How To Fix Student Debt (And Save The World)

I was once a student. And I was the type of student who did exactly what every other millennial did and listened to the older, wiser, boomers when it came to school and life plans. So, I got myself into a massive amount of student debt so that I could bargain my way to an extra eighty cents per hour and then spend the rest of my life so far wondering why those jerks decided to change the rules again and again.

Perfect system!

Look, I’m not going to sit here and act like I know some secret trick to getting out of this debt. If I did I would have done it myself a long time ago. I’m just doing the best I can with whatever rules are in place at the time and praying that they don’t change the rules so much that I can’t get out of this hole one day.

Yeah, it’s depressing.

But one thing I do think I’m a borderline expert on is knowing how this broken world could effectively solve this particular problem of mine. Not from a procedural standpoint or anything. But from a standpoint of knowing whether something would make me feel better.

So, in the face of yet another summer of hoping that our dear leaders don’t find that final nail to pound into the lid of my financial coffin quite yet, I’m going to share my ideas. With luck, some national leader will see this and think, “you know what, this article is the one that’s gonna turn me around!”

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

How To Fix Student Debt (And Save The World)

You might be asking yourself, “why is this nobody adding that parenthetical to his title?”

That’s a good question, reader number X of twelve who will ever read this nobody’s article!

The reason is because I’m not an ignorant twit and I recognize that helping generations, especially in the face of making education better and more attainable, is one of the best things to do for the future of any demographic you wish to select for.

No community, big or small, was ever hurt by having a better educated population.

Not one.

The only way education makes things “worse” is if it does exactly what it’s doing to American’s right now and puts them in debt. But keep it straight, it’s not the education that makes things worse. It’s the debt.

So, if we fix the broken system of student debt and just let everyone be smarter, this world will only be improved.

Full stop.

Don’t pretend it isn’t true.

A plumber may not need to understand the finer points of filmmaking or quantum physics. But his or her life will not be worse if they are a plumber who also knows more about American History or Art Literacy.

So, let’s indulge that train of thought and figure out how to get us there in the ignorant way only a guy who’s too poor to afford more education knows how!

Forgive It

Yep.

I’m going to be that obvious about it.

Do you know why? Because all of the people claiming that students should pay that money back don’t realize that it’s already a loss on the investment financially.

Since it was first introduced in 1994, income driven repayment has been the standard as far as federal student loan repayment goes. Sure, plenty of go-getters out there will do other plans to get out of student debt sooner. But those people are dumb and bad at business because with how expensive education is there are no incomes out there that will cause an income driven payment to match a standard graduated payment, especially when you factor in interest.

What does that mean?

It means that when the loans are forgiven in 10–20 years, depending on other factors, the person who’s had that extra payment all those years will probably not pay off the exact amount they were loaned anyways.

Now, some people might think that that’s a reason to make people only pay on a standard plan. But think for a second. If the INCOME DRIVEN plan doesn’t match the standard payment, then the income doesn’t provide enough to pay the standard plan. What does that mean? It means the person won’t be able to pay their loans at all. Regardless of if bankruptcy does or doesn’t clear student loans, if a person can’t pay then they won’t, meaning you’re not getting that money anyways.

All of this to say, all of that money that was loaned won’t be repaid no matter what we do at the current educational price point. So, let’s just forgive it, cut our losses, and let all of those dollars go into the economy in other ways. You want a stimulus to your precious capitalist America? Don’t give a one-time check that’ll be gone in a month. Clear out the recurring payment of hundreds to thousands of dollars so that we can afford houses. I promise that’s more money than I’m spending at Starbucks… which is presently zero dollars.

Stop Charging

The thing about loan forgiveness, though, is that it’s only a Band-Aid over the problem that will simply rebuild in less than a generation when students need to keep taking loans to be educated.

So, what do we do?

Personally, I think we should just make a four-year degree free for everyone. All those public universities? Well, if we’re going to use student loans as a crappy system for funding all Americans to get a bachelor’s degree anyways, let’s just cut out the middleman of crippling the workforce financially and just give all the loan dollars to the schools to provide degrees without it ever touching the students’ hands.

