Rep. Virginia Foxx On People With Student Loans: ‘I Have Very Little Tolerance’ For Them
8:06 am - 04/16/2012
Rep. Virginia Foxx On People With Student Loans: ‘I Have Very Little Tolerance’ For Them
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) took on a unique enemy during a radio interview yesterday: people with student loans.
Though many politicians sympathize with those who are saddled with exorbitant student debt, Foxx, who chairs the House subcommittee on higher education, had a different take. Appearing on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, the North Carolina congresswoman recounted her own experience paying for college, where she worked her way through and graduated after seven years. Foxx then pointed to her own experience as justification for why she has “very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt.” “There’s no reason for that,” she concluded:
FOXX: I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally. [...] I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap.
Listen to it:
Despite Foxx’s implication, these loans are not taken out frivolously. They are taken out because of the soaring cost of college. In other words, because the price of college is so high — and House Republicans are working overtime to cut Pell grants for one million low-income students — the amount of loans required to pay for it is also high. Indeed, student loan debt topped one trillion dollars last year, orders of magnitude larger than in the decades prior.
Still, Foxx’s distaste for large loans does not appear to extend to the mortgage sector. In Foxx’s 2010 financial disclosure statement, she owned two individual mortgage notes worth up to $250,000 each, from which she earned as much as $20,000 in payments.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) took on a unique enemy during a radio interview yesterday: people with student loans.
Though many politicians sympathize with those who are saddled with exorbitant student debt, Foxx, who chairs the House subcommittee on higher education, had a different take. Appearing on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, the North Carolina congresswoman recounted her own experience paying for college, where she worked her way through and graduated after seven years. Foxx then pointed to her own experience as justification for why she has “very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt.” “There’s no reason for that,” she concluded:
FOXX: I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally. [...] I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap.
Listen to it:
Despite Foxx’s implication, these loans are not taken out frivolously. They are taken out because of the soaring cost of college. In other words, because the price of college is so high — and House Republicans are working overtime to cut Pell grants for one million low-income students — the amount of loans required to pay for it is also high. Indeed, student loan debt topped one trillion dollars last year, orders of magnitude larger than in the decades prior.
Still, Foxx’s distaste for large loans does not appear to extend to the mortgage sector. In Foxx’s 2010 financial disclosure statement, she owned two individual mortgage notes worth up to $250,000 each, from which she earned as much as $20,000 in payments.
I think the other problem, though, is people reaching beyond their means - if you can't afford four years at an upper-crust institution, then do two years at a CC and then transfer, or find a less expensive state school. Unless you're in the upper tiers of a clique profession like law, if just doesn't really matter anyway.
And tuition + housing at my state school is 23k a year - less expensive then some schools, yes, but still nothing that most people could do without loans.
If you're lucky enough to have a local CC that's actually any good, which let's be honest, not all are. The time I spent at a CC was an absolute waste of my time and money, and next to nothing I did was transferable anywhere.
In fact, it's next to impossible to get student loans discharged in bankruptcy and the feds have options for collecting debt that the credit card companies can only dream about. They can seize income tax refund and other federal payments (including portions of Social Security payments), garnish your wages without getting a court order, and assign your debt to the Department of Justice for litigation. They also use collection agencies.
Speaking as a 40ish, my parent's never told me anything like that, what? Who thinks like that?
I think the other problem, though, is people reaching beyond their means...
Stop. Right. There.
The whole POINT of student loans is to enable people to do something that is at the moment beyond their means- to pursue an education- in the hopes that this will allow them to use their skills in such a way that they never could without that education. Whatever gifts alone won't usually cut it in a world that measures success by degree verification.
Any large finance arrangement does the same thing, whether it's for a house, a car or an education. And what about small business start-up loans? I don't hear people saying "Sorry, Mr. Entrepreneur, that SBA loan is reaching beyond your means, leave starting businesses to the people who can afford it?" Oh no, that would be seen as Anti-American. Why? Because higher education is seen as a the luxury of the already well off, and what you say just proves that.
if you can't afford four years at an upper-crust institution, then do two years at a CC and then transfer, or find a less expensive state school. Unless you're in the upper tiers of a clique profession like law, if just doesn't really matter anyway.
I don't disagree with the CC idea- many community colleges rock, and are an underutilized resource. However, saying that big name schools are only useful to lawyers? The science departments at MIT and Cambridge (or Harvard Med or many others) would like a word.
The document is from www.collegeboard.com.
Even 20 years ago, the average tuition for a public university was about 7% the average US income. Now it's about 20%. And a lot of the related expenses (like textbooks) have also gone up disproportionally.
The final price of what we should be paying per annum still came out to about one fifth to one quarter of what most of our class attending university paid this year. And that's just public universities.
Demand for college education has also risen dramatically, as a Bachelor's degree has become a more common job requirement, women have joined the professional world, and underprivileged groups have tried to work their way up through education. Supply (as in number of freshman slots available in decent schools) really hasn't risen to meet demand so the cost of the available slots has increased accordingly.
I think it would be virtually impossible to do that now. First, with the rate of unemployment, the jobs simply aren't there and when a job opens up, they're definitely not going to give it the job to a college student that's going to leave in a couple of months. Second, even if a student could find a job like that, good luck making enough to cover $13,000 in tuition, plus sending money home. Third, the way classes are set up now, attending every other semester would really mess you up in terms of what classes you needed. When I attended, some classes were fall only, some were summer only, and some were fall of even years or spring of odd years or whatever.
Also, even if someone could do it, no one should have to. She really enjoyed her college years and I feel like she really got cheated by not being able to have a real 4 year college experience even though she worked hard. Plus, she either wore hand-me-down clothes or made her own and she had virtually no money to buy snacks or go shopping for fun.
Plus she kept working at that pace even once she got out of school and started teaching (for similar reasons) and she wound up with a really severe case of ulcerative colitis. It nearly killed her (she's 5'6 and she was down to 87 pounds) and they had to remove her entire colon when she 28. And given the stress component to ulcerative colitis, I'm pretty sure that if she hadn't had so much stress, it might have been possible to manage it medically which would have made a huge difference in her quality of life for the past nearly fifty years.
Point blank, just because a few lucky people can do it (and often pay for it in other ways) doesn't mean anyone should have to do it.
Inflation is generally around 3-4% a year. One would expect, therefore, that 12-15 years later, the cost of such a school would be (1.04)^15 (I'm going with the top estimates) times 30,000. That would mean we should expect THE MOST expensive school this year to be around 54,000 a year, after having rounded everything up, and state schools to be around 18 grand for everything.
BC last year was almost 56,000-- under old calculations, it would have been more like 40,000 (again rounding up). UMass was 22,000 going with the cheapest options.