This essay is full of sloppy generalizations and far below your best, Noah. It sounds like you’re addressing your friend group as your rhetorical “we,” not Millennials, writ large.
Because how could this “we” be the generation you’re ostensibly talking about and for? Most Millennials didn’t go to college at all, much less overpay for it. Only 38% has a four-year degree! This is part of the general tendency of the (highly-educated) media class to project their own experience too much.
Most Millennials didn’t flirt with Bernie or Socialism or whatever. Only a very modest majority of Millennials even voted in that election--still a much lower rate than for older generations. The boring truth is that most Millennials were like most Americans: relatively politically apathetic and disengaged from the process beyond (maybe) voting.
So what about all the other generalizations and revisionist counter-generalizations here? Are most Millennials living in a house with a two-car garage that they own? This is clearly incorrect since only barely over half of Millennials owns a house, and many of those houses, presumably, look a little different than the TV family homes you’re imagining. This also elides the fact that 49% of Millennials doesn’t own a home at all!
This isn’t a matter of nitpicking or nuance. You’ve totally obscured the reality for Millennials, not to mention the American population as a whole, adding to the general tendency of American media to assume that upper middle class Americans are normative, instead of a minority.
If student debt can’t be cancelled, how about improving it so that it’s terms are not so rigid and - I think - unfair to borrowers. Just make it more like conventional debt. When interest falls, let borrowers refinance. If borrower is overwhelmed, let chapter 11 address the challenge. Etc
The boring but radical answer is that all loans should be converted to IBR. Period.
It’s a crime against millennials that loans were even the model in the first place. We were warned IN THE FUCKING 60s by Milton Friedman that loans were a terrible idea, but society did nothing. Instead, they had a bunch of babies and told them all they HAD to go to college. It’s fucking sickening.
The Dems could have voted to “cancel” student loan debt in any of the years they controlled Congress, including 2021-2022. They did not. They didn’t have the votes for it, and anyway rewarding donors with new spending plans was judged more important. The whole “cancellation” by fiat gambit was merely the creation of a wedge issue to get votes from the sort of gullible people who take out too much student loan debt. It worked so well that Biden will try it again.
I think for me there’s a real frustration that we don’t really have a system to pay for useful education except for skills that are highly profitable.
So like I’m a teacher, and like it would be really good for me to have Spanish teachers available and socially reinforced like in college because just a ton of my families don’t speak English. It would be useful to have better training in a wide range of disciplines that really will never pencil out for me the way my wife just got her mba and then it resulted in a huge opportunity increase.
Like trades yes, but also just the wide range of areas to improve. Not umpteen online sessions about something that seems more aimed at covering butts but working on self improvement in a social context with expert guidance. You know school available to everyone for whatever they feel they need.
It’s weird that we offer this to 18 year olds financed by debt they don’t really understand but we don’t just offer this like we do 9th grade to anyone who wants to improve themselves. It’s also there for tbr tremendously successful like how my wife made a ton of money after getting an mba. But there’s just a huge gap of adult education opportunities for a better world.
“Young Black women are the most likely to have student debt, and their average loan balance is the highest at $11,000. Women are more likely than men to hold debt, and men’s higher incomes allow them to pay down their debt faster than women. Black men and Black women both start out with more student debt than their white counterparts, and because of their lower earnings, they pay it down more slowly. Gender and racial disparities in student debt thus grow over time.”
1) taxing the bottom 70% to pay off the student loans of the top 30%
2) explicitly discriminating in favor of particular races in law
These are your issues, Democrats! Your people demand that you be on the right side of history and against oppression, and when you've got history and Karl Marx on your side, nothing can stop you! Don't worry about those polls that say 2/3rds of the country and half your own voters are against these things -- that's far-right disinformation, probably from Putin. You stand boldly for progress -- fear not! Go all in on these issues and you'll take 60 seats in the Senate in 2024.
(As a conservative, I really hope they take my advice.) :-)
A truer line has never been spoken, Noah: "honestly, there are worse fates." Yes, a great many of them. Having traveled and lived in 3rd world countries on and off, I've had a chance to see some of those "worse fates". Americans of all stripes and all ages would do well to remember that, for all it's faults and political fights, you live in the most amazing country the world has ever seen.
Great balanced article. Noah explains why at some point he favored student debt cancellation and now doesn’t do so. Compared to all the hyperventilation about this topic, this is refreshing.
"In an inflationary environment, budget constraints start to matter"
This exactly states my beef with the average progressive— they just can't wrap their minds around filthy lucre. I am a progressive in my heart, but fortunately/unfortunately, I have a calculator in my hand.
What about the millennials with working/lower-middle class parents? Not everyone stands to inherit their parents house in Orinda or whatever, and I would guess that at least some of the millennials with student loan debt are the same ones whose parents don't have the assets to bail them out.
There seem to be basically two sides to the student loan debate:
1. We have a student loan crisis because capitalism is bad.
2. We have a student loan crisis because government subsidies are bad.
But it seems to me that the data pretty clearly point to a third option that nobody really wants to acknowledge: We don't have a student loan crisis.
