[Sixstrings]

Students across U.S. march over debt, free public college

tudents held rallies on college campuses across the United States on Thursday to protest ballooning student loan debt for higher education and rally for tuition-free public colleges and a minimum wage hike for campus workers.

The demonstrations, dubbed the Million Student March, were planned just two days after thousands of fast-food workers took to the streets in a nationwide day of action pushing for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and union rights for the industry.

About 50 students from Boston-area colleges gathered at Northeastern University carrying signs that read "Degrees not receipts" and "Is this a school or a corporation?"

"The student debt crisis is awful. Change starts when people demand it in the street. Not in the White House," said Elan Axelbank, 20, a third year student at Northeastern, who said he was a co-founder of the national action.

Photos and videos posted on social media showed marches at schools including Texas State, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Depaul University in Chicago.

Organizers are demanding tuition-free public colleges, cancellation of all student debt and a $15-an-hour minimum wage for campus workers.

The total volume of outstanding U.S. student loan debt has more than doubled to $1.2 trillion, according to the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, compared with less than $600 billion in 2006.

Saddled with debt that can sometimes run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, many college graduates struggle to make payments amid an ailing economy and job market.

"I want to graduate without debt," said Ashley Allison, a 22-year-old student at Boston's Bunker Hill Community College, at the Northeastern rally. "Community college has been kind to me, but if I want to go on, I have to take on debt."

Dealing with swiftly mounting student loan debt has been a focus of candidates vying for the White House in 2016.

Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders has vowed to make tuition free at public universities and colleges, and has pledged to cut interest rates for student loans.

His rival Hillary Clinton has said she would increase access to tuition grants, let graduates refinance loans at lower interest rates, and streamline income-based repayment plans.

Florida U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, the most prominent Republican candidate to lay out a concrete proposal, says he would establish an income-based repayment system for federal student loans and would simplify applications for federal aid.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/12/us-usa-college-protests-idUSKCN0T116W20151112#gk2WoQo92AHyMyzJ.97

[Cog]

Who is paying for all this free stuff?

[C8]

Who is paying for all this free stuff?

The people who are too busy working to march all day

The left understands these words: protest, take, destroy

It does not understand: work, build, give

[Cog]

If you have 9 minutes you might want to watch Neil Cavuto's interview with one of the leaders of the student marchers. He destroys her with the first question about the cost of all of this free stuff and spends the remaining time trampling over her lifeless body. Great entertainment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmji36q8E4o

[Plantagenet]

@6

I hang out at the University of Alaska a lot, and let me tell you that to today's college students the word "racism" is what is known as a "trigger word".

If you are going to put that word in a title, you should put a trigger warning ahead of it so people can prepare themselves for such a distressing word.

If you don't put in the trigger warning about your trigger word then you are engaging in micro aggression.

Cheers!


Is peakoil.com a safe space for our young college students or not?

[Sixstrings]

If you have 9 minutes you might want to watch Neil Cavuto's interview with one of the leaders of the student marchers. He destroys her with the first question about the cost of all of this free stuff and spends the remaining time trampling over her lifeless body. Great entertainment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmji36q8E4o

As if that's a fair debate, Neil Cavuto versus a 19 year old teenager.

Why doesn't he have someone like senator Sherrod Brown on to debate. Why doesn't he have Bernie Sanders on, and ask Bernie those questions.

[edit: I had a maddow interview with sherrod brown but then I noticed the link is an old interview so I'm removing it. I saw him on maddow just a couple nights ago, it's not youtube, but he explained how raising the min wage actually helps the economy grow.]

Senator Brown is right -- he says Harry Truman doubled the minimum wage and that actually boosted the economy and got unemployment down to 3% and set off the post war baby boom good times.

It was BECAUSE of good wages and money concentrated in the middle class. The vets came home from the war, unemployment was up, and government responded by doubling the minimum wage and passing the GI Bill to get all those millions of vets into college. Free of charge.

These things can be done Cog, and Republicans have done them before, it's just been so long you've never seen it before and I don't think today's republicans are aware of historical republicans. Like Truman, like Eisenhower, like Teddy Roosevelt, like Abraham Lincoln who in addition to abolitionist he was also for workers' rights. Lincoln and Republicans were the progressives of their day, and Democrats back then were like the Republicans now.

