I think I was 47 when I finally paid mine off. My wife and I are doing everything we can to help our boys get out of college debt free. Starting your career at a net worth of zero is so much better than negative tens of thousands.
akudha · 1h ago
Between student loan and mortgage, I guess most people are destined to be in debt their entire life.
And that is for healthier individuals and not including other loans like car loans etc. God (if there is one) help with medical debt.
How do we expect young people to navigate this rigged system?
solveit · 1h ago
There's nothing wrong with being in debt per se, and in particular, (federal) student loans and mortgages are loans rigged in favor of the borrower.
beej71 · 59m ago
Out of curiosity, how are federal student loans rigged in favor of the borrower? Asking for a friend.
erikerikson · 54m ago
They are issued for something [contingently] incredibly valuable that cannot be repossessed. They are also generally issued at a lower rate of interest with little collateral, in part due to the fact that they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy and the resulting lower risk.
[edit: added "contingently" above. Some education programs have been found to be scams yet could be paid for with debt. I generally stand by the value of higher education and have found it to be a net benefit in my own life. The value has been strained as costs have shifted and the social contract is rearranged behind the backs of educators at all levels]
mrangle · 29m ago
Education is a unique product, which I'd argue warrants favorable loan terms. Ignoring the inability to declare bankruptcy.
Even in non-scam programs, there's sometimes a massive amount of unknowable hazard on the path to a degree. And whether or not the degree is attained, the debt is still due.
In terms of hazard, I don't mean grades. Assume perfect grades. Especially in graduate programs, interpersonal politics can permanently wreck students who then have no effective recourse.
Examples and intricacies of what I'm trying to imply, aside, consider that education is a unique product that costs a lot of money but, in the process of attaining the product, you aren't treated as a customer but as if your position is precarious. Grades aside. Whatever specifics you might imagine, as they would vary, assume that the system is set up to protect the school that is collecting money. Not the person paying it.
Coming back around to my ultimate point about loan terms and risk.
xhkkffbf · 53m ago
I'm curious too. The rates aren't particularly generous. Okay, maybe they're a bit lower than the private markets might deliver given the rates of default. And maybe they let you study whatever you want. A private lender might insist on funding economically worthwhile degrees.
The real issue isn't the loan, but the entire system. The colleges have really jacked up the price of a degree. That's the real source of the problem. The interest rates are much closer to the market rates for capital.
SoftTalker · 1h ago
Tens of thousands isn't much. That's a new car. More people should buy a used one and pay what they owe.
lc9er · 57m ago
This reads like, "It's a banana, Michael, what could it cost, $10?".
SoftTalker · 42m ago
Would you go finance a $50k car and just think it's OK to not make the payments on it?
mrangle · 25m ago
A 50k car almost always drives, and you don't risk someone that doesn't like you telling you that you can't get the title after you've paid.
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
Can’t squeeze a rock. If they can’t afford homes, and a good credit score is all that’s good for, why pay it? Wage garnishment is only a concern if you’re employed or make enough that it’s an option. No future, no payments.
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
> Can’t squeeze a rock.
Sums it up well. What else could anybody possibly expect to happen? Wages have remained flat and/or negated by inflation, upward mobility has declined, and getting hired has become progressively more difficult. Good employment prospects remain in major metropolitan areas with high cost of living that eat paychecks whole. Where are the payments supposed to come from, exactly?
onlyrealcuzzo · 1h ago
Because you can't default on federal student loans. They garnish your wages. So just not paying isn't (currently) an option.
Sure, if never having any income and living off someone else is an option, you can do that.
toomuchtodo · 1h ago
The U.S. Department of Education can garnish up to 15% of your disposable pay (your net wages after legally required deductions like taxes). However, they must leave you with at least 30 times the federal minimum wage, which is currently $7.25 per hour, or $217.50 per week.
So, 15% for the rest of your life or until you can leave the country and are beyond their reach (if an option) if you cannot afford to pay them off. The reality for many is they will never have enough income potential to pay off this debt, so the best course of action is to bail on it to optimize for quality of life if you’ll never be able to pay it back. The developed world is hungry for young, educated talent.
