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1) Move most good careers that do not require a college degree out of the country for the benefit of shareholders 2) Tell everyone born between 1980 and 1995 t

1) Move most good careers that do not require a college degree out of the country for the benefit of shareholders 2) Tell everyone born between 1980 and 1995 that they'll be unable to compete in the global marketplace if they don't get at least some post-high school education, and imply that the mere presence of a degree will help instead of having a specific type of degree 3) Have next-to-zero standards for public funds used in grant and loan programs for college education, meaning people can take out loans for any sort of degree program at almost any sort of institution 4) Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other types of debtors. You cannot discharge them through bankruptcy, it's very difficult to renegotiate, and SCOTUS has said that the chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case, the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans.

scoofy 2y ago
You forgot the most important part. The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged. Taking our a vast loan to study English literature might seem unwise, but it’s something I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding to do.
- paulcole 2y ago
  I took out around $20k in loans to study literature starting in 2001. Graduated in 2005. Rent was $150 a month. Played a lot of poker and disc golf. Studied and learned a bit. Had a 75% scholarship to help with tuition. Had a $300/semester book stipend as part of that and just bought penny books off Amazon (one of the benefits of an English degree) and pocketed the difference. Basically for 5-8% or so of my (estimated) lifetime I was completely free to goof around. Great value for someone who dislikes working. Consolidated the loans after I graduated at 1.5% interest. Finished paying them off in 2021 with the Biden Bucks. Pretty sure that kind of deal doesn’t exist anymore.
  - Avicebron 2y ago
    I'm trying to figure out if you missed a 0 at the end of your rent...
    - paulcole 2y ago
      Lol no it was $150. This was Gainesville, Florida and I split a horrible studio apartment with a friend of mine. It was located in a low lying area and once after a tropical storm we had to wade through hip-deep water to get to class (the apartment itself was miraculously high and dry). Coming home one night I saw a little gator swimming along near me as I trudged through it. After we graduated my roommate moved to Manhattan for an engineering job. His month’s rent up there was significantly more than he paid for a year in college. I ended up moving to Portland, Oregon in 2007 and my first rent here was $550. Now in 2024, I’ve finally tacked on that missing 0 and my rent is now around $1500.
      - downut 2y ago
        1985-87 my partner and I rented a just fine spacious 1 bdrm with a 10 min walk to the Math building on the East side of Gville for $200/month. We both had graduate school stipends. The 4 apartments all had cool tenants. Geckos in the stairwell. It was glorious, even w/o AC. I ended up finishing at ASU. This highly educated ChE/Math imbecile took out a $12K student loan near the end because it was "free"[1]. Got to silicon valley and started learning the maths about house loans and income tax interactions and took a glance at the student loan interest payments (something like 6%? I don't remember) and freaked out. Paid it down immediately. Needless to say we advised the daughter different. [1] The application was like: name, address, and school. Less than a page.
    - gfs 2y ago
      I don't think $150 is out of the question over twenty years ago with roommates and a LCOL region.
    - sevensor 2y ago
      Big state U is in the middle of nowhere, and in those years I was paying closer to $250, but I could see if you were willing to compromise on quality or quantity of personal space, getting that down to $150 without even hitting bottom.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building. Instead, all I was told was to go to college. So... the people that made me woefully sheep like and "financially innocent" then sent me to the wolves because they believed in me. Seriously, they made huge changes to the way people were accepted into college - created High School "career counseling" (college/University recruiters) to tell everyone kid they were smart enough to go, and the dumber down tests convinced enough to convince the rest. The loans went up each year - the costs more than doubled between my Freshman and Sophomore year and just never stopped going up - the more you owe the more you HAVE to finish to get the job to pay the loans. Before all this, when less than 1% of all student loans had been defaulted on, the loan debt was made unforgivable by 6 people - a committee of bankers created by the people in Congress they bought. It was setup so that of a millennial "Wins" it means they can afford to pay their loans - so the bank wins. If we lose we still have to pay/often must pay more with all the fees and added interest - bank still wins. During the time I lived thru all this I was reading shit about how lazy all f are bc we don't own as many houses as we are supposed at our age - this is still true to this day actually. This is an intolerable and disgusting thing for a society to do to an entire generation - any group is wrong but to plan out the demise of a generation of, at the time all this was first set in motion, we were literal Elementary Students. These loans destroyed lives, relationships, sets parents against their children, divided families. - All just part of the plan.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    > not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building. Not everything can be, or is supposed to be, taught by schools. Your parents should've taught you those things, and if they didn't do that they failed you.
    - elashri 2y ago
      What if I lost my parents before they got the chance to teach me that? What if I was raised in a foster care and I never knew who my parents were? And what if my parents don't know these things themselves? There are many ways that this logic goes wrong. The school should teach that because it is very important lesson to engage in a society and be a good citizen. Edit: Sorry I meant people raised in orphanages not foster care. I wasn't in focus enough while writing this. Sorry if this caused hard feelinga for anyone
- jancsika 2y ago
  > The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged. I guarantee you that law/med school students have an education in "complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged." Because before the current law was passed, they were the ones abusing the old "complex debt instruments" to discharge debt they knew they'd be able to pay back once they started making bank. The law was passed because they were doing this in large numbers. For these serious med/law students, the old system was free money. The new system is a reasonable risk. Did you know this? If so, why did you write "by definition?" And why go off on a tangent about English literature students?
  - slaw3 2y ago
    What was the law that was passed? and what was the "old" method for discharging debt? Asking as someone interested in discharging some debt
  - mbrumlow 2y ago
    You flew too close to the sun. You can’t argue with a bunch of people who are in debt and learned that playing the victim pays. It’s funny. That everybody is mad at the banks and schools. But the politicians and do good laws passed are what caused all of this. Banks did it want to give loans out for shitty degrees to people who would probably not pay them back. So laws were passed to force banks they had to give out loans. Schools did not want to accept everybody, but only the top of class. But laws were passed forcing them to widen their acceptance criteria. This creates the perfect storm we are in. Before the system was self limiting. Banks only gave out loans for degrees and to people who had high probability to pay back. Schools accepted only the best students who had a high probability of succeeding. The loans were low risk, high reward, and the schools were able to provide a higher level of overall education to those who did go.
    - Izikiel43 2y ago
      > banks did it Banks didn’t?
      - 2y ago
- zozbot234 2y ago
  The bulk of education debt in the U.S. is not about undergrad degrees in English literature or the like. By and large, it gets incurred either for lucrative postgrad degrees (MBA, law, medical etc.) or for earning degrees at "non-traditional" for-profit colleges.
  - TeaBrain 2y ago
