Obama's Student Loan Forgiveness plan.

[Alphawolf55]

Link

President Obama announced a plan to ease the burden of student loans on college graduates on Wednesday by capping federal student loan repayments at 10 percent of discretionary income, Reuters reports.

The president spoke to a crowd at the University of Colorado in Denver and said he would take executive action to begin the new steps starting in January.

"Our economy needs it right now, and your future could use a boost right now," Obama said.

White House officials said it could help up to 1.6 million people and reduce their loan payments each month by as much as a couple hundred dollars, according to the Washington Post.

"Steps like these won't take the place of the bold action we need from Congress to boost our economy and create jobs, but they will make a difference," Obama said in a statement.

More: VIDEO: Occupy Oakland turns violent

According to CNN, Obama also criticized Congress for not passing his early $447 billion jobs bill during the stop in Colorado to discuss the changes. He urged the young crowd to support him in getting Congress to have a "sense of urgency" in helping the ailing economy.

"Some of these folks in Washington still aren't getting the message. I need your voices heard," he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "Young people, I need you guys involved; I need you active."

The current plan for borrowers enrolled in income-based payment calls for 15 percent of discretionary income to be paid for 25 years before having their debt forgiven, The New York Times reports. In Obama’s new plan, all remaining debt will be forgiven after 20 years.

The “pay as you earn” program will start in January, two years before the plan was due to be enacted under federal law.

The Washington Post reports:

Yet it remains unclear how many people will take advantage of the offer--even with the economy lagging and college tuition prices continuing to rise. Since 2007, borrowers have been allowed to cap federal student loan repayments at 15 percent of discretionary income. But White House officials acknowledged that just 450,000 of the nation’s 36 million student loan borrowers are participating in the income-based repayment program.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans’ student loan debt surpasses outstanding credit card debt, and “total loans outstanding are slated to exceed $1 trillion this year.”

CNN reports that average student loan debt at four-year colleges was $24,000 for the graduating class of 2009. That data, from the Institute for College Access & Success, includes all private and federal loans.

More: Photos: Occupy Wall Street spreads throughout America

The topic of student loans has also become a contentious political issue for Obama and presidential nominees. Many of the Occupy Wall Street protests in the U.S. have said increasing debt for college graduates is something that needs to be fixed, according to the Washington Post.

It's nice to see something is being done. I kind of wish there was more aid being directed towards current graduates and I wish that there would be more focus on combating the cost of university and perhaps focusing on limiting degrees more to what the economy can handle. But considering that Obama can't do much with those things given the current political land scape it's nice to see something being done.

[Themightytom]

ten percent of DISCRETIONARY INCOME? Man I have like 75K to go on mine and even I think that's too generous...

[Alphawolf55]

Actually about that I wonder. Is there any chance that this will encourage somewhat reckless spending? That people might be willing to buy houses and rent apartments that are too high for their income since they know it won't have to be applied to student loans, in the same way people argue the mortgage interest deduction encouraged expensive mortgages?

[Gandalf]

It's nice to see something is being done. I kind of wish there was more aid being directed towards current graduates and I wish that there would be more focus on combating the cost of university and perhaps focusing on limiting degrees more to what the economy can handle. But considering that Obama can't do much with those things given the current political land scape it's nice to see something being done.

What do you mean by that?

[Simon_Jester]

We have a problem in the US with large numbers of teenagers getting crammed into the university system for four-year degrees. It's questionable, at the lower end, whether those students will perform well enough and master disciplines challenging enough to justify the cost and the years of their lives spent getting the degree.

Looked at another way, do we think everyone in the US should get a four-year college education? Is that really necessary, or wise? Can and should we collectively accept the economic costs that go with that, both the direct costs of education and the opportunity cost of those people not being in the workforce for four years?

[aerius]

It's a bullshit program that'll do jackshit. If he wants to get serious he needs to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy filings like they were before the last set of bankruptcy reforms. When banks and other lenders can't make debt slaves out of students they won't be handing out $100k loans to anyone who has a pulse, because will lose their money when the students file Chapter 7. No more loans for everyone means tuition costs will come back down to more affordable levels.

