, or to offset housing or health care costs, or whatever else.
Further the cash component of any welfare programs could be greatly expanded.
The goal of these policies should in my opinion be to spend resources to decrease the quality of living gap between the college educated professional middle class and the lower classes who lack college education.
And sure, I am aware that there are a _lot_ of people with college education who are struggling. That doesnt change the fact that people without college education on average struggle significantly more, and a 'left' party should be representing the working classes, not the professional ones. (Of course in truth the Democrats are primarily a liberal party representing educated professionals and workers dont really have representation in the American system but when talking 'left' or 'progressive' policy in my opinion the goal should be to change that.) There is not universal support in this thread. Some of us are just reading everyone’s opinions quietly. I took out $100k in student loans, got a computer science degree, and paid off my debt in 5 years by working hard and not spending my money on needless stuff. No cable television or phone with data plan and I still don’t have either despite doing well in life now. Before my loan I worked minimum wage full time for two years at a different college before picking a path and going all in on it. I think student loan debt is a product of the ill educated or ill prepared. Most students have no idea what an interest rate means before they get into college and take out these variable loans without thinking. It’s the same problem with home owners too. There should be classes taken by banks before even applying for a loan. People take these loans out and don’t understand their responsibilities to them. It’s not free money. I’m open to the idea of more financial government support for college level education, but when you take out a loan that’s you making a promise that you better be willing to fulfill (sans terrible or tragic luck). It’s weird to me that in one post you argue that many were insufficiently informed to understand what they were signing and practically children before concluding that they should be bound to the maximum extent of their contractual obligations. It seems the most dickish stance to take. You could have argued that they knew what they were doing and should be forced to hold up their end. You could have argued that they didn’t know what they were doing and shouldn’t be forced to hold up their end. But instead you argued that they were taken advantage of, but should still be punished for that ignorance. Adding in that you’d feel like you got a bad deal if they weren’t hurt because you paid off yours is also classic American hazing mentality. Making things better for other people is apparently bad because then they won’t have to suffer the way you did. It’s a weird flagellation where people who suffered for good things hate to see other people having them without also suffering. I'll agree with Kwark's last point, that just because you managed to pay off your debt, that loan forgiveness would cause your social standing to fall and you would be injured. In fact, that is not exactly the case, society is benefited from not haveing to pay back those enormous student loans. Do I agree with much of Bisudagger's stance that people should be more educated before the blindly go into college? Yes. I also believe that useless degrees DO EXIST, contrary to what many other people might think. Examples are things like how STEM, especially computer science these days, are more valuable to our society than things like the humanities. As a political science major, I really only have a few choices in life, become a professor, go into politics for life as a staffer/think-tank, or go to law school. I chose the last option because I believe law school is the most flexible of all those options. But people don't realize the futures they have when they jump into university and pick a major. We should do a better job of educating, and I believe strongly that high schools need to do a better job of connecting their students with real adults/alumni who are in the real world and can explain to them what it's like. I think there's a very large common trend in this thread: education is king, and more education can literally do no harm, because it pushes better, but more convoluted policies into the forefront, and it allows people to make smarter choices in just about every aspect of their lives. Yeah I think we need to have more robust trade school options and remove the social stigma from them. There's so many kids in college that really don't belong or want to be there yet are paying tens of thousands for it. Our profit-seeking model of college is like the other side of the coin of our for-profit prisons. Both are losing sight of their purpose to society because of profit being the biggest goal. A lot of people aren’t well suited for those industries, it’s not a catch-all solution but yes I do agree they shouldn’t be stigmatised either. Employers in white collar jobs being imbeciles are a big part of the problem. They complain about people coming from college not having sufficient skills for the workplace, but yet they insist on college degrees for really basic shit. Or prior experience that you can’t get because of the aforementioned. I’ve had some of the most infuriating interviews outside of a Donald Trump one, I once didn’t get a gig because I hadn’t used Excel in an office scenario before, despite explaining that I converted an Excel spreadsheet into a functioning SQL-based database with tiered user access permissions at my volunteer gig. People absolutely do make bad decisions in life, some people have bad circumstances to mitigated some don’t. So yeah we can’t account for all of that. But we’re talking about young people in their formative adult years, who aren’t educated properly in terms of career progression, money management and a whole host of vital life skills, with a culture that really pushes going to college and a job market that makes it almost a prerequisite for many jobs where it’s totally unnecessary. Kind of hard to make the right decision with all those factors there, for many people anyway. I dropped out on a 2/1 honours degree due to intolerable stress, partly from having a mewling child, partly due to then undiagnosed bipolar disorder which I ended up in hospital for for a full year in 2015. A bad decision to be fair, albeit somewhat explicable. A lot of debt accrued there too (the joys of that side of bipolar), but hey managed vaguely to get on top of that. A few years of shit tier work with no stability and no luck in the job hunt whatsoever. Back at school now, early doors but I’m maintaining first class honours grades life is vaguely balanced, my condition is balanced. I’d initially wanted to go into academia with politics, so I didn’t just randomly go into school with no ideas. Aside from the illness I did discover that I’m kind of a generalist, shifting gears and combining multiple interests where I can, just mixing things up works quite well for me. Probably partly a bipolar thing too, but yeah even if I’d got the grades I’d wanted the singular focus of academia probably wasn’t for me (my baby momma and best friend are both academics and I’ve lived their lives by proxy). Computer science (although I’m going to be streamlining into software engineering) suits my current temperament a lot better. Always some factoid to pick up or something interesting to do. In my teens I was a decently comp-literate guy but I’d sort of perceived pushing that on was only something for the ‘real’ computer nerds. Perhaps it’s something of a bias of mine, but hey. There weren’t many decisions I made looking back that were particularly bad given information I had at the time. The bias would come from well, what if I was American, I have those student debts from first time round, had my health issues and then a horrible experience in job hunting, well where’s my rope ladder out of the pit? I’d be saddled with way, way more debt in the first place and how on Earth would I finance a second degree with both a terrible credit score and higher fees?
I went through something very similar twice in my life, though a bit more spread out, so I can give the american perspective on what happens.
(Though I avoided hospitalization even if it would have been a very good idea at one point, exactly for cost concerns).
In 2011 I went through a bout of MDD and took a 6 month hiatus from college, dropping out of my major one class from finishing my major's requirements. It took me until 2013 to finish the degree, which I did long distance after moving back in with one of my parents. I then floated from shitty job to shitty job until late 2014, as I refused to finish my specific major and got one of the few legitimately really useless undergrads (General Education).
Then at the end of 2014 I wound up with another bout of MDD, tried new meds and got serotonin sickness and trembling. Then I lost my job, lost insurance, and had to move back in with my parent who lived 140 miles away (on top of ending a long-term relationship and a bed bug infestation). I then had to go off an extremely high dose of xanax that had been prescribed to me.
I couldn't even taper off normally because medicaid (my only option) effectively refuses to cover xanax for any reason (not a BAD idea, per se, but the way I went off it was legitimately quite dangerous). This is not exactly intentional, but only 2 psychiatrists in the entire state accepted medicaid and neither was accepting new patients. Recovering from that took up my life for about another year.
To resolve my shitty degree I went back for a master's in 2017... which taught me nothing that I use in my current job, but was proof that I was capable of it (app development... when I had learned to program in 6th grade and knew four programming languages before starting the degree). The master's cost $60k but made my salary go from $12k to $70k/year.
However, I am extremely lucky because I come from a somewhat wealthy family on one side. My undergrad debts were 95% covered and in the long run I'm well aware that if I have a truly unexpected expense, that I can beg (which is admittedly extremely unpleasant) and have it paid for me, and that if I had healthcare costs they would generally be covered no question (which was how I covered a few visits to a psychiatrist). Medicaid also would not be an option in a ton of states.
So at the end of it I'm in debt something close to $72k (due to interest and some really strange requirements from my college that I get a mean plan at one point). The main reason student debt is so weird is that you can't discharge it, ever, through any means.
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How long do you have to pay off the debt? Until it is fully paid?
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On November 10 2020 00:32 Sr18 wrote:
How long do you have to pay off the debt? Until it is fully paid?
If you do "income based repayment" on federal student loans, you pay a fraction of your income until 20 years are up and then the remainder is forgiven. That's what I'm doing. It really sucks and is one of the many reasons moving to another country is very appealing. Income based repayment is based on your taxable income. When you live abroad, the first $100k of income isn't taxed by the US government. So you essentially pay a fraction of an extremely low income.
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On November 09 2020 19:30 Acrofales wrote:
Regarding debt relief: while I understand there are some different rules regarding how student loans are treated legally which may merit treating it differently, but I don't see how it being owned by the government makes it categorically different from other loans. If the government decided it wanted to forgive credit card debt, it would not be hard for them to buy credit card debt from the banks and then forgive it all. Or mortgages, car loans, etc etc.
It does help that the president can forgive some student loan debt without legislative approval - primarily the debt that isn't being paid. Congress has control of the budget, and if you don't affect the budget (e.g. saying that money you're not getting is money that is no longer owed) it really is a lot easier to do. If you straight-up cut out the entire body of student loans, though, now you have to finance what those loans paid for a different way. In this case, student loan incomes pay for financial support to the next generation of students, so where does that funding come from if not current loans?
The moral hazards of expensive education are still alive and well, and the reasons that costs are so high are very directly caused by poor policy. Forgiving loans without solving the policy problem is just a waste of a good trillion dollars of government income.
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On November 10 2020 00:32 Sr18 wrote:
How long do you have to pay off the debt? Until it is fully paid?
Whatever I haven't paid is forgiven after 25years (it may vary from 20-25 depending on the loan)
You can do income-based repayment and not have to pay if you make less than a certain amount (this is how I was able to save up some money. That amount is 150% of the poverty line).
All of the repayments based on income methods are based around 20-25 year repayments, btw.
Income-driven repayment plans have different repayment periods.
REPAYE Plan
20 years if all loans you’re repaying under the plan were received for undergraduate study
25 years if any loans you’re repaying under the plan were received for graduate or professional study
PAYE Plan
20 years
IBR Plan
20 years if you’re a new borrower on or after July 1, 2014
25 years if you’re not a new borrower on or after July 1, 2014
ICR Plan
25 years
https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/plans/income-driven
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Watch out for the tax hit on forgiven debt, friendly reminder 
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That seems fair and balanced, assuming the monthly sum that has to be repaid according to the income based calculation is reasonable. Or am I missing something?
