More Obama helpfulness?

I, for one, am more than impressed with the amount of abuse ryoung can absorb. Thank you, sir! May I have another?

 

Congrat's on your wife starting a new career, best regards that she enjoys and succeeds in it. As for the later, I'm not aware of that issue. As far as I know, if a person is on one of the traditional four styles of income based repayment plans, they have to annually re-certify. If their income or family size changes, their payments change accordingly. Those plans have maximum income and family size figures, and if someone exceeds the tables, they default to the traditional standard repayment plan. While this isn't an area I'm deeply involved with, I'm not aware of any that won't allow a person to pay back higher amounts or locks them in at a reduced rate/extended timeline indefinitely.

I'm with you on being baffled by that decision. Hopefully your friend's well off and able to pay for that adventure. If he's taking out loans, he must really be gambling on a public service loan forgiveness option.

They don't call them sales teams, but every university has a marketing and recruitment department. A number have also entered into some questionable revenue sharing agreements with outside sales agencies. Unfortunately, there are some programs that spend more on sales (marketing and recruitment), than they do on instructors.

 

You should look into the practice of tuition set a side. Then look into research and development.

 

So show me what specific promises they gave any student reletive their degree and resulting potential earning capacity.

 

Don`t "parrot" anyone. Looks like that`s what you`re saying. We`ll agree to disagree. I believe people need to be self responsible. Period.

 

You arrogant prick, you really need to stop assuming that someone who disagrees with your self serving world view is parroting anything at all.

 

Eat a dick Acree. 90% of the people in here can’t string together a coherent sentence, let alone process an argument and put together a point by point rebuttal. All I get are drive-bys slinging generic right wing insults. You’re no different. What’s “self serving” about my view? Nothing, that’s what.

My entire standpoint is “long term greatest good for the greatest amount of people” because I can see how letting the wealthy/business/corp manipulate the government disenfranchises people over time and leads to the extreme far left gaining more and more traction. Things like Venezuela happen not because of beliefs like mine, but because of beliefs like yours. As wealth gets concentrated, so does power, with the wealthy using their influence to control government, reduce competition, and squeeze more and more profit out of the people. Ultimately it kills the host, because when enough people get driven down by debt, lack of free market forces, lack of competitive wages, lack of true opportunity, etc, they wind up voting for a Bernie or a Hugo. You can ramble on about “personal responsibility” and “learning a lesson” all you want, but it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change the outcome. The only lesson people learn is to hate the big business that they think screwed them over so they vote D.

 

You first.

 

69er and you're both happy?

 

It is my birthday

 

Happy Birthday

 

Happy birthday.

 

That is a very specific question, regarding something that I neither stated or implied. If you're honestly curious though, deceptive to outright fraudulent marketing was rampant among a handful of private for-profit universities. The Department of Education used to maintain a publicly accessible list of schools that have been caught with deceptive/fraudulent marketing practices, although I believe Devos removed it from being publicly accessible. One of the primary motivations of rescinding the gainful employment requirements, was that those same schools kept getting into trouble for non-compliance. A staggering 98% of the non-compliance with that regulation was by for-profit schools. Last I looked, over half the student loan crisis can be attributed to around one hundred for-profit schools, which also account for nearly 90% of the financial aid fraud nationwide. If you delve into the default rate analysis, Brookings has a good write up, we can see ethnic variations and demographics as low as a manageable 4-6% default rates for public colleges and universities, to unfathomable 67% at for-profit schools. Realistically, one can argue that this is a consumer fraud issue that's amplified by unacceptable due diligence on behalf of the borrower, lender, and tax payer.

 

