11 ms·

An interesting article about a person who got every warning, knew all the details of her own undoing but is trying to claim ignorance after the fact to put the

An interesting article about a person who got every warning, knew all the details of her own undoing but is trying to claim ignorance after the fact to put the blame on the “big bad industry” who really did nothing wrong here. She’s a fool who complain that her principle hasn’t gone down when she never actually paid anything towards it. And yes she knows that and yes they and her parents, old teachers, friends and any advicers she has ever talked to explained that the basics of a loan are that you pay it down and pay interests on it. She’s mortified that a variable rate interest loan has a rate that varies.... and sure as hell she remembers them telling her that, she’s just playing dumb to sound the victim. Oh and ofcause they make the details of the loan “almost impossible to find!....” in a tab called details on their website....... or if in doubt you know, you could call them. What sort of black hole level of entitlement is she living in? Education is costly in the USA, this is horrible and wrong. But hell Tesla’s are costly too, you’d get no sympathy if you buried yourself in debt to buy a Tesla and then didn’t pay off the principle for years. In the ideal world she could have been denied the loans on the basis of her lack of ability to manage her own financiancials. But then it would not be the land of the free, and she would just have been complaining about that instead.

CogitoCogito 8y ago
> But hell Tesla’s are costly too, you’d get no sympathy if you buried yourself in debt to buy a Tesla and then didn’t pay off the principle for years. Legally you _do_ get more sympathy given that you are at least able to discharge those loans in bankruptcy.
- sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
  We've been over this a thousand times: you would not be able to get loans for education if you could discharge them in bankruptcy. They would become a super-toxic bet. They would have to be conditioned on the ability of the student to make significant earnings, because otherwise the optimal play for many people would be to get the education, and then declare bankruptcy.
  - viraptor 8y ago
    That situation is US specific. Many other countries allow you to go bankrupt from student loans in various ways. (Or have an alternative way of supporting the debt, for example family co-signing) The fact the current system wouldn't work it doesn't mean the idea is impossible.
    - sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
      In most other countries, student loans aren't even a thing, because university is subsidized to the extent that it is free or relatively inexpensive. The size of the bet is absolutely integral to whether giving the loan makes sense, because it affects the benefit of discharging the loan. If you're saying, "We should make uni cheap or free, and also make loans dischargable," well, sure, but now you're talking about changing a lot of variables rather than just one, and correspondingly increasing the difficulty of reform.
      - xxxdarrenxxx 8y ago
        Jup. I mean for 100k you could live in an European country for a few years with some good groundwork and get a degree with 10k some left. I'd say you'd even get a better job/deal, because surely if these degrees made u 200k a year this thread wouldn't exist. An investment should yield a profit in return... going all in and return with less, are we talking schools or casinos here? It doesn't make moral sense, and in the long run surely is not beneficial for general education.
  - VBprogrammer 8y ago
    I know socialism isn't particular popular in the US but in outher countries student loans are issued by a non-profit / government supported body. Repaying the loan is conditional on earning a reasonable wage.
    - sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
      I wouldn't say I am firmly against this approach, but I do feel that if you have that sort of system, you probably need some control over the types of studies that people can engage in. This is a somewhat unpopular opinion most places, but I do think it's possible for a major to be more or less useful to society. I think that (broad strokes) that is reflected by compensation and/or demand for the services offered by graduates of a given major (teachers and social workers notwithstanding). I think in general it's in the best interests of society to limit the number of people studying unproductive subjects.
- talltimtom 8y ago
  That isn’t so much a question of sympathy as much as a question of the type of asset. If you go into bankruptcy they can claim the physical car and use it to reduce their loss. If you could dischharge student loans you would have to sign over the rights to any future financial gain you would have from your education to let them reduce their loss. This is essentially what happens when they garnish your wage to reduce the loan, but ofcause not in a clean cut bankruptcy like process.
mping 8y ago
How can you even compare a luxury item to getting an education? Besides students are in a disadvantaged position when they really want to get educated. They have no bargaining power. Just because it's legally ok, doesn't mean it's morally right. And as far as I remember, the big bad industry was saved after the crash...
- jVinc 8y ago
  > How can you even compare a luxury item to getting an education? A car can be a necessity, in that case a Tesla is a luxury. An education is not a necessity in any case, but for the sake of argument lest pretend that it was, a that you would die a quick death if you did not at minimum have a degree in something. Then choosing the cheapest available option would the the necessity and choosing to take variable rate high interest loan in order to stay "with your friends and the teacher you know" is a luxury. Then with a huge pile of debt, and a finished degree, to decide to pursue graduate school abroad instead of getting a job and dealing with your debt is an insane luxury. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that anyone who takes an education is buying themselves a luxury, but in a market with varying costs and opportunities, if you decide on your own to go out and put yourself in huge debt to study above your means, then you are choosing a luxury. And saying things like "but community college sucks/My kids can't be successful without expensive private schools/etc." Does not suddenly make it societies responsibility to magically make it possible for you to live above your means. > And as far as I remember, the big bad industry was saved after the crash... Yes, the government went in and invested in the industry when it was at the lowest and no one else had available capital to invest. Those investments are paying off today(https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/ https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/), and the industry is at a better place, where among other tings it can provide loans to students who would otherwise not be able to pay for their education. What is your point? Should they start printing free money to students like this who can't manage their finances, gets whiny when it comes time to pay back the money they loaned?
