Student Debt, Free College, and William Edward Hickson

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

Related Post Roulette

21 Responses

  1. Brandon Berg says:

    Biaggi is being disingenuous here, of course. If her balance is going up despite consistently making payments, she’s probably on an income-driven repayment plan, which means that she will never be required to pay off the full balance. Likely the two loans she paid off in full were private loans ineligible for income-driven repayment.

    I never thought I’d say this again after Trump, but Biden might legitimately be the worst President since Nixon.Report

  2. PD Shaw says:

    The $10,000 wasn’t calculated to solve student loan debt problems, it was calculated to be the amount of debt relief that would maintain roughly the same level of delinquency and default rates that existed prior to the pandemic. Whatever one thinks about the policy or or its legality, its reach was limited in scope to the Pandemic pause. The new theory won’t be so limited.

    (I thought the program wasn’t authorized by statute, but none of the parties had standing. The revenge of Massachusetts v. EPA is underway)Report

    • Jaybird in reply to PD Shaw says:

      From what I understand, getting to the other side of inflation from 2019 to 2023 is one heck of a lot of debt relief in and of itself.

      If the plan isn’t to solve student debt but to… what? Make Grad School free?

      We’re going to not only have this problem again in 5 years, it’s going to be *WORSE*.Report

    • KenB in reply to PD Shaw says:

      Do you have any good sources for an analysis of the forgiveness based on the Higher Ed Act? I found this one, which makes it sound clearly not applicable, but that was just from a random search.Report

      • PD Shaw in reply to KenB says:

        Not really. The HEA came up in oral argument. The Solicitor General used HEA waivers to argue that this type of relief is not unusual since Congress had approved its use, while the Nebraska AG pointed out that HEA had different language, indicating Congress did not want HEA style waivers in the Heroes Act.

        My instinct is that there are different issues to address under different laws and the program would end up differently, but maybe they just use the same underlying analysis. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the Administration use the HEA in the first place? It might be that HEA waivers would open up a can of worms to continuous calls for debt jubilees that would pose political problems for Democrats and incentives to rack up more and more student loans (political, not legal issues).Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    Another one:

    If you check her bio on Wikipedia, she got her BA from Whitman College and her JD from the University of Pennsylvania.

    Whitman College shows up on the “100 Most Expensive Colleges” lists.Report

    • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

      She also appears to have never worked in a high-paying job. Human rights law is an honorable field, but it’s a choice that’s not going to boost the bank account. And the office of the Secretary of State in Colorado earns less than $100k.Report

      • InMD in reply to Pinky says:

        On the one hand, I find her to be among the least sympathetic of people in this situation, probably due to my survivor’s bias of graduating law school in the pit of the financial crisis but somehow salvaging a successful and lucrative (enough anyway) career. Not that she hasn’t also done that in a way, assuming one has the brains and perspective to understand that a public service inclined career involves certain trade offs.

        At the same time, it reinforces my hypothesis about why reform is harder than it seems. Fixing it over the long term may well require telling poor people who are smart and academically successful that they are still not going to be able to go to college. That is a very difficult argument to make politically from any mainstream perspective.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to InMD says:

          We keep comparing SLACs to No College and we shouldn’t.

          We should compare SLACs to State University.

          We should compare State University to State College.

          We should compare State College to Compass Directional State.

          We should compare Compass Directional State to Community College.

          And we should compare Community College to No College.

          Because that’s where the margins change.Report

        • Pinky in reply to InMD says:

          Eh, tell her she can go to college and to law school, but also tell her that if she doesn’t put in a few years in the private sector she’ll have no right to complain about not paying off her loans. She’s been out of law school for 13 years, and now she has a ton of unique experience. Bang it out in a few.Report

          • InMD in reply to Pinky says:

            This is why I don’t have a lot of sympathy for her in particular. She could have a very lucrative career and at some point almost certainly will. Most likely she falls into the High Earner Not Rich Yet class.

            But the issue she raises is still IMO one that needs to be addressed if we ever get to reforming the system, even if she is a pretty terrible example of it.Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to Jaybird says:

      I think there is an important distinction btw/ what the U.S. government loans, which is around $31k for a four year degree, and the private loans that people necessarily took out in to order to cover the rest. I don’t know that the U.S. government profits from the former, I would count these as subsidies to make college available to more young people, just not the most expensive colleges. The government can’t do much about private loans; maybe the government can impose enough regulatory requirements on them that the business folds.Report