Showing posts with label Jillian Berman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jillian Berman. Show all posts

Friday, November 9, 2018

Roosevelt Institute researcher says student-loan program is "a failed social experiment." But you already knew that.

Julie Margetta Morgan and Marshall Steinbaum wrote a blockbuster of a report for the Roosevelt Institute on the student-loan crisis. Unfortunately, the bland title and multiple graphs obscured the authors' key finding, which is this: Contrary to what student-loan advocates proclaim, a great many people who took out student loans for postsecondary education have not seen a rise in wages.

As author Julie Margetta Morgan summarized, "We've essentially engaged in a failed social experiment where the government thought that it would be fine to give people student debt because it would pay off in the long run and we're seeing that's not the case."

On the contrary, this is what Morgan and Steinbaum found:
  • "More education has not led to higher earnings over time." Although the higher education community trumpets the myth that rising student debt and more education leads to higher income, that is not true. Instead, "the distribution of earnings in the labor market has remained relatively unchanged over time. And to the extent that individuals see an income boost based on college attainment, it is only relative to falling wages for high school graduates."
  •  "Student debt is a burden for a growing share of young adults." Traditional ways of measuring student debt "fail to consider the changing distribution of  debtors over time or the changes in the ways that borrowers repay their loans." When these factors are accounted for, "the data show that many more Americans have debt, and the burden of that debt is more significant now than for previous generations."
  •  "Credentialization better explain these dynamics than the 'skills gap.'" Although the nation's population is becoming better educated, "each educational group is becoming less well paid." In the authors' view, this phenomenon "is a result of declining worker power, which allows employers to demand a higher level of educational attainment for any given job, not a broken link between workforce skills and labor market demands."
  • "These trends have had particularly negative impacts on Black and brown Americans." Minorities already have to obtain more education than their peers in order to get the same or similar jobs. In general, people of color have less wealth than nonminorities, which means students of color take on disproportionate amounts of debt, which exacerbates disparities in student-loan debt between minority and nonminority students.
 Morgan and Steinbaum fortify their arguments with statistical analysis, but this is the essence of what they found. A higher percentage of Americans have student-loan debt than previous generations, and they have more debt than in the past.  And this trend has developed at the same time that wages have remained stagnant.

As worker power in the job market declines, employers have been able to demand more credentials from job  applicants. In essence, employers have been"upskilling" the labor market.

 I see evidence of this everywhere. Lawyers, for example, need just one professional degree to practice their trade: a J.D.  Yet as the job market for attorneys tightens, I see more and more lawyers get additional education: an MBA, for example,or a master's degree in law.  But these additional credentials often do not lead to higher salaries--and generally are not necessary for the jobs they are seeking.

I give myself as an example of a person who took out student loans to get a credential that did not enhance my job skills. I had a law degree before I became a professor, and my legal skills and experience are all I needed to be a competent education-law professor, a job I have done for 25 years.

But to get my first professor's job, I had to have a doctorate, and so I took out loans to get an Ed.D. degree from Harvard. It was a complete waste of time and money.

Morgan and Steinbaum question the enormous public investment in postsecondary education our government is making through the student-loan program. Midway through their policy report, they make this trenchant observation:
If the only function of that public investment is to increase the credentialization of the labor market and enrich academic institutions that are best able to provide those credentials to students looking to differentiate themselves (at great expense) in a rat race, it's hard to conclude that the public investment s paying off . . . .
Indeed, the investment is not paying off.  For millions of Americans, the student-loan program is doing nothing more than sentencing them to become members of a permanent debtor class.

Will you will be richer if you get an advanced degree?

References

Jillian Berman. America’s $1.5 trillion student-loan industry is a ‘failed social experiment.’Marketwatch.com,October 18, 2018.

Julie Margetta Morgan and Marshall Steinbaum. The Student Debt Crisis, Labor Market Credentialization, and Racial InequalityRoosevelt Institute, October 2018.

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Finally, More Bankruptcy Attorneys Getting on the Student Loan Discharge Bandwagon--article by Steve Rhode

This excellent essay by Steve Rhode originally appeared on the Personal Finance Syndication Network, PFSyncom.  Mr. Rhode also maintains a web site titled Get Out of Debt Guy that contains a variety of good advice and information about all manner of consumer debt problems, including student loans.  You can learn more about Steve Rodes here.

In addition to the attorneys listed in Mr. Rhode's article, I would like to commend George Thomas, a Kansas attorney, who did a great job representing Alan and Catherine Murray against Educational Credit Management Corporation  in a Kansas bankruptcy court. Mr. Thomas won a partial discharge of the Murrays' student loan debt. That case is now on appeal.


In addition,Eugene R. Wedoff, retired bankruptcy judge and incoming president of the American Bankruptcy Institute, is defending Alexandra Acosta-Conniff in an Alabama bankruptcy case now on appeal before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.


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Finally, More Bankruptcy Attorneys Getting on the Student Loan Discharge Bandwagon

 by Steve Rhode


A recent MarketWatch piece by Jillian Berman did a great job of not only naming a bunch of attorneys I’m proud to call friends, but debunking this myth that there is nothing that can be done about student loans in bankruptcy.

I get so frustrated when consumers tell me they went to a bankruptcy attorney and was told there was no hope for dealing with their student loans, when there clearly was.

The article quotes four attorneys who all make the same point, there are legal options for dealing with student loans in bankruptcy. Don’t believe everything you’ve been told that there are no options – That’s Fake News! Want to learn more, here you go.

Attorney Richard Gaudreau is mentioned, “Nobody is doing anything for these people in terms of laws to benefit them,” said Richard Gaudreau, a New Hampshire-based bankruptcy attorney, who’s been working on student loan issues for the past few years. “We’re just forced to be creative.”

And when he says creative, what he’s really saying is applying some brain power and creative thinking to look at the law under new light to find where is already applies to dealing with student loans.

That’s what attorney Austin Smith is doing, and winning.

“Taking that logic one step further means that student loans from private lenders can be discharged in bankruptcy if they were made to students who didn’t attend an accredited program or were lent more money than the cost of attendance. Possible debts that fit into this category could include the aforementioned bar study loan or a loan to attend an unaccredited trade school, Smith said.

“A loan is not like a scholarship or a stipend and such a private loan cannot be included in this definition. If I were to interpret educational benefit to include loans that has some relation to attaining an education, it would render the other two provisions of [the bankruptcy code as it relates to student debt] totally superfluous,” the judge said, according to a transcript.

“I have yet to go in front of a judge who disagrees with my overall thesis, which is that not all student loans are not dischargeable,” Smith said. “I do think the tide is now turning on that.”

Then there is attorney Lewis Roberts, “Roberts’s intervention is to get judges and trustees to classify the federal student loan debt separately so that his clients can take advantage of special payment plans the government offers borrowers to manage their student loans.”

Attorney Jay Fleischman said, “This fight is just in its infancy,” he said. “We’re seeing the birth of it in many ways.”

Steve Rhode

Get Out of Debt Guy  Twitter, G+, Facebook

If you have a credit or debt question you’d like to ask, just click here and ask away. 

This article by Steve Rhode first appeared on Get Out of Debt Guy and was distributed by the Personal Finance Syndication Network