    Almost 60% of U.S. undergraduate students take out either federal or private loans and there are 5x as many undergraduate students as graduate students in the U.S. For those downvoting: 54% of US graduate students take out student loans, while around 55% of US undergraduate students take out loans. The average undergraduate student loan debt is around $29000, while the average debt for graduate school borrowers is $71000. Given that there are five times as many undergraduate students as graduate students and given that a greater number of undergraduate students take out loans, the average graduate school debt would have to be nearly $150k to be greater than the undergraduate debt. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/average-student-loan-debt-graduate-school?msockid=2375d0d1d7b4611437bbc2a0d69160d1 https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/avera... https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-student-loan-debt-statistics/ https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-student... https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/average-student-loan-debt https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/average-student-lo... https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/average-student-loan-debt-graduate-school?msockid=2375d0d1d7b4611437bbc2a0d69160d1 https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/avera...
    - lapcat 2y ago
      I think the OP is referring to the number of dollars rather than the number of students.
      - TeaBrain 2y ago
        Of course it was based on the number of dollars, but based on which figures? It was an assertion conjured out of thin air. If there are five times as many undergrad students as grad students and a similar percentage of grad students had to take out student loans, then this would mean that students are incurring on average five times more debt for graduate school. This is without taking into consideration that a far higher percentage of US graduate students are international students.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Plenty of smart people who get liberal arts degrees from top schools do just fine. I know plenty of them even though I have engineering degrees myself. They may not get FAANG salaries in general--unless they end up in management--but plenty of people I know are just fine.
  - adityamwagh 2y ago
    I see a problem here. Why are English majors in Management positions? With LLMs, I don't see a value on an English degree anymore. So I personally believe it's just a money sink at this point. I don't believe art can be taught in universities as a degree program. Universities should only be for domains that have tangible value.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      What the hell do LLMs have to do with anything on this topic? If anything, they commodify low-level tech folks just like past tools have. I'll mostly hire a smart liberal arts major so long as they're respectful of tech and other domain expertise over someone who thinks it's only about (probably narrow) technical smarts.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      LLMs are the exact antithesis of what an English degree teaches you: how to communicate effectively and with context, and to understand nuance in what other people say. LLMs make things that sound good but have no real depth to them.
      - adityamwagh 2y ago
        You might understand this but I would like to believe and employer won't. Anyways, my main point is universities should focus more on tangible skills - accounting, engineering etc and should not have random useless degrees of little value. Maybe English major is still valuable, but I personally don't see the tangible value in it - other than being an English teacher.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding to do. That's the addendum to the "most important part." These people without an education in complex debt instruments are the vast majority of the time either children, or were children quite recently. Even when it comes to the ones in grad school, I have jeans older than their legal ability to sign contracts.
- MisterBastahrd 2y ago
  Sorry, I feel no sympathy for them. I went to college before I had internet access and my decision on what college degree to get and where to go to get it was based upon the salary I would receive upon graduation and my ability to repay my loans. I went to the library to figure these things out for myself. Nowadays, you don't even have to get up out of your chair. If you are a young person and you make stupid decisions on your college education and student loans, that's a YOU thing. I personally think college should be free because education is a worthwhile endeavor for everyone. But since it isn't, I'm not willing to make excuses for those who attend without weighing the costs and benefits. It's one of the easiest things in the world to do.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > debt instruments that cannot be discharged Your regular reminder that debt bondage is a form of slavery, and is illegal in most countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage There are only two options with debt: bad debt are written off, lender takes a hit and the lender must be careful who they lend money to. Or bad debt lingers forever and accrues lucrative interest, in which case giving out bad debt is the whole point for the lender’s operation. The only risk is that the debtor might die. If the debt also passes to the next of kin, you have full-on, real slavery.
  - chii 2y ago
    > is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt a student does not pledge their services as security for the debt. It's not debt bondage at all.
    - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
      It just had a few extra stepts
- maerF0x0 2y ago
  > The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged. I mean it's a pretty simple concept that you borrow money and you must pay it back. However we agree that the failure is that we do not educate them enough already in the first 12 years we force upon them. For that I blame a lack of options, government "standards" which become ceilings instead of floors, and the unions that protect bad teachers, also I'll note as a foreigner in the US. The US Schools i've seen (and i'm extrapolating here to most public schools) are ran like social clubs and have far too much time devoted to bs that does not help the kids. I'm talking about extracurriculars that impede with a quality education. Football is not a subject we should be prioritizing as a nation... Formals, homecoming, spirit days etc are such a distraction from what highschool kids should be focused on -- Growing up and making a viable future for themselves. People note that Highschool rankings in Canada are excellent, well guess what? None of that happens in Canadian highschools (that I'm aware of), there might be a school dance or two, and "Prom" is very low key, relatively. High school football is small time...
  - kiba 2y ago
    I am disinclined to agree with you. Homecoming, football, having fun in sports, are exactly what kids should be focused on. They should be enjoying life, not hunched over materials studying late into the night. Of course, focus on footballs, elaborate dance, and other sports can be excessive. I merely object to the excessive focus on academics, the rat race, and pressure cooker environment to get education at top ranked colleges. On the contrary education should be meeting the needs of the 21st century, teaching skills to create functioning adults that can navigate life's challenge, such as avoiding scammers, how to judge quality information, how to diagnose and solve emotional challenges. There will still be classes taught on academics such as learning to read, simple arithmetic. Only when they're adults that their focus will entirely be on academics. Academics are easy if you're well adjusted and know how to learn.
    - chii 2y ago
      > navigate life's challenge, such as avoiding scammers, how to judge quality information, how to diagnose and solve emotional challenges where are the parent's? They're meant to be the ones teaching these non-academic education to their children. School does not replace parenting. School is for academic studies - stuff that a parent won't have had the qualifications to teach.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > complex debt instruments They are not complicated. Compound interest is middle school arithmetic. Too bad the public schools are inept at teaching math. I received a modest tuition loan when I went to college. There was no mystery about it. I made the payments after I graduated, and paid it off.
  - cdaringe 2y ago
