They were always intended to be forgiven if you followed the conditions. It basically was unemployment insurance but setup to prevent the unemployment. It frustrates me when people keep posting that. We should go back and identify people who used it fraudulently.
Same here. Not sure what windy is talking about.
My wife graduated with a $2K/year scholarship and when she graduated in 1991, she still had almost $2K left. She lived on campus her freshman year and then commuted for the final 3. This would be just a little under $6K/year, adjusting for inflation today. This is not possible anywhere today whether you are living at home or on campus. Maybe through community college, but nowhere else.
For loan forgiveness, I’d like to see something where if you have paid the original loan amount, the interest would be forgiven. There should only be enough interest charged on a student loan required to facilitate the loans and not be a government profit center.
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It’s not the fine print, it’s the fundamental essence of the programs. Student loans are loans, PPP “loans” were stimulus checks. Semantics aside, if your broader point is that the government can and has absorbed writing off a lot of money sure, I can agree with that. And I’m not wholly against writing off student debt.
What I am against is writing off student debt without simultaneously tackling the drivers of kids getting into so much debt in the first place. There’s an argument to be made to cutting businesses a one time check to keep the economy humming through a once in a lifetime pandemic. There’s no argument to be made for sustaining the current student loan system if the result is that every few years the accumulated debt burden is so crushing it has to be written off.
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I’m in 100% agreement with everything you wrote here.
Only caveat is that the PPP loans were only forgiven if you could prove you met the criteria. If you didn’t you were expected to pay it back. That was my last understanding from years ago. So in essence it was kind of like the student loans where many were in a contract with the govt for forgiveness if certain terms were met, and now Trump has eliminated that.
But the overreaching issue is the cost and underwriting, or lack thereof, for the dishing out of so much money for individuals without an understanding of the product.
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The point is that the Republicans didn’t have any problem giving $600+ billion to businesses, some of whom didn’t need it. Some of these so-called loans were given to businesses owned by people in Congress. They also have no problem giving huge tax breaks amounting to trillions of dollars to the rich, but God forbid they should let $10,000 of a student’s debt be forgiven.
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Sadly, I do know of more than several people (who are 15+ years younger than me, if not moreso!) who took on 6-figure debts for either college or postgraduate school (and not med school or law school) knowing that it would be a pretty crushing burden on them if they had to pay it back in full - but they were hoping/expecting a gov’t forgiveness on the loan after around 15 or 20 years (I can’t recall) due to some clause in the loan that was supposed to do that. They intended to pay the minimum due for those 15-20 years, and then have their loan forgiven. One of these people was a young <25yr old girl who took on 350k to go to ultrasound school. (Ultrasound techs make good money but that would be a really big debt for even them to cover)
I have no idea if that worked out or not, but I certainly would have advised against it, just knowing how such a loophole could be reversed quickly.
Just going to quote this part, as many keep saying forgiving student loans like 100’s of thousands are being forgiven. It is 10k from each loan folks, so stop with all the forgiving the loan rhetoric. And a 10k forgiveness probably captures virtually all of the original loan, and with some interest too.
You’re glomming a lot of issues into one big ball of whataboutism here.
The CARES Act and PPP program happened under Trump I because that’s when the pandemic happened. The CARES Act was heavily negotiated, and alternatives were proposed (Yang wanted UBI for example), but it was wildly bipartisan, as was the extension act signed by Biden.
The flaws with the program were known and obvious - there would be a lot of fraud, and a lot of the “job saving money” would flow to employers and their creditors. It was also wildly expensive if measured on a jobs saved per $ basis. But it passed anyway, comfortably, because the reality is there was a broad consensus that a huge stimulus program was needed. The packaging really didn’t matter and the issues of fraud and targeting needed to be weighed against urgency.
As long as we let people in Congress own businesses there will be conflicts of interest. More than 10% of the House have student loans in their household as of 2024. It’s messy.
Tax breaks are a separate issue (although there were plenty of them in the CARES Act).
Yes. $10K was Biden’s original plan. It was never about forgiveness of every student loan in its entirety. Plus, all the people weighing in with their experiences from 20-50+ years ago seem to have no clue as to how much college costs escalated and have far outpaced inflation even for public universities. I look at my son and his wife with their student debt and there’s no way they can afford to buy a home until maybe their late 30s at best. I bought a home at age 24.
While I’m on the fence on loan forgiveness- I definitely think there should be interest reduction/ interest free repayment for public servants- teachers etc.
I feel like it’s a good balance between being responsible for what you signed up for and not ending up under an escalating obligation you have no line of sight to ever getting out from under that you may not have understood as a teenager.
I also like an earlier point about the schools somehow having some skin in the game.
Reading through this thread, and specifically the reply from some “old timers” really shows the difference between the higher end system and job markets of yester-year and today. Cheap tuition, on the job training… Things young people today will never experience.
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And this is part of the discussion that keeps just getting ignored. Things have changed so much since, “back in the day” and doesn’t relate even closely with what kids are dealing with today.
The scary part is “back in the day” wasn’t that long ago.
I was referring to loans-not scholarships or handouts. Colleges you listed have an exceptionally huge endowments. I’m talking about acting as a bank, with an interest rate, paybacks, etc. I think this might encourage students looking for offered lower interests rates. Maybe even help fund other areas at the college.
I think a large part of the problem:
Is that children are being encouraged to pursue unachieveable dreams and that many universities programs are predatorially “cashing in” on this idealism.
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And frequently unachievable.
I think at some point in the early 2000s all of the schools started competing on amenities to attract students.
I was looking at meal plans at a public university and the top meal plan costs as much as my state U cost for tuition, room, board and fees in the mid 90s.
Maybe I’m old fashioned- but I don’t think sushi belongs on the menu at a state school cafeteria.
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This
Its heathier than the pizza, fried chicken, burgers, hot dogs they serve…
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