Other country’s citizens leave to avoid military service, Americans leave to…avoid student loan repayments. That’s sad.
toomuchtodo · 1h ago
If people leave your country because it sucks, that’s a governance problem, not a citizen problem. People are mobile, if they have options and can do better, they should take them. Life is short and you only live once. Debt is just accounting, it is a shared delusion like a currency.
We set these citizens up to fail, and they’re the bad guys? Hardly. If you can escape the torment nexus, go, don’t look back. The torment nexus does not care about you. “The purpose of the system is what it does.”
Alive-in-2025 · 49m ago
We've got a lot of governance problems. Our system allows college prices to get really high, mostly because 18 year kids can sign up for these guaranteed loans. They don't know what they are signing up for, and colleges just want students in seats. People don't know if their major has good employment prospects, avg salary and how that will affect their loan repayment.
America chose to do this, banks make big money from the loans. Colleges make big money from students.
We have a similar system with medical care. We have regulatory capture of our medical system by the drug sellers, medical groups, etc. We pay way way way more than other countries with worse outcomes. And the reaction of half the country, the republicans, it is we'll fix this by eliminating a lot of coverage for poor people. Democrats try to control costs, cover more poor people, get on a better trajectory and it's demonzied as destroying democracy. Meanwhile, our recently passed BBB bill takes billions out of medicare, ie coverage for poor people, many of whom voted for Trump. This whole thing is disgusting. I'm angry because of the loss of potential here, just like for student debt.
My dad says colleges are corrupt because they "waste money on dei things" and that's why they have high costs (sadly not making this up). I try to explain college is not subsidized like it used to be when you went to college in the 60s. Similar thing with young people not affording housing, not having kids as much.
anonandwhistle · 1h ago
As they should. They bailed banks in 2008. It's time for each citizen to equally get same level of tax money, amounts they deserve like bank owners and banks? why it was only possible for banks in 2008 and airlines in covid and PPE loans in Covid ?
lokar · 1h ago
The got equity and loans for the bailout, and made a lot of profit in the end
theyarethey · 1h ago
> The[sic] got equity and loans for the bailout, and made a lot of profit in the end
Your running to defend the bailout in this way reveals your bias.
The “they” in your defense is the government, who issued the loans, but the money was yours and mine. That is, they were public funds, but we, the public, failed to get anything tangibly out of this “profit”.
Quite the opposite, really.
The public took a great deal of the brunt of the failure of the economic tools these banks dreamed up in the form of foreclosures, wherein members of the public completely lost the only financial asset many possess.
lokar · 43m ago
Where do you think the repayments went?
cjfd · 1h ago
One cannot just look at the end result. It is also of relevance what risk was run. Nobody else was willing to lend those bank some more money. Guess why. If can play russian roulette and win 100000 dollars if you survive and it turns out that you survive and get 100000 dollars can we conclude from this that it was a wise decision?
vineyardmike · 1h ago
And an educated population is also an end goal “they” (we) should be happy paying for.
anonnon · 1h ago
> each citizen
Go lookup the lifetime earnings of college grads vs. HS-only. Then go lookup the demographics (especially economic) of student loan borrowers. Then go lookup home ownership rates of college grads vs. HS-only.
bluGill · 52m ago
Those charts are interesting but better to look up by degree. Some degrees are not worth getting, some are only from a cheap school. And there are non degree jobs that pay very well - if you can get one.
anonnon · 26m ago
My point was that student loan debtors are some of the least deserving of forgiveness, given that you have actual poor people struggling to make ends meet. At best you could make a case for the ones who never graduated or whose degree demonstrably hasn't improved their income or employability, or for making the loans dischargeable through bankruptcy.
Student loans are bailouts. The banks paid back their loans, why shouldn't students?
al_borland · 1h ago
Various people in the government have been telling them for years that they'll be forgiven, and creating periods where they don't need to pay on them, what did people expect would happen?
Anyone have a way to read this without a log in? I can't seem to get past the paywall with archive tools.
Aside from that, a friend of mine had a good solution for this - she just moved to Europe, got citizenship, and plans to never return to the states. Granted, she also had a terrible connection with her family, so she didn't stand to lose much anyway.
