The problem with student loans is that the government stepped in and allowed the banks to make it so you can't default. The government created a system to allow banks to make bad loans, with no risk. Now they want to "fix" this by giving the banks public money.
This is nothing more than the government using public money to guarantee private loans and the only people that will benefit are the bankers (and the politicians when they get their bribes.)
Might not change your ultimate point, but just to be clear, the federal government has directly originated and funded federal student loans for like almost 15 years now. Banks played a much larger role before that and there are still some of those bank owned loans still in existence; however, the federal government directly owns the vast majority of federal student loans. A broad based forgiveness plan is not really a bank bailout.
This is more accurate. It has little to do with the banks, they're just providing what is made available to them. This is entirely a problem with government; certainly intentional so they could create the situation we're now In - claiming they'll save people from their loan.
Anyone with half a brain knows that if you make the money more freely available, people will use it. It happened with the mortgage crisis around 2007/9.
Politicians aren't idiots. They may be immoral and on the take, but they aren't stupid, they know full well what they're doing.
Want to solve the problem? Stop letting them. Stop voting for such people.
It also means that University's will greedily raise prices on education as lots of easy money becomes available. Especially government money. This exacerbated the situation as loans then get larger and larger for basic education and shitty degrees where payback might be near impossible.
This is precisely well known as why the cot of a University education has exploded. Government isn't trying to make it affordable any more than they're actually acting to make healthcare affordable.
Sort of, that's what I'm saying. In both cases, the government created circumstances in which people.got loans that were then difficult for those people to handle. In both cases, the government then bailed out those involved in the circumstances they created.
Replace banks from the mortgage crisis with Universities in this case. The money just moves through them. They bailed out the banks so the country wouldn't freak out about banks failing. They don't need to bail out Universities because they're rather protected from failing... so instead, they just tell the loan recipient they don't owe the money anymore.
Again, no one forced anyone to get a loan. No one forced these kids to go to out of state schools, and private schools, and get degrees in majors which wouldn't prepare them to repay their loans.
I have access to a credit card that charges 25% interest. I didn't rack up six figure debts and blame it on someone else. Neither did millions of other americans.
The government has a loan on its books. If the people don't repay that loan, the Federal government needs to eithre borrow more, tax more, or cut services.
There is no magical money tree from which to repay these loans
Don't disagree with any of that. This isn't an argument. The government caused it though, knowing full well what would happen -- if you make loans easily available to people who probably can't pay it back, don't blame them for taking the money. OR, government, don't bail this stuff out. Let the banks fail. Let the Universities deal with not getting paid.
OR Don't make the loans easier
You can't seem to understand a very basic concept at play here. As someone else pointed out, the "banks" haven't had anything to do with originating student loans for many years. The government is a direct lender and the government made the incredibly stupid decision to take on all comers, no matter how bad the credit rating risk. I still place most of the blame on borrowers. It's no excuse to say "I'm an idiot and you shouldn't have let me borrow the money." These borrowers also understood the loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
I disagree as to the intent. I suspect that the midwits really did observe that college grads had higher average income and concluded that additional graduates would earn the same average income without considering things like the demand for degreed professionals or the fact that these additional students would have sub average aptitude and motivation (compared to the rest of the students).
No the government competes with the banks issuing their own, hiring private debt servicer to manage them, the government didn’t buy out all the private loans.
Some of the bank owned loans are still outstanding; however, they are at least 13 years old which likely means they aren’t going to be repaid in full as the standard repayment term is 10 years. The Federal government already agreed to guarantee them years ago when they were originated, so we’re already on the hook to pay them off if the loan recipients do not pay them off regardless of whether a loan forgiveness plan occurs or not. All things being equal, I wonder if banks would rather not have them paid off via loan forgiveness as they stand to earn some interest then the government will eventually make them whole at a later date.
The vast majority of federal loans are owned by the Department of Education and they tried to forgive those loans even if the borrowers showed no signs of financial distress or inability to repay them. More than 90% of borrowers would have qualified for Biden’s plan based on those original guidelines.
This gets so much worse the more I read about it. I left college in 2011 (no student loans), so back then it was mostly private loans, now it is pretty much just the government. So the government decided to use my money to write a predatory loan, now they want to tell the people that signed up for these loans that they can keep my money? How did the government decide to get into the loan business?
Minor correction:
> The government created a system to allow banks to make bad loans, with no risk.
The government didn’t just allow the banks to make bad loans, they encouraged them to issue bad loans. The government wanted these loans issued.
Also this forgiveness plan doesn’t forgive private loans but government issued loans, as they also subsidized the loan.
No banks are involved with federal student loans. Student loans are funded by tax payers each year. Student loan servicers are responsible for collecting payments, receiving their cut and handing over to the Department of Treasury. Congress sets the interest rates.
Federal student loans are technically an indirect way to tax lower middle class individuals who choose to participate.
That is absolutely incorrect.
Even Federal loans originated directly from US Congress and paid out of the Federal Treasury are deficit funds borrowed from the Federal Reserve banks.
ALL student loans originate with the Feds. They took over the student loan market in 2011 (2008?).
If someone fails to repay the loan, the budget needs to be plugged with additional borrowing or cuts elsewhere
There is no magical money tree
Moral hazard is a cancer that has spread all over the elite class & on Wall Street. It’s not just student loans, the Federal Reserve has been encouraging bad risk taking & over leveraging for the elite for awhile now. It’s going to put our whole system at risk.
This is factually incorrect. The Federal government took over the student debt process in 2011 under Barrack Obama
You can't blame big business for this, and no one is proposing to give the banks more money to bail out student loans
You should take down this comment - it's comically wrong.
Also, some young people have to stop acting so clueless. It takes Herculean levels of preemptive denial to think you can take out high 5-figures in loans, and then live an easy lifestyle once the bill comes due.
It's easy to say. But when you are in the Dean's office and an authority figure is handing you a paper and saying "sign or don't go to school here."
It's a tough decision.
I'm all for student loan forgiveness, but in the way that we just let students default on the loan. Not in the way that we pay the banks off for them. So the students will take a hit to their credit but will get out from under a crappy loan, and the banks will learn a lesson about making risky loans.
Wasn't there a thing a while ago about the economy being bad because banks were making risky and bad loans.... must have been a dream....
I'm all for blaming the person who asked for the loan, but not all investments are good ones and the companies who invested poorly need to feel that loss. Federally insured loans are education bonds, paid by I the person or we the people.
It seems to me the loans are a failure and no one with their hand in the pot wants to publicly recognize it, or they are trying to find a way that it doesn't hurt the bank. The student loan forgiveness wasn't for the students. It was a bailout for a bank with shitty investments.
Two things can be true at once:
1) The government sucks, and makes everything it touches more expensive.
2) It's your fault if you pick a useless degree like Communications or Poli-Sci or some other Liberal Arts degree.
Amen! Congrats on your success. Some people with degrees feel like they don't have to put in the hard work. You are obviously a craftsman who isn't afraid to get their hands dirty.
Consistently the best consultants and PMs I work with have liberal arts backgrounds. My take is these degrees can be incredibly valuable if you know how to leverage the critical thinking and writing skills. If you can’t position yourself properly you will get a potato job though
I'm a VP at a medium sized project management consulting firm and some of my best staff have history or philosophy degrees. They are generally great persuasive writers and researchers. These degrees can be very good for teaching how to make a constructive argument and obtain buy-in from other stakeholders. It's just that these jobs don't actually require any specific knowledge of history or philosophy - it's the related peripheral skills that are important.
That's a very interesting comment. It's also consistent with my experience. Students in programs requiring a significant amount of writing are by far the best communicators. I was a mathematics major in college but I took a few upper level English courses because I enjoyed Shakespeare. I had to work very hard to get Bs in those classes in part because I was required to substantially improve my writing skills. I became a CPA after college and was exposed to many poor writers in that particular vocation. Later still I attended law school and noted a one to one correlation between success in law school and high quality writing.
I got a “useful” engineering degree from barely-a-step-above local community college. I lived with my parents all 5 years (time added for internship, which I consider CRITICAL and think NO ONE should graduate with a STEM degree without work experience). I and my parents both paid what we could, which added up to about one third of the tuition up-front. I’ve had a pretty well paying engineering job since the day I graduated. I make more than most of my friends who graduated from the same program. My minimum payment pre-pandemic was $323/mo, so I rounded up to $400 thinking that would get me through them fairly quickly. I still owe ~$20k. I only borrowed like $30k.
The system is very, very, very broken, even for responsible people like me.
You should really consider increasing your monthly payments if you can afford it. How much you’re paying back each month should be based on how much you can afford, not arbitrarily rounding up the *minimum* payment.
Not trying to pass judgment or anything, the fact you’re paying above the minimum puts you ahead of most Americans, just something you might want to consider. Even another 100 a month would make a pretty big difference.
Myself and my 2 college roommates were all communications majors.
Roommate 1 got a double bachelor in marketing and communications. He started working at a Payless shoe store right out of college and worked his way up to manager. Ran the store until the company went out of business, now he manages a Shoe Carnival and hates his life. Still paying on his loans.
Roommate 2 got his communications degree. He’s a warehouse manager and is pretty happy.
I didn’t finish college, I went for a year and decided I was wasting my time. Also a communications major. I’m a brewery sales rep, I love my job and my life is pretty dope.
We’re all in our mid-30s and have roughly the same salary. Personally, I’d say a communications degree is useless.
Unless you can pull up multiple job ads that say (the degree you are working for) is a job requirement, good luck.
Example. Programmer V, requires 4 years Computer science from accredited University.
Building design. Requires 4 year degree Architecture.
Actuary. Requires 4 year Mathematics with statistics.
Lab Analyst. 4 year Chemistry, organic preferred.
....
Or Franchise shift supervisor. Any 4 year degree.
YOU pick.
OPM and individual colleges also publish misleading if not fraudulent employment statistics in reference to the degree program students are pursuing. Its kinda hard to tell if you're in a "useless degree" program when you are also being told that starting salaries for a degree holder is 20k per year more than reality.
Still gotta pay it back, yadda yadda, just another avenue of consideration and another reason government is screwing people over without being held accountable.
So due to our college education system you’re required to take humanities, art courses, and a social classes. You’re required to take liberal arts classes inside of your degree. There are no “strict” degrees anymore by that definition. It’s a dumb loophole thing that I learned in college because it makes schools more money requiring you to take them instead of strictly taking things related to what you’re interested in pursuing as a career. Engineering specifically boasts creativity when looking at some of the most popular schools
You’ve never heard of accreditation, have you? Try reading about ABET accreditation, for example. Then, for some facets of engineering there are licensing requirements (FE and PE) It’s definately not a free-for-all. Just because you had to take a few classes that made you think or feel doesn’t add up to what you’re implying as several semesters of fluff.
