Yes, I'm on a rant. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, and not only because it's what they pay me to do.
Some of the comments on Facebook and other sites raise another ideological and systemic issue. More than one has asked why anyone planning to be a doctor or lawyer or hedge fund manager would to school in Oregon and be on the hook for 3% of their astronomical income for 24 years. They'd be better off financially to take out traditional student loans.And that's before figuring the cost of graduate school. Unless they also go to school in Oregon, and unless this program also covers grad school, they'll be paying the school from an income that is due in large part to a degree earned elsewhere -- a degree for which they most likely took out traditional student loans.
What would this mean for the financial viability of the program, if the high earners are not part of it? Would it be sustainable with only the contributions from teachers and librarians and nurses, with a few engineers and computer scientists thrown in?
And more importantly, if schools' viability is a function of the post-graduation income of their students, would they have an even greater incentive to cut back and even close programs in arts, humanities, and social sciences? State legislatures are already pressuring schools to increase the number of STEM graduates, and schools are slowly starving programs in every other area, so this is not some paranoid fantasy.
How will this affect admissions? Will schools become more rigid, only accepting students with demonstrated ability to succeed in those fields? Or will they begin accepting as many students as possible, to increase the number "paying it forward?" Will states restrict arts, humanities and social science programs to only one or two institutions? Will schools be willing to accept part-time students, knowing that they won't begin to be reimbursed for 8 years or more? Will they accept non-traditional students?
How will this affect retention and graduation? Will schools have a greater incentive to push students to graduate as soon as possible? Will schools have an incentive to retain marginal students through graduation, or will the incentive be to weed out those students as soon as possible? What effect will this have on grade inflation?
Where is the student's incentive to graduate on time -- if at all? The amount they will pay back won't change if they remain in school another semester or two or three. No one should feel pressured to graduate before their education has been completed; by the same token, no one should feel free to just drift for years.
How will states distribute the money? Would the money go back to the school from which the student graduated or would it go into a general fund benefiting all higher education in the state?
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