  - mping 8y ago
    While I generally agree with your comments, I still think it's absurd to have such high interest rates. What's really ironic is that the bailouts were payed with taxpayer money - they shouldn't be printing money but taxpayers should reap the benefits of the investment - directly, not "supposedly" just because the state earned it. I'm not an Is citizen, but I feel the US is much more person-centric than Europe thus the responsibility is on the individual. In Europe we expect certain things from the state, namely not to turn education and health into a private business.
CJefferson 8y ago
Did you read the same article as me? She had already done 2 years of schooling -- to drop out at that point would leave her with no degree, and a massive mountain for existing debt. She was effectively forced into taking a horrible loan, which she understood was horrible (just not how horrible).
- itake 8y ago
  She was paying ~$70k for a degree whose first job paid less than $20k/yr. Purely from a financial standpoint, dropping out would be been the better choice or to at least change majors.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    > She was paying ~$70k for a degree whose first job paid less than $20k/yr. I'd say that is the problem in the US education system as well. US colleges and universities are ridiculously expensive and getting more and more expensive every year. And there's no reasonable explanation, why.
    - charlesdm 8y ago
      Because students can get the loans and they don't look at the price "because all education is good". It honestly is that simple.
      - gambiting 8y ago
        Yep. The same thing happened in the UK - the cost is capped by the government, but the limit was increased from about 3k to 11k/year, with the government arguing that there will be competition between universities and only the best ones will charge maximum. But it never worked like this - there are literally zero downsides to charging maximum amount, so every university does it - and the students don't care because they are guaranteed a loan by the Student Loan Company anyway, and none of the students I've interacted with ever asked themselves "is this degree worth about £50k once I'm done" - they just want to go to uni, the cost is just a magical number no one looks at. The only good thing about the UK system is that the loan repayment is means based and if you don't make more than ~£22k/year you don't pay anything, and if you do you only pay 10% of your salary above 22k towards your student loan(so the more money you make the faster it will be paid off). If the loan is not paid off in 40 years it's automatically forgiven. But from my point of view - it's completely nuts either way. Higher education should be completely free to the student, no matter where or what they study.
matthewmacleod 8y ago
That seems like a bit of an unfair reading to me. Yes, ultimately everyone is responsible for managing their own finances, and it seems like the author acknowledges that and her own part in their mismanagement. But expecting young people to make rational, fully-considered choices about taking loans in order to receive education is a tough sell. Higher education is often - sometimes unfairly - seen as an essential requirement for making progress in many careers. And in a situation where so many people are struggling with unmanageable debt, it seems that “every individual is responsible for their own choices” is a less useful position than “what is wrong with this system nationally and how can we fix it”. It’s kind of like US healthcare: participants are almost obliged to participate in the system, and for various reasons can’t be considered fully rational consumers. There are lots of things that can be done, though. A change in culture making college education less essential; better loan programs; excision of bureaucracy; single-payer education systems; the list goes on. The answer is a lot more complex than “college students need to make better decisions”.
- andrewxhill 8y ago
  Completely. Nobody sat me down to explain debt, they just explained that it was an option to go to the school I wanted to go to. I'm pretty much an idiot now, I can barely comprehend how stupid I was at 18. So to think that I somehow could fully realize the repercussions of student loans is less than unrealistic. It's a many many billion dollar industry versus some (mostly) naive kids. I'm on the side of the idiot kids on saying that the moment in time we are living through is brutal. I hope we find a fix for future kids.
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    > I'm pretty much an idiot now, I can barely comprehend how stupid I was at 18. HN expects one to add to the discussion rather than simply quoting and liking, but it's hard to add anything to that quote :-)
- dnomad 8y ago
  It's not just an unfair reading it's a laughably short-sighted reading. These loans are ultimately guaranteed by State and Federal governments (meaning the banks take zero risk beyond servicing costs) and yet they magically generate billions in profit. Where do you think those billions come from? What do you think actually happens when this woman effectively defaults on her loans? Who really loses when this woman can't afford to start a family or start a startup because she's paying thousands of dollars to banks and collection agencies who, again, took zero risk? Really, the American tax payer might be the dumbest type the planet has ever seen. The genius of the student loan racket[1] is that Americans are paying billions to the government to steal billions from other Americans and then give those billions to banks -- who are working full-time to further undermine American democracy. It's a scheme whose boldness goes beyond the outright slavery and peasant-bondage paradigms of the past. The elites have actually tricked their victims into paying for their own chains. [1] https://abovethelaw.com/2010/09/the-student-loan-racket-now-in-one-easy-to-understand-graphic/ https://abovethelaw.com/2010/09/the-student-loan-racket-now-...
Entalpi 8y ago
In some countries this kind of loan scheme would be deemed profiteering and thus illegal.
nordsieck 8y ago
