There is much talk about using federal tax dollars to pay off certain debts acquired by adults who took out loans in order to pay for education credentials offered by colleges. These credentials were assumed to be beneficial in increasing the wages earned by the borrows in later years and so, make it a worthwhile financial decision.
As it turns turns out, these adults are having difficulty repaying the loans and while the reasons are not explicit, one can assume that their earnings with the added credentials are not sufficient to repay the loan.
If this is the case, would it be prudent for the government to investigate the possibility that some or many of the colleges selling the credentials committed a sort of fraud, should be held at least partially liable for the loans, and be required to refund some or all of the fees charged for the credentials?
In short, if I am selling tight rope walking lessons for $1,000 a week, $5,000 for the complete five week session and at the end, few if any of my students can walk the tightrope, but all took out government backed loans to pay for my course…..when none of them can get a job at the circus, why do I get to keep the $5,000?
caveat emptor
Would you tell that to the investors who went along with Bernie Madoff?
Yes. I lost some on Enron. Win some, lose some.
Right now if you have $1000 dollars buy bitcoin, I’ll
check with you in 5 years.
Madoff was promising returns which were unrealistic.
Never gamble more than you’re willing to lose.
This is circular reasoning and assumes the outcome you are trying to prove. The claim has never been that an undergraduate college degree guarantees a higher income.
Few, if any, colleges sell any undergraduate degree — particularly a BA — as “tight rope walking lessons”. The claim is, instead, that a student with a degree is likely to have higher lifetime compensation than the same student without that degree.
The ability to read and understand written material does not guarantee higher earnings. A person who is able to read and understand written material is likely to have much better earnings than a person who is illiterate.
The issue is that young people across the board have historically low earnings. Young people without college degrees have an even tougher time than those with college degrees.
A sobering reality of today’s American economy is that young people across the board are likely to have lower lifetime earnings than older people — for the first time in US history.
America owes ALL of its young people compensation for the betrayal of the promises America has always made to its younger generations. That betrayal affects not just those with student loans, but also those whose families paid for their college educations without taking out student debt.
The proposals are intended to address one segment of that population. It should not and does not rule out other programs that address the same betrayal.
An erosive wealth tax applied to the wealthiest 1% or 0.1% of the population generates enough new tax revenue to fund other programs that benefit all Americans, including young people with or without college degrees.
One such program is a Universal Base Income. Another is to provide federally-subsidized child care.
One of the more heartbreaking cases I’ve dealt with in the past two years is a student who ended up working in a meat factory for most of remote learning, and lost most of his immediate family to Covid, and another student who is now working as a “toe tagger” moving cadavers around MGH.
Both are undocumented, although I was honestly shocked when I found out the latter was since his English is flawless and his culture is almost entirely American influenced down to his love of Joe Rogan and Tim Dillon. He also loves his job and is hoping to go to college, but it’s unclear to me how DACA is enforced and what private or state schools he is eligible to go to.
So to me the Democratic Party should stand first and foremost for the dignity of all workers. I think the Clintonian mantra that education was the key to competing in a globalized economy has not borne the promises it was meant to, this is not to say an education is not valued, only to say, we need to have a both/and approach that values higher skills as well as higher education.
I am disappointed that with all the extra money coming into public schools from federal Covid ESSER relief and the state finally passing SOPA, that we have not seen any gubernatorial candidate make a strong commitment to expanding vocational education. One of the main reasons I ultimately went for a Kennedy over Markey in that primary was the formers advocacy for vocational Ed. This could be a key wedge issue to get blue collar male voters of all races back to the Democratic Party while shoring up our support for trade unions while nudging them to diversify.
