Student Loan Forgiveness Antireligious?


prisonchaplain
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I imagine that the BYU system is subsidized by the church. This means that leadership and members believe that a faith-promoting higher education is worth investing in--even worth putting some of the Lord's money into. As a result, I imagine that most graduate from BYU schools with little-to-no debt. Similarly, my oldest chose a Christian college with relatively low costs and high scholarships. All three daughters are working during their university years, and during the summers. Now we're hearing that the feds are considering student loan forgiveness. Am I wrong in thinking this is welfare for the upper middle class--paid for by lower-income, less educated workers?

Another matter is that free or subsidized college is often secular. For example, in California junior college is free. So, 4-year religious colleges often recruit out of state to fill their freshman and sophomore ranks. Whether those proposing these schemes intend to harm religious schools (which may be perceived as anti-LGBT) remains an open question. 

Maybe I'm just a wing nut, but I find these types of programs underhanded, anti-religious, and certainly rewarding of the irresponsible and the expense of the most responsible.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

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No, I don't think this is anti-religious. But I would agree that it is rewarding the irresponsible.  I think we would disagree on who are the irresponsible parties.

I have major concerns with student loan forgiveness, because the origin of the massive loans is tuition and living costs at universities spiraling out of control. And they're spiraling out of control because universities are cutting and reducing programs, expanding administration, and building out higher cost living facilities for students.  All those costs get passed down to the students. These costs are not readily manageable, and thus more loans are taken out. Then when costs keep going up, student loan programs offer more funding, and the schools start competing to get that money.

In short, higher education institutions are not competing for students, anymore; they are competing to get the students' loan money. And every time they make decisions (increasing tuition, cost of living, etc), the institutions get rewarded with more loan money. Offering loan forgiveness without reforming the loan program would just further reward crappy behavior on the part of the institutions. 

Now, I don't want to take away from the fact that people have walked themselves into these problems by insisting on going to overpriced "popular" schools, or pursuing full on degrees at large universities that could have been completed just as well at smaller, less expensive schools. Or for insisting that they not work while studying, or any combination of a lot of factors. So I've never been a fan of complete loan forgiveness (in fact, I'm vehemently against full forgiveness). But I'm not opposed to offering some form of relief if there are substantive changes to the loan program itself (and no, I don't really have any thoughts on where to start).

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So, I don’t think it’s a blanket forgiveness that’s been under discussion.  Let me use my own experience to illustrate:

I graduated from law school in 2008 with about $90K of federally subsidized loan debt.  At the time the job market was horrible; I hung out my own shingle but was just barely getting by and was living in my in-laws basement.  I was told that I could apply for a “forbearance”—basically a one-year suspension of payments while I got my job situation figured out; after which I would start making payments and over time, it was expected, pay off the loan in full.  IIRC federal policy allowed up to three years of forbearance. In 2009 my financial situation was still tenuous, so I took another forbearance.  In 2010 I became aware of another federal option called “Income-based repayment”, where you pay a reduced payment calculated as a percentage of your income and expenses over a fixed term (20 years, I think, with the payment amount recalculated annually based on your most recent tax return) and at the end of the 20 years, whatever isn’t paid is discharged (with the discharged amount being considered taxable income).  I’ve been doing that since then.  Since going to work for the state in 2017 I am also eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness (the concept underlying that program is that people working for the state or in other forms of public service/nonprofit make less than workers in the public sector and thus need some extra incentive to go into public service); which means that as long as I make my payments for ten years, I can have my remaining debt forgiven at the end of them and it won’t be deemed taxable income.  These all—forbearance, IBR, and PSLF—are pre-Biden programs.

What Biden is doing is saying “hey, JAG, maybe we should have worked harder to make sure you knew about IBR before we let you take that forbearance.  So, we are just going to take the two years you were in forbearance and count them as IBR, so in your case your IBR plan will end two years early.”  Similarly, if I had been eligible for the PSLF program while I took my forbearances (which I wasn’t, but speaking hypothetically here)—those forbearance years would be credited to my PSLF program.

Now, from a policy standpoint:  because I know those programs exist, I am strongly opposed to any additional loan forgiveness regimen.  So what if I have to stay in IBR or PSLF for an additional two years?  If I didn’t take advantage of the programs earlier—that’s on me, not the government or the taxpayers.  As with so many other categories of “poor” people—relief is already available to those who want to and are willing to deal with the bureaucracies that administer it.  And frankly, I think the pre-Biden programs were too generous and shift too much of the burden to the taxpayer.