The situation with college tuition is even better than the chart you showed: There's another chart in the same report (Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid) that shows net tuition (i.e. tuition net of scholarships and need-based discounts), and it's much lower.
Nearly half of recent 4-year graduates of public and private non-profit schools are graduating debt-free, and the other half are graduating with debt averaging $30k. This is a totally reasonable and manageable debt to take on for a bachelor's degree. It only takes like $4k per year to pay this off in ten years, and the college wage premium (median earnings for bachelor minus median earnings for high school) is about $30k per year. For most people, student loans pay for themselves many times over.
Furthermore, the main places where college graduates are struggling to pay the bills are cities where housing is overpriced because of supply constraints. In these cities, it seems likely to me that debt cancellation would just result in the price of the limited supply of housing being bid up further, essentially making it a transfer from taxpayers to landlords and homeowners.
The question about tuition debt often neglects to look at the disconnect between tuition and what students can earn in part time and summer jobs. I graduated from Northwestern University in 1973. I worked a summer warehouse job that paid $2.75/hour though we often worked 60 hour weeks. The income from this job typically covered a bit more than 2/3 of my tuition and living expenses. After graduation I had around $4,000 in loans and my first job out of college paid $10,600/year. So my debt was less than 50% of my annual salary. I suspect that not very many college students could fund their education in a similar fashion.
Canceling student debt was a HORRIBLE idea and a HORRIBLE waste of money (and time).
The adults that took these classes choose to go into fun and easy fields that paid little to nothing.
Many of these ppl never even completed the degree and are now working minimum wage jobs.
Worse, a number DID compete their degree and are now working minimum wage jobs.
Sorry, but English, Art History, Business, Political science, underwater basket weaving sound like fun things, but plain and simple, the fields are OVER LOADED.
OTOH, we have an extreme shortage of ppl in various fields AND TRADES.
For the last 5+ years, I have been trying to get CONgress to actually FUND students that seek bachelors/Associates in fields that we need, or trades such as construction, plumbing, electrician, CNC operator, manufacturing, welding, etc.
Hopefully now that SCOTUS has stopped this insanity, CONgress will do something right.
THIS is what we need to do to address a number of issues in our higher education.
This essay is full of sloppy generalizations and far below your best, Noah. It sounds like you’re addressing your friend group as your rhetorical “we,” not Millennials, writ large.
Because how could this “we” be the generation you’re ostensibly talking about and for? Most Millennials didn’t go to college at all, much less overpay for it. Only 38% has a four-year degree! This is part of the general tendency of the (highly-educated) media class to project their own experience too much.
Most Millennials didn’t flirt with Bernie or Socialism or whatever. Only a very modest majority of Millennials even voted in that election--still a much lower rate than for older generations. The boring truth is that most Millennials were like most Americans: relatively politically apathetic and disengaged from the process beyond (maybe) voting.
So what about all the other generalizations and revisionist counter-generalizations here? Are most Millennials living in a house with a two-car garage that they own? This is clearly incorrect since only barely over half of Millennials owns a house, and many of those houses, presumably, look a little different than the TV family homes you’re imagining. This also elides the fact that 49% of Millennials doesn’t own a home at all!
This isn’t a matter of nitpicking or nuance. You’ve totally obscured the reality for Millennials, not to mention the American population as a whole, adding to the general tendency of American media to assume that upper middle class Americans are normative, instead of a minority.
If student debt can’t be cancelled, how about improving it so that it’s terms are not so rigid and - I think - unfair to borrowers. Just make it more like conventional debt. When interest falls, let borrowers refinance. If borrower is overwhelmed, let chapter 11 address the challenge. Etc
Lots of salty Millennials down here in the comments, but I think you nailed it!
If you put Noah in charge of managing Disneyland, he would argue that "on average, most people never go there", and then close the park.
The boring but radical answer is that all loans should be converted to IBR. Period.
It’s a crime against millennials that loans were even the model in the first place. We were warned IN THE FUCKING 60s by Milton Friedman that loans were a terrible idea, but society did nothing. Instead, they had a bunch of babies and told them all they HAD to go to college. It’s fucking sickening.
The Dems could have voted to “cancel” student loan debt in any of the years they controlled Congress, including 2021-2022. They did not. They didn’t have the votes for it, and anyway rewarding donors with new spending plans was judged more important. The whole “cancellation” by fiat gambit was merely the creation of a wedge issue to get votes from the sort of gullible people who take out too much student loan debt. It worked so well that Biden will try it again.
I think for me there’s a real frustration that we don’t really have a system to pay for useful education except for skills that are highly profitable.
So like I’m a teacher, and like it would be really good for me to have Spanish teachers available and socially reinforced like in college because just a ton of my families don’t speak English. It would be useful to have better training in a wide range of disciplines that really will never pencil out for me the way my wife just got her mba and then it resulted in a huge opportunity increase.