Edit: WarOnPrivacy has us covered with a link. Thanks!
Alive-in-2025 · 48m ago
To do that for yourself, put "https://archive.is/" the actual url. If there is tracking junk at the end of the link you might have to trim the url. Very often it's already archived, some times you have to wait for it to load.
ivape · 1h ago
I think both the student and school should be on the hook for the loan. If the student is successful and does not pay, the school has legal rights. If the student is unsuccessful, then the student has legal rights. Both can sue each other for the full cost of the loan.
I still don’t know why there aren’t mass scale class action lawsuits against higher education for certain degrees.
dml2135 · 50m ago
For real, it’s basically predatory. And I’m not talking about BS degrees from crap online schools.
What the Ivy Leagues charge for certain graduate degrees in the social sciences is basically a huge scam. There is absolutely no viable pathway to pay back the $200,000+ cost of a graduate degree in social sciences from a school like Columbia or Harvard, other than public service loan forgiveness, if you actually want to work in the field that the degree ostensibly prepares you for.
I know people that got grad degrees like this and then ended up going to coding bootcamps so they could work in tech to pay them off.
stonogo · 53m ago
The school isn't issuing the loans. How exactly do you think student loans work?
bluGill · 49m ago
The banks should demand the school take responsibility as part of agreeing to the loan.
if the degree is for fun not a job that is fine - but as the taxpaper subsidising this all I only want to help those who will pay off my investment (or those who stasticaly would have had not whatever unexpected disaster happened)
stonogo · 47m ago
You appear to have mistaken the purpose of a degree. It's not a job ticket. The school gave you what you paid for. Your transaction is complete.
dml2135 · 48m ago
The loans should not be given out, but also schools should not be charging the sort of tuition that they do for professional degrees, for professions that do not provide a salary that could pay for said tuition.
stonogo · 45m ago
University degrees are not coupons for jobs, regardless of what someone told you when you were little. They never have been.
dml2135 · 38m ago
I’m specifically talking about professional, graduate degrees. Undergrad is a different matter.
A professional degree should give you an opportunity to increase your income in proportion to the cost of the degree. If that is not even close to being the case, as is what happens with a lot of degrees at elite schools, then I’d call that what it is — a scam.
dahart · 18m ago
The stats from the US FED show that people with professional degrees earn approximately 3x what people without degrees make, and people with undergrad degrees earn - on average - 2x what people without degrees make. Your hypothesis is somewhat flawed.
ivape · 47m ago
You’re a drug abuser, I’m a drug dealer. I can’t sell you drugs without money. I have a friend who can give you a loan if you convince him, then you can pay me.
I know the drug dealer is not issuing the loan, but the dealer accepts and facilitates it. I’ll make it clearer:
I’m a drug dealer that doesn’t care where you get your money. If you rob and kill someone and bring me the money, I will take it.
So how does the dealer facilitate this entire institution?
They take the money, simple as that. If a drug dealer was a legal entity, they’d be sued into oblivion. These schools may as well be selling kilos of coke.
I’ll go one further:
I’m a drug dealer, currently you have no drug addiction. I cannot make money if you don’t have an addiction. Let me convince you need to take this drug.
The dealer creates the market for the loan too. Higher education needs you to take the loan.
pengaru · 1h ago
Of course they're not paying their student debt. When the federal government of the moment is using student loan forgiveness to try bribe reelection votes, it sends a pretty strong signal that this shit is frivolous.
As a taxpayer who has never taken on loans of any kind, I find this all quite irritating. You take on debt, you pay the debt, don't turn my tax dollars into your negligence subsidy.
vineyardmike · 1h ago
Sometimes the government can help someone who isn’t you, without it being a problem for you. And society is large and complex, so you’ve certainly benefited from lots of government spending on things that don’t benefit you.
As a taxpayer who paid off all the debts they’ve incurred, I have no ill feelings towards those who can’t.
As a taxpayer who has always been able to pay for food, I have no ill feelings towards those on food stamps.
As a taxpayer who has been able to pay rent/mortgage, I have no ill feelings towards those in shelters.
Some people need help, it’s the responsibility of everyone else in society to aid those in need.