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On November 09 2020 23:58 Nevuk wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2020 10:02 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2020 09:35 Starlightsun wrote:On November 09 2020 09:20 FlaShFTW wrote:On November 09 2020 08:57 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2020 08:41 BisuDagger wrote:On November 09 2020 08:18 KlaCkoN wrote:
Thought:
There seems to be pretty universal support in this thread for forgiving (or ending mandatory repayments, or some version thereof) student debt. This is portrayed as a leftist or progressive proposal, however the US is one of the countries in the world with the highest wage premiums for college attendance, this feel quite jarring to me.
Focusing state resources so that the professional middle class can buy single family homes a few years earlier is certainly a vote winner but it doesn't do anything about the underlying class structure. If anything I think part of the reason the old social democratic parties in Europe fell from grace is that they forgot who they were supposed to represent.
So rather than forgiving 50-200k in debt for people who already have obtained 4 year degrees what about giving 50-200k in grants or cheaply financed loans for people _without_ college degrees. This can be used to fund adult professional education in fields that are deemed in demand, or to offset housing or health care costs, or whatever else.
Further the cash component of any welfare programs could be greatly expanded.
The goal of these policies should in my opinion be to spend resources to decrease the quality of living gap between the college educated professional middle class and the lower classes who lack college education.
And sure, I am aware that there are a _lot_ of people with college education who are struggling. That doesnt change the fact that people without college education on average struggle significantly more, and a 'left' party should be representing the working classes, not the professional ones. (Of course in truth the Democrats are primarily a liberal party representing educated professionals and workers dont really have representation in the American system but when talking 'left' or 'progressive' policy in my opinion the goal should be to change that.) There is not universal support in this thread. Some of us are just reading everyone’s opinions quietly. I took out $100k in student loans, got a computer science degree, and paid off my debt in 5 years by working hard and not spending my money on needless stuff. No cable television or phone with data plan and I still don’t have either despite doing well in life now. Before my loan I worked minimum wage full time for two years at a different college before picking a path and going all in on it. I think student loan debt is a product of the ill educated or ill prepared. Most students have no idea what an interest rate means before they get into college and take out these variable loans without thinking. It’s the same problem with home owners too. There should be classes taken by banks before even applying for a loan. People take these loans out and don’t understand their responsibilities to them. It’s not free money. I’m open to the idea of more financial government support for college level education, but when you take out a loan that’s you making a promise that you better be willing to fulfill (sans terrible or tragic luck). It’s weird to me that in one post you argue that many were insufficiently informed to understand what they were signing and practically children before concluding that they should be bound to the maximum extent of their contractual obligations. It seems the most dickish stance to take. You could have argued that they knew what they were doing and should be forced to hold up their end. You could have argued that they didn’t know what they were doing and shouldn’t be forced to hold up their end. But instead you argued that they were taken advantage of, but should still be punished for that ignorance. Adding in that you’d feel like you got a bad deal if they weren’t hurt because you paid off yours is also classic American hazing mentality. Making things better for other people is apparently bad because then they won’t have to suffer the way you did. It’s a weird flagellation where people who suffered for good things hate to see other people having them without also suffering. I'll agree with Kwark's last point, that just because you managed to pay off your debt, that loan forgiveness would cause your social standing to fall and you would be injured. In fact, that is not exactly the case, society is benefited from not haveing to pay back those enormous student loans. Do I agree with much of Bisudagger's stance that people should be more educated before the blindly go into college? Yes. I also believe that useless degrees DO EXIST, contrary to what many other people might think. Examples are things like how STEM, especially computer science these days, are more valuable to our society than things like the humanities. As a political science major, I really only have a few choices in life, become a professor, go into politics for life as a staffer/think-tank, or go to law school. I chose the last option because I believe law school is the most flexible of all those options. But people don't realize the futures they have when they jump into university and pick a major. We should do a better job of educating, and I believe strongly that high schools need to do a better job of connecting their students with real adults/alumni who are in the real world and can explain to them what it's like. I think there's a very large common trend in this thread: education is king, and more education can literally do no harm, because it pushes better, but more convoluted policies into the forefront, and it allows people to make smarter choices in just about every aspect of their lives. Yeah I think we need to have more robust trade school options and remove the social stigma from them. There's so many kids in college that really don't belong or want to be there yet are paying tens of thousands for it. Our profit-seeking model of college is like the other side of the coin of our for-profit prisons. Both are losing sight of their purpose to society because of profit being the biggest goal. A lot of people aren’t well suited for those industries, it’s not a catch-all solution but yes I do agree they shouldn’t be stigmatised either. Employers in white collar jobs being imbeciles are a big part of the problem. They complain about people coming from college not having sufficient skills for the workplace, but yet they insist on college degrees for really basic shit. Or prior experience that you can’t get because of the aforementioned. I’ve had some of the most infuriating interviews outside of a Donald Trump one, I once didn’t get a gig because I hadn’t used Excel in an office scenario before, despite explaining that I converted an Excel spreadsheet into a functioning SQL-based database with tiered user access permissions at my volunteer gig. People absolutely do make bad decisions in life, some people have bad circumstances to mitigated some don’t. So yeah we can’t account for all of that. But we’re talking about young people in their formative adult years, who aren’t educated properly in terms of career progression, money management and a whole host of vital life skills, with a culture that really pushes going to college and a job market that makes it almost a prerequisite for many jobs where it’s totally unnecessary. Kind of hard to make the right decision with all those factors there, for many people anyway. I dropped out on a 2/1 honours degree due to intolerable stress, partly from having a mewling child, partly due to then undiagnosed bipolar disorder which I ended up in hospital for for a full year in 2015. A bad decision to be fair, albeit somewhat explicable. A lot of debt accrued there too (the joys of that side of bipolar), but hey managed vaguely to get on top of that. A few years of shit tier work with no stability and no luck in the job hunt whatsoever. Back at school now, early doors but I’m maintaining first class honours grades life is vaguely balanced, my condition is balanced. I’d initially wanted to go into academia with politics, so I didn’t just randomly go into school with no ideas. Aside from the illness I did discover that I’m kind of a generalist, shifting gears and combining multiple interests where I can, just mixing things up works quite well for me. Probably partly a bipolar thing too, but yeah even if I’d got the grades I’d wanted the singular focus of academia probably wasn’t for me (my baby momma and best friend are both academics and I’ve lived their lives by proxy). Computer science (although I’m going to be streamlining into software engineering) suits my current temperament a lot better. Always some factoid to pick up or something interesting to do. In my teens I was a decently comp-literate guy but I’d sort of perceived pushing that on was only something for the ‘real’ computer nerds. Perhaps it’s something of a bias of mine, but hey. There weren’t many decisions I made looking back that were particularly bad given information I had at the time. The bias would come from well, what if I was American, I have those student debts from first time round, had my health issues and then a horrible experience in job hunting, well where’s my rope ladder out of the pit? I’d be saddled with way, way more debt in the first place and how on Earth would I finance a second degree with both a terrible credit score and higher fees? I went through something very similar twice in my life, though a bit more spread out, so I can give the american perspective on what happens. (Though I avoided hospitalization even if it would have been a very good idea at one point, exactly for cost concerns). In 2011 I went through a bout of MDD and took a 6 month hiatus from college, dropping out of my major one class from finishing my major's requirements. It took me until 2013 to finish the degree, which I did long distance after moving back in with one of my parents. I then floated from shitty job to shitty job until late 2014, as I refused to finish my specific major and got one of the few legitimately really useless undergrads (General Education). Then at the end of 2014 I wound up with another bout of MDD, tried new meds and got serotonin sickness and trembling. Then I lost my job, lost insurance, and had to move back in with my parent who lived 140 miles away (on top of ending a long-term relationship and a bed bug infestation). I then had to go off an extremely high dose of xanax that had been prescribed to me. I couldn't even taper off normally because medicaid (my only option) effectively refuses to cover xanax for any reason (not a BAD idea, per se, but the way I went off it was legitimately quite dangerous). This is not exactly intentional, but only 2 psychiatrists in the entire state accepted medicaid and neither was accepting new patients. Recovering from that took up my life for about another year. To resolve my shitty degree I went back for a master's in 2017... which taught me nothing that I use in my current job, but was proof that I was capable of it (app development... when I had learned to program in 6th grade and knew four programming languages before starting the degree). The master's cost $60k but made my salary go from $12k to $70k/year. However, I am extremely lucky because I come from a somewhat wealthy family on one side. My undergrad debts were 95% covered and in the long run I'm well aware that if I have a truly unexpected expense, that I can beg (which is admittedly extremely unpleasant) and have it paid for me, and that if I had healthcare costs they would generally be covered no question (which was how I covered a few visits to a psychiatrist). Medicaid also would not be an option in a ton of states. So at the end of it I'm in debt something close to $72k (due to interest and some really strange requirements from my college that I get a mean plan at one point). The main reason student debt is so weird is that you can't discharge it, ever, through any means.
The fact that education loans are undischargable is a huge reason why college is so expensive. Like I said its basically a 1:1 track of expense to Government involvement. This is not some "market failure", it is as almost always a Government failure. All loans should be dischargable through bankruptcy. You need risk in the system to price things accordingly.
I had the GI bill so that worked for me, but even I took out a small FAFSA loan in school so I didnt need to work while I went to school (20k). The problem with progressives here is that theyre not so much interested in the working class (theyre not by and large working class - theyre heavily/over-represented with white collar and upper mid class jobs/folks) as they emphasize all the policies and programs that most benefit them. Theyre also hostile to many industries that working class folks ya know work in because theyve bought the AGW/Climate change extinction doom scenario hook and line sinker and want to outlaw these jobs by Government writ. Working class folks dont want the "Green New Deal". They dont have 100k in student debt. Theyre disproportionately affected by COVID lockdowns and insane occupational licensing laws. I could go on here.
You know who appealed to the working class better - Ron Paul and Donald Trump. Thats saying something, isn't it?
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United States43984 Posts
Friendly reminder that if you’re a W2 employee you’re working class. A successful mechanic that owns his own shop is middle class. A successful lawyer that isn’t a partner is working class. Class relates to your relationship with labour, not how many dollars you get.
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On November 10 2020 00:52 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2020 00:51 Wegandi wrote:On November 09 2020 23:58 Nevuk wrote:On November 09 2020 10:02 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2020 09:35 Starlightsun wrote:On November 09 2020 09:20 FlaShFTW wrote:On November 09 2020 08:57 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2020 08:41 BisuDagger wrote:On November 09 2020 08:18 KlaCkoN wrote:
Thought:
There seems to be pretty universal support in this thread for forgiving (or ending mandatory repayments, or some version thereof) student debt. This is portrayed as a leftist or progressive proposal, however the US is one of the countries in the world with the highest wage premiums for college attendance, this feel quite jarring to me.