    Username checks out. :) Ya the arithmetic is easy. Building up the associated algebraic expression(s) though is certainly high school level where I’m from. I wish I understood why math education is the way it is. I really have no idea. I suspect the problem’s complexities are both wide and deep
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - pokerface_86 2y ago
      no one actually good at math is going to become a K-5 teacher, they’re gonna get paid, so it creates a doom loop where each new generation of primary school teachers get progressively shittier at math.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        There's a reason why 3rd grade "teachers' edition" textbooks for math exist. It's because those teachers need an answer key for 100+200. As for "good at math", it's hard to see how a teacher with a degree can fail at 3rd grade arithmetic.
        pokerface_86 2y ago
        i have literally witnessed students in a senior level discrete math class struggle with simple algebraic operations. they were on the math education track.
- ta_1138 2y ago
  Then colleges are concerned when they see enrollment at many majors keep shrinking, while the demand for computer science grows, even when the college doesn't even have a proper CompSci department, but they depend on the Math school. Then the students wonder why it's a 4 year degree with a full year wroth of non-major classes that seem unrelated, but tack on tens of thousands to the cost of the degree, plus whatever on-campus housing and meal plan, mandatory for freshmen, might cost.
freshtake 2y ago
5) Do nothing about the problem until the debt becomes too large, then attempt to blanket cancel the debt without expecting any fallout. All the while doing nothing to fix the underlying issues.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  i.e.: transfer the wealth from the taxpayer to the creditors anyways, just in a different way
bufferoverflow 2y ago
I would also add 5) Don't educate young people on what their degree would earn them. So many young people think their hobby can become their career and pay for a nice life style. Unfortunately, it's not the case for many majors.
- kraussvonespy 2y ago
  Which is bad too because if you turn your hobby into your career, you end up not having a hobby anymore. In order to have a happy life, you have to have a vocation and an avocation that are separate from each other.
  - foobazgt 2y ago
    > In order to have a happy life, you have to have a vocation and an avocation that are separate from each other. This reads to me as your career shouldn't involve doing something you enjoy. I think this mostly happens in situations where people are doing exactly at work what they'd do at home, and they don't like their job for any vast number of reasons. Usually that's only a problem if you don't have the security to find another job. My personal experience is that it really helps to be able to be passionate about your work. It's fulfilling. You will perform better at your job, because you will be multiplying your experience from work with your experience at home. Sometimes my hobbies and my work have been literally exactly the same, e.g. I've been able to open source projects from work (which I then work on as a hobby). The advice I'd give people instead: Like your job. Get a degree in a field that you both enjoy and that pays well. That sounds glib, but so many people don't think about this at all (part of the focus of the article). You probably won't be able to align your career and the exact activity you enjoy the most, but you should shoot for them being in the same ballpark. Where they don't align? Sure, that's opportunity for a hobby.
    - pixodaros 2y ago
      The problem is finding that intersection. If you are really suited to journalism you will have a hard time financially in 2024. And the experience of studying a thing and doing it for a living are different, and in 2024 its hard to try different careers out because most employers want credentials and experience. There are still jobs where you can walk into the office and talk someone into giving you an internship but many organizations force all hiring through online applications and the HR bureaucracy (and the 'talk yourself up' approach works better for extroverts from the hiring manger's culture).
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
I mean for fucks sake we were pushing 18 year old teenagers into tens of thousands of dollars of debt! I dunno about most people but at 18 I had absolutely no clue about anything, especially the concept of money nor career. How the fuck does an 18 year old comprehend why taking $60,000 to get a degree in “Latin Dance” is not a good idea (and we all know many people who fall into this bucket too!). And yet parents, councilors, teachers, and “the whole system” pushed this onto every kid in high school. And then society turns around and mocks them later on for being “stupid” and “lazy” or whatever… fuck that shit. Society strongly told kids that college, any college, was the only way to have a future.
- lispisok 2y ago
  You are being downvoted but that was exactly my experience. It wasnt hyperbole. I was told my entire time in k-12 you need to get a college degree by everybody. Parents, teachers, counselors. Additionally they said, with no exaggeration, to get any degree, at any school, and take out as many loans as you need. So yes an entire generation of kids were told the $60,000 in debt for a latin dance degree at a no-name school was better than no degree at all.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    I don't know when that narrative started, but it was not what I heard (high school in the 90s). I at one point thought out loud about majoring in Art in university, and everyone, parents, teachers, guidance counsellors said, "Buddy, not if you want an actual career! Major in engineering or something." Maybe the later generations got the bad "Major in anything" advice but I sure as heck didn't.
- jajko 2y ago
  Where were parents? Don't tell me they were absent in such a massive decision that absolutely defines rest of their kids lives. Yes its horrible to force 17-18 year old to make such an important decisions and also schools should have known better and counsel heavily beforehand. But lets not forget that for the state you are 100% responsible for your actions at that point including any crime, state will happily draft you and send you to get killed if the need arises. Loan management pales in comparison with this. Truth is harsh, society is harsh and unfair in many aspects. I don't see this improving unfortunately anytime soon.
skrebbel 2y ago
I don't like this type of comment because it's makes it seem like that this was all planned like this on purpose (by some cabal of evil schemers, I suppose?), but without the need to provide any evidence that that's indeed how it went, because nothing of the kind of is explicitly claimed. Things can go wrong without people scheming to do evil. It's not helpful to twist "these and these circumstances combined to produce a bad outcome" into a plan description unless you bring at least some evidence that it was, in fact, planned to go like that.
- carapace 2y ago
  It would actually be worse if we accidentally built this machine to trap and drain a generation of their productive capacity? And of course there is a cabal of evil schemers, they have hardly bothered to hide themselves, e.g.: > Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon. > The theory was first articulated by James H. Hammond, a Democratic United States senator from South Carolina and a wealthy Southern plantation owner, in a speech on March 4, 1858. Hammond argued that every society must find a class of people to do menial labor, whether called slaves or not ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory It gets worse from there. You can go look up the people who passed these laws and the arguments they used to promote them, but in the end it hardly matters. What matters is disassembling the mudsill machine.
  - Aunche 2y ago
    This is barely relevant to college debt. If anything, it contradicts the parent comment because it would be the white collar middle class resting on the "mudsill" of cheap global labor. The Internet also underestimates how hard labor jobs are on your body. It would have been even worse during the golden age of American manufacturing, when there were 10 times as many work related deaths. When people imagine a world of we didn't outsource factory work, they assume it will be exactly like ours but where all unemployed English majors become unionized factory workers. In reality, any policy comes with trade offs. People like Steve Jobs would have entered blue collared work, like their parents. Consumer electronics would be significantly more expensive when made by domestic labor, and that means there would be less competition and innovation in this space.
