Ron Paul Wants To End the Federal Student Loan Program 1797
On the heels of declaring his intent to axe a few departments from the federal government, Ron Paul has revealed more plans should he become President. The_THOMAS writes "Ron Paul wants to end Federal student loans stating that the Government involvement artificially inflates the cost of a college education and that once the government is out of the situation, students will be able to work their way to a college degree. What do you think?"
Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Subsidies inflate pricing. I agree.
Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe if he had to actually work for a living at a minimum wage job, he'd stop asking those with little to no money to give up their chance to be raised up.
"Free" money (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it does (Score:4, Insightful)
In a lot of ways, they do inflate the cost of education. However, the quality is also going down. The bigger problem is that the demand is being artificially inflated at the same time. Nearly every job requires a BS or BA...even if they don't care which subject. A University should be a place of higher learning and research, not a factory for just the next step in education.
I agree that eliminating the student loan program will help. However, there need to be a lot more changes then that.
Ron Paul is an idiot (Score:1, Insightful)
Typical ideologue nonsense. Luckily he's got about the same chance of being elected as an iceberg has of showing up at the equator.
I wonder who he blames when his car doesn't start. (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh boy. What does Ron have as proof?
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:0, Insightful)
This is good that he's suggesting these things. It shows how much of an unviable candidate he is.
Free market fairy (Score:2, Insightful)
Free market theory is like Communism. Sounds good on paper, but when you apply it to the real world, it's a disaster.
Interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm no republican, and at first I was thinking "here we go again - another GOPer trying to take money away from the little guy" - but I think he has a valid point.
People would only be willing to spend a hundred-grand on education if there was someone standing right there willing to easily loan them a hundred-grand to do so. I've always thought there was some odd market force that was allowing the cost of education rise in such a bizarre way - this is probably it.
If if were really up the the "free market" - i.e. there were no "special" loans, scholarships, or free-rides, people would be willing (and able) to spend a LOT less. Schools would have to come *WAY* down in price to get people in. It would be a very different landscape.
Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Because deregulating financial matters always ends well.
Re:FP (Score:4, Insightful)
Then I guess it is time we join the rest of the world in being "isolationist".
If you can get a $60,000 loan for school (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wonder who he blames when his car doesn't sta (Score:4, Insightful)
If you like indentured servitude so much, why don't you use your useless advanced degree to build a time machine and go back to 1720?
ron paul is economically illiterate (Score:1, Insightful)
ron paul is to economics what creationists are to science: a deep and unshakeable blind faith in a fantastic lie
namely, that government involvement in the marketplace hurts it. ron paul and other libertarian idiots: left to its own devices, the market will naturally, i said NATURALLY, gravitate all power and wealth into the hands of a few. that this still might happen with government involved is a lesson in government being corrupted. so it is a reason to clean up government, not a reason to get government out of the way. getting government out of the way would accelerate the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, to create even more all of the abuses you worry about appearing in the marketplace. government is the only chance we have to keep the market fair and equal. left to itself, all by itself, NATURALLY, the market is abused by its largest players
why don't some of you idiots understand this? why do you persist in this complete insanity that an unregulated marketplace is somehow fair and equal and somehow it is the government screws it up? the government is the only tool we have to keep it regulated, policed, and therefore fair, where the large are prevented from using their entrenched position to cheat off the backs of the small
where does this pseudoreligious belief, in defiance of all economic history and simple logic and reason come from that an unregulated marketplace is somehow more fair?
Screw the poor and lower middle class! (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, the best solution to the shrinking middle class is to not educate the poor and lower middle class. Let them be happy with their barely literate high school education and mind-numbing menial labor jobs (which by the way are in other countries now).
Do the Republicans have any sane candidates? It makes being and independent really tough.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
A trillion dollars in student loan debts (Score:4, Insightful)
The education bubble [nwsource.com]
Remember, that's a trillion dollars of debt that can't even be wiped out by bankruptcy, unlike the previous bubbles of the dot-bombs and real estate.
Re:FP (Score:2, Insightful)
Problem is, the rest of the world kind of sucks. America must be different. We do not suck, and thanks to being so awesome that we can't keep all the awesome on our own soil, we need to annex additional territory now and then to spread it out. What's wrong with that? If you want to live in an isolationist regime like, say, Finland, no one is stopping you. There are dozens to choose from, suit yourself!