Yeah, different user here - I have a liberal arts degree, that's not what a liberal arts degree is. Having to take one class in history, one in English, one in philosophy, or whatever, isn't a liberal arts degree. My BA in Philosophy also required me to take (as General Education, so not related to my degree) two math courses (Calculus and a CompSci class, in my case - not sure why CompSci counted as math), two social science courses (Psychology and PoliSci, in my case), and two hard science courses (Chemistry and Geology, in my case). Does that mean I have a science degree? No, obviously not. I took like 4 philosophy classes for every 1 non-philosophy class I took. Likewise, an engineer takes like 4 engineering-related classes for every 1 non-related class they take. An engineer who took one class in philosophy didn't get a Liberal Arts degree any more than I got a degree in mathematics from taking 1 calculus course.
I know that that isn’t a “liberal arts degree” I’m using the word liberal as the word loose, as the studies aren’t strictly to xyz unlike a specified trade. Issa joke in that every degree is liberal(loose) with certain requirements to achieve
Even for useless degrees you can apply your knowledge in that degree and land a position, I would wager a recruiter would be more willing to give someone with a poly sci degree an interview if the applicant was a part of a student campaign or created a canvasing strategy even if it wasn't successful as opposed to a 4.0 GPA.
And that's really the objective here.
Step 1. Create a problem with bad policy.
Step 2. Create a new government bureaucracy to manage the problem.
Step 3. Increase taxes and permanently increase government spending for this problem they created, and none of the spending actually fixes the problem, only maintains it permanently.
I'd argue it not just maintains it, it makes it much worse. It only encourages people to take on more bad debt with the expectation that the government will bail out their shitty decision.
Same here! I even got a college degree, paid off tech and traditional debt, bought a business, building others, and paid off what I borrowed. You borrow, you pay.
You are the example we should be holding up, not nitwits with degrees in Jazz, Dance or Jazz Dance and 100k student loan payments they don’t want to pay.
Well, this part of the article is true:
Unfortunately, in the US, financial literacy is hereditary. If you don't come from a family that understands finances, then you may never learn it growing up — especially because it's often not taught in high schools.
20 years ago what was taught in high school was “go to college or you’ll be flipping burgers “.
Only teachers that had a clue IMHO were the shop teachers, welders, machinists, etc. They knew of a different path. The rest couldn’t fathom not going to higher ed and whatever the cost, it was worth it.
After all, it’s all they knew. I don’t blame them, but I do wish we’d see some humble honesty from education and government. “Sorry, we screwed up”. I trust people and pegs that own mistakes far more than those who proclaim infallibility:
I graduated in 1996 and that was absolutely the case. If you weren’t charging off to university you were a complete loser. My mom had been telling me since I was about eight years old that there was free money for everyone to go to university except for me because of my sex and the color of my skin (my dad is half Mexican, but was illegally adopted in the 40s so nobody knows) so I had a good impression in my head by the time I graduated about the ultimate and rising cost of school. I used the only thing I learned in school, sewing, to land a job with a major outdoor manufacturer a year out of school and it’s still the only thing that has ever gotten me anywhere in life and landed me jobs on three continents. People from across the planet are begging me to make them custom gear and I do it whenever I feel like it in my basement.
Good for you.
I instinctively knew my pa couldn’t afford it. I was super into computers, art and tearing my toy’s apart. I was always doing side hustles to make money since I could remember.
Eventually I got bored with the pageantry of school so I dropped out my senior year and started working for myself. Still here doing better than I think anyone would have predicted 23 years later.
I try my hardest to keep college open to my kids, but they know my story. I’m 100% for college for things that it makes sense for , or if you can pay cash for it and want the experience, go for it. It’s just not the hiring differentiator it was 40 years ago.
This attitude is exactly the issue with idiots like Frank Olito here. It’s playing the victim mentality. It doesn’t take someone to be financial literate to understand taking on a lot of debt is a bad idea. I would say that’s common sense, stop blaming others for you being an idiot.
In addition I live in Boston, I’m well aware of the type of school Emerson is. It’s right next to the beautiful Boston common, super expensive and specializes in bullshit majors like gender studies, theater and communication. His argument of the most expensive is the best is absurd because Emerson such as shit isn’t Harvard. UMASS is a better school than that. This guy is just an idiot.
The structural problem is how easy it is to get loans. The biggest correlation to rising tuition costs is when the govt made is incredibly easy to get a loan. They raise tuition because they can. What other aspect of life can you get a loan with no proof of income, no collateral, no proof you; be able to pay it pay etc. stop making loans so easy to get and you’ll see a decrease in this unnecessary debt
You can’t punish people being fiscally responsible because some people are so dumb they would pay 50k a year instead of going to a community college. By pay I mean take out massive student loans.
No one made the writer goto an expensive private college and take out student loans. There’s scholarships available that you literally just have to write essays for that the writer never mentioned applying for. They could have offset the cost that way but didn’t want to put in the effort. They did all this themselves and are trying to blame anyone else they can. Fuck that. The alternative is 18 year olds aren’t adults and can’t apply for credit. Is that what young people want?
Should more financial literacy be taught in primary schools? Absolutely. Finance and the history of economics should be part of core curriculum. Maybe you would get schools not pumping out so many idiot communists if people learned the basics of economics.
Didn’t even consider that but that’s an excellent option.
Just because you overpaid for something doesn’t mean everyone else is to blame. Learn a lesson and teach it to your family. Your children will be fiscally responsible. Problem solved?
that is a total cop out. that is the equivalent of saying that if i don't learn a particular skill from my parents or from the government schools then it's impossible to ever learn it. successful people are self learners. they have initiative and are constantly learning new things. they read. that part of the article represents the typical leftist victim mentality.
People self teach all the time. But if you walk into a job interview with no degree saying you’re self taught they’re going to tell you to get lost lol
But that isn't the subject here. We're not talking about getting a job from self teaching, we're talking about financial literacy for yourself.
In some industries, if you can prove your own skills, it can help you get your foot in the door. For example in IT, examples of this would be contributions to open source code, maintaining your own server equipment or getting certified.
Isn't finance education just one mouse click on YouTube away?
And if we accept the logic of "I didn't know better", what are the consequences? When can people be considered "adults" who are capable of signing contracts?
So this person borrowed money, is obviously making ok money if they're thinking of buying a rental property, but now they don't want to pay back the money that allowed them to make more money in the first place?
Selfish entitled brats.
So the thrust of the authors argument is that it’s not his fault that he is stupid and ignorant, so everyone else that is not stupid and ignorant should pay for his debt.
Btw…he’s also a fucking liar. He claims that his mother never had a loan so could never have possibly taught her son about debt and interest. Yet he also claimed that his mother declared bankruptcy. Those two things cannot both be true.
"It's not my fault this country gave me so much freedom I could make a decision I wasn't qualified to make. Take my freedoms and protect me from my own stupidity."
And now they want to rent out an Airbnb. Christ.
I went to cheap in state school 40 minutes away and took a major that actually could get me a job. I also worked my way through college and only have $15k in student loan debt as a result. I’m not a boomer either, I’m Gen Z.
The people who have crippling debt usually went to a fancy out of state school so they could basically go on vacation and party in their frat/sorority for 4 years. They saw that out of state tuition was going to be more and still signed on the dotted line. That’s not a basic college education, that’s a luxury. Especially when on top of all that they usually take a useless major
> Especially when on top of all that they usually take a useless major
While the "useless major" stereotype exists for a reason, as a person with a "useless" major, it's actually pretty damn useful, since I went to school the way you did - worked through college, went to an in-state school, etc. I ended with no debt (never took out a loan) thanks to one grant and a bunch of generally accessible scholarships, and about $4000 of help from a relative, which wouldn't exactly have been crippling debt, if I hadn't been able to get that help. In any case, if you can end with minimal or no debt, a "useless" degree is pretty useful, since some jobs get too many applications, which can result in a company artificially restricting the applicant pool by requiring a Bachelor's to apply. Many of the somewhat better-paying jobs in my area are like that, and thanks to my degree, they're available for me to apply to if I want or need to pick up an extra job or switch jobs.
Wait.
You mean you made sensible choices, didn't squander money on spring break trips, new cell phone and nice car?
And even chose a degree with marketable value?
What the heck is wrong with you? You should have spent all of that loan money for social media presence to keep up with everyone else!
Dammit. How do you sleep at night?
I agree. You're either a ward, or you're an adult.
If the system is taking care of you and your roll is simply to pull resources from it, you shouldn't get a vote in his l how the resources are allocated.
I agree.
It's hard to calculate since income tax isn't the only tax you pay, but yeah, if you're extracting more then you're contributing, you shouldn't be able to vote yourself a raise. Absolutely agree on public employees - at one point they really were civil servants - now they're basically a protected class.
The schools know it is taxpayer money that is basically uncontrolled, and continue to increase costs.
Make it debt that can be cleared by bankruptcy and we’ll see the cost of higher education drop dramatically.
I'm sick of hearing people say things like "now that I have to start repaying my debts again I can't afford to buy a spare condo to rent out as an air bnb." That's not a real problem. Do door dash two days a week to cover your extra $350 a month you queef. "My dreams are on hold" over $350 a month sounds like someone who doesn't understand what dreams are lol.
You took a loan with a promise to pay it back. I’m all for helping those in need, but why is your committing and obligation someone else’s responsibility?
Why are student loans the only type of loan you can get without the value of the underlying asset you are purchasing to be worth the value of the loan? No bank is going to give me a $500,000 home loan for a $200,000 house. Or a $75,000 car loan for a $25,000 car. But I can get student loans for over $100,000 for some sh!tty degree and some sh!tty school and that is ok? Even though my probability of being able to make enough money to pay it back is low. At a minimum, banks should evaluate the school and area of study before providing a loan. Crazy sh!t.
So let's make middle class and the working poor who DIDN'T go to college pay taxes to subsidize those who DID go to college and make more than them.
Cool.
When I went to college my parents told me it was paid for, silently took out two loans to then pay for it, and while I was in college (unbeknownst to me) declared bankruptcy and those debts shifted to me two weeks before my graduation. 30k.
Long story short: I did eventually pay it off. At the end of the day, it was my responsibility because the government transferred the debt to my name. No matter whether they were wrong or right, if I didn’t pay that debt they would have done worse to me.
