I see some pretty stupid people with meme’s based on their bias complaining about POTUS Biden desire to pay off student loans or at least pay them down. I’ve through family, loans, scholarships, and plain grit paid off my AA, BA, BS, MS, and PhD degrees. I’ve done the same for my wife and her BA, MA, MS, and ABD degrees. Similarly my twins have had their BS degrees paid off. I’ve no problem if others get to be a little freer of a debt they should never have had.
Just a simple little thing. Public Higher Education was never supposed to cost the students a dime. The Morril Land Grant Act was about creating agricultural engineering state institutions of higher learning that would teach the military officers of the future. Until the early 1960s and mid 1970s a four year degree cost a student a few months of salary. It was thought that stepping out of the work force for 4 years and entering college based on merit was already a steep price to pay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Land-Grant_Acts
Most K-12 education in the United States was a far from enlightened practice. We talk about teachers and a higher calling but for the first couple hundred years of European public education systems they were industrial revolution schools making cogs for the machine. https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promoted-by-industrialists-who-wanted-docile-factory-workers/
Now some history. Between 1970 and 2015 when I left Purdue University the state support for students at the Universtiy went from about 99% to around 17% (these numbers are VERY fuzzy and current numbers are hard to find). As students became more and more responsible for the entirety of their education a strange thing happened on the way to the registrar. Industry started holding more sway in the university. As corporations outsourced the education costs to the students the corporations also started telling universities what to teach. That’s how we got the “under water basket weaving” narrative. Companies denigrated the humanities but remember the companies weren’t paying the bill.
What about the current period. I’ve heard it said we have had the industrial revolution, the information revolution, and are in the midst of the social revolution. Since 2008 nobody trusts corporations (I believe in a free market economy not capital based abuses of society). Massive savings and financial independence based on hard assets (FIRE) took over a segment of youth society. The memetic gold watch retire from a company concept died. Loyalty was uncovered for the capitalist control it always had been. Roll through COVID a decade later and the final shovels of societies industrial revolution were placed on the coffin of corporate America.
So what about today? In many ways the excesses of DJ Trump, E Musk, and J Bezos are testaments to the dying of old capitalist ways. Capital accrues to a few, but whereas money meant power before a new mechanism is rising. Money is still part of it. Money begets freedom and is a social framework for exchange that is winding it’s way through people. Pay me for an hours work but don’t tell me where that hour is done. Or when it is done. More than a few social influencers giving some gilded view into trite sayings in front of photoshopped waterfalls. We’re talking about the gig economy rural and globalized at the same time.
I’m not smart enough to explain it. But I can see it. The business world screwed Gen X, Y, Z, millennials and just about anybody who wanted an education. I taught for a decade that founders following the build, prove, and sell out were screwing themselves. There ideas being absconded with fractured the society they were building. Now we see the current crop of innovators and creators not seeking funding or go to IPO strategies. The private equity investors still finds plenty of candidates but some of the most innovative company’s are “stealth”. A company founder once told me, “I paid for my education, I got a great education, but the state and industry didn’t give me scratch.”
Silicon valley gazillionaires wagging their tongues about not needing a college degree is just another form of predatory ignorance creation. Politicians of a certain type love the idea of creating ignorant drones incapable of thinking as much as other politicians love the idea of creating fear frazzled freaks who are too scared to think. Making higher education in our current age free or low cost increases the chances the free market versus capital market concepts rise even more. Ruralized and globalized the $20K pay off of loans will likely accelerate this trend. I’m not smart enough to explain it well or succinctly but I’m watching it closely.