ChadNauseam · 1h ago
The difference is that people on food stamps and people who are in homeless shelters are in need of help. They are our most needy (perhaps in addition to those on mediaid). I am not needy, yet for some reason I would have been a beneficiary of Biden's original student loan forgiveness plan. Giving money to people for having loans for a college degree doesn't seem like a great way to redistribute to "those in need". I haven't looked it up, but I'd be willing to bet that people with student loans earn more than others their age, even after accounting for their loan payments.
And it does create a massive moral hazard. I still have my student loans, because why would I pay them off? I'd rather wait for someone to get elected and decide to pay them off for me. (And you can bet that everyone considering taking loans is thinking the same thing, and factoring the chance of forgiveness into the expected cost of the loans.)
dahart · 37m ago
FWIW, that strikes me as a somewhat myopic view of ‘need’. Homelessness and food stamps are certainly an incredibly acute need, for daily survival. But investing in education is something our country needs for long term survival.
The US makes more money on the additional income tax of college educated people than it costs to educate them, many times over. It’s in our collective interest to put you (and anyone who wants to go) through college. I totally get the personal responsibility angle here, but the actual moral hazard here is that our country chooses not to cover education in the first place, when it doesn’t make economic sense to do anything else, and not educating people is worse for everyone (except perhaps a few CEO billionaires).
As a total side note, it’s also really interesting to me how strong our ingrained no-free-lunch and teach-someone-to-fish mores are, even when there’s lots of strong counter evidence. Poverty is extremely damaging and getting people out of poverty by giving them what they need is more important than forcing people to struggle through it and learn something. The (often) unspoken assumption that rides under that stuff is that people are poor because of bad choices and low work ethic, which is frequently completely and utterly wrong, and anyway extremely complicated because being poor forces people to make bad choices. Breaking the cycle allows people in need to live and breathe and make good choices.
dml2135 · 1h ago
On the flip side, your tax dollars made a bad loan. Usually, when a creditor did a bad job underwriting and makes a loan that cannot be repaid, the creditor is made to eat the cost.
datavirtue · 1h ago
This. People want to act like they aren't the government when it does something stupid.
nickff · 1h ago
Voters have basically no power, and very little incentive to even bother voting wisely. There is abundant evidence that your vote does not matter, and to pretend otherwise is fantasy.
dml2135 · 36m ago
Oaky but again — be pissed at the government for making bad loans in the first place, not for writing them off when it is impossible for them to be repaid.
nickpsecurity · 51m ago
Those of us who voted for the current President have seen him do so much of what he told us he would with so much progress. Even his opponents claim he's done dozens to fifty things in office that they wish didn't happen. Even they agree he's getting a lot done. So, he's proof that our vote counted.
I'd rather have a person following Christ with godly character. That plus not taking a bribe and having skill at leading are the Bible's standard for picking rulers. Americans filter them for these rich, elitist egomaniacs. Then, we have to pick the lesser evil on policy grounds until that stops. God works even through the wicked to bless us in some ways, though. That's the bright side.
jasonlotito · 43m ago
Whatever it takes to justify voting for and supporting a rapist and a pedophile. Jesus would be proud, I'm sure.
stonogo · 52m ago
Why would you claim evidence and not cite any?
cricketsandmops · 1h ago
I look at it more as an investment in our citizens . If you don't keep your grades up or fail out you should have to pay it back, but if you graduate and start your life, pay taxes etc the loans should be forgiven. The country would eventually get their investment back via taxes. They could implement this and some type of oversight to reign in the university costs. Easier to control indebted people though so it wont happen.
dml2135 · 30m ago
Practically, this makes no sense though. Those that do not complete school are the ones that will have the hardest time paying back their loans. You are just burying people further in their own failures.
Young people make mistakes. It does not benefit society to make those mistakes ruin their lives.
nickff · 1h ago
That would make sense as a program, though it might incentivize some strange Cobra-Effect type behaviour among both institutions and students. The problem is that the backwards-looking forgiveness/giveaway programs do not incentivize people to work hard or select degrees they can complete.
gameman144 · 48m ago
I think one difference is that for most investments, you get some say in what you invest in.