Focusing state resources so that the professional middle class can buy single family homes a few years earlier is certainly a vote winner but it doesn't do anything about the underlying class structure. If anything I think part of the reason the old social democratic parties in Europe fell from grace is that they forgot who they were supposed to represent.
So rather than forgiving 50-200k in debt for people who already have obtained 4 year degrees what about giving 50-200k in grants or cheaply financed loans for people _without_ college degrees. This can be used to fund adult professional education in fields that are deemed in demand, or to offset housing or health care costs, or whatever else.
Further the cash component of any welfare programs could be greatly expanded.
The goal of these policies should in my opinion be to spend resources to decrease the quality of living gap between the college educated professional middle class and the lower classes who lack college education.
And sure, I am aware that there are a _lot_ of people with college education who are struggling. That doesnt change the fact that people without college education on average struggle significantly more, and a 'left' party should be representing the working classes, not the professional ones. (Of course in truth the Democrats are primarily a liberal party representing educated professionals and workers dont really have representation in the American system but when talking 'left' or 'progressive' policy in my opinion the goal should be to change that.) There is not universal support in this thread. Some of us are just reading everyone’s opinions quietly. I took out $100k in student loans, got a computer science degree, and paid off my debt in 5 years by working hard and not spending my money on needless stuff. No cable television or phone with data plan and I still don’t have either despite doing well in life now. Before my loan I worked minimum wage full time for two years at a different college before picking a path and going all in on it. I think student loan debt is a product of the ill educated or ill prepared. Most students have no idea what an interest rate means before they get into college and take out these variable loans without thinking. It’s the same problem with home owners too. There should be classes taken by banks before even applying for a loan. People take these loans out and don’t understand their responsibilities to them. It’s not free money. I’m open to the idea of more financial government support for college level education, but when you take out a loan that’s you making a promise that you better be willing to fulfill (sans terrible or tragic luck). It’s weird to me that in one post you argue that many were insufficiently informed to understand what they were signing and practically children before concluding that they should be bound to the maximum extent of their contractual obligations. It seems the most dickish stance to take. You could have argued that they knew what they were doing and should be forced to hold up their end. You could have argued that they didn’t know what they were doing and shouldn’t be forced to hold up their end. But instead you argued that they were taken advantage of, but should still be punished for that ignorance. Adding in that you’d feel like you got a bad deal if they weren’t hurt because you paid off yours is also classic American hazing mentality. Making things better for other people is apparently bad because then they won’t have to suffer the way you did. It’s a weird flagellation where people who suffered for good things hate to see other people having them without also suffering. I'll agree with Kwark's last point, that just because you managed to pay off your debt, that loan forgiveness would cause your social standing to fall and you would be injured. In fact, that is not exactly the case, society is benefited from not haveing to pay back those enormous student loans. Do I agree with much of Bisudagger's stance that people should be more educated before the blindly go into college? Yes. I also believe that useless degrees DO EXIST, contrary to what many other people might think. Examples are things like how STEM, especially computer science these days, are more valuable to our society than things like the humanities. As a political science major, I really only have a few choices in life, become a professor, go into politics for life as a staffer/think-tank, or go to law school. I chose the last option because I believe law school is the most flexible of all those options. But people don't realize the futures they have when they jump into university and pick a major. We should do a better job of educating, and I believe strongly that high schools need to do a better job of connecting their students with real adults/alumni who are in the real world and can explain to them what it's like. I think there's a very large common trend in this thread: education is king, and more education can literally do no harm, because it pushes better, but more convoluted policies into the forefront, and it allows people to make smarter choices in just about every aspect of their lives. Yeah I think we need to have more robust trade school options and remove the social stigma from them. There's so many kids in college that really don't belong or want to be there yet are paying tens of thousands for it. Our profit-seeking model of college is like the other side of the coin of our for-profit prisons. Both are losing sight of their purpose to society because of profit being the biggest goal. A lot of people aren’t well suited for those industries, it’s not a catch-all solution but yes I do agree they shouldn’t be stigmatised either. Employers in white collar jobs being imbeciles are a big part of the problem. They complain about people coming from college not having sufficient skills for the workplace, but yet they insist on college degrees for really basic shit. Or prior experience that you can’t get because of the aforementioned. I’ve had some of the most infuriating interviews outside of a Donald Trump one, I once didn’t get a gig because I hadn’t used Excel in an office scenario before, despite explaining that I converted an Excel spreadsheet into a functioning SQL-based database with tiered user access permissions at my volunteer gig. People absolutely do make bad decisions in life, some people have bad circumstances to mitigated some don’t. So yeah we can’t account for all of that. But we’re talking about young people in their formative adult years, who aren’t educated properly in terms of career progression, money management and a whole host of vital life skills, with a culture that really pushes going to college and a job market that makes it almost a prerequisite for many jobs where it’s totally unnecessary. Kind of hard to make the right decision with all those factors there, for many people anyway. I dropped out on a 2/1 honours degree due to intolerable stress, partly from having a mewling child, partly due to then undiagnosed bipolar disorder which I ended up in hospital for for a full year in 2015. A bad decision to be fair, albeit somewhat explicable. A lot of debt accrued there too (the joys of that side of bipolar), but hey managed vaguely to get on top of that. A few years of shit tier work with no stability and no luck in the job hunt whatsoever. Back at school now, early doors but I’m maintaining first class honours grades life is vaguely balanced, my condition is balanced. I’d initially wanted to go into academia with politics, so I didn’t just randomly go into school with no ideas. Aside from the illness I did discover that I’m kind of a generalist, shifting gears and combining multiple interests where I can, just mixing things up works quite well for me. Probably partly a bipolar thing too, but yeah even if I’d got the grades I’d wanted the singular focus of academia probably wasn’t for me (my baby momma and best friend are both academics and I’ve lived their lives by proxy). Computer science (although I’m going to be streamlining into software engineering) suits my current temperament a lot better. Always some factoid to pick up or something interesting to do. In my teens I was a decently comp-literate guy but I’d sort of perceived pushing that on was only something for the ‘real’ computer nerds. Perhaps it’s something of a bias of mine, but hey. There weren’t many decisions I made looking back that were particularly bad given information I had at the time. The bias would come from well, what if I was American, I have those student debts from first time round, had my health issues and then a horrible experience in job hunting, well where’s my rope ladder out of the pit? I’d be saddled with way, way more debt in the first place and how on Earth would I finance a second degree with both a terrible credit score and higher fees? I went through something very similar twice in my life, though a bit more spread out, so I can give the american perspective on what happens. (Though I avoided hospitalization even if it would have been a very good idea at one point, exactly for cost concerns). In 2011 I went through a bout of MDD and took a 6 month hiatus from college, dropping out of my major one class from finishing my major's requirements. It took me until 2013 to finish the degree, which I did long distance after moving back in with one of my parents. I then floated from shitty job to shitty job until late 2014, as I refused to finish my specific major and got one of the few legitimately really useless undergrads (General Education). Then at the end of 2014 I wound up with another bout of MDD, tried new meds and got serotonin sickness and trembling. Then I lost my job, lost insurance, and had to move back in with my parent who lived 140 miles away (on top of ending a long-term relationship and a bed bug infestation). I then had to go off an extremely high dose of xanax that had been prescribed to me. I couldn't even taper off normally because medicaid (my only option) effectively refuses to cover xanax for any reason (not a BAD idea, per se, but the way I went off it was legitimately quite dangerous). This is not exactly intentional, but only 2 psychiatrists in the entire state accepted medicaid and neither was accepting new patients. Recovering from that took up my life for about another year. To resolve my shitty degree I went back for a master's in 2017... which taught me nothing that I use in my current job, but was proof that I was capable of it (app development... when I had learned to program in 6th grade and knew four programming languages before starting the degree). The master's cost $60k but made my salary go from $12k to $70k/year. However, I am extremely lucky because I come from a somewhat wealthy family on one side. My undergrad debts were 95% covered and in the long run I'm well aware that if I have a truly unexpected expense, that I can beg (which is admittedly extremely unpleasant) and have it paid for me, and that if I had healthcare costs they would generally be covered no question (which was how I covered a few visits to a psychiatrist). Medicaid also would not be an option in a ton of states. So at the end of it I'm in debt something close to $72k (due to interest and some really strange requirements from my college that I get a mean plan at one point). The main reason student debt is so weird is that you can't discharge it, ever, through any means. The fact that education loans are undischargable is a huge reason why college is so expensive. Like I said its basically a 1:1 track of expense to Government involvement. This is not some "market failure", it is as almost always a Government failure. All loans should be dischargable through bankruptcy. You need risk in the system to price things accordingly. I had the GI bill so that worked for me, but even I took out a small FAFSA loan in school so I didnt need to work while I went to school (20k). The problem with progressives here is that theyre not so much interested in the working class (theyre not by and large working class - theyre heavily/over-represented with white collar and upper mid class jobs/folks) as they emphasize all the policies and programs that most benefit them. Theyre also hostile to many industries that working class folks ya know work in because theyve bought the AGW/Climate change extinction doom scenario hook and line sinker and want to outlaw these jobs by Government writ. Working class folks dont want the "Green New Deal". They dont have 100k in student debt. Theyre disproportionately affected by COVID lockdowns and insane occupational licensing laws. I could go on here. You know who appealed to the working class better - Ron Paul and Donald Trump. Thats saying something, isn't it? Your theory breaks down when you look outside your own borders.
Americans are not going to support a 25% national VAT and tax burdens of 45-50% like in Europe. Even many EU states are talking of rolling back the extent of their welfare states because of cost and because theyve used up all the accumulated years of growth under their market system when they didnt have elaborate welfare systems.
There's a reason progressives lie overtly or by omission about working class and middle class tax burdens in the EU. "The rich will pay for it". Tell that to Europe.
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On November 10 2020 00:51 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2020 23:58 Nevuk wrote:On November 09 2020 10:02 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2020 09:35 Starlightsun wrote:On November 09 2020 09:20 FlaShFTW wrote:On November 09 2020 08:57 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2020 08:41 BisuDagger wrote:On November 09 2020 08:18 KlaCkoN wrote:
Thought:
There seems to be pretty universal support in this thread for forgiving (or ending mandatory repayments, or some version thereof) student debt. This is portrayed as a leftist or progressive proposal, however the US is one of the countries in the world with the highest wage premiums for college attendance, this feel quite jarring to me.
Focusing state resources so that the professional middle class can buy single family homes a few years earlier is certainly a vote winner but it doesn't do anything about the underlying class structure. If anything I think part of the reason the old social democratic parties in Europe fell from grace is that they forgot who they were supposed to represent.
So rather than forgiving 50-200k in debt for people who already have obtained 4 year degrees what about giving 50-200k in grants or cheaply financed loans for people _without_ college degrees. This can be used to fund adult professional education in fields that are deemed in demand, or to offset housing or health care costs, or whatever else.
