Student Debt Cancellation

Yes. In fact, both of these are results of the same underlying problem, i.e. education is bought by individuals, but it benefits society, which is why society is paying for it -- but rather than admitting that and paying for it directly, as you do with the military and the police and the courts, you introduce a system based on uninformed personal decision and uncovered personalized debt.

I doubt this covers fees, books, room and board. Basically GA's lottery did the same until about 7 years ago when it could no longer cover tuition so they reduced it to 80% of tuition. All other costs are up to the student. Tuition is less than half of what it costs to go to college and live on campus.

Living at home you have commuter and parking expenses (cars aren't cheap) but you would save about $12 per year in living costs.

But the lottery is a regressive tax. Stupid poor people with dreams of hitting the lottery are funding middle class kids to go to school.

no, not really. Poor people would have to compete for scholarships, grants, and part time jobs, instead of taking on stupid amounts of debt they won't be able to afford, especially when they drop out if they weren't suited to university.

Those that don't compete well still have the choice of community colleges, but those aren't free either in most states (any?).

Yeah, so that provides some limited access to poor people while most remain disadvantaged. Not good enough in any advanced country.

I agree. the fix is to fund the schools directly so they can offer more scholarships and lower costs to those that don't get them.

But the schools are deep in debt having built up posh campuses to attract 18yo kids to Campus Life™ and will be stuck paying for the facilities for a generation.

They're struggling to keep the kid-resorts open in the light of Covid rather than go to remote learning. Another benefit of our system.

Public education should be socialized and funds administered by the schools and not 18year olds.

For the generation of people that took on stupid debt they couldn't afford, it sucks, but that's also the American Way™. Today they cannot get relief from this debt in bankruptcy court. I think this has to change.

Yes, you do need standing to bring a lawsuit, and yes, standing requires that you have been wronged or will be wronged in some way that is concrete and present/imminent.

So arguing "Man, now colleges might continue to raise prices if all these people who got their loans forgiven" probably wouldn't do.

Neither would (IMO) arguing "Back in MY day, I had to pay off my student loans, and I LIKED it! So these other people should suck it."

But there are at least a few plausible arguments for someone to have standing:
1. People who have taken out private loans or who are private lenders can attempt to argue that the decision of the government to wipe away public student loan debt is somehow unfair to them
2. People who arguing by waiving billions/trillions of student loan debt, the government is increasing the tax burden on the rest of us by that much and that other programs may suffer
3. People arguing about vital but more indirect harms such as violation of separation of powers

It is important to keep in mind that the decision on whether standing is proper would be made in a judiciary that is packed with Trump appointees. So that is a thing. I can't claim to be particularly knowledgable about the law about standing, but the notion, for example, that anyone would have standing to challenge Obamacare over an individual mandate that has been set to $0 and has no enforcement mechanism does not make sense to me. And yet here we are.

Isn't there legal precedent stating that "I'm a taxpayer, so this could all affect me sooner or later" isn't enough to qualify as standing?

See "2."

So a key decision on standing is written by Scalia and talked about here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lujan_v._Defenders_of_Wildlife

The TLDR: environmentalists were upset about how the federal government had decided that the Endangered Species Act was going to be enforced abroad. But they themselves were not endangered species, were not connected to the places abroad, and couldn't articulate how they themselves were affected. So the Court found that they didn't have standing to sue. Justice Souter mused that if one of them said, "I'm planning to go to one of these places where the Endangered Species Act is being ignored, and here's my plane ticket" that would have been enough.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were other cases where courts held that the demonstrated allegations of future harm were too distant or insubstantial. But it seems to me that "I'm a taxpayer and this may directly affect me" would generally be enough to convey standing for review of a government decision.

You put your finger here squarely on the key to the whole problem (which is the same as for health care, as well as quite a few other things): the "we don't want to pay for other people's advantages" crowd cannot see this, and therefore their entire approach to the situation flows from a fundamental misunderstanding of how society works.

We already have "free" education in K-12, so adding a four year degree onto that shouldn't be an issue. But let's be honest, here . . . K-12 has firm expectations. You're supposed to come out of that able to read, write, do at least basic math, and have a minimal understanding of how society works in the abstract. What doesn't get taught, or at least not sufficiently focused upon, is critical thinking, logic, reasoning, and debate. But anyway.

If your four year degree college goes to a "free" model, then similar expectations should be in play. The focus should be heavily on STEM fields or other things that directly benefit society. If you want to pursue underwater fourteenth century Klingon poetry , that should be on your own dime. Having said that, even if someone goes after a hard science degree of some kind, there should still be an "arts" requirement as at least a familiarization course each semester. Cold math only gets you so far, you also need to be able to express yourself coherently.

Then if you do well enough in your four-year and come out with your Bachelor's, then you get "free" Masters and Doctorate programs, but they should only remain "free" if you're doing well in the program. No rewards for coasting, no Doctor Nick types.

Alternatively, "free" education could be paid for by some kind of mandatory public service. Military, a modernized Civilian Conservation Corps, working as a park ranger on public lands, something like that. Hell, if you really want to pursue underwater fourteenth century Klingon poetry, spend your non-class time picking up trash or doing environmental remediation work, stuff like that. Spend the summer break working a Superfund site? Another year of free classes for you!

Ah yes. I see you are back to Boomering. Blame the ‘18yo kids’ who have oh so much control over the system.

I'm making this up as I go, but, the benefits to society may be intangible for non-stem fields, but they are there.

For example, someone that sucks at math might not get to go and will wind up a trumper.

They control the money, because it's their decision which school to attend. Maybe not so much in Alabama. What's the age of majority there anyway?

I'm so sick of this 'STEM is really the only legitimate form of higher education' bullshit. Do we really want a culture without literature, poetry, history, etc? A liberal arts degree isn't a waste of private or public money.

Maybe you missed that bolded bit.

No, I just don't think that a degree in basket weaving directly benefits society. The benefits of broadening a mind are indirect.

It's just funny that there's this weird STEM chauvinism in the United States, a country that values education about as much as it values health care or social welfare. We can become a nation of coders, but we won't be producing shit.

Who gets to decide what degrees benefit society?

Right now, the narrative is being controlled by the rich and powerful, so their definitions are something like this: "It benefits society if it saves my business money on training or if it helps people learn a skill that is useful to me personally, but it's worthless if it involves upsetting the existing social order in any way."

So, on the "good" list we get:

• Business and finance (they need accountants to work for them)
• Manufacturing-related skills (they want the education system to provide them with a pre-trained workforce)
• Skilled trades (they don't want there to be a shortage of people they can hire to work on their homes and yachts)
• Health care (they want people to take care of them when they get old and sick)

On the "bad" list we get:

• Sociology and anything related to studying gender or race (can't have the existing social order questioned)
• History (can't have people learning about the labor movement and realizing that it's possible for workers to band together against the bosses)
• Social work (since they think it mainly benefits the poors)
• And basically anything that doesn't directly lead to producing the type of value that will fatten the wallets of the 1%

And then there's the arts, which tend to fall under "this is OK for my kids to study, but your kids need to become electricians and plumbers."

Well fucking said.

STEM is and will continue to be the key to prosperity, and anything that furthers those fields is welcome.

Having said that, the catastrophe of Trumpism is not caused by a lack of engineers and mathematicians, and certainly not by a lack of medical experts. It is due, one, to a lack of general education for all; and two, a lack of understanding for rhetorics, public communication, sociology, political theory, and most of all history in all its shapes and forms. The first thing fascists want to get rid of is the humanities; they hate people who think differently even more than people who look different to them.

Geordi and Data are great, but they're greater because of the philosophy major that is Jean-Luc Fucking Picard.

I'm sorry, how expensive a were floppy disks if this was an incentive the schools were throwing at kids?! even in the late 80s, they couldn't be that far outta reach?

Well, college students all tend to be broke and floppy discs weren’t ubiquitous at this point. Generally, if you wanted them, you either had to order them or go to Radio Shack. Also, it was something that they knew would appeal to the largest number of students. The school was reknown for its computer science program and not their football team.

That's exactly it.

There's a reason Hitler went after the research on gay sexuality second.

Ahhh, that makes sense then.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/...forgiveness-biden.html?searchResultPosition=4

Colleges used to be a lot cheaper because they got subsidies from the government. Guess who took that away.

What do call guaranteed loans?

Giving money to banks instead of students.