Locally I’m glad as both a Wakefield taxpayer and Revere employee to see the Northeast Voke expanded to prevent waiting lists in the future. This will be a huge opportunity for the 400 or so kids who get rejected every year, many of them with English access or special education needs. Also the new Revere high school and new Seacoast alternative will have dedicated innovation and STEM elements. If we can max our career training in high school and keep partnering with community colleges for dual enrollments we can get a lot of kids into living wage jobs. That should be the ultimately goal, not college prep exclusively.
http://homenewshere.com/middlesex_east/article_edc0bc44-a8f1-11eb-b256-cf01dd60f747.html
We also need to go on the offense on immigration. These people are the future of America, especially as our own birth rates are declining it’s a way to shore up our safety net programs and maintain our high population. Attracting the worlds best, brightest, and hardest workers is the key to keeping us competitive. We should take in every Afghan, Iraqi, or Ukrainian who wants entry. Make legal immigration easier and make illegal immigration harder. I’ll see your wall and raise you automatic visas, half time and half cost for green cards, and fast tracking citizenship.
I still wouldn’t build the wall, though.
I think that getting a Green Card should be approximately as difficult – and take about as long – for an immigrant as getting a drivers license is for a citizen. Similarly, becoming a citizen should be approximately as difficult and take about as long as getting a passport.
I think that federal, state, and local government have a very long list of priorities that are MUCH more important than making illegal immigration harder.
I would say make legal immigration easy enough that illegal immigration is rendered essentially moot.
I’m sorry to hear about your student who lost so much family to COVID. Do you know if there were underlying issues?
For the last five years before I retired, I worked in retail, It was not by choice, but after losing my “desk job” to a younger, less expensive worker, I had to bridge the gap to retirement somehow, even if it meant a 70% pay cut. I’ve written about my coworker’s who were in similar straits.
Now I’d like to tell you about the others, the kids in their late 20’s, early 30’s, all struggling to pay off their college loan debts and all working full time in what we learned are essential jobs but because of public perception that only jobs requiring a college diploma can expect a middle class life, these kids are paid a fraction of what that college degree job would have paid them. These kids had degrees in psychology, music production, women’s studies, sports management, and a whole lot of “communications” degrees. Did anyone sit them down before they decided to go to college, spell out the hard truths of their odds of getting a job in that field and how much they would owe at the end? My guess is, no. I had personal experience with this when I was 46 and unemployed for the first time in my life. On the advice of a “career counselor” I went back to school to get a masters degree. Long story short, I realized after one semester that my optimum expected earnings with the new job, if I even got it, would be far less that my previous job and I’d be saddled with debt. I finished the semester and grabbed a job selling luxury cars in a wealthy Boston suburb where I made enough in a few months to pay off the school loans and get back on my feet.
Once again, I am not against college, or degrees, of diplomas….I am against the commonly held belief that without them, an American worker should face a difficult path to what we call a Middle Class Life.
“Commonly held belief”? You might as well assert that you are against gravity or the speed of light.
Whether intentionally or not, you’ve at least finally made your denial explicit.
Your personal experience as related here confirms what you oppose. A risk of relying on personal experience is that it blinds you to what you do not see.
How many working class kids in urban black neighborhoods do you know? How many black women did you meet while “selling luxury cars in a wealthy Boston suburb where [you] made enough in a few months to pay off the school loans and get back on [your] feet“?
Your comment reeks of white privilege and willful ignorance of long-documented economic reality.
A job may be essential, but the person occupying it may not be.
There is a big shortage of trash truck drivers and plenty of bonuses are being offered. I talked to one ( a 20 something) and he is well on his way to a middle class life. Right now 401k’s(Roth) and real estate can provide wise long term investments. He was into both. He spent $1000 on Amazon stock instead of getting a tattoo and bemoaning wealth inequality.
If your kid came to you and said I want to spend $100,000 on 4 years of learning “women’s studies” you shouldn’t co-sign the loan. I went to college for a year and in a micro economics lecture hall with 200 other kids I realized I knew more about commerce from delivering newspapers as a kid than the grad student overseeing my study group.
Sell cars, sell real estate, learn plumbing but don’t expect knowledge itself to be a store of value unless it’s a technical field (medical..) even then be ready with a back up plan. I know a bond analyst for Bank of Amer who is expecting his job will be done on artificial intel in a few years.
