You are now comparing apples and oranges, the thread is about education not immigration policy

 

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It is in the category of Fannie and Freddie before they were rolled back into the federal government, when Sallie Mae fails like Fannie and Freddie did, and it will fail, then it will go to its creator, the federal government, just like Fannie and Freddie

 

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Sallie Mae has been a private company for nearly ten years, dumbass. It's even publicly traded.

 

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As much as Fannie and Freddie were befor they failed. As soon as Sallie fails, back to the government that created it, it will go

 

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Companies are using the premise of the lack of qualification and education to justify shipping work overseas or to import cheap labor here. Thus, formerly economically viable "skilled labor" is turning to education to possibly become economically viable again and others who might have gone into skilled labor are avoiding it and taking "free" gub'mint money to get a college degree which will be increasingly less useful every year.

The issue is not immigration policy, the issue is the private sector claiming they have a skill deficit so that they can justify shipping labor overseas and/or importing it to pay it a lower wage.

Again college costs are in a bubble for several reasons:

1) The presence of low cost/cheap education loans with little or no qualification process in terms of student skill or degree to which those loans will be applied.

2) The reduction of viable careers in fields which do not require college degrees, i.e. the skilled labor force.

3) The influx of people to college degree programs who were formerly employed in the fields of skilled labor.

As corollaries to points 2 and 3 above, companies are claiming that they cannot find skilled labor for the positions they want to fill - and thus, they claim they are justified in shipping their labor forces overseas and/or importing labor from places where 1/3rd the standard wage in the US is still a king's ransom. In REALITY, there is cheap labor overseas to be had either by moving production to other places or by shipping in immigrant labor and companies try to justify it by claiming they can't get the labor here in the US, what they REALLY can't get is skilled labor here in the US that will work for what they can pay foreign labor.


These forces acting on the college bubble aren't exactly particularly difficult to see. More people are seeking more degrees because non-degreed labor is no longer viable here in the US. Meanwhile, companies claim there is a skill deficit here, when they really mean that there is a deficit of skilled labor that will work for rock bottom wages...

Meanwhile, more and more Americans go into greater and greater debt chasing the American Dream which they will never achieve and which debt will crush them and reduce their economically productive years further. Talk about a vicious cycle...

 

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There are more people with student loan debt than there used to be because these days anyone can go to college, regardless of their finances, if they take out debt to finance it. That didn't used to be an option. 30 years ago you couldn't go to any college you wanted regardless of your financial situation unless you were lucky enough to get a merit scholarship.


Student loan debt can be a crushing economic burden. But the fact that student loans are now available to a wider range of people isn't something to cry about. The key is educating people so they realize going hugely into debt via student loans is not always a good economic decision.


As I demonstrated earlier in the thread, the real cost of a college education at a fancy 4 year private school has not changed NEARLY as dramatically as people like to claim. The big difference is not that costs have increased but that more people are using loans to go to college, who in prior years wouldn't have gone to college at all, or would have paid their way through work before and during, but now just take out loans instead.


The other big difference is funding for state schools has been drastically cut, meaning that for many there is no longer the option of a budget degree. This also drives up average loan values.


tl;dr : increased tuition costs at private colleges are NOT the primary driver of increased student debt when you actually do the math right.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises. They always have been. Sallie Mae used to be a government sponsored enterprise. It no longer is.

It's like you revel the the chance to display how wrong you are about everything, in every thread.

 

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What is the proper cost for education in a truly private market? I suspect as the state pulls back funding for colleges (which we have been doing for many years) and pulls back price controls on the tuition colleges can charge we should expect to see costs start to move towards the real value provided by a college degree.


Should be easy to figure out.


Present value of (Life time earnings of a college graduate - lifetime earnings of a HS graduate without a college degree) = price of college


I bet that price is pretty high. Plus there is the social value of having a diploma on the wall which increases the price even more.


The tricky part is that we all receive some small benefit from having better workers in the economy....so how do we value that benefit.

The big change you would see if access to federal loans were abolished would be stratification. Right now most 4 year private colleges charge about the same tuition, even though the value of a diploma from somewhere like stanford is realistically much higher than the value of a diploma from some regional private college nobody out of state has ever heard of.


Places like Stanford will always be able to put a high sticker price on their degrees (even though most people don't pay full sticker price) because the demand will always be there, with or without access to loans. Stanford will always fill its class one way or another.


The local 4 year private colleges wouldn't be able to, though. They would either disappear entirely or they would have to start competing on price as budget diploma mills.


We would basically go back to the old system, where a college degree from a fancy institution was limited to the rich or those who can get a charity scholarship.

We'd end up with the English system of "public" colleges, like Oxford and Cambridge, for the elite, and no name private colleges for everyone else. With all the power jobs going to the Oxford and Cambridge grads. It's already something like that, with Ivy League colleges, but, total lack of government funding would pretty much guarantee that only high income folks could send their kids to college.

As to Sally Mae. Even if it WAS government, loaning out money is quite different from pumping money into the higher education system.

 

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