Question

For some time the United States Government has been collecting student loan debt from Social Security benefits. The amount it can collect each month cannot be more than 15%. But with over 50% of retirees relying solely on Social Security for their income this has a tremendous impact. The Government does collect about one billion dollars doing this, but it is a mere pittance with the total student loan debt at 1.4 Trillion dollars. And, as we learned student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, except for very, very rare circumstances of undue hardship. I have some ideas on what to do about this horrendous situation, but I would like you to post a short paragraph under this discussion question about your ideas as to what can be done. If you do so, I will add 10 points to your Exam 02 score

Answer 1

• Problem:
  • Overall amount is significantly small
  • Excess dpendance on social security benefits
  • Thus student who seek loans suffer
• Solution (evaluation in brackets)
  • Increase rate of payment towards social security benefit (will people relatiate?)
  • Design new pension scheme of the retired where their collection amount for retirement is higher (will worker strike against this proposal?)
  • Negoatiation for lower interest rates so that repayment for student loans becomes faster, making loan facilties available for more students (will students become encouraged to take out further loans since its now cheaper?)
  • Introduction of very liberal payment policies
  • Encouraging students to chose online courses over on-site courses
  • Encouraging universities to decrease university years from 4 to 3 so that cost of tution decreases, which even if small, could have a significant effect holistically (negotiation with many niversities, how practical might this approach be?)
  • chosing a job from the abundance of well-paying, significant jobs for tradespeople in many fields that require training and experience but do not require a four-year college degree—plumbers, electricians, carpenters, roofers, mechanics, assembly line workers, to mention only a few: so remind students that college degree is not necessarily an obvious requiremnent.
  • yet, all these solutions have loopholes, or significant obstacles towards its implementation, thus the most suitble option is concentrating on lowering the cost of higher education by the govermnt taking big steps towards this chnage in the country's education sector without reducing the quality of the education being offered