[Alphawolf55]

It's nice to see something is being done. I kind of wish there was more aid being directed towards current graduates and I wish that there would be more focus on combating the cost of university and perhaps focusing on limiting degrees more to what the economy can handle. But considering that Obama can't do much with those things given the current political land scape it's nice to see something being done.

What do you mean by that?

In the US, colleges are accepting huge amounts of students for certain majors, more so then jobs possibly available for said major. I don't think it's smart to accept 100,000 journalism majors when there's only 40,000 jobs (not real numbers). We should look at the market and economy and if there's 40,000 jobs for a major, limit accepting 45-50,000 students in the major.

It's a bullshit program that'll do jackshit. If he wants to get serious he needs to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy filings like they were before the last set of bankruptcy reforms. When banks and other lenders can't make debt slaves out of students they won't be handing out $100k loans to anyone who has a pulse, because will lose their money when the students file Chapter 7. No more loans for everyone means tuition costs will come back down to more affordable levels.

I believe that's something Congress has to do and I doubt Congress would do that.

[Bakustra]

It's nice to see something is being done. I kind of wish there was more aid being directed towards current graduates and I wish that there would be more focus on combating the cost of university and perhaps focusing on limiting degrees more to what the economy can handle. But considering that Obama can't do much with those things given the current political land scape it's nice to see something being done.

What do you mean by that?

In the US, colleges are accepting huge amounts of students for certain majors, more so then jobs possibly available for said major. I don't think it's smart to accept 100,000 journalism majors when there's only 40,000 jobs (not real numbers). We should look at the market and economy and if there's 40,000 jobs for a major, limit accepting 45-50,000 students in the major.

Did you know that this is actually far more authoritarian than Stalinism ever was?

The actual, real question, is whether we should be telling kids to go for what they want to do (introducing inefficiencies) or telling them to do what the "market" wants (decreasing overall mental health and job satisfaction). As it is, the reason there is such an overload is because the current belief is that you need a college degree to be employed period, since unskilled and semiskilled labor is no longer an option, and the current culture denigrates skilled labor.

Making skilled labor more acceptable and more common would help those kids that currently go into "easy" degrees because that's what they're told they need to do to get a job, because now they know that they can go to a technical school and end up with a good, well-paying job that's always in demand.

Secondarily, we can begin working on decoupling education from work so that people no longer presume that you can't be informed or educated and be a lathe operator or electrician, so that the emphasis in college is less on getting a job so much as learning about things that you, personally are interested in. Of course, I am speaking from the perspective of someone who thinks that markets are not our masters, so take from that what you will.

[Alphawolf55]

Did you know that this is actually far more authoritarian than Stalinism ever was?

Yes because having public universities only accept a certain amount of applicants for their programs so that students don't waste their time and money is far more authoritarian then Stalinism. I guess every program ever that puts hard limits on acceptance is a horrible system of repression!

[Simon_Jester]

Did you know that this is actually far more authoritarian than Stalinism ever was?

Yes because having public universities only accept a certain amount of applicants for their programs so that students don't waste their time and money is far more authoritarian then Stalinism. I guess every program ever that puts hard limits on acceptance is a horrible system of repression!

Wolf, I don't know about you, but the universities I'm familiar with let you pick your major. They admit applicants to the university, and let you decide for yourself what you want to learn how to do.

A nationwide system that puts a hard cap on the number of journalism majors is something totally different from anything we now have in the US. There are a few specific professions where the professional association does this- law and medicine are the ones that occur to me, in that the ABA and AMA effectively limit the number of accredited law and medical schools, thus limiting the number of students. But in general, you are free to study what you want. You'd be proposing to basically eliminate this- to apply to a university at all, you'd have to pick a specific major and apply for entrance, with little freedom to shift majors if you change your mind.

You're also forgetting that a lot of majors come with cross-trainability- you don't have to end up working in one of a short list of jobs your major qualifies you for.

