osan
Member
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2009
- Messages
- 16,829
I am of two minds regarding the student loan issue.
On the one hand, you signed the papers. Pay the fucking loan.
On the other hand, it is a bit more complicated than that.
I can see forgiving the loans, but not having the taxpayers foot the bill. We, after all, are not the ones who issued the paper, nor did we guarantee that lenders would get paid.
Some of the real culprits in all this are... <drumroll>... THE LENDERS! If your reflex is "you're full of shit", then hold your bile a minute and consider the following.
The lenders use but one criterion for granting the loans: your status as a college student. If you are in school, you get the money. This seems innocent enough on the surface... at least to those who have no knowledge of finance. But those of us that have been initiated into that particular brotherhood will tell you right off that this method of approval doesn't even rise to idiocy. It is outright malfeasance, incompetence, lassitude, and pure corruption.
When you go to get a loan for anything, other than school that is, the lender dives into your credit history, examines whether you are employed, considers how much you bring home every month, and so on down a litany of criteria, the sum total of which paints for them a picture that tells them how likely it is that: a) you will be able to pay back the loan, b) how likely you are to be reliably punctual in repayment, and c) how likely it is that you will not decide one day to fly the aspidistra and sail away, never again to be heard from.
None of this is done with student loans. OK, so it is clear that certain criteria cannot be reasonably applied to most 18 year old adults. Generally speaking, they have little to no employment history, no credit of which to speak, no assets, and little to no experience. They are, in these regards, blank slates. But there ARE indicators that can give lenders statistically reasonable signs of how you may fare, once graduated.
The most significant of these is the actual major you choose to undertake as your goal. Were I a lender and you came to me with a major in Lesbian Dance Studies, you're not getting a loan. Period. Why? Because the degree is economically valueless. If you already had a degree in, say, Law or mechanical engineering and had perhaps three or more years of steady and good employment history behind you, as well as many of the usual indicators of credit-worthiness, then perhaps that otherwise economically useless degree, to be taken as a labor of love, would rise to the status of qualified for lending. But as a first degree, no way. English lit? No. Phys. Ed.? Questionable at best.
Degrees in business, engineering, hard science, pre-med, pre-law... those are the promising avenues of pursuit, economically speaking. The rest are "nice to have" at best. They may be of some cultural value, but if you cannot make an economic go of your studies, then you should not be handed $100K, and often much more, because chances are you will never be able to pay it back.
Therefore, the lender institutions have grossly failed in their due diligence to make a reasonable effort at assessing the wisdom of investing in your degree as a human-development major. Therefore, it is the lenders who should be placed on the hook for all this. Forgive the outstanding loans - certainly for the economically worthless pursuits such as fine arts, music, and so on, and let the lenders eat the losses. If they go out of business, well... that's business for you. Proceed as a fool, have your lunch eaten by the sharks of the misfortune you have made for yourself.
The other culprits, of course, are the universities themselves, offering the most inane and worthless degrees imaginable. They are largely enabled by the equally culpable, not to mention blindly stupid, students who attend these universities at extortionate prices with not even a reasonable assurance that your degree in Summer's Eve Disposable Douche Studies will provide you with even the most remote hope of leading to gainful employment, much less an actual career.
Were this situation not a threat to those who chose soundly and who work and repay as they promised, I'd find it all amusing while I broke out the popcorn and beer, drunkenly cheering as the imbeciles and morons died in the street of starvation in accord with the hard gravity issues that attach to the life choices we all must make. Choose well, perhaps you live a good life. Choose poorly, die.
The whole college finance situation is absurd beyond absurdity. It is long overdue for people to start popping their heads from the Dark Place and begin using their brains as something better and more useful than mere hat racks. This goes for lenders, universities, and borrowers, who share in the blame when they stupidly finance, offer, and choose idiotic majors that eventually bestow graduates with worthless degrees, the very notions of which dishonor and discredit universities across the globe and reveal the lenders as insufficient to their own better interests. The schools have become bastions of raving Stupid and braying lunacy. Until the consequences of their choices outstrip the perceived benefits, all parties will continue on their merry way with winks and nudges upon that yellow brick road that leads straight into the maw of Hell itself.