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:3, Insightful)
Because without government education, you end up with a large uneducated class of people. When a bunch of uneducated people have voting rights, they will vote themselves so many government programs that you'll wish you'd bent your libertarian views just a smidgen. Venezuela is a good example.
I say this as someone who's ideology is based in libertarian, but with a hefty dose of pragmatism.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of those schools exist to process students and take their money. They are money making institutions that happen to award credits when you pay the exorbitant fees. A lot would shutdown if the loans system was removed.
Another problem is that until the prices lowered, superior education would only be the purview of the rich - RPs kids would do just fine, but the average person's ability to help get their children into a higher level of living would be removed. People say there are far too many university graduates, and far too many positions for which a degree is the expected minimum, and thats definitely true. I have no degree and many many jobs are closed to me, despite the fact that I could easily do many of those jobs. However no one wants to be amongst the first people who no longer get the benefit of a good education, when the other side of the equations (business/Government) is not going to change their standards any time soon. Why should they, they can ask whatever they want, at whatever rate of pay, and someone will come along and take the job, no matter how awful it is.
At my old Alma Mater the pressure seems to be on generating income, so the Engineering Department gets brand new buildings, while the Fine Arts department only got out of its WWII Quonset huts a few years ago - they had been there for 30 years at least. The university education system is focusing on things which can turn quick bucks (business degrees, Engineering degrees and people getting the school patents, new business development), all because the Government has stopped supporting the schools and they are expected to survive on their own. The problem is that the nature of education gets changed in the process.
In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
I love Ron Paul. He's the most idealistic person I've ever known. He's basically lying to everyone though. Most of the things he says go like this:
1. Cut funding
2. ??? Allow free market to do it's thing ???
3. Problem solved
He doesn't mention two crucial things. One is that step 2. may take a very long time. The other is that for 2 to happen effectively, we have to equalize any unfair and corruption-driven advantages that others have gained in a crooked system over two hundred years. Once highly paid yuppies get busted for illegally claiming "expenses" as tax free money and corporations get busted for gambling with pension funds at the same rate that people get busted for stealing a piece of bread or robbing a grocery store, then we'll have a truly fair environment for the free market to do its thing. In the meantime, Ron Paul is selling pipe dreams. Awesome pipe dreams, but ultimately dreams without good plans to back them up.
Re:Of course it does (Score:4, Insightful)
Nowadays I doubt you could get a job at Apple doing anything besides retail or janitorial work without a degree.....
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:2, Insightful)
Subsidies inflate pricing. I agree.
Because companies change what they can, rather than a fair cost. The answer to that is simple - let the government run the universities too. That's a much better fix than denying most of the young people a higher education as Ron Paul's proposal does.
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is a really good justification for him shutting the hell up when it comes to issues of welfare. I can't personally afford to work for free, in fact most Americans can't afford to do so either. We just don't have the money in the bank to allow for that. Perhaps if the GOP kleptocracy would stop looking for new and innovative ways of stealing from the poor to give to the rich, we might be able to afford to give back more.
At the end of the day, any politician that can afford to do that, whether or not they do, has no right to suggest that we cut back on our minimalist safety net.
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the federal student loans, while genuinely useful to some, have been exploited pretty much to death by the for-profit colleges. Those do powerful marketing and have pretty much established the idea that everyone should go to college, no matter what. It's the same with diamond jewelry: somehow a semi-rare rock is elevated to cult status, and every woman in the U.S. feels that getting a big one on a golden ring is cool and shit. The colleges merely took a good marketing lesson from DeBeers and applied it to a different market. The outcome is pretty much the same. Couples get into debt for shiny rocks. Students get into debt for college education that can be very well useless to them. Nothing new here, move along.
As much as I think some of RPs ideas are overreaching, I do believe that axing or at least reforming the federal loan program is a must. As an alternative to axing, I'd limit its availability to people who to non-profit schools. I'm sure a more extreme option exists, say limiting it to people who go to non-profit public schools.
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:4, Insightful)
Education doesn't just benefit the person educated. It benefits society.
Re:FP (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it the governments responsibility to pay those "with little to no money" way through college?
And I thought the American Dream was all about equal opportunity... about breaking entrenched class systems and allowing anyone with ability to improve themselves. If you have no way to save enough money to buy a good education, how is that better?
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Of course it does (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, why would employers be demanding a college education if they didn't see that it actually makes a significant difference in employee performance? They could hire people for less money if they didn't require a degree, so if less-educated employees could do the job, employers would be all over it.
