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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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You sound like the kind of person that has benefited from a degree and can pay your debt
Yup, i can. Its almost like I'd be joining in as a form of protest for those who can't. Weird to have solidarity and sympathy for others right?
I don't see that as helping anyone. You're protesting from a point of privilege. Those that aren't can be seriously financially harmed by following your example.
It's like throwing the first stone at a peaceful protest when your daddy is powerful and can get you out of consequences.
Gee, we should all just sit on our hands and piss our pants for progress. It gets more done. How did I not see this before.
Personally, if I loaned someone a thousand dollars, they were perfectly capable of paying me back, but said that they would be withholding the payment out of solidarity, I'd be rather annoyed.
But hey, if you wanna publicly announce to lenders that your word is meaningless, that's your call. Certainly hope you don't wind up in an unexpected bind.
Also, chasing payment from delinquent debtors is a cost that simply gets shifted on to everyone else in the form of higher interest rates on the people who actually are honest, so you're not doing the poor the service you think you are.
We're really caring about student loan servicers' feelings? Like Nelnet? If that's what they want to do, then it does show solidarity regardless of how privileged they may be.
Yes but if we are pretending: now pretend you're a government that provides services to its citizens. As in, making profit from interest of education loans is counterproductive and undermines the purpose of getting citizens educated.
From what I saw, briefly looking around, the interest rate is a fair bit lower for government loans than private ones, and when you add in inflation and administrative costs, I could imagine the actual profit margin on public loans being relatively low. Regardless though, I strongly agree with the fundamental point that investments in education are generally a really good use of government money.
That said, subsidizing demand like that does give universities a lot of leeway to dramatically increase costs (as well as giving state governments cover to slash funding to state universities). Additionally, given that university graduates go on to make quite a lot more money than non-grads - even if the first several years out can be a bit rough dealing with loan payments - throwing them even more money isn't exactly the most progressive use of tax funds if you're aiming to help the poor. I'd much much rather graduates who are actually able to re-pay their loans, even if it involves a bit of belt-tightening for a bit, to do that so that that money can be used to help fund education costs for more people who truly need it. The median student loan debt is about the same as the median cost of attending a public university for one year, so every person that decides to just not pay their debt back is one less student in true need of assistance that won't be able to go to college. It's more than reasonable for people who benefited from loans to help fund the next wave of students, and doing so makes the financials much much more scalable and sustainable.
I think there is an obscured part of the student loan debate were federal loans were never really quite enough to fund college alone. Rising tuitions have meant a private loan becomes a basic necessity for covering the costs unless you have something like generational wealth, or specific subsidy like a scholarship.
It's created a feedback loop where students are funneled increasingly towards taking on private loans to complete their degree, or have to drop out and have all the debt for nothing. To the point one could argue people aren't benefitting from the loans to begin with.
Subsidizing without regulation just raises costs.