@ryoung57, I hesitantly type this because the only thing that outweighs your blindness to opinions other than yours is your stuborness to argue said point to death, but anywho, here's a real life case study.
I met a girl many years ago. Swell specimen that I really liked. She had two sons. One older that was out on his own already and another who was in middle school. His Mom is a great parent, his Dad is a stand up guy, and when I chose to be with his Mom, he was part of the package. Over the years, he's asked for and taken my advise on various issues from school work, car issues, etc. Kid is pretty smart and got good grades. Years down the road, he comes home one day and tells us he's enlisting in the military. I have to admit his mother and I didn't see that coming, as he never indicated that was a direction he was headed. He proceeds to explain to us that the recruiter tested him and his test scores indicated he could choose any position he wishes in the Army and that they will pay damn near 100% of his college bill. He really thought this through, researched that what the recruiter told him wasn't bullshit, toured several schools that he was eligible to attend, spoke to the schools about his desired major and made decisions based on his findings. He signed up for the Army National Guard, went through his basic and Army job training (he runs satellites), and after his initial full time commitments to the Army were finished, enrolled at the university. He now commits one weekend a month to the Army and goes to school full time. Other than a deployment to Jordan for the better part of the year, he's been a full time student. He'll graduate next Spring with a degree in physics and the Army is paying for him to continue on and get a masters in Engineering.
Moral to this long drawn out story: He will have a VERY useful and likely lucrative degree and has done so with ZERO debt of any kind. He had to buy books and pay rent once he moved out of the house. It not only is possible, it's not even hard with some commitment and effort.
Quit trying to blame others on bad parenting. It is the parent's responsibility to teach and guide a child toward success. No one else's. Period.

I hope these sentences were coherent enough for you.

 

Sounds like the diploma mills were, and are, the primary problem. I know some folks that have taught at a couple of those institutions. Quite frankly, they were not dumb people, but they sure as hell were not qualified to teach college level.

 

I get all this with the exception of the unacceptable due diligence on behalf of the taxpayers. When have the taxpayers as a whole honestly had any ability to directly execute due diligence towards this or for most any other government spending for that matter outside of bloated bond issues or indirectly through elections. Certainly not as an individual taxpayer.

 

I appreciate the well thought out response, but his/your experience is not the norm. Most people experience a significant burden in paying for their education, and this is due to a system that is being manipulated by the wealthy and powerful to increase their profit and control and reduce yours.

For every case like yours, there’s a hundred C students who are convinced that the only chance they have to make a good living is to go to college. They, and their parents, been told this by everyone they trust and respect for their whole lives. They don’t have the grades for a scholarship so they take out loans to go to school. Four or five years later they graduate with $60k or more in loan debt and go looking for a job. But there are hundreds of thousands of other people on the same path also looking, so maybe they wind up with some cubical job making $30k a year. At this point in their lives, people (many in here) are expecting this person to settle down, start a family, buy a house and join the HOA, but instead they’re driving a 200k mile beater and sharing an apartment with three other guys. And they’re stuck in this rut well into their 30’s. Meanwhile the college president, thousands of professors, the textbook publishers, etc are ROLLING in money.

Compare that to a scenario where the Ed lobby hadn’t pushed the government to get involved and society had not pushed this narrative that everyone must go to college. Same kid focuses on something he’s good at, maybe welding, and gets a great job six months out of high school making $50k/yr. Or maybe he does go to college, but tuition is affordable enough due to competition that he can work his way through. In either case, he has a marketable skill and zero debt.

This kid and his parents aren’t bad people. They’re not lazy freeloaders looking for a handout. They THINK they’re doing the right thing because they’ve been told by sources they trust that college is the only way, and for whatever reason, grants, scholarships, the military, etc weren’t a good option. Maybe they’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Most people aren’t, but that doesn’t make them bad and it doesn’t mean they should suffer or be taken advantage of.

 

Due diligence my friend. I think the point others have been trying to make is personal responsibility, and in turn their lack of being responsible for other's poor decision making.
In my opinion, if you aren't bright enough to determine $100,000 in debt to acquire a $30,000 per year job is a poor idea, you likely have no buisness going to college in the first place.
Indirectly, whether you realize it or not, it comes back directly to the parents feet. Simple math isn't hard and calculators are cheap.
Do the math.

 

I'll give you one other perspective. We have friends with two high school aged boys right now. Great people. Great parents, and not surprisingly, great kids so far. The older one is planning on going to college for some sort of science degree. The younger one is in his first year of a high school trade school. His grandfather is a HVAC contractor and he tagged along and helped out over the last two summers and enjoyed the field. He's learning a trade as a teenager and will have a position with his grandfather upon graduation to complete an apprenticeship. He'll end up with a $70,000ish annual earnings job with zero debt. I'm aware this is an isolated case, but it further emphasizes that college is NOT necessarily the only path toward success. It also is another case of strong parenting leading to good decision making. People need to be responsible for their own actions and the path they choose. Anything else is nanny state bullshit.