Sunday, February 5, 2012

Could Dismantling the Submerged State Surrounding Student Debt Pay for Free Colleges?

Josh Eidelson has a great post at The Nation, “Fighting Privatization, Occupy Activists at CUNY and UC Kick Into High Gear,” that dives into the battles currently being waged against the dismantling of public higher education. One of the Occupy movement’s major objectives is combating the privatization of public higher education and its replacement with a debt-fueled economy of indenture.

While prepping a recent Occupy panel, Sarah Jaffe brought up how we subsidize student debt in a similar way to mortgage debt, that is, through allowing people to deduce the interest paid on this debt from taxes. According to Pew Charitable Trust’s website subsidyscope, the deductibility of student loan interest alone costs taxpayers $1.4 billion dollars. Instead of taking $1.4 billion dollars and directly making college cheaper, students take out massive amounts of student loan debt and we alter the tax code to make that debt $1.4 billion dollars cheaper. Read more....
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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 6, 2012 at 6:08 AM

    10:43 I CONCUR! WE NEED MORE "TOOL GIRL TIMMIES"!
    GET THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF LOANS AND EDUCATION.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousFebruary 6, 2012 at 9:57 AM

    Hand and hand, every time universities up their tuition, the government ups the loan payments to cover them.

    Get government out of the student loan business and college costs would drop to what the private market could bare.

    The reality is nobody is entitled to a college education. If you score the ACT high, great but figure out your own way to pay.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousFebruary 6, 2012 at 12:42 PM

    WHY is this site farmed on to INDIA? They write all these horrible articles.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousFebruary 6, 2012 at 12:46 PM

    If your objective is to destroy higher education then make it free. If you want to fix the problem then get the government out of the business of making loans to students. The tax payers can't afford it and the colleges take advantage of the readily available money to increase costs and decrease cost effectiveness.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AnonymousFebruary 6, 2012 at 1:51 PM

      This was a timely comment from Biden,

      http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/02/06/biden_admits_government_subsidies_have_increased_college_tuition.html

      Delete
  5. AnonymousFebruary 6, 2012 at 5:59 PM

    STEM degrees are pretty useless too. Generally if you don't make med school your science degree is garbage now, since with H1-B visas and jobs going overseas there really aren't any jobs for US grads.

    A liberal arts women's studies degree from Harvard will beat a science degree out of a state school every single time. The IVYs are still worth it, but that's it. All the other schools are scams.

    The worst scam is probably law school.

    ReplyDelete

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