This would save young Americans from going into crippling debt, but it would also make a university degree completely unaffordable for most. However, in the age of the Internet, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t get an education.
Consider the long term impact of this. There are a lot of different ways such a situation could go, for better and for worse.
Loans aren’t the problem. Insane loan debt is a symptom of an unsustainable higher education system.
You can learn a lot on your own, but many careers require a formal education (medicine, law, engineering, etc.). By itself, banning student loans within our current system merely makes it harder for poorer people to attain those careers.
Loans that can’t be discharged are the problem. Tuition went out the roof when universities discovered this gold mine.
But on the other hand, if loans were subject to bankruptcy, most poor people would never be approved to get them.
We could go back to government guaranteed loans based on financial circumstances. And we could go back to tuition rates that were compatible with working your way through college. That system worked pretty well. It did drop some students through the cracks because their families were too wealthy for them to qualify and they couldn’t or wouldn’t work their way to tuition, but it seems like it did a lot less damage than the current system.
Student loans seem to be a massive part of the problem of out of control tuition increases. The National Bureau of Economic Research published this study in 2016 that showed that changes to the Federal Student Loan Program accounted for the majority of the 106% increase in tuition between 1987 and 2010. Whether that’s some right-wing scheme to divert attention from reduction of states’ funding of public universities I haven’t looked into, but it seems to me that it’s at least a significant factor on its face.
On the flip side, consider this. If few can afford university, then the universities will have a reduced income and they’ll be forced to adapt by shrinking and lowering tuition rates. Cheaper institutions will end up with a competitive advantage. This could ironically make degrees more affordable.
Your logic completes ignores costs of business. Property taxes. Utilities. Staffing. Those must still be covered
We can lower all of these costs by shrinking the university. Fewer buildings, fewer utilities, fewer classrooms. Not to mention the many extraneous amenities that don’t directly relate to coursework.
What about online university? Then you don’t even need a building and students don’t need to travel to the campus.
This only works if the product isn’t in demand. Degrees are in high demand - jobs require them, better jobs require multiple and higher prestige degrees. That isn’t going to change.
Instead those rich enough would still get a degree, but middle and lower classes would be cut out. In the end it would create a wider gap between the classes.
A. That would only be true in a culture where employers don’t think you need a degree for basic jobs. From what I’ve seen, the US isn’t like that.
B. Even if people are practically able to turn down uni, all the universities will most likely agree to keep prices high, similar to what landlords do. If all of them keep their prices high, then all of them get more money.
If no one could get a degree, employers would have to change their requirements to reflect this. Otherwise they won’t be able to find any employees.
Universities need to have their classrooms filled to stay in business. If attendance plummets, then they will be forced to adapt by reducing tuition prices and reducing expenses, i.e. providing less amenities.
It cost 70k to get my degree. Any idea how much tuition would have had to be for someone living out of a trailer to be able to afford it? If your answer was zero dollars you are correct.
I don’t believe encouraging someone to go into crippling debt over a certification will help them.
So education for the wealthy only? Bugger off.
No. I predict we would revert to the status quo of 20-100 years ago, with very affordable state-run schools providing excellent education, and high price private schools catering to the rich. Cheap schools got expensive because we allowed the for-profit student loan industry to run wild.
Assuming nothing is done to curb the recent capitalist tendencies of universities to inflate tuition then yeah it would be mostly restricted to the wealthy. It might be possible that market forces would coerce them to become cheaper again in order to not end up getting shut down from lack of funding from lower enrollment though.
It’s also possible that lack of access to higher education would cause SOME kind of populist uprising, which people then hope would lead sweeping economic and social reforms.
But I’m increasingly pessimistic that populist uprisings in America would lead anywhere other than Christian fascism.
I think student loans are a symptom of the problem. But not the problem itself. The problem is that college is so incredibly unaffordable for many American students. If higher education wasn’t so absurdly expensive, many students could take out fewer loans.
The loans are not just a symptom. Is probably the main cause of current college prices. Prices would not be so high if students would not be given money to pay them.
They are the cause for the high tuition. I don’t have it on me, but I saw a graph showing that when Biden made Student Loans impossible to forgive via Bankruptcy, the prices for tuition positively skyrocketed.
when Biden made Student Loans impossible to forgive via Bankruptcy
That’s a curious way to describe Republican-led, bipartisan legislation with where Biden was one of 18 Democratic votes in the Senate.
Given the other massive catastrophic defects in the fabric of our society, making student loans illegal makes about as much sense as outlawing flat tires. The law you’ll probably write isn’t going to punish the people who need to be punished, and it won’t help the people you’re trying to help.
Shoulda been illegal/actually regulate, in the first place. Removing restrictions on raising tuition was also another lame move.