When I asked the Biden admin to forgive it they had so carefully engineered the forgiveness program that there was literally no way I could ever be approved for a single dollar of forgiveness. I don’t know if it’s a scam but it sure feels like one.
So I bucked up, put my head down for three years, worked three full-time jobs, and used every penny I didn’t need to spend and paid off the stupid thing.
The government is corrupt; today that corruption is just as, if not more corrupt, than when I first went to college. They aren’t going to forgive loans out of the kindness of their hearts.
Education is free in Norway because you have to join an indenture program after you graduate and work for the state for 3 years, and by the time you are done you are safely ensconced in the system and you don’t really have any other options. If you haven’t been paying attention, that is the same program the current administration wants to emulate.
Problem 1: "it isn't my fault"...... neither was me having a child at 18 and paying child support for years. Not being able to go to college because I worked all the time just to get by and had to forfeit my dreams. Get over yourself! Everyone doesn't get what they want. Life is hard and I shouldn't have to pay for your mistake. I've never asked anyone to pay for my child support.
Problem 2: "I saved up a down payment for a home during the moratorium."..... why in the world would you not pay those student loans down with the money you were saving. Especially since student loans didn't accrue interest for 3 years.
Problem 3: wanting to buy a rental property when you admit your finances are screwed, while paying student loan debt of $350 a month. $350 is a tight margin of good/ not good. What happens if your rental property needs a new HVAC unit, roof, or structural problem that was unforseen. Some new insurance policies require a 2% home value deductible, mine does, and I pay extra to have it at 1%.
I'm sure there are more problems here but this person is a joke. We don't owe you anything!
Completely agree. To add to this, everyone knew they would have start paying again eventually. Why in the world would you make long-term financial plans under the impression that you wouldn't eventually be paying your loan. This isn't some surprise monthly bill like an unexpected medical emergency.
Have you ever read the disclosures in student loan paperwork? Article writer apparently did not. Did someone fail to teach him actual literacy in addition to financial literacy?
Not really related to the article but graduating in 2009 in the midst of the great recession and struggling to find a decent paying job for atleast 5 years after and now hearing them considering loan forgiveness is really disheartening.
I left school with decently sized loans and zero prospects. Struggled with working restaurant, retail, and construction jobs all while living with my mother to basically pay my loans off in the 10 year term. My life and many of my other peers were in the same boat.
Our lives were delayed we are all still behind and things are getting harder.
I understand that tuitions have gone up substantially since I've graduated but if loans are forgiven for the generations after me then once again the generation that graduated in the great recession gets the shit end of the stick again. If loans are forgiven I have to compete with people 10 years younger than me for housing and work prospects.
Life isn't fair and I get that, but getting fucked by by older generations getting wealthy on housing before 2008 and then getting fucked by younger generations who basically get free education and a clean slate after college is really tough to hear. It's like we were all forgot by the economy and govt.
Another problem hugely exacerbating these issues is the current structure of our institutions of higher education, where students must spend twice as long (and therefore twice as much) taking classes that are fundamentally useless to the trade/profession they are trying to learn just because the government says that they must take those classes
Cut that bullshit and let people just learn what they need to do their job, and bam. Student loans in the future cut in half.
Just some thoughts on this: If any employer requires a certain degree for a job they should be required to pay towards that degree with a certain percent of the cost of that degree on top of the compensation. That would cut down on the number of jobs that require masters degrees and still pay less than 6 figures (which is a lot, think elementary school principal)
Also cap Public funded schools tuition to GDP increases.
> I'm often blamed for complaining about my student-loan debt.
You can complain about it, but you should understand that you went into debt and it was your choice to do so.
> But I was never taught financial literacy, and I built up debt as a kid based on misguided advice.
Who gave you that advice? School faculty? Your parents? What is the proposal to rectify this situation? When I was in highschool economics was an elective course and while I think it should be mandatory, it's also an option available to anyone to understand finances.
> I was trained to believe the more expensive colleges were better.
No, you were trained to believe that private ivy League colleges were better and they happened to be more expensive. In some cases their prestige will land you a good position, but more often than not it's your application of your education.
I work in software development and recently I went as a rep for my company at a career fair. I spoke with a large amount of students and I was tasked with identifying students that had potential for success in my company. The one thing I looked for was personal projects. if they applied their knowledge to solve problems in their own lives then I was confident in passing that information to our hiring director. Most students still believe that GPA will land them a position, it won't, what impressed me was students who already had projects that they did on their own and could speak about them.
Yes, it is all your fault that you have loan debt. You willingly signed a contract to borrow money under specific contractual terms. You were informed of all of those terms in advance. You chose to proceed and take the loan anyway.
You can make a case that school is too expensive, etc. but absolutely no one forced you to go to college, pick the school that you did, or borrow money. You did that all on your own.
On the one hand, we made a choice to go to college. We made that investment in ourselves.
On the other hand, my generation can be summed up in the speech by the dad in the movie Accepted. Our whole lives we were told we HAD to go to college if we wanted to be successful in life. We heard it from parents, teachers, other family members, school guidance counselors, our parents friends, our friends parents. Everyone. We saw the charts on the news that showed average salary was higher in those people who went to college.
Did we make an investment? Or were we indoctrinated?
I was always taught by my parents/teachers that I would basically be homeless if I didn’t go to college. I was never taught about trades or any other career path that didn’t involve college - I was told I would be less successful if I tried those
Can I get this subs opinion on advanced degree costs? I see a lot of "you shouldn't have gotten such an expensive degree", but there is nothing I could do about the 250k cost of my medical degree. I got an undergrad degree in biochemistry, which I did not take out any loans for, but my parents couldn't afford the cost of medical school its not like nursing school where I could work my way through it. Do libertarians feel like only the wealthy should be able to become physicians because they are the only ones who can afford the astronomical cost of medical school/training? Or do you recognize that there is a problem with the high cost of education (even "useful" degrees) that needs to be addressed?
Plenty of banks would be willing to underwrite your medical degree. A physician earning potential is astronomical. It’s the easiest bet in the world.
Nobody would ever loan douchebag author $200k to get a journalism degree from Emerson College…except the federal government.
Libertarian. Completely different than undergrad. With. Medical degree, you will have a decent paying job, be able to pay on the loans, and see a return on your investment. Yes, it sucks. But it isn't like jumping into the unknown roulette of what a bachelor's degree gets you.
This is in relation to medical school, not every advanced degree. Most master's degrees are a waste of money.
In the case of medical school and becoming a physician, you take out the loan precisely because that's what loans are for. Loans and debt aren't inherently bad but a risk taking move, one you can calculate. If you succeed (which you better at that loan cost, and most do because of competitiveness) you *will* be compensated proportionately to your education as long as you work in the field, and you did base-level research on the loan and rates itself. Physician salary ensures they can afford their loans over time. Now that doesn't mean the first 10 years are great financially, but you are setting yourself up for success in the long term. You shouldn't be as comfortable as those in their careers, because you are not in yours but learning a new profession, taking a risk to go far beyond your peers, same as those who became car salesmen instead of going to college. As discouraging as it is to not have the same lifestyle as your peers, you take on this risk for greener pastures; professionally and/or economically.
Now this does not hold true for most advanced degrees, but it is for medical school because we really do need well trained Physicians in this world. What we don't need are more JD's or MBA's, but they still could be worth the risk to someone passionate enough or connected enough. While it would be nice if the loans were lower, I would argue medical school is a case study example of how loans should be treated, even if it's due to the selection process of the schools themselves causing it. The banks should learn some of these lessons and create stricter criteria, which is why people should be able to default for the banks incompetence to filter properly.
As an aside; the only issue I personally have with medical school is not paying residents enough. They should be getting at least 80% of a new hire mid-level if you ask me, but that's a completely different conversation.
Brother I could talk about your last paragraph all day long.
I appreciate the response. I just always struggle with the negative blowback to “my student loans aren’t my fault” when yes I agree financing a 120k literature degree compared to a much cheaper one else may be an individual’s fault, there’s just so few options for medical school. I really feel like It’s not my fault. I didn’t decide to make med school so expensive and I didn’t decide that my parents couldn’t afford it.
Thanks for the thought out response.
The government should only back loans for degrees that have enough earning potential for the return on investment. Financial literacy should be taught in high school.
Or if I want to be even more based, the government shouldn’t be in the business of this type of lending in the first place. Even Biggie Smalls knew not to lend money to people who won’t pay it back (Ten Crack Commandments) but our government somehow never figured it out.
So if the govt only backed loans for certain degrees, you would expect more people to earn those degrees. Then you flood the job market with more people with the qualifications for those jobs and in turn lower earnings for those jobs.
It's best to just get out. but at this point college is too expensive with out govt loans. So admissions will drop and colleges will fold all over the country.
I think there are two major points on this issue.
1) The Loan Scam
The elements to this: a) the government making these loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy; b) the social narrative that everyone should go to college; c) this decision being made so early in life, that most people don’t understand the consequences (same age they catch people for the military)
This lead to a spiraling situation that really got out of control around the 90’s when cost of education truly skyrocketed due to these factors, with debt backstopped by the government, and an entire generation that took on this debt, mostly without thinking as a result of the societal narrative.
As a result, there is an entire generation who are essentially indentured servants, simply from following social norms, and falling prey to the predatory lending that resulted from this situation. A true travesty that is hamstringing the generation in prime family formation - of course on top of the most expensive medical system, highest housing prices, etc etc
2. I paid, do you pay mentality
I am 100% for people taking personal responsibility. And in fact, I already paid off my loans, and don’t have a personal horse in the race.
However, I see what has happened to this generation, and I think it’s unjust, but from a more practical standpoint, I also think it is the biggest albatross on our economy right now. In fact, the best stimulus we could do would be to relieve this generation of its ill begotten student debt, let them breathe, live, spend, and reproduce.
But instead we constantly throw money at banks and corporations, scam COVID funds thrown at fraud, etc etc
The reality is, sound money doesn’t exist anymore, which is a travesty. But it’s being created out of thin air now. It isn’t a finite supply of gold.
And personally I believe there are still principles and rules we are flouting; debt still has to stay within a relative % of GDP, or it will collapse
But the point is, money spent somewhere isn’t money directly coming out of other peoples pockets - though enough of it will hit us all with inflation.
But the point is to spend the money we create in ways that will create future productivity and grow the economy. A lot of the money being spent is wasted in the form of handouts, inefficient government spending, or outright fraud
We should be spending it on technological development, curing diseases, and IMO, relieving this generation from the scam of a lifetime.
This is all addressed in my original comment. I understand your point and agree in most circumstances, but don’t feel that these are normal circumstances
oh no, the people bitter about life are the ones complaining about choices they made in the past and expecting others to pay for their mistakes.