deleted 2y ago
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spencerchubb 2y ago
Unless I missed it in the article, I don't think the author mentioned one of the biggest factors. The big lenders in America are effectively extensions of the US government, and the government guarantees over 90% of loans. That means there is no risk (for the lender) to give out student loans. The taxpayers take on the risk
freitzkriesler2 2y ago
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brigadier132 2y ago
In your 4 step process where do you blame the not for profit schools for raising tuition by completely absurd and unsustainable amounts? If we are going to forgive student loans, tax payers should not be on the hook. The loan originators and most importantly the schools should pay since they are both the primary beneficiaries of this disastrous policy.
- JoBrad 2y ago
  The cost of student loans is nothing compared to the value that those degree holders will provide. In my opinion, your first degree at a public university or community college should be paid for by the Federal government as long as you keep a certain grade average, and stick to a reasonable timeline. If it matters to anyone, I paid off my loans entirely, but also received Pell grants.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    If your opinion were correct the degrees would pay for themselves and we wouldn't be having these discussions. We have people paying $160k a year to study in fields that are increasingly having their fundamental research completely debunked and exposed as fraudulent (see Political Science and Pyschology). There is also absolutely 0 reason these degrees should cost so much. If we want to keep a guaranteed student loan program it should be restricted in the amount that can be borrowed and it should only be usable at local community colleges that cost under $5k a year. Nothing about education necessitates spending more than that.
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      The degrees do pay for themselves on average. Bachelor's degreeholders have median earnings $525/week higher than high school graduates (https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/education-pays.htm https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/educa...), which over the course of a career would cover even the most egregious student debt loads. That's precisely why it's a hard problem; we could just warn kids not to jump into the debt trap if it weren't genuinely worth the cost.
api 2y ago
You forgot: 5) Systematically under-build housing so that future generations will be unable to simultaneously repay these loans and afford a place to live.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  Also: 6) Intentionally train too few doctors for the explicit, stated, out-in-the-open purpose of pumping doctor wages. Continue this policy until it is too late to train enough doctors for the coming wave of Boomers.
spamizbad 2y ago
I feel like the key thing missing from this discussion are the employers who still demand these degrees. Let's say we reformed both higher education and student loans - does that have any meaningful impact on the demand side beyond pushing the salaries of degree holders up (thus increasing the value of a degree, thus making larger loan values easier to justify, thus...)
- fallingknife 2y ago
  If we stopped subsidizing the degrees less people would have them, but employers would still need the same number of employees. They would be forced to drop necessary degree requirements or go understaffed.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Who knows what would happen? Maybe they'd do their own educational curricula with requirements that would require minimum tenures with payback requirements. (Not sure of all the US laws in this regard. There used to at least be relocation payback requirements.) But I suspect a lot of people here wouldn't like 1 year bootcamps for jobs that included an extended employment commitment.
    - fallingknife 2y ago
      I suspect they would like it better than paying for 4 years of education with no guarantee of employment at the end. But most likely it would be nothing of the sort. Most jobs that require degrees don't actually use any of the material in the degree (any job that doesn't care what your major was). Those jobs could just hire HS grads without any other changes.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  Most good employers, especially in tech, don't require degrees these days.
  - Izikiel43 2y ago
abnry 2y ago
Re: 4), isn't forgiving loans awfully close to having power of the purse? That is explicitly congress's role. You have some really perverse incentives too if you allow loan forgiveness by the executive branch, something close to buying votes.
mbostleman 2y ago
For number 2, how did you come up with the very narrow 15 year window of birth from 1980 to 1995? I was born in 1963 and for the entirety of my upbringing it was a forgone conclusion that the lack of post high school education had a dire and inescapable consequence in future earning and socioeconomic status.
- kungito 2y ago
  Because at that time an engineering degree still had some weight because not everyone can get it. This inflation 9f degrees caused the degrees to have way less value only for the next generation
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I was born in the mid-70s, and nobody told me "Just go to college, any college, and major in anything." That was never the narrative. It was "Go to a top-N college, major in one of these very carefully enumerated majors that tend to result in good career trajectory (business, engineering, medicine, and so on), and maintain a very good GPA throughout." The messaging was very clear, from parents, teachers, and guidance counselors: Don't go to film school or a Tier-2 university and major in history, if you want a career. I'm not sure when the "Go to any school, and do whatever" messaging started but it was not happening in the 90s when I was in high school.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    I grew up in the latter half of the 90's and the narrative I remember was that it was a time when even like entry-level secretary jobs started requiring degrees (a phenomenon which may or may not have been exaggerated), and the reasoning was "it doesn't matter what it's a degree in, they just want to see that you have the capability to see something through to the end and not drop out"
    - pokerface_86 2y ago
      was still told this and i graduated college in 2024. it did work out for me, but for the vast majority of ppl in my graduating class, unless they double majored from B School or did a proper STEM degree, they’re unemployed
User23 2y ago
> cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans You present this as though it doesn't make sense, but as far as the federal government is concerned forgiving a debt is spending (which is why the IRS will tax you for forgiven debts, income is the other side of spending). And spending is explicitly under Congress's authority.
diob 2y ago
5) Don't forget the massive rise in tuition. My brother went to college a few years before me, and by the time I got there (born before 1990), the price was double what it was his first year. It was only 2 years of increases. 6) Only allow help for families making under a certain amount, so those from abusive homes are shit out of luck.
IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
>>> 1) move most careers...out of the country....to the benefit of shareholders. You've hidden very carefully the causality in this sentence. Who moved them? Why? Its perhaps implied that since shareholders benefited, that they did it. Yet a careful examination reveals quickly the elephant in the room in that thesis: why did outsourcing now, and not before, if the benefit to shareholders has always been there? why did this happen mostly in the US, and not other countries? Of course, the reality is far more complex and reveals that the road for manufacture hollowing in the US was a road paved with good intentions. History is there for anyone who wants to read it.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  There is outsourcing in places like the EU but it looks different and takes place within it, because the wealth disparities between EU countries are so much greater and US GDP per capita is so high. The state with lowest GDP per capita, Mississippi, is on par with Belgium.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  [dead]
- doctorwho42 2y ago
  Well one of the reasons for outsourcing was the idea that becoming a service economy would improve our country and it's citizens... Unfortunately that turned out bust.