For public schools, you have school districts. For infrastructure you have utility districts. For libraries and parks and amenities, you have municipal government.
For student loans, though, the individual students are the ones making the decisions. The taxpayer is subsidizing students pursuing highly employable careers like engineering or medical science, but is equally subsidizing students pursuing unemployable degrees like cultural studies or literature.
And to be clear, these areas do have value, but it also seems reasonable for taxpayers to call out the fact that these are terrible ROI investments, money-wise.
michaelfm1211 · 1h ago
Congrats on not having to take out a loan. Most people aren't that lucky.
Most people taking out student loans are still teenagers. Does anyone really expect a teenager to make good financial decisions? Also, most people can't get a solid job without going to college, so they're forced to take out loans.
That "negligence subsidy" is really helping people who were put in an unfair situation by colleges and banks.
xnx · 1h ago
> As a taxpayer who has never taken on loans of any kind
No mortgage? Bravo
shazbotter · 1h ago
No credit card, no mortgage, no "you cover dinner tonight and I'll Venmo you later"...
lotsofpulp · 1h ago
I would bet they inherited land which has benefitted tremendously from price increases due to taxpayer subsidized no prepayment penalty 30 year fixed rate mortgages.
pengaru · 1h ago
> I would bet they inherited land which has benefitted tremendously from price increases due to taxpayer subsidized no prepayment penalty 30 year fixed rate mortgages.
Try again. I've inherited relatively little.
michaelfm1211 · 1h ago
> Try again. I've inherited relatively little.
Most people inherit nothing. Actually, most people end up spending money taking care of their parents.
nickff · 59m ago
Why do you think most people inherit nothing? Every person I know who has had an immediate family member die has received some sort of inheritance, though sometimes not a very valuable one. Do you have a citation for your very strong claim?
dahart · 27m ago
It’s crazy easy to Google that claim, why not try that first? “Every person I know” is also known as type of ‘survivor bias’. Googling, I get multiple answers that 30%-40% of US citizens get any inheritance, which is a minority. Here’s one of them: https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2011/pdf/ec110030.p...
bluGill · 44m ago
because for most inheiritance is a rounding error. Either I happens far too late in life and so you are already set or it is distributed between so many others your share is insignificant.
though it appears most people will get something
dgfitz · 24m ago
When my grandmother-in-law passes away, my father-in-law will be about 500k+ “in the hole” because he will receive nothing, and has housed them for the past 25 years, in addition to paying for care, GIL has dementia.
nickpsecurity · 57m ago
We were forced to go to school under penalty of law. We were told our whole time that you have to go to college to get a good job. Employers often demanded Bachelor's degrees to get hired at all. If not, "you'll be flipping burgers" was a common warning.
The people requiring us to go to college usually wouodn't pay for it. The colleges got more expensive. So, if it's required or really helps, it was rational to take on college loans to get a Bachelor's in good specializations. Many of us did IT or Business. (I did both.)
Once out of college, people looking for jobs found that most companies woukdnt hire them for lack of experience. If they did, they would pay them a little above minimum wage. That would either not cover the bills or barely cover them. The minimums on the loans were high, too.
At this point, people with Business degrees are working in grocery stores making nothing but loaded with debt. They realize they were screwed by the whole system in what amounted to a long-term con about the ROI of a college degree. They feel that, if they got nothing for it, they shouldn't have to repay it at all or at least get a break on payments. They're paying less on the debts to experience some of the quality of life they were promised if they spent 4 years on a degree.
That's what happened to a large number of hard-working people whose expensive degrees got them nothing but poverty and debt. They're barely scraping by now. They wish they ignored all the advice in school and never got one. Or maybe got the cheapest one they could find instead of really investing into a worthless asset.
And the best part is we all get to read descriptions of us online that we were just irresponsible, lazy idiots. No mention of years of being forced by schools and businesses to get this debt to have a decent job. No mention that they often don't pay people with degrees anything. Something seems wrong about that.
AmVess · 54m ago
One foolish decision after another. Believing that the loans would be hand waived away was peak naivety.
