On Forgiving Debts
Is everyone right?
Pick yourself up by the bootstraps. How badly do you want it? When I was your age. . .
Two miles in the snow, buddy, uphill both ways. Nobody drove us to school. College? If we wanted to go to college, we figured a way to pay for it.
Unless we didn’t figure a way. Mom and dad figured it. Mom sold houses seven days a week. Dad came home from Job 1 in time to eat dinner, then trudge out to Job 2, running his own appliance service business.
Either way, we left college debt free. It was one of our parents’ greatest gifts to us.
Kerry and I continued the tradition. She kept teaching, I took free-lance work. I accepted the job as WLW Sports Talk host partly because I could finance college with it, for my two kids.
I don’t know how I’d have felt then, had the president urged debt forgiveness on student loans. I don’t know how I feel about it now, either.
I think this: I’m not worked up about kids getting $10,000 in tuition relief. I don’t feel as if the world today is getting over on me. One kid’s good fortune doesn’t spoil mine, or that of my kids. Good for him/her. If we got as worked up about big corporations paying no taxes as we’re getting about 22-year-olds getting a money break for college, maybe Jeff Bezos would be paying his fair share.
Working extra so our kids don’t have to is what we do. Somebody else getting free stuff doesn’t change that.
I think this, too: Anything we do is more meaningful when we’re invested in it. Our son was a lousy student at UC. He wasn’t ready for it. We pulled him out after one semester. Not long after, he expressed interest in returning. We said fine. Here’s the deal:
You go to work for six months, save enough to pay for a semester somewhere close. We pay you back for every A and B you earn. Kelly went to what was then Raymond Walters College in Blue Ash, made all As and Bs for a year, then transferred to Ohio State. We paid for all of that, and for his Masters in English.
I’m all for incentivizing kids to strive harder.
There is no denying that tuition forgiveness pisses some people off. Those of us who didn’t provide free lunches can begrudge mightily those who ate the sandwich without paying for the bread. I get that. Everyone does.
Will the current proposed largesse make our college grads lazier? Maybe. Will it free them some from crushing debt and, thusly energized, allow them to be more productive citizens? Maybe.
We don’t know. What we should know, from our national experience, is that opportunity is the engine of success. We give people freedom and to thrive, freedom needs opportunity. Money devoted to creating opportunity gives our future a better chance. It honors our best past. In some way, begrudging the money says we don’t believe the recipients will put it to good use. Successful countries simply can’t think that way. The land of opportunity cannot be allowed to die.
I hedge my bet on the president’s plan. Frequent Perusers of This Space know I rarely hedge on anything. But I lean toward hope and chances. It’s still something we’re good at.
I paid off my loans in 2016, 14 years post graduation. I had about $30k to start. At Butler University, they have more than doubled tuition since I graduated. I WOULD NOT go there today because of the price of tuition and amount of debt I’d be staring at. That’s the real issue.
I’m not “jealous” of people who got some relief. The list is long of reasons why this is a bad idea.
1) This does zero to address the out of control prices of higher education. 2) incentivizes universities to support politicians in favor of debt relief. 3) creates a new entitlement. 4) increases income inequality. 5) not fair to the people who paid their loans off instead of spending those dollars on lifestyle. 6) does nothing to make students look at the debt/income ratio of their higher Ed choices. 7) the rage of tax payers who never attended college is underestimated. 8) creates tuition inflation for future students (my kids for example).
I’m with ya Doc in that opportunity is the engine of success. More than anything, I think universities will see this as a green light to continue to raise tuition. And this will be a political wedge issue going forward.
Doc, following is what I said to a FB poster complaining about the debt giveback. As usual, the world is not as black and white as too many try to make it. I'm also sick of the trope about lazy millennials. It's b.s. Like my cohort of privileged boomers has done such a great job running things. Anyway, what I said: Fair points but since you were in college it got far more expensive as schools started adding deans, building student unions with lazy rivers, while state legislatures in most places drastically cut support to public universities. The ease of student debt encouraged a lot of irresponsible behavior by schools plus encouraging young people to borrow whatever they needed. It’s not apples to apples to think what happened in your generation and mine are analogous with what the millennials deal with.