I did an episode called Reinventing Education that gives a LOT of details on the predatory student loan program. Much of my research came from The Student Loan Scam by Alan Michael Collinge. When you know the facts and extent of the corruption, it's hard to believe this has been normalized by every HS counselor. And yet, I talk about why blanket student loan forgiveness is logistically untenable and Biden's is particularly badly designed. However, under the system changes I propose in my book and Substack, those loans could be turned towards revitalizing the community: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/reinventing-education.
Free education is available everywhere in the US, the HE industry sells the idea that you need a teacher holding your hand, walking you like a child down the path to an education but that is just marketing. There is free information, textbooks, online video training and so much more. People are just lazy and don't apply themselves. Student loans are the fools choice not the only option.
I agree fully with your first point but not at all that the students paying for an education are lazy. Most students I know are working PT while going into debt for school FT. The intensity leaves them unable to take full advantage of what they're learning. By the time they graduate and find there's no jobs, they're burnt out and never want to see a book again. Unless they go into internships where they work like dogs for free so they can get into another school and more debt.
Everything you're talking about could be put into curricula, that are developed by teachers outside of the Carnegie-oligarchical system and recognized by employers and mentors in community economies that don't serve the oligarchy. It could include small inexpensive classes / learning groups that provide community (and potential sex partners, let's be real about what college is for ;-) and an international network of 'sibling cities' for lifelong edu-travel and edu-tourism.
It shouldn't have to be one or the other--corporate profit-driven university or taking on all the risk and isolation of uncredentialed, self-driven, self-organized, self-authorized learning. At least that's what I'd want if I was starting out.
Perhaps lazy was a bit bombastic, perhaps better to say they didn't investigate any alternatives. My sons have avoided student loans, taught themselves and are doing fine. As an engineer I have to study everyday, if I don't stay up to date with the latest studys I become dated and irrelevant. Saying they are burnt out after school is an excuse.
Like I said there are fully accredited on line colleges that provide a BA/BS level education for free they are just unaccredited. In the technical industry I work in we don't really look at transcripts, don't really care about your college. Almost exclusively we look at real time in person performance of the duties. Can you do the job ? Can you do the job while a group of your peers is watching ? If you succeed or fail at doing the job, where you went to school is truly irrelevant.
School should be free, the best way to make that happen is online. The barrier to a totally free accredited online bachelors degree is government accreditation not being granted to solutions outside the university system. Once again the problem is government not for profit industry.
Hi, notBob. My daughters have also managed to graduate without debt and succeed, so I don't have a personal pony in this race. But I don't take their success as a sign the system is working. As a former high tech Dir of HR, I know every technical position I advertised needed a BA/BS. These days degree checks are routine and automated. How does an uncredentialed person get that first technical job?
I'm guessing that you haven't read my Reinventing Education episode when you say the problem isn't for-profit 'industry' (have to put that word in quotes since it implies actual work being done other than raking in) but is gov't. I go into some depth but also just scratch the surface on how for-profit industry drives the degree factories we call college. They don't call it the Carnegie Curriculum because they like the alliteration.
I think it's a false dichotomy, however, between 'we and our kids did it so anyone who can't, it's their own fault' and Biden's blanket transfer of $20K in debt to taxpayers. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion of the problem in the context of changing the economy from serving profits to serving people.
Let me try to understand your logic here: Government owns and operates many universities around the nation. Government controls the accreditation of which schools are valid and which are not. Government pays the salaries of the staff and administration of those schools. 75% of all university students attend a government run university. Government either guarantees or directly lends to students in the vast majority of cases.
Your claim is that the government is guiltless is the desecration of these schools and it is all the fault of the capitalist driven model of education ?
Hello, Hubris! Thanks for responding, it's always great to hear from you. In the US what we have is the worst of both worlds. Our money is generated by bankers, who issue mortgages out of thin air that we repay with 30 (or 60 combined) years of labor. In the meantime they retain free ownership of the house and have no social obligation for how they use their profits, which are equal to the cost of the house (and 94% of all dollars issued). That's not just capitalism but feudalism.
