Student-loan-debt-forgiveness plans by --biden-administration

I didn’t read the article, so my apologies ahead of time if this is clarified in it… Would this $10K be in addition to the Pell grants? I thought the government already gives some free grants to low-income students (around $7.5K).

Sure, that would work, maybe, depending on the final wording. But that would mean, to be under the limit even if you don’t start until 10/1 (which seems very late to me, but I guess I don’t really remember), your annual income would have to be less than ~64k. And that’s if you didn’t work at all in college or at all between graduation and 10/1.

Yes this is seperate

THis is forgiveness of student loan debt and its not for current students.

Also, BTW, Pell grants maxed at $6345

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Thanks for the info, Jerosen.

example, UC Berkeley:

https://cfo.berkeley.edu/budget-101

" in the past decade, the percentage of Berkeley’s annual operating budget that comes from the state has shrunk from 27% to 14%, while tuition and fees grew from 18% to 34% over the same period."

State tax spending has dropped significantly in just 10 years and this has directly resulted in higher tuition.

Tutition is up 44% the past 10 years for Berkeley. It was $12.4k for '10-11 and now its $17.9k for ‘20-21. Thats double the rate of inflation. Over 4 years thats over $12k inrease in tutition’/fees above inflation. And thats in just the past 10 years.

So students today have had their tutition jacked up 12k over inflation and now we might forgive 10k in debt … still net loss of $2k vs someone who got the same degree just 10 years prior.

Of course many schools aren’t that bad, but ya can see the point.

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How much more are they spending per student though? Can these increases all be blamed on the states getting stingy with funding? I doubt it.

Schools seem to have vastly more programs and services than they did when I went, and tons more staff that aren’t doing any teaching. I went in 1985 tho.

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Around 1990, I came to this country with a TA/RA engineering assistantship. Tuition at that Ohio private university was approximately $400/credit. Today, 30 years later, tuition is $2100/credit. So, tuition alone increased at a rate of 14% per year. And the University instituted several “fees” that didn’t exist before such as a “matriculation fee”, “transportation fee”, “activity fee”, …

I think there is a problem with the cost of higher education. I understand public universities being affected by states reducing contributions for different reasons. However, private universities are seeing dramatic increases too, even though they don’t receive/depend on state budgets.

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Yes, and the problem is government subsidized lending for college. And they’re not trying to be good at it, so the colleges admit poor students to non-economic majors, but who cares if they can afford it? Their debt is your problem - via defaults on federal loans or Biden style giveaways.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/student-loan-losses-seen-costing-u-s-more-than-400-billion-11605963600?mod=hp_lead_pos1
Backup link

The U.S. government stands to lose more than $400 billion from the federal student loan program, an internal analysis shows, approaching the size of losses incurred by banks during the subprime-mortgage crisis.

The Education Department, with the help of two private consultants, looked at $1.37 trillion in student loans held by the government at the start of the year. Their conclusion: Borrowers will pay back $935 billion in principal and interest. That would leave taxpayers on the hook for $435 billion, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The losses are far steeper than prior government projections, which typically measure how much the portfolio will cost the government in the next decade, not the entire life of the loans. Last year the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the student-loan program would cost taxpayers $31.5 billion, including administrative costs.

After decades of no-questions-asked lending, the government is realizing that it has a pile of toxic debt on its books. By comparison, private lenders lost $535 billion on subprime-mortgages during the 2008 financial crisis, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

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Yeah private universities are different.

First of all they’re super expensive to begin and pretty much always have been. I just think they should be in a seperate category and not really part of any discussion about college affordability. If you’re concerned with cost you’ve no place paying inflated private tutition.
Second theres relatively low government funding. Private colleges do get tax dollars in the billions. I think its more in form of grants, but grant money seems to fund whatever at colleges. And its much less of a % of operating expenses than public schools.
Third the tuition rates at private colleges are more MSRP inflated rates that many/most don’t pay. So while their tutition might go up and up and up that doesn’t mean the net amount people actually pay goes up the same amount. They give full rides to a certain % of students, others get large merit grants, others get generous financial aid, etc. Its only the mediocre students from rich families who pay full sticker at private schools.