I'd say the problem is more along the lines of huge numbers of people crowding into the system in general, picking 'easy' majors for which there is little demand, and then not having the earning potential post-college to make up for the hit their economic standing took during college. Again, this has more to do with excessive pressure to get some four-year college degree (financing with debt if need be) than it does with lots of people wanting to get four-year degrees in subjects there's "no demand" for.

[Bakustra]

Did you know that this is actually far more authoritarian than Stalinism ever was?

Yes because having public universities only accept a certain amount of applicants for their programs so that students don't waste their time and money is far more authoritarian then Stalinism. I guess every program ever that puts hard limits on acceptance is a horrible system of repression!

It's a simple fact. The USSR at its most authoritarian never told you what you could or could not study in university. You are proposing to make this happen by forcing prospective students to conform to whatever openings universities have, regardless of their personal interests or capabilities. In this economy, it is generally accepted that university degrees are the only way, and so your proposal would be effectively telling people what kind of job they're going to have ahead of time. This is like the faux Communism that conservatives believe in, only somebody is actually advocating it.

The critical difference, you understand, is that those professional programs which restrict the number of admissions don't do so based on what they believe is the optimal number for the job market. Colleges limit the number of people admitted based on space, professional programs sometimes limit based on that or based on educational philosophies or based on class size and faculty restrictions- but they don't rely on some sort of optimal market number.

[Alphawolf55]

Fuck double post.

It's a simple fact. The USSR at its most authoritarian never told you what you could or could not study in university. You are proposing to make this happen by forcing prospective students to conform to whatever openings universities have, regardless of their personal interests or capabilities. In this economy, it is generally accepted that university degrees are the only way, and so your proposal would be effectively telling people what kind of job they're going to have ahead of time. This is like the faux Communism that conservatives believe in, only somebody is actually advocating it.

Except I'm not, they always have the option to take time off and apply again to their major. The same way as just because I don't get into Harvard doesn't exclude me forever from taking the class. Also from what I understand does Germany and Japan use heavy entrance exams for their universities and progams?

The critical difference, you understand, is that those professional programs which restrict the number of admissions don't do so based on what they believe is the optimal number for the job market. Colleges limit the number of people admitted based on space, professional programs sometimes limit based on that or based on educational philosophies or based on class size and faculty restrictions- but they don't rely on some sort of optimal market number.

And how is not limiting education to those that will get use out of it not a philosophy? We already limit the amount of students certain universities allow based on what we think will be best for the student. How is taking into account a student's post-graduate life not apart of that?

[K. A. Pital]

Which one of your posts should be erased, Alphawolf?´First or second?

Also from what I understand does Germany and Japan use heavy entrance exams for their universities and progams?

Heavy entrance exams are not "limits" as you said before: "We should look at the market and economy and if there's 40,000 jobs for a major, limit accepting 45-50,000 students in the major".

[LaCroix]

German universities use "numerus clausus", so you need to have a certain overall grade if you want to study a certain field. E.g. if you want to do medicine and have less than a, say, 1.9 average grade, too bad. (There are some other mechanisms, as well.) Usually, applicants are also ranked by grades.

So if you want to study medicine, law or anything high profile? You better have good grades to show for.

Usually, high-profile fields are also capped. There are only a certain number of student "slots" per field. University of Vienna, for example, only accepts 700-800 students for medicine, whole Austria only ~1500 per year, simply because they don't have the facilities needed to tutor more students. (Also, this is correlating to demand.) Ranking is done via standardized tests.
Number of applicants for medicine in Vienna only - about 5000.

Overall, everybody is allowed to study any field he qualifies for, and for which the market isn't saturated.

[K. A. Pital]

Limiting due to lacking facilities and grades is not the same as setting a cap because "there's only so few jobs here", however.

[Winston Blake]

In the US, colleges are accepting huge amounts of students for certain majors, more so then jobs possibly available for said major. I don't think it's smart to accept 100,000 journalism majors when there's only 40,000 jobs (not real numbers). We should look at the market and economy and if there's 40,000 jobs for a major, limit accepting 45-50,000 students in the major.

