Hey Soy Boy, Deep State, China Paid, Antifa Libz...

[Belsnickel]

(02-22-2021, 01:23 PM)Dill Wrote: Back in my teen years, there were still a considerable number of people who thought that college was about education as much or more as vocational training. Five of my mother's six brothers went to college because people in her family saw it as "bettering" themselves, but not only financially. They had a very protestant obligation to develop all their talents. The whole person.

It seems that rationale disappeared during the '70s, in part as educators at the tertiary level began to meet demand from employers and students to make education more "relevant"--i.e., in practice more useful to employers and less likely to produce civil disruption. By "disappeared" I mean that one began to hear the education rationale pushed less and less among family and educators and the "good job" rationale more.  This was still before students became education "consumers" and "customers" for whom colleges had to compete via spiffy facilities like dorm "suites" and leisure gyms.

I had some Pell Grants and federally insured loans, but they were never "sold" as part of some narrative, at least on the government's part. I just remember that when I began researching how to pay for college, college officers presented me with government-funded "options." There might have been some literature at the Post Office or County building, as well.  In my world, it was mostly parents and peers who boosted college.  And for those primarily focused on "good jobs," one only had to look around town to see who did and didn't have them--the college grads or those who had no time for it.

So to my question: Of course the government has to make options for education funding known to the citizens it serves. That requires some level of advertising. But when you worked in loan accounting, did you actually see government advertising that strove to "sell" education beyond any informative purpose? E.g., were there brochures which featured tables showing income of college and non-college educated earners over decades? Visual advertising to help students imagine themselves into "successful" post-degree lives and the like?

I am aware that many educational institutions--especially for-profit ones--have sought to increase enrollment by presenting education as road to employment. I remember several for-profit scandals involving military tuition assistance, which did exactly that, angling their pitch to military members who needed it for promotion points. But it was not the government selling a narrative there.

I am asking this question because because I am curious as to whether and when the government became so implicated in market logic that it began behaving like a player with its own private interests, and something to buy or sell, and profit from. Were you working on loans before 2010, before the Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act eliminated private lenders from the student loan game? Or were you working after 2010, observing the government behaving more and more like a private lender--but with infinitely vaster collection power?

It really picked up with the Clinton years, which is when we saw such a push for people to go to college. I've definitely seen a lot of material from the Department of Ed talking up college and showing those sorts of tables.

Now, specifically to your last section, why do you think there are no longer private lenders? I started working in the field in 2012 and stopped that role in 2019 when I became an auditor. During that time frame, not only were private loans a regular part of the process, but they were growing in their proportion of the loan funds the university took in.