And now, 2/3 of them are not even bothering to pay the loans. Good luck getting an apartment, house, car, or a top job with bad credit.
readthenotes1 · 1h ago
Financial aid programs began so that deserving students could get to college and afford to do so without requiring extended family support.
Not too surprisingly, the perverse incentive of government aid to school administration and loan brokers has made college nearly unaffordable for all.
And of course, boomers cut the tax subsidies to schools once they are out so that even without the administrative bloat, tuition would be more expensive for those who came after
righthand · 2h ago
I’m ahead on payments because I want to get rid of them. Now I’m wondering if I should hold on to them and stop paying ahead so I am not covering other peoples chunk of the debt today. This sounds cruel in some passive way but I’d rather help signal the unaffordable-ness of the Usa.
I can’t afford:
- eggs (generally many groceries are more expensive)
- a 1-2 bed home of any quality
- medical care that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg
- my energy bill has doubled
- my savings payments have lowered
- 9+% inflation
And many of these problem have existed for the last 10+ years. But at least we had a pretty great bond market for a few years to help offset regular inflation.
If people can’t afford something like a student loan that’s already been “delayed or postponed” they will definitely deprioritize it.
jedberg · 1h ago
> Now I’m wondering if I should hold on to them and stop paying ahead
If you want to be purely logical about it, the only thing that matters is the interest rate. Can you get higher returns investing the money elsewhere? Then invest it elsewhere.
My student loan was at 0.2% (yes, below 1). I made the minimum payment every month for 15 years. I was actually sad when it ended. I wish I could have added to the balance!
Also one other thing to remember, a student loan doesn't have collateral. They can't take your degree back if you don't pay. They can garnish your wage, but that's about it.
And that is for healthier individuals and not including other loans like car loans etc. God (if there is one) help with medical debt.
How do we expect young people to navigate this rigged system?
[edit: added "contingently" above. Some education programs have been found to be scams yet could be paid for with debt. I generally stand by the value of higher education and have found it to be a net benefit in my own life. The value has been strained as costs have shifted and the social contract is rearranged behind the backs of educators at all levels]
Even in non-scam programs, there's sometimes a massive amount of unknowable hazard on the path to a degree. And whether or not the degree is attained, the debt is still due.
In terms of hazard, I don't mean grades. Assume perfect grades. Especially in graduate programs, interpersonal politics can permanently wreck students who then have no effective recourse.
Examples and intricacies of what I'm trying to imply, aside, consider that education is a unique product that costs a lot of money but, in the process of attaining the product, you aren't treated as a customer but as if your position is precarious. Grades aside. Whatever specifics you might imagine, as they would vary, assume that the system is set up to protect the school that is collecting money. Not the person paying it.
Coming back around to my ultimate point about loan terms and risk.
The real issue isn't the loan, but the entire system. The colleges have really jacked up the price of a degree. That's the real source of the problem. The interest rates are much closer to the market rates for capital.
Sums it up well. What else could anybody possibly expect to happen? Wages have remained flat and/or negated by inflation, upward mobility has declined, and getting hired has become progressively more difficult. Good employment prospects remain in major metropolitan areas with high cost of living that eat paychecks whole. Where are the payments supposed to come from, exactly?
Sure, if never having any income and living off someone else is an option, you can do that.
So, 15% for the rest of your life or until you can leave the country and are beyond their reach (if an option) if you cannot afford to pay them off. The reality for many is they will never have enough income potential to pay off this debt, so the best course of action is to bail on it to optimize for quality of life if you’ll never be able to pay it back. The developed world is hungry for young, educated talent.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/25/they-fled-the-country-to-esc...
We set these citizens up to fail, and they’re the bad guys? Hardly. If you can escape the torment nexus, go, don’t look back. The torment nexus does not care about you. “The purpose of the system is what it does.”
America chose to do this, banks make big money from the loans. Colleges make big money from students.
We have a similar system with medical care. We have regulatory capture of our medical system by the drug sellers, medical groups, etc. We pay way way way more than other countries with worse outcomes. And the reaction of half the country, the republicans, it is we'll fix this by eliminating a lot of coverage for poor people. Democrats try to control costs, cover more poor people, get on a better trajectory and it's demonzied as destroying democracy. Meanwhile, our recently passed BBB bill takes billions out of medicare, ie coverage for poor people, many of whom voted for Trump. This whole thing is disgusting. I'm angry because of the loss of potential here, just like for student debt.