Choice is ours. Always has been.
On the one hand, you signed the papers. Pay the fucking loan.
On the other hand, it is a bit more complicated than that.
I can see forgiving the loans, but not having the taxpayers foot the bill. We, after all, are not the ones who issued the paper, nor did we guarantee that lenders would get paid.
Some of the real culprits in all this are... <drumroll>... THE LENDERS! If your reflex is "you're full of shit", then hold your bile a minute and consider the following.
The lenders use but one criterion for granting the loans: your status as a college student. If you are in school, you get the money. This seems innocent enough on the surface... at least to those who have no knowledge of finance. But those of us that have been initiated into that particular brotherhood will tell you right off that this method of approval doesn't even rise to idiocy. It is outright malfeasance, incompetence, lassitude, and pure corruption.
When you go to get a loan for anything, other than school that is, the lender dives into your credit history, examines whether you are employed, considers how much you bring home every month, and so on down a litany of criteria, the sum total of which paints for them a picture that tells them how likely it is that: a) you will be able to pay back the loan, b) how likely you are to be reliably punctual in repayment, and c) how likely it is that you will not decide one day to fly the aspidistra and sail away, never again to be heard from.
None of this is done with student loans. OK, so it is clear that certain criteria cannot be reasonably applied to most 18 year old adults. Generally speaking, they have little to no employment history, no credit of which to speak, no assets, and little to no experience. They are, in these regards, blank slates. But there ARE indicators that can give lenders statistically reasonable signs of how you may fare, once graduated.
The most significant of these is the actual major you choose to undertake as your goal. Were I a lender and you came to me with a major in Lesbian Dance Studies, you're not getting a loan. Period. Why? Because the degree is economically valueless. If you already had a degree in, say, Law or mechanical engineering and had perhaps three or more years of steady and good employment history behind you, as well as many of the usual indicators of credit-worthiness, then perhaps that otherwise economically useless degree, to be taken as a labor of love, would rise to the status of qualified for lending. But as a first degree, no way. English lit? No. Phys. Ed.? Questionable at best.
Degrees in business, engineering, hard science, pre-med, pre-law... those are the promising avenues of pursuit, economically speaking. The rest are "nice to have" at best. They may be of some cultural value, but if you cannot make an economic go of your studies, then you should not be handed $100K, and often much more, because chances are you will never be able to pay it back.
Therefore, the lender institutions have grossly failed in their due diligence to make a reasonable effort at assessing the wisdom of investing in your degree as a human-development major. Therefore, it is the lenders who should be placed on the hook for all this. Forgive the outstanding loans - certainly for the economically worthless pursuits such as fine arts, music, and so on, and let the lenders eat the losses. If they go out of business, well... that's business for you. Proceed as a fool, have your lunch eaten by the sharks of the misfortune you have made for yourself.
The other culprits, of course, are the universities themselves, offering the most inane and worthless degrees imaginable. They are largely enabled by the equally culpable, not to mention blindly stupid, students who attend these universities at extortionate prices with not even a reasonable assurance that your degree in Summer's Eve Disposable Douche Studies will provide you with even the most remote hope of leading to gainful employment, much less an actual career.
Were this situation not a threat to those who chose soundly and who work and repay as they promised, I'd find it all amusing while I broke out the popcorn and beer, drunkenly cheering as the imbeciles and morons died in the street of starvation in accord with the hard gravity issues that attach to the life choices we all must make. Choose well, perhaps you live a good life. Choose poorly, die.
The whole college finance situation is absurd beyond absurdity. It is long overdue for people to start popping their heads from the Dark Place and begin using their brains as something better and more useful than mere hat racks. This goes for lenders, universities, and borrowers, who share in the blame when they stupidly finance, offer, and choose idiotic majors that eventually bestow graduates with worthless degrees, the very notions of which dishonor and discredit universities across the globe and reveal the lenders as insufficient to their own better interests. The schools have become bastions of raving Stupid and braying lunacy. Until the consequences of their choices outstrip the perceived benefits, all parties will continue on their merry way with winks and nudges upon that yellow brick road that leads straight into the maw of Hell itself.
Choice is ours. Always has been.