It's particularly interesting to me that she spent most of her undergrad at a private institution. > Education is costly in the USA, this is horrible and wrong. I mean, there are straight forward ways to pay very little money for a degree in a high earning field. That people people decide not to take this path tells me a lot. A decision is only bad in so far as the consequences are (expected to be) unpleasant. > In the ideal world she could have been denied the loans on the basis of her lack of ability to manage her own financiancials. This is where her parents failed her (and I suppose, themselves, since they are on the hook as well).
- damontal 8y ago
  >I mean, there are straight forward ways to pay very little money for a degree in a high earning field Can you give some examples?
  - nordsieck 8y ago
    Community College -> State School costs very little, especially when compared to private universities like the article. State schools tend to offer everything, so picking a high earning field is typically a matter of an hour's worth of research and maintaining high enough grades to get accepted into the program. There are a few instances where going to an elite private school can pay off (e.g. MBA from a top 5 ivy league school), but for the most part, there is no measurable benefit of going to a private university when compared to a public one. Programs like Running Start[0] can drop this cost even further. Attending Community College can be seen as déclassé, but looking at a university degree purely as an investment, it seems like a pretty reasonable decision. I understand that not everyone wants to treat college purely as an investment, which is fine. Life is not purely about making money. However, the further away from treating college as an investment a person gets, the more painful the post college experience will be. It's generally fine to get a degree in a low earning field (e.g. philosophy) as long as you don't spend too much on it. It's also fine to spend a lot of money to get into a high earning field (e.g. dentistry). It is a toxic brew to spend a lot of money on a low earning potential credential (e.g. MFA in dance from a private university). [0] http://www.k12.wa.us/OSSI/K12Supports/CareerCollegeReadiness/RunningStart.aspx http://www.k12.wa.us/OSSI/K12Supports/CareerCollegeReadiness...
justonepost 8y ago
The take-away here is probably teaching kids from like grade 5 on and up on how to amortize loans and debt repayment. The math is useful and it'd be good to drill in to every kid out there.
- slavik81 8y ago
  Maybe it's different in New York, but interest calculations were a part of the Grade 11 math curriculum when I was in school. Grade 12 math is a hard requirement for most undergraduate degrees.
mhuffman 8y ago
> you’d get no sympathy if you buried yourself in debt to buy a Tesla and then didn’t pay off the principle for years. Banks get to create the principal that they loan out of thin air[1], lend it at ridiculous interest rates to students and have it guaranteed by tax money...they do not have my sympathy! Risk usually dictates interest rates. Meaning that there must be a chance for you to lose the money, but that is not the case with most student loans. Yet they still charge high interest rates. It is criminal that zero-interest (or near zero) loans are not available for students from the government. I am fine with hounding them for life the principal and even not letting them discharge it with bankruptcy, but the interest is practically evil considering the banks take no risk at all. There is literally nothing we can invest our tax money in that will return bigger gains than education and healthcare. [1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
- jstanley 8y ago
  > I am fine with hounding them for life the principal and even not letting them discharge it with bankruptcy Why?
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
    The idea is that you can’t “give back” the education so if you could discharge student loan debt the whole system would probably collapse as students would just finish their education and declare bankruptcy.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      The idea is that students have nothing to lose and a mountain of debt when they graduate, so they should systematically declare bankruptcy to erase the debt.
      - Turing_Machine 8y ago
        The bankruptcy would remain on their credit report for seven years (affecting their ability to buy a house, rent an apartment, or perhaps even get a job), so it's not at all correct that they have "nothing to lose".
leroman 8y ago
Your framing of the core issue is all wrong. "the industry" is monetizing on an opportunity it helped to engineer, there is no point in pointing fingers as this by itself will happen naturally. The real takeaway you should be left with here is the result of this social-economic engineering - people left with crippling debt and other economic or otherwise repercussions. People have "bugs" - you can engineer a way to make them act irrationally (against their own eventual good), this is actually a science, you can call it mass-psychology, propaganda, marketing and so on. Consider yourself lucky, for one reason or another you did not end up in this "trap" but probably not in the account of your "intuition" or "all comprehending knowledge"..
abdeczwyx 8y ago
Bang on brother! You speak directly from the bottom of my heart. She messed things up big time and now is whining around because of the bad, bad world. Ridiculous! And why the heck did she not talk with her parents who might have been more capable of doing some basic math!?
mattmanser 8y ago
They're kids mate. We're telling kids education is key, then telling them to sign a document. They should be protected against this stuff, not put into debt because the baby boomers want to spend tax dollar on pensions instead of education.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
I think it comes down to this - should we as a society let contracts that involve agreeing to harm, should we let them be legal? If you and I agree that you will sell me your left kidney, or that I can punch you repeatedly next Saturday for fifty quid, noncourt will enforce those contracts because you are agreeing to harm. And that history has shown that people in adverse conditions will sell their organs/children/dignity whenever offered (and frequently at below market rates) Usury Contracts like this are another form of harm and we just need to decide where the line gets drawn.
dang 8y ago
Please don't come to Hacker News to gloat about what a fool someone is and how they deserve their misfortune. Comments here need to have more substance than that, and at least a little more decency. We're all fools anyhow. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