The thing is, I think it’s only fair to do exactly this considering having a bachelor’s degree is about the minimum any employer other than manual labor positions expects. If you look at the historical context of education and work, the bachelor’s degree has become what a high school diploma used to be a few generations ago. Some oligarchs might say that means we’ve devalued the college degree by handing too many out. But that’s just rich people trying to keep the working class too downtrodden to know their own worth.

So, forget charging students for a standard education. It’s already just tax dollars funding these things. Student loans are basically just a tax penalty against those who are taking the time to learn the skills that the employers will exploit later.

Tax the Wealthy

Yep, I’m a dirty liberal. It’s because I was educated and studied basic history and economics.

Fite me.

Seriously, though, Jeffrey Amazon, Elmo X, come fight me. I guarantee I’ll make you look stupid. Even you, Markus Zuckerbook. I guarantee I’m a better fighter than you, even with your handful of MMA retreats where you gave washed-up fighters and coaches a fat check to stroke your ego.

Sorry. I’m getting worked up here.

For real, though. If the rich people want to take advantage of the system by trashing the economy and profiting off a system that is propped up by us schmucks that keep going to school, the least they can do is invest in it.

And that’s what it is. An investment. Their favorite thing to do to avoid actually working.

That’s what the rich people (and all the people who support those ideas against their own best interests) either don’t understand or ignore in bad faith. Having an educated populace is an investment in their own profits. Again, no individual, no community, and no workforce was ever harmed by having a better average education. Even if you have to pay them an extra couple bucks per hour.

Just think about the return on investment. Suppose you own a bottling plant for some name-brand soda. The rate at which those places crank out tooth-rotting-serum means even an hour of downtime can result in hundreds of thousands of losses in profits. Just imagine if you can cut that downtime down to almost nothing because every single worker has the technical knowhow to identify, fix, or prevent those downtimes?

Pays for itself in no time. Seems like a pretty good deal if you’re worth eighteen figures or whatever and get to multiply that daily thanks to math games at the bank.

Charge Employers

Haha, suck it rich people! You thought I wouldn’t think about your little loopholes of hiding behind business accounts and all that crap!

I may not of gotten an MBA, but I’m educated enough to still know that you all do that type of stuff! See… that’s why this system of trying to bury me and every other grad in debt won’t work! Unless you flat out close all the schools, which would be too transparent and why you haven’t done it yet for fear of us just figuring out our own ways to make guillotines, there will still be enough of us accepting that debt for the sake of seeing through your Snidely Whiplash level of cartoon villainy!

I’m exaggerating.

But also not.

At any rate, I think a great system would be one where we expect businesses to invest in the future as early as the students.

I can remember as early as middle school when they started having me do all the aptitude test nonsense to plant ideas of picking a lane to commit to for the rest of my life. Now, here I am, a degree in biology and desperately trying to write my way into a career in the arts.

Regardless, my point is that if we expect students to commit that early, I think we should expect employers to commit that early. What if Wells Fargo was required to talent scout as early as the NHL was? Or if there was a biochemical combine that scouted talent by checking out high school science fairs? Or an engineering draft? Businesses would be required to invest in their people early, providing promises of contracts for students in exchange for covering all of their educational needs. Even for the trades it could work if we have things like major construction companies target their recruits and fund their trade-school and licensing efforts.

Now, I recognize that this crazy hypothetical has some issues with major companies easily out-competing small companies. But just like the NFL, there’s a bit of risk/reward for those major teams on these early investments. Think about it. What eventually happens to every athlete? Maybe they get their contract terminated because they don’t perform well enough. Maybe they work through their contract and become a free agent. All sorts of things wind up with pro athletes still having all the skills gained through that investment on the team’s part but free to do whatever they want. Transfer that to lifetime skills like economics or electrical engineering combined with a lack of crippling debt, we suddenly have a lot of people with a lot of skills and a lot of freedom to take some different risks working for smaller companies or starting their own.

