 Welcome to Teens on Topic, I'm your host Emma Arnson and today I'm joined by Sam Sheridan, Hadi Shah, Issa Sheikh. We have another exciting topic this week to talk about but first let's see what the people of Davis have to say about it. Do you think college tuition should be free? I mean I think we'd all like that. I think that'd be really nice and it'd make it inside divides a lot more people to go to school too because then they wouldn't have to worry about paying for it. But politics are not my thing so not really gonna. That would be amazing if it is. I think it's terrible right now that the students basically have to take out a loan that's equivalent of a house loan and try to pay that back to school. I graduated from college like in 1985 and it was a lot cheaper back then and so I wasn't saddled with you know this humongous debt. I also hope that the more and more schools if it doesn't become free the more and more that there are more programs to forgive college debt especially if you go into if you do something good for society or whatever like that that my wife actually benefited from something like that when she graduated she wanted to go into public interest law to help people in poverty. That's awesome. Yeah so yeah the politicians right now that are talking about that good for them. So you support like debt relief programs and stuff like and candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have a like free like tuition programs that they want to implement? Yeah definitely I mean you know they have to figure out the ways to pay for it you know but you know so anybody talking about that house you know in order for everyone to buy it you know they're gonna have to explain how they're gonna pay for it but yeah it's you know it shouldn't be this like ridiculous thing on your shoulders when you get out of college. I mean people usually have some debt you know when they get out of college but not that much debt. And then it's you know it's harder to find like especially if you want to go into a job that maybe isn't like it's high paying but it's like something of great benefit to society you know you end up like taking jobs that you know pay you more money but it's maybe it's not really what you want to do or you know or you know you could be doing something something better than that if not for this problem. Yes I do think it should be free it's important to educate the youth of America and starting them off by putting them in debt for essentially the rest of their life is not really a good way to boost our future economy and everything in this country. Do you think it's like realistic for like candidates like Bernie Sanders who promise like debt free college? I think it can be with the proper delegation of funds. He hasn't really put out a distinct plan for how he wants to go about free college. Elizabeth Warren has a more actual structured plan about how she'd want to pay for it. I'm more of a Bernie fan but I'd like to see him actually put out a plan for how he intends to pay for it. Well those were some very interesting opinions seems like everyone pretty much had the same yes we should have free college but Sam what do you think about the their like opinions on the fact that it should be free? I think that like there needs to be some sort of like difference between like public universities and private universities. I know for me personally I have a lot of issues with the UC system and the way that things are run especially for people like us who live in California and who are from California. It sometimes feels like we don't even have the upper hand going to these like California schools. I know that for me I'm relying on like financial aid and aid from the school to get myself through college but I don't think that all college necessarily be free. I do want to dive into something a little bit later about how I feel about like FAFSA and stuff like that. If anyone else has any opinions or anything? I don't like the DMV because it's low and so if college is like that I won't be happy. If the government runs colleges? No. I think this is a super duper I mean it's not necessarily complicated but there's so many aspects to this. I mean there's the free tuition things for public colleges and there's debt relief which Elizabeth Warren has said. I think it's really easy to just say yeah we want free college and then pretend like you can pay for that. Bernie Sanders who is I mean congratulations to him this is his work going from the fringe to being in the mainstream now where his ideas basically accepted by the entire it is not even his party but the Democratic Party and so he simultaneously says that he wants a middle-class tax cut which if you're gonna do all these spendings is not the only thing that he wants to spend extravagant lots of money on. He has all those other things but if you want to spend all that money you're gonna have to find a way to pay for it and there's not enough rich people in America that you're just gonna oh we're gonna need to tax the million is and billion is which I'm one of now he's a billion he's a billion he's a millionaire now but they already pay so much of our taxes it's you know you can keep raising the rates it's just not enough to pay for all these crazy things which I think is the first thing that we need to look over before a whole lot of other things that are involved in this. Well Blaine once told me that if you took all the money from the most rich people at top 10% it could run the government for eight months which is like I mean government spends a lot of damn money so I don't think we can keep spending more we can find places to cut it but I don't know college already sucks wouldn't it get worse if it was free? Well yeah I think that another thing that's like important to look at is is like how government aid impacts like the pricing for colleges like if the government keeps giving more and more aid colleges keep seeing