The Student Debt Crisis: Explained

By 2030 college is gonna be half a million a yr

A government that taxes people without doing anything for them is an illegitimate government. The U.S. government deficit-spends a trillion dollars a year and hands it over to defense contractors and the Pentagon. So they are perfectly capable of making college free with no strings attached and canceling existing student loan debt.

It's nice to see an unbiased approach to this.
And not a video of an angry man cursing who's Ronald Reagan for everything.

If the government never got involved granting banks guaranteed loans, this problem would never exist. Before 1965, the banks were more selective who got what.

Personally I don't think it's fair that people who don't go to uni should pay taxes to send someone to uni for free for no nescessary skills. Going to uni is a personal investment on the hope that your education will enable you to earn more, if you study useless courses you should pay for it, nit a restaurant worker on minimum wage

I love the sound of Australian University funding. Unfortunately, I borrowed a large amount to go to flight school and get a bachelor degree. Medical issues caused me to not be able to get a job where I could afford to pay my student loans. Compound interest has grown the loan beyond any amount I will ever be able to afford to pay. Government guarantees against the loans prevent me from ever escaping the ever tightening noose. Student loans lead to a lifetime of poverty and with information so freely available these days, I don’t think college is worth what it costs. I would even argue that easy access to ridiculously large student loans caused the price of college to skyrocket to an unsustainable level.

The increasing tiers of taxable income threshold are SUPPOSED to have the same net effect as your video describes - those with higher salaries will pay a higher percentage of this difference in the terms of their taxable income. The problem isn't jobs. The problem is in getting these skilled and educated people to the point where they're paid enough for that to even be a factor in the first place!!

There is no job scarcity. There is income scarcity, and this is not the same problem as that.

Is it not yet dead obvious that a debt this size is equal to generational slavery? Nice try.

you forgot one of the most important things between Australia and the US. Aussies aren't charged interest on their student loans. I cant believe that i can get a car loan in Australia at a lower interest rate than what is charged on US debts, even more so that it starts accruing interest immediately

Disappointed there was no stock footage of underwater basket weaving, maybe it does need funding…/s

Would like to hear your opinions on the 10k debt relief biden wants done and if it’s a good or a bad idea. Seems to be pretty evenly split opinion wise from what I hear.

You didn't really answer the question

Politicians aren't worth the money we give them.

Let's cancel all student debt and make all education universal!
Let’s also cancel all medical debt and make all healthcare universal too!

Thank you for always providing a rational and enlightened view of these topics. Too many channels/commentary starts with some ideological framework and then spend the rest of discussion trying to justify that framework, rather than following the facts. 👍

When you see universities as investment opportunities, many things just seem crazy. Prospective students have little protection from fraud and exploitation, unlike in the real financial market.
Not investment advice!

Your solution of making admission to a university more limited ignores a huge problem. Students at the bottom will be left out. These are the kids most likely to be suffering from student loan debt now. Their families didn't have the resources to allow them to do well, so they didn't get scholarships. Their families couldn't pay for their schooling, so they took out loans. Without the schooling, they will not be able to provide those same resources to their own children. If you simply don't allow them into school in the first place, it will result in the same issue.
Why not just make college free? We did it for elementary and high school, despite the same arguments about cost, and it has benefited society greatly. Public schools out perform the private ones on just about every measure.

Dislike. 2005 study? 🤔 It's 2022. Biden could only muster $2.2trillion; and triggered Inflation. Student loan debt today is nearly $2trillion. To say forgiveness is possible is ridiculous and is harmful to the economy.

I think that the government should give an allowance for people to go to school, maybe $5-10k a year while a person in school. IMO the benefit would heavily outweigh the negatives because a worker with a college degree will generally create more than $20-40k in extra value because of their degree. Maybe the government could give different allowances based on the field a student is going into as well, but that may not be great, I'm sure big tech companies would love to lobby congress to get everyone to get a CS degree so CS graduates aren't so expensive.

I don't agree with this video. In France you study for free. So for me the problem is not how much you spend to study, but how the states give opportunities to young people to study. Are the studies the best investments you can make ? of course yes, but you have to regulate the market, otherwise obisouly it's gonna turn bad

I don't remember cosigning everyone's student loan,...pay your debt you bums,...

