by ET » Sat Mar 29, 2014 4:15 pm
Dave, back to the charity part of this discussion. I don't think it is feasible to ever go to a completely private system of charity. However, I would argue that the system we have now is largely wasteful. The Department of Agriculture main job these days is to administer food stamps. Why are government bureaucrats who are theoretically tasked with setting policy on farming administering food stamp handouts? Besides the fact that here is no constitutional authority for the federal government to engage in charity, the farther away the administration of benefits are from the recipients, the more subject they are to abuse. Charity endeavors should, in my opinion, be almost exclusively state and local matters. Transferring that money from Nevada or Oregon or Michigan or Oklahoma to D.C. just means there's a big pool of money for politicians and lobbyists to fight over. The closer the programs are to the people, the more say we have in how they are run. "Of, by and for the people" to me means that there shouldn't be a "one-size-fits-all" approach to charity (and a whole lot of other things). The states should be laboratories for what works and what doesn't. If the "blue states" want to try one method and the "red states" want to try another, then so be it. Let them go about it instead of having to fight which way everybody will follow whether they want to or not.
Post secondary education is a rather interesting subject to me, particularly the costs. A multitude of lengthy threads and discussions here have decried the "high cost" of health care. Folks have talked about the immorality of it all, yet college costs have risen TWICE that of health care over the last 30 years or so. However, since higher ed is largely a government-run domain (and a bastion of liberal thought and administration), it seems to be protected from the obvious criticism that if government can't control college costs, how is it going to do so with health care? If liberals can't keep the costs down of institutions that they largely run based on their philosophies, how can their beloved "Big G" keep health care costs contained? But I digress.
Colleges costs are not immune to the law of supply-and-demand. If you enact a large grant and guaranteed loan program and make 5 and 6-figure sums of money available to kids with little job history and very little credit history and most likely very little wisdom to weight costs and benefits, then we should naturally expect to end up with a "student loan crisis" as college costs rise. After all, it is almost obligatory for college administrators to lament their lack of funds, so when Johnny or Suzie shows up with a brand new shiny grant of $5000 from the taxpayers, the finance folks start figuring out where to spend it....raise some person's salary, build a new building, redo the college president's mansion, add an ancient Babylonian Entertainment major. Not to mention that many students probably go to schools they couldn't otherwise afford if not given monetary handouts in the forms of grants or loans.
I don't accept that there are "few opportunities for students to graduate without major debt". I'm sorry, but student loan debt is largely a self-imposed bondage. The military offers college tuition benefits. My employer offers college tuition benefits (which I used to put myself through the last few year of college...took me almost 8 years to get through college, but I did without any debt). There's plain old work. There may be some students who "need" to take on student loans to go to college because they may not live anywhere near one, but I imagine the vast majority are like my son. He wanted to go to a small out-of-state Christian college that offered him a small football scholarship....BUT he/we would have to potentially take out student loans to the tune of 20 to $30,000 depending on increases in the football scholarship as he progressed. We refused to do it. He could go to school here at Univ. of Memphis and not have any debt. But had we allowed him, he'd most likely be at Evangel and loaded with 20 or $30,000 in debt.
However, I would guess that most students simply justify taking out tens of thousands, some times 100,000+, in student loans to go the "best" school for their major. They could go in-state or close to home and live with the parents and have no debt or very little, but "you get what you pay for", so they graduate with 50 or 60k with a degree in art history, "womyn's studies" or "environmental justice" (yes, that is an actual major...at least according to the Nashville paper who quoted a student that had supposedly majored in it at Vanderbilt University). The payments come due and they can't find a job in art history and then we see them at an Occupy Wall Street rally protesting the rich and lamenting the "student loan crisis". Huh?
My youngest is a junior in high school and she refuses to take on any debt. She may not go to a school that makes U.S. News and World Report's "Top 10" rankings or such, but since where your went to school matters little in the end (contrary to what those rankings imply and what the Ivy League crowd would like for you to believe), she says she'll be going to wherever she can go without using the student loan "credit card". If that's locally at the UofM, she's cool with that. If she can put together scholarships for volleyball and others, she may look at Union University, Christian Brothers or others.
At any measure, with some rather modest help from us and my parents, we'll get 3 kids through college without any debt...well, one of them will have $3500 or so, but that's more of a footnote. We've told them that if they make the decision to not take on student loan debt, they'll be way ahead of many of their peers. One of my son's friends at church has $80,000 in debt and was working for a non-profit after college....why so much debt? Because she could get "free money" and kept changing majors. So she entered married life a year or two ago with an $80,000 student loan to saddle onto their married life. But she got an "education". Hooray!!!
I'm Ed Thompson, and I approve this message.