I do think borrower relief should be available, because schools for decades have had a history of padding their post-graduation employment and earnings stats and I think a lot of college students (especially undergrads) have been actively deceived as to the value of the product they are purchasing.  (And frankly, state universities and state high schools have played a major role in this deception.). But I think the simpler and more elegant approach would be:

1)  Get the federal government out of the student loan business.  Public high school career development/guidance counseling offices need to be reformed to de-emphasize college and give equal time to trade schools and other blue-collar career paths.  

2)  Make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy ten years after graduation; with the bankruptcy trustee being empowered to claw back from the university up to 50% of tuition payments received in the 15-year period before the bankruptcy filing.

3)  Keep IBR, but limit the program to ten years and do not offer loan forgiveness at the end of them (borrowers wanting the forgiveness will have to go the bankruptcy route, if they qualify).

4)  I’m indifferent about the PSLF program.  I’m ordinarily leery of redistributionist schemes and bureaucratic nest-feathering with the public purse.  On the other hand, it can also be seen as primarily an HR issue rather than a social welfare one—in my office we’ve had a position open for five months now, and we’ve made offers to three or four potential new hires only to have them come back at the last minute and tell us that they’ve received an offer at a private firm that we, as a state agency, just can’t match.  And of course, being a participant in the program myself, there’s always a measure of self-interest at play . . .

Edited by Just_A_Guy
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I’m pretty conservative in my thinking, but I do have to admit that many of us were sold a bill of goods when it comes to college, college loans, and degrees. 
 

On one hand, I would life some sort of repayment for the 30+ hours I worked while taking 16+ credits a semester to pay my way through college. Why should the people with no work ethic, poor fiscal literacy, and a lacking vision of their future be rewarded?

On the other hand, everything we were taught growing up from educators, parents, church leaders, and media screamed “go to college or your life will suck, also, you are cool if you go to an expensive college”. Then, everyone is thrown on front of government back predatory lenders as their first experience in borrowing money and told “this is a good decision”. I’m lucky to have had the wit and vision to not have fallen into the traditional traps.

My mom works as a school counselor and college is not longer the push for their district. They just push for what they call “secondary education” which encompasses college and other post high school learning opportunities.

Edited by Fether
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I am a big fan of personal responsibility... If you acquire a debt you should discharge it.  Simple personal responsibility.
 
Religiously speaking there are tons and tons of examples of everyone failing to be personally responsible and needing help digging out of the pit we put ourselves in. (AKA Sin and Forgiveness)
 
There are also lots of stories where others see the help given to others and do not like it.  They think it is unfair to those who did not screw up in that manner. (Aka the Older son in the Prodigal Son, the day laborers).  They are wrong to do so.
 
So from a theoretical and principle perspective, I can not call it Anti Religious.  But it is not in government we should be placing our Faith... that would be Anti Religious.
 
This whole problem exists because the government isolated student loans from corrective market forces which has allowed it to spiral out of control and take several educational aspects with it.  I would much prefer that we hold the government accountable for causing the problem and have it revisit that choice, and find another answer to the problem it was trying to solve.  I am very much against slapping yet another not clearly thought out patch that goes on top of a different poorly thought out patch.
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9 hours ago, prisonchaplain said:

Now we're hearing that the feds are considering student loan forgiveness. Am I wrong in thinking this is welfare for the upper middle class--paid for by lower-income, less educated workers?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

It's not so simple as those class lines, but yes it is welfare and rewards poor money-management / planning.  I'm not saying that every person who graduated with student debt did so because they were not responsible (that's not remotely true!), but it does directly penalize those whom 1) never went to college, 2) went to college and worked really hard to minimize debt, and 3) set the expectation that finically irresponsibility is rewarded. 

9 hours ago, prisonchaplain said:

Another matter is that free or subsidized college is often secular. For example, in California junior college is free. So, 4-year religious colleges often recruit out of state to fill their freshman and sophomore ranks. Whether those proposing these schemes intend to harm religious schools (which may be perceived as anti-LGBT) remains an open question. 