Finally if you live in an area where you can’t afford to live, move.
Oh please Tom, the claim has been made even by the current president of the USA.
Citation please.
“We all know that 12 years of public education is not enough,”
“Twelve years of education is not enough anymore,”
Not enough for what, Mr. President?
By educational attainment: 35 percent of the job openings will require at least a bachelor’s degree, 30 percent of the job openings will require some college or an associate’s degree.
70% of job openings in the USA do not require more than a high school diploma. According to President Biden, these 65% of American workers will not be paid enough to live a middle class life. Why is that?
As I suspected, you have misquoted your “sources”.
NONE of those make any guarantee or claim.
Is it so very hard to acknowledge the difference between a prerequisite and an assurance?
A person whose hands are limited to a span of an octave cannot play many blues and jazz arrangements for the piano — even ragtime will be hard. This is because the left-hand must often span a “tenth” — the interval between the root of a chord and the third above the octave of the same chord. A person who is less than six feet tall is unlikely to play competitively in professional basketball.
A person with a small left hand is very unlikely to succeed as a blues or jazz pianist. A person who is less than five feet tall is unlikely to succeed as a professional basketball player.
Having a large left hand is NOT an assurance or guarantee of being a successful pianist. Being over five feet tall is NOT an assurance or guarantee of being a professional basketball player.
Joe Biden in particular and the Democratic Party in general have said for decades that no American should be denied access to higher education because of their inability to pay.
The quotes you cite affirm that higher education is a prerequisite to a “middle-class” lifestyle.
NOBODY makes the false claim that you so frequently repeat here that higher education is an assurance or guarantee of a middle-class lifestyle.
In your final paragraph (emphasis mine):
This is either a truly egregious misquote of your third citation or just a brain-fart (it happens to me as well from time to time).
In your quoted passage from your third source, you omitted a crucial sentence. Here is the quote, with your omission emphasized:
Not 70%, but 36%.
The rest of your final paragraph is an outright lie.
It isn’t “65%” and it isn’t “according to President Biden”.
It is 36%, not 65%. Job openings are not the same as people or as workers. The partitioning of job openings is DIFFERENT FROM the partitioning of people who might fill those openings, and that difference is crucial to the misinformation that you so often post here.
Joe Biden in particular and the Democratic Party in general have been striving to ensure that no American has to chase one of those rare (36%) job openings that do not require higher education.
You in particular — and the GOP in general — have passionately opposed those efforts.
Tom, what do you suppose Mr. Biden was referring to then by saying “12 years is not enough”? Scotch?
It’s not enough for many high-quality, high-compensation jobs in the 21st century, but as Tom has said repeatedly that does not translate to guarantees that more than 12 years will automatically lead to those jobs. I can personally vouch for that part.
Who said anything about “high compensation”? The president was talking about a typical middle class life in America, something he has declared is not possible without a college degree.
What Joe Biden said — and what you deny — is that the overwhelming majority of jobs in today’s economy require higher education.
Your own source showed that those who do not have a higher education compete for just 36% of the total job openings (and that 36% says nothing about compensation).
Your refusal to admit your own misquote or mistake hurts your credibility.
You made the following claim:
Do you stand by this grossly incorrect claim?
John, what part of “being 6 feet 10 is not enough” to be a center for the Boston Celtics is hard for you to understand?
Tom, if my high school principal declared a minimum height requirement of 5’11 to play basketball in the gym, I’d say she was dismissing a large number of students as unqualified to play.
This comment is unresponsive and irrelevant.
The plain fact remains that many people who are 6′ 10″ are terrible basketball players. A person who is 4′ 11″ is unlikely to become a center for the Boston Celtics.
A prerequisite is not a guarantee. Higher education is a prerequisite for a middle-class lifestyle in the economy of today and tomorrow.
It is not a guarantee.
Because school is a place where everyone should at least be allowed to try, though I suspect even school teams end up heavy on the taller players.
