So I mean if and YES I AM GIVING A COUNTERFACTUAL HERE, just to be clear, if you had the same situation as you great grandparents and you could have a good career without college, how many people would actually go? I cannot imagine that if you didn’t need college for a full time career type job most people would not go. Why? Because until college became a job requirement, very few people actually bothered to go. In fact, up until 1960, most people didn’t even bother with high school diplomas. And what happened is exactly what I’m talking about. Basically, we took college and turned it into job training. Businesses decided that it was cheaper to require applicants to have training rather than to train themselves. So now, starting in about 1980s you couldn’t get an indoor, white collar job without a degree. So if you want to be middle class go to college. So of course if you think that being middle class requires a college degree, the price doesn’t matter. How much would you pay to be upwardly mobile? Or to avoid flipping burgers forever? So no matter how much college cost, the price point doesn’t matter. Especially once student loans were available. It’s like cancer drugs — how much is someone willing to pay for drugs to keep themselves or their kids alive? I mean you’re not really going to say “no, $500 a dose is too much to pay for my life” especially if you have access to loans. If there were an alternative to this, if I could assure people that they could have a middle class professional job without college, then there’s no reason to bear the increasing costs of college and student loan payments. It’s about as much as a home loan at this point. Unless you’re convinced there are no alternatives, nobody’s taking out a mortgage sized loan.
You're not giving a counterfactual, you're restating debunked arguments. That's my point. You have no valid or cogent argument here because you aren't reliant on facts, you're all about the vibes. We're here in a pissing match because you said - and keep saying - that "The actual problem isn’t college or student loans." Except time and time again, I've given evidence that the actual problem IS college and IS student loans. Here's what I said two fuckin' months ago: FFEL was in effect from 1965 to 2010, FDLP in effect from 2010 'til now. Simply put, college students from 1965-2010 had a different financial landscape than college students from 1945 to 1965... and college students from 1945-1965 had the GI Bill. They had the GI Bill, of course, because more than half of young men were enlisted between 1941 and 1945 and letting them into the job force with nothing better to do isn't a great idea, and then we had Korea, and then we had Vietnam but for everyone else there's FEDERALLY GUARANTEED STUDENT LOANS so you could either pay Uncle Sam up front or on the back end. You wanna die on the hill that employers just up'n'decided that they felt like requiring a college degree so all of a sudden, everyone went "well shit guess I'm going to Columbia now" rather than recognizing that when a college degree is advantageous and free, everyone goes to college. There's no grand conspiracy. The Chamber of Commerce didn't have a meeting at the Skull'n'Bones club and say "fuck yeah bachelor's degrees or no typing pool." What happened is the government extended education to everyone at favorable terms and everyone got educated. What happened next is Republicans lost their shit over the idea that college liberals might get a free ride and made it really tough to disburse college debt in bankruptcy, and then a generation later Republicans lost their shit again and made it impossible. I'm saying all this for a third time in some instances. It's not "especially once student loans were available" it's BECAUSE student loans were not only available it's that they are lucrative as fuck for anyone servicing them. It's nothing like cancer drugs, it's like student loans.ninety two percent of student loan debt is federal. you fills out your FAFSA you gets your check. This is because first the FFEL then the FDLP guarantee these loans, therefore they are the lowest rates available to anyone.
Businesses decided that it was cheaper to require applicants to have training rather than to train themselves.
