Rather than pollute the
The Second Trump Presidency topic further,
In his
Message 892, Percy wrote:
Percy writes:
I agree that student loan forgiveness is a contentious issue. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I do believe that college costs have gotten out of hand.
There appears to be more involved than meets the eye and that would warrant further investigation.
When I'm out and about in the car running errands, I listen to Sirius XM, including music stations, radio classics (love it when
Dragnet comes on), and
Progressive Radio. Several months ago a caller to
Thom Hartmann's show described her own student loan situation.
Even though she has never missed a single payment, her $35,000 student loan now has a balance of over $100,000. Despite her doing everything right, her student loan is still out of control.
As I recall her explanation, those loans get sold several times to other lenders. I have personally seen this practice once or twice when my mortgage would be sold to another lender, but the new lender would still honor the terms of the loan so I was largely unaffected by that transaction.
However, in her case the new lenders levied new fees (as I seem to recall; since I was driving at the time I could not take notes) and took other actions with kept increasing the balance. I don't know what those were, which is why this warrants investigation.
Basically, it sounds like the student loan market has become a form of predatory lending. Obviously, the Trump Administration will do nothing about it, except for making it much easier for the lenders and much harder for their victims.
The main news coverage of this that I've seen has been to pin the blame on how one sentence was added to a bill which did not allow relief from a student loan through bankruptcy, unlike with all other forms of debt. But that would only mean that you can never get out from under that debt and would not account for that caller's situation of her balance ballooning from $30k to $100k despite her having made every payment. Some more is going on here.
For example, while I was stationed in North Dakota (see below), my wife also attended University of North Dakota (UND) and she took out student loans to help supplement our household income (junior enlisted pay is meager; even nowadays military families need to apply for food stamps just to get by). We repaid them as required, but at that time they were low-priority debt so she just made the minimum payments for 20 years.
That could be where the disconnect is between the older generation whose experience was with the older benign system and the current generation who are apparently being victimized by predatory lending practices.
... but I do believe that college costs have gotten out of hand.
Here are some comparisons.
I attended junior college from 1969 to 1976 and a California State University (CSU, Fullerton) from 1971 to 1976, returning to both for night classes between 1982 and 2002. I also attended University of North Dakota (UND) while on active duty (1976-1982), but a large portion of my tuition was paid for by the military (80% at first, then 95%).
In terms of tuition, my junior college fees were about $25 per semester throughout that period (1969 - 2002), though I heard that that changed drastically with the mortgage market crash of 2008 (same with CSU fees). I don't know what they are now.
In 1971-1976 CSUF charged $300 per semester for full-time students. I spoke with a CSUF student in 2019 who told me that it's $3000 now. I forget what it was at CSUF in the 80's since I was on the GI Bill at the time.
And for UND, as I said my tuition was being paid mostly by the military, but in 2001 my son enrolled there (as a resident under their Western States Reciprocity Agreement) and I recall that his tuition per semester was about $2000.
But I think that the cost of books is a greater factor. For example, my three-semester
Fundamentals of Physics (Halliday & Resnick) cost me $13.38 in 1977, but I just now looked on amazon.com where it now costs $280. That's a 21-fold increase, over 2000%.
In the 70's at Cal-State Fullerton, I would plan my school budget by assuming that books would cost me $10 per class. In reality, the actual cost would be less than that, so I was padding that expense in my planning.
In the late 70's at UND, the most expensive textbooks were less than $15 (eg, the aforementioned
Fundamentals of Physics and my calculus textbook, both intended to cover three semesters). At that time, my most expensive book purchase was $20-$25 for a
book of tables (ie, a math reference which included tables).
In the 90's at junior college, since I was doing upgrade training in programming (AKA "exploring strange new languages"), my textbooks were off-the-shelf computer books which were running about $35 each at the time. However, in the college bookstore I did browse the books in other subjects and noticed that they were about $100 each.
And when I took a beginning Italian class the textbook cost $256. Of course, that included online support such as automated practice exercises, videos, etc, so you do get a lot more than a regular traditional textbook could have offered, but still that is a huge expense for a single class (plus, after the semester is over you lose that online support).
Coffee House perhaps?
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