Corinthian student loans and the problem of for-profit education. (Thumbs up for Biden.)

 President Biden has decided to cancel the loans incurred by students who enrolled at institutions affiliated with Corinthian.  If you hear the word, "Corinthian," and think of either an architectural school or the character from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, then congratulations.  You went to a real college, or perhaps just taught yourself, which was better than borrowing fuckloads of money from me, the taxpayer, to line the pockets of the con-artists who ran Corinthian, who were roughly as evil as the Gaiman character, if nowhere near as cool or badass.  Also, why are they adapting Sandman?  Seriously?  Another adaptation?  OK, I'm getting sidetracked again.

Back on track.  Eyes on the prize.  Get it?  Eyes?  No?  Read Sandman.  Anyway, Biden has been under pressure to cancel all student loans, or somewhere approaching all.  Do I have to explain how wrong this would be?  A grant is a conditional gift in which the recipient is granted money for a specific purpose, in this case, education.  However, many are ineligible, or at least, grants cannot cover their full educational expenses as colleges and universities keep raising their costs well above the rate of inflation to cover the salaries of administrators and useless offices.  If Ben Ginsberg's book, The Fall of the Faculty, was timely before the full rise of woke, it is downright prescient-seeming now.  Regardless, federally subsidized loans are...

fucking awesome.

Seriously.

They are an amazing deal, for the borrower.  The interest rates are far below market rates because the loans are taxpayer-funded, and you cannot discharge them through bankruptcy, but the point is that if you go out and get a real education, and major in something real (um...), you won't need to declare bankruptcy.  Then on top of that, federally subsidized loans don't accrue interest as long as you are in school, and there are deferments under a bunch of circumstances even if you are out of school.

Federal student loans are awesome.

They ensure that even if you come from zero money, and even if you don't have access to scholarships, you have a path to the middle class.  Do it right, and it isn't even all that costly.  The cheap way is as follows.  Two years of community college, finish a bachelor's at a state school with a degree in something practical, and you're solid.  Accounting, nursing, something like that, and student loans give you a path to the middle class.

But they are loans.  The deal is, you gotta pay me back.  If someone comes along and says, nah, I am required to relinquish that debt, um, I didn't agree to that!  You got a great deal, you signed up for it, and now, what?  Darth Vader says he is altering the terms of our deal, and I should pray he doesn't alter it any further?  Contracts need to be enforced.

We cannot have contracts or loans if a debtor can go to one guy and say, cancel my debt 'cuz debt is bad.

Y'all already got a great deal.  We'all already got a great deal.  Part of the deal is living up to one's side of the deal.

But there's a problem when the deal is made in bad faith because there's a third party.  The institution of lower learning, and I'll leave it to the hypothetical reader to decide how many institutions fall into that category.  Yet those of the Corinthian persuasion certainly did.  They were a scam.

This introduces several questions.  Do we blame those who got taken?  At a certain level, anyone who gets taken by an obvious scam bears some responsibility, but the glitch here is that, by definition, the for-profit college scam preys on the uneducated, and hence those least able to discern a scam.  Yeah, that sounds elitist, but what do you expect?

Even if those taken by the scam bear some responsibility in some vague moral sense, do we as a nation force them to bear the financial cost?  Or can we, as taxpayers, say that they have already paid enough of a cost?

Because those who bought into the scam aren't the problem.  The scam-artists are.  In fact, the concept of for-profit education is pretty much blinkered, keeping in mind how much I bash the left's increasing aversion to capitalism.  Biden did a good thing here, because the problem was Corinthian.  Not the poor schleps who thought they had a way out, but the con-artists who manipulated them, and basically stole our money.  Education has a lot of problems, not-gonna lie.  But the for-profit sector?  It has always been worse, and structurally, it cannot work.

Market competition and the for-profit sector does many things better than the public sector or the non-profit sector.  If you want innovation, development, efficient allocation of resources, the production of wealth...  Greed, for lack of a better word, is good, and all that.  Where did Gordon Gecko go to college?  More to the point, you like all your cool shit, right?  The people who designed and built it went to public or nonprofit private schools, and then elite nonprofit private or public colleges and universities.  Have you ever needed the benefits of awesome doctors?  Same deal.

Yeah, the leftward march of the educational system, at both K-12 and the collegiate level is getting creepy, but for the most part, the problems are contained to some but not all classes within the social sciences and humanities.  Education is still happening.  It's still a thing that exists.

Why have the for-profit schools never produced anyone who can... compete?  Part of it is that those who can compete don't choose those schools, but they also don't "add value," in business-speak.  Why not?  That's not how they get their money.  Their business model is to get their money the way Corinthian did-- from us, through manipulation of the loan system.  They don't get their money by cranking out badasses who invent better mousetraps.  They get their money by scamming the system.

So think about how institutions of lower, middle and very rarely, higher learning work.  How do you tell, and when do you tell that value has been added?  That is not an easy question.

People stumble out of the gate, and don't produce anything of real value frequently until years have passed.  There is a learning curve in the real world, and people need experience before they can actually do anything.  You cannot tell at graduation how much value has been added.  That will take years.

That makes the production of skills and knowledge through the educational system fundamentally different from the production of what we normally call, "products."  Scanning my desk, hooked up to my computer, I have some audio equipment.  Why?  Well, in case you have not noticed, I dig music.  Here's a tip.  The audio processing equipment in your computer sucks.  I run the sound through an external DAC (digital-to-analog converter), and then that sound gets sent either to my main sound system for this room (amplifier with speakers), or to my headphones.

How do I assess headphones?  Sound quality.  I also have noise canceling headphones, but I don't need those at home, because this is a quiet, bookish environment.  When headphones leave the factory, I can try them, listen to them, hear the sound quality, and that's the end product.  When they're done, they're done.  I know if I want them, although with stores disappearing, it may be more about going with product reviews.  Still, done is done.

A fresh-out-of-college 22-year-old ain't really done.  The value that has been added will not be revealed for years to come.  That's a big difference, and it means institutions that operate for-profit cannot do so by cranking out badasses and saying, hey, look at my 22-year-old badass!  Bose can say, listen to how much noise cancelation our headphones get, if you need that particular thing, and Sennheiser and others can go for some budget fidelity, and so forth, and when you are shopping, once out of the factory, done is done.

Not true for college grads.  Hence, the perverse incentives.

For-profit education has never worked.  Will it ever?  I doubt it, and the Corinthian students got scammed.  I'm good with Biden canceling those loans, and really, I'd be OK with blocking loans to any for-profit college.

Yet there is an impulse here to go too far.  If you make an agreement, live up to your agreement.  Once upon a time, that wasn't a controversial sentiment.

Being persnickety about language, I occasionally remind people what words like "jubilee" actually mean.  Here's Charlie Parr doing, "Jubilee."  A little different, but this guy can play.