In the simplest terms, the problem, as I see it, it this: We have a significant number of young adults who view college in terms of added income which is understandable given our society’s view that skills not acquired via higher education and awarded a certificate are “low skilled” which justifies low pay, even while those skills are essential to support the lifestyle and wages of the college educated.
With only 70% of jobs requiring a college degree of any sort, and given the rising cost of college combined with a refusal on the part of either political party to raise the minimum wage, we have an over supply of college grads to meet the demand of employers seeking college grads, and so there is downward pressure on wages for the college grads.
In the midst of all this, we have colleges raking in the profits as the demand for what they are selling rises at every turn.
We have two options, as I see it.
We can continue to urge working class kids to go to college as the only way to enter the middle class – and for those who fail, forgive the loans and leave them out of the middle class along with all those without a college degree. OR
We can raise the floor of wages so that even with just a high school diploma, a young citizen has a significant chance of a middle class life.
You present the classic false dilemma.
I most enthusiastically agree with your final sentence:
That has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether we do or do not forgive student debt. It has nothing to do with whether we do or do not ensure that economic considerations do not block any otherwise capable American from obtaining higher education.
The best way to accomplish this to apply an erosive wealth tax on the very top of the wealth distribution and use the proceeds from that wealth tax to create a UBI for every American.
I’ll see your final sentence and raise it to this:
In the wealthiest nation in human history, NO American should have to work in order to have the necessities of life — food, water, shelter, health care, and education.
It has everything to do with student debt. If jobs that did not require a college diploma paid well, there would be a much lower demand for college degrees. That would result in lower college loan debt.
Fair enough, but do you agree with my position that jobs that do not require a college degree ought to be able to support a family on one income? If not, we’re just wiping our butt with a hoop and it’s never going to get cleaned up.
If the acceleration due to gravity were zero, then no energy would be required to move things and most of humanity’s most vexing issues would never exist.
Jobs that do not require higher education are never going to pay as much as jobs that do. That is what happens in a free-market economy with hourly wages as the item being priced. The reality is that almost NO jobs pay well. Many of the jobs that pay well today will not pay well a decade from now.
Our economy has made wages and labor obsolete. In today’s economy, wealth generation does not require any labor at all. That means that using labor to distribute newly-created wealth is a guarantee that little or none of that newly-created wealth will be distributed.
That is not the fault of Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, or — for that matter — any other elected official.
The fact remains that SOME jobs really do require a college education. Anyone who wishes to pursue that path should be financially assisted if that is a barrier.
Yes, that fact remains. Is it relevant to the problem of massive student debt and low wages? No, not at all.
Of course it is. People take on debt so they can pay for the college education that will open the doors to jobs they want. You still seem to think that if only non-college jobs paid more, people will flock to them. There ARE in fact non-college jobs, mostly in trades, that pay pretty decently, and yet their are plenty of people, myself included, who just plain aren’t interested. Just about everybody here, and most elected Democrats, support higher wages, so why do you keep arguing with us on that point?
The only way you can make it not matter is by making jobs that don’t require higher education pay the same as jobs that do.
That’s an absurd fantasy — perhaps even a dangerous one for those who think that our society needs at least some surgeons, engineers, designers, and even lawyers.
Any essential job should pay enough for an individual to raise a family and save for a rainy day, regardless of educational credentials. Once the Democratic Party admits this, it can stop worrying about Donald Trump, voter turnout, and losing the non-college educated voters.
Yes, we need doctors and the rest, but we also need people to stock the shelves, wash the pots & pans, haul away the garbage, shovel snow from the walkways. The idea that hauling garbage does not require a diploma from a university and therefor does not deserve a wage to support a family in the community that one serves is just one more ugly “ism”, like racism and sexism: Credentialism.
There are glimmers of hope. Recently, Massachusetts announced that all essential workers who were not laid off during the heights of the pandemic and who were paid poor wages will receive a check for $500.