Plus, bonus for everyone, this one doesn’t touch tax codes! It just makes companies be the ones spending on skills they need, not individuals spending on skills they hope someone will need at the right time.

Make the Military Pay for It

I’m getting more and more insane with these ideas. I recognize that.

But if you haven’t figured it out yet, this article is largely satirical. Every idea I’m spouting is unoriginal and the powers-that-be have already invented dozens of reasons not to try these ideas so that they can continue to be the ones pulling all the strings. The fact is that any idea with proper buy in and a little more time to plan and implement can work. The proof in the pudding is New York right now that has a balanced budget in six months simply because they got a guy who actually gave it an honest try.

So, knowing that none of this matters because no matter how good or bad my ideas are they won’t be implemented because they don’t let rich people get richer, I’m going for broke!

Charge the military! I see it as a very functional idea, honestly. Because the fact is that the military has tons of loss baked into their budget that lets them be lazy with things. We all know it because it’s in the publicly released money documents. They have tons of bonuses handed out that people will survive without and there’s tons of loss due to lazy management of supplies that could be tightened up. Add to that the fact that they already pay for the schooling costs of veterans, my proposal is that we combine my idea of just sending tax dollars directly to the schools with the idea of finding those tax dollars from the military.

Think about it this way, if every dollar that the military spends on schooling costs for veterans was just, instead, sent to schools to use for all students to receive that free college degree, veterans will still get a free education because there are few citizens more American than a veteran. Plus, in a world where boots on the ground is a decreasing proportion of how conflicts are handled, it feels to me like a military with a surplus of college grads to recruit from in order to have the physicists, engineers, and tacticians that can wage drone-warfare more effectively than a high school grad would only strengthen our military prowess.

Personally, I would love for humanity to entre a new age of not fighting wars at all. But I’m not naïve. So, if that brand of monkey-brained activity is going to persist, let’s at least have the system also do it’s part to advance us along the way.

Make AI Fix It

If we all love the robots so much, why don’t we have their metal butts figure out how to fix student loans?

Oh wait!

They have!

And the answers they give are largely the same ones that I’m talking about right now! Why is that? Because it doesn’t take more than a basic understanding of cause and effect to see what got us into this mess and what can get us out of it!

So, instead of letting them create freaky “art” where humans have too many noses and don’t follow basic line-of-sight rules, let’s make them actually useful and solve a real problem for crying out loud!

…

Don’t come at me with all the counter arguments to my ideas here. If you do I’ll know I can’t take you seriously because you don’t have the attention span or reading comprehension to make it to this point in the article and understand what I’m saying.

I know these ideas are imperfect. I’m not making a 50-page grant proposal here. I’m just writing a semi-sarcastic article that’s trying to take advantage of current google search trends for the week.

The real point of all of this is to offer a bit of levity to counteract all of the useless articles out there that do nothing but reiterate the problems we’re already super aware of. Because that’s all media is nowadays; outrage covered in a thin layer of promises that will never be delivered on.

What I would rather we do is, sarcastically or not, start spitting out any ideas on how to actually solve these problems. Because so often what ends up actually working is a crazy idea that accidentally gains traction. It’s how we wound up with things like combustion engines (what if we take explosions and use them instead of horses?) or barefoot shoes (what if I stop using cushioned shoes to solve my back problems?) to land in this bizarre world we have today.

I don’t want you to assume my ideas are the end-all-be-all. I just want you to give yourself permission to be outraged about how broken the current system is and to follow the ideas that seem so crazy they just might work. I don’t know how we will solve this deepening crisis of a population that has to choose between being financially or educationally crippled. But I have a lot of ideas on how we can solve it and one day the right person will have a crazy idea that will actually get things done. And if that day comes thanks to something stupid I wrote then it will have all been worth it to spend an hour of my day spewing nonsense and working up the courage to share it with the world.

So, again, don’t @ me with your counterpoints! Use them to refine my ideas and @ your congressperson or whatever! I’m nobody but if we refine our ideas and give them to somebody we might actually start fixing this busted up planet!