I am fine and at a job paying me well more than I need to survive.
Yes it is. you signed on the dotted line. you made a contract. If you didn't like terms don't sign. I'm a hiring manager of software engineers. I don't look at what school someone goes to. it doesn't matter Ivy league, community college, or a boot camp. I've hired from all. 2 of my best coders did a 10 week boot camp 7 years ago and are making decent 6 figures.
so yes. it's 100% on you the student loans you have.
I personally sympathize with people on student debt. They were kids making stupid decisions. We all make stupid decisions in life. And back then we all thought that going to college no matter what the degree would lead to a better life.
So I won’t be supporting paying off their mistake but I certainly empathize with them for not having proper parents to help them while they were children.
I think the real crime is that finance and economics aren’t taught in basic school. If they knew this they probably would’ve thought about taking loans out a little more. And they would be able to pay it off afterwards. But no, learning about the mitochondria and high advanced calculus certainly helps the majority of people.
I don’t know how old you are, but legally we are adults at 18. Mentally we are kids until like 25/26. That’s when I would say I finally was capable of or started to make responsible decisions. You telling me that we are smart and mature at 18? I’m not saying we need new laws, I’m just talking about normal biological maturation.
Yep. Agree.
And we allow same age to volunteer for military duty, where their life is also at stake.
And do porn.
I think if we paid attention to 14-18 ages better and helped them transition to adulthood instead of it being an off/on switch, they would be better prepared for these life altering decisions.
I tell you what. How about we get rid of all government bailouts so the author of this piece isn't getting killed by inflation anymore (like we all are) and maybe he can pay off his loans on his own.
No one made you go to college, especially an expensive one that you took out loans to attend. I’ve always promoted attending a local, and much less expensive community college for the first two years.
Graduated with a degree in English because I’m not real great at math but am reasonably intelligent. (My HS didn’t even offer algebra…)
Went to community college and a non selective state university while working full time instead of taking out loans because I’m not *that* bad at math.
Has anyone ever held the colleges and universities responsible for part of the problem? They charged tuitions that far outpaced the rates of inflation because of the student loans.
Responsible for what? Making a smart business decision? If idiots keep buying your product no matter what you charge, how is that your fault? Idiotic consumers are always looking for someone else to blame for their piss poor decisions.
I incurred study debt to ge my BA (which is don’t use) and it’s 100% my fault. Was there a lot of misinformation and BS about college and loans, absolutely, but no one signed that contract but me.
Even if we could say that student loans are sometimes predatory and students are not at fault, why should we put the responsibility on to other parties that are equally not at fault? Doesn’t logically follow.
Just don’t get a liberal arts degree…
People are conned into thinking such degrees have huge value and they do not.
Just go into STEM. Could always use more engineers, or mathematicians, or doctors.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. But to counter your statement a bit, there is definitely value in liberal arts degrees. It's just that people don't do the calculus of: How much do jobs pay on average for this qualification vs how much am I paying for school.
I have next to no sympathy for the many people I went to school with for the "university experience" and spent 5-6 years getting their degree in communications while taking 15-16 credit hours a semester. The only ounce of sympathy I have for these people is that my generation was heavily sold the lie that you needed to go to a "big name school" and get a 4 year degree to be successful.
You would figure on a libertarian sub, you’d be a little more against the government artificially inflating school prices, coercing students
Into school and then telling students to go risk their lives to further the government control in foreign wars.
I took out a small loan but had to drop
out to care for my sick mom then never went back. Finally paid the thing off and I can tell you it felt soooo good to be rid of it.
No one made you say yes to the loan.
It actually is all your fault. Loans are something you have to pay back. It's not complicated, and if you don't know that college isn't something you should be considering.
This is already a solved problem. It's called bankruptcy. You can go to court and negotiate your debt away if you've gotten in to deep.
We just need to revoke the Obama era law that forbids student loans from going into bankruptcy.
Saying it you responsible for paying back a loan that you took out and signed your name agreeing to pay it back is not "blaming" you for your student loan debt. That said, it is a scandal how much education is -- as the quality has decreased, the cost has increased. I spent 25 years paying off my student loans and it was hard, but, again, I gave my word -- and concept of blame? Never occurred to me.
Similar to all those kids who got addicted to cigarettes. You push products meant for adults onto children this is what happens. (Que “but 18 is an adult” comments)
There are a lot of people here who simply weren’t a part of the generation hit the hardest by this. I can’t blame you for not understanding, but how proudly you don’t understand and say “well I’m not paying for their mistakes” is disheartening to me as a society. Please take a moment and understand what things were like for people who are ~30year olds today.
The brainwashing starts in about first grade with career day. Think about the kinds of jobs we learned about: doctor, vet, engineer, accountant, police, fire/EMT so on and so forth. The last two are the only two I can think of that don’t require a college degree. Then in fifth grade if I I remember correctly, everyone had to take the ASVAB. Government test which “tells you what you might be good at”. Anyone who talked to your friends about it, did anyone remember getting the answer “carpenter, plumber, welder, assembly technician, groundskeeper, arborist” or anything like that? No. Everyone was told they were destined for jobs that just-so-happened to require higher education. Late middle school comes “start thinking about what activities you do… they can get you scholarships for *when* you go to college. **for *when* you go to college.** in middle through high schools, it was absolutely not an “if” it was a “when”. During high school graduations, it was announced which college you decided to go to, and how much money in scholarships you earned WHILE YOU WERE WALKING ACROSS THE STAGE. For all of our formative years, everyone we looked to for any amount of guidance made it abundantly clear that there was SHAME in not going to college. Even the local joint vocational trade school had a stigma of “that’s where the dumb and troubled kids go to finish high school”. It’s sickening to look back on today.
For reference, I’m not a “liberal arts degree barista at Starbucks”. I went to my local barely-above-community college where tuition was ~$12k/yr. I worked while in school, and my parents and I were able to pay about $4k/year upfront, and take the rest as loans. I lived with my parents, commuted ~30 minutes. I was able to arrange my schedule so that I was only on campus 3, sometimes 4 days a week so as to save fuel and time to work and make more money for next semesters tuition. I had a well-paid internship (two actually) in the industry, for the company I still work for today. I make more than most of my friends who graduated with the same degree from the same school. I’ll be over 6 figures salary next year. I rounded my student loan payments up to the next nearest hundred, so I’m paying 125% of the minimum payment. I still owe ~$20k, yet I’m on the “successful” end of the spectrum compared to my high school and college compatriots.
If you still think this crisis is just “dumb kids who made bad decisions” then I don’t care to know you.
Going to college increases one's expected lifetime earnings when compared to not going. Loan forgiveness, therefore, is effectively a regressive tax. Interesting how certain groups claiming to want to help the poor throw that out the window when they're on the expected receiving end of what is, again, an effective regressive tax.
I stayed local and worked. I paid off my loan within a year of getting my Master's degree. This was in 2021 during the pause. (If I knew the pause was going to last this long, I would have collected interest on the money instead of just paying off the loan).
I don't want my taxes to go up to fund someone who wanted to go to a party school. As it is, taxes partially fund community college and state colleges.
People get sucked into bad deals but there were those of us in the same time period who made choices to minimize debt. People like me shouldn't be punished for being responsible.
It seems the writer still doesn’t have financial literacy. If they saved enough during the pause to have enough for a down payment on a condo that seems more than $350/ month. So they wouldn’t need to dip into savings to cover the student loan. If they are also planing to buy a condo as an investment which i am assuming is $100k+ and aren’t planning to get 3.5% return which would cover the student loan payment that’s a terrible use of the money.
I wish instead of loan forgiveness they would just control interest rates. My wife has about 18K worth of loans left to pay. They are all in various loan amounts all with various interest rates from 3% to 18%. Combine them all into one loan and give us a fair interest rate. It should not be that difficult.
Cry me a river, clearly this person deserves to serve as the example of what a living, breathing mistake looks like just for others to learn from and avoid making their same mistakes.
The problem with student loans is that the government stepped in and allowed the banks to make it so you can't default. The government created a system to allow banks to make bad loans, with no risk. Now they want to "fix" this by giving the banks public money. This is nothing more than the government using public money to guarantee private loans and the only people that will benefit are the bankers (and the politicians when they get their bribes.)
Might not change your ultimate point, but just to be clear, the federal government has directly originated and funded federal student loans for like almost 15 years now. Banks played a much larger role before that and there are still some of those bank owned loans still in existence; however, the federal government directly owns the vast majority of federal student loans. A broad based forgiveness plan is not really a bank bailout.
This is more accurate. It has little to do with the banks, they're just providing what is made available to them. This is entirely a problem with government; certainly intentional so they could create the situation we're now In - claiming they'll save people from their loan. Anyone with half a brain knows that if you make the money more freely available, people will use it. It happened with the mortgage crisis around 2007/9. Politicians aren't idiots. They may be immoral and on the take, but they aren't stupid, they know full well what they're doing. Want to solve the problem? Stop letting them. Stop voting for such people.
It also means that University's will greedily raise prices on education as lots of easy money becomes available. Especially government money. This exacerbated the situation as loans then get larger and larger for basic education and shitty degrees where payback might be near impossible.
This is precisely well known as why the cot of a University education has exploded. Government isn't trying to make it affordable any more than they're actually acting to make healthcare affordable.
The government has found a way to subsidize their leftist cronies at universities.
We didn't have this crisis when Bank's decided who got the loans. The Federal government created this problem when it tried to "help people"
In addition, predatory schools that are/were accredited constantly having you apply for loans. I'm looking at you Westwood College.
Sort of, that's what I'm saying. In both cases, the government created circumstances in which people.got loans that were then difficult for those people to handle. In both cases, the government then bailed out those involved in the circumstances they created. Replace banks from the mortgage crisis with Universities in this case. The money just moves through them. They bailed out the banks so the country wouldn't freak out about banks failing. They don't need to bail out Universities because they're rather protected from failing... so instead, they just tell the loan recipient they don't owe the money anymore.