Of course, they are till essential today and still earning below 300% of the federal poverty level. And is $500 enough to put ones health at risk? Well, no, but this is start.
In your proposed approach, who decides which jobs are “essential” and which are not? Who sets the wages for those “essential” jobs?
A key factor that you ignore is the distinction between the importance of the job versus the importance of the worker who fills the job.
Somebody has to haul garbage. If Fred decides that he’d rather do something else, how hard is it to replace Fred with somebody else? Like it or not, the truth is that the skills required to haul garbage are easily replaced or taught — Ralph or Jim can be hired and either will haul garbage just as well as Fred did.
The market economy has historically been better at setting the wages for a specific job than the several alternatives that have been attempted over the years. Your proposal is silent about this issue.
Your proposal waves away the most important factors in all this by ignoring them.
We do not have to look too far back to know what jobs are essential. During the height of the pandemic, it was fairly clear, eh?
How hard is it to replace Fred the garbage man? Well, that all depends on the labor laws that our government has written.
Whether it is easy or difficult all depends on public policy.
That is an important fact that you choose to ignore.
You’re evading the questions.
I know of no Democrat who doesn’t believe that the jobs you cite should earn a living wage, at least if employed full time.
John proposes much more than a “living wage”, as commonly understood. He demands that an essential job “[should pay] enough for an individual to raise a family and save for a rainy day, regardless of educational credentials.
I’m not sure that the minimum wage has ever been high enough that an individual could raise family and “save for a rainy day”.
The largest number I’ve heard for minimum wage is $22/hr, from Elizabeth Warren. That’s a gross monthly wage of $3,667. Assuming a 40% tax rate (federal, state, and fica), that becomes a net monthly wage of $2,200.
A family of three surely needs two bedrooms, and by “middle-class” standards three.
In the city of Somerville, rent for a 2-br apartment has been at least $2,500 for years.
Until the demand includes specifics of who determines which jobs are essential, who sets their wages, and who sets the qualification, the “proposal” is empty rhetoric.
What I “propose” is simply the same thing that was “proposed” by Adam Smith in “Wealth Of Nations”:
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.
What Smith did not imagine was an economic system that allowed an employer to do what we call Cost externalizing in modern day American Capitalism. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the brilliance of Capitalism is that you never run out of other people’s money.
In short, if anyone in the USA is working full time for one year and still needs to rely on government in order to sustain themselves, or even more importantly, their family, they are not sponging off the government, their employer is.
I guess the question is how large a family we expect either the employers or government to subsidize on one income. Quick searching reveals that at least 50K is required for a family of 4 to be middle class, or at least $25 per hour full time. I’m not sure it’s realistic to expect every job to pay that rate, though we can certainly do better. It probably would require both parents to work to have any chance to be in the middle class working that kind of job.
You’re waving your hands again.
“Assuming a 40% tax rate (federal, state, and fica),. . . . ” Probably closer to 25% at current tax rates for that income.
The federal tax rate (https://www.hrblock.com/tax-center/irs/tax-brackets-and-rates/what-are-the-tax-brackets/) for the first $40,525 is 22%. MA state income tax rate is 5%. Employee share of FICA/Medicare is 7.65%. The total is 34.65 instead of 40%.
So the net monthly income is $2,396. That still doesn’t even cover rent in Somerville.
The point remains that even the $22/hr minimum wage proposed by Ms. Warren isn’t certainly won’t allow an individual to support themselves and a family in Somerville.
No argument on your larger point. But 22% is the marginal rate above $40,525. The effective rate on income up to that amount is lower, around 10 %.
Agreed, I misread the page. Looking more carefully — and assuming the individual has a filing status of “married filing jointly”, then the effective rate is 11% (10% on the first $19,900, 12% on the remaining $24,100).
So the total withholding percentage is 11 + 5 + 7.65, or 23.65%.
The individual has a net income of $2,799.50/month.
As I think we agree, that certainly isn’t enough to live in Somerville. I’m not sure there are many places in MA where a family can live on less than $3,000/month.