CogitoCogito 8y ago

> But hell Tesla’s are costly too, you’d get no sympathy if you buried yourself in debt to buy a Tesla and then didn’t pay off the principle for years. Legally you _do_ get more sympathy given that you are at least able to discharge those loans in bankruptcy.

sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
We've been over this a thousand times: you would not be able to get loans for education if you could discharge them in bankruptcy. They would become a super-toxic bet. They would have to be conditioned on the ability of the student to make significant earnings, because otherwise the optimal play for many people would be to get the education, and then declare bankruptcy.
- viraptor 8y ago
  That situation is US specific. Many other countries allow you to go bankrupt from student loans in various ways. (Or have an alternative way of supporting the debt, for example family co-signing) The fact the current system wouldn't work it doesn't mean the idea is impossible.
  - sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
    In most other countries, student loans aren't even a thing, because university is subsidized to the extent that it is free or relatively inexpensive. The size of the bet is absolutely integral to whether giving the loan makes sense, because it affects the benefit of discharging the loan. If you're saying, "We should make uni cheap or free, and also make loans dischargable," well, sure, but now you're talking about changing a lot of variables rather than just one, and correspondingly increasing the difficulty of reform.
    - xxxdarrenxxx 8y ago
      Jup. I mean for 100k you could live in an European country for a few years with some good groundwork and get a degree with 10k some left. I'd say you'd even get a better job/deal, because surely if these degrees made u 200k a year this thread wouldn't exist. An investment should yield a profit in return... going all in and return with less, are we talking schools or casinos here? It doesn't make moral sense, and in the long run surely is not beneficial for general education.
- VBprogrammer 8y ago
  I know socialism isn't particular popular in the US but in outher countries student loans are issued by a non-profit / government supported body. Repaying the loan is conditional on earning a reasonable wage.
  - sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
    I wouldn't say I am firmly against this approach, but I do feel that if you have that sort of system, you probably need some control over the types of studies that people can engage in. This is a somewhat unpopular opinion most places, but I do think it's possible for a major to be more or less useful to society. I think that (broad strokes) that is reflected by compensation and/or demand for the services offered by graduates of a given major (teachers and social workers notwithstanding). I think in general it's in the best interests of society to limit the number of people studying unproductive subjects.
talltimtom 8y ago
That isn’t so much a question of sympathy as much as a question of the type of asset. If you go into bankruptcy they can claim the physical car and use it to reduce their loss. If you could dischharge student loans you would have to sign over the rights to any future financial gain you would have from your education to let them reduce their loss. This is essentially what happens when they garnish your wage to reduce the loan, but ofcause not in a clean cut bankruptcy like process.