Senator Brown says Eisenhower raised the minimum wage too, and the economy only did better after that.

He sounds right to me, I agree with him.

edit: and Truman was a Democrat obviously but Eisenhower raised it too. My point remains, history shows the economy does well when they raise the minimum wage.

IT'S GOOD FOR BUSINESS to get money into the pockets of working class people.

Those people then spend every bit of that money patronizing businesses, which gives the money over to those businesses and then they grow more and get rich. It should be TRICKLE UP *not* TRICKLE DOWN.

I wish I could find that sherrod brown interview, he said when the 1% just have all the money they stick it in a swiss bank account or something.

But give working and middle class people a raise instead, and they go out and SPEND that money. And that would be GREAT for business, it would mean more customers and get the economy moving again.

[Sixstrings]

@6

I hang out at the University of Alaska a lot, and let me tell you that to today's college students the word "racism" is what is known as a "trigger word".

If you are going to put that word in a title, you should put a trigger warning ahead of it so people can prepare themselves for such a distressing word.

If you don't put in the trigger warning about your trigger word then you are engaging in micro aggression.

Cheers!

Is peakoil.com a safe space for our young college students or not?

Lol, plant. I've heard of the "trigger word" thing. Yeah, that's crazy.

Look guys -- Cog, Plant, and various assorted conservatives and libertarians and independents.. I don't like this crazy far left stuff any more than you do. "Trigger words" and marchers and protesters and ferguson effects, and people suing exxon over the planet and next thing you know they're gonna sue the gun factories.

AND, THEY WENT AFTER SEA WORLD and now there's not going to be any more shamu shows. It's just a bunch of stuff like that, one thing after another.

I don't like all this socialism either.

But look, the GOP has got to raise this minimum wage and it's got to start offering the working and middle class some things that it wants. Like student loan debt forgiveness, like moving toward affordable college again, etc. etc.

The GOP has to get a pro-active message on things like climate change, too. Along the lines of what Pataki's been saying in the debates.

If the GOP does not raise the min wage and do some other things, then we really are going to have socialists in charge eventually -- and who's fault would that be, really? Would it be the working and middle class's fault, for voting more and more liberal?

Or would it be the GOP that just wouldn't bend and raise the darn minimum wage before a bunch of socialists do it.

People don't really want all this far extreme socialist stuff, but they do want wages to go up. And they want college to get cheaper, not more expensive. If Republicans don't have any butter to put on that bread, then they'll vote Democrat.

[Sixstrings]

Who is paying for all this free stuff?

Back when I went to college, it was just at the tail end of the days when you could just pay for it with a part time job.

TO BE FAIR on this whole issue, a part of it is actually due to the student loans and all the grants. That caused inflation, the colleges just kept raising costs more and more and they got rich off it.

Bankers got rich, and university presidents live better than many presidents of countries do..

But the students lost out.

The real solution: we need to do what we did back in the 60s - 90s and government just has to fund these state colleges like they used to. The whole loans things was a massive mistake, it let the colleges raise costs so much whereas when states did all the funding, they kept the costs down.

AS FOR MIN WAGE and "who pays for that?"

It's a wash. Business has to pay its labor more, but then their customers have more money to spend and they get more customers.

[Plantagenet]

College students aren't actually marching to end racism. There are certain kinds of racism they are perfectly OK with.

For instance, an oriental student in a "safe space" complained about racism directed at her, and the students booed her for daring to complain about it.

College students clearly think racism directed at oriental students is OK.

college-safe-space-boos-an-asian-woman-for-declaring-black-people-can-be-racist

[Cog]

This vacuous little gal got schooled more in 9 minutes with Cavuto than all her high school and college years combined. I doubt it will take though. The brainwashing is too deep.

[ROCKMAN]

"Why doesn't he have someone like senator Sherrod Brown on to debate. Why doesn't he have Bernie Sanders on, and ask Bernie those questions." I have no doubt at all that Cavuto would give his left nut to have either on his show and be able to put the same questions to them. If they aren't on Fox it's because they choose not to be. IMHO Fox above all other networks thrives on confrontational interviews.