The only reasonable conclusion, IMO, is that it does matter. Of course, it's entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that the education isn't so much the cause of good performance as the education and good job performance both result from the habits and character of the individual. By that I mean that the sort of industrious, intelligent person who will be a good employee is also the sort of person who will pursue and achieve a good education.
But I don't think so. My former employer, IBM, long had programs where they provided educational opportunities for factory workers so those people could advance within the company. I worked with a couple of gentlemen who had taken this route, starting on an assembly line, bolting computers together and ultimately achieving technical and managerial leadership positions in the company, getting the equivalent of a college education in the process. I noticed a couple of things about these people. The first was though they were given greater responsibilities at the same time they were getting their educations, those responsibilities were limited -- and even still they felt underqualified and somewhat overwhelmed by them. They, at least, felt that the education they received was essential in their ability to succeed.
The other was that I always felt they were less effective than they could have been if they'd had a "normal" college education. IBM didn't bother providing, or requiring, a liberal education curriculum and the result was people with deep knowledge and skill in a narrow focus. It was less problematic for the technical guy; he'd earned the equivalent of an MSCS, and within the context of software and hardware he knew his stuff -- but don't expect him to understand much about the social or historical context of his work. For the manager, he'd earned the equivalent of an MBA and again he knew business, negotiation and the economic theory of pricing, and again he lacked the broader education, but for him that lack really caused him to make some, IMO, poor decisions.
But the key point of my anecdotes is this: IBM is big enough and at one time had a large pool of low-skilled employees they could search for capable people to educate in job-specific skills and advance. And you know what? They more or less abandoned that approach. Partly because they shipped all manufacturing overseas and no longer had many unskilled positions from which to draw, but I think also because those trained-up people, however motivated, intelligent and hardworking, were actually less effective than their college-educated counterparts. Instead IBM disbanded its "IBM University" programs and shifted to the more common method of offering to subsidize a normal college education.
I'm convinced that they did this because they found that the sort of education offered by universities did a better job of preparing people to be effective technologists, businessmen and administrators.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:4, Insightful)
And what's the flip side?
Traditional financing. You finance a car, a house, a TV, why not an education?
This puts college education back in the private sector (that is, without government meddling). Let the market decide.
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:5, Insightful)
On the minus side, you do run into situations where City Counselor McSleazy passes an obscure bill such that the clock for his retirement started when he worked as a volunteer at the library one summer back in high school, leaving him to retire at 40.
On the plus side, if being a politician actually pays in vagely the same bracket as other jobs requiring similar qualfiications, you don't have a class of "representatives" that is 100% either bought-and-paid for because they couldn't afford it otherwise, or economic gentry who can afford to retire from day to day work in order to focus legislating in the favor of the local gentry.
That's why, historically speaking, legislative salaries have been something of a contested issue between the proponents of approximately egalitarian democracy, and the proponents of limited-sufferage democratic aristocracy. Career politicians generally leave a slime trail, and it is hard to like them as a class; but if you can't can't earn wages as a legislator, you can be pretty much assured that legislating will be done entirely by people who have other ways of obtaining support...
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:3, Insightful)
Salaries for congressmen is one of the cornerstones of a true democracy. Before that, only those with large passive income (through land and industrial investments) could afford to invest the time into politics. Removing such things would obliterate all hope that one may be represented by anyone who has any other interest than making the rich richer and preserving the status quo.
Ron Paul would like a return to the glory days of American democracy where leaders would not mooch off the state and instead draw an income from honourable means, like plantations in Virginia.
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:5, Insightful)
The average annual income for an individual with a high school diploma is $35k. For an individual with a bachelors degree, it is $50k.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
For a married man in that tax bracket, the difference in income is taxed at 15%.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_schedule_(federal_income_tax) [wikipedia.org]
The average annual cost of tuition at a public university in 2009 was $7020.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_in_the_United_States#Finances [wikipedia.org]
Last year, 7.2 percent of those loans to public universities resulted in a default.
Assumptions: 4 years to complete a bachelors degree plus 1 year to start repayment and loans have a 3% APR and are dispersed in full at the start of the school year. Let's also say the government bears the full cost for all defaults, and the defaulter never pays a cent in taxes.