mping 8y ago

How can you even compare a luxury item to getting an education? Besides students are in a disadvantaged position when they really want to get educated. They have no bargaining power. Just because it's legally ok, doesn't mean it's morally right. And as far as I remember, the big bad industry was saved after the crash...

jVinc 8y ago
> How can you even compare a luxury item to getting an education? A car can be a necessity, in that case a Tesla is a luxury. An education is not a necessity in any case, but for the sake of argument lest pretend that it was, a that you would die a quick death if you did not at minimum have a degree in something. Then choosing the cheapest available option would the the necessity and choosing to take variable rate high interest loan in order to stay "with your friends and the teacher you know" is a luxury. Then with a huge pile of debt, and a finished degree, to decide to pursue graduate school abroad instead of getting a job and dealing with your debt is an insane luxury. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that anyone who takes an education is buying themselves a luxury, but in a market with varying costs and opportunities, if you decide on your own to go out and put yourself in huge debt to study above your means, then you are choosing a luxury. And saying things like "but community college sucks/My kids can't be successful without expensive private schools/etc." Does not suddenly make it societies responsibility to magically make it possible for you to live above your means. > And as far as I remember, the big bad industry was saved after the crash... Yes, the government went in and invested in the industry when it was at the lowest and no one else had available capital to invest. Those investments are paying off today(https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/ https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/), and the industry is at a better place, where among other tings it can provide loans to students who would otherwise not be able to pay for their education. What is your point? Should they start printing free money to students like this who can't manage their finances, gets whiny when it comes time to pay back the money they loaned?
- mping 8y ago
  While I generally agree with your comments, I still think it's absurd to have such high interest rates. What's really ironic is that the bailouts were payed with taxpayer money - they shouldn't be printing money but taxpayers should reap the benefits of the investment - directly, not "supposedly" just because the state earned it. I'm not an Is citizen, but I feel the US is much more person-centric than Europe thus the responsibility is on the individual. In Europe we expect certain things from the state, namely not to turn education and health into a private business.

CJefferson 8y ago

Did you read the same article as me? She had already done 2 years of schooling -- to drop out at that point would leave her with no degree, and a massive mountain for existing debt. She was effectively forced into taking a horrible loan, which she understood was horrible (just not how horrible).

itake 8y ago
She was paying ~$70k for a degree whose first job paid less than $20k/yr. Purely from a financial standpoint, dropping out would be been the better choice or to at least change majors.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  > She was paying ~$70k for a degree whose first job paid less than $20k/yr. I'd say that is the problem in the US education system as well. US colleges and universities are ridiculously expensive and getting more and more expensive every year. And there's no reasonable explanation, why.
  - charlesdm 8y ago
    Because students can get the loans and they don't look at the price "because all education is good". It honestly is that simple.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      Yep. The same thing happened in the UK - the cost is capped by the government, but the limit was increased from about 3k to 11k/year, with the government arguing that there will be competition between universities and only the best ones will charge maximum. But it never worked like this - there are literally zero downsides to charging maximum amount, so every university does it - and the students don't care because they are guaranteed a loan by the Student Loan Company anyway, and none of the students I've interacted with ever asked themselves "is this degree worth about £50k once I'm done" - they just want to go to uni, the cost is just a magical number no one looks at. The only good thing about the UK system is that the loan repayment is means based and if you don't make more than ~£22k/year you don't pay anything, and if you do you only pay 10% of your salary above 22k towards your student loan(so the more money you make the faster it will be paid off). If the loan is not paid off in 40 years it's automatically forgiven. But from my point of view - it's completely nuts either way. Higher education should be completely free to the student, no matter where or what they study.