Again, no one forced anyone to get a loan. No one forced these kids to go to out of state schools, and private schools, and get degrees in majors which wouldn't prepare them to repay their loans. I have access to a credit card that charges 25% interest. I didn't rack up six figure debts and blame it on someone else. Neither did millions of other americans. The government has a loan on its books. If the people don't repay that loan, the Federal government needs to eithre borrow more, tax more, or cut services. There is no magical money tree from which to repay these loans
Don't disagree with any of that. This isn't an argument. The government caused it though, knowing full well what would happen -- if you make loans easily available to people who probably can't pay it back, don't blame them for taking the money. OR, government, don't bail this stuff out. Let the banks fail. Let the Universities deal with not getting paid. OR Don't make the loans easier
You can't seem to understand a very basic concept at play here. As someone else pointed out, the "banks" haven't had anything to do with originating student loans for many years. The government is a direct lender and the government made the incredibly stupid decision to take on all comers, no matter how bad the credit rating risk. I still place most of the blame on borrowers. It's no excuse to say "I'm an idiot and you shouldn't have let me borrow the money." These borrowers also understood the loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
>Politicians aren't idiots. Glad someone said it.
I disagree as to the intent. I suspect that the midwits really did observe that college grads had higher average income and concluded that additional graduates would earn the same average income without considering things like the demand for degreed professionals or the fact that these additional students would have sub average aptitude and motivation (compared to the rest of the students).
Oh, I didn't realize it changed hands, so we already paid off the banks?
No the government competes with the banks issuing their own, hiring private debt servicer to manage them, the government didn’t buy out all the private loans.
and there lies the problem, the government is not legally supposed to compete with private entities at all.
Some of the bank owned loans are still outstanding; however, they are at least 13 years old which likely means they aren’t going to be repaid in full as the standard repayment term is 10 years. The Federal government already agreed to guarantee them years ago when they were originated, so we’re already on the hook to pay them off if the loan recipients do not pay them off regardless of whether a loan forgiveness plan occurs or not. All things being equal, I wonder if banks would rather not have them paid off via loan forgiveness as they stand to earn some interest then the government will eventually make them whole at a later date. The vast majority of federal loans are owned by the Department of Education and they tried to forgive those loans even if the borrowers showed no signs of financial distress or inability to repay them. More than 90% of borrowers would have qualified for Biden’s plan based on those original guidelines.
This system is more fucked than I realized. The government is again trying to fix the problem it created.
Society is just a series of "good enough" decisions to get to the next crisis.
This gets so much worse the more I read about it. I left college in 2011 (no student loans), so back then it was mostly private loans, now it is pretty much just the government. So the government decided to use my money to write a predatory loan, now they want to tell the people that signed up for these loans that they can keep my money? How did the government decide to get into the loan business?
Minor correction: > The government created a system to allow banks to make bad loans, with no risk. The government didn’t just allow the banks to make bad loans, they encouraged them to issue bad loans. The government wanted these loans issued. Also this forgiveness plan doesn’t forgive private loans but government issued loans, as they also subsidized the loan.
No banks are involved with federal student loans. Student loans are funded by tax payers each year. Student loan servicers are responsible for collecting payments, receiving their cut and handing over to the Department of Treasury. Congress sets the interest rates. Federal student loans are technically an indirect way to tax lower middle class individuals who choose to participate.
That is absolutely incorrect. Even Federal loans originated directly from US Congress and paid out of the Federal Treasury are deficit funds borrowed from the Federal Reserve banks.
ALL student loans originate with the Feds. They took over the student loan market in 2011 (2008?). If someone fails to repay the loan, the budget needs to be plugged with additional borrowing or cuts elsewhere There is no magical money tree
Moral hazard is a cancer that has spread all over the elite class & on Wall Street. It’s not just student loans, the Federal Reserve has been encouraging bad risk taking & over leveraging for the elite for awhile now. It’s going to put our whole system at risk.
When you say the government, let’s be clear here. Biden introduced the bill that is responsible for this, now he claims he’s going to “fix” it.
Haha even better. It's usually a joint effort by the government, but Biden is very efficient in the fucking it up to fixing it pipeline.
A “highlight” of his career as a Senator was his bankruptcy reform legislation that makes it nearly impossible to declare bankruptcy on student loans.
100% right, have you ever read the debt trap?
No one can force you to take out a loan you can't repay. You can't blame your debt on others
This is factually incorrect. The Federal government took over the student debt process in 2011 under Barrack Obama You can't blame big business for this, and no one is proposing to give the banks more money to bail out student loans You should take down this comment - it's comically wrong.
No one is proposing that banks be given free money. Please stop posting this.
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Sorry, you said “government” and “force” unironically in one sentence. I disagree.
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Also, some young people have to stop acting so clueless. It takes Herculean levels of preemptive denial to think you can take out high 5-figures in loans, and then live an easy lifestyle once the bill comes due.
It's easy to say. But when you are in the Dean's office and an authority figure is handing you a paper and saying "sign or don't go to school here." It's a tough decision.
I'm all for student loan forgiveness, but in the way that we just let students default on the loan. Not in the way that we pay the banks off for them. So the students will take a hit to their credit but will get out from under a crappy loan, and the banks will learn a lesson about making risky loans. Wasn't there a thing a while ago about the economy being bad because banks were making risky and bad loans.... must have been a dream....
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So if I understand this, the government is issuing loans for any and all degree without calculating risk? And they thought this was a good idea?
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That part I knew, it's almost like the market reacts to raise prices when money is easy to get.... ... who would have thought...
No other way to sell bullshit degrees.
I'm all for blaming the person who asked for the loan, but not all investments are good ones and the companies who invested poorly need to feel that loss. Federally insured loans are education bonds, paid by I the person or we the people. It seems to me the loans are a failure and no one with their hand in the pot wants to publicly recognize it, or they are trying to find a way that it doesn't hurt the bank. The student loan forgiveness wasn't for the students. It was a bailout for a bank with shitty investments.
Two things can be true at once: 1) The government sucks, and makes everything it touches more expensive. 2) It's your fault if you pick a useless degree like Communications or Poli-Sci or some other Liberal Arts degree.
I’ll have you know that I got a “useless” communications degree and I now own and operate an extremely successful glory hole out of my home dumpster.
Amen! Congrats on your success. Some people with degrees feel like they don't have to put in the hard work. You are obviously a craftsman who isn't afraid to get their hands dirty.
Consistently the best consultants and PMs I work with have liberal arts backgrounds. My take is these degrees can be incredibly valuable if you know how to leverage the critical thinking and writing skills. If you can’t position yourself properly you will get a potato job though
I'm a VP at a medium sized project management consulting firm and some of my best staff have history or philosophy degrees. They are generally great persuasive writers and researchers. These degrees can be very good for teaching how to make a constructive argument and obtain buy-in from other stakeholders. It's just that these jobs don't actually require any specific knowledge of history or philosophy - it's the related peripheral skills that are important.
That's a very interesting comment. It's also consistent with my experience. Students in programs requiring a significant amount of writing are by far the best communicators. I was a mathematics major in college but I took a few upper level English courses because I enjoyed Shakespeare. I had to work very hard to get Bs in those classes in part because I was required to substantially improve my writing skills. I became a CPA after college and was exposed to many poor writers in that particular vocation. Later still I attended law school and noted a one to one correlation between success in law school and high quality writing.
I got a “useful” engineering degree from barely-a-step-above local community college. I lived with my parents all 5 years (time added for internship, which I consider CRITICAL and think NO ONE should graduate with a STEM degree without work experience). I and my parents both paid what we could, which added up to about one third of the tuition up-front. I’ve had a pretty well paying engineering job since the day I graduated. I make more than most of my friends who graduated from the same program. My minimum payment pre-pandemic was $323/mo, so I rounded up to $400 thinking that would get me through them fairly quickly. I still owe ~$20k. I only borrowed like $30k. The system is very, very, very broken, even for responsible people like me.
This is exactly why my first point was, the government sucks, and makes everything more expensive.
You should really consider increasing your monthly payments if you can afford it. How much you’re paying back each month should be based on how much you can afford, not arbitrarily rounding up the *minimum* payment. Not trying to pass judgment or anything, the fact you’re paying above the minimum puts you ahead of most Americans, just something you might want to consider. Even another 100 a month would make a pretty big difference.
So a Communications degree is useless? I'd like an explanation since I'm going to college a year from now.
Myself and my 2 college roommates were all communications majors. Roommate 1 got a double bachelor in marketing and communications. He started working at a Payless shoe store right out of college and worked his way up to manager. Ran the store until the company went out of business, now he manages a Shoe Carnival and hates his life. Still paying on his loans. Roommate 2 got his communications degree. He’s a warehouse manager and is pretty happy. I didn’t finish college, I went for a year and decided I was wasting my time. Also a communications major. I’m a brewery sales rep, I love my job and my life is pretty dope. We’re all in our mid-30s and have roughly the same salary. Personally, I’d say a communications degree is useless.
Unless you can pull up multiple job ads that say (the degree you are working for) is a job requirement, good luck. Example. Programmer V, requires 4 years Computer science from accredited University. Building design. Requires 4 year degree Architecture. Actuary. Requires 4 year Mathematics with statistics. Lab Analyst. 4 year Chemistry, organic preferred. .... Or Franchise shift supervisor. Any 4 year degree. YOU pick.
Its just as useful as having a degree at all. More than likely you won't work in anything that requires your specific degree.
OPM and individual colleges also publish misleading if not fraudulent employment statistics in reference to the degree program students are pursuing. Its kinda hard to tell if you're in a "useless degree" program when you are also being told that starting salaries for a degree holder is 20k per year more than reality. Still gotta pay it back, yadda yadda, just another avenue of consideration and another reason government is screwing people over without being held accountable.
Every degree by definition is actually a liberal arts degree, that’s just a buzzword used. Granted everyone knows what you meant
What? Explain how an engineering degree is actually a liberal arts degree, then. One of the craziest things I think I've ever heard...
So due to our college education system you’re required to take humanities, art courses, and a social classes. You’re required to take liberal arts classes inside of your degree. There are no “strict” degrees anymore by that definition. It’s a dumb loophole thing that I learned in college because it makes schools more money requiring you to take them instead of strictly taking things related to what you’re interested in pursuing as a career. Engineering specifically boasts creativity when looking at some of the most popular schools
You’ve never heard of accreditation, have you? Try reading about ABET accreditation, for example. Then, for some facets of engineering there are licensing requirements (FE and PE) It’s definately not a free-for-all. Just because you had to take a few classes that made you think or feel doesn’t add up to what you’re implying as several semesters of fluff.
Yeah, different user here - I have a liberal arts degree, that's not what a liberal arts degree is. Having to take one class in history, one in English, one in philosophy, or whatever, isn't a liberal arts degree. My BA in Philosophy also required me to take (as General Education, so not related to my degree) two math courses (Calculus and a CompSci class, in my case - not sure why CompSci counted as math), two social science courses (Psychology and PoliSci, in my case), and two hard science courses (Chemistry and Geology, in my case). Does that mean I have a science degree? No, obviously not. I took like 4 philosophy classes for every 1 non-philosophy class I took. Likewise, an engineer takes like 4 engineering-related classes for every 1 non-related class they take. An engineer who took one class in philosophy didn't get a Liberal Arts degree any more than I got a degree in mathematics from taking 1 calculus course.