  - chii 2y ago
    many citizens' lives were improved. The cheap material consumption and availability is an improvement. It's just that the benefit is so widely available that people stopped thinking of it as a benefit. It used to be that owning a TV or radio was an expense you planned for and it had to last. Of course there are those who were hurt from the move from blue collar manufacturing, but overall, the aggregated benefit is higher than the losses from those who were laid off. And it's not as if new industries did not spring up.
to11mtm 2y ago
> 2) Tell everyone born between 1980 and 1995 that they'll be unable to compete in the global marketplace if they don't get at least some post-high school education, and imply that the mere presence of a degree will help instead of having a specific type of degree Yes but I'm conflicted on this for a couple reasons. The second part, became less true for anyone graduating after 2004 or so. Where I still get -vexed- are the people I know who, about to hit or are into their 30s, start in a program for (or, wind up finishing with) a non-marketable degree as their first degree. And the best example I can think of, was a specific not-colleague that started in some sort of program because they wanted to get into prostetics (I warned them about 3d printing upsetting the industry, they yelled at me for raining on their parade,) the 3d printing paradigm shift, surprise surprise, caused an upset into the marketability of their program, and they shifted into, at least last I was on speaking terms with them, women's studies. I think part of the reason for the second half however, is an odd balance of 'younger people can be naive' and it's better to have them think that and finish than drop out a year or two because their major isn't panning out, i.e. switch to something else. I say -that-, mostly because I know a lot of folks in my school would wash out from Engineering into Business or something else and while it's possibly not 'ideal', finishing some semi-useful degree is better than dropping out with some percentage of the full debt and nothing to show for it. I will note that almost everyone I saw 'leave' an engineering/CS/STEM type major flipped to something that was still, on some level, marketable. > 3) Have next-to-zero standards for public funds used in grant and loan programs for college education, meaning people can take out loans for any sort of degree program at almost any sort of institution This is a large blowback effect of various laws to prevent discrimination/etc against historically ethnic universities and programs. Unfortunately it's led to the 'Underwater Basket Weaving' meme. > 4) Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other types of debtors. You cannot discharge them through bankruptcy, it's very difficult to renegotiate, and SCOTUS has said that the chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case, the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans. Well, there's the 'flip' side, which ironically, due to all the other arms of the Kraken, contributes to the problem. They are difficult to negotiate but have various outlying circumstances, i.e. IBR and time periods associated with that, certain discharge conditions (I have a colleague who's student loans were completely forgiven because she had ADA paperwork and they neither offered her a reasonable accommodation nor warned her when she started said program, at least -that- part of the system worked,) and the lovely 'indentured servitude with extra steps' Nonprofit forgiveness program, where if you work for a nonprofit long enough, you can get a discharge. But then, you do get all these folks that 'wash out' into non-marketable degrees, they keep working at Starbucks or low paying jobs so they get the IBR, what does that do to the rest of the system though? it puts a fuckton of stress on it that we see in the rates. All of that said, I feel like there's a 'number' where the loan should just be treated like any other debt. e.x. oh you've got $4000 in student loan debt and $50,000 in other debt? Fine wash it too. Or 'hold' the degree till it gets paid back, IDK.
DavidPiper 2y ago
From TFA: > Lenders keep issuing loans without regard for the borrower’s ability to repay, knowing the debt can’t be discharged. ... Meanwhile, lenders—both government and private—keep the money flowing. Why wouldn’t they? With loans that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, they’re guaranteed a return, even if it takes decades to collect. From the first chapter of David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years". > “But,” she objected, as if this were self-evident, “they’d borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one’s debts.” It was at this point that I realized this was going to be a very different sort of conversation than I had originally anticipated. Sounds like the perfect way to create a system where the only way out is some kind of black swan bubble burst. I (genuinely) wonder who will be protected from the shockwave when it does: the number of people on the debt side is presumably enormous.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>SCOTUS has said that the chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case, the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans. Yes, because the power of the purse rests solely with the House of Representatives. Despite terms like "the President's budget", the White House has next to no authority in regards to what budget they get and how it will be spent. The legislature (House of Representatives) legislates and the executive (White House) executes; the executor cannot legislate. This is why the often mentioned PPP loan forgiveness was fine (it was codified by the House) but Biden unilaterally deciding that certain debts to the government are forgiven is not.
WalterBright 2y ago
> 4) SCOTUS ruled that the President exceeded the authority over this that was authorized by Congress. I.e. it's Congress' purview to do this, not the Executive. The Executive does not get to make up laws.
WalterBright 2y ago
> Move most good careers that do not require a college degree out of the country for the benefit of shareholders The economic law of comparative advantage means that expenses go to where they are the cheapest. The solution is not to punish companies, because if you do then the entire company moves out of the country. The solution is to look at why foreign labor is cheaper, and what can be done to make domestic labor more competitive.
- nothercastle 2y ago
  Sure just allow slavery, unlimited pollution and no safety requirements or liability then the US would have no problem competing. Otherwise you have to regulate to create a level playing field
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    The law of comparative advantage applies even to the states. It applies everywhere.
qwerpy 2y ago
I'm glad that everyone is calling out that it is in fact a very good thing that the President is prohibited from arbitrarily deciding who to gift free college to. Loan forgiveness should rarely if ever be used. Too much opportunity for abuse by politicians who would love to dangle it as a carrot during election season.
WalterBright 2y ago
> Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other types of debtors. You cannot discharge them through bankruptcy That's because other types of debts are backed up with collateral. 18 year olds have no collateral, and so can easily just declare bankruptcy - and what is the note holder gonna do about it? That means the note holder needs some sort of guarantee to get paid back, otherwise they are simply not going to grant the loan.
rayiner 2y ago
> Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other types of debtors That’s because these loans are made using standards that aren’t applied to other loans. The government basically does not consider credit risk or traditional underwriting standards when making student loans.
sp527 2y ago
> SCOTUS has said that the chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case, the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans It's really amusing how the unitary executive oscillates in fashionability according to which political tribe is currently in power. Congress is responsible for appropriations. Full stop. Whenever this has been bypassed via some loophole, by Bush, by Trump, by Biden, etc, it has been at its core unconstitutional. And it is in our collective interest that it remains that way.
jklinger410 2y ago
Someone should be in jail for this. And the boomers and older who enabled it should feel embarrassed about feeding their children into this debt machine.
Log_out_ 2y ago
5) Have a massive elite overptoduction that becomes an anti elite toppling your democracy .