Subsidized Interest: $7020 * (1+2+3+4+4 years) * 0.03 = ~$3000
Marginal cost of default: $7020 * 4 * 0.072 = ~$2000
Marginal annual tax revenue from graduate: ($50k - 35k) * 0.015 * 0.928 = ~$2000
So, for a college student on a loan-driven ride through college, the total cost to the government is about $5000. That cost is recovered from said graduate within 3 years via increased income tax revenue. Since most workers will remain in the economy for another 30 years, this investment represents a 10:1 return on investment.
There are separate issues wrt private schools, MAP grants, etc. But this exercise almost always shows a substantial return on the investment. This isn't about poor lazy people. This raises people out of poverty, with a side dose of increased tax revenue and decreased welfare costs.
Only a fiscal lunatic would eliminate subsidized loans.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies drove us here because a 4 year degree student is "better" even if it doesn't really matter.
Re:A trillion dollars in student loan debts (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:2, Insightful)
Or it could mean that a lot of jobs that do not really need degrees would stop requiring it.
"Front desk administrative assistent. Must have master's degree."
Yeah...okay...it's insane. Soon McDonald's will require a BS degree for it's cashiers.
Re:A trillion dollars in student loan debts (Score:4, Insightful)
I got one of the earlier student loans in 1984-88. During those four years, tuition at my U cost $60K, $10K in 1984-5, then 13K, 17K, and finally 20K in 1987-8. We didn't have anything else to protest, so some (not me) marched on the president's office to protest tuition hikes. Me, personally, the U and the state were giving me scholarships that meant my out of pocket tuition costs dropped from $3K in 1984-5 down to 0 by 1988.
College costs will drop when employers start hiring people who didn't go to expensive colleges and giving them the same compensation as those who did. It doesn't matter if the Feds, or your church, or your great aunt Tillie is financing it, if there is a cost-benefit advantage, the cost will rise until there isn't.
The opposite side of Ron Paul's thinking would be to inject government cost controls on a select number of highly regarded universities (State schools?) and make a respectable, employable college education affordable as competition for the endowment based institutions that are fattening up their war chests with inflated tuition.
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:5, Insightful)
Ron Paul can be creditably accused of many things, but being an aristocrat isn't one of them. He paid for his education with military service, and retired from medical practice (OB/GYN) to go into politics. He is at least consistent in his principles, and as honest a man as you're going to find in politics.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:5, Insightful)
How many 18 year olds do you know with good enough credit to buy a car, let alone a house?
How many private banks are going to be willing to fork over $20,000-200,000 for an education for an 18 year old kid with no credit history, no job, and a low likelihood of gaining employment in their first 5 years that will pay anything close to enough to be able to aford the payments on that loan?
The reason the federal student loan program exists is because it ISN'T profitable to make that loan. Most kids are going to default, and the banks will be left holding the bag.
The government program exists in a market where the private market doesn't want to go. That's a significant purpose of the government in a capitalist society.
-Rick
Well duh...Economics 101. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anytime a government subsidizes a product or service - the price will increase to match the subsidy. Period. The producers know how much the subsidy is(A), and how much a consumer can spend(B). They will always add a+b in the end because the elasticity of price can be known to support that level.
There isn't even an unknown pricing curve here - the University already knows your finances when you apply for financial aid. They can simply and easily price an education to target the population of students they want.
How many (fiscally) bankrupt universities have you seen lately? I only know of Huron University in South Dakota in 2005.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_universities_and_colleges_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a lazy-ass argument. There are plenty of things that could be done, but Ron Paul's solution to the high cost of college is to simply cut off anyone who isn't already rich.
See, his education got paid for back in the 1950's. Probably by his parents. So, he's got his. Fuck the rest of us.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:1, Insightful)
We have been using this piece of lazy, ARROGANT, and fucking stupid logic to let unaccountable crooks, theives, and frauds run wild with our economy for decades now, and where has it gotten us?
Higher cost of living/education/energy, lower wages/less job opportunity/less upward mobility.
This kind of logic has FAILED US EVERY FUCKING TIME IT HAS BEEN USED.
It's about time someone told you people that LAZY, DUMB-ASS, knee-jerk fuck-off thinking like yours IS NOT SOLVING PROBLEMS, BONEHEAD.
Why don't you trouble your worthless, lazy, ignorant ass to understand a problem before you just shoot off your jerking knee the "let the market decide DERP!" stupidity that you've been programmed to emit every time a complicated problem crosses your nose?
Or better yet, SHUT YOUR IGNORANT MOUTH when you don't understand a problem, and let people who are smarter and harder-working than you actually DO SOMETHING about solving a problem.