Maybe I'm just a wing nut, but I find these types of programs underhanded, anti-religious, and certainly rewarding of the irresponsible and the expense of the most responsible.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

The anti-religious point I'm not going to quite agree with.   I find it more people just don't want to pay their debts.  

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Government tries to do good.  "If everyone goes to college, then the US will be a better nation!" we told ourselves from WWII until today.  Since it's a popular thing, ppl can win elections by legislating things into existence that get more Americans to go to college.  Jag's federally subsidized loan for example.  And more people go to college - hooray!

The only problem is, whenever a government does such a macro tinkering with stuff that costs money, the impact is measured in terms of how much damage occurs to that system.  Access to guaranteed loans or other sources of 'free money', with costs borne by a nation's taxpayers, means costs go up.  Over and over.  More and more.  Politicians keep winning by increasing the funds available.  Universities and colleges keep receiving the free flow of money, and costs go up.  Everyone wants a piece of the action, so you get 26 year olds in >$1m of debt in hospital directorship, who have never had a job in their lives.   Degrees with no economic future are paid for with easy loans that have zero chance of being paid back by that job in art therapy or ethno-musicology. 

So we're stuck with a problem that isn't going to go away, with no easy answers.  Can we wise up as a society and stop throwing cheap loans at kids that end up with career-crushing debt?   Or will we just creep further and further down the road of 'oh, you're in pain?  Let the government fix it', and taxpayer funded bailouts become taxpayer funded free college for everyone.  

The bill is in the process of coming due.  US Post WWII dominance and the dollar-fueled global economy is fading.  China is making a multidecadelong play to be the next global superpower.  Want to see our future?  Look at Greece's financial troubles, or google "unfunded mandate crisis".

The religious aspect of this?  I dunno.  If we can't be righteous enough to be fiscally responsible, how long will God preserve this nation?

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A couple of clarifications:

1. The type of loan forgiveness @Just_A_Guy refers to is legitimate, IMHO. My wife got loan forgiveness due to her teaching in Title 1 schools, Special Education. She is a hero and more than earned her forgiveness. Likewise with Teach Grants. What I am hearing now is broad forgiveness based simply on the fact that college grads carry difficult debt.

2. Many state-level free college schemes are for public schools only. As it stands now, my daughter went to a private, Christian university for pretty close (within 10%) of what she would have paid to attend a local public university (cheaper than the UW). If public schools become "free" (totally taxpayer-funded), private schools will find it much harder to recruit. 

BTW, if some type of free tuition scheme is enacted, I wonder if the church will subsidize BYU even more, making it free for members?

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There are many fingers to point, and there are multiple sides of the argument, some of which I can see as religious.

However, when it comes right down to it, they are the ones who signed their names on the dotted line, and agreed to pay those loans back. So they should.

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There are a lot of factors that don't always get talked about when it comes to issues like this:

1. American society has, for decades, pushed kids to go to college, even going so far as to stigmatize the protective services and the skilled trades as being "lesser" occupations for people who can't cut it in school. In reality, these careers are not only necessary for society to function, but are in high demand with extensive shortages of workers. Many people who either noped out of college or couldn't pass muster would have gone on to very happy, very healthy lives had they been steered this direction from the get-go, and would have quickly paid back whatever debt they took out for their training programs given how quickly they'd have been able to find work. 

2. Many people pick schools based on presumed prestige rather than how good the schools are or what academic and financial assistance they might receive. Because of this, they'll ignore cheaper schools and/or schools more willing to provide scholarships in favor of expensive facilities. 

3. A lot of the people who have the greatest amount of debt are people whose degrees are in career fields that are in low demand, meaning that it's difficult to find work in that career field. This is why, for example, you see so many jokes about how you need an MFA (Master's in Fine Arts) just to be a barista at Starbuck's: they've set themselves up for failure by not considering what career prospects they had based on their degrees and planning accordingly. For example, someone who wanted to pursue the study of English literature could have mated their study with a degree in teaching and become a school teacher. 

 

 

Yes, I have an MBA (Master's in Business Administration) unless someone has tried to have it retroactively revoked again.

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I warn my children that if you get these college loans you are likely stuck with this debt until you pay it off or you die.  There is no bankruptcy (and this is immoral in my opinion).  My daughter seems bound and determined to get over $45,000 worth of education at a school when she could be paying a lower cost for the same education somewhere else.

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