Very happy to have this piece in the Times https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/13/opinion/politics/student-loan-payments-resume.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Hopefully it won’t get me fired for basically calling bullshit on the entire higher education system. - ThreadSky

econmarshall.bsky.social • 596 days ago

Very happy to have this piece in the Times

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/13/opinion/politics/student-loan-payments-resume.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Hopefully it won’t get me fired for basically calling bullshit on the entire higher education system.

Comments

jofrhwld.bsky.social•596 days ago

is the aggregated data available somewhere? I love the grouping by calendar year view, but would also be interested to see a grouping by year of loan view

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

We’ve done that, our so-called “Spider Chart”. Check out the report—it’s linked in the NYT piece

jofrhwld.bsky.social•596 days ago

Oh yeah, thanks! much easier to eyeball how it gets progressively worse for more recent borrowers

kevincarey1.bsky.social•596 days ago

How much of the increase in the percentage of people underwater on their student loans is because fewer have the financial capacity to make payments, and how much is because we made a policy choice to redirect a big percentage of loans into IDR?

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

Are those two things distinct?

kevincarey1.bsky.social•596 days ago

I think so. IDR is the required path to PSLF, to start. And there’s surely a subset of IDR users who chose the lower monthly payment because they wanted to, not because they had to, and paid down other debt faster as a result.

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

But everything I hear about IDR is that it's "targeted" to distressed borrowers.

kevincarey1.bsky.social•596 days ago

That’s my question. Your article suggests that many if not all IDR borrowers are distressed, I’m asking if that’s true.

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

My article doesn’t suggest anything of the kind. It says sitting on a mounting pile of debt curtails the economic life cycle. But the point is that whether you go delinquent (one definition of distressed) or get into IDR (a way of preventing delinquency), either way the loans aren’t being repaid.

smenor.com•596 days ago

Appreciated though the y axis on that graph starting at 70% is a bit misleading

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

If the vertical axis started at 0 the fact that no one’s repaying their student loans would be even more stark and obvious.

smenor.com•596 days ago

That’s what I’m saying. When it goes down to the bottom like that it looks like men paid theirs off but they really have 70% remaining [ and / FWIW mine from that era is at 120% ]

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

The text of the piece explicitly points that out

smenor.com•596 days ago

I understand

Figures matter though because people will skim and glance without looking at the numbers and text and you’re sharing this one here and I’m guessing on Twitter so how many will see that and think this is just about women being screwed over and not everyone ?

faineg.bsky.social•596 days ago

Get their asses

bakerdphd.bsky.social•595 days ago

Truly genuine question. I'm noodling on the national university piece. Do you think that's the feds creating wholly new institutions or taking over institutions that are about to close?

econmarshall.bsky.social•595 days ago

I certainly don’t think it should be confined to the latter, though they might offer useful facilities to be taken over. The point is to “intervene” in the higher education system to move it to a better equilibrium, not clean up messes at the margins of it.

bakerdphd.bsky.social•595 days ago

Got it. I'm just trying to think through how it could happen, what that would take, etc. Thanks!

ethanjacobs.bsky.social•596 days ago

Wow. I had no idea repayment rates were this bad.

profmisterlizzie.bsky.social•596 days ago

But have you called BS on all of higher ed? I didn’t see data disaggregated by type of degree or institution. It’s not great borrowing for school, but surely some investments are better than others? $10K to finish your BA might make sense, $100 for an arcane masters maybe not.

katcalvin.bsky.social•596 days ago

I just found out that my 6 figure loans will be forgiven after 3 more years of nonprof work after having made so many payments that without interest I would have been close to paying them off but instead I owe more than ever. The idea of being debt free for the first time since I was 17 is shocking.

katcalvin.bsky.social•596 days ago

Of course this is also after having to work my ass off to pay off my private loans, who have no program. I will be 43 when I am finally free of the loans that started before I was an actual adult.

mdasilva.bsky.social•596 days ago

Those repayment and loan balance over time stats are yikes and highlight how broken things are.

Too often policymakers and institutions blame failure to pay loans on individuals. You punch back against that and successfully illustrate the systems-level failure and need for federal intervention.

lookheron.bsky.social•596 days ago

What does this look like without IDR reforms in 2015, do you think?

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

Definitely would have had more repayment, and also more contractionary effect on the micro and perhaps macro level.

lookheron.bsky.social•596 days ago

Isn't that in tension with the "people can't even pay interest" proposition? I mean it's a different thing to say people would have less purchasing power/wealth now

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

I think the 2015 expansion was in response to a bulge of people coming out of higher ed during the Great Recession not even coming close to being able to make payments, so there was a surge of delinquency & default.

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

But no way to know if every dollar of payments not made under IDR wouldn’t have been paid out of IDR either.

socio-steve.bsky.social•596 days ago

Very interested in Bobby's thoughts on this.

mikepalmedo.bsky.social•596 days ago

Also, has anyone tried to project the impact AI will have on this? It seems a lot of the jobs at risk (i.e., administrative office work, short-term writing jobs) are the ones that might be otherwise taken by new college grads.

mikepalmedo.bsky.social•596 days ago

Great article. I knew there were a lot of folks who owed more than they borrowed but I had no idea that it was this many!

Have you guys looked at different majors and people with/without graduate degrees?

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

Hard to do in the credit reporting data. At some point we will attempt a linkage with data that tells us about institutions and attainment.

klm.bsky.social•596 days ago

This is the truth. I was saying it in 2015. You were too. And maybe maaaayyyybe more D policymakers will get it. But I'm so skeptical

tomstrand.bsky.social•596 days ago

This is a great piece.

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

Thank you. I wonder how my boss’s boss’s bosses will take it.

tomstrand.bsky.social•596 days ago

I want to see the critics of cancellation respond to it

eventscape.bsky.social•596 days ago

Your recommendation seems to lean on the current college sports paradigm. This is a limiting (and already contentious) landscape.

I think there are models for startup accelerators which can present opportunity for federal/VC dollars outside of top heavy administrative structures.

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

Is this a parody?

eventscape.bsky.social•596 days ago

Nope. I speak from having attended Polytechnic during its acquisition by NYU. That school was one of the best paths to middle class income before the acquisition. Also I am on Board with your assessment so my comment only addresses the last two paragraphs of your article.

eventscape.bsky.social•596 days ago

I.e. during the student loan pause what was SBA doing? All I’ve read are overblown articles on grift but guess what, I can still get my car fixed post pandemic and go see a movie. Maybe this is a trade school argument but a trade school model ignores massive increase in innovation.

eventscape.bsky.social•596 days ago

My humble opinion is that it might be best to address points of failure before turning off the spigot because, congratulations, you’ve carefully documented an unsustainable model with heavily entrenched interests.

eventscape.bsky.social•596 days ago

Since I’ve probably been muted— just gonna throw one more statistical query out there:

How many people are figuring out payroll on the same night they write student loan checks? If the percentage is minimal, why?

cowlicks.bsky.social•596 days ago

Big get

glencote.bsky.social•596 days ago

Fantastic article

econmarshall.bsky.social•596 days ago

Thank you!

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply