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Notes -
Inspired by college loans discussion earlier, I'd like to apply a policy engineering lens:
Break universities' ability to price discriminate on income. Separate the federal loan program from the uni's ability to present a "personalized price" to each individual based on extremely good information on the student's (and the student's parents) financials. Just don't make that information available to the unis. What business do they have looking at that information? Make them do something else. Then, observe what the other thing is that they do and figure out the optimal next step.
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The current limits on government backed loans are frozen for the rest of time. It wouldn’t fuck over current students nor would it allow for continued expansion.
That just gets undone with a little crying from advocates.
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*heads on pikes
*see above
*more heads
Let the hate flow through you elsewhere. This is not the place for unironic Palpatine-posting.
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Low Effort? Boo Outgroup? Antagonistic? Literally calling for violence and nothing else? Check check check check. Please don't do this, you write pretty good comments sometimes.
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I don't understand why anyone cares. According to the Fed, median student debt is in the low 20K range, which is an amount that people routinely borrow [to buy cars}(https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/#Averageautoloanamounts). And the larger amounts tend to be for professional degrees that lead to high income. This does not seem to be a crisis.
There are of course exceptions, such as people who borrow tons of money to attend various private schools, including some sketchy trade schools. Any reform should focus on reducing the incidence of that specific phenomenon.
People who routinely borrow 20k USD for a car usually have a better job or job prospects than the median people coming out of college, and especially better than the median debtor, since income is right up there with credit score for something required to qualify for such a auto loan that isn't for education loans. They also have an asset that can, in a majority of cases, be meaningfully repossessed, and while such repossessions are janky and unpleasant for everyone, they happen at scale in a way that discharges the loan without unspooling significant portions of the United States economy.
College loans guaranteed by the government, at least on paper, make up a value equivalent around 6% of GDP, which isn't quite the right comparison but it's as useful of one as I can provide. It's plausible that this just goes on forever with a bunch of barely-serviced loans, but another fun stat is that people with active loans make up around 13% of the population. And they're kinda the historical go-to example for people who vote, and the last three Democratic Presidential primaries have been full of people fighting with each other to see who can pander the most while dangling 20k USD bills in front of this particular audience; the current sitting President has tried to push a blatantly illegal policies to do so, that was specifically 10k-20k USD per person.
There are other issues on top of this -- proposals that don't change the system mean that this exact same problem will come about again in another decade or two, the problem's particularly galling because university administration where a lot of this money is getting funneled is filled with awful and awfully anti-Red-Tribe people, just as this failure mode was obvious back in the ACA debate era the next step where this debt forgiveness/nullification breaks down will be funny when Red Tribers are joking about nationalizing the university endowments and significantly less so when the actual policy response has considered ten years of its worst enemy's public plans. But it's Bad Enough.
That exaggerates their significance by at least an order of magnitude. Assuming that they're paid off on a ten-year schedule, student loan payments would be more like 0.6% of GDP, and well under 1% of aggregate personal income.
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Because our society doesn’t consider a college degree to be a straightforward investment, it considers it the price of entry into the class of people who deserve a comfortable life without having to work particularly hard for it. And part of our society’s definition of a comfortable life is ‘get to spend 18-21 partying and experiencing life in an extended adolescence’ so it’s just wrong to ask them to pay for their semester in France where they gained the kind of familiarity with French culture that apparently doesn’t involve learning the language. Or pay for their nicer than necessary dorms and accommodations and the professional chef running the dining hall.
‘The traditional college experience’ delendum est. You can get a college degree for cheap, or at least affordable, if you don’t have extenuating circumstances- live at home, get as much as possible done through community college, then commute to bumfuck nowhere tech- cowtippingville campus. But 18 year olds choose not to do that, because they’ve been convinced that spending four years in high school but without having to answer to their parents is a necessity.
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Simple, try to change the law so that student loans can be discharged in bankruptcy.
The fact that it's hard to explain things to the average person helps you here. Average people will see it as "help graduates who owe a lot of money by at least letting them go bankrupt". They won't think about how it incentivizes universities to give loans only for useful majors, because they won't think about incentives at all. The left can't complain that you can't get loans for feminist studies because the cause and effect from allowing bankruptcy to that result won't fit in a sound bite.
(Someone points out below that a lot of loans are direct, which may make this harder.)
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Unlikely to be resolved, because loan rates will differ by ethnic background because college completions differ by ethnic background.
This is currently illegal and would remain so. It doesn’t matter if an inscrutable AI model produces the same model.
Not interest rates - the number of people getting the loans in the first place. Should have clarified that.
It has similar political problems, which is why the college loan situation in the US is unlikely to be resolved. Libs have proven willing to accept a higher non-graduation rate and higher debt, but probably won't accept a difference in how often the loans are issued.
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The problem is you can't do minimal changes except to make things worse. There's a ratchet which led to the current situation, so the only way back is a major change to break the ratchet.
It would require:
Getting the government out of the loan business
Making loans dischargeable in bankruptcy after x years.
The two changes would probably significantly reduce the capital available to young students / make borrowing more expensive. Doing so would lead to less students going to college. As demand drops, colleges would either fold or more likely cut non essential personnel (eg admin). Prices drop and people can now afford college (with some minor loans).
But that admin base is heavily democratic so one party has little incentive to change the system since it allocated money to a major voting bloc.
Hahaha. Colleges are extremely poorly run and there might be a few small private schools that go under but realistically the US education system is a black hole of turning resources into demands for unconditional respect and more resources. No, universities won’t accept shrinking or cutting in any way without being directly forced to by the government. They’ll cry about going bankrupt, borrow enough to give free tuition to their entire student body for ten years, then squander it all and stick taxpayers with the bill.
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Yes, and those are major changes, not minor ones. There's no gradualist approach to get there; gradualism favors the incumbent here.
Off-the-cuff gradualist proposal to play with, and maybe be an existence proof: fedgov only guarantees 95% of a loan balance, measured as an amount of approved loan principle. Or whatever amount is needed to see a signal emerge (is part of your point that the minimum amount to see that is too large to be viable?). This paired with, I dunno, earmarks for grants for some of those who are impacted, to add palatability to lefty opposition and keep incentives straight for borrowers.
What doesn't work there?
The part where you expect the government to let the sorts of people who own debt take a haircut.
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Student loans already aren't guarantees any more; they went over to almost entirely direct loans from the government in the Obama administration. Just undoing that would be a big move.
If you did do it, the first time there were a lot of defaults, the percentage would be retroactively bumped back up to 100% because "too big to fail" or something like that.
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