• 201dberg
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    2 months ago

    Yeah this supply and demand thing is mostly bullshit. This whole video reels of diverting blame. “It’s not the greedy capitalist running the colleges raising prices exponentially. It’s all you damn kids wanting to be educated.” Just ignore the fact that many other countries have far more affordable colleges and way better graduation rates.

    A big part of it is government funding. Decades ago the government was pumping tons of cash to try and get the population educated and bringing down and controlling college prices. I worked with some old fuck boomer for a while that went on and on about how “I PAID for my college by working for it.” Dumb old fuck had his college subsidized without even asking. Now all the subsidization is gone.

    Now, on top of your points there’s also the fact that student loan debt is a major player in Wall Street. Banks and other debt holders bundle them up and use them as assets to back their stock market gambles and other fuckery. This is why Biden made it impossible to get out of student debt even with filing for bankruptcy. They learned from the crash of 2008, which was kicked off by people defaulting on their mortgages and filing bankruptcy. Wallstreet was using those mortgages as their collateral. They are still doing it now but student loan debt is the big cash cow now cause its safer. This is also why the government will NEVER do student loan forgiveness. It would be an immediate economic collapse of they did. So the more student debt there is to bundle up and use as collateral,the happier the banks and wallstreet is.

    Incidentally this is why they fight so hard to kill remote work. Another big asset they use is commercial real estate… So they NEED offices being bought up and rented.

    • Kaffe
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      2 months ago

      Yeah colleges were heavily subsidized and California had one of the largest public systems in the country. That system also gave Bobby Seale and Huey Newton an education so it’s not a coincidence that 1969 was when college prices started to spiral.

      The colleges themselves are racketeers, I recommend Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris who writes about the creation of Stanford U and its subsequent role in Colonialism and Anti-Communism. Stanford’s campus land houses all of the big weapon makers and it produced Herbert Hoover, the man responsible for mining gold during Australia’s genocide, modernizing the March on Africa, and the modern semi-state food cartels and housing policy.