matthewmacleod 8y ago

That seems like a bit of an unfair reading to me. Yes, ultimately everyone is responsible for managing their own finances, and it seems like the author acknowledges that and her own part in their mismanagement. But expecting young people to make rational, fully-considered choices about taking loans in order to receive education is a tough sell. Higher education is often - sometimes unfairly - seen as an essential requirement for making progress in many careers. And in a situation where so many people are struggling with unmanageable debt, it seems that “every individual is responsible for their own choices” is a less useful position than “what is wrong with this system nationally and how can we fix it”. It’s kind of like US healthcare: participants are almost obliged to participate in the system, and for various reasons can’t be considered fully rational consumers. There are lots of things that can be done, though. A change in culture making college education less essential; better loan programs; excision of bureaucracy; single-payer education systems; the list goes on. The answer is a lot more complex than “college students need to make better decisions”.

andrewxhill 8y ago
Completely. Nobody sat me down to explain debt, they just explained that it was an option to go to the school I wanted to go to. I'm pretty much an idiot now, I can barely comprehend how stupid I was at 18. So to think that I somehow could fully realize the repercussions of student loans is less than unrealistic. It's a many many billion dollar industry versus some (mostly) naive kids. I'm on the side of the idiot kids on saying that the moment in time we are living through is brutal. I hope we find a fix for future kids.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  > I'm pretty much an idiot now, I can barely comprehend how stupid I was at 18. HN expects one to add to the discussion rather than simply quoting and liking, but it's hard to add anything to that quote :-)
dnomad 8y ago
It's not just an unfair reading it's a laughably short-sighted reading. These loans are ultimately guaranteed by State and Federal governments (meaning the banks take zero risk beyond servicing costs) and yet they magically generate billions in profit. Where do you think those billions come from? What do you think actually happens when this woman effectively defaults on her loans? Who really loses when this woman can't afford to start a family or start a startup because she's paying thousands of dollars to banks and collection agencies who, again, took zero risk? Really, the American tax payer might be the dumbest type the planet has ever seen. The genius of the student loan racket[1] is that Americans are paying billions to the government to steal billions from other Americans and then give those billions to banks -- who are working full-time to further undermine American democracy. It's a scheme whose boldness goes beyond the outright slavery and peasant-bondage paradigms of the past. The elites have actually tricked their victims into paying for their own chains. [1] https://abovethelaw.com/2010/09/the-student-loan-racket-now-in-one-easy-to-understand-graphic/ https://abovethelaw.com/2010/09/the-student-loan-racket-now-...

Entalpi 8y ago

In some countries this kind of loan scheme would be deemed profiteering and thus illegal.

nordsieck 8y ago

It's particularly interesting to me that she spent most of her undergrad at a private institution. > Education is costly in the USA, this is horrible and wrong. I mean, there are straight forward ways to pay very little money for a degree in a high earning field. That people people decide not to take this path tells me a lot. A decision is only bad in so far as the consequences are (expected to be) unpleasant. > In the ideal world she could have been denied the loans on the basis of her lack of ability to manage her own financiancials. This is where her parents failed her (and I suppose, themselves, since they are on the hook as well).

