OT Biden's Education Department will immediately wipe out out student loan debt for 40,000 borrowers

Most poor kids I grew up around joined the military to get the GI Bill for school. That's how I went to college. All over the globe kids are not making that choice anymore if it's a choice. The military is suffering from lack of enlistments...it's happening in many countries, not just here.

 

I'm not giving up my constitutional rights to join the military. And I'm not going to encourage my kids to, either.

Offer me incentives and I'll think about it.

 

You're not 18 and poor and single though with no prospects...I served with a lot of Native Americans and poor rural folks from all around the country who all wanted room, board, 3 square meals and a paycheck. Those kids often really turn their life around and do something with their lives more often than not. My uncle was an orphan who joined the Navy at about 17 and made a career of it...saw the whole world, married a wonderful wife in New Zealand and raised a family there and built a bed and breakfast outside Christchurch...retired with full pension at a young age and golfed and lived a wonderful life until he passed away 10 years ago. To some it's life saving. My son had no desire to join the military. It's not a terrible choice for lost souls without prospects though.

 

Thanks for posting this!

 

My daughter is about to go to a school next fall that costs roughly $78,000/year.....sigh. Get your kids a soccer ball ASAP FAMS!

 

The price of the course should be dictated by fair wage of great teachers and the amount of credit hours needed.

And that's it.

 

Yeah, if you start charging more for different well paying degrees, you're going to get an even bigger divide in the haves and have nots in our country. That's such a stupid idea.

 

Take a loan!

 

If colleges would stop gouging students, they wouldn't need to borrow so much money.

Books
Apartments
School food
Online classes... I had online classes that cost more than in person classes. It's fucking absurd.

Everything is massively overpriced. Schools shouldn't be making a profit off their kids. Period.

We are also failing our kids in guiding them before college. Nobody talks to kids about careers that don't require a degree. Nobody talks to kids about why they should be going to school... and more importantly why they might NOT want to go school. When I was growing up, we were hammered over and over that we need to go to college to get a good job. And worse, we were told that we needed to go to college for the experience. Kids should not be spending tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, to get "an experience." What we end up with is a bunch of people who major in a worthless degree because they were too busy enjoying college, and they ended up with a piece of paper that says they went. We should be talking to kids in advance about what they need to get for their money. Help them explore careers before they go. Help them determine if they might be interested in a trade. Instead we just crank them through high school and then send them off to college where they go massively into debt, often times with no real way to climb out of it.

The system is massively broken.

 

"Here's $10k to forget about what you are saying above. We fixed it!"

 

On the other hand, if my wife had a degree (any degree) she'd be making twice the salary and we'd have a lot less to worry about.

 

This is exactly right, all Biden has done is put a band aid over a gushing wound. I'd be much more impressed if he actually tried to fix the problem of the universities price gouging, of the banks using predatory loan practices and the government trying to make money off these exorbitant loans. But hey Uncle Joe handed out some more free cash, so everything is all better right? I'm not mad at these people getting the $, just think it's wasteful spending (like a ton of other things our government throws cash at) and isn't getting to the actual problems.

And then there is the mindset that must change in our education system. This idea that HS kids HAVE to go to college needs to stop. I don't know if these universities/colleges are giving kickbacks to the principals or counselors but it's crazy how hard they are still pushing this narrative. In a teachers meeting yesterday, our principal openly said he's tired of our kids going to the local CC and that he wants bigger for them. I got his sentiment and teaching in a low economic part of town, many of the kids think the CC is their ceiling, but it's also a GREAT way to get a more affordable education. I went that route and have zero regrets at all. First doing career days and now as a teacher, I tell my students all the time that college is one path but so is trade school, so is the military, so is a life in sales, there are a million paths to take in life.

 

I do agree the U’s should forgive some of it.

 

The universities don't hold the loans, though, right?
If I take out a loan from onpoint to buy a toyota, I don't ask toyota for help with my loan. They've already been paid.

 

But that's the beauty of people identifying a career and going back to school later with a goal in mind. I went back to school at 27. Going to college changed my life, but that's because I approached it like a job. I didn't go to a school like UofO or OSU. I went to PSU where there's nothing to do but go to class.

I know plenty of people with college educations who are working dead end jobs. My cousin went to an expensive private university in California, got a degree in English lit and then came back to Portland to work at Fred Meyer for years.

There's a massive disconnect between the reality of college and what we tell our kids. They're told it's this fun time to explore new things and enjoy themselves, all while they're racking up a ton of crippling debt that they can't clear with bankruptcy. I totally get it. There are classes that I thoroughly enjoyed while I was there. I love history and I really enjoyed taking history classes, but there's really only so many careers that you can go for if you major in history, and most of them require more than a 4 year degree.

Really we should be finding an alternative for kids to serve the country that isn't the military but provides something similar to the GI Bill. Let kids go work for 4-5 years doing something we need as a society, and then provide them with a nearly free education. That gives them time to figure out what they want to do and an opportunity to grow as people before they go to school.

So many kids waste their time at college. They drop out while still accruing debt. They pick a degree that doesn't help them find a job. Some of them make massive mistakes because they can't handle the culture on a campus. I just think we need to do a better job preparing our kids for this huge decision. We don't hand out massive car loans to kids without credit. We don't hand out massive mortgages to kids without a steady income and good credit.... but we hand out huge student loans to kids who are 18 and have no credit, no income, and don't know what they're going to do in life to pay it back. It's absurd.