scoofy 2y ago

You forgot the most important part. The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged. Taking our a vast loan to study English literature might seem unwise, but it’s something I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding to do.

paulcole 2y ago
I took out around $20k in loans to study literature starting in 2001. Graduated in 2005. Rent was $150 a month. Played a lot of poker and disc golf. Studied and learned a bit. Had a 75% scholarship to help with tuition. Had a $300/semester book stipend as part of that and just bought penny books off Amazon (one of the benefits of an English degree) and pocketed the difference. Basically for 5-8% or so of my (estimated) lifetime I was completely free to goof around. Great value for someone who dislikes working. Consolidated the loans after I graduated at 1.5% interest. Finished paying them off in 2021 with the Biden Bucks. Pretty sure that kind of deal doesn’t exist anymore.
- Avicebron 2y ago
  I'm trying to figure out if you missed a 0 at the end of your rent...
  - paulcole 2y ago
    Lol no it was $150. This was Gainesville, Florida and I split a horrible studio apartment with a friend of mine. It was located in a low lying area and once after a tropical storm we had to wade through hip-deep water to get to class (the apartment itself was miraculously high and dry). Coming home one night I saw a little gator swimming along near me as I trudged through it. After we graduated my roommate moved to Manhattan for an engineering job. His month’s rent up there was significantly more than he paid for a year in college. I ended up moving to Portland, Oregon in 2007 and my first rent here was $550. Now in 2024, I’ve finally tacked on that missing 0 and my rent is now around $1500.
    - downut 2y ago
      1985-87 my partner and I rented a just fine spacious 1 bdrm with a 10 min walk to the Math building on the East side of Gville for $200/month. We both had graduate school stipends. The 4 apartments all had cool tenants. Geckos in the stairwell. It was glorious, even w/o AC. I ended up finishing at ASU. This highly educated ChE/Math imbecile took out a $12K student loan near the end because it was "free"[1]. Got to silicon valley and started learning the maths about house loans and income tax interactions and took a glance at the student loan interest payments (something like 6%? I don't remember) and freaked out. Paid it down immediately. Needless to say we advised the daughter different. [1] The application was like: name, address, and school. Less than a page.
  - gfs 2y ago
    I don't think $150 is out of the question over twenty years ago with roommates and a LCOL region.
  - sevensor 2y ago
    Big state U is in the middle of nowhere, and in those years I was paying closer to $250, but I could see if you were willing to compromise on quality or quantity of personal space, getting that down to $150 without even hitting bottom.
NemoNobody 2y ago
Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building. Instead, all I was told was to go to college. So... the people that made me woefully sheep like and "financially innocent" then sent me to the wolves because they believed in me. Seriously, they made huge changes to the way people were accepted into college - created High School "career counseling" (college/University recruiters) to tell everyone kid they were smart enough to go, and the dumber down tests convinced enough to convince the rest. The loans went up each year - the costs more than doubled between my Freshman and Sophomore year and just never stopped going up - the more you owe the more you HAVE to finish to get the job to pay the loans. Before all this, when less than 1% of all student loans had been defaulted on, the loan debt was made unforgivable by 6 people - a committee of bankers created by the people in Congress they bought. It was setup so that of a millennial "Wins" it means they can afford to pay their loans - so the bank wins. If we lose we still have to pay/often must pay more with all the fees and added interest - bank still wins. During the time I lived thru all this I was reading shit about how lazy all f are bc we don't own as many houses as we are supposed at our age - this is still true to this day actually. This is an intolerable and disgusting thing for a society to do to an entire generation - any group is wrong but to plan out the demise of a generation of, at the time all this was first set in motion, we were literal Elementary Students. These loans destroyed lives, relationships, sets parents against their children, divided families. - All just part of the plan.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  > not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even the most basic education about investments or actual wealth building. Not everything can be, or is supposed to be, taught by schools. Your parents should've taught you those things, and if they didn't do that they failed you.
  - elashri 2y ago
    What if I lost my parents before they got the chance to teach me that? What if I was raised in a foster care and I never knew who my parents were? And what if my parents don't know these things themselves? There are many ways that this logic goes wrong. The school should teach that because it is very important lesson to engage in a society and be a good citizen. Edit: Sorry I meant people raised in orphanages not foster care. I wasn't in focus enough while writing this. Sorry if this caused hard feelinga for anyone
jancsika 2y ago
> The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged. I guarantee you that law/med school students have an education in "complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged." Because before the current law was passed, they were the ones abusing the old "complex debt instruments" to discharge debt they knew they'd be able to pay back once they started making bank. The law was passed because they were doing this in large numbers. For these serious med/law students, the old system was free money. The new system is a reasonable risk. Did you know this? If so, why did you write "by definition?" And why go off on a tangent about English literature students?
- slaw3 2y ago
  What was the law that was passed? and what was the "old" method for discharging debt? Asking as someone interested in discharging some debt
- mbrumlow 2y ago
  You flew too close to the sun. You can’t argue with a bunch of people who are in debt and learned that playing the victim pays. It’s funny. That everybody is mad at the banks and schools. But the politicians and do good laws passed are what caused all of this. Banks did it want to give loans out for shitty degrees to people who would probably not pay them back. So laws were passed to force banks they had to give out loans. Schools did not want to accept everybody, but only the top of class. But laws were passed forcing them to widen their acceptance criteria. This creates the perfect storm we are in. Before the system was self limiting. Banks only gave out loans for degrees and to people who had high probability to pay back. Schools accepted only the best students who had a high probability of succeeding. The loans were low risk, high reward, and the schools were able to provide a higher level of overall education to those who did go.
  - Izikiel43 2y ago
    > banks did it Banks didn’t?
    - 2y ago
zozbot234 2y ago
The bulk of education debt in the U.S. is not about undergrad degrees in English literature or the like. By and large, it gets incurred either for lucrative postgrad degrees (MBA, law, medical etc.) or for earning degrees at "non-traditional" for-profit colleges.
- TeaBrain 2y ago
  Almost 60% of U.S. undergraduate students take out either federal or private loans and there are 5x as many undergraduate students as graduate students in the U.S. For those downvoting: 54% of US graduate students take out student loans, while around 55% of US undergraduate students take out loans. The average undergraduate student loan debt is around $29000, while the average debt for graduate school borrowers is $71000. Given that there are five times as many undergraduate students as graduate students and given that a greater number of undergraduate students take out loans, the average graduate school debt would have to be nearly $150k to be greater than the undergraduate debt. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/average-student-loan-debt-graduate-school?msockid=2375d0d1d7b4611437bbc2a0d69160d1 https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/avera... https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-student-loan-debt-statistics/ https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-student... https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/average-student-loan-debt https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/average-student-lo... https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/average-student-loan-debt-graduate-school?msockid=2375d0d1d7b4611437bbc2a0d69160d1 https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/avera...