damontal 8y ago
>I mean, there are straight forward ways to pay very little money for a degree in a high earning field Can you give some examples?
- nordsieck 8y ago
  Community College -> State School costs very little, especially when compared to private universities like the article. State schools tend to offer everything, so picking a high earning field is typically a matter of an hour's worth of research and maintaining high enough grades to get accepted into the program. There are a few instances where going to an elite private school can pay off (e.g. MBA from a top 5 ivy league school), but for the most part, there is no measurable benefit of going to a private university when compared to a public one. Programs like Running Start[0] can drop this cost even further. Attending Community College can be seen as déclassé, but looking at a university degree purely as an investment, it seems like a pretty reasonable decision. I understand that not everyone wants to treat college purely as an investment, which is fine. Life is not purely about making money. However, the further away from treating college as an investment a person gets, the more painful the post college experience will be. It's generally fine to get a degree in a low earning field (e.g. philosophy) as long as you don't spend too much on it. It's also fine to spend a lot of money to get into a high earning field (e.g. dentistry). It is a toxic brew to spend a lot of money on a low earning potential credential (e.g. MFA in dance from a private university). [0] http://www.k12.wa.us/OSSI/K12Supports/CareerCollegeReadiness/RunningStart.aspx http://www.k12.wa.us/OSSI/K12Supports/CareerCollegeReadiness...

justonepost 8y ago

The take-away here is probably teaching kids from like grade 5 on and up on how to amortize loans and debt repayment. The math is useful and it'd be good to drill in to every kid out there.

slavik81 8y ago
Maybe it's different in New York, but interest calculations were a part of the Grade 11 math curriculum when I was in school. Grade 12 math is a hard requirement for most undergraduate degrees.

mhuffman 8y ago

> you’d get no sympathy if you buried yourself in debt to buy a Tesla and then didn’t pay off the principle for years. Banks get to create the principal that they loan out of thin air[1], lend it at ridiculous interest rates to students and have it guaranteed by tax money...they do not have my sympathy! Risk usually dictates interest rates. Meaning that there must be a chance for you to lose the money, but that is not the case with most student loans. Yet they still charge high interest rates. It is criminal that zero-interest (or near zero) loans are not available for students from the government. I am fine with hounding them for life the principal and even not letting them discharge it with bankruptcy, but the interest is practically evil considering the banks take no risk at all. There is literally nothing we can invest our tax money in that will return bigger gains than education and healthcare. [1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

jstanley 8y ago
> I am fine with hounding them for life the principal and even not letting them discharge it with bankruptcy Why?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
  The idea is that you can’t “give back” the education so if you could discharge student loan debt the whole system would probably collapse as students would just finish their education and declare bankruptcy.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    The idea is that students have nothing to lose and a mountain of debt when they graduate, so they should systematically declare bankruptcy to erase the debt.
    - Turing_Machine 8y ago
      The bankruptcy would remain on their credit report for seven years (affecting their ability to buy a house, rent an apartment, or perhaps even get a job), so it's not at all correct that they have "nothing to lose".

leroman 8y ago

Your framing of the core issue is all wrong. "the industry" is monetizing on an opportunity it helped to engineer, there is no point in pointing fingers as this by itself will happen naturally. The real takeaway you should be left with here is the result of this social-economic engineering - people left with crippling debt and other economic or otherwise repercussions. People have "bugs" - you can engineer a way to make them act irrationally (against their own eventual good), this is actually a science, you can call it mass-psychology, propaganda, marketing and so on. Consider yourself lucky, for one reason or another you did not end up in this "trap" but probably not in the account of your "intuition" or "all comprehending knowledge"..

abdeczwyx 8y ago

Bang on brother! You speak directly from the bottom of my heart. She messed things up big time and now is whining around because of the bad, bad world. Ridiculous! And why the heck did she not talk with her parents who might have been more capable of doing some basic math!?

mattmanser 8y ago

They're kids mate. We're telling kids education is key, then telling them to sign a document. They should be protected against this stuff, not put into debt because the baby boomers want to spend tax dollar on pensions instead of education.

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lifeisstillgood 8y ago

I think it comes down to this - should we as a society let contracts that involve agreeing to harm, should we let them be legal? If you and I agree that you will sell me your left kidney, or that I can punch you repeatedly next Saturday for fifty quid, noncourt will enforce those contracts because you are agreeing to harm. And that history has shown that people in adverse conditions will sell their organs/children/dignity whenever offered (and frequently at below market rates) Usury Contracts like this are another form of harm and we just need to decide where the line gets drawn.

dang 8y ago

Please don't come to Hacker News to gloat about what a fool someone is and how they deserve their misfortune. Comments here need to have more substance than that, and at least a little more decency. We're all fools anyhow. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html