JACK-OFF thinking like yours has NOT. Go watch your TV. You are NOT INTELLECTUALLY CAPABLE of solving this problem. So SHADDAP already.
Supporting Ron Paul feels cool, is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Support for Ron Paul by the young and sometimes geeky has intrigued me for some time. Is it a result of reading Ayn Rand? Is it because his ideas seem so much more sensible than so many others? Is it because he does not appear beholden to any lobbyists? Is it primarily because he wants to end drug Prohibition? Possibly all of the above.
But it's also confused me because a number of the things Ron Paul wants to do away with are things that help the young find their first footholds -- things like student loans (or even grants). When I read this headline, I thought for just a second that perhaps Dr. Paul wants to throw open the universities for all, call a full education a civil right that you get to take advantage of based on merit. But I dismissed that thought before I saw the rest of the post, and I was right to do so. My response: his analysis may have some truth in it but it's so simple as to be suspect, in my view. On balance, like much of what Ron Paul says, it's too simple to be right.
Whoever thinks Ron Paul is cool, whatever lobby groups he is not beholden to, make no mistake: the über-rich and powerful wish his ideas well because their adoption would entrench and deepen the growing class divisions in America and put an end to the American dream as anything but that: a wistful dream of what expectations used to be.
Something is rotten in the way the US is going these days. For instance, in my lifetime, before 2008, I had never heard a leading politician in the US say of their president from the opposing party that they wanted him to fail. Whether you agree with Mr. Obama or not, that attitude on the part of any member of your government is pernicious. I'll stop there because the list of things going wrong is so long (most of them decades in the making) as to make this too-long post ridiculously so.
But Ron Paul is not the answer to those problems: his ideas (and incidentally those of the Tea Party) are only going to help the rich get richer and inherit the meek (and the not so meek). Do yourselves a favour, folks, and elect leaders that remember what they learned in Kindergarten (without forgetting all the things they learned since) and value their neighbours over hard lines -- internal neighbours, of course! I wouldn't advocate that you would elect the people I, your Canadian neighbour, want you to elect. I'm just confident that if, overall, you voted in line with your interests (and that may take a lot of thinking to figure out who's going to serve those best) and do well, then you won't become neighbours that we have to fear from across that longest unarmed border in the world.
be good to each other, folks...ank
Re:"Free" money (Score:5, Insightful)
You can preach personality responsibility all day long, but that doesn't change the fact that it's bad for society when we just let the vast majority fail. That's why prison populations are growing at outrageous rates. Why unemployment is skyrocketing. Why the United States is in decline.
What you consider 'very little money' is a whole lot to some people. And mentioning post-secondary options for high schoolers is just insulting. I wasn't able to attend post-secondary because I didn't have a car. All the kids who were in post-secondary classes when I was in high school were the ones with parents who could buy their education anyway. Also, a student has to be an above-average performer for post-secondary. How do you expect someone with uneducated parents to perform at that level in high school?
This attitude of, "it's your fault if you don't succeed, society has no business ensuring that you do" is the same attitude that has led to all the problems this country is facing. The college students who spend their time getting drunk and partying aren't the ones who cut their teeth just so they can attend. They're the rich fucks who have all their bills paid by mommy and daddy.
Someone needs to take his medicine... (Score:4, Insightful)
Chill, dude. The market isn't so bad as that.
What you guys don't realize is that there are no activities that aren't regulated today. Everything any company does is subject to regulations at all levels of government.
When you say "activity X should be regulated" what you really mean is that "current regulations for activity X aren't working".
Re:"Free" money (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. He does have money and he doesn't need his government salary.
However, the problem isn't with what he does with his salary, the problem is with the situation where people are attacking Ron Paul instead of attacking his position. He is entitled to both his salary and whatever he has made in private life. And that doesn't make him any less qualified to make a point about what is needed to improve the country.
I don't live in Africa, but I doubt anyone would call me out about condemning abuses and corruption that happens there. The fact that I am not needy does not make me unqualified to make decisions to help alleviate the problem. Indeed, being somewhat successful might well make me more qualified to help other people be more successful. Of course, that doesn't mean I am the only voice that should be listened to, we do need the viewpoints of the unemployed, the students and the otherwise disadvantaged to make a good policy, but we seem to be arguing that only a needy person has any right to talk about the safety net, and that is just plain wrong. After all, it's the well-off people in previous Congresses who set it up to begin with, was it not?