Further the cash component of any welfare programs could be greatly expanded.
The goal of these policies should in my opinion be to spend resources to decrease the quality of living gap between the college educated professional middle class and the lower classes who lack college education.
And sure, I am aware that there are a _lot_ of people with college education who are struggling. That doesnt change the fact that people without college education on average struggle significantly more, and a 'left' party should be representing the working classes, not the professional ones. (Of course in truth the Democrats are primarily a liberal party representing educated professionals and workers dont really have representation in the American system but when talking 'left' or 'progressive' policy in my opinion the goal should be to change that.) There is not universal support in this thread. Some of us are just reading everyone’s opinions quietly. I took out $100k in student loans, got a computer science degree, and paid off my debt in 5 years by working hard and not spending my money on needless stuff. No cable television or phone with data plan and I still don’t have either despite doing well in life now. Before my loan I worked minimum wage full time for two years at a different college before picking a path and going all in on it. I think student loan debt is a product of the ill educated or ill prepared. Most students have no idea what an interest rate means before they get into college and take out these variable loans without thinking. It’s the same problem with home owners too. There should be classes taken by banks before even applying for a loan. People take these loans out and don’t understand their responsibilities to them. It’s not free money. I’m open to the idea of more financial government support for college level education, but when you take out a loan that’s you making a promise that you better be willing to fulfill (sans terrible or tragic luck). It’s weird to me that in one post you argue that many were insufficiently informed to understand what they were signing and practically children before concluding that they should be bound to the maximum extent of their contractual obligations. It seems the most dickish stance to take. You could have argued that they knew what they were doing and should be forced to hold up their end. You could have argued that they didn’t know what they were doing and shouldn’t be forced to hold up their end. But instead you argued that they were taken advantage of, but should still be punished for that ignorance. Adding in that you’d feel like you got a bad deal if they weren’t hurt because you paid off yours is also classic American hazing mentality. Making things better for other people is apparently bad because then they won’t have to suffer the way you did. It’s a weird flagellation where people who suffered for good things hate to see other people having them without also suffering. I'll agree with Kwark's last point, that just because you managed to pay off your debt, that loan forgiveness would cause your social standing to fall and you would be injured. In fact, that is not exactly the case, society is benefited from not haveing to pay back those enormous student loans. Do I agree with much of Bisudagger's stance that people should be more educated before the blindly go into college? Yes. I also believe that useless degrees DO EXIST, contrary to what many other people might think. Examples are things like how STEM, especially computer science these days, are more valuable to our society than things like the humanities. As a political science major, I really only have a few choices in life, become a professor, go into politics for life as a staffer/think-tank, or go to law school. I chose the last option because I believe law school is the most flexible of all those options. But people don't realize the futures they have when they jump into university and pick a major. We should do a better job of educating, and I believe strongly that high schools need to do a better job of connecting their students with real adults/alumni who are in the real world and can explain to them what it's like. I think there's a very large common trend in this thread: education is king, and more education can literally do no harm, because it pushes better, but more convoluted policies into the forefront, and it allows people to make smarter choices in just about every aspect of their lives. Yeah I think we need to have more robust trade school options and remove the social stigma from them. There's so many kids in college that really don't belong or want to be there yet are paying tens of thousands for it. Our profit-seeking model of college is like the other side of the coin of our for-profit prisons. Both are losing sight of their purpose to society because of profit being the biggest goal. A lot of people aren’t well suited for those industries, it’s not a catch-all solution but yes I do agree they shouldn’t be stigmatised either. Employers in white collar jobs being imbeciles are a big part of the problem. They complain about people coming from college not having sufficient skills for the workplace, but yet they insist on college degrees for really basic shit. Or prior experience that you can’t get because of the aforementioned. I’ve had some of the most infuriating interviews outside of a Donald Trump one, I once didn’t get a gig because I hadn’t used Excel in an office scenario before, despite explaining that I converted an Excel spreadsheet into a functioning SQL-based database with tiered user access permissions at my volunteer gig. People absolutely do make bad decisions in life, some people have bad circumstances to mitigated some don’t. So yeah we can’t account for all of that. But we’re talking about young people in their formative adult years, who aren’t educated properly in terms of career progression, money management and a whole host of vital life skills, with a culture that really pushes going to college and a job market that makes it almost a prerequisite for many jobs where it’s totally unnecessary. Kind of hard to make the right decision with all those factors there, for many people anyway. I dropped out on a 2/1 honours degree due to intolerable stress, partly from having a mewling child, partly due to then undiagnosed bipolar disorder which I ended up in hospital for for a full year in 2015. A bad decision to be fair, albeit somewhat explicable. A lot of debt accrued there too (the joys of that side of bipolar), but hey managed vaguely to get on top of that. A few years of shit tier work with no stability and no luck in the job hunt whatsoever. Back at school now, early doors but I’m maintaining first class honours grades life is vaguely balanced, my condition is balanced. I’d initially wanted to go into academia with politics, so I didn’t just randomly go into school with no ideas. Aside from the illness I did discover that I’m kind of a generalist, shifting gears and combining multiple interests where I can, just mixing things up works quite well for me. Probably partly a bipolar thing too, but yeah even if I’d got the grades I’d wanted the singular focus of academia probably wasn’t for me (my baby momma and best friend are both academics and I’ve lived their lives by proxy). Computer science (although I’m going to be streamlining into software engineering) suits my current temperament a lot better. Always some factoid to pick up or something interesting to do. In my teens I was a decently comp-literate guy but I’d sort of perceived pushing that on was only something for the ‘real’ computer nerds. Perhaps it’s something of a bias of mine, but hey. There weren’t many decisions I made looking back that were particularly bad given information I had at the time. The bias would come from well, what if I was American, I have those student debts from first time round, had my health issues and then a horrible experience in job hunting, well where’s my rope ladder out of the pit? I’d be saddled with way, way more debt in the first place and how on Earth would I finance a second degree with both a terrible credit score and higher fees? I went through something very similar twice in my life, though a bit more spread out, so I can give the american perspective on what happens. (Though I avoided hospitalization even if it would have been a very good idea at one point, exactly for cost concerns). In 2011 I went through a bout of MDD and took a 6 month hiatus from college, dropping out of my major one class from finishing my major's requirements. It took me until 2013 to finish the degree, which I did long distance after moving back in with one of my parents. I then floated from shitty job to shitty job until late 2014, as I refused to finish my specific major and got one of the few legitimately really useless undergrads (General Education). Then at the end of 2014 I wound up with another bout of MDD, tried new meds and got serotonin sickness and trembling. Then I lost my job, lost insurance, and had to move back in with my parent who lived 140 miles away (on top of ending a long-term relationship and a bed bug infestation). I then had to go off an extremely high dose of xanax that had been prescribed to me. I couldn't even taper off normally because medicaid (my only option) effectively refuses to cover xanax for any reason (not a BAD idea, per se, but the way I went off it was legitimately quite dangerous). This is not exactly intentional, but only 2 psychiatrists in the entire state accepted medicaid and neither was accepting new patients. Recovering from that took up my life for about another year. To resolve my shitty degree I went back for a master's in 2017... which taught me nothing that I use in my current job, but was proof that I was capable of it (app development... when I had learned to program in 6th grade and knew four programming languages before starting the degree). The master's cost $60k but made my salary go from $12k to $70k/year. However, I am extremely lucky because I come from a somewhat wealthy family on one side. My undergrad debts were 95% covered and in the long run I'm well aware that if I have a truly unexpected expense, that I can beg (which is admittedly extremely unpleasant) and have it paid for me, and that if I had healthcare costs they would generally be covered no question (which was how I covered a few visits to a psychiatrist). Medicaid also would not be an option in a ton of states. So at the end of it I'm in debt something close to $72k (due to interest and some really strange requirements from my college that I get a mean plan at one point). The main reason student debt is so weird is that you can't discharge it, ever, through any means. The fact that education loans are undischargable is a huge reason why college is so expensive. Like I said its basically a 1:1 track of expense to Government involvement. This is not some "market failure", it is as almost always a Government failure. All loans should be dischargable through bankruptcy. You need risk in the system to price things accordingly.
Totally agree.
They dont have 100k in student debt. Theyre disproportionately affected by COVID lockdowns and insane occupational licensing laws. I could go on here.
You know who appealed to the working class better - Ron Paul and Donald Trump. Thats saying something, isn't it?
Ignoring the rest of this post as we'll never agree on any of it.
The bolded is probably not as correct as you are presenting it for younger working class members (calling them blue collar is probably more accurate for what you mean).
The thing is that 67% of <30 have at least some college, and 47% have an associates as of 2018. Yes, 50 year old steel workers don't have degrees, but many of their children at least tried it out for a bit. (I initially was going to say farmers, then remembered that my college had a huge ag program and most of the farmers I knew had a bachelor's).
Many of the working class dropped out before finishing even an associate's degree, meaning they have the debt but none of the benefits (my brother-in-law is in this situation). Sure, it's not 100k, but it is 12-14k for even the first year they tried before dropping out. This is something that may honestly never be repaid if they make under the poverty line.
Sure, 1/3 of the population isn't affected, but I don't think it's so easy to say that the working class in the US isn't affected by student loans (as some of that 1/3 are probably not working class).
On November 10 2020 01:01 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2020 00:52 JimmiC wrote:On November 10 2020 00:51 Wegandi wrote:On November 09 2020 23:58 Nevuk wrote:On November 09 2020 10:02 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2020 09:35 Starlightsun wrote:On November 09 2020 09:20 FlaShFTW wrote:On November 09 2020 08:57 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2020 08:41 BisuDagger wrote:On November 09 2020 08:18 KlaCkoN wrote:
Thought:
There seems to be pretty universal support in this thread for forgiving (or ending mandatory repayments, or some version thereof) student debt. This is portrayed as a leftist or progressive proposal, however the US is one of the countries in the world with the highest wage premiums for college attendance, this feel quite jarring to me.
Focusing state resources so that the professional middle class can buy single family homes a few years earlier is certainly a vote winner but it doesn't do anything about the underlying class structure. If anything I think part of the reason the old social democratic parties in Europe fell from grace is that they forgot who they were supposed to represent.
So rather than forgiving 50-200k in debt for people who already have obtained 4 year degrees what about giving 50-200k in grants or cheaply financed loans for people _without_ college degrees. This can be used to fund adult professional education in fields that are deemed in demand, or to offset housing or health care costs, or whatever else.
Further the cash component of any welfare programs could be greatly expanded.
The goal of these policies should in my opinion be to spend resources to decrease the quality of living gap between the college educated professional middle class and the lower classes who lack college education.
