“student Loans And The Arts: Navigating Creative Career Paths” – Before the federal government forgives student loan debt, it would be good to understand what makes the debt so onerous. The problem isn’t overwhelming debt, it’s inadequate education.
Graduates don’t make enough money to pay off their loans because what they studied didn’t give them the skills to get a job that pays well enough.
“student Loans And The Arts: Navigating Creative Career Paths”
Think about it: Even a lot of debt is manageable if, say, you take it on to study medicine. Conversely, even a small amount of debt is prohibitive if you’re pursuing college in a subject with limited career prospects or a low salary, or worse, dropping out of college with no credit for your efforts. The high tuition fees make the problem worse.
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This obvious point has been obscured in the current debt forgiveness debate, which focuses on the symptom of prohibitive debt rather than the cause, namely unproductive education.
If the federal government forgives most or all of its student loan debt without fixing the schools, it simply keeps the vicious cycle going. Students will continue to borrow, their money will disappear into the bank accounts of ineffective schools with clever marketing, and in a few years there will be renewed calls for credit breaks. That would be bad for students, for taxpayers, and for employers who really need a skilled workforce.
That’s what I thought about Thursday as I read a press release from the US Department of Education announcing that 28,000 people who took out loans to attend the Marinello Schools of Beauty from 2009 until it closed in 2016 would have paid off a total of $238 million in debt. “Marinello took advantage of students who dreamed of careers in the beauty industry, misleading them about the quality of their programs and burying them in prohibitive debts they could not pay back,” Education Minister Miguel Cardona said in the press release. (By the way, as of Thursday, the Small Business Administration still had a website boasting about helping fund Marinello’s expansion, although it was apparently removed after I asked about it.)
The problem is, of course, much bigger than the Marinello Schools of Beauty. Only a small percentage of schools that fail to teach are outright predatory, but those that mean well but are ineffective are just as bad from a student and business perspective. According to the latest data from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, only 26 percent of students enrolled at private, for-profit institutions in 2013 managed to graduate within six years. Six-year graduation rates at other schools weren’t particularly good either: 62 percent at public institutions and 68 percent at private non-profit organizations.
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A report released last year by Third Way, a centre-left think tank, found more than 500 schools where the average low-income student who enrolls makes less than the average high school student, even ten years after enrollment. Graduate. “It is unlikely that low-income students attending these institutions will ever be able to recoup their investment in education,” the study states.
Congress is to blame, said Adam Looney, student loan debt expert and executive director of the University of Utah’s Marriner S. Eccles Institute.
“The debt crisis is a very recent phenomenon,” he told me. “In the 1980s there was already a crisis. The default rate then was three times what it was during the Great Recession. The cause was terrible schools that enrolled unsuspecting students and saddled them with unaffordable loans. That’s why Congress passed very strict rules. If your default rate was too high, your institution was excluded from the loan program. Or if students were too dependent on state aid. Or you used aggressive recruitment techniques. Or you taught everyone remotely. Thousands of schools were thrown out and the dropout rate fell drastically.”
Looney continued, “Then we got rid of the distance learning rule in the late ’90s or early 2000s. There were no quality controls. We removed the rules on default rates and the portion of funding that could come from federal sources. We have abolished the credit limits for doctoral students. All of this has allowed the proliferation of substandard schools.”
Working Nights In A Doughnut Shop And Days At A Paper Products Plant, Robert Gilbert, 30,
In 2018, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos scrapped a rule that would have required nonprofit colleges to demonstrate that the students they enrolled were able to find decent-paying jobs. A 2018 New York Times article called the move “the most drastic in a series of policy changes that will free the scandal-ridden, for-profit sector from the safeguards introduced during the Obama era.”
The federal government could reinstate the safeguards put in place under Obama and previous presidents, but the current focus for Congressional Democrats is on debt relief. President Biden has repeatedly extended a pandemic moratorium on student loan debt repayments. The current moratorium expires on August 31, leaving him soon to decide whether to extend it again or seek permanent relief. It is unclear whether he could write an executive order himself or would have to ask Congress to do so.
Some progressives, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, are pushing for sweeping debt relief, believing it would primarily benefit the poor and lower-middle class, particularly black borrowers who are at greater risk of default.
According to Looney, blanket forgiveness would actually help the rich far more than the poor. The debate on this question is intriguing, but two points that Looney makes convince me. First, some of the borrowers who appear poor at first glance—like recent medical graduates—are wealthy given the lifetime earnings potential that their college education has bolstered. Canceling the debt of these nominally “poor” people would not exactly deal a blow to the proletariat. Second, many people with lower incomes are already receiving limited debt relief. Full debt relief is a lesser benefit to a low-income person who probably wouldn’t pay the full amount anyway, while it is a valuable benefit to a higher-income person who would have paid the full amount.
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Looney is all for selective debt relief. “Almost everyone agrees that people who have a low income for a period of time and cannot pay back all or part of their loans should have the majority of their loans forgiven. (In fact, this is now the law, albeit poorly implemented.),” he wrote in an email. “So the contested reason (and progressive position) is to advocate for forgiveness for people whose income is sufficient to pay.”
And that – forgiveness for people who don’t need forgiveness – seems a bit silly to me. “In addition to my kids’ student loans, I want the state to pay off my mortgage. If the latter idea shocks you, the first should shock you, too,” commented David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a 2020 University of Chicago Booth School of Business Initiative on Global Markets survey of leading academic economists .
We all benefit from a more educated population, so helping people get college degrees makes sense, but taking federal loans and then (maybe) lending them isn’t the way to go. It’s better to keep tuition down by giving more support to schools that actually teach, giving students more grants instead of loans, or both.
Since money is at stake, the government has the right to steer students into desirable fields of study. On the other hand, we don’t want only the independent wealthy to learn about art, history and philosophy. Finding a balance between professional education and humanities is difficult but possible.
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The overall solution is clear: limited forgiveness coupled with increased aid and reforms that discourage prospective students from racking up debt for worthless studies. Cardona, the secretary of education, testified in Congress Thursday that the Biden administration is looking to double the maximum Pell grant by 2029 and increase support for institutions that serve minorities. It has re-established an enforcement unit to crack down on institutional grant fraud and is working on a new rule to ensure graduates get jobs, he said in January. These steps are in the right direction.
I like what Kevin Carey, a higher education expert, wrote in last year’s Washington Monthly: “The amount of new funding currently being proposed for higher education is historic. It would be a tremendous missed opportunity to spend so much and do little to change the underlying structures that are failing too many students.”
In answer to your question of what makes a good job: shorter working hours! A 32-hour, four-day workweek will help more people have good jobs as the productivity of every worker continues to rise thanks to the beneficial and unstoppable advance of technology and automation. More importantly, the three-day weekend gives families and friends more time to do activities of their choosing together.
“The ‘invisible hand’ can only do its work, if at all, with material that has been carefully prepared and continues to be supervised by many visible hands.”
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— Lisa Herzog, from “The Epistemic Seduction of Markets” in The Raven: A Magazine of Philosophy, Fall 2021. With
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