The cost of college is artificially high to begin with due to the excess of administration in the United States, perhaps other countries, and that's because of a business model being imposed on universities. You need more administrators in order to control everybody, and the costs of that system and the adjuncts being increasingly used to cut costs are harming the quality of the system for students.

You do not need the US government directing funds to certain classes over others; this country spent trillions of dollars on two illegal wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) and didn't blink an eye over it. The combination of tax payer subsidy and university reform, handing control back to faculty and students through democratic participation, would solve the major issues.

first of all there is no such thing as forgiving the debt, what is being proposed is that instead of the borrowers repaying their debt, they want the american taxpayers to pay off the borrowers debt. somebody is going to get stuck paying the bill, the least they can do is be honest about that.

I think one of the most important changes to U.S. student loan finance should be to not insulate it from bankruptcy protection. This wouldn't create any more of a moral hazard than any of the many other types of debt which bankruptcy covers, it would result in fewer sketchy loans and sketchy lenders, it would forgive the student loan debt of the people who need the forgiveness and not those who don't, and it would signal to schools that they have to limit fees and expenses.

The government: Education at any cost.

Student Loans: Okay. Thanks for the raise.

More educated people earn more money get taxed more so it makes far more sense to do it through tax, since the people with the education will be the ones paying the most.

We cant fix the student debt crisis without fixing the pyramid scheme that is education.
So many naive young people doing majors that don't get them any job other than teaching it to more young people.
We must refuse loans for areas of study that are not employable and offer no return on investment.

TADEYYY

We should not forgive the original loan amount but something needs to be done about the staggering interest. It is ridiculous that people can't pay off their loans due to interest. That's financial slavery.

I feel like student loans should be interest free loans and forgive 50% once you get your degree that way it incentives actually finishing your degree and won't hurt as much

Bailout students 😂

And then colleges small and large give free education to athletes who for the most part use for degrees that don’t help them well insurance any better. If not that, to students whose mom and dad who were already wealthy pay for tutoring so they could qualify for scholarships for free education. So you’re losers are the average student who happen to come from families that don’t have the money to cover their education much less the inflated cost of living at universities. Then no one in our newer generation is patient so of course we won’t sacrifice to pay off this astounding debt we got into when we have Disney trips 3 story homes and Tesla’s to post to Instagram showcasing how powerful our degree was all the while we have debt we’ll die with and always have at our neck. All the while administrators get paid 200-500 k a year for what? To travel for free to smooze for free to attract more people who can pay for their salary. While the professors make 60 k a year and sometimes are losing their pension because of mismanagement of funds. Schools should be held accountable. Administrators and deans should be limited to 2x staff salary unless there’s real evidence student success is happening. As a first gen college student I was blessed with scholarship but see my friend who just went to work now make 60 k a year in blue collar work while I’m still in school. I see more students going to school when there’s news and evidence big companies will train you on the job. I definitely think college should be limited to those who are serious about it. Why are we forgiving money that people had a good time on when there’s people like my friend who worked harder getting his salary up through work. What’s his benefit from this? The government should give a tax credit to those who didn’t go to school to make it fair.

I am all for raising the taxes on those who get student debt forgiveness to help balance this out. No skin in the game if it just gets wiped without consequence. We need to fix college tuition before we fix student loan debt.

I started off as a foster child and took on crippling debt to go to a crappy university. Ever since I graduated, I've been working and living abroad, making absolute minimum payments of $0 since I qualify under the Foreign Income Tax Exclusion Act. I'll continue to live abroad and make minimum payments until I have enough to sustain a family and retirement. It makes 0 sense to pay back to the student loans in full and reset my life to 0 once again.
Let's not even get into the fact it should be forgiven after 20 years of steady payments, yet when my fedloans got moved to a new "servicer", they reset the payment count to 0. Utterly pointless.

It's so bad, even MHA is affected smh

Haha! Penn State Engineering shout out! 😂

Well, for one the loans need to stop being considered a business model and need to start being seen as an infrastructure investment.

A 50k loan is bad enough, but a 50k loan with interest is even worse because it means your debt starts rising and gets worse the longer it takes you to end up in a position where you can repay it.