Mind you, I don't like his idea of pulling the rug out from under the student loan system, but I don't like hearing talk about him being rich and therefore unable to empathize with anyone else. It makes me think that his opponents in this case have no better points to make than an appeal to emotion and the language of class division.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:2, Insightful)
We have been using this piece of lazy, ARROGANT, and fucking stupid logic to let unaccountable crooks, theives, and frauds run wild with our economy for decades now, and where has it gotten us? Higher cost of living/education/energy, lower wages/less job opportunity/less upward mobility.
higher cost of living... perhaps it is because the federal government guarenteed that the costs of putting people who make 20K a year in a 500K house that the costs went up... you introduce new people into the buying force (people spending money they dont have) and there is more people fighting for the same number of houses, therefore the price rises. I say that if we didnt give people who we all know could never afford those houses a loan in the first place, they would be better off and everyone else would be as well.
Education? again, when teachers are guarenteed a job, no matter if they do well or not, and when the government is paying the schools buckets of cash for buying ipads for everyone or whatever they are going to do everything to keep getting that money, even at the cost to our children.
energy? if we were drilling for our own oil, prices would be lower. But no we dont do that, we pay corn growers to grow corn, to turn into ethanol, even after its been show to not be the best way to go. we give 500 million to a solar panel company who took the money and ran. 1.2 billion to another company whos putting its jobs in mexico. Here is an idea, lets stop the fed from giving money to any of these people, and we let the market decide. When cars came around, it didnt take the federal government to make everyone buy a car. When it became cost efficient for everyone (model T) than the forces took over. Until than the horse was thew way to go. But if you tell me "more people could have been in cars sooner if the government bought everyone a car" i dont know what to tell you.
less jobs/wages? simple, there are to many college students, due to the schools knowing that they will get paid by the gov, even if the student gets screwed with mountains of debt, so they raise prices, they take anyone and everyone, and standards are lowered. when those students get out, there are 100 people applying for the same job, only a handfull are really qualified, but with so many degrees out there, most jobs require one these days even if you dont need it to do your job. I saw a school janitor job that wanted a masters... a MASTERS! just to clean up the school???
so while you want to call us lazy.. what can you say about your side? the OWS people? they want all debt forgiven... they want free schools, free houses, and they wanna kick anyone who has made the right choices.Who are the REAL lazy people? those who work their assess off to pay for what they want? or those who want the government to do everything for them???? I believe its the latter.
Re:The problem with Ron Paul's solution (Score:4, Insightful)
The way to introduce accountability is to push the loans onto the commercial space, where people are in it to make money, and for one person to make money another loses. Another who can't just jack up taxes and doesn't live on politics.
The universities only win if they get money. The banks only win if the students pay. And the students only win if they can afford the loan. Currently, the banks can't lose; thus, the banks and the universities both win if the student takes loans, and the student is naive and easily manipulated.
In reality, when it becomes impossible for students to afford college, and too damn risky to give them loans, the universities will collapse. Don't want to collapse? Lower your prices.
It has to hurt if it's to heal.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:5, Insightful)
So the answer is to cut off higher education at the knees and hope that eventually the market comes around before we enter a new dark age?
Maybe there is some other way we could go about doing this.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:2, Insightful)
His solution is to let the private industry handle the loans. There are plenty of banks you can get student loans from.
There's no need for the government to be handling anything that the government hasn't been given expressed rights to do via the constitution, and especially anything that the private industry can do themselves.
Why is it that you think that if the government can't do it, no one can?
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:4, Insightful)
After a couple years, every university in the country will radically adjust their prices and cut waste in order to not cease to exist since no one will be able to afford the ridiculous cost anymore.
Either that, or they would more actively recruit foreign students. There have already been news stories of state funded schools preferring foreign students because they don't have to give them the in-state discount rate. We'll just end up with more tax funded institutions that Americans can't afford to attend.
A better solution would be to push trades and entrepreneurial skills in high school. Reduce the demand for student loans by showing students how they can earn a living without a college requirement. Many of the trades taught at Vocational Technical schools can earn above median incomes. Personally, I don't know that I wouldn't have been just as happy doing engine repair for the last 30 years as I have been working in IT. I certainly would have been healthier with a less sedentary job, and once you calculate in all that I have spent on education expenses I probably would have earned more.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking as a successful software developer who needed student loans to attend college. Bullshit. Student loans SUCK, but they are the only thing that allows a large number of low to middle income people get into the career they want and need.
