Based on a long and winding post by Alien Space Bats, which I shall reprint most of without permission below: (probably a bad idea as I believe Mr. Bats is a practicing attorney).
But I think it’s an interesting topic in its own self and should be talked about in its own thread, and I don’t recall talking about this in a while
What do you Denizens of Nation states, think should be done about the college student debt issue, and lets start with what Mr. Bats has to say
Alien Space Bats....
On the issue of college, my view is that having the government pay everybody's tuition is a bad idea on so very many counts. For one thing (as I suggested), it really doesn't actually deal with the problem of making college affordable for as many people as possible. For another, it places the independence of academia at risk.
In many ways, it's like health care: If government starts paying for everything, then government will eventually want to dictate the essentials of whatever it is that they're buying. This already happens with Medicare: I struggled for a couple of years in trying to get my wife a fully-electric hospital bed when Medicare would only pay for one on which the hi-lo function was powered by a crank at the foot of the bed. Medicare's reasoning was that having the hi-lo function be powered by the same electric motor that powers everything else is a convenience for the caregiver and not a medical necessity; it was only after fumbling around through regulations and rulings in an effort to justify giving the patient (in this case, my wife) control over the hi-lo function that I ultimately found out that Medicare won't pay for a fully-electric bed because it doesn't actually recognize a fully-electric bed as being something that actually exists (they have no category for it, so they can't ay for such a bed, even if you could actually argue that the patient needed one!).
So imagine where we'll be 15-20 years after we've created a program that pays for everybody's college education. I can see public universities restricted to a set of rigidly-defined academic careers, each built around a rigidly-defined curriculum, with rigidly-defined deliverables within each rigidly-defined class that makes up a part of this curriculum. Academic freedom will be gone; academic innovation will be gone; and politics will be pervasive throughout the entire structure ("No, you can't take courses on 'Lesbian Feminism in 19th Century Literature' — but 'Post-Colonialist Global Perspectives in 20th Century Literature' is mandatory for all liberal arts students, so you'll need to take that"). No, if there's something that government should stay away from, its curriculum — and that probably rules out having it pay for tuition.
So my idea for nearly four years has been that government should pay every student a per diem living stipend based on their estimates of the cost of living in the community in which they go to school (the government already has a lot of the data needed to calculate these per diems as is) such that 80-100% of their living expenses are covered; grants, scholarships, and student loans can then cover books and tuition. This would have the advantage of allowing colleges to offer more "full-ride" scholarships, as those "full rides" would no longer have to cover room and board (or more than a fraction of room and board). I think a good conservative estimate here is that every current "full-ride" scholarship could easily become 3-4 such scholarships if room and board were taken off the table.
This would also put government in the position of dictating and/or regulation housing and dietary standards for students if (or more likely, when) the inevitable extension of payments into regulation of the thing being paid for finally came to pass. Indeed, this is something government already does with housing and nutritional assistance, and in extremis would likely involve nothing more intrusive than rent control in student neighborhoods (which many college towns already have under local authority).
Couple this with some of Elizabeth Warren's ideas for reducing interest on student loans and/or letting students refinance such loans in the same way that homeowners are able to refinance mortgages, along with some of the other ideas that are out there for making student loans more manageable, and college could very easily become more affordable across the board.
There are other advantages to such an approach. Current tax law allows for books and tuition to be written off on income tax returns, and makes effectively exempts scholarships from being treated as taxable income; unfortunately, the same cannot be said for room and board. Thus, under current tax law, when a student gets a "full-ride" scholarship that pays for room and board, technically the part that pays for room and board is considered taxable income. Having government pay for room and board eliminates this problem.
I understand that there would be a huge amount of push-back against "paying welfare" to "freeloading" college students so that they can "live for free", but it makes sense that anyone studying full-time to advance their educational prospects can't work full-time to support themselves at the same time; what we'd basically be doing is supporting students while they study in order for them to be able to focus on their education. It's not ridiculous to expect a student to take on some debt while this happens as a last resort, so long as we make sure than the final result isn't odious, as it is now. Thus, we'd be putting students in the position of (at worst) borrowing for the cost of books and tuition, and then having the most affordable terms possible for handling that debt afterward.
Thank you Mr. bats.
I think that there is a pretty decent amount of meat to what mr bats has to say in a lot of different areas.
I think he is right that education will be treated the way medicine is currently and that is generally a bad thing. As I have mentioned many many times before my objection to obama care has nothing to do with the insurance market angle, but how it has changed and standardized the practice of medicine and medical record keeping.
I think the idea we can just cancel current debt is absurd, the government doesn’t own any of that debt it is owned by the lending companies, I think that needs to be cleaned up and rates should be adjusted, but I don’t think the feds should be handing more money to the banks.
I think providing room and board at college and university is just too expensive, and impractical, there will still be no incentive for private schools to make an attempt to contain their costs.
My solution is to make public state run community colleges free. For 3 years let everyone get a 2 year degree.
Community colleges are local and run by the county and are accessible to residents in the towns.
No housing allowance is needed as they already live in the county the school is based,
We give them 3 years for the degree so if they have to work part time or take care of a sick relative they have the time to do so.
I pay for this via federal block grants to the states, that way the feds can not change the local curriculum and those schools are still only answerable to whoever accredits them, and it keeps the bureaucracy down. If a state does not want to provide free tuition they can opt out, but they don’t get the money.
Poll with hasselhoff option coming:
