On March 27, 2014, Carolyn Thompson of the Associated Press writes:
Every month that Gregory Zbylut pays $1,300 toward his law school loans is another month of not qualifying for a decent mortgage.
Every payment toward their student loans is $900 Dr. Nida Degesys and her husband aren’t putting in their retirement savings account.
They believe they’ll eventually climb from debt and begin using their earnings to build assets rather than fill holes. But, like the roughly 37 million others in the U.S. saddled with $1 trillion in student debt, they may never catch up with wealthy peers who began life after college free from the burden.
The disparity, experts say, is contributing to the widening of the gap between rich and everyone else in the country.
“If you graduate with a B.A. or doctorate and you get the same job at the same place, you make the same amount of money,” said William Elliott III, director of the Assets and Education Initiative at the University of Kansas. “But that money will actually mean less to you in the sense of accumulating assets in the long term.”
Graduates who can immediately begin building equity in housing or stocks and bonds get more time to see their investments grow, while indebted graduates spend years paying principal and interest on loans. The standard student loan repayment schedule is 10 years but can be much longer.
The median 2009 net worth for a household without outstanding student debt was $117,700, nearly three times the $42,800 worth in a household with outstanding student debt, according to a report co-written by Elliott last November.
About 40 percent of households led by someone 35 or younger have student loan debt, a 2012 Pew Research Center analysis of government data found.
Allen Aston is one of the lucky ones, having landed a full academic and financial-need scholarship at Ohio State University. The 22-year-old software engineer from Columbus estimates it let him avoid about $100,000 in debt.
Without loans to repay, Aston is already contributing 6 percent of his salary to a retirement fund that is matched in part by his employer and doesn’t have the same financial concerns his friends do.
“I’m making the same money as them, but they have student loans they’re paying back that I don’t. So, it definitely seems noticeable,” he said.
At the other end of the spectrum is Zbylut, an accountant-turned-attorney in Glendale, Calif. He’s been chipping away at nearly $160,000 in student debt since graduating in 2005 from law school at Loyola University in Chicago. Now 48, the tax attorney estimates he could have $150,000 to $200,000 in a 401(k) had the money he’s paid toward loans gone there.
“I’m sitting here in traffic. I’ve got a Mercedes behind me and an Audi in front of me and I’m thinking, ‘What did they do that I didn’t do?'” Zbylut said by cellphone from his Chevrolet. He’s been turned down twice for the type of mortgage he needs to buy a home big enough for himself, the fiancee he would have married already if not for his debts and her 10-year-old son.
“I have more education and more degrees than my father, as does she than her parents, and yet our parents are better off than we are. What’s wrong with this picture?” he said.
Student debt is the only kind of household debt that rose through the Great Recession and now totals more than either credit card or auto loan debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Both the number of borrowers and amount borrowed ballooned by 70 percent from 2004 to 2012.
Of the nearly 20 million Americans who attend college each year, about 12 million borrow, according to the Almanac of Higher Education. Estimates show that the average four-year graduate accumulates $26,000 to $29,000 in loans, and some leave college with six figures worth of debt.
The increases have been driven in part by rising tuition, resulting from reduced state funding and costlier campus facilities and amenities. Compounding the problem has been a trend toward merit-based, rather than need-based, grants as institutions seek to attract the higher-achieving students who will boost their standings.
“Because there’s a strong correlation in this country between things like SAT scores or ACT scores and wealth or income, the (grant) money ends up going disproportionately to students from wealthier families” who tend to perform better on those tests, said Donald Heller, dean of the Michigan State University College of Education.
Those factors, along with stagnating family incomes and declining savings, have made student loans a much bigger part of funding higher education, Elliott said.
Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton wonders whether greater public awareness of the widening wealth gap in the United States would hasten policy change. Norton conducted a 2011 survey that found that people tend to think wealth is more equally distributed than it is.
But with elected officials from President Barack Obama on down now talking about the wealth gap as an urgent public problem, a more complete picture seems to be emerging, he said.
“Both parties are now saying, perhaps inequality has gotten to the point where it’s not fair when people don’t have a chance to rise, and we need to do something about it,” Norton said.
Targeting the soaring cost of higher education, Obama in August proposed the most sweeping changes to the federal student aid program in decades. His plan would link federal money to new college ratings and reward schools if they help low-income students, keep costs low and have large numbers of students earn degrees.
Lawmakers in Congress also are debating how to address the issue, including proposals to allow graduates with high-interest loans to refinance at lower rates.
The American Medical Student Association supports expanding the National Health Services Corps, which provides loan forgiveness in exchange for service in underserved areas.
Nida Degesys, AMSA’s president, graduated in May 2013 from Northeast Ohio Medical University with about $180,000 in loans. The amount has already swelled with interest to about $220,000.
“There were times where this would make me stay up at night,” Degesys said. “The principal alone is a problem, but the interest is staggering.”
Yet, as costly as medical school was, Degesys sees it as an investment in herself and her career, one she thinks will pay off with a higher earning potential.
College degrees can pay off. College graduates ages 25 to 32 working full time earn $45,500, about $17,500 more than their peers with just a high school diploma, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data.
Elliott says the country needs to re-think college financing options to bring debt down and graduation rates up.
“We can’t,” he said, “let debt hinder a whole generation of people from beginning to accumulate wealth soon after graduating college.”
We at the Center for Economic and Social Justice maintain that attending a university is an expense, not an “investment.”
We need to emphasize that financing education within a world in which the money system and economy is restructured according to the logic of binary economics and Capital Homesteading reforms, is fundamentally different from financing education in today’s unjust system of monopoly capitalism or socialism.
Underneath the analysis in this op-ed is the unaddressed question of whether interest-free money and credit should be created by the monetary system to provide for the otherwise worthy education and consumption needs of students.
The focus of binary economics is on increasing the productiveness of the non-human factors of production. In this way students and all members of society –– including educators and school administrators — can become owners of machines and other non-human inputs to the productive processes of society. This will enable students and the rest of society to earn capital incomes to supplement their incomes from other sources. Direct personal ownership of productive capital would help pay for the consumption needs of all members of society…from the bottom-up. Interest-free credit should not be used for consumption rather than liberating non-owning people through capital ownership from their continued dependency on their employer, the government and the private sector power elite who now control money and credit.
Education is a marketable good or service, a consumption item that students purchase. Consuming an education does not directly produce marketable services and direct incomes, except for educators and others supplying educational goods and services. Education is an expense for students, however profitable it may (or may not) be for teachers and administrators. Going to school costs money, it does not generate a profit; getting an education is not financially feasible capital by any stretch of the imagination.
The last few years have revealed as an outrageous lie the “conventional wisdom” that getting an education is an “investment.” Young people have been told that if they get a “good education,” they are virtually guaranteed a “good job.” What passes for “education” these days has become “job training for jobs that won’t be there,” as students discover upon entering today’s workforce.
Fiddling with interest rates on student loans is the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. If the price of higher education and the resulting debt burden were not so great in the first place, there would be no problem with interest rates on them.
The easy availability of loans for students is itself a major part of the problem. Pumping money into education by providing financing to the “consumer” –– the student –– has increased the cost of education dramatically.
Assuming that a “good education” automatically means a “good job” creates a vicious circle. As a result, the cost of education has been spiraling out of control. Ironically, the myth that a “good education” will result in a “good job” has meant that the cost of education increases even faster during an economic downturn when demand increases, and even more money is made available, driving up the cost even more.
This could not possibly happen if being a student or getting an education were a genuine investment. The cost of forming capital is irrelevant as long as the capital generates sufficient income to cover its own cost and provide an adequate return to the owner.
The obvious conclusion is that because getting an education does not, in and of itself, generate wealth, it is therefore not a capital good by any standard. The use of pure interest-free credit to finance an education is therefore directly contrary to the most fundamental principles of binary economics.
This does not mean that anyone should be indifferent to the problem. If, as moral authorities through the ages have agreed, paying for someone’s education is a virtuous act, then private individuals or foundations can make interest-free loans, or even non-repayable grants to students –– as long as these are financed out of existing accumulations of savings. Most people agree that a well-educated citizenry is a benefit, albeit indirect, to the State. Given that, interest-free loans or non-repayable grants financed by a tax levy, can also be justified, but not money creation.
With full implementation of the proposed Capital Homestead Act, government vouchers could address the student loan problem but be gradually phased out. Under Capital Homesteading, the private sector would become more productive. This economic growth would be financed through interest-free credit used to purchase new, directly owned capital. Rising dividend incomes would enable students to pay for their own education. It would also provide supplementary capital incomes to substitute for the inflationary costs of salaries and benefits of teachers and school administrators at all levels of education under today’s economic system of monopoly capitalism. That’s why we try to concentrate our time and attention to advancing support for passage of the Capital Homestead Act, rather than expedients required under the current system.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
