Elizabeth Warren Wants to Lower Student Loans to .75%

The only thing that you brought up that has any evidence behind it is the cutting of funding from the states, which the Texas Senate voted yesterday to increase funding. That bill was introduced by Republicans.

Even with the cut in funding, it does not explain the quadrupling of tuition over 13 years. It is time to find out in earnest why such increases were deemed necessary and take real steps to alleviate the problem so families do not have to borrow so much.

As for the study of law, sure the big firms are paying more now. A very small percentage of graduates will even step foot in the offices of big law firms. If I had to pay $135,000 for my law degree, I would be completely insolvent by now. There is no reason why a Texas resident should have to pay $64,000 for a public university undergraduate degree and $135,000 for public law school. $200,000 for a public education is insane.

Oh, and the private schools have skyrocketed also. When I was in school, Baylor cost about $30,000 per year. Today, it is $56,000 per year.

 

Excellent. Unemployment figures from a recent article about the best degrees to have if you want a top starting salary had those with engineering degrees at around 2.5%. Starting salaries, which would be lower in Texas due to the lower cost of living, so this is a national figure that includes high salary states like New York and California, are around $60K for a computer science degree, and a bit higher for those with a computer engineering degree. He has a double major in both. Yes, it was an investment in our son, for our son, but I have to be honest with you. We would have paid for him to go out of state if he had pursued his original interest, which was in academia with a major in math and physics, which I am sure would have paid much less to start, with a very long road to tenure, and would have required both a masters and a doctorate. It was his decision to go this route. He got the degree, a 5 year program, in 4 years. Yeah, we're a bit proud of the guy.

There were unique circumstances that occurred during his last year at his magnet high school. He had a very serious illness and spent a week in ICU. What caused it was never determined. He had scholarship offers from several schools, but he wanted to go to this particular one, a state school that essentially offered assistance to those in-state, and not to out of state students like him, so we had to pay the full freight. He had an offer from UC-Boulder and turned it down. At his age, I would have loved going to college in Boulder, a really cool college town with beautiful surroundings and chicks out the kazoo. Yet with the fragile health he had at the time, we didn't want to say no.

Being a parent is not easy, but we're lucky to have him. Literally. -

 

Congrats to your son, Deckard.

 

Thank you, Steve_Francis_Rules (that's hard for a "two-fingered" guy to type!), and thanks for your interest, Classic. Yes, we're very, very proud of him. He turned 22 today. Well, yesterday by a couple of minutes. Right now, life is good. -

 

The graduation of a child that parents have raised and put through school is one of the rare times in life where accomplishment is shared among a family. Enjoy it to the fullest. It sounds like he has a very bright future ahead of him.

Cheers.

 

Jobs are important of course, but a well-educated population with good minimum standards is critical to a healthy democracy.

FB's argument makes total sense in a scenario where citizens' thoughts and ideas are critical to the management and development of a country. It may have been true once upon a time that a basic high school education is a feasible and acceptable minimum standard for America, but with the way politics tend to progress, that's no longer the case IMO. By no means do I think everyone has to get a college degree, but if there is a person who is willing and incapable of accessing higher education, that should be considered a failure of the government IMO.

With all due respect to Kojirou's views, I don't think it's a coincidence that he is a lukewarm supporter of education as well as a relatively lukewarm supporter of the concept of self-determination. If the purpose of a college degree is to just become an obedient and narrowly trained subject of the existing status quo, then a college degree is a luxury rather than a necessity. If things like self determination and democratic deficit are not pertinent to the success of government, then subsidized/free education is actually a problem.

Personally I think education does not necessarily make every single person a better decision maker, but it significantly improves their chances of the pool of people. You can always find exceptions on both sides - for example, I think the Westboro Baptist Church people are mostly lawyers, while someone like Bill Gates doesn't even have a college degree. Overall though, (and I have to check this) I'm fairly certain that education significantly improves a population's ability to govern itself and hence become less dependent on government and regulations.

Whether it is perfectly feasible to suit the narrow and arbitrary needs of a job... is a valid argument, but also a worthless argument once you take into consideration the other important outcomes of higher education.

 

The irony of this being that arbitrarily lowering student loan interest rates would put upward pressure on the cost of higher education.

Lower cost of borrowing will encourage people to borrower for higher education. More people trying to attain a higher education, all else equal, results in a higher price for education.

Everybody sits around wondering why the cost of tuition is skyrocketing, but nobody will look at the obvious problems posed by incentivizing higher education.

 

This absolutely ignores the fact that the larger state universities routinely cap enrollment. If a university has 45,000 spots available, it does not matter if there are 100,000 people applying or 100,000,000. Only 45,000 will get it.

The questions becomes what level of tuition and fees are necessary for the institution to provide services to those 45,000 students.

Your argument also fails to account for economies of scale. Assume a college had a student body of 40,000 students 20 years ago and 48,000 today. There are basic costs of a bus system and food service that are now spread over a larger number of people paying in. For those services, the cost theoretically should be less rather than more.

 

As they were 15 years ago. That really does not explain such a large increase.

 

Congrats to by our son deckard. I'm on the opposite side of your story. Teaching my son to count to 10 and the ABC's . it is all worth it I know that for sure.

 

You gotta be kidding me. Why not just come out and say that if you can't afford to pay for a college education, then maybe you should just go to work at Jiffy Lube and shut the hell up about it? Talk about irony. Oh yeah, the "problem" with higher education if this were to pass would be that it's become "too affordable." Truly one of the more bizarre posts I've read in a while, with all due respect, or else I'm not understanding you at all.

"Everybody sits around wondering why the cost of tuition is skyrocketing, but nobody will look at the obvious problems posed by incentivizing higher education."

You wrote that, so I think I'm understanding you quite well. Give me a ****ing break! No, scotch that. We're paying most of the freight to put our two kids through college, so how about giving those who can't afford to put their kids through school, or those who can't afford to put themselves through school, a freakin' break.

 

Explosion in applicant demand, based on lack of imagination on the part of ambitious twenty-somethings, and disillusioned humanities majors, with regards to solid, respectable and even possibly interesting middle-class careers. If there were more hour-long dramas about retail district managers, plant accountants or commercial insurance underwriters, law school tuition would have never exploded.

 

Supply and demand, don't they teach that? Lower borrowing costs for education, then tuition will likely rise if demand-destroying extracurricular standards are not attached. This is the same logic people use to justify the Federal Reserve's low-interest rate policy - it serves to increase demand.

So is Warren saying that we need to increase demand for higher-education to prevent price collapse in tuition, which would decrease the retirement packages of university staff and faculty?