There are multiple problems with college costs. Government lending might worsen things some in some ways but its absolutely not ‘the’ singular problem.

Also I wonder how much of the debt and losses for student loans was from those predatory for profit universities? None of them should have ever been eligible for any student loan or any other government funding. Yet big companies made an industry out of getting students into student loan debt.

Don’t public universities offer this same type of help to students? I think at least some of them do.

So true! It’s mind boggling how these institutions have settled lawsuits on several occasions and yet they still qualify for this indirect government funding.

Eh, I will beg to differ.

Private universities were very popular with my graduating class, although that was back in 2002. That’s because I was born and raised in New York State, which has the SUNY system as the in-state public university option. SUNY (including the big four, Albany/Binghamton/Buffalo/Stony Brook) is simply not competitive in many majors with surrounding private schools. I work in high tech and I can say that my employer does not bother with on-campus recruiting at any of these schools because their academic reputation isn’t stellar. SUNY has a hard time recruiting those looking for rigorous academics.

Side note: Cornell is actually a public/private hybrid, and is New York’s land grant university. However, only four schools are public - Human Ecology, Agriculture, Industrial/Labor Relations, and the vet school. If your major is in one of those schools, you pay public tuition, if not, you pay full-freight private tuition.

When you start looking at out of state public options with better academic reputations, like Michigan, Georgia Tech, UW-Madison, UT-Austin, UCLA, University of Washington, etc… out of state tuition is on-par with that of private universities.

I think a lot of folks that live in states with marginal public universities are often forced to explore private options. I was one of them, and I’m as cheap as they come.

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True. Looked at that university in Ann Arbor and it was actually more expensive than many other private schools. Columbia ended up being cheaper than that university after merit scholarship.

So the problem there is really that SUNY is marginal. Its not that SUNY is unaffordeable.

IF people in NY are saying ‘college isn’t affordable’ based on your reasoning then what they should really be saying is ‘SUNY isn’t good enough for me’.

Its a different problem with a different solution. And I think NY is in a small minority of states that have that problem (at least that bad).

I do see your point though as it applies to that situation. And different states all have different public schools of varying quality. I don’t know if I’d want to got to U. Wyoming or ND State any more than SUNY.

Also the 50 states have different funding and costs for their public colleges. So even the affordability of public universities varies a lot. RI, VT, others have pretty pricey in state public tuition rates.

From Biden’s Twitter account:

In the 21st century, twelve years of school isn’t enough. That’s why under the Biden-Harris plan, community college will be free — and public colleges and universities will be tuition-free for families earning less than $125,000 a year.

agree with community college,trade schools etc. being free. We have a shortage of trades. 4 yr colleges have too many BS degrees though (i don’t mean B.science :wink: )

It’s funny how Cornell is a public/private hybrid, and land grant university. Meanwhile UPenn is a private Ivy. Wonder how Cornell deals with public major switching? Human Ecology could be a great premed degree too. Wonder what the out of state spread is?

I liked the proposal that colleges should underwrite the loans to their students. It’s not like Ivy Leagues with their 10 figure endowments need anyone else’s money. Who else has all the information to judge both the student’s prospects (from their application) and the quality of their education and future degree/job prospects (from their alumni)? If their degrees are worth it, let them put their own capital on the line at market interest rates, or at the very least, take the equity tranche / first loss of say 20% if the loans are going to be partially backed by outside financing. This will definitely align incentives and stop people from getting a bunch of worthless degrees and then sticking the taxpayer with the bill. The fact is a lot of degrees these days aren’t worth anything, let alone 6 figure sums that they cost in inflated tuition, but the Feds don’t care in the way they give out loans these days.

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