  - lapcat 2y ago
    I think the OP is referring to the number of dollars rather than the number of students.
    - TeaBrain 2y ago
      Of course it was based on the number of dollars, but based on which figures? It was an assertion conjured out of thin air. If there are five times as many undergrad students as grad students and a similar percentage of grad students had to take out student loans, then this would mean that students are incurring on average five times more debt for graduate school. This is without taking into consideration that a far higher percentage of US graduate students are international students.
ghaff 2y ago
Plenty of smart people who get liberal arts degrees from top schools do just fine. I know plenty of them even though I have engineering degrees myself. They may not get FAANG salaries in general--unless they end up in management--but plenty of people I know are just fine.
- adityamwagh 2y ago
  I see a problem here. Why are English majors in Management positions? With LLMs, I don't see a value on an English degree anymore. So I personally believe it's just a money sink at this point. I don't believe art can be taught in universities as a degree program. Universities should only be for domains that have tangible value.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    What the hell do LLMs have to do with anything on this topic? If anything, they commodify low-level tech folks just like past tools have. I'll mostly hire a smart liberal arts major so long as they're respectful of tech and other domain expertise over someone who thinks it's only about (probably narrow) technical smarts.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    LLMs are the exact antithesis of what an English degree teaches you: how to communicate effectively and with context, and to understand nuance in what other people say. LLMs make things that sound good but have no real depth to them.
    - adityamwagh 2y ago
      You might understand this but I would like to believe and employer won't. Anyways, my main point is universities should focus more on tangible skills - accounting, engineering etc and should not have random useless degrees of little value. Maybe English major is still valuable, but I personally don't see the tangible value in it - other than being an English teacher.
pessimizer 2y ago
> I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding to do. That's the addendum to the "most important part." These people without an education in complex debt instruments are the vast majority of the time either children, or were children quite recently. Even when it comes to the ones in grad school, I have jeans older than their legal ability to sign contracts.
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
Sorry, I feel no sympathy for them. I went to college before I had internet access and my decision on what college degree to get and where to go to get it was based upon the salary I would receive upon graduation and my ability to repay my loans. I went to the library to figure these things out for myself. Nowadays, you don't even have to get up out of your chair. If you are a young person and you make stupid decisions on your college education and student loans, that's a YOU thing. I personally think college should be free because education is a worthwhile endeavor for everyone. But since it isn't, I'm not willing to make excuses for those who attend without weighing the costs and benefits. It's one of the easiest things in the world to do.
ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> debt instruments that cannot be discharged Your regular reminder that debt bondage is a form of slavery, and is illegal in most countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage There are only two options with debt: bad debt are written off, lender takes a hit and the lender must be careful who they lend money to. Or bad debt lingers forever and accrues lucrative interest, in which case giving out bad debt is the whole point for the lender’s operation. The only risk is that the debtor might die. If the debt also passes to the next of kin, you have full-on, real slavery.
- chii 2y ago
  > is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt a student does not pledge their services as security for the debt. It's not debt bondage at all.
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    It just had a few extra stepts
maerF0x0 2y ago
> The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged. I mean it's a pretty simple concept that you borrow money and you must pay it back. However we agree that the failure is that we do not educate them enough already in the first 12 years we force upon them. For that I blame a lack of options, government "standards" which become ceilings instead of floors, and the unions that protect bad teachers, also I'll note as a foreigner in the US. The US Schools i've seen (and i'm extrapolating here to most public schools) are ran like social clubs and have far too much time devoted to bs that does not help the kids. I'm talking about extracurriculars that impede with a quality education. Football is not a subject we should be prioritizing as a nation... Formals, homecoming, spirit days etc are such a distraction from what highschool kids should be focused on -- Growing up and making a viable future for themselves. People note that Highschool rankings in Canada are excellent, well guess what? None of that happens in Canadian highschools (that I'm aware of), there might be a school dance or two, and "Prom" is very low key, relatively. High school football is small time...
- kiba 2y ago
  I am disinclined to agree with you. Homecoming, football, having fun in sports, are exactly what kids should be focused on. They should be enjoying life, not hunched over materials studying late into the night. Of course, focus on footballs, elaborate dance, and other sports can be excessive. I merely object to the excessive focus on academics, the rat race, and pressure cooker environment to get education at top ranked colleges. On the contrary education should be meeting the needs of the 21st century, teaching skills to create functioning adults that can navigate life's challenge, such as avoiding scammers, how to judge quality information, how to diagnose and solve emotional challenges. There will still be classes taught on academics such as learning to read, simple arithmetic. Only when they're adults that their focus will entirely be on academics. Academics are easy if you're well adjusted and know how to learn.
  - chii 2y ago
    > navigate life's challenge, such as avoiding scammers, how to judge quality information, how to diagnose and solve emotional challenges where are the parent's? They're meant to be the ones teaching these non-academic education to their children. School does not replace parenting. School is for academic studies - stuff that a parent won't have had the qualifications to teach.
deleted 2y ago
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WalterBright 2y ago
> complex debt instruments They are not complicated. Compound interest is middle school arithmetic. Too bad the public schools are inept at teaching math. I received a modest tuition loan when I went to college. There was no mystery about it. I made the payments after I graduated, and paid it off.
- cdaringe 2y ago
  Username checks out. :) Ya the arithmetic is easy. Building up the associated algebraic expression(s) though is certainly high school level where I’m from. I wish I understood why math education is the way it is. I really have no idea. I suspect the problem’s complexities are both wide and deep
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - pokerface_86 2y ago
    no one actually good at math is going to become a K-5 teacher, they’re gonna get paid, so it creates a doom loop where each new generation of primary school teachers get progressively shittier at math.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      There's a reason why 3rd grade "teachers' edition" textbooks for math exist. It's because those teachers need an answer key for 100+200. As for "good at math", it's hard to see how a teacher with a degree can fail at 3rd grade arithmetic.
      - pokerface_86 2y ago
        i have literally witnessed students in a senior level discrete math class struggle with simple algebraic operations. they were on the math education track.
ta_1138 2y ago
Then colleges are concerned when they see enrollment at many majors keep shrinking, while the demand for computer science grows, even when the college doesn't even have a proper CompSci department, but they depend on the Math school. Then the students wonder why it's a 4 year degree with a full year wroth of non-major classes that seem unrelated, but tack on tens of thousands to the cost of the degree, plus whatever on-campus housing and meal plan, mandatory for freshmen, might cost.