And sure, I am aware that there are a _lot_ of people with college education who are struggling. That doesnt change the fact that people without college education on average struggle significantly more, and a 'left' party should be representing the working classes, not the professional ones. (Of course in truth the Democrats are primarily a liberal party representing educated professionals and workers dont really have representation in the American system but when talking 'left' or 'progressive' policy in my opinion the goal should be to change that.) There is not universal support in this thread. Some of us are just reading everyone’s opinions quietly. I took out $100k in student loans, got a computer science degree, and paid off my debt in 5 years by working hard and not spending my money on needless stuff. No cable television or phone with data plan and I still don’t have either despite doing well in life now. Before my loan I worked minimum wage full time for two years at a different college before picking a path and going all in on it. I think student loan debt is a product of the ill educated or ill prepared. Most students have no idea what an interest rate means before they get into college and take out these variable loans without thinking. It’s the same problem with home owners too. There should be classes taken by banks before even applying for a loan. People take these loans out and don’t understand their responsibilities to them. It’s not free money. I’m open to the idea of more financial government support for college level education, but when you take out a loan that’s you making a promise that you better be willing to fulfill (sans terrible or tragic luck). It’s weird to me that in one post you argue that many were insufficiently informed to understand what they were signing and practically children before concluding that they should be bound to the maximum extent of their contractual obligations. It seems the most dickish stance to take. You could have argued that they knew what they were doing and should be forced to hold up their end. You could have argued that they didn’t know what they were doing and shouldn’t be forced to hold up their end. But instead you argued that they were taken advantage of, but should still be punished for that ignorance. Adding in that you’d feel like you got a bad deal if they weren’t hurt because you paid off yours is also classic American hazing mentality. Making things better for other people is apparently bad because then they won’t have to suffer the way you did. It’s a weird flagellation where people who suffered for good things hate to see other people having them without also suffering. I'll agree with Kwark's last point, that just because you managed to pay off your debt, that loan forgiveness would cause your social standing to fall and you would be injured. In fact, that is not exactly the case, society is benefited from not haveing to pay back those enormous student loans. Do I agree with much of Bisudagger's stance that people should be more educated before the blindly go into college? Yes. I also believe that useless degrees DO EXIST, contrary to what many other people might think. Examples are things like how STEM, especially computer science these days, are more valuable to our society than things like the humanities. As a political science major, I really only have a few choices in life, become a professor, go into politics for life as a staffer/think-tank, or go to law school. I chose the last option because I believe law school is the most flexible of all those options. But people don't realize the futures they have when they jump into university and pick a major. We should do a better job of educating, and I believe strongly that high schools need to do a better job of connecting their students with real adults/alumni who are in the real world and can explain to them what it's like. I think there's a very large common trend in this thread: education is king, and more education can literally do no harm, because it pushes better, but more convoluted policies into the forefront, and it allows people to make smarter choices in just about every aspect of their lives. Yeah I think we need to have more robust trade school options and remove the social stigma from them. There's so many kids in college that really don't belong or want to be there yet are paying tens of thousands for it. Our profit-seeking model of college is like the other side of the coin of our for-profit prisons. Both are losing sight of their purpose to society because of profit being the biggest goal. A lot of people aren’t well suited for those industries, it’s not a catch-all solution but yes I do agree they shouldn’t be stigmatised either. Employers in white collar jobs being imbeciles are a big part of the problem. They complain about people coming from college not having sufficient skills for the workplace, but yet they insist on college degrees for really basic shit. Or prior experience that you can’t get because of the aforementioned. I’ve had some of the most infuriating interviews outside of a Donald Trump one, I once didn’t get a gig because I hadn’t used Excel in an office scenario before, despite explaining that I converted an Excel spreadsheet into a functioning SQL-based database with tiered user access permissions at my volunteer gig. People absolutely do make bad decisions in life, some people have bad circumstances to mitigated some don’t. So yeah we can’t account for all of that. But we’re talking about young people in their formative adult years, who aren’t educated properly in terms of career progression, money management and a whole host of vital life skills, with a culture that really pushes going to college and a job market that makes it almost a prerequisite for many jobs where it’s totally unnecessary. Kind of hard to make the right decision with all those factors there, for many people anyway. I dropped out on a 2/1 honours degree due to intolerable stress, partly from having a mewling child, partly due to then undiagnosed bipolar disorder which I ended up in hospital for for a full year in 2015. A bad decision to be fair, albeit somewhat explicable. A lot of debt accrued there too (the joys of that side of bipolar), but hey managed vaguely to get on top of that. A few years of shit tier work with no stability and no luck in the job hunt whatsoever. Back at school now, early doors but I’m maintaining first class honours grades life is vaguely balanced, my condition is balanced. I’d initially wanted to go into academia with politics, so I didn’t just randomly go into school with no ideas. Aside from the illness I did discover that I’m kind of a generalist, shifting gears and combining multiple interests where I can, just mixing things up works quite well for me. Probably partly a bipolar thing too, but yeah even if I’d got the grades I’d wanted the singular focus of academia probably wasn’t for me (my baby momma and best friend are both academics and I’ve lived their lives by proxy). Computer science (although I’m going to be streamlining into software engineering) suits my current temperament a lot better. Always some factoid to pick up or something interesting to do. In my teens I was a decently comp-literate guy but I’d sort of perceived pushing that on was only something for the ‘real’ computer nerds. Perhaps it’s something of a bias of mine, but hey. There weren’t many decisions I made looking back that were particularly bad given information I had at the time. The bias would come from well, what if I was American, I have those student debts from first time round, had my health issues and then a horrible experience in job hunting, well where’s my rope ladder out of the pit? I’d be saddled with way, way more debt in the first place and how on Earth would I finance a second degree with both a terrible credit score and higher fees? I went through something very similar twice in my life, though a bit more spread out, so I can give the american perspective on what happens. (Though I avoided hospitalization even if it would have been a very good idea at one point, exactly for cost concerns). In 2011 I went through a bout of MDD and took a 6 month hiatus from college, dropping out of my major one class from finishing my major's requirements. It took me until 2013 to finish the degree, which I did long distance after moving back in with one of my parents. I then floated from shitty job to shitty job until late 2014, as I refused to finish my specific major and got one of the few legitimately really useless undergrads (General Education). Then at the end of 2014 I wound up with another bout of MDD, tried new meds and got serotonin sickness and trembling. Then I lost my job, lost insurance, and had to move back in with my parent who lived 140 miles away (on top of ending a long-term relationship and a bed bug infestation). I then had to go off an extremely high dose of xanax that had been prescribed to me. I couldn't even taper off normally because medicaid (my only option) effectively refuses to cover xanax for any reason (not a BAD idea, per se, but the way I went off it was legitimately quite dangerous). This is not exactly intentional, but only 2 psychiatrists in the entire state accepted medicaid and neither was accepting new patients. Recovering from that took up my life for about another year. To resolve my shitty degree I went back for a master's in 2017... which taught me nothing that I use in my current job, but was proof that I was capable of it (app development... when I had learned to program in 6th grade and knew four programming languages before starting the degree). The master's cost $60k but made my salary go from $12k to $70k/year. However, I am extremely lucky because I come from a somewhat wealthy family on one side. My undergrad debts were 95% covered and in the long run I'm well aware that if I have a truly unexpected expense, that I can beg (which is admittedly extremely unpleasant) and have it paid for me, and that if I had healthcare costs they would generally be covered no question (which was how I covered a few visits to a psychiatrist). Medicaid also would not be an option in a ton of states. So at the end of it I'm in debt something close to $72k (due to interest and some really strange requirements from my college that I get a mean plan at one point). The main reason student debt is so weird is that you can't discharge it, ever, through any means. The fact that education loans are undischargable is a huge reason why college is so expensive. Like I said its basically a 1:1 track of expense to Government involvement. This is not some "market failure", it is as almost always a Government failure. All loans should be dischargable through bankruptcy. You need risk in the system to price things accordingly. I had the GI bill so that worked for me, but even I took out a small FAFSA loan in school so I didnt need to work while I went to school (20k). The problem with progressives here is that theyre not so much interested in the working class (theyre not by and large working class - theyre heavily/over-represented with white collar and upper mid class jobs/folks) as they emphasize all the policies and programs that most benefit them. Theyre also hostile to many industries that working class folks ya know work in because theyve bought the AGW/Climate change extinction doom scenario hook and line sinker and want to outlaw these jobs by Government writ. Working class folks dont want the "Green New Deal". They dont have 100k in student debt. Theyre disproportionately affected by COVID lockdowns and insane occupational licensing laws. I could go on here. You know who appealed to the working class better - Ron Paul and Donald Trump. Thats saying something, isn't it? Your theory breaks down when you look outside your own borders. Americans are not going to support a 25% national VAT and tax burdens of 45-50% like in Europe. Even many EU states are talking of rolling back the extent of their welfare states because of cost and because theyve used up all the accumulated years of growth under their market system when they didnt have elaborate welfare systems. There's a reason progressives lie overtly or by omission about working class and middle class tax burdens in the EU. "The rich will pay for it". Tell that to Europe.
The new US method is just to print the money. It's how we paid for absurd tax cuts.
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On November 10 2020 00:51 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On November 09 2020 23:58 Nevuk wrote:On November 09 2020 10:02 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2020 09:35 Starlightsun wrote:On November 09 2020 09:20 FlaShFTW wrote:On November 09 2020 08:57 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2020 08:41 BisuDagger wrote:On November 09 2020 08:18 KlaCkoN wrote:
Thought:
There seems to be pretty universal support in this thread for forgiving (or ending mandatory repayments, or some version thereof) student debt. This is portrayed as a leftist or progressive proposal, however the US is one of the countries in the world with the highest wage premiums for college attendance, this feel quite jarring to me.
Focusing state resources so that the professional middle class can buy single family homes a few years earlier is certainly a vote winner but it doesn't do anything about the underlying class structure. If anything I think part of the reason the old social democratic parties in Europe fell from grace is that they forgot who they were supposed to represent.
So rather than forgiving 50-200k in debt for people who already have obtained 4 year degrees what about giving 50-200k in grants or cheaply financed loans for people _without_ college degrees. This can be used to fund adult professional education in fields that are deemed in demand, or to offset housing or health care costs, or whatever else.
Further the cash component of any welfare programs could be greatly expanded.
The goal of these policies should in my opinion be to spend resources to decrease the quality of living gap between the college educated professional middle class and the lower classes who lack college education.
