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No, they’re not.

Still, it’s not the government’s place to change that.

I will say this. There is NO reason for companies to fund worthless college degrees. And they never should.

68

Actually, since a college degree is pretty much required for white collar jobs, the degree is not useless. A certain body of coursework is required to get that degree. The subject matter may not be relavent to the job sought, but if you don’t like that, complain to the companies requring the degree, rather than complaining to the student who sees the need for a degree and takes whatever to get that degree.
The coursework may be of minimal use, but the degree that coursework earns is far from useless.

69

It shows that the graduate is educable.

70

The company isn’t wanting me to pay off the college debt.

71

Is that the stock value of the companies, or the value of their buildings, patents, and such?

72

Too many lawyers is a substantial reason for how we got into much of the mess we are in. :wink:

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  1. It will only accelerate inflation in college costs driving it up to such an extent virtually no one can afford a college education except at gov’t expense.
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You are right. It was the proliferation of easy to get low interest loans that drove up the price of college at twice the rate of inflation.

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75

Charge it back to the institution that rec’d the money but produced a student that can’t even pay their loan and I’m fine with that.

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76

Not remotely what I said and not remotely saying we should blanket repay student debt. Forgiving my own debt, which only exists because I earn far more investing than I would save with early payoff, accomplishes nothing.

Further, the “privileged few” are, of course, 66.2% of graduating seniors from 2019.

Now, I’m just a dumb MBA, but I’m pretty sure that if 66.2% of 2019 high school graduates are going on to college, that means that:

A) It’s not remotely “the privileged few”; and
B) A minimum of roughly 15% of those matriculants are coming from families below the median household income.

So you’ve got false premises to work on, sir; come back when you have another argument.

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From the time our kids were born, DH and I started putting away every spare dime, gave up extras and when the kids were old enough to get summer jobs, the rule was that 3/4 of their pay went into the college fund. The result? All of them went to college and one through grad school with no loans and no debt. We did the responsible thing, and if others can’t do the same, look to the source of the problem, not to my pocket book.

The source of the problem is, IMHO, the unjustifiably high cost of college. When I went to a very expensive private big city university, the cost of tuition, room and board was about 1/4-1/5 of the median family income. Many smaller and state colleges were much cheaper. This meant that an average family could do some belt-tightening and send kids to college with very few having to resort to loans. (I didn’t know anyone who had to take out loans to pay for college) Today, the tuition, room and board of that same college is about 110% of the median family income, which means that all except the extremely wealthy, or those fortunate enough to get a full scholarship have to resort to loans. Stop throwing money at the problem and start looking into where the money is going and where the colleges could scale back before you ask me to pay for someone else’s kids education after I struggled to pay for my own.

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78

Can you explain this please?

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It is virtually free already. Very low cost at any rate, if you’re eligible for Pell grants and attend an affordable state college.

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Of course:

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Scenario on the left (50 houses with sample incomes) assumes that every kid in a house earning above median goes on to college and that every house has two kids. Even if that’s the case, we would still have 16 of the 66 college attendees (66 of every 100 seniors goes on to college) coming from houses with incomes below the median.

Scenario on the right is more accurate. When incomes are broken down into thirds, we see 80% of those kids going to college and about 65% of the bottom two thirds attending.

We see in this scenario that 19 of the 67 kids going to college are from the bottom third.

If we wanted to take it a step further, we’d say that there are more kids in the bottom third than the top third but I don’t quite have time for that (this would grow the number of “poor kids” in college even further).

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Thank you. I’ll study on it.

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They should not. You don’t owe privileged people such as Lori Loughlin any money.

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And how old are you?

In 1995, the debt-income ratio for college grads in the bottom 50% of income was .36. Today, that number is 1.03.

For people in the next 40%, that number was .05 in 1995, and today it’s .24.

Think about what that means for the difficulty in you and I paying off our loans versus the difficulty for a 25 year old today.

This is why the “I had to do it” argument is so weak when it comes to student loans - it’s a comparison of apples to chiapets.

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Are those ratios solely the fault of student loans? But even if they are, nobody forced them to go to expensive colleges, you can lay that at the feet of easily obtained federally backed low interest loans.

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85

We all owe Aunt Becky money for hotting up TGIFs 30 years ago.

But you’re right - loan forgiveness to all is not an efficient stimulus. I could pay off my remaining loans tomorrow with no improvement to my life.

People from low income families who took a nursing job back in their neighborhoods, people teaching in rural counties, whatever…a 10k reduction might be life changing and clearly more stimulating than giving it to me.

86

Okay…what’s that have to do with my opinion that “I did it - you should too” is a weak argument when it comes to student loans.