Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
Student loan forgiveness with no other action is completely counter-productive. Just like allowing drug companies to charge anything they want for Insulin, and then just having the government pay them is completely counter-productive. The answer to spiraling insulin prices (when not due to a shortage of some key ingredient) is to cap prices, not just pay whatever ransom drug companies are asking.
College costs have spiraled out of control because laws were passed to prevent you from escaping student loan debt through bankruptcy. From a lender perspective there’s almost no risk to giving students as much money as they want to borrow. Colleges in turn realized they could just keep raising prices because students could “afford” pretty much any tuition price through loans. If you just “forgive” all student loan debt, you’ll just encourage colleges to jack up prices even more. Why not? Come one come all, the government is going to foot whatever the bill ends up being!
If you’re going to forgive student debt, it needs to come with 3 things:
You want to find a middle ground with conservatives? Make tuition free for the occupations we have a shortage of to encourage people to go to school for a degree in which there will be a job waiting when they’re done.
We need more teachers? Teaching degrees are free for the next decade. You want to be a marine biologist? You pay whatever the (reasonable) capped state tuition is.
whoosh
I know people who have fully embraced that they will never be able to pay off their student loans and are just letting them default. It’s often easier to get out of wage garnishment and wrecked credit than it is trying to pay back tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So yeah, the government paying off its own loans is just kicking the can down the road. Accelerating a process that’s already happening.