Congress passes Heroes act which gives Sec of Ed ability to forgive student loans. Sec of Ed forgives student loans. SCOTUS says that Congress needs to pass an act to give ability to forgive student loans. WTF
I'm interested in your perspective on this as a German. I have family in Germany and they think the US higher education system, particularly the cost to attend college, is insane. From what I understand, university costs in Germany are heavily subsidized by the government. This enables people to get a college education without taking on astronomical amounts of debt like they do in the US. I feel like the generational divide on this issue in the US is stark. Generations X through Z have been told that they only way to succeed after high school is to go to college. Vocational training in public schools has been non-existent and the erosion of labor unions has meant less protection for people in the trades. That pressure to go to college means that more people have taken on more debt to get a watered-down degree. My generation (millennials) came of age during the 2008 economic crisis and left college without any prospect of jobs to pay off their loans that started coming due immediately after graduation. Wages have stagnated while the cost of education has gone up. I don't understand people who pretend that this isn't an economic time bomb, especially when most student loan debt is not dischargeable during bankruptcy. Worst of all, we still have baby boomer lawmakers telling us we were irresponsible for pursuing the educations they said were so important and opining for the days when they could pay for medical school with summer jobs. The disconnect is a chasm. Finally, I don't understand the vindictiveness of those on right who are relishing that these people now have to repay $20,000 of their loans. In normal times without this inflation, I'd argue that money might be better spent broadly throughout the economy than funneled into the student loan industry. I'm not in favor of blindly forgiving $100k+ fine arts degree debt (and I know people who made this mistake), but I would support some sort of national service program to forgive some of it. Teaching, working as park rangers, working in construction on infrastructure projects, etc. could be a good way for civilian graduates to have some college debt forgiven while also strengthening national bonds during a time where that is fraying beyond all belief.
We don't know if Thomas favors loan forgiveness. We do know he believes it can't be done without authorization from Congress.
Politically this is just fine for Biden, looks like he's going to hit the airwaves and remind young voters who they should be voting for, looks like the man is running to the podium for a national address.
in the context of a war or 'national emergency.' Not as a permanent cancellation of 400 billion in loans in a non-emergency context. The Higher Education Relief Opportunities For Students (HEROES) Act (Pub. L. 108–76 (text) (PDF)) was legislation passed unanimously by the United States Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush on January 15, 2002. It was extended and amended in 2003, extended in 2005, and made permanent in 2007. The Act allows the U.S. Secretary of Education to grant waivers or relief to recipients of student financial aid programs under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.[1] It allows waiving of statutory or regulatory requirements related to federal student loans for three categories of individuals: active-duty military or National Guard officials, those who reside or are employed in a declared disaster area, or those who have suffered direct economic hardship as a result of wars, military operations, or national emergencies.[2][3]
The decision was wrong. Not because it invalidated race based admissions practices, but because it did so at both public and private universities. They should have taken this opportunity to both eliminate affirmative action in public entities and to invalidate the Civil Rights Act and get the government out of the decision making of private entities. Oh well, at least it was better than upholding systemic racism in public entities (aka affirmative action). Elite universities don't tend to fail students. Graduating from Harvard essentially just means you were admitted to Harvard and didn't choose to quit. If that is your criteria, then anyone who meets the bare minimum is equal to the absolute top student. LeBron James and Brent Price were both NBA players that got contracts to play, but no one would say that they are equivalent. What people are complaining about is that you need to score something on the order of 400 points higher on the SAT to be considered for admission to Harvard if you are Asian American than you need to score to be considered for admission if you are African American. Treating people differently based on their race is racist. Even a stopped watch is right twice a day. Dr. King happened to give a great speech with an iconic line that most people agree with. You don't have to agree with everything he ever said to agree that a society that judges people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character is a good idea. The same is true of any famous quotation. People are agreeing with the quote, not the man in his totality. How about just using objective measures of academic achievement, like sorting all applicants by SAT score and taking the top however many applicants on the list? That already happened after the Dobbs leak. A dude named Roske went to try to go kill Justice Kavanaugh and said he was aiming to get three of them. Nicholas Roske googled stabbing methods before Brett Kavanaugh murder attempt (nypost.com) For people serving in war following or were directly impacted by an attack on the United States. For people not serving in war, because voters like free money. SCOTUS thinks a delegation to allow loan forgiveness for people serving in war following an attack on the United States cannot be used to forgive student loan debt for just anyone because voters like free money. Where are you seeing a contradiction here?
The student debt issue looks like political football to me. The entire sequence of events doesn't fix the endemic issues for spiraling education costs, utility of liberal arts degree for it's costs (software architect with a degree in Swahili Literature? GOOD 4 U! now repeat it with an industrial pipeline of young impressionable adults...), and a broken credit system that preys on young or uneducated folk who make poor long term decisions. Biden used this to keep a promise to millennial voters but it's a lazy one off. He tried to get more Congressional support in future bills but this topic was usually the first or second to go on the negotiating table. I mainly see the finger pointing as a way to avoid election fallout for people framing whether Biden kept his promise or not. **** students, but them millennial voters...how do we give them a check to make them feel better? Bleh, carry on.
That's a terrible analogy. Yes, anyone that makes it to the NBA is a successful basketball player and are top 1% in their field in the world. Yes, there is a difference between Lebron James and Brent Price but Brent Price was still better at basketball than 99% of the population. Dashien Nix could go to a pick up game anywhere in the world and look like Stephen Curry. Also the whole discussion hinges on if you think students are MERELY their test scores. What's funny to me is how many people on the right believe Obama was an AA beneficiary yet at the same time turned out to be an excellent student and president of the USA, literally if you believe Obama was an AA recipient his experience and others like him proves Harvard's holistic review correct. Wow, we're comparing Dr. King to the broken clock analogy. My point is using him to be against AA is wrong since the man literally fought for AA. It would be like saying Lincoln wasn't for black freedom based on later quotes when the man literally pushed for a war to free the slaves. Its' completely dishonest of the person in question. King believed that people shouldn't be judged by their skin color but he ALSO believed that black people were unfairly hamstrung in the race. So here is a question, were those quotes wrong then, at the time? I refer to the quotes such as... “It’s like having a man in jail for years and years and then you suddenly discover this man is innocent, you go to him and say, ‘now, you are free.’ The man has been unjustly jailed for 35 or 40 years, and you just put him out of jail, saying, ‘now, you are free.’ You don’t give him any bus fare to get to town, no money to buy any clothes, no money to get something to eat. This is what happens to the Black man in this country.” And the general belief he had that black people were handicapped by the country and thus should receive recompense for that.
Indeed. I have no idea what you're talking about. I do know that the vast majority of student loan holders pay their loans and do not enter default. One out of every ten Americans has defaulted on a student loan, and 5% of all student loan debt is in default. https://educationdata.org/student-loan-default-rate
Matt Yglesias observes there's a contradiction inherent to the whole idea of "elite" universities: I think professors at top universities face a conceptual problem in that they want to affirm values like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” but the whole point of top universities is to be elitist, hierarchical, and exclusionary. I’m not 100 percent sure what to tell people in this situation. But if you want to be equitable and inclusive, go teach in a community college or a public high school. If you want to cultivate excellence among a social elite, then own up to that as a mission in life. I don’t think there’s one right thing to do, but it’s deeply confusing to try to do both of them simultaneously. I think that gets it pretty much right.
The reduction on debt has a much larger impact on default rate than does the increase in cash flow - thus it actually reduces inflation.