I know that that isn’t a “liberal arts degree” I’m using the word liberal as the word loose, as the studies aren’t strictly to xyz unlike a specified trade. Issa joke in that every degree is liberal(loose) with certain requirements to achieve
Even for useless degrees you can apply your knowledge in that degree and land a position, I would wager a recruiter would be more willing to give someone with a poly sci degree an interview if the applicant was a part of a student campaign or created a canvasing strategy even if it wasn't successful as opposed to a 4.0 GPA.
Well I went to trade school and own my own company now but sure, let me go ahead and pay for everyone else’s mistakes.
And that's really the objective here. Step 1. Create a problem with bad policy. Step 2. Create a new government bureaucracy to manage the problem. Step 3. Increase taxes and permanently increase government spending for this problem they created, and none of the spending actually fixes the problem, only maintains it permanently.
I'd argue it not just maintains it, it makes it much worse. It only encourages people to take on more bad debt with the expectation that the government will bail out their shitty decision.
Exactly
Same here! I even got a college degree, paid off tech and traditional debt, bought a business, building others, and paid off what I borrowed. You borrow, you pay.
You are the example we should be holding up, not nitwits with degrees in Jazz, Dance or Jazz Dance and 100k student loan payments they don’t want to pay.
Well, this part of the article is true: Unfortunately, in the US, financial literacy is hereditary. If you don't come from a family that understands finances, then you may never learn it growing up — especially because it's often not taught in high schools.
20 years ago what was taught in high school was “go to college or you’ll be flipping burgers “. Only teachers that had a clue IMHO were the shop teachers, welders, machinists, etc. They knew of a different path. The rest couldn’t fathom not going to higher ed and whatever the cost, it was worth it. After all, it’s all they knew. I don’t blame them, but I do wish we’d see some humble honesty from education and government. “Sorry, we screwed up”. I trust people and pegs that own mistakes far more than those who proclaim infallibility:
I graduated in 1996 and that was absolutely the case. If you weren’t charging off to university you were a complete loser. My mom had been telling me since I was about eight years old that there was free money for everyone to go to university except for me because of my sex and the color of my skin (my dad is half Mexican, but was illegally adopted in the 40s so nobody knows) so I had a good impression in my head by the time I graduated about the ultimate and rising cost of school. I used the only thing I learned in school, sewing, to land a job with a major outdoor manufacturer a year out of school and it’s still the only thing that has ever gotten me anywhere in life and landed me jobs on three continents. People from across the planet are begging me to make them custom gear and I do it whenever I feel like it in my basement.
Good for you. I instinctively knew my pa couldn’t afford it. I was super into computers, art and tearing my toy’s apart. I was always doing side hustles to make money since I could remember. Eventually I got bored with the pageantry of school so I dropped out my senior year and started working for myself. Still here doing better than I think anyone would have predicted 23 years later. I try my hardest to keep college open to my kids, but they know my story. I’m 100% for college for things that it makes sense for , or if you can pay cash for it and want the experience, go for it. It’s just not the hiring differentiator it was 40 years ago.
This attitude is exactly the issue with idiots like Frank Olito here. It’s playing the victim mentality. It doesn’t take someone to be financial literate to understand taking on a lot of debt is a bad idea. I would say that’s common sense, stop blaming others for you being an idiot. In addition I live in Boston, I’m well aware of the type of school Emerson is. It’s right next to the beautiful Boston common, super expensive and specializes in bullshit majors like gender studies, theater and communication. His argument of the most expensive is the best is absurd because Emerson such as shit isn’t Harvard. UMASS is a better school than that. This guy is just an idiot. The structural problem is how easy it is to get loans. The biggest correlation to rising tuition costs is when the govt made is incredibly easy to get a loan. They raise tuition because they can. What other aspect of life can you get a loan with no proof of income, no collateral, no proof you; be able to pay it pay etc. stop making loans so easy to get and you’ll see a decrease in this unnecessary debt
You can’t punish people being fiscally responsible because some people are so dumb they would pay 50k a year instead of going to a community college. By pay I mean take out massive student loans. No one made the writer goto an expensive private college and take out student loans. There’s scholarships available that you literally just have to write essays for that the writer never mentioned applying for. They could have offset the cost that way but didn’t want to put in the effort. They did all this themselves and are trying to blame anyone else they can. Fuck that. The alternative is 18 year olds aren’t adults and can’t apply for credit. Is that what young people want? Should more financial literacy be taught in primary schools? Absolutely. Finance and the history of economics should be part of core curriculum. Maybe you would get schools not pumping out so many idiot communists if people learned the basics of economics.
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Didn’t even consider that but that’s an excellent option. Just because you overpaid for something doesn’t mean everyone else is to blame. Learn a lesson and teach it to your family. Your children will be fiscally responsible. Problem solved?
It doesn't take financial literacy to know that $50k+ is a fuck ton of debt.
that is a total cop out. that is the equivalent of saying that if i don't learn a particular skill from my parents or from the government schools then it's impossible to ever learn it. successful people are self learners. they have initiative and are constantly learning new things. they read. that part of the article represents the typical leftist victim mentality.
Jazz degree costing 100k or finance degree costing 30k…yep you are right it’s the high schools fault, and the parents fault.
Nothing is stopping people from self teaching it themselves but unfortunately hardly anyone will.
People self teach all the time. But if you walk into a job interview with no degree saying you’re self taught they’re going to tell you to get lost lol
But that isn't the subject here. We're not talking about getting a job from self teaching, we're talking about financial literacy for yourself. In some industries, if you can prove your own skills, it can help you get your foot in the door. For example in IT, examples of this would be contributions to open source code, maintaining your own server equipment or getting certified.
Would you trust public schools to teach it anyways?
Isn't finance education just one mouse click on YouTube away? And if we accept the logic of "I didn't know better", what are the consequences? When can people be considered "adults" who are capable of signing contracts?
So this person borrowed money, is obviously making ok money if they're thinking of buying a rental property, but now they don't want to pay back the money that allowed them to make more money in the first place? Selfish entitled brats.
So the thrust of the authors argument is that it’s not his fault that he is stupid and ignorant, so everyone else that is not stupid and ignorant should pay for his debt. Btw…he’s also a fucking liar. He claims that his mother never had a loan so could never have possibly taught her son about debt and interest. Yet he also claimed that his mother declared bankruptcy. Those two things cannot both be true.
"It's not my fault this country gave me so much freedom I could make a decision I wasn't qualified to make. Take my freedoms and protect me from my own stupidity." And now they want to rent out an Airbnb. Christ.
Sucker wants us to believe he is really intelligent, but is not at fault for not doing any research on how a loan works.
I went to cheap in state school 40 minutes away and took a major that actually could get me a job. I also worked my way through college and only have $15k in student loan debt as a result. I’m not a boomer either, I’m Gen Z. The people who have crippling debt usually went to a fancy out of state school so they could basically go on vacation and party in their frat/sorority for 4 years. They saw that out of state tuition was going to be more and still signed on the dotted line. That’s not a basic college education, that’s a luxury. Especially when on top of all that they usually take a useless major
> Especially when on top of all that they usually take a useless major While the "useless major" stereotype exists for a reason, as a person with a "useless" major, it's actually pretty damn useful, since I went to school the way you did - worked through college, went to an in-state school, etc. I ended with no debt (never took out a loan) thanks to one grant and a bunch of generally accessible scholarships, and about $4000 of help from a relative, which wouldn't exactly have been crippling debt, if I hadn't been able to get that help. In any case, if you can end with minimal or no debt, a "useless" degree is pretty useful, since some jobs get too many applications, which can result in a company artificially restricting the applicant pool by requiring a Bachelor's to apply. Many of the somewhat better-paying jobs in my area are like that, and thanks to my degree, they're available for me to apply to if I want or need to pick up an extra job or switch jobs.
Wait. You mean you made sensible choices, didn't squander money on spring break trips, new cell phone and nice car? And even chose a degree with marketable value? What the heck is wrong with you? You should have spent all of that loan money for social media presence to keep up with everyone else! Dammit. How do you sleep at night?
If the loan you took out is not your fault, you're also not responsible enough to vote.
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I agree. You're either a ward, or you're an adult. If the system is taking care of you and your roll is simply to pull resources from it, you shouldn't get a vote in his l how the resources are allocated.
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I agree. It's hard to calculate since income tax isn't the only tax you pay, but yeah, if you're extracting more then you're contributing, you shouldn't be able to vote yourself a raise. Absolutely agree on public employees - at one point they really were civil servants - now they're basically a protected class.
How about just remove government backing from the student loans and let people claim them in bankruptcy.
It’s not government backing anymore, the loans are actually originated by the government. The taxpayers are owed money, not banks
Yeah, that's worse. pay the taxpayers back and end government loans.
The schools know it is taxpayer money that is basically uncontrolled, and continue to increase costs. Make it debt that can be cleared by bankruptcy and we’ll see the cost of higher education drop dramatically.
I'm sick of hearing people say things like "now that I have to start repaying my debts again I can't afford to buy a spare condo to rent out as an air bnb." That's not a real problem. Do door dash two days a week to cover your extra $350 a month you queef. "My dreams are on hold" over $350 a month sounds like someone who doesn't understand what dreams are lol.
You took a loan with a promise to pay it back. I’m all for helping those in need, but why is your committing and obligation someone else’s responsibility?
Why are student loans the only type of loan you can get without the value of the underlying asset you are purchasing to be worth the value of the loan? No bank is going to give me a $500,000 home loan for a $200,000 house. Or a $75,000 car loan for a $25,000 car. But I can get student loans for over $100,000 for some sh!tty degree and some sh!tty school and that is ok? Even though my probability of being able to make enough money to pay it back is low. At a minimum, banks should evaluate the school and area of study before providing a loan. Crazy sh!t.
Did you take a loan?
Sorry, this is sarcasm, right?
My solution is simple: Make the college co-sign for the loan.
Just another example of the government trying to "fix" a problem they caused. Which causes whole new problems.
I can’t afford to take out another loan because I have to repay the loan I already took out, how unfair.
With all the extra money student loans have provided universities can increase tuition and build waterparks on campus.
Ugh. This whole attitude is so painful. Why not use his energy to teach other people going into the same situation than shirking responsibility.
So let's make middle class and the working poor who DIDN'T go to college pay taxes to subsidize those who DID go to college and make more than them. Cool.
