[email protected] (Sat 02/21/09 at 10:54 AM -0800): > On the plus side, the Congress just appropriated the most money for higher > education ever, increased student subsidies, grants and loans, reduced the > criteria for obtaining financial assistance, increased the ability of > working people to deduct the cost of higher education/training from their > tax bills, and tens of billions for basic research. Its not the whole > kaboodle, but its a start.
Obama seems to have a very patient style, so much so that it's tempting to see him as 'a bit' Machiavellian. In the blogosphere+ this has been distilled into the caricature of deluded utopians claiming that "Obama has a secret plan," which somehow smells like the pseudo-cynicism of a people who've been beaten down so far that the prospect of hope smells fishy. We'll see how he fares; but when it comes to the ludicrous cost of education in the US, he'd bloody well better have a plan. There's an alphabet soup of financial products that, like MBSes and CDOs, will only appear in public discussion when they collapse. I won't pretend to have a grasp of the myriad acronyms the financial services sector cooked up; but, luckily, I don't need that kind of grasp to predict that student loans and their various derivatives present another looming crisis -- and in their case one that, culturally, will be much more difficult to write off than bad real-estate investments. The premise of the skyrocketing cost of education in the US for the last some (x>few but <several) decades has been the ability of beneficiaries to pay for it. With "the economy" losing hundreds of thousands of jobs every month with no end in sight, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see that the most vulnerable "workers," freshly minted and recent grads, will have few if any job prospects -- and certainly not the kinds of jobs that will allow them to reliably meet their crushing debt obligations. In the past, this problem has seemed to those affected to be atomized, a 'private' issue involving appeals to Sallie Mae and other providers for forbearances and similar administrative rubbish. Give it six months, a year, two years, it doesn't matter: it's extremely unlikely that the US economy will rebound to such an extent that the requisite majority of former students will be able to (a) survive while (b) paying their debts off. And the fallback, family subsidy, will also increaingly be out of the question. Unfortunately, this rising problem won't be addressed on the basis of a collective social problem affecting 'young' people (and don't even get me going on the subject of "life-long learning" -- I'm all for learning, except when it becomes the vig expropriated from the ever-more precarious social body called the "work force"). Instead, the systemic problem posed by educational debt will be addresses when enough former students start to default on their loans that the creditors and the suckers who bought their derivative products are threatened. It isn't impossible that Obama and his administration will have learned enough from prior bailout processes to recognize that subsidizing or recapitalizing or whatever they-want-to-call-it-by-then Fannie Mae at al. won't work; but I'm not holding my breath, and you shouldn't either unless you know a foolproof way to hedge against suffocating. Not so long ago, Fannie Mae was GSE akin to Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac; but, like them, it was 'privatized'; and, like them, it's liabilities will be, for lack of a better term 'publicized.' This whole process will suggest the obvious: that it's much more socially advantageous in countless ways to subsidize education in real time than it is to treat collective social aspirations as yet another fertile ground for usury. But we've known that about housing and health for along time, to no avail. The debate surrounding the cost of education is far behind those debates. I'm tempted to say that I don't expect to see it addressed, let alone resolved, in my lifetime; but, then again, I felt the same ways about a ~black president. In the meantime, if you can figure out how to bet against whichever megacorps are saddled with CLOs (watch that acronym --it's coming to a media source near you) based on student loans, you might even make enough money to pay for a few very good educations. (Not that you need one of course. :) Cheers, T -- http://b1ff.org!!! # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