My dad says colleges are corrupt because they "waste money on dei things" and that's why they have high costs (sadly not making this up). I try to explain college is not subsidized like it used to be when you went to college in the 60s. Similar thing with young people not affording housing, not having kids as much.
Your running to defend the bailout in this way reveals your bias.
The “they” in your defense is the government, who issued the loans, but the money was yours and mine. That is, they were public funds, but we, the public, failed to get anything tangibly out of this “profit”.
Quite the opposite, really.
The public took a great deal of the brunt of the failure of the economic tools these banks dreamed up in the form of foreclosures, wherein members of the public completely lost the only financial asset many possess.
Go lookup the lifetime earnings of college grads vs. HS-only. Then go lookup the demographics (especially economic) of student loan borrowers. Then go lookup home ownership rates of college grads vs. HS-only.
But otherwise, it's just the college cohort voting themselves a handout they don't deserve, and it only deepens the degree divide: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/college-costs-working...
Aside from that, a friend of mine had a good solution for this - she just moved to Europe, got citizenship, and plans to never return to the states. Granted, she also had a terrible connection with her family, so she didn't stand to lose much anyway.
Edit: WarOnPrivacy has us covered with a link. Thanks!
I still don’t know why there aren’t mass scale class action lawsuits against higher education for certain degrees.
What the Ivy Leagues charge for certain graduate degrees in the social sciences is basically a huge scam. There is absolutely no viable pathway to pay back the $200,000+ cost of a graduate degree in social sciences from a school like Columbia or Harvard, other than public service loan forgiveness, if you actually want to work in the field that the degree ostensibly prepares you for.
I know people that got grad degrees like this and then ended up going to coding bootcamps so they could work in tech to pay them off.
if the degree is for fun not a job that is fine - but as the taxpaper subsidising this all I only want to help those who will pay off my investment (or those who stasticaly would have had not whatever unexpected disaster happened)
A professional degree should give you an opportunity to increase your income in proportion to the cost of the degree. If that is not even close to being the case, as is what happens with a lot of degrees at elite schools, then I’d call that what it is — a scam.
I know the drug dealer is not issuing the loan, but the dealer accepts and facilitates it. I’ll make it clearer:
I’m a drug dealer that doesn’t care where you get your money. If you rob and kill someone and bring me the money, I will take it.
So how does the dealer facilitate this entire institution?
They take the money, simple as that. If a drug dealer was a legal entity, they’d be sued into oblivion. These schools may as well be selling kilos of coke.
I’ll go one further:
I’m a drug dealer, currently you have no drug addiction. I cannot make money if you don’t have an addiction. Let me convince you need to take this drug.
The dealer creates the market for the loan too. Higher education needs you to take the loan.
As a taxpayer who has never taken on loans of any kind, I find this all quite irritating. You take on debt, you pay the debt, don't turn my tax dollars into your negligence subsidy.
As a taxpayer who paid off all the debts they’ve incurred, I have no ill feelings towards those who can’t.
As a taxpayer who has always been able to pay for food, I have no ill feelings towards those on food stamps.
As a taxpayer who has been able to pay rent/mortgage, I have no ill feelings towards those in shelters.
Some people need help, it’s the responsibility of everyone else in society to aid those in need.
And it does create a massive moral hazard. I still have my student loans, because why would I pay them off? I'd rather wait for someone to get elected and decide to pay them off for me. (And you can bet that everyone considering taking loans is thinking the same thing, and factoring the chance of forgiveness into the expected cost of the loans.)
The US makes more money on the additional income tax of college educated people than it costs to educate them, many times over. It’s in our collective interest to put you (and anyone who wants to go) through college. I totally get the personal responsibility angle here, but the actual moral hazard here is that our country chooses not to cover education in the first place, when it doesn’t make economic sense to do anything else, and not educating people is worse for everyone (except perhaps a few CEO billionaires).
