Olent
Plenty are choosing a 4 year school over commuting or starting in community college out of a desire for "the college experience".
Although there was a college cost thread a number of years ago where someone argued with me about whether it was worth going into debt to have "the college experience".
I think what I was going for is this idea of what the college experience is. Going to community college IS a college experience as the opposite is rather not going to college at all or doing strictly online college where there is no in person interaction at all. But that is not what people mean when they say that in a derogatory way. They have an idea of what that means and use it over and over as a generalization. Some kids go for party schools yeah but is that something to paint a broadbrush on all college students? Are we making a blanket statement that students who opted to go to a 4 years school simply did it out of silly reasons? Just something used often but is there concrete proof that the majority of college students are declining other options simply because they are silly
Any source that is on the extreme (regardless of what side) tends to use things in a certain way. Often omitting details or conflating them or even outright making correlations that are not accurate.
For example this is from the actual GOV website:
"Although actual costs cannot be known until the end of the loan terms, as of fiscal year 2021 these loans are estimated to cost the federal government $197 billion. This swing of $311 billion was driven both by programmatic changes and by reestimates using revised assumptions
(e.g., economic factors and loan performance) as additional data became available (see figure)."
Bolding is mine. Further it was explained "Among the factors that make estimating the cost of Direct Loans difficult are the lack of historical data when new programmatic changes are introduced, and assumptions Education must make about borrower behavior over the life of the loan. For example, the monthly payment amount for borrowers in Income-Driven Repayment plans can change based on their economic situation. Using a hypothetical group of borrowers, GAO found that borrowers' income growth and inflation, which are difficult to predict, affect borrowers' payments. For example, GAO found that when income grows at a slower rate, borrowers' payments to the government decrease, which increase government costs."
But the blog wrote it as "bad accounting is due to these faulty assumptions. Those bad assumptions included incorrect estimates pertaining to the economic standing of borrowers, underestimating the likelihood of borrower default, and underestimating the percentage of borrowers who would enter income-driven repayment (IDR) plans."
That short paragraph is loaded with stuff and certainly takes what was fairly neutral that which when income doesn't raise much over time add in inflation the payment back goes down and spins it into something way different. And delving into that issue if one of the problems found was that income growth tied with inflation was eating up the ability to pay in larger amount is the problem with the loan borrowing in the first place (as the other blog would have you more think) or is the issue that when you have inflation (that we all have right in front of our face) coupled with wages not increasing enough (and this alone is harmful enough) you can run into large problems.
That's just one piece. Probably not going to go paragraph to paragraph on this one but did want to let others know.
The numbers come from the GAO. While the narrative might be slanted, the numbers are the numbers.
See above, data like all things when given with a bias becomes less about the numbers.