Like trades yes, but also just the wide range of areas to improve. Not umpteen online sessions about something that seems more aimed at covering butts but working on self improvement in a social context with expert guidance. You know school available to everyone for whatever they feel they need.
It’s weird that we offer this to 18 year olds financed by debt they don’t really understand but we don’t just offer this like we do 9th grade to anyone who wants to improve themselves. It’s also there for tbr tremendously successful like how my wife made a ton of money after getting an mba. But there’s just a huge gap of adult education opportunities for a better world.
Your analysis doesn’t take this into account:
“Young Black women are the most likely to have student debt, and their average loan balance is the highest at $11,000. Women are more likely than men to hold debt, and men’s higher incomes allow them to pay down their debt faster than women. Black men and Black women both start out with more student debt than their white counterparts, and because of their lower earnings, they pay it down more slowly. Gender and racial disparities in student debt thus grow over time.”
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-equity-insights/gender-racial-disparities-student-loan-debt
Please, Democrats, please, go all in on:
1) taxing the bottom 70% to pay off the student loans of the top 30%
2) explicitly discriminating in favor of particular races in law
These are your issues, Democrats! Your people demand that you be on the right side of history and against oppression, and when you've got history and Karl Marx on your side, nothing can stop you! Don't worry about those polls that say 2/3rds of the country and half your own voters are against these things -- that's far-right disinformation, probably from Putin. You stand boldly for progress -- fear not! Go all in on these issues and you'll take 60 seats in the Senate in 2024.
(As a conservative, I really hope they take my advice.) :-)
A truer line has never been spoken, Noah: "honestly, there are worse fates." Yes, a great many of them. Having traveled and lived in 3rd world countries on and off, I've had a chance to see some of those "worse fates". Americans of all stripes and all ages would do well to remember that, for all it's faults and political fights, you live in the most amazing country the world has ever seen.
Great balanced article. Noah explains why at some point he favored student debt cancellation and now doesn’t do so. Compared to all the hyperventilation about this topic, this is refreshing.
"In an inflationary environment, budget constraints start to matter"
This exactly states my beef with the average progressive— they just can't wrap their minds around filthy lucre. I am a progressive in my heart, but fortunately/unfortunately, I have a calculator in my hand.
What about the millennials with working/lower-middle class parents? Not everyone stands to inherit their parents house in Orinda or whatever, and I would guess that at least some of the millennials with student loan debt are the same ones whose parents don't have the assets to bail them out.
There seem to be basically two sides to the student loan debate:
1. We have a student loan crisis because capitalism is bad.
2. We have a student loan crisis because government subsidies are bad.
But it seems to me that the data pretty clearly point to a third option that nobody really wants to acknowledge: We don't have a student loan crisis.
The situation with college tuition is even better than the chart you showed: There's another chart in the same report (Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid) that shows net tuition (i.e. tuition net of scholarships and need-based discounts), and it's much lower.
Nearly half of recent 4-year graduates of public and private non-profit schools are graduating debt-free, and the other half are graduating with debt averaging $30k. This is a totally reasonable and manageable debt to take on for a bachelor's degree. It only takes like $4k per year to pay this off in ten years, and the college wage premium (median earnings for bachelor minus median earnings for high school) is about $30k per year. For most people, student loans pay for themselves many times over.
Furthermore, the main places where college graduates are struggling to pay the bills are cities where housing is overpriced because of supply constraints. In these cities, it seems likely to me that debt cancellation would just result in the price of the limited supply of housing being bid up further, essentially making it a transfer from taxpayers to landlords and homeowners.
The question about tuition debt often neglects to look at the disconnect between tuition and what students can earn in part time and summer jobs. I graduated from Northwestern University in 1973. I worked a summer warehouse job that paid $2.75/hour though we often worked 60 hour weeks. The income from this job typically covered a bit more than 2/3 of my tuition and living expenses. After graduation I had around $4,000 in loans and my first job out of college paid $10,600/year. So my debt was less than 50% of my annual salary. I suspect that not very many college students could fund their education in a similar fashion.
Canceling student debt was a HORRIBLE idea and a HORRIBLE waste of money (and time).
The adults that took these classes choose to go into fun and easy fields that paid little to nothing.
Many of these ppl never even completed the degree and are now working minimum wage jobs.
Worse, a number DID compete their degree and are now working minimum wage jobs.
Sorry, but English, Art History, Business, Political science, underwater basket weaving sound like fun things, but plain and simple, the fields are OVER LOADED.
OTOH, we have an extreme shortage of ppl in various fields AND TRADES.
For the last 5+ years, I have been trying to get CONgress to actually FUND students that seek bachelors/Associates in fields that we need, or trades such as construction, plumbing, electrician, CNC operator, manufacturing, welding, etc.
Hopefully now that SCOTUS has stopped this insanity, CONgress will do something right.
THIS is what we need to do to address a number of issues in our higher education.
https://windbourne.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-americas-higher-education
The government should give *everyone* $10,000 and let anyone pay off their debt but this is not about debt repayment.