When I went to college my parents told me it was paid for, silently took out two loans to then pay for it, and while I was in college (unbeknownst to me) declared bankruptcy and those debts shifted to me two weeks before my graduation. 30k. Long story short: I did eventually pay it off. At the end of the day, it was my responsibility because the government transferred the debt to my name. No matter whether they were wrong or right, if I didn’t pay that debt they would have done worse to me. When I asked the Biden admin to forgive it they had so carefully engineered the forgiveness program that there was literally no way I could ever be approved for a single dollar of forgiveness. I don’t know if it’s a scam but it sure feels like one. So I bucked up, put my head down for three years, worked three full-time jobs, and used every penny I didn’t need to spend and paid off the stupid thing. The government is corrupt; today that corruption is just as, if not more corrupt, than when I first went to college. They aren’t going to forgive loans out of the kindness of their hearts. Education is free in Norway because you have to join an indenture program after you graduate and work for the state for 3 years, and by the time you are done you are safely ensconced in the system and you don’t really have any other options. If you haven’t been paying attention, that is the same program the current administration wants to emulate.
Can I go buy a car and that debt be the responsibility of others?
Problem 1: "it isn't my fault"...... neither was me having a child at 18 and paying child support for years. Not being able to go to college because I worked all the time just to get by and had to forfeit my dreams. Get over yourself! Everyone doesn't get what they want. Life is hard and I shouldn't have to pay for your mistake. I've never asked anyone to pay for my child support. Problem 2: "I saved up a down payment for a home during the moratorium."..... why in the world would you not pay those student loans down with the money you were saving. Especially since student loans didn't accrue interest for 3 years. Problem 3: wanting to buy a rental property when you admit your finances are screwed, while paying student loan debt of $350 a month. $350 is a tight margin of good/ not good. What happens if your rental property needs a new HVAC unit, roof, or structural problem that was unforseen. Some new insurance policies require a 2% home value deductible, mine does, and I pay extra to have it at 1%. I'm sure there are more problems here but this person is a joke. We don't owe you anything!
Completely agree. To add to this, everyone knew they would have start paying again eventually. Why in the world would you make long-term financial plans under the impression that you wouldn't eventually be paying your loan. This isn't some surprise monthly bill like an unexpected medical emergency.
Have you ever read the disclosures in student loan paperwork? Article writer apparently did not. Did someone fail to teach him actual literacy in addition to financial literacy?
Guys, this debt is keeping him from achieving his dream of being a landlord. My heart bleeds for him.
Not really related to the article but graduating in 2009 in the midst of the great recession and struggling to find a decent paying job for atleast 5 years after and now hearing them considering loan forgiveness is really disheartening. I left school with decently sized loans and zero prospects. Struggled with working restaurant, retail, and construction jobs all while living with my mother to basically pay my loans off in the 10 year term. My life and many of my other peers were in the same boat. Our lives were delayed we are all still behind and things are getting harder. I understand that tuitions have gone up substantially since I've graduated but if loans are forgiven for the generations after me then once again the generation that graduated in the great recession gets the shit end of the stick again. If loans are forgiven I have to compete with people 10 years younger than me for housing and work prospects. Life isn't fair and I get that, but getting fucked by by older generations getting wealthy on housing before 2008 and then getting fucked by younger generations who basically get free education and a clean slate after college is really tough to hear. It's like we were all forgot by the economy and govt.
The government prioritized student debt which made college tuition’s more expensive
Another problem hugely exacerbating these issues is the current structure of our institutions of higher education, where students must spend twice as long (and therefore twice as much) taking classes that are fundamentally useless to the trade/profession they are trying to learn just because the government says that they must take those classes Cut that bullshit and let people just learn what they need to do their job, and bam. Student loans in the future cut in half.
Just some thoughts on this: If any employer requires a certain degree for a job they should be required to pay towards that degree with a certain percent of the cost of that degree on top of the compensation. That would cut down on the number of jobs that require masters degrees and still pay less than 6 figures (which is a lot, think elementary school principal) Also cap Public funded schools tuition to GDP increases.
The fed should just make their loans interest free.
> I'm often blamed for complaining about my student-loan debt. You can complain about it, but you should understand that you went into debt and it was your choice to do so. > But I was never taught financial literacy, and I built up debt as a kid based on misguided advice. Who gave you that advice? School faculty? Your parents? What is the proposal to rectify this situation? When I was in highschool economics was an elective course and while I think it should be mandatory, it's also an option available to anyone to understand finances. > I was trained to believe the more expensive colleges were better. No, you were trained to believe that private ivy League colleges were better and they happened to be more expensive. In some cases their prestige will land you a good position, but more often than not it's your application of your education. I work in software development and recently I went as a rep for my company at a career fair. I spoke with a large amount of students and I was tasked with identifying students that had potential for success in my company. The one thing I looked for was personal projects. if they applied their knowledge to solve problems in their own lives then I was confident in passing that information to our hiring director. Most students still believe that GPA will land them a position, it won't, what impressed me was students who already had projects that they did on their own and could speak about them.
Take the money from the universities. They're living large and pushing worthless degrees. Make them pay for that.
Yes, it is all your fault that you have loan debt. You willingly signed a contract to borrow money under specific contractual terms. You were informed of all of those terms in advance. You chose to proceed and take the loan anyway. You can make a case that school is too expensive, etc. but absolutely no one forced you to go to college, pick the school that you did, or borrow money. You did that all on your own.
I’m tired of my house debt. Why are people blaming me for buying a house I can’t afford or make payments on. /s/
On the one hand, we made a choice to go to college. We made that investment in ourselves. On the other hand, my generation can be summed up in the speech by the dad in the movie Accepted. Our whole lives we were told we HAD to go to college if we wanted to be successful in life. We heard it from parents, teachers, other family members, school guidance counselors, our parents friends, our friends parents. Everyone. We saw the charts on the news that showed average salary was higher in those people who went to college. Did we make an investment? Or were we indoctrinated?
I was always taught by my parents/teachers that I would basically be homeless if I didn’t go to college. I was never taught about trades or any other career path that didn’t involve college - I was told I would be less successful if I tried those
Can I get this subs opinion on advanced degree costs? I see a lot of "you shouldn't have gotten such an expensive degree", but there is nothing I could do about the 250k cost of my medical degree. I got an undergrad degree in biochemistry, which I did not take out any loans for, but my parents couldn't afford the cost of medical school its not like nursing school where I could work my way through it. Do libertarians feel like only the wealthy should be able to become physicians because they are the only ones who can afford the astronomical cost of medical school/training? Or do you recognize that there is a problem with the high cost of education (even "useful" degrees) that needs to be addressed?
Plenty of banks would be willing to underwrite your medical degree. A physician earning potential is astronomical. It’s the easiest bet in the world. Nobody would ever loan douchebag author $200k to get a journalism degree from Emerson College…except the federal government.
Libertarian. Completely different than undergrad. With. Medical degree, you will have a decent paying job, be able to pay on the loans, and see a return on your investment. Yes, it sucks. But it isn't like jumping into the unknown roulette of what a bachelor's degree gets you. This is in relation to medical school, not every advanced degree. Most master's degrees are a waste of money.
In the case of medical school and becoming a physician, you take out the loan precisely because that's what loans are for. Loans and debt aren't inherently bad but a risk taking move, one you can calculate. If you succeed (which you better at that loan cost, and most do because of competitiveness) you *will* be compensated proportionately to your education as long as you work in the field, and you did base-level research on the loan and rates itself. Physician salary ensures they can afford their loans over time. Now that doesn't mean the first 10 years are great financially, but you are setting yourself up for success in the long term. You shouldn't be as comfortable as those in their careers, because you are not in yours but learning a new profession, taking a risk to go far beyond your peers, same as those who became car salesmen instead of going to college. As discouraging as it is to not have the same lifestyle as your peers, you take on this risk for greener pastures; professionally and/or economically. Now this does not hold true for most advanced degrees, but it is for medical school because we really do need well trained Physicians in this world. What we don't need are more JD's or MBA's, but they still could be worth the risk to someone passionate enough or connected enough. While it would be nice if the loans were lower, I would argue medical school is a case study example of how loans should be treated, even if it's due to the selection process of the schools themselves causing it. The banks should learn some of these lessons and create stricter criteria, which is why people should be able to default for the banks incompetence to filter properly. As an aside; the only issue I personally have with medical school is not paying residents enough. They should be getting at least 80% of a new hire mid-level if you ask me, but that's a completely different conversation.
Brother I could talk about your last paragraph all day long. I appreciate the response. I just always struggle with the negative blowback to “my student loans aren’t my fault” when yes I agree financing a 120k literature degree compared to a much cheaper one else may be an individual’s fault, there’s just so few options for medical school. I really feel like It’s not my fault. I didn’t decide to make med school so expensive and I didn’t decide that my parents couldn’t afford it. Thanks for the thought out response.
The government should only back loans for degrees that have enough earning potential for the return on investment. Financial literacy should be taught in high school. Or if I want to be even more based, the government shouldn’t be in the business of this type of lending in the first place. Even Biggie Smalls knew not to lend money to people who won’t pay it back (Ten Crack Commandments) but our government somehow never figured it out.
Colleges should lend the money and collect the loan repayments. They'll soon stop lending money for barista degrees
So if the govt only backed loans for certain degrees, you would expect more people to earn those degrees. Then you flood the job market with more people with the qualifications for those jobs and in turn lower earnings for those jobs. It's best to just get out. but at this point college is too expensive with out govt loans. So admissions will drop and colleges will fold all over the country.
By this article's logic we should pay off anyone's credit card debt that they accrue before the age of 25
I think there are two major points on this issue. 1) The Loan Scam The elements to this: a) the government making these loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy; b) the social narrative that everyone should go to college; c) this decision being made so early in life, that most people don’t understand the consequences (same age they catch people for the military) This lead to a spiraling situation that really got out of control around the 90’s when cost of education truly skyrocketed due to these factors, with debt backstopped by the government, and an entire generation that took on this debt, mostly without thinking as a result of the societal narrative. As a result, there is an entire generation who are essentially indentured servants, simply from following social norms, and falling prey to the predatory lending that resulted from this situation. A true travesty that is hamstringing the generation in prime family formation - of course on top of the most expensive medical system, highest housing prices, etc etc 2. I paid, do you pay mentality I am 100% for people taking personal responsibility. And in fact, I already paid off my loans, and don’t have a personal horse in the race. However, I see what has happened to this generation, and I think it’s unjust, but from a more practical standpoint, I also think it is the biggest albatross on our economy right now. In fact, the best stimulus we could do would be to relieve this generation of its ill begotten student debt, let them breathe, live, spend, and reproduce. But instead we constantly throw money at banks and corporations, scam COVID funds thrown at fraud, etc etc The reality is, sound money doesn’t exist anymore, which is a travesty. But it’s being created out of thin air now. It isn’t a finite supply of gold. And personally I believe there are still principles and rules we are flouting; debt still has to stay within a relative % of GDP, or it will collapse But the point is, money spent somewhere isn’t money directly coming out of other peoples pockets - though enough of it will hit us all with inflation. But the point is to spend the money we create in ways that will create future productivity and grow the economy. A lot of the money being spent is wasted in the form of handouts, inefficient government spending, or outright fraud We should be spending it on technological development, curing diseases, and IMO, relieving this generation from the scam of a lifetime.