As a total side note, it’s also really interesting to me how strong our ingrained no-free-lunch and teach-someone-to-fish mores are, even when there’s lots of strong counter evidence. Poverty is extremely damaging and getting people out of poverty by giving them what they need is more important than forcing people to struggle through it and learn something. The (often) unspoken assumption that rides under that stuff is that people are poor because of bad choices and low work ethic, which is frequently completely and utterly wrong, and anyway extremely complicated because being poor forces people to make bad choices. Breaking the cycle allows people in need to live and breathe and make good choices.
I'd rather have a person following Christ with godly character. That plus not taking a bribe and having skill at leading are the Bible's standard for picking rulers. Americans filter them for these rich, elitist egomaniacs. Then, we have to pick the lesser evil on policy grounds until that stops. God works even through the wicked to bless us in some ways, though. That's the bright side.
Young people make mistakes. It does not benefit society to make those mistakes ruin their lives.
For public schools, you have school districts. For infrastructure you have utility districts. For libraries and parks and amenities, you have municipal government.
For student loans, though, the individual students are the ones making the decisions. The taxpayer is subsidizing students pursuing highly employable careers like engineering or medical science, but is equally subsidizing students pursuing unemployable degrees like cultural studies or literature.
And to be clear, these areas do have value, but it also seems reasonable for taxpayers to call out the fact that these are terrible ROI investments, money-wise.
Most people taking out student loans are still teenagers. Does anyone really expect a teenager to make good financial decisions? Also, most people can't get a solid job without going to college, so they're forced to take out loans.
That "negligence subsidy" is really helping people who were put in an unfair situation by colleges and banks.
No mortgage? Bravo
Try again. I've inherited relatively little.
Most people inherit nothing. Actually, most people end up spending money taking care of their parents.
though it appears most people will get something
The people requiring us to go to college usually wouodn't pay for it. The colleges got more expensive. So, if it's required or really helps, it was rational to take on college loans to get a Bachelor's in good specializations. Many of us did IT or Business. (I did both.)
Once out of college, people looking for jobs found that most companies woukdnt hire them for lack of experience. If they did, they would pay them a little above minimum wage. That would either not cover the bills or barely cover them. The minimums on the loans were high, too.
At this point, people with Business degrees are working in grocery stores making nothing but loaded with debt. They realize they were screwed by the whole system in what amounted to a long-term con about the ROI of a college degree. They feel that, if they got nothing for it, they shouldn't have to repay it at all or at least get a break on payments. They're paying less on the debts to experience some of the quality of life they were promised if they spent 4 years on a degree.
That's what happened to a large number of hard-working people whose expensive degrees got them nothing but poverty and debt. They're barely scraping by now. They wish they ignored all the advice in school and never got one. Or maybe got the cheapest one they could find instead of really investing into a worthless asset.
And the best part is we all get to read descriptions of us online that we were just irresponsible, lazy idiots. No mention of years of being forced by schools and businesses to get this debt to have a decent job. No mention that they often don't pay people with degrees anything. Something seems wrong about that.
And now, 2/3 of them are not even bothering to pay the loans. Good luck getting an apartment, house, car, or a top job with bad credit.
Not too surprisingly, the perverse incentive of government aid to school administration and loan brokers has made college nearly unaffordable for all.
And of course, boomers cut the tax subsidies to schools once they are out so that even without the administrative bloat, tuition would be more expensive for those who came after
I can’t afford:
- eggs (generally many groceries are more expensive)
- a 1-2 bed home of any quality
- medical care that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg
- my energy bill has doubled
- my savings payments have lowered
- 9+% inflation
And many of these problem have existed for the last 10+ years. But at least we had a pretty great bond market for a few years to help offset regular inflation.
If people can’t afford something like a student loan that’s already been “delayed or postponed” they will definitely deprioritize it.
If you want to be purely logical about it, the only thing that matters is the interest rate. Can you get higher returns investing the money elsewhere? Then invest it elsewhere.
My student loan was at 0.2% (yes, below 1). I made the minimum payment every month for 15 years. I was actually sad when it ended. I wish I could have added to the balance!
Also one other thing to remember, a student loan doesn't have collateral. They can't take your degree back if you don't pay. They can garnish your wage, but that's about it.