But then, from the money we eke back from them with our labor, we pay taxes, from which we expect to socialize the costs of all the harms they've created: poor health, homelessness, need for corporate working papers (aka degree), aging useless eaters, etc.
What my system does, which could be called anarchy, federalism, libertarianism, community self-governance or small-scale sovereignty, is take back mortgages and money creation as THE exclusive and essential privilege of gov't, and decentralizes it. Then it allows communities to generate a local credit into the community that can't exceed the debts, taxes and cash reserves.
How a community uses that credit is up to them but I recommend modeling the plan before implementing it because the goal is to maximize the times your credit circulates before getting sucked out. The education episode talks about some of my ideas for my community but this one on The Economics of Anarchy, talks more about the whole plan: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-anarchy
Oh, please! You've fallen for the "money is created by bankers" myth, completely overlooking the US Constitution: Article 1, Section 8, which states "Only Congress has the right to mint coin [create the currency - they used coins in 1783]."
Learn Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and get your facts straight.
Susan, we already had a very long conversation about this on another thread, where I talked about how that's been interpreted literally by the Supreme Court as only coins and we talked at length about MMT. But the question under discussion is whether students are at fault for getting a college education at all, whether government is at fault, or whether a for-profit economic system is at fault. What do you (and MMT) say about that, and how would education be (or is already) funded under MMT?
"Under MMT": Since MMT Is an empirical description of the current monetary system, whatever way college is being funded at this time is the way it's being funded "under MMT."
However long our former discussion may have been, it seems that I need to give you some more time or information to understand that MMT isn't something you "do." It's a description of what already IS.
"An empirical description" means that MMT economists look at the monetary system the way another scientist would look at a microorganism through a microscope. It's not something that you implement, any more than a microscope is something that you implement.
It's just looking and describing.
This is a different approach than classical economics, in which a Great Man would describe his theory of how the economy works, or how it SHOULD work, and then subsequent scholars would argue for or against the theory, until another Great Man came along and offered a new theory.
MMT scholars stick to What Is.
Does this help to explain why asking how college would be funded "under MMT" is not a question? It simply doesn't apply.
P.S. The Supreme Court is now into a very literal interpretation of the Constitution in many areas.
I didn't do any research, per se on Student Loans when I was young.
1. Because I never went to University or even matriculated full courses in community college.
I graduated high school in 1969 and proceeded to protest the Vietnam War at American Legion Posts, VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) and public areas such as Court house squares.
2. Because I had also become a singer in classic rock groups as an income.
BUT....I did get drafted and had to report for a physical at the Syracuse NY military service facility.
I failed the physical but passed the written. I got out.
I did Not become an oligarchic soldier.
My point here is simple.
The "Draft" was done away with on January 27th 1973.
THIS is the reason that the US Empire lost its supply of human body cannon fodder.
And THIS is the reason the US Empire believes that education now is less important than dying for the cause of protecting Corporate profits in EVERY country outside of the US soil that the US Empire has military bases.
The last number I knew of those bases was between 600 and 800.
This is how the Corporatocracy works and will continue to work, as long as working American taxpayers are forced to pay for a military full spectrum dominance in this Global Industrial Complex.
We are prisoners of a Monetary system that literally OWNS our lives, womb to tomb...unless we're billionaires.
The Billionaires and the Banks, with their "Modern Money Mechanics" financial policy document, control the entire planet.
That control is all encompassing and they MUST have military dominance to protect their global profits.
No one wants a draft again. No one (I know) wants 'endless war'.
No one wants to be subjected to poverty, illness and starvation because they served in a military whose Govt will NOT take care of them.
But that's what we're faced with, as pawns in a system that will inevitably chew us up and spit us out into cemeteries and/or urns of ashes throughout this "land of the free".
I'm a ~boomer~ that does not begrudge ANY student whatever it costs to become educated.
Just do me a favor:
Endeavor to learn how to dismantle this Monetary system and search for a way to technologically make non-fossil fuel energy (zero-point energy), useful and FREE to every human on the planet.
"The "Draft" was done away with on January 27th 1973. THIS is the reason that the US Empire lost its supply of human body cannon fodder."