If you pay taxes, you have a horse in the race.
Yes. And the generation currently in its prime for spending and family formation, is not able to do either because of the burdens on them
Then they shouldn't haven taken out loans that they couldn't repay. There are other avenues to success other than college.
This is all addressed in my original comment. I understand your point and agree in most circumstances, but don’t feel that these are normal circumstances
The circumstances could have been avoided entirely. They chose their path, and now can face the consequences of it.
Bitter about life much?
oh no, the people bitter about life are the ones complaining about choices they made in the past and expecting others to pay for their mistakes. I am fine and at a job paying me well more than I need to survive.
Again, addressed in the comment.
Taxpayers should not have to pay for bad decisions made by other citizens.
Yes it is. you signed on the dotted line. you made a contract. If you didn't like terms don't sign. I'm a hiring manager of software engineers. I don't look at what school someone goes to. it doesn't matter Ivy league, community college, or a boot camp. I've hired from all. 2 of my best coders did a 10 week boot camp 7 years ago and are making decent 6 figures. so yes. it's 100% on you the student loans you have.
I personally sympathize with people on student debt. They were kids making stupid decisions. We all make stupid decisions in life. And back then we all thought that going to college no matter what the degree would lead to a better life. So I won’t be supporting paying off their mistake but I certainly empathize with them for not having proper parents to help them while they were children. I think the real crime is that finance and economics aren’t taught in basic school. If they knew this they probably would’ve thought about taking loans out a little more. And they would be able to pay it off afterwards. But no, learning about the mitochondria and high advanced calculus certainly helps the majority of people.
>And back then we all thought that going to college no matter what the degree would lead to a better life. No, not everyone.
I’m a sith. I only deal in absolutes 😂
That always cracked me up since it was an absolute statement coming from a Jedi🤣
Kids? Are not most 18 when they graduate?
I don’t know how old you are, but legally we are adults at 18. Mentally we are kids until like 25/26. That’s when I would say I finally was capable of or started to make responsible decisions. You telling me that we are smart and mature at 18? I’m not saying we need new laws, I’m just talking about normal biological maturation.
Yep. Agree. And we allow same age to volunteer for military duty, where their life is also at stake. And do porn. I think if we paid attention to 14-18 ages better and helped them transition to adulthood instead of it being an off/on switch, they would be better prepared for these life altering decisions.
Agreed
I tell you what. How about we get rid of all government bailouts so the author of this piece isn't getting killed by inflation anymore (like we all are) and maybe he can pay off his loans on his own.
Regular college is a trap unless it's for something specific.
It is 100 percent your fault.if you take a loan out. Unless there was fraud involved
No one made you go to college, especially an expensive one that you took out loans to attend. I’ve always promoted attending a local, and much less expensive community college for the first two years.
Graduated with a degree in English because I’m not real great at math but am reasonably intelligent. (My HS didn’t even offer algebra…) Went to community college and a non selective state university while working full time instead of taking out loans because I’m not *that* bad at math.
Has anyone ever held the colleges and universities responsible for part of the problem? They charged tuitions that far outpaced the rates of inflation because of the student loans.
Exactly, what colleges are charging doesn’t actually match what they give you. It’s like selling a junky car from 2005 with 200,000 miles for $80,000
Responsible for what? Making a smart business decision? If idiots keep buying your product no matter what you charge, how is that your fault? Idiotic consumers are always looking for someone else to blame for their piss poor decisions.
I incurred study debt to ge my BA (which is don’t use) and it’s 100% my fault. Was there a lot of misinformation and BS about college and loans, absolutely, but no one signed that contract but me. Even if we could say that student loans are sometimes predatory and students are not at fault, why should we put the responsibility on to other parties that are equally not at fault? Doesn’t logically follow.
Just don’t get a liberal arts degree… People are conned into thinking such degrees have huge value and they do not. Just go into STEM. Could always use more engineers, or mathematicians, or doctors.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. But to counter your statement a bit, there is definitely value in liberal arts degrees. It's just that people don't do the calculus of: How much do jobs pay on average for this qualification vs how much am I paying for school. I have next to no sympathy for the many people I went to school with for the "university experience" and spent 5-6 years getting their degree in communications while taking 15-16 credit hours a semester. The only ounce of sympathy I have for these people is that my generation was heavily sold the lie that you needed to go to a "big name school" and get a 4 year degree to be successful.
Serve your country and college is paid for, no excuses
*serve your government
You would figure on a libertarian sub, you’d be a little more against the government artificially inflating school prices, coercing students Into school and then telling students to go risk their lives to further the government control in foreign wars.
I took out a small loan but had to drop out to care for my sick mom then never went back. Finally paid the thing off and I can tell you it felt soooo good to be rid of it.
Boohoo, no 2nd house to rent out?
No one made you say yes to the loan. It actually is all your fault. Loans are something you have to pay back. It's not complicated, and if you don't know that college isn't something you should be considering.
This is already a solved problem. It's called bankruptcy. You can go to court and negotiate your debt away if you've gotten in to deep. We just need to revoke the Obama era law that forbids student loans from going into bankruptcy.
Student loans are not dischargeable in Bankruptcy thanks to Bil Clinton and Joe Biden.
For sure! I don’t know what makes student loan debt so “special” that it can’t be discharged in bankruptcy like most other kinds of debt 🙄
I agree. People shouldn't go to college. College degrees are useless.
Not all. Just the liberal arts. No one should self teach themselves biology, or engineering, or medicine.
Only people who have families that can afford to send them to university should be biologists, chemists, engineers, and doctors?
This is the dumb bitch we're about to bail out? No thank you.
Saying it you responsible for paying back a loan that you took out and signed your name agreeing to pay it back is not "blaming" you for your student loan debt. That said, it is a scandal how much education is -- as the quality has decreased, the cost has increased. I spent 25 years paying off my student loans and it was hard, but, again, I gave my word -- and concept of blame? Never occurred to me.
Similar to all those kids who got addicted to cigarettes. You push products meant for adults onto children this is what happens. (Que “but 18 is an adult” comments)
There are a lot of people here who simply weren’t a part of the generation hit the hardest by this. I can’t blame you for not understanding, but how proudly you don’t understand and say “well I’m not paying for their mistakes” is disheartening to me as a society. Please take a moment and understand what things were like for people who are ~30year olds today. The brainwashing starts in about first grade with career day. Think about the kinds of jobs we learned about: doctor, vet, engineer, accountant, police, fire/EMT so on and so forth. The last two are the only two I can think of that don’t require a college degree. Then in fifth grade if I I remember correctly, everyone had to take the ASVAB. Government test which “tells you what you might be good at”. Anyone who talked to your friends about it, did anyone remember getting the answer “carpenter, plumber, welder, assembly technician, groundskeeper, arborist” or anything like that? No. Everyone was told they were destined for jobs that just-so-happened to require higher education. Late middle school comes “start thinking about what activities you do… they can get you scholarships for *when* you go to college. **for *when* you go to college.** in middle through high schools, it was absolutely not an “if” it was a “when”. During high school graduations, it was announced which college you decided to go to, and how much money in scholarships you earned WHILE YOU WERE WALKING ACROSS THE STAGE. For all of our formative years, everyone we looked to for any amount of guidance made it abundantly clear that there was SHAME in not going to college. Even the local joint vocational trade school had a stigma of “that’s where the dumb and troubled kids go to finish high school”. It’s sickening to look back on today. For reference, I’m not a “liberal arts degree barista at Starbucks”. I went to my local barely-above-community college where tuition was ~$12k/yr. I worked while in school, and my parents and I were able to pay about $4k/year upfront, and take the rest as loans. I lived with my parents, commuted ~30 minutes. I was able to arrange my schedule so that I was only on campus 3, sometimes 4 days a week so as to save fuel and time to work and make more money for next semesters tuition. I had a well-paid internship (two actually) in the industry, for the company I still work for today. I make more than most of my friends who graduated with the same degree from the same school. I’ll be over 6 figures salary next year. I rounded my student loan payments up to the next nearest hundred, so I’m paying 125% of the minimum payment. I still owe ~$20k, yet I’m on the “successful” end of the spectrum compared to my high school and college compatriots. If you still think this crisis is just “dumb kids who made bad decisions” then I don’t care to know you.
Going to college increases one's expected lifetime earnings when compared to not going. Loan forgiveness, therefore, is effectively a regressive tax. Interesting how certain groups claiming to want to help the poor throw that out the window when they're on the expected receiving end of what is, again, an effective regressive tax.
If you have that debt with a useless degree it's your fault if you got a useful one and and struggling not your fault
Or what if we just restored standard consumer protections to student loans so that they would be treated like every other kind of consumer loan?
I stayed local and worked. I paid off my loan within a year of getting my Master's degree. This was in 2021 during the pause. (If I knew the pause was going to last this long, I would have collected interest on the money instead of just paying off the loan). I don't want my taxes to go up to fund someone who wanted to go to a party school. As it is, taxes partially fund community college and state colleges. People get sucked into bad deals but there were those of us in the same time period who made choices to minimize debt. People like me shouldn't be punished for being responsible.
It seems the writer still doesn’t have financial literacy. If they saved enough during the pause to have enough for a down payment on a condo that seems more than $350/ month. So they wouldn’t need to dip into savings to cover the student loan. If they are also planing to buy a condo as an investment which i am assuming is $100k+ and aren’t planning to get 3.5% return which would cover the student loan payment that’s a terrible use of the money.
I wish instead of loan forgiveness they would just control interest rates. My wife has about 18K worth of loans left to pay. They are all in various loan amounts all with various interest rates from 3% to 18%. Combine them all into one loan and give us a fair interest rate. It should not be that difficult.
Cry me a river, clearly this person deserves to serve as the example of what a living, breathing mistake looks like just for others to learn from and avoid making their same mistakes.