[Contentless] ITT you post right now [ASAP] your current thought [Brains][Thinking][Personal][#29] (999)

362 Name: (*゚ー゚) : 1993-09-9094 01:22

>>351
It's definitely a bubble, but it's probably gonna fizzle rather than burst. Student loans are a lot harder to escape than housing loans, so it's not like everybody can just suddenly stop paying them. They just keep paying less and less every year.

>>354
Taxes. The US has cut education funding dramatically since the 2008 recession (<a href="https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-lost-decade-in-higher-education-funding">Source</a>) and while it's slowly rising, they could definitely do better. The US can't afford to make college completely free like a smaller country such as Germany, but it could definitely do better. Even without raising taxes, the US could simply cut other parts of the budget, such as defense, to pay for education.

Without state funding, the cost of education shifts from taxpayers to students, which just makes the problem worse. Students can't afford to contribute to the economy because they're too busy paying off student loans. Colleges make budget cuts, decreasing the quality of education and producing less students who are good for the economy. The only people who profit from the situation are moneylenders, and even they might take a loss when the bubble fizzles.

That said, the belief that everybody needs a college education is silly to begin with. For many jobs, experience and training in a specific skill-set is much more important. But everybody wants to get a degree, leading to degree inflation: these days a bachelor's degree is practically meaningless unless you went to a big-name school, and even then employers still value actual skill and experience more than the piece of paper.

Speaking of unnecessary education, US medical students typically need to study 8 years vs. 5-6 years in the rest of the world. The extra two years doesn't increase the quality of the doctors, it just increases health care costs because we need to pay doctors more to pay off their massive tuition debts.

So yeah, these problems could be solved by lower enrollment, lower degree requirements for jobs, and higher education spending. But good luck convincing Americans to do either of those.

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