There are alternatives to student loans: Ron Pauls solution: only the wealthy may attend college. Tuitions will skyrocket even farther because there are so few new students. Hundreds of universities are forced to close their doors and all we are left with are a lot of trade schools and the Ivy Leagues. Something rational: Recognize that state universities are state universities and have no profit obligation and should not be run like corporations. Cut administrative costs (tuition increases go almost 100% to higher administrative wages and more administrative positions instead of to professors and facilities) and offer low or free tuition subsidized by the state.
^^^ This. This a million times.
I find Ron Paul's position akin to an bone-headed, no-hold-barred adherence to an extremist interpretation of laissez faire capitalism and libertarianism, everything else be damned. This is just the libertarian doppelgänger of the tragically known Maoist great leap forward. I do subscribe (to a point) with libertarianism, but this is just insane!
Ok, we cut federal student loans. Great. Does that immediately solve the problems of high cost of education? No. Will it solve it? Maybe... if you are willing to believe federal intervention is the primary culprit of the rising cost of education (it is not.) We need a serious reform in education. Too many people go for a 4-year degree, and far too many companies require such a degree for jobs that, in truth, only require a AA/AS degree.
But a true reform requires support for vocational school at the HS and post-HS level (as done in the German and Japanese models of education), providing for true and diversified alternatives (at the county community college level) other than a 4-year degree. Cutting federal student loans simply does not resolve the root cause, and will cause people to pursue any form of education, independently of whether they are qualified or not.
It's not fucking rocket science to come up with something rational. But nooooooooooooooooooooooo, we have to go ZOMG! berserkers all the way to the fringe extreme of an ideological kaleidoscope. What Ron Paul is suggested is akin to having a headache, and instead of looking at the root causes, he's suggesting a lobotomy.
Ron Paul has completely jumped the shark on this one. He has foregone all reasonable explanations and solutions to the rising cost of education by pushing an extremist, radical and harmful action as a solution solely for ideological reasons.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Only for a couple of years, and its a nessecary evil.
Bullshit. Try telling people that making jobs LESS available for the next few years is a "necessary evil."
After a couple years, every university in the country will radically adjust their prices and cut waste in order to not cease to exist since no one will be able to afford the ridiculous cost anymore.
Based on what evidence? And furthermore, why the fuck should the poor and middle class have to suffer for your ideology? Why should the poor and middle class be cut out of college educations for the next few (more like 20-30) years?
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's just laughable, and tells me that you have no freaking idea what's been going on in higher education for the past two decades. I've watched as the states have slashed and slashed the subsidies that they pay for in-state residents. As that budget shrinks, sure, they cut where they can, but any realistic cuts were made almost two decades ago back when they started slashing the subsidies. What remains are the unrealistic ones—the changes that would reduce the quality of the education you receive.
Educators aren't willing to compromise the quality of education to save a buck, and as a result, for the past several rounds of state subsidy cuts, every time the state has taken more money out, the cost of education has gone up proportionally. There are no more cuts that can usefully be made when most of the operating costs are teacher salaries and benefits (which are still usually below industry norms), and when the rest is going into building maintenance, which you can only defer for so long before it comes back to bite you.
Sure, in theory, you might be able to cut out some administrative positions, but the administrators are the ones in charge, and they'll never decide to cut themselves, which means that you cannot possibly achieve any cuts that do not gravely impact the quality of education unless you start by replacing all of the leadership from the top down. It's like trying to kill cancer by starving the patient. The cancer is still going to take all the energy it needs, so the only real effect is that the patient won't get the energy that he or she needs. You have to start by cutting it out, then go from there.
More to the point, nearly every single recent cut in government subsidies to higher education has resulted in a tuition increase. You'd have to be completely naïve to believe that the next such cut will miraculously cause tuition to drop. The only effect that cuts to federal student loans will have is that the poorest students will be unable to attend. That means that there will be fewer students paying tuition.
The problem is that students still have to be able to get all of the classes they need to graduate within any given four-year period. That means you'll still need roughly the same set of classes, which means that you can't cut faculty except possibly in certain general classes like freshman English composition (which are mostly taught by poorly paid part-time adjunct instructors anyway, and thus have almost no real impact on the bottom line).
Because, faculty have to get paid by the class/hour, not by the student count (the alternative would be absurd), this means that you'll have roughly the same total operating cost divided by fewer people paying those costs. In other words, guaranteed higher cost. Anyone who says otherwise is simply delusional.