You say 'we should look at the market & economy'. Who is 'we'? An omniscient, omnibenevolent government regulatory body? Perhaps you really mean that applicants should investigate their desired careers and balance their personal interest in any degree against its job prospects. What you really need then is slightly better careers advice for final-year high school students, not grand magical caps.

[Simon_Jester]

Wolf, one problem is that I don't see there being any problem big enough that it needs your plan to solve it. Why, exactly, do we need to do this? What's the problem that needs fixing?

Except I'm not, they always have the option to take time off and apply again to their major. The same way as just because I don't get into Harvard doesn't exclude me forever from taking the class. Also from what I understand does Germany and Japan use heavy entrance exams for their universities and progams?

This only serves to create extensive front-loading- you're competing with students who've studied for three years to get into the university in the program they'd like at all, which means you have to study three years to do it. I'm not sure this is desirable. Do we really want secondary education to de facto take six or seven years instead of four?

Also, if you implemented this in the modern US, there would be huge pressure on students to go into 'just any' major rather than taking extra years of time to study and re-study and train to "follow their dream" of becoming an engineer or a lawyer or something. This will result in a glut of people taking whichever majors are open to all or nearly all students, which in turn creates a glut of people with degrees in those areas. More than there are now... which suggests that under your system we'd be swamped in people who took an underwater basketweaving degree just so they could get a degree now rather than waiting. I don't see how that's better than having them be English majors or something.

Hmmm. Another question. For some fields, how do you even define the number of jobs in the market? Which jobs is a physics major qualified to do? Just academic positions? Government research? Private industry? Do you count the Wall Street quantitative analyst positions under 'private industry,' and other job options which are only tangientally related to actually doing physics? What about physics majors who decide to go teach high school- are they counted?

I could ask the same question for English or economics or any of a wide range of other disciplines.

And how is not limiting education to those that will get use out of it not a philosophy? We already limit the amount of students certain universities allow based on what we think will be best for the student. How is taking into account a student's post-graduate life not apart of that?

Several reasons:
-Universities' decisions not to admit more students aren't made "because it will be best for the student," as a rule. They're made because the university doesn't want to expand to become very, very large- which a place like Harvard would become, if they expanded until they could take in every reasonably bright student in American who wanted a Harvard education. This is a practical limit that doesn't involve the school arbitrarily deciding what you're allowed to do.
-What you propose makes no allowance for growing fields. I would be wise to choose my major now in light of what I expect to be in demand later, when I'm looking for work. Consider the boom in computer programming- would your system have limited the number of math or computer science majors in 1960 to a standard of demand measured some time in the 1950s? If so, we'd be pretty damn short on programmers in the '60s and '70s.
-What you propose makes little allowance for the fact that many people wind up doing things largely unrelated to their major. This happens anyway, even in fields where there's theoretically enough supply of graduates to fill all demand- people change jobs, change careers, migrate towards management when they trained as engineers, and so on.

So I don't think it makes sense to artificially impose limits on a student's choice of major. That forces them not to get qualifications for things they would like to do for a living, on the grounds of some rather arbitrary standardized test score or how well they did on a single essay.

[Alphawolf55]

Which one of your posts should be erased, Alphawolf?´First or second?

I guess the first since Simon already responded to it.

Heavy entrance exams are not "limits" as you said before: "We should look at the market and economy and if there's 40,000 jobs for a major, limit accepting 45-50,000 students in the major".

Depends on how they're used. If I have 100 applicants and give heavy entrace exams while telling them "The top 40 scores get accepted" how is that not a limit?

German universities use "numerus clausus", so you need to have a certain overall grade if you want to study a certain field. E.g. if you want to do medicine and have less than a, say, 1.9 average grade, too bad. (There are some other mechanisms, as well.) Usually, applicants are also ranked by grades.

So if you want to study medicine, law or anything high profile? You better have good grades to show for.

Usually, high-profile fields are also capped. There are only a certain number of student "slots" per field. University of Vienna, for example, only accepts 700-800 students for medicine, whole Austria only ~1500 per year, simply because they don't have the facilities needed to tutor more students. (Also, this is correlating to demand.) Ranking is done via standardized tests.
Number of applicants for medicine in Vienna only - about 5000.

