I'm not sure debt makes sense to many people today. A friend of mine was well into at least 5 figures of debt for pre-law and law schooling. He told me he wasn'

I'm not sure debt makes sense to many people today. A friend of mine was well into at least 5 figures of debt for pre-law and law schooling. He told me he wasn't worried about such a huge debt because he could just declare bankruptcy (this is premeditated theft). I told him that student loan debt isn't allowed to be discharged by bankruptcy. This was news to the legal scholar. I got into the #1 ranked (by US News and World Report) graduate school in my major. I decided I did not want $180,000 of debt. My parents thought I should go and, in a mistake, I accepted their offer to pay for the first semester so I could try it. The quality of instruction was a bizarre joke. The buildings were beautiful but the equipment students were allowed to access was so out of date as to be useless, so I had to procure my own. Many things that were free or cheaper at cheaper schools were more expensive. One professor flat out told us that he did not read the papers he assigned us to write. As long as we sent him an email with a Word doc attached, we got full credit (and no feedback). What was of very high quality? A few famous professors, but mostly the other students, who had also come because of that advertisement in US News and World Report. One of my fellow students was heavily involved in the local Occupy group. He is full-on and consciously Cloward-Piven. With no intention of ever paying back his six figures in loans (if he had the money, he might not pay it back because of his principles, and the lack of sufficiently fearsome use of force) he lives off of taxpayer money and channels it into activism against the interests of those taxpayers forced to let him suckle. What's was his real, stated, conscious plan for dealing with his student loan debt? To get Elizabeth Warren elected president. He believed she would discharge it all in a Ecclesiazusaen jubilee and thereby further fuck over people like me who were price responsive and avoided debt, attending less prestigious institutions that already have to deal with unmerited and statistically documented discrimination. I don't know what he's doing now that Warren isn't running. Probably supporting Sanders. And probably supporting loan forgiveness, but also, simultaneously, and outrageously, continuing to support these loan programs because it redistributes wealth to his favorites. His university program provided no information about student outcomes in terms of employment or income. If the school even cared to gather the information, it was kept secret. My parents' retirement plan is to never retire. They had some savings, but, after the stock market crash, the Affordable Care Act has tripled the cost of their insurance. I am worried about ever getting a job with the Masters in CS I am pursuing at a school I can afford with savings from the three years I worked after leaving that disaster of a school after the single semester trial. I am so worried about helping my parents, who have paid for other peoples' kids to go to more prestigious schools even as the government seems to be taking no steps against school prestige discrimination. Sorry for blabbering on.