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.
But…if you think free public university is a good thing…isn’t not giving loan forgiveness analogous to saying “folks should stay in jail for trumped up marijuana charges until it’s legal Federally”? IMHO people shouldn’t have these loans in the first place.
If we can’t afford loan forgiveness, we can’t afford free public university. We can simultaneously fix the problems of the past while trying to improve things for the future.
it would be worse actually, it would be the equivalent of federally legalizing weed, but then doing nothing for all the existing weed charges and just letting them roll out their time.
The marijuana comparison is not even close to the same thing.
In terms of harm done, no. Principle? Yeah? It’s best to stop further harm, but undoing past harms as well is even better.
It’s also important for dumb choices to have consequences. The systemic racism that brought the majority of the marijuana convictions is not even close in comparison to someone who borrowed money to get a degree that was never going to make a decent income.
The assumption that you should only do things that are profitable is faulty. I don’t want to live in a world where that’s true, and if you thought about it longer you probably also don’t. Assuming you like books, art, music, culture, etc.
People shouldn’t choose to take on debt that they can’t afford and free education will still get me all of that culture.
Except the system is so fucked that even terrible low paying jobs routinely ignore applicants without degrees.
State universities, community colleges, boot camps and inexpensive online universities exist. Not to mention trade schools and entrepreneurship. No one was forced to take on an insane amount of debt. They chose it.
FWIW, the system is fucked for people that have degrees right now too. The job market is super competitive and a lot of educated people are struggling to find work.
We should plan for the future rather than pay the bills you don’t feel like paying.
State colleges are still extremely expensive.
Community colleges are more manageable, but most of those jobs don’t value them much more than no degree. Same with online.
Boot camps are obscenely expensive, and so many are so absurdly bad that having a boot camp on your resume might lower your chances of getting a job.
Everyone who took on that debt was told, by effectively every authority figure they ever interacted with, plus the objective reality of the real world, that success was borderline impossible without a college degree. The system is bad for people with degrees for literally the same reason. Because the system is fucked and told everyone, regardless of ability of inclination, that a college degree was mandatory to even theoretically have a chance of success.
So free University only for majors you deem worthy? Or only for profit minded disciplines? MBAs yes, but art history no?
Besides, economic desperation makes people make poor choices, and I’d wager that most people taking on debt for education don’t consider it a poor choice. Often higher education is key to economic success, but given tumultuous economic conditions in the past decades…things haven’t panned out for everyone, which makes those decisions look worse in hindsight.
You can’t claim everyone with student loan debt has it because they’re a worthless hippie art student. The increase in the number of bachelor’s degrees made it more competitive to get jobs requiring those degrees, meaning people need to get them just to compete…so people wind up shackled with debt.
It’s free to be sympathetic to people who are in a tough situation, even if they bear some responsibility for it. We all do.
No, free university for whatever. It’s simply a better investment than fixing people’s past mistakes.
You’re not explaining why you think that, beyond wanting to punish people for taking out loans.
Your position is inconsistent, because you’re arguing they shouldn’t have needed to take out those loans.
Again: you’re saying people made mistakes, but I don’t think that’s precisely the case. The majority of student debt isn’t because of people going to incredibly expensive schools for useless majors, you know.
I don’t want to punish anyone, I just think free university is a better investment for the future. Debt relief only removes the consequences for the choices some people made, while free university is for everyone.
Making it free for everyone is excellent, specifically because it removes the potential of “the consequences for the choice” of taking out loans.
If you’re operating under the assumption that we can only do one or the other, sure: free going forward is better. I just think that we need to make it retroactively free, too.
Doing illegal drugs is at least as dumb a choice as getting into debt to get an education.
When drugs wear off, you are good to go…
Student debt is life changing if you can’t get a job to pay them back
The illegal part is key to it being at least as stupid. A drug conviction can change your life just as surely as student debt.
🤡 or just a boomer?
The presented scenario was comparing not forgiving loans to not releasing people for drug convictions. I don’t see how you can say going into debt for an education was a poorer choice than risking a conviction and jail time for weed.
Well, when you say it like that, I can only believ— wait a minute. Show me the receipts. The ‘missing middle’ is real.