Now I will admit that making college less affordable might cause improvements in the breadth of our K-12 education offerings to compensate, but to do so requires bringing in more people at that level, so you're really just shifting the costs around into a program where all the costs are borne by the state instead of only part of the cost, which clearly increases the use of public funds, not decreases it. Also, there are a lot more K-12 schools, so increasing the quality of education at that level is a lot more expensive than increasing the quality of education at the state college level.
I should emphasize that all of this is fairly basic math, coupled with a fairly basic understanding of the history of the program in question. It's downright scary that Ron Paul is so utterly clueless about the things he wants to cut and the effect that it will have, as that tells me that he hasn't bothered to do even a few minutes of actual research on the subject. That's the absolute last kind of person we need as our next President.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sigh...no. The idea is *if* government regulation is necessary, then the lower level it occurs at the better. The issue is the interpretation of the phrase "if government regulation is necessary". He leans a lot more towards "no, it most likely isn't" than most people.
It really helps to put your partisan preconceptions aside and listen to what *he* says. This actually works for *ALL* politicians, believe it or not.
Stop listening to what other people -- supporters or detractors -- say and go right to the source. Follow that up with an analysis of what he has actually *DONE* over the years. You can see for yourself whether he does what he says and whether or not his actions are consistent with his words.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides not having a clue about Education, how it works or whats going on in a University. The idea that shoving people in a room and thinking that $1 per student for "rental" costs makes any real sense.
As for the purpose of an Instructor neigh Educator in the class, if showing the material, in written or video form was effective then you would find those institutions that are for profit and run by business men, implementing that years ago. They haven't because it is not as effective a teaching tool as having someone there to answer your questions, on the spot and to clarify things not understood through example, analogy.
Everyone comes to the classroom from a different background. All disciplines have their own sub-dialect. The Educator translates that sub-dialect for the un-initiated so they can understand and adopt that sub-dialect going forward in their studies. I have yet to pick up a book on material that spoke exactly my sub-dialect, causing me to miss-understand or do extensive work tracking down the problem. So having an Educator there is the most efficient, I would estimate about 500% more efficient than the material alone. Then there are the aspects of focus and the synergy of the group of questions fielded answering questions you did not even know you had.
Having a $20/hr temporary worker cheapens that whole idea of an Educator and comes from a missunderstanding of what is really going on, what its value is and what its long term effects are.
What
Re:Ron Paul should give away his money (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to think that way.. why should my tax dollars taken from my paycheck which I work hard for go to someone else who contributes nothing to society.
But the truth is, while I didn't exactly grow up rich, I didn't grow up poor. It's largely random chance that I was born to middle class parents .. and as I didn't have to claw my way up from poverty, I try not to judge those who would have to in order to get to my lifestyle.
I don't have much problem with my tax dollars going towards helping out those less fortunate (I'm Canadian though, we tend to be a little more minded in this direction) .. as long as it's not being spent foolishly or abused, and with an emphasis on fixing the problem rather than just keeping the status quo.
If we could just get rid of all those regulations (Score:4, Insightful)
We could return [wikipedia.org] to the land of milk and honey [wikipedia.org] that was the Gilded Age [wikipedia.org]. Geez, I can hardly wait to return to horrific labor conditions, tainted food, and rampant criminality! Who could possibly be opposed? (I mean, except for child laborers, people who eat, etc).
tl;dr: Government intervening in society is a good thing.
Re:Subsidies inflate pricing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone's been drinking the koolaid straight from the pitcher.
The best job applicants I have had (in programming and electronic design) have been the self-taught ones. Because they are *already* intelligent, motivated, inventive, creative, critical thinkers. Putting lipstick on a pig doesn't turn it into an Orion slave girl. Neither would teaching it to put the lipstick on itself.
If you're really a high quality engineering type, you'll prove it before a college ever gets its hands on you. And if you're the best, you won't waste your time in college at all. You'll buy books and do research on your own while the college kids waste time muddling through unrelated topics, being inculcated with years-old outlooks on relevant technical topics, and after graduation, are then years behind the really excellent candidates, who've probably already done quite a few useful things, some of which may have been excellent money earners.
But hey... if you're looking for another warm body to fill staff at mangement-driven junkware mills like defense contractors and Big Company Inc., by all means, select only from college graduates. And good luck with that. LOL.