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From guest columnist Diane Petryk
Student loan? Blame Reagan When my son, a millennial, accuses me, a boomer, of ruining his economic future, I say, “Don't blame me, I didn't vote for Ronald Reagan.” Yeah, that was a long time ago. And yes, Reagan worked assiduously to impose those student loans that are such a burden on proletariat kids and their parents. So I just want to tell young people today: Reagan was a Republican. And he didn't want a middle class kid to get a leg up. He didn't like their long hair and he didn't like their flowers and he certainly didn't like it that they were protesting the Vietnam War. Sit down to hear this. In the sixties, California public colleges had no tuition. They were free! Reagan was governor of California from 1967 to 1975. He didn't want the kids of the lower classes to learn anything and then go on to promulgate their “proletarian” opinions from a higher socio-economic standing. He forgot that some students in the sixties were studying math and rocket science and how to rendezvous in space, like Buzz Aldrin at MIT. In 1963, Aldrin earned his Ph.D in science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His thesis was “Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.” On Earth, when you want to reach a destination in a car, you just accelerate toward it. In space, if you did that, you might arrive far above it. Aldrin figured it out. Without that knowledge, we could not have gone to the moon using command module and lander rendezvous, and the heavy payload of a straight launch all the way wouldn't have worked. While walking around a few days ago I mentioned student loans to a man from Maine. He said he didn't see why there should be student loan “relief” because “that was their choice.” Yes. It was their choice to get an education. Just as someone might choose to save your life, your money, make you more comfortable, or safer, with their talents. They took a chance on their future income offsetting the pay back burden and often lost the bet, some because they were conned by schools that didn't deliver, such as Trump University. This burden, we now know, includes what some believe are exploitative interest rates. (Federal student loans currently have interest rates ranging from 6.53 percent to 9.08 percent, according to Bankrate. Average private student loan interest can range from around 4 percent to about 17 percent. For comparison, today the average mortgage for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage costs 6.29 percent). Why did students choose these loans? Perhaps they had a desire to do something significant in life, Perhaps they eyed a profession that they would love. Perhaps the choice to remain non college-educated might have seemed more unconscionable than a future loan burden. After all, often mom and dad were college educated professionals. How could they do less? Or, mom and dad weren't and were waiting for the first college grad in the family. How could they disappoint them? Nevertheless, the man from Maine contends, why should the general taxpayer shoulder the burden for those who wished to “better” themselves? Whoo-hoo! People have long asked why those who do not have children in the schools should pay property taxes, our method of financing education. Or why a family with five children in school should pay the same as a family with two children. These questions have been well answered: Because everyone benefits from an educated populace. With higher education, the answer is even more stark. We are no longer just concerned that children learn not to do something stupid or illegal before they go work in the factory or on the farm. With higher education we are taking care of much more serious and acute needs. The need for a bridge not to collapse, or an airplane to stay in the air. The need for a doctor to know how to cure what ails you, the need for teachers and dentists and architects and engineers and librarians, researchers, and, if I must admit, lawyers. The man from Maine might just as easily have asked why do you want a doctor available when you are sick or an architect to make sure your condo doesn't collapse or a lawyer to get you out of trouble. Do you really want only those people whose parents could pay the full and exorbitant cost of college to be educated in those professions that “assist” you on a daily basis? Think you wouldn't mind waiting in long lines for needs to be met by too few professionals? Actually, minute to minute, you are aided by the graduates of our colleges and universities. No one today could go five minutes or five miles without an “assist” from a college grad. Beyond the cell phone that you look at the first second you awake, you touch an engineered world all day. You drive an engineered car and even if you walked to Walden Pond to live you'd probably need to cross an engineered bridge. You'd want a microbiologist to save you from tainted fish because Walden Pond is probably now polluted with flammable fracking chemicals. You'd certainly want safe toys for your children and cars that have safety features. Who invented those? I'll bet, for the most part, they went to college first. A plumber may not have a college degree and is a wonderful person to have around when you need your backed-up drain unclogged, but when you need that kidney stone zapped, you're gonna need a doctor. Not since Henry David Thoreau retreated into seclusion has anyone been able to live without college graduate help, in the moment or through the writings and research they endowed to the future. Thoreau, by the way, attended Harvard for a spell and spent only two years away from the growing urban and industrial life that increasingly required higher education. Before medical researchers learned how to prevent diphtheria, parents watched children slowly and agonizingly choke to death. Polio paralyzed children. Jonas Salk, one of the polio vaccine developers, worked for a time at the University of Michigan, and it was at U-M the first national study of the polio vaccine was analyzed. In 1955 the press conference announcing the results was held at U-M's Rackham Hall. Before press packets could be distributed off carts reporters were leaping and climbing over each other to get a copy. In a few seconds they were shouting to each other: “It works! It works!” (See Patenting the Sun by Jane S Smith.) For the relief that flowed around the world that year, no one would have begrudged free college education. Sometimes it seems that scientific agriculture has done harm with all its chemicals and preservatives, but then, education is also needed to right wrongs. Yes, all people benefit when education is prized and given away. No one questioned that in the sixties. Today, Germany, famously, offers free education to everyone. Other European countries that know it is in their best interest to offer free or vastly subsidized college include Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Greece and France. Others include the Czech Republic, India, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Turkey and Russia. In the United States students must juggle $10,000 to $38,000 per year in state schools and up to $60,000 in private ones. Only America, now, burdens it s graduates with loan repayments that often mean they will find it near impossible to also buy a home or start a family. In 1990, when boomers were in their thirties or so, they held 21.3 percent of the nation's wealth, according to Thom Hartmann of The Hartmann Report, and now, thirty-something-year-old millennials own only 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. Hartmann blames the dip wages took with union busting and “Right-to-work-for less” laws, deregulation of the financial industry and medical bills, “another burden that came out of the Reagan Revolution that is destroying millions of American families a year,” he said. Millennial poverty, however, began with student loans. Hartmann said he went to college in the late sixties and paid tuition “working part-time jobs as a dishwasher at Bob’s Big Boy on Trowbridge Road in East Lansing and changing tires and pumping gas at the Esso station across the street.” “My mom paid her own way through four years of Michigan State University in the 1940s with the money she made as a summer lifeguard up in her home town of Charlevoix...” he said. “My dad, like most men of his generation, was paid to go to college by the GI Bill. “Now, Republicans have not only changed the bankruptcy laws so that you are no longer “cleared“ after seven years like it was when I was coming up, but you can’t even discharge student loans in bankruptcy. This was arguably one of the largest gifts the GOP ever gave the banking industry.” You can read Hartman's full report here: https://thomhartmann.medium.com/dear-millennials-im-sorry-we-didn-t-stop-them-d47d78463cbc The Biden administration has been able to offer some student debt relief in certain categories, but where his sweeping plans are halted, it's because Republicans took them to the Republican-dominated Supreme Court. The irony may never have reached President Reagan as he recovered from a gunshot wound in 1981, but the surgeon who saved his life, Dr. Benjamin Aaron, relied on loans and government grants to fund his medical education. Author Diane Petryk can be reached at bloomplanet@gmail.com.
Send comments, questions, and tips to stevenrharry@gmail.com or call or text me at 517-730-2638. If you'd like to be notified by email when I post a new story, let me know.
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