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Demeter

(85,373 posts)
15. The Burgeoning Student Debt Problem
Tue Apr 24, 2012, 09:42 PM
Apr 2012
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/the-burgeoning-student-debt-problem.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Even though other consumer debt-bombs have done more damage, student debt is producing significant social and economic distortions. One is so useful to the authority structure that it seems certain that they will keep this type of bondage in place. Heavy debt loads pressure young people into making conservative choices. If you carry a lot in the way of student loans, you have to worry about employability. That doesn’t simply push graduates into bigger ticket (hence more conventional) career choices; more important, it makes them far less likely to step out of line. In particular, an arrest record, which is often a by product of protesting, is an automatic out with a lot of employers.

But the level of student debt, now estimated at over $1 trillion outstanding, is having an impact on spending. First time home buying is running below the level expected given new household formation, and a big culprit is student debt loads, since many young people are too leveraged to take on a decent-sized mortgage on top of their existing obligations. In addition, the 25 to 39 year old cohort is the top target of advertisers, but the more debt service they have, the less they can buy in the way of goodies.

Adam Levitin has taken his first serious look at student debt. Aside from grumbling at the dearth of academic research, he offers some useful observations. The big one is that the problem is the level of debt: student debt rates are generally pretty favorable, and the loans also offer a lot in the way of payment flexibility.

He also made a modest suggestion:


Why we are financing education via debt? It’s not obvious that we have to do so, and that’s the easiest way to avoid leverage going forward. Milton Friedman proposed equity financing some years back, meaning that the school got a % of future income, rather than a fixed amount. It could be as progressive or regressive as a school wanted.

Yale tried such an experiment in the 1970s, but with poor results–the alumni didn’t pay. Yale didn’t want to sue its alums, and let them convert to debt at a favorable rate. But that’s an easily surmountable problem–we could have education payments rolled into tax bills and collected by the IRS, which would then remit to the schools. Non-payment isn’t stiffing the school. It’s stiffing Uncle Sam, who is much better at collecting. It’s not such a radical idea–Australia collects student loans via its tax service.

There’s an entrenched education bureaucracy that would have a lot of trouble changing to an equity financed system (alumni fundraising would surely suffer, for example). But it would mean that people take the jobs they want, rather than the jobs that pay the student loans. That might be a very good thing for society, even if it would certainly hurt some employers (think those who pay recent graduates outsized “hazard pay”).
http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2012/04/some-thoughts-on-the-student-loan-debt-problem.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+creditslips%2Ffeed+%28Credit+Slips%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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