The draft was leaking, (ex: sock puppet Bush Jr. and his puppeteer Dick-head Chenny) but to a degree it forced the middle class to have stake in any war. The draft being done away with created a supply of cannon fodder, to remove the revulsion to body bags returning home, and as an added advantage it removed a large mass of educated, articulate white young men who might write and speak about the horror and who might more successfully work within the system to restrict the MIC. Instead, those young men found their career often dependent on the MIC backend instead.
Now the people who matter can watch the news with no fear, and even a perverse pleasure. It's why war porn sells so well on youtube, it's the thrill of Rome's colosseum for the modern age.
You are speaking my language, Rick, my fellow boomer. That's the exact topic of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, which talks about those 800+ military bases and how we became pawns of the monetary system and how to get out of it. Change who our labor serves, to being the community rather than the bankers, and I believe the rest will come. We already have solutions and plenty of creativity but a system that actively suppresses whatever interferes with profits.
For me, it's not a matter of begrudging students education (and we should be clear that education, all you can eat, is already freely available in books and on the internet). What they pay an arm and a leg for is a degree, authorized by the powers-that-be, which has a curriculum that serves the corporatocracy.
If you're paying for teachers and buildings and administration, that's not free, it's taxpayer subsidized. So then you need to decide how much education anyone deserves, who's entitled to teach, what subjects you're willing to pay for, and who's qualified to take them. It leads to centralized control and a point where that student has to stop learning in order to work and pay for other people to learn.
In my system, I say that cheap is better than free because it puts the person in control of what they want to learn and from whom. It makes learning (with travel!) lifelong and subsidizes it equally for all people throughout their lifetimes, rather than concentrating it in four intensive years. Check it out if interested, and here's my book and an episode on building a new economic model:
I did an episode called Reinventing Education that gives a LOT of details on the predatory student loan program. Much of my research came from The Student Loan Scam by Alan Michael Collinge. When you know the facts and extent of the corruption, it's hard to believe this has been normalized by every HS counselor. And yet, I talk about why blanket student loan forgiveness is logistically untenable and Biden's is particularly badly designed. However, under the system changes I propose in my book and Substack, those loans could be turned towards revitalizing the community: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/reinventing-education.
Free education anyone?
I got my free education back in Eastern Europe, where we also had free healthcare...
What MONSTERS those commies were!
Free education is available everywhere in the US, the HE industry sells the idea that you need a teacher holding your hand, walking you like a child down the path to an education but that is just marketing. There is free information, textbooks, online video training and so much more. People are just lazy and don't apply themselves. Student loans are the fools choice not the only option.
I agree fully with your first point but not at all that the students paying for an education are lazy. Most students I know are working PT while going into debt for school FT. The intensity leaves them unable to take full advantage of what they're learning. By the time they graduate and find there's no jobs, they're burnt out and never want to see a book again. Unless they go into internships where they work like dogs for free so they can get into another school and more debt.
Everything you're talking about could be put into curricula, that are developed by teachers outside of the Carnegie-oligarchical system and recognized by employers and mentors in community economies that don't serve the oligarchy. It could include small inexpensive classes / learning groups that provide community (and potential sex partners, let's be real about what college is for ;-) and an international network of 'sibling cities' for lifelong edu-travel and edu-tourism.
It shouldn't have to be one or the other--corporate profit-driven university or taking on all the risk and isolation of uncredentialed, self-driven, self-organized, self-authorized learning. At least that's what I'd want if I was starting out.
Perhaps lazy was a bit bombastic, perhaps better to say they didn't investigate any alternatives. My sons have avoided student loans, taught themselves and are doing fine. As an engineer I have to study everyday, if I don't stay up to date with the latest studys I become dated and irrelevant. Saying they are burnt out after school is an excuse.
Like I said there are fully accredited on line colleges that provide a BA/BS level education for free they are just unaccredited. In the technical industry I work in we don't really look at transcripts, don't really care about your college. Almost exclusively we look at real time in person performance of the duties. Can you do the job ? Can you do the job while a group of your peers is watching ? If you succeed or fail at doing the job, where you went to school is truly irrelevant.