or colleges don't see any downturn in like applications or expenses if like as because the government is giving people more aid and so then the colleges are like oh we can just continue to raise our prices and then the government gives more aid and the colleges raise prices and so I think that that's kind of a problem in a cycle too and that's what we see the price of college increasing so much more rapidly and so much more quickly than just right now I think this is something that a lot of people neglect to realize which is I think it's the Kato Institute has a project called Human Progress and they have this chart where it shows for one textbook in the 1980s you can't even get it one textbook now and for one of those ugly box TVs you can get like 15 of those yeah the price of everything related to education has been subsidized and therefore prices have gone up it's just if you want to make something as screwed up as college subsidized it yeah yeah how do you guys I mean it's like how much did like money and that kind of stuff impact your decision well I think it definitely impacted mine I got like a half ride scholarship to the college I'm going to and I I definitely wouldn't be able to afford to go to that college if I didn't get that aid yeah the government did give me some money that's from the government right yeah yeah I don't know they gave me some money so yeah I feel like a communist at this point it's also free money so I'll take it the problem with that is that a lot of that money isn't free rate so a lot of it and not all of it is you know financially a lot of it is loans which is the government loaning you know people money that they have trouble with later on I think you see a lot of people later on in life saddled with student debt and you know there are decisions that we are going on into the world can make that will prevent us from going to that rate working it working with college it sucks it's you know it's tough it might make life boring because you don't have time for other stuff but it helps going through community college and transferring saves you a lot of money there are a lot of tangible steps that you can do as you know college students as people going into the world that save you money in the long run and then you don't have to have the government pay your debts off just going to the debt idea that's pretty crazy because how would I feel if I'm somebody who's you know had a lot of debt and managed to pay it off managed to work my butt off to pay my debt off and then I see you know my cousin Sal getting all his my my cousin getting all his debt just erased by Elizabeth Warren I think that's pretty unfair yeah I think another thing though that's important to look at is student debt is the only I think my understanding is like the only that you can't go bankrupt from like you can when you declare bankruptcy like your student debts stay with you and so I think that like the fact that people who are 17 and 18 years old are signing up for these debts that might carry with them throughout the rest of their entire lives is kind of ridiculous I think that obviously like if you work your butt off and if you pay your student loans off that's great but at the same time like how is America putting children in a situation where they like now get ready to carry this debt for the rest of your entire life and we're not gonna tell you we're not gonna give you any extra support we're not gonna give you any relief anything like that because you signed up to do it this other person paid it off why can't you like obviously in a perfect world everyone could pay it off and everyone would be like I picked myself up and I worked three jobs and I did it the way that I could but like that's unfortunately not the reality especially like depending on how rigorous your academic coursework is and so like obviously missing out on social things to work is just part of life but I think it's much more than that I think with the way that college is set up like I know that I'm signing on to a lot of student loan debt just because of where I'm going to school and it's my choice obviously and I'm like willing to accept that but I would feel better and it would feel better to me if I knew that the government was willing to offer some sort of not even relief just like understanding for my student loan debt because I think it's kind of like signing you're signing part of your life away if there's no way to relieve it there's no way to go bankrupt I think that's right and I think our federal government does do a lot to encourage this whole student debt culture right right with FAFSA they're encouraging you to take these loans that'll trouble you throughout your life also I mean there is there are choices to avoid those debt I just think that's plain I think I think for me that I mean a lot of those choices would be less pal palatable but they're still away to avoid this culture I guess of debt taking we don't it's not just something with college but it's a big problem with our college application system today that we're basically encouraging student debt and then sometimes for majors that don't help you pay them off yeah that's another thing that like I'm thinking about too now realizing like like one thing that if I could give advice to myself in the past or just in general to people is like look at what you're gonna major in and look at that average salary and then think about that because obviously you have the dream job and you have like the stuff like that but but I think the thing about especially for like like I'm I'm a communications major but I know kind of where I want to work a little bit more and like what the salary looks like for that but for people who maybe don't I feel like that's something that's that's important to look at even more than just like could I pay this off well thank you all for joining us it was a very interesting episode make sure and join us next week thank you