Overall, everybody is allowed to study any field he qualifies for, and for which the market isn't saturated.

[/quote]

And how is the job situation in Germany? IS there some grand tyranny and authoritarian life style going on far harsher then even Stalinism? Are students being forced to conform to Government demands?

[K. A. Pital]

Depends on how they're used. If I have 100 applicants and give heavy entrace exams while telling them "The top 40 scores get accepted" how is that not a limit?

It is not a limit because you're not excluding any people from the process from the get-go. Such "limits" already exist in most higher education institutions, since the acceptance is limited and there is always a competition for the places (sometimes as high as 10 or 20 people per place). So how is your system different from reality? On the other hand, if someone has grades which are good enough to enter but you suddenly redirect him to some other field of study because of some concerns of yours, that is not really feasible at all.

[Simon_Jester]

Wolf, I'd like to see you address my questions at some point.

Heavy entrance exams are not "limits" as you said before: "We should look at the market and economy and if there's 40,000 jobs for a major, limit accepting 45-50,000 students in the major".

Depends on how they're used. If I have 100 applicants and give heavy entrace exams while telling them "The top 40 scores get accepted" how is that not a limit?

Because it's not arbitrary- they only have facilities to accept, say, forty students.

Here, you're proposing that a national committee allocate slots in given majors to universities, to create an artificial constraint on how many majors they can graduate per year in certain areas. There are a lot of problems with this.

One that just occurred to me: specialization. Certain universities pride themselves on being the institutions in certain areas- Princeton for the sciences, MIT for computer programming, and so on. Do these institutions get a disproportionate number of slots, to allow them to sustain thriving programs in the areas they specialize in? Doesn't that crowd out other universities from trying to develop strong departments in new areas?

And how is the job situation in Germany? IS there some grand tyranny and authoritarian life style going on far harsher then even Stalinism? Are students being forced to conform to Government demands?

Hint: he said this applies to medical students. That doesn't mean it applies to all students. Only some, in specific areas, that require unusual systems to teach what is often a post-graduate degree. You go to medical school after receiving a university education from somewhere else, in something else, what is known as a "pre-medical" degree. Medical degrees are graduate programs, which are tightly integrated with the associations and codes of the medical profession.

The fact that to get into a prestigious graduate school after already having your basic university degree, you must pass a difficult exam, does not mean that all college majors should be required to pass a difficult exam to create artificial bottlenecks in the supply of majors in those fields.

[Alphawolf55]

Depends on how they're used. If I have 100 applicants and give heavy entrace exams while telling them "The top 40 scores get accepted" how is that not a limit?

It is not a limit because you're not excluding any people from the process from the get-go. Such "limits" already exist in most higher education institutions, since the acceptance is limited and there is always a competition for the places (sometimes as high as 10 or 20 people per place). So how is your system different from reality? On the other hand, if someone has grades which are good enough to enter but you suddenly redirect him to some other field of study because of some concerns of yours, that is not really feasible at all.

The difference would be that instead of the limit being just at the University itself, there is a limit for the program as well. So Harvard could have 100,000 openings for Freshmen, and when it comes time to choosing a major, have 10,000 openings for it's Economics program.

You say 'we should look at the market & economy'. Who is 'we'? An omniscient, omnibenevolent government regulatory body? Perhaps you really mean that applicants should investigate their desired careers and balance their personal interest in any degree against its job prospects. What you really need then is slightly better careers advice for final-year high school students, not grand magical caps.

I would say either the Government or the University itself. Better career advice could help but I'm not optimistic these are 17 year old kids a lot of times, we're talking about issues that will impact the rest of their lives, a lot of times they just don't have the experience to make an informed decision especially in our society. Everything about our society tells teenagers they need to go to college. When we watch movies and tv shows what do we always see? People having the time of their lives in college, that it's the greatest experience. What do we see on tv when we see kids go to community college? Losers, what do we see when a kid goes to a trade school? Losers, what do we see when a kid decides not to go to school at all? Losers. You can't expect these kids to reasonably make objective informed decisions.