School should be free, the best way to make that happen is online. The barrier to a totally free accredited online bachelors degree is government accreditation not being granted to solutions outside the university system. Once again the problem is government not for profit industry.
Hi, notBob. My daughters have also managed to graduate without debt and succeed, so I don't have a personal pony in this race. But I don't take their success as a sign the system is working. As a former high tech Dir of HR, I know every technical position I advertised needed a BA/BS. These days degree checks are routine and automated. How does an uncredentialed person get that first technical job?
I'm guessing that you haven't read my Reinventing Education episode when you say the problem isn't for-profit 'industry' (have to put that word in quotes since it implies actual work being done other than raking in) but is gov't. I go into some depth but also just scratch the surface on how for-profit industry drives the degree factories we call college. They don't call it the Carnegie Curriculum because they like the alliteration.
I think it's a false dichotomy, however, between 'we and our kids did it so anyone who can't, it's their own fault' and Biden's blanket transfer of $20K in debt to taxpayers. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion of the problem in the context of changing the economy from serving profits to serving people.
Let me try to understand your logic here: Government owns and operates many universities around the nation. Government controls the accreditation of which schools are valid and which are not. Government pays the salaries of the staff and administration of those schools. 75% of all university students attend a government run university. Government either guarantees or directly lends to students in the vast majority of cases.
Your claim is that the government is guiltless is the desecration of these schools and it is all the fault of the capitalist driven model of education ?
Hello, Hubris! Thanks for responding, it's always great to hear from you. In the US what we have is the worst of both worlds. Our money is generated by bankers, who issue mortgages out of thin air that we repay with 30 (or 60 combined) years of labor. In the meantime they retain free ownership of the house and have no social obligation for how they use their profits, which are equal to the cost of the house (and 94% of all dollars issued). That's not just capitalism but feudalism.
But then, from the money we eke back from them with our labor, we pay taxes, from which we expect to socialize the costs of all the harms they've created: poor health, homelessness, need for corporate working papers (aka degree), aging useless eaters, etc.
What my system does, which could be called anarchy, federalism, libertarianism, community self-governance or small-scale sovereignty, is take back mortgages and money creation as THE exclusive and essential privilege of gov't, and decentralizes it. Then it allows communities to generate a local credit into the community that can't exceed the debts, taxes and cash reserves.
How a community uses that credit is up to them but I recommend modeling the plan before implementing it because the goal is to maximize the times your credit circulates before getting sucked out. The education episode talks about some of my ideas for my community but this one on The Economics of Anarchy, talks more about the whole plan: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-anarchy
Oh, please! You've fallen for the "money is created by bankers" myth, completely overlooking the US Constitution: Article 1, Section 8, which states "Only Congress has the right to mint coin [create the currency - they used coins in 1783]."
Learn Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and get your facts straight.
Susan, we already had a very long conversation about this on another thread, where I talked about how that's been interpreted literally by the Supreme Court as only coins and we talked at length about MMT. But the question under discussion is whether students are at fault for getting a college education at all, whether government is at fault, or whether a for-profit economic system is at fault. What do you (and MMT) say about that, and how would education be (or is already) funded under MMT?
"Under MMT": Since MMT Is an empirical description of the current monetary system, whatever way college is being funded at this time is the way it's being funded "under MMT."
However long our former discussion may have been, it seems that I need to give you some more time or information to understand that MMT isn't something you "do." It's a description of what already IS.
"An empirical description" means that MMT economists look at the monetary system the way another scientist would look at a microorganism through a microscope. It's not something that you implement, any more than a microscope is something that you implement.
It's just looking and describing.
This is a different approach than classical economics, in which a Great Man would describe his theory of how the economy works, or how it SHOULD work, and then subsequent scholars would argue for or against the theory, until another Great Man came along and offered a new theory.
MMT scholars stick to What Is.
Does this help to explain why asking how college would be funded "under MMT" is not a question? It simply doesn't apply.
P.S. The Supreme Court is now into a very literal interpretation of the Constitution in many areas.