And sure, I am aware that there are a _lot_ of people with college education who are struggling. That doesnt change the fact that people without college education on average struggle significantly more, and a 'left' party should be representing the working classes, not the professional ones. (Of course in truth the Democrats are primarily a liberal party representing educated professionals and workers dont really have representation in the American system but when talking 'left' or 'progressive' policy in my opinion the goal should be to change that.) There is not universal support in this thread. Some of us are just reading everyone’s opinions quietly. I took out $100k in student loans, got a computer science degree, and paid off my debt in 5 years by working hard and not spending my money on needless stuff. No cable television or phone with data plan and I still don’t have either despite doing well in life now. Before my loan I worked minimum wage full time for two years at a different college before picking a path and going all in on it. I think student loan debt is a product of the ill educated or ill prepared. Most students have no idea what an interest rate means before they get into college and take out these variable loans without thinking. It’s the same problem with home owners too. There should be classes taken by banks before even applying for a loan. People take these loans out and don’t understand their responsibilities to them. It’s not free money. I’m open to the idea of more financial government support for college level education, but when you take out a loan that’s you making a promise that you better be willing to fulfill (sans terrible or tragic luck). It’s weird to me that in one post you argue that many were insufficiently informed to understand what they were signing and practically children before concluding that they should be bound to the maximum extent of their contractual obligations. It seems the most dickish stance to take. You could have argued that they knew what they were doing and should be forced to hold up their end. You could have argued that they didn’t know what they were doing and shouldn’t be forced to hold up their end. But instead you argued that they were taken advantage of, but should still be punished for that ignorance. Adding in that you’d feel like you got a bad deal if they weren’t hurt because you paid off yours is also classic American hazing mentality. Making things better for other people is apparently bad because then they won’t have to suffer the way you did. It’s a weird flagellation where people who suffered for good things hate to see other people having them without also suffering. I'll agree with Kwark's last point, that just because you managed to pay off your debt, that loan forgiveness would cause your social standing to fall and you would be injured. In fact, that is not exactly the case, society is benefited from not haveing to pay back those enormous student loans. Do I agree with much of Bisudagger's stance that people should be more educated before the blindly go into college? Yes. I also believe that useless degrees DO EXIST, contrary to what many other people might think. Examples are things like how STEM, especially computer science these days, are more valuable to our society than things like the humanities. As a political science major, I really only have a few choices in life, become a professor, go into politics for life as a staffer/think-tank, or go to law school. I chose the last option because I believe law school is the most flexible of all those options. But people don't realize the futures they have when they jump into university and pick a major. We should do a better job of educating, and I believe strongly that high schools need to do a better job of connecting their students with real adults/alumni who are in the real world and can explain to them what it's like. I think there's a very large common trend in this thread: education is king, and more education can literally do no harm, because it pushes better, but more convoluted policies into the forefront, and it allows people to make smarter choices in just about every aspect of their lives. Yeah I think we need to have more robust trade school options and remove the social stigma from them. There's so many kids in college that really don't belong or want to be there yet are paying tens of thousands for it. Our profit-seeking model of college is like the other side of the coin of our for-profit prisons. Both are losing sight of their purpose to society because of profit being the biggest goal. A lot of people aren’t well suited for those industries, it’s not a catch-all solution but yes I do agree they shouldn’t be stigmatised either. Employers in white collar jobs being imbeciles are a big part of the problem. They complain about people coming from college not having sufficient skills for the workplace, but yet they insist on college degrees for really basic shit. Or prior experience that you can’t get because of the aforementioned. I’ve had some of the most infuriating interviews outside of a Donald Trump one, I once didn’t get a gig because I hadn’t used Excel in an office scenario before, despite explaining that I converted an Excel spreadsheet into a functioning SQL-based database with tiered user access permissions at my volunteer gig. People absolutely do make bad decisions in life, some people have bad circumstances to mitigated some don’t. So yeah we can’t account for all of that. But we’re talking about young people in their formative adult years, who aren’t educated properly in terms of career progression, money management and a whole host of vital life skills, with a culture that really pushes going to college and a job market that makes it almost a prerequisite for many jobs where it’s totally unnecessary. Kind of hard to make the right decision with all those factors there, for many people anyway. I dropped out on a 2/1 honours degree due to intolerable stress, partly from having a mewling child, partly due to then undiagnosed bipolar disorder which I ended up in hospital for for a full year in 2015. A bad decision to be fair, albeit somewhat explicable. A lot of debt accrued there too (the joys of that side of bipolar), but hey managed vaguely to get on top of that. A few years of shit tier work with no stability and no luck in the job hunt whatsoever. Back at school now, early doors but I’m maintaining first class honours grades life is vaguely balanced, my condition is balanced. I’d initially wanted to go into academia with politics, so I didn’t just randomly go into school with no ideas. Aside from the illness I did discover that I’m kind of a generalist, shifting gears and combining multiple interests where I can, just mixing things up works quite well for me. Probably partly a bipolar thing too, but yeah even if I’d got the grades I’d wanted the singular focus of academia probably wasn’t for me (my baby momma and best friend are both academics and I’ve lived their lives by proxy). Computer science (although I’m going to be streamlining into software engineering) suits my current temperament a lot better. Always some factoid to pick up or something interesting to do. In my teens I was a decently comp-literate guy but I’d sort of perceived pushing that on was only something for the ‘real’ computer nerds. Perhaps it’s something of a bias of mine, but hey. There weren’t many decisions I made looking back that were particularly bad given information I had at the time. The bias would come from well, what if I was American, I have those student debts from first time round, had my health issues and then a horrible experience in job hunting, well where’s my rope ladder out of the pit? I’d be saddled with way, way more debt in the first place and how on Earth would I finance a second degree with both a terrible credit score and higher fees? I went through something very similar twice in my life, though a bit more spread out, so I can give the american perspective on what happens. (Though I avoided hospitalization even if it would have been a very good idea at one point, exactly for cost concerns). In 2011 I went through a bout of MDD and took a 6 month hiatus from college, dropping out of my major one class from finishing my major's requirements. It took me until 2013 to finish the degree, which I did long distance after moving back in with one of my parents. I then floated from shitty job to shitty job until late 2014, as I refused to finish my specific major and got one of the few legitimately really useless undergrads (General Education). Then at the end of 2014 I wound up with another bout of MDD, tried new meds and got serotonin sickness and trembling. Then I lost my job, lost insurance, and had to move back in with my parent who lived 140 miles away (on top of ending a long-term relationship and a bed bug infestation). I then had to go off an extremely high dose of xanax that had been prescribed to me. I couldn't even taper off normally because medicaid (my only option) effectively refuses to cover xanax for any reason (not a BAD idea, per se, but the way I went off it was legitimately quite dangerous). This is not exactly intentional, but only 2 psychiatrists in the entire state accepted medicaid and neither was accepting new patients. Recovering from that took up my life for about another year. To resolve my shitty degree I went back for a master's in 2017... which taught me nothing that I use in my current job, but was proof that I was capable of it (app development... when I had learned to program in 6th grade and knew four programming languages before starting the degree). The master's cost $60k but made my salary go from $12k to $70k/year. However, I am extremely lucky because I come from a somewhat wealthy family on one side. My undergrad debts were 95% covered and in the long run I'm well aware that if I have a truly unexpected expense, that I can beg (which is admittedly extremely unpleasant) and have it paid for me, and that if I had healthcare costs they would generally be covered no question (which was how I covered a few visits to a psychiatrist). Medicaid also would not be an option in a ton of states. So at the end of it I'm in debt something close to $72k (due to interest and some really strange requirements from my college that I get a mean plan at one point). The main reason student debt is so weird is that you can't discharge it, ever, through any means. The fact that education loans are undischargable is a huge reason why college is so expensive. Like I said its basically a 1:1 track of expense to Government involvement. This is not some "market failure", it is as almost always a Government failure. All loans should be dischargable through bankruptcy. You need risk in the system to price things accordingly. I had the GI bill so that worked for me, but even I took out a small FAFSA loan in school so I didnt need to work while I went to school (20k). The problem with progressives here is that theyre not so much interested in the working class (theyre not by and large working class - theyre heavily/over-represented with white collar and upper mid class jobs/folks) as they emphasize all the policies and programs that most benefit them. Theyre also hostile to many industries that working class folks ya know work in because theyve bought the AGW/Climate change extinction doom scenario hook and line sinker and want to outlaw these jobs by Government writ. Working class folks dont want the "Green New Deal". They dont have 100k in student debt. Theyre disproportionately affected by COVID lockdowns and insane occupational licensing laws. I could go on here. You know who appealed to the working class better - Ron Paul and Donald Trump. Thats saying something, isn't it?
Your're supposing that the working class is perfectly informed.
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United States43984 Posts
On November 10 2020 01:01 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2020 00:52 JimmiC wrote:On November 10 2020 00:51 Wegandi wrote:On November 09 2020 23:58 Nevuk wrote:On November 09 2020 10:02 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2020 09:35 Starlightsun wrote:On November 09 2020 09:20 FlaShFTW wrote:On November 09 2020 08:57 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2020 08:41 BisuDagger wrote:On November 09 2020 08:18 KlaCkoN wrote:
Thought:
There seems to be pretty universal support in this thread for forgiving (or ending mandatory repayments, or some version thereof) student debt. This is portrayed as a leftist or progressive proposal, however the US is one of the countries in the world with the highest wage premiums for college attendance, this feel quite jarring to me.
Focusing state resources so that the professional middle class can buy single family homes a few years earlier is certainly a vote winner but it doesn't do anything about the underlying class structure. If anything I think part of the reason the old social democratic parties in Europe fell from grace is that they forgot who they were supposed to represent.
So rather than forgiving 50-200k in debt for people who already have obtained 4 year degrees what about giving 50-200k in grants or cheaply financed loans for people _without_ college degrees. This can be used to fund adult professional education in fields that are deemed in demand, or to offset housing or health care costs, or whatever else.
Further the cash component of any welfare programs could be greatly expanded.
The goal of these policies should in my opinion be to spend resources to decrease the quality of living gap between the college educated professional middle class and the lower classes who lack college education.