[Lore]

"Why doesn't he have someone like senator Sherrod Brown on to debate. Why doesn't he have Bernie Sanders on, and ask Bernie those questions." I have no doubt at all that Cavuto would give his left nut to have either on his show and be able to put the same questions to them. If they aren't on Fox it's because they choose not to be. IMHO Fox above all other networks thrives on confrontational interviews.

Because when it comes to Neil Cavuto, he will always be pompous and he will always talk over any guest who disagrees with his narrow world view.

[yellowcanoe]

I don't think students realize there is a downside to free tuition. The college/university system in the US and Canada is really oriented towards continuously increasing enrollment and retention so just about any high school graduate can continue on to college/university if they wish. To make this work, universities have had to dumb down their standards as otherwise they would be flunking large numbers of less capable students.

Countries that provide free tuition are generally not trying to accommodate the same percentage of high school graduates as the US and Canada are. Therefore, many students attending college/university in the US and Canada would not have that option if they were living in a country with free tuition. The standards would also be higher so if they did not perform adequately in their first year they would be washed out of the program.

[hvacman]

Public college, both 2 year and 4 year, in California USED to be essentially free. 2-year colleges had zero per-unit fees. 4-year colleges were about $5/unit. Starting in the 80's somewhere, the state government and the college systems starting having yearly budget "crises", with "painful but necessary" modest fee increases - with a new crisis and a new "modest" fee increase almost every year, until we have the situation we have now.

I suspect this happened across the country....

So today's students should really ask, "What happened?" Did the state cut back on college funding to cover other costs? Did the faculty get a lot more money? Did the taxes collected fall, making it tougher all around? Corporate greed?

I'm not usually a Fox fan, but I was impressed with Cavuto's soft but direct question process. It was like he realized this girl was innocently-clueless and his role was to be more of a Socratic teacher than brutal interviewer.

It has to be rough growing up in these times.....

[Pops]

Elected governor of California in 1966 after running a scorched-earth campaign against the University of California, Reagan vowed to “clean up that mess in Berkeley,” warned audiences of “sexual orgies so vile that I cannot describe them to you,” complained that outside agitators were bringing left-wing subversion into the university, and railed against spoiled children of privilege skipping their classes to go to protests. He also ran on an anti-tax platform and promised to put the state’s finances in order by “throw[ing] the bums off welfare.” But it was the University of California at Berkeley that provided the most useful political foil, crystallizing all of his ideological themes into a single figure for disorder, a subversive menace of sexual, social, generational, and even communist deviance.
When Reagan assumed office, he immediately set about doing exactly what he had promised. He cut state funding for higher education, laid the foundations for a shift to a tuition-based funding model, and called in the National Guard to crush student protest, which it did with unprecedented severity. But he was only able to do this because he had already successfully shifted the political debate over the meaning and purpose of public higher education in America. The first “bums” he threw off welfare were California university students. Instead of seeing the education of the state’s youth as a patriotic duty and a vital weapon in the Cold War, he cast universities as a problem in and of themselves—both an expensive welfare program and dangerously close to socialism. He even argued for the importance of tuition-based funding by suggesting that if students had to pay, they’d value their education too much to protest.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article ... -education

[Cog]

The whole concept of personal responsibility is apparently absent in those who don't want to pay back their student loans. It starts with borrowing massively to attend a big name university and getting a degree in gender studies or puppet theatre(No I'm not joking). Do you really expect to find a job adequate to pay back your loans with degrees like that? You will be lucky to land a job as a barista at Starbucks.

Now if you are getting a STEM degree, there is a reasonable chance you will land a job in your field and be able to pay back the loans you took out. Call it a calculated risk assessment.

While we are on the subject of degrees, who ever came up with the idea that you need a four year degree to succeed? Many people take a two year courses at a community college and come out as welders, HVAC repairmen, auto mechanics, and so on. They make very good money and can pay back the minimal amount they had to borrow to fund their community college training. A lot of people who go to community college work full time jobs and go to classes at night. Its hard but its doable. You walk away with a useable skill with very little student loan debt.

I'm sorry that people make really bad choices about taking out college loans but that is on them.

[Sixstrings]

So today's students should really ask, "What happened?" Did the state cut back on college funding to cover other costs? Did the faculty get a lot more money? Did the taxes collected fall, making it tougher all around? Corporate greed?

...

I'm not usually a Fox fan, but I was impressed with Cavuto's soft but direct question process. It was like he realized this girl was innocently-clueless and his role was to be more of a Socratic teacher than brutal interviewer.

The bottom line is that there's actually truth on both sides, the left wing view and the right wing view.

What happened with education is that Republicans won so much on the "no taxes" message that the states and federal govt stopped funding the colleges to the extent they used to.

And as Pops posted like with Reagan in California, they began the model of tuition-based. And like everything else it's a slippery slope, right? At first the tuition was very cheap. And then just wind the clock up 50 years and we're at where we are now with the tuition being $30 grand or $100 grand or whatever.

The problem with the tuition model, and then getting the banks involved with student loans, is that it opened the door wide open to cost inflation. The unis just start charging too much, and there was no government paying for it all so there was no government to say "okay mr. chancellor I'm sorry but no you can't make $120 grand a year because we have a budget we have to balance and we can't give your faculty and your bloated bureaucracy all this money for salaries and bennies and a secretary for every department chair and all this stuff you want."

The actual fact is, government really ain't so bad at controlling cost when it's government that is paying for all of soemthing.

If you just set the thing up with banks and then do loans, then it's like anything else and there's no mechanism to control costs.

The universities went hog wild on student loans, and still do. They just built whatever they wanted to, all kinds of amenities and no thought about costs and they put all the costs onto the students with DEBT.

Well a 20 year old college kid can't hold a university accountable for their spending, right? These are just kids. So who is there, to control these costs? The banks? Nope, they don't care, more debt means more interest and it's federal guaranteed debt. So there's nobody controlling the SPENDING going on.

And then these new for-profit college companies got involved, and they're far worse than the older traditional institutions. The newer ones are flat-out for profit "let's make as much money as we can for our shareholders" corporations. And that's what led to the absurdity of massage therapists and culinary graduates winding up $30,000 in debt, for darn cooking school or like to be a dental assistant or other low level medical.

IF WE DID THIS THING with our PRIMARY EDUCATION like this -- a "student loan" debt model, can you imagine how horrible that would be?

Grade school and high school administrators would just spend and spend and just raise tuition and then all the parents just have to take on these student loans, to be paid for over a lifetime. And then people would say "well so what if you're still paying 40 years later for your grade school education, wasn't learning to read worth it?" blah blah

The costs need to come down, that's the bottom line.

And it's darn near impossible at this point, BUT THE BANKS NEEDS TO GET OUT OF the education funding business.

It needs to get back to 100% state and federal funded, just as public school is.

And all these obscenely expensive for profit college corporations need to be phased out of business as well.

Because at the end of the day, 20 year old kids do not know what they are doing and you can't expect them to, whether it's the girl interviewed by Neil Cavuto or it's all the students that take out $50,000 loans for cooking school or some such. If you set things up so that 19 year old kids are offered thirty thousand dollars for some low level job education, they actually aren't smart enough to say "that's crazy, you want me to go in this much debt just for a $12 an hour job?"

The schools make mountains of money, the bankers make a load of money, and ultimately it's all federally guaranteed loans and the taxpayer is on the hook anyway -- the state should have just run the whole thing to start with, these student debts cannot be paid back.

And the girl interviewed by Neil Cavuto is right about that much. The student loan debt avalanche is as bad or worse than the housing inflation bubble. So it is what it is, it's too much debt and can't be paid back.

[Sixstrings]

What's the bottom line?

Think about it.

The COSTS of a middle class life have gone UP so much. Education, healthcare, etc.

But THE EARNINGS of middle class, have NOT gone up. In fact, they've fallen.

Whose earnings HAVE gone way up?

The top 1%.

[Cog]

If you can't calculate the result of compound interest perhaps you shouldn't be attending college to begin with.

[Sixstrings]

If you can't calculate the result of compound interest perhaps you shouldn't be attending college to begin with.

That really should be taught in high schools. Yet it's not. Basic financial literacy -- Suze Ormand type stuff -- should be a required class in every high school.