I didn't do any research, per se on Student Loans when I was young.
1. Because I never went to University or even matriculated full courses in community college.
I graduated high school in 1969 and proceeded to protest the Vietnam War at American Legion Posts, VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) and public areas such as Court house squares.
2. Because I had also become a singer in classic rock groups as an income.
BUT....I did get drafted and had to report for a physical at the Syracuse NY military service facility.
I failed the physical but passed the written. I got out.
I did Not become an oligarchic soldier.
My point here is simple.
The "Draft" was done away with on January 27th 1973.
THIS is the reason that the US Empire lost its supply of human body cannon fodder.
And THIS is the reason the US Empire believes that education now is less important than dying for the cause of protecting Corporate profits in EVERY country outside of the US soil that the US Empire has military bases.
The last number I knew of those bases was between 600 and 800.
This is how the Corporatocracy works and will continue to work, as long as working American taxpayers are forced to pay for a military full spectrum dominance in this Global Industrial Complex.
We are prisoners of a Monetary system that literally OWNS our lives, womb to tomb...unless we're billionaires.
The Billionaires and the Banks, with their "Modern Money Mechanics" financial policy document, control the entire planet.
That control is all encompassing and they MUST have military dominance to protect their global profits.
No one wants a draft again. No one (I know) wants 'endless war'.
No one wants to be subjected to poverty, illness and starvation because they served in a military whose Govt will NOT take care of them.
But that's what we're faced with, as pawns in a system that will inevitably chew us up and spit us out into cemeteries and/or urns of ashes throughout this "land of the free".
I'm a ~boomer~ that does not begrudge ANY student whatever it costs to become educated.
Just do me a favor:
Endeavor to learn how to dismantle this Monetary system and search for a way to technologically make non-fossil fuel energy (zero-point energy), useful and FREE to every human on the planet.
Please.
"We are prisoners of a Monetary system that literally OWNS our lives, womb to tomb...unless we're billionaires. "
... and all based on NOTHING - funny money. In some sense, this is poetic - a reflection of quantum mechanics in finance :P...
"The "Draft" was done away with on January 27th 1973. THIS is the reason that the US Empire lost its supply of human body cannon fodder."
The draft was leaking, (ex: sock puppet Bush Jr. and his puppeteer Dick-head Chenny) but to a degree it forced the middle class to have stake in any war. The draft being done away with created a supply of cannon fodder, to remove the revulsion to body bags returning home, and as an added advantage it removed a large mass of educated, articulate white young men who might write and speak about the horror and who might more successfully work within the system to restrict the MIC. Instead, those young men found their career often dependent on the MIC backend instead.
Now the people who matter can watch the news with no fear, and even a perverse pleasure. It's why war porn sells so well on youtube, it's the thrill of Rome's colosseum for the modern age.
You are speaking my language, Rick, my fellow boomer. That's the exact topic of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, which talks about those 800+ military bases and how we became pawns of the monetary system and how to get out of it. Change who our labor serves, to being the community rather than the bankers, and I believe the rest will come. We already have solutions and plenty of creativity but a system that actively suppresses whatever interferes with profits.
For me, it's not a matter of begrudging students education (and we should be clear that education, all you can eat, is already freely available in books and on the internet). What they pay an arm and a leg for is a degree, authorized by the powers-that-be, which has a curriculum that serves the corporatocracy.
If you're paying for teachers and buildings and administration, that's not free, it's taxpayer subsidized. So then you need to decide how much education anyone deserves, who's entitled to teach, what subjects you're willing to pay for, and who's qualified to take them. It leads to centralized control and a point where that student has to stop learning in order to work and pay for other people to learn.
In my system, I say that cheap is better than free because it puts the person in control of what they want to learn and from whom. It makes learning (with travel!) lifelong and subsidizes it equally for all people throughout their lifetimes, rather than concentrating it in four intensive years. Check it out if interested, and here's my book and an episode on building a new economic model:
https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607/
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/build-a-new-model
Thank you for your reply and your offer.
☮️ 💜 ☯️ ♾️
Rick..