Also, let's remember that those debt rate payments also mean the student is tied up financially long term. For instance, because they're in debt already, they cannot afford a house. Because they can't afford a house, they need to rent a flat. Because they've only rented their home, they need to pay even more money every month.

Because their budget is tight due to their rent payments and loan rates, the student also might not be table to take their time finding a well-paid job, because they cannot afford waiting. By taking a job that might offer sub-par pay for their qualifications, they are not getting wealthier either.

The main reason for this is just unreasonable high fees. There should be a check on it... How can studying for 2 years cost you over 100k.

We're also forgetting that the glut of degrees floating around make a B.A. the equivalent of what a high school diploma once was - the minimum standard.
Now employers can demand a 4 year degree for what should be taught in the field, because there is a starving graduate who will accept it if you don't.

Is it a good investment?

Is air a good investment?

Intrinsically it's as good an investment as an investment in a few cubic meters of air is. Great if you're on Mars; not so great if you're on Earth.

Is it an education? I very much doubt it. Not in a sense that can be meaningfully distinguished from training. Not for most people. Yes at times a university will make some kind of token attempt at teaching students how to think, but for the most part they just teach the "better"meat machines more complicated tricks. Learn how to perform the trick, and you get certified as a reliable machine for some purpose. And you can call that an "education" if you have some emotional need to do so.

What the world probably needs more of is vocational training (for everyone). Everyone knows after a very short time in a job that once you're done with college you "know nothing". They discover this by being brought back down to Earth by reality. (Well some do. Some don't ever really get back down to Earth. They sit on their mountains being Sacred forever.) If people were learning their professions truly from the bottom up, they'd at least develop a good idea of what thinking tricks they need to learn to perform well by experiencing a mail room or factory floor view of that need.

Is actual education worth anything? Maybe. Maybe not. I doubt if there's enough of it around to get good numbers on this.

And who needs an education if you can go into your training institution perfect, play the game, log the high score, and then emerge still perfect at the end of it all? In practical terms this boils down to what people should learn when not just learning on the job. It probably shouldn't get over fussy about the idea of teaching people to think, most of the time. People can already think. Well enough, anyway. Or so they're going to insist all the way through, which amounts to the same thing in practical terms.

What about the use of the institutions as a measuring apparatus? For taking head measurements. Why bother? Just do IQ tests (and work on making this kind of test more predictive), and you get that information in less than a day from the prospective Managing Director newly arrived from college to take over just sitting the right battery of tests.

I'm not saying that getting a certificate that lets you in through some entrance barrier is a bad investment, just that the entire system is probably much less efficient than it should be. To some extent it could be done without. To a very large extent it could be fixed by simply restoring the vocational training model of things.

I watch and hear students complaining about their loan debts and that they cannot get well paying jobs.. Then you peer behind the curtain and find they have useless degrees that would never hold up in the real world.Fault of the student ..Yes. Fault of the Universities.. Yes. Fault of the taxpayer NO.

Student loan debt forgiveness does sound like a good idea. But if this idea is implemented, it'll only fix a part of the problem. College tuition should be decreased so that many applicants would not have to borrow money just to attend these schools. If they want to go to college after high school. In my case, I ended up skipping college especially since my employment prospects weren't good to begin with. Because of my disability and lack of work experience, my job prospects were slim anyway. Which is why I wished I started investing in dividend stocks with the little money I had. For me, if I had listened to others and went to college I could've been unemployed with student loan debt. The state vocational rehab program I was under wasn't gonna pay for me to get any degree. Just my two cents here.

Go to college if your 100% sure that degree you will get will pay great dont waste your time the job market is tough so pathetic degree is your own mistake

I completely disagree with EE. A stupid liberal arts degree is a waste. I have one by the way. We do not need the average Joe Smoe to have a degree in education to work at a Spectrum Wireless. College, unless you are going for a STEM, Law, medicine is a scam. It is just a way to have a ton on mid level education plutocrats sitting in their offices.

I often wonder how responsibly student loan money is spent. The apparent student wealth surrounding me when I was a University student and that I still think I see years later in nearby State University town makes me relatively unsympathetic to the so-called crisis. 
Personally, as an undergrad and 10 years later at graduate level (both times graduating into recessions darn it) I controlled my spending, took large course loads and worked multiple jobs while in school and graduated with very manageable debt despite initially landing low paying jobs on graduation.