Clown Car: 7/13/23
This week, we begin by talking about Twitter having just given me $1,700 for being such a successful influencer. Getting free money from a corporation isn’t something that happens every day, so it was a very pleasant surprise. This leads to a discussion about how each of us uses the platform and what the incentives of this profit-sharing model will mean for how Twitter functions in the future.
From there, we talk about Inez’s forthcoming report on what she thinks should be done about student loans. The approach preferred by the left has the problem of letting universities off the hook. Inez thinks it would be good policy and good politics for the right to tie forgiveness to the taxation of university endowments. This strikes me as being at the very least superior to what the Biden administration has been trying to do, and I could find myself supporting it based on the details.
Throughout the process, we talk about just how horrible the expansion of higher education has been for society, whether one is thinking about the economy, the labor market, family formation, or the culture more generally. The idea that college is simply bad has become a pretty standard belief among conservatives, and that’s something I’m glad to see. We’ll find if Inez’s proposal goes anywhere and potentially helps us do something about it.
Listen here or watch on YouTube:
Links
The message you get when Twitter decides to share ad revenue
My Tweet on NYT on student debt
Reuters on Biden’s new plan for student loan forgiveness
Clown Car: 7/13/23
Inez is wrong about Harvard and Yale and other elite schools and student loan debt. According to US News report for graduating class of 2019, only 2% of Harvard students took federal loan, and the median loan was just 12,000 dollars. This is because ivy league schools offer aid to most lower middle class and middle class families. While at low ranked university like Alabama State, 89% took out federal loan with a median loan of 54,000 dollars. How is fair to tax ivy league endowments when it is not even ivy league schools or other top schools like Stanford that are contributing to student loan crisis. So, in Inez's view colleges like Stanford, Harvard etc need to pay to discharge loans for graduates of Alabama state. This is what happens when culture war triumphs logic.
To me, the biggest issue with colleges is the mismatch between their value and their cost.
Long gone are the days when colleges claimed to make well-rounded, erudite people...all college marketing is based solely on helping students gain employment. Yet many students emerge with degrees that render them essentially unemployable, all the while paying the same prices as someone in a high-demand major.
Why should someone graduating college with a Communications degree pay the same cost as someone getting an Electrical Engineering degree when their job prospects are so dramatically different? There is no place else in life where that is the case. But if colleges believe the value between these two is the same, they should have skin in the game to justify that concept.
Once students leave the school (with or without a degree), the college should be on the hook for the employment status of that student based on a % of their loan amount. In other words, if a student annually makes less than, let’s say, 20% of their loan amount, the school is on the hook for the delta.
This would do a few things-
1) Create a tier system where the more valuable degrees are higher cost (though possibly lower than now) and less valuable ones are lower cost.
2) The degrees with the lowest value (think all the identity-based curriculum) will simply cease to exist because, now that there is a price/value match, there would be no way to implement those departments profitably.
3) Colleges would be forced to get a better handle on their overhead (DEI admins, etc.) bc that cost would come straight from the bottom line.