And sure, I am aware that there are a _lot_ of people with college education who are struggling. That doesnt change the fact that people without college education on average struggle significantly more, and a 'left' party should be representing the working classes, not the professional ones. (Of course in truth the Democrats are primarily a liberal party representing educated professionals and workers dont really have representation in the American system but when talking 'left' or 'progressive' policy in my opinion the goal should be to change that.) There is not universal support in this thread. Some of us are just reading everyone’s opinions quietly. I took out $100k in student loans, got a computer science degree, and paid off my debt in 5 years by working hard and not spending my money on needless stuff. No cable television or phone with data plan and I still don’t have either despite doing well in life now. Before my loan I worked minimum wage full time for two years at a different college before picking a path and going all in on it. I think student loan debt is a product of the ill educated or ill prepared. Most students have no idea what an interest rate means before they get into college and take out these variable loans without thinking. It’s the same problem with home owners too. There should be classes taken by banks before even applying for a loan. People take these loans out and don’t understand their responsibilities to them. It’s not free money. I’m open to the idea of more financial government support for college level education, but when you take out a loan that’s you making a promise that you better be willing to fulfill (sans terrible or tragic luck). It’s weird to me that in one post you argue that many were insufficiently informed to understand what they were signing and practically children before concluding that they should be bound to the maximum extent of their contractual obligations. It seems the most dickish stance to take. You could have argued that they knew what they were doing and should be forced to hold up their end. You could have argued that they didn’t know what they were doing and shouldn’t be forced to hold up their end. But instead you argued that they were taken advantage of, but should still be punished for that ignorance. Adding in that you’d feel like you got a bad deal if they weren’t hurt because you paid off yours is also classic American hazing mentality. Making things better for other people is apparently bad because then they won’t have to suffer the way you did. It’s a weird flagellation where people who suffered for good things hate to see other people having them without also suffering. I'll agree with Kwark's last point, that just because you managed to pay off your debt, that loan forgiveness would cause your social standing to fall and you would be injured. In fact, that is not exactly the case, society is benefited from not haveing to pay back those enormous student loans. Do I agree with much of Bisudagger's stance that people should be more educated before the blindly go into college? Yes. I also believe that useless degrees DO EXIST, contrary to what many other people might think. Examples are things like how STEM, especially computer science these days, are more valuable to our society than things like the humanities. As a political science major, I really only have a few choices in life, become a professor, go into politics for life as a staffer/think-tank, or go to law school. I chose the last option because I believe law school is the most flexible of all those options. But people don't realize the futures they have when they jump into university and pick a major. We should do a better job of educating, and I believe strongly that high schools need to do a better job of connecting their students with real adults/alumni who are in the real world and can explain to them what it's like. I think there's a very large common trend in this thread: education is king, and more education can literally do no harm, because it pushes better, but more convoluted policies into the forefront, and it allows people to make smarter choices in just about every aspect of their lives. Yeah I think we need to have more robust trade school options and remove the social stigma from them. There's so many kids in college that really don't belong or want to be there yet are paying tens of thousands for it. Our profit-seeking model of college is like the other side of the coin of our for-profit prisons. Both are losing sight of their purpose to society because of profit being the biggest goal. A lot of people aren’t well suited for those industries, it’s not a catch-all solution but yes I do agree they shouldn’t be stigmatised either. Employers in white collar jobs being imbeciles are a big part of the problem. They complain about people coming from college not having sufficient skills for the workplace, but yet they insist on college degrees for really basic shit. Or prior experience that you can’t get because of the aforementioned. I’ve had some of the most infuriating interviews outside of a Donald Trump one, I once didn’t get a gig because I hadn’t used Excel in an office scenario before, despite explaining that I converted an Excel spreadsheet into a functioning SQL-based database with tiered user access permissions at my volunteer gig. People absolutely do make bad decisions in life, some people have bad circumstances to mitigated some don’t. So yeah we can’t account for all of that. But we’re talking about young people in their formative adult years, who aren’t educated properly in terms of career progression, money management and a whole host of vital life skills, with a culture that really pushes going to college and a job market that makes it almost a prerequisite for many jobs where it’s totally unnecessary. Kind of hard to make the right decision with all those factors there, for many people anyway. I dropped out on a 2/1 honours degree due to intolerable stress, partly from having a mewling child, partly due to then undiagnosed bipolar disorder which I ended up in hospital for for a full year in 2015. A bad decision to be fair, albeit somewhat explicable. A lot of debt accrued there too (the joys of that side of bipolar), but hey managed vaguely to get on top of that. A few years of shit tier work with no stability and no luck in the job hunt whatsoever. Back at school now, early doors but I’m maintaining first class honours grades life is vaguely balanced, my condition is balanced. I’d initially wanted to go into academia with politics, so I didn’t just randomly go into school with no ideas. Aside from the illness I did discover that I’m kind of a generalist, shifting gears and combining multiple interests where I can, just mixing things up works quite well for me. Probably partly a bipolar thing too, but yeah even if I’d got the grades I’d wanted the singular focus of academia probably wasn’t for me (my baby momma and best friend are both academics and I’ve lived their lives by proxy). Computer science (although I’m going to be streamlining into software engineering) suits my current temperament a lot better. Always some factoid to pick up or something interesting to do. In my teens I was a decently comp-literate guy but I’d sort of perceived pushing that on was only something for the ‘real’ computer nerds. Perhaps it’s something of a bias of mine, but hey. There weren’t many decisions I made looking back that were particularly bad given information I had at the time. The bias would come from well, what if I was American, I have those student debts from first time round, had my health issues and then a horrible experience in job hunting, well where’s my rope ladder out of the pit? I’d be saddled with way, way more debt in the first place and how on Earth would I finance a second degree with both a terrible credit score and higher fees? I went through something very similar twice in my life, though a bit more spread out, so I can give the american perspective on what happens. (Though I avoided hospitalization even if it would have been a very good idea at one point, exactly for cost concerns). In 2011 I went through a bout of MDD and took a 6 month hiatus from college, dropping out of my major one class from finishing my major's requirements. It took me until 2013 to finish the degree, which I did long distance after moving back in with one of my parents. I then floated from shitty job to shitty job until late 2014, as I refused to finish my specific major and got one of the few legitimately really useless undergrads (General Education). Then at the end of 2014 I wound up with another bout of MDD, tried new meds and got serotonin sickness and trembling. Then I lost my job, lost insurance, and had to move back in with my parent who lived 140 miles away (on top of ending a long-term relationship and a bed bug infestation). I then had to go off an extremely high dose of xanax that had been prescribed to me. I couldn't even taper off normally because medicaid (my only option) effectively refuses to cover xanax for any reason (not a BAD idea, per se, but the way I went off it was legitimately quite dangerous). This is not exactly intentional, but only 2 psychiatrists in the entire state accepted medicaid and neither was accepting new patients. Recovering from that took up my life for about another year. To resolve my shitty degree I went back for a master's in 2017... which taught me nothing that I use in my current job, but was proof that I was capable of it (app development... when I had learned to program in 6th grade and knew four programming languages before starting the degree). The master's cost $60k but made my salary go from $12k to $70k/year. However, I am extremely lucky because I come from a somewhat wealthy family on one side. My undergrad debts were 95% covered and in the long run I'm well aware that if I have a truly unexpected expense, that I can beg (which is admittedly extremely unpleasant) and have it paid for me, and that if I had healthcare costs they would generally be covered no question (which was how I covered a few visits to a psychiatrist). Medicaid also would not be an option in a ton of states. So at the end of it I'm in debt something close to $72k (due to interest and some really strange requirements from my college that I get a mean plan at one point). The main reason student debt is so weird is that you can't discharge it, ever, through any means. The fact that education loans are undischargable is a huge reason why college is so expensive. Like I said its basically a 1:1 track of expense to Government involvement. This is not some "market failure", it is as almost always a Government failure. All loans should be dischargable through bankruptcy. You need risk in the system to price things accordingly. I had the GI bill so that worked for me, but even I took out a small FAFSA loan in school so I didnt need to work while I went to school (20k). The problem with progressives here is that theyre not so much interested in the working class (theyre not by and large working class - theyre heavily/over-represented with white collar and upper mid class jobs/folks) as they emphasize all the policies and programs that most benefit them. Theyre also hostile to many industries that working class folks ya know work in because theyve bought the AGW/Climate change extinction doom scenario hook and line sinker and want to outlaw these jobs by Government writ. Working class folks dont want the "Green New Deal". They dont have 100k in student debt. Theyre disproportionately affected by COVID lockdowns and insane occupational licensing laws. I could go on here. You know who appealed to the working class better - Ron Paul and Donald Trump. Thats saying something, isn't it? Your theory breaks down when you look outside your own borders. Americans are not going to support a 25% national VAT and tax burdens of 45-50% like in Europe. Even many EU states are talking of rolling back the extent of their welfare states because of cost and because theyve used up all the accumulated years of growth under their market system when they didnt have elaborate welfare systems. There's a reason progressives lie overtly or by omission about working class and middle class tax burdens in the EU. "The rich will pay for it". Tell that to Europe.
Americans already pay more than Brits do. Americans just love their stealth taxes. I pay $16k in employer paid benefits and another $7k in employer paid FICA that I don’t even see on my paycheck. Then a further $5k and $7k for employee paid benefits and FICA. Then I pay worker’s comp and other payroll deductions. Then I pay Federal income tax, then State income tax. And then, when I have the money, I pay property tax. But the rest I can spend as I choose, as long as I keep a fair chunk of it back for medical and educational expenses. Oh, and whenever I pay utilities or phone bills there’s taxes for things that should be public expenditures hidden on those. Registered a car earlier this year, another $1.2k in tax. But after those it’s all mine, except for sales taxes on everything I buy. Oh, and it doesn't buy as much as it would have the last year because the government printed a bunch of new money which, through the power of fiat currency, is really just taking value from all currency currently in circulation through dilution.
I’m an accountant and a very good one so I actually worked it all out one time for fun. You would not believe how much tax Americans pay. Most of it isn’t labeled tax but if you were living in the UK you wouldn’t have to pay it because funds for it come out of general tax revenue. Americans are more heavily taxed than it’s really possible to explain to Europeans because of stealth taxes. Europeans are familiar with fuel taxes but may be surprised to learn that the 911 emergency response call centres are funded by a special surcharge on my cell phone bill, rather than coming out of the police budget. That most jurisdictions realize that they can tax out of town folks by slapping special surcharges on hotel rooms. That some areas fund their police departments entirely by having sudden speed limit decreases and issuing tickets to anyone driving the normal speed on the road. When you devolve tax raising powers to local authorities shit gets weird. You start finding taxes in all sorts of weird places where they shouldn't be. The US wants to pay for all the things that are paid for in a modern functioning state but it doesn't want to pay for them with taxes and so they get paid for with a thousand special fees, surcharges, and other costs.
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On November 10 2020 01:03 Erasme wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2020 00:51 Wegandi wrote:On November 09 2020 23:58 Nevuk wrote:On November 09 2020 10:02 WombaT wrote:On November 09 2020 09:35 Starlightsun wrote:On November 09 2020 09:20 FlaShFTW wrote:On November 09 2020 08:57 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2020 08:41 BisuDagger wrote:On November 09 2020 08:18 KlaCkoN wrote:
Thought:
There seems to be pretty universal support in this thread for forgiving (or ending mandatory repayments, or some version thereof) student debt. This is portrayed as a leftist or progressive proposal, however the US is one of the countries in the world with the highest wage premiums for college attendance, this feel quite jarring to me.