Also what happens when every kid hears the same advice? Like "Go into finance, or into health?" You're going to get an oversaturation of certain education?

Wolf, I'd like to see you address my questions at some point.

I will but you're giving the longest post so I could either respond to everyone in one giant mega post or I have to wait so I can direct a huge post to you, don't worry I'm not ignoring you.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The easy answer is that the federal government only has an obligation to support students who are going to university in things which make a direct contribution to society. If you cannot locate a direct social benefit to a federal assistance programme, it probably shouldn't exist. This of course qualifies a lot of majors--teaching, Social Work, psychology, medicine, pre-law, pharmacy, vet school, nursing, engineering, biology and related subjects, chemistry the same, physics, geology, etc, to name and incomplete list. On the other hand we shouldn't issue aid at all to other degrees because people getting them is ultimately a luxury. We should instead support their developing skilled trades, and use the money saved by doing so to make education for people in fields that essentially give back more to society free. Then the liberal arts will contract back into private universities and smaller departments filled with people who are able to pay for their education out of pocket. This will more or less serve to correct the oversupply of those degrees without any kind of quota system, and the people excluded from them have the choice of studying a supported degree field, or ignoring college and going to a technical school to start on the path of certification in a skilled trade.

[Bakustra]

Alternatively, we could simply institute propaganda against the study of literature, film, and whatever other degrees you personally think are bullshit, and follow through by sending anybody who enters those programs to reeducation camps where their will is crushed (through lobotomy if necessary) and they are willing to work at whatever you tell them to do. Probably we should go whole-hog and begin full indoctrination against the idea of the individual until all people are convinced that they do things not because they want them, because they do not exist.

Your advocacy of what are essentially fascist positions is pretty disgusting. Thought you might like to cover them up better.

[Simon_Jester]

Hmmm. Duchess's basic argument is that state-subsidized university education in the arts and humanities is unnecessary, at least on a large and systematic scale. That, instead, someone other than the state should have to find the money for such things, rather than the state simply arbitrarily throwing money at everyone who decides to pick up an English or history degree.

I've seen fascism, and I don't think this qualifies, Bakustra. "Not state subsidized" does not equal "forbidden," or shouldn't except in the kinds of states that I'd call fascist.

While my standards of how to spend public funds are a lot more liberal (literally) than the national average in the US, I do think there has to be some kind of limit on what we do and don't spend money on. Not every project we can imagine the state funding can be funded, even if we're totally willing to soak the rich for the taxes we're planning to use to pay for it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Alternatively, we could simply institute propaganda against the study of literature, film, and whatever other degrees you personally think are bullshit, and follow through by sending anybody who enters those programs to reeducation camps where their will is crushed (through lobotomy if necessary) and they are willing to work at whatever you tell them to do. Probably we should go whole-hog and begin full indoctrination against the idea of the individual until all people are convinced that they do things not because they want them, because they do not exist.

Your advocacy of what are essentially fascist positions is pretty disgusting. Thought you might like to cover them up better.

And you're a cheap troll looking for cheap thrills whose efforts have become a parody of themselves that everyone laughs about when talking to each other off this board. Society has no obligation to give a tertiary education to anyone who is not a ward of the state, unless by doing so society will benefit. Therefore the state, in the role of promoting social interests, should focus its aid programmes on degrees which yield a tangible social benefit. People who are not capable or interested in studying these degrees should be offered the alternative of federally supported education at technical schools--including for example the one surviving WPA art school--which offer non-degree programmes in mastery of skilled fields, which yield to directly useful skills at much reduced cost, including in some fields that there are notionally degrees for, like art, music, etc, which are better learned by a system of basic skills certification and internship with skilled individuals in that field, as well as the simpler and more straightforward skills like automotive repair. If you want a liberal arts degree, however, you'll have to find the money to pay for it yourself. Boo-fucking-hoo, why should federal tax money pay for someone to get a "General Studies" degree when it could be used to fund part of universal healthcare instead?