Focusing state resources so that the professional middle class can buy single family homes a few years earlier is certainly a vote winner but it doesn't do anything about the underlying class structure. If anything I think part of the reason the old social democratic parties in Europe fell from grace is that they forgot who they were supposed to represent.
So rather than forgiving 50-200k in debt for people who already have obtained 4 year degrees what about giving 50-200k in grants or cheaply financed loans for people _without_ college degrees. This can be used to fund adult professional education in fields that are deemed in demand, or to offset housing or health care costs, or whatever else.
Further the cash component of any welfare programs could be greatly expanded.
The goal of these policies should in my opinion be to spend resources to decrease the quality of living gap between the college educated professional middle class and the lower classes who lack college education.
And sure, I am aware that there are a _lot_ of people with college education who are struggling. That doesnt change the fact that people without college education on average struggle significantly more, and a 'left' party should be representing the working classes, not the professional ones. (Of course in truth the Democrats are primarily a liberal party representing educated professionals and workers dont really have representation in the American system but when talking 'left' or 'progressive' policy in my opinion the goal should be to change that.) There is not universal support in this thread. Some of us are just reading everyone’s opinions quietly. I took out $100k in student loans, got a computer science degree, and paid off my debt in 5 years by working hard and not spending my money on needless stuff. No cable television or phone with data plan and I still don’t have either despite doing well in life now. Before my loan I worked minimum wage full time for two years at a different college before picking a path and going all in on it. I think student loan debt is a product of the ill educated or ill prepared. Most students have no idea what an interest rate means before they get into college and take out these variable loans without thinking. It’s the same problem with home owners too. There should be classes taken by banks before even applying for a loan. People take these loans out and don’t understand their responsibilities to them. It’s not free money. I’m open to the idea of more financial government support for college level education, but when you take out a loan that’s you making a promise that you better be willing to fulfill (sans terrible or tragic luck). It’s weird to me that in one post you argue that many were insufficiently informed to understand what they were signing and practically children before concluding that they should be bound to the maximum extent of their contractual obligations. It seems the most dickish stance to take. You could have argued that they knew what they were doing and should be forced to hold up their end. You could have argued that they didn’t know what they were doing and shouldn’t be forced to hold up their end. But instead you argued that they were taken advantage of, but should still be punished for that ignorance. Adding in that you’d feel like you got a bad deal if they weren’t hurt because you paid off yours is also classic American hazing mentality. Making things better for other people is apparently bad because then they won’t have to suffer the way you did. It’s a weird flagellation where people who suffered for good things hate to see other people having them without also suffering. I'll agree with Kwark's last point, that just because you managed to pay off your debt, that loan forgiveness would cause your social standing to fall and you would be injured. In fact, that is not exactly the case, society is benefited from not haveing to pay back those enormous student loans. Do I agree with much of Bisudagger's stance that people should be more educated before the blindly go into college? Yes. I also believe that useless degrees DO EXIST, contrary to what many other people might think. Examples are things like how STEM, especially computer science these days, are more valuable to our society than things like the humanities. As a political science major, I really only have a few choices in life, become a professor, go into politics for life as a staffer/think-tank, or go to law school. I chose the last option because I believe law school is the most flexible of all those options. But people don't realize the futures they have when they jump into university and pick a major. We should do a better job of educating, and I believe strongly that high schools need to do a better job of connecting their students with real adults/alumni who are in the real world and can explain to them what it's like. I think there's a very large common trend in this thread: education is king, and more education can literally do no harm, because it pushes better, but more convoluted policies into the forefront, and it allows people to make smarter choices in just about every aspect of their lives. Yeah I think we need to have more robust trade school options and remove the social stigma from them. There's so many kids in college that really don't belong or want to be there yet are paying tens of thousands for it. Our profit-seeking model of college is like the other side of the coin of our for-profit prisons. Both are losing sight of their purpose to society because of profit being the biggest goal. A lot of people aren’t well suited for those industries, it’s not a catch-all solution but yes I do agree they shouldn’t be stigmatised either. Employers in white collar jobs being imbeciles are a big part of the problem. They complain about people coming from college not having sufficient skills for the workplace, but yet they insist on college degrees for really basic shit. Or prior experience that you can’t get because of the aforementioned. I’ve had some of the most infuriating interviews outside of a Donald Trump one, I once didn’t get a gig because I hadn’t used Excel in an office scenario before, despite explaining that I converted an Excel spreadsheet into a functioning SQL-based database with tiered user access permissions at my volunteer gig. People absolutely do make bad decisions in life, some people have bad circumstances to mitigated some don’t. So yeah we can’t account for all of that. But we’re talking about young people in their formative adult years, who aren’t educated properly in terms of career progression, money management and a whole host of vital life skills, with a culture that really pushes going to college and a job market that makes it almost a prerequisite for many jobs where it’s totally unnecessary. Kind of hard to make the right decision with all those factors there, for many people anyway. I dropped out on a 2/1 honours degree due to intolerable stress, partly from having a mewling child, partly due to then undiagnosed bipolar disorder which I ended up in hospital for for a full year in 2015. A bad decision to be fair, albeit somewhat explicable. A lot of debt accrued there too (the joys of that side of bipolar), but hey managed vaguely to get on top of that. A few years of shit tier work with no stability and no luck in the job hunt whatsoever. Back at school now, early doors but I’m maintaining first class honours grades life is vaguely balanced, my condition is balanced. I’d initially wanted to go into academia with politics, so I didn’t just randomly go into school with no ideas. Aside from the illness I did discover that I’m kind of a generalist, shifting gears and combining multiple interests where I can, just mixing things up works quite well for me. Probably partly a bipolar thing too, but yeah even if I’d got the grades I’d wanted the singular focus of academia probably wasn’t for me (my baby momma and best friend are both academics and I’ve lived their lives by proxy). Computer science (although I’m going to be streamlining into software engineering) suits my current temperament a lot better. Always some factoid to pick up or something interesting to do. In my teens I was a decently comp-literate guy but I’d sort of perceived pushing that on was only something for the ‘real’ computer nerds. Perhaps it’s something of a bias of mine, but hey. There weren’t many decisions I made looking back that were particularly bad given information I had at the time. The bias would come from well, what if I was American, I have those student debts from first time round, had my health issues and then a horrible experience in job hunting, well where’s my rope ladder out of the pit? I’d be saddled with way, way more debt in the first place and how on Earth would I finance a second degree with both a terrible credit score and higher fees? I went through something very similar twice in my life, though a bit more spread out, so I can give the american perspective on what happens. (Though I avoided hospitalization even if it would have been a very good idea at one point, exactly for cost concerns). In 2011 I went through a bout of MDD and took a 6 month hiatus from college, dropping out of my major one class from finishing my major's requirements. It took me until 2013 to finish the degree, which I did long distance after moving back in with one of my parents. I then floated from shitty job to shitty job until late 2014, as I refused to finish my specific major and got one of the few legitimately really useless undergrads (General Education). Then at the end of 2014 I wound up with another bout of MDD, tried new meds and got serotonin sickness and trembling. Then I lost my job, lost insurance, and had to move back in with my parent who lived 140 miles away (on top of ending a long-term relationship and a bed bug infestation). I then had to go off an extremely high dose of xanax that had been prescribed to me. I couldn't even taper off normally because medicaid (my only option) effectively refuses to cover xanax for any reason (not a BAD idea, per se, but the way I went off it was legitimately quite dangerous). This is not exactly intentional, but only 2 psychiatrists in the entire state accepted medicaid and neither was accepting new patients. Recovering from that took up my life for about another year. To resolve my shitty degree I went back for a master's in 2017... which taught me nothing that I use in my current job, but was proof that I was capable of it (app development... when I had learned to program in 6th grade and knew four programming languages before starting the degree). The master's cost $60k but made my salary go from $12k to $70k/year. However, I am extremely lucky because I come from a somewhat wealthy family on one side. My undergrad debts were 95% covered and in the long run I'm well aware that if I have a truly unexpected expense, that I can beg (which is admittedly extremely unpleasant) and have it paid for me, and that if I had healthcare costs they would generally be covered no question (which was how I covered a few visits to a psychiatrist). Medicaid also would not be an option in a ton of states. So at the end of it I'm in debt something close to $72k (due to interest and some really strange requirements from my college that I get a mean plan at one point). The main reason student debt is so weird is that you can't discharge it, ever, through any means. The fact that education loans are undischargable is a huge reason why college is so expensive. Like I said its basically a 1:1 track of expense to Government involvement. This is not some "market failure", it is as almost always a Government failure. All loans should be dischargable through bankruptcy. You need risk in the system to price things accordingly. I had the GI bill so that worked for me, but even I took out a small FAFSA loan in school so I didnt need to work while I went to school (20k). The problem with progressives here is that theyre not so much interested in the working class (theyre not by and large working class - theyre heavily/over-represented with white collar and upper mid class jobs/folks) as they emphasize all the policies and programs that most benefit them. Theyre also hostile to many industries that working class folks ya know work in because theyve bought the AGW/Climate change extinction doom scenario hook and line sinker and want to outlaw these jobs by Government writ. Working class folks dont want the "Green New Deal". They dont have 100k in student debt. Theyre disproportionately affected by COVID lockdowns and insane occupational licensing laws. I could go on here. You know who appealed to the working class better - Ron Paul and Donald Trump. Thats saying something, isn't it? Your're supposing that the working class is perfectly informed.
I certainly don't talk down to them and act like I know what is better for them like many progressives do. Things like Lady Gaga mocking them, or mocking their lifestyle, it's very common in progressive circles. Acting like being against lockdowns you were the devil incarnate. Progressive talking points are very technocratic.
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Bernie Sanders was also very popular among blue collar types in 2016. It's a stylistic thing, they prefer that sort of politician to a wonky Clinton or Obama type (or right wing one... uh... Paul Ryan?). Has little to do with their policies, imo.
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On November 10 2020 01:15 Nevuk wrote:
Bernie Sanders was also very popular among blue collar types in 2016. It's a stylistic thing, they prefer that sort of politician to a wonky Clinton or Obama type (or right wing one... uh... Paul Ryan?). Has little to do with their policies, imo.
You just contradicted yourself within the space of two sentences. Blue collar working folks hated Clinton. Guess who their only option was in 2016? Right. Now look at how he did in 2020. Awful, completely awful and look who his base is. Theyre not blue collar folks pushing Bernie - theyre overwhelming young, college educated, middle to upper class white folks.
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EPT