freshtake 2y ago

5) Do nothing about the problem until the debt becomes too large, then attempt to blanket cancel the debt without expecting any fallout. All the while doing nothing to fix the underlying issues.

29athrowaway 2y ago
i.e.: transfer the wealth from the taxpayer to the creditors anyways, just in a different way

bufferoverflow 2y ago

I would also add 5) Don't educate young people on what their degree would earn them. So many young people think their hobby can become their career and pay for a nice life style. Unfortunately, it's not the case for many majors.

kraussvonespy 2y ago
Which is bad too because if you turn your hobby into your career, you end up not having a hobby anymore. In order to have a happy life, you have to have a vocation and an avocation that are separate from each other.
- foobazgt 2y ago
  > In order to have a happy life, you have to have a vocation and an avocation that are separate from each other. This reads to me as your career shouldn't involve doing something you enjoy. I think this mostly happens in situations where people are doing exactly at work what they'd do at home, and they don't like their job for any vast number of reasons. Usually that's only a problem if you don't have the security to find another job. My personal experience is that it really helps to be able to be passionate about your work. It's fulfilling. You will perform better at your job, because you will be multiplying your experience from work with your experience at home. Sometimes my hobbies and my work have been literally exactly the same, e.g. I've been able to open source projects from work (which I then work on as a hobby). The advice I'd give people instead: Like your job. Get a degree in a field that you both enjoy and that pays well. That sounds glib, but so many people don't think about this at all (part of the focus of the article). You probably won't be able to align your career and the exact activity you enjoy the most, but you should shoot for them being in the same ballpark. Where they don't align? Sure, that's opportunity for a hobby.
  - pixodaros 2y ago
    The problem is finding that intersection. If you are really suited to journalism you will have a hard time financially in 2024. And the experience of studying a thing and doing it for a living are different, and in 2024 its hard to try different careers out because most employers want credentials and experience. There are still jobs where you can walk into the office and talk someone into giving you an internship but many organizations force all hiring through online applications and the HR bureaucracy (and the 'talk yourself up' approach works better for extroverts from the hiring manger's culture).

cruffle_duffle 2y ago

I mean for fucks sake we were pushing 18 year old teenagers into tens of thousands of dollars of debt! I dunno about most people but at 18 I had absolutely no clue about anything, especially the concept of money nor career. How the fuck does an 18 year old comprehend why taking $60,000 to get a degree in “Latin Dance” is not a good idea (and we all know many people who fall into this bucket too!). And yet parents, councilors, teachers, and “the whole system” pushed this onto every kid in high school. And then society turns around and mocks them later on for being “stupid” and “lazy” or whatever… fuck that shit. Society strongly told kids that college, any college, was the only way to have a future.

lispisok 2y ago
You are being downvoted but that was exactly my experience. It wasnt hyperbole. I was told my entire time in k-12 you need to get a college degree by everybody. Parents, teachers, counselors. Additionally they said, with no exaggeration, to get any degree, at any school, and take out as many loans as you need. So yes an entire generation of kids were told the $60,000 in debt for a latin dance degree at a no-name school was better than no degree at all.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I don't know when that narrative started, but it was not what I heard (high school in the 90s). I at one point thought out loud about majoring in Art in university, and everyone, parents, teachers, guidance counsellors said, "Buddy, not if you want an actual career! Major in engineering or something." Maybe the later generations got the bad "Major in anything" advice but I sure as heck didn't.
jajko 2y ago
Where were parents? Don't tell me they were absent in such a massive decision that absolutely defines rest of their kids lives. Yes its horrible to force 17-18 year old to make such an important decisions and also schools should have known better and counsel heavily beforehand. But lets not forget that for the state you are 100% responsible for your actions at that point including any crime, state will happily draft you and send you to get killed if the need arises. Loan management pales in comparison with this. Truth is harsh, society is harsh and unfair in many aspects. I don't see this improving unfortunately anytime soon.

skrebbel 2y ago

I don't like this type of comment because it's makes it seem like that this was all planned like this on purpose (by some cabal of evil schemers, I suppose?), but without the need to provide any evidence that that's indeed how it went, because nothing of the kind of is explicitly claimed. Things can go wrong without people scheming to do evil. It's not helpful to twist "these and these circumstances combined to produce a bad outcome" into a plan description unless you bring at least some evidence that it was, in fact, planned to go like that.

carapace 2y ago
It would actually be worse if we accidentally built this machine to trap and drain a generation of their productive capacity? And of course there is a cabal of evil schemers, they have hardly bothered to hide themselves, e.g.: > Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon. > The theory was first articulated by James H. Hammond, a Democratic United States senator from South Carolina and a wealthy Southern plantation owner, in a speech on March 4, 1858. Hammond argued that every society must find a class of people to do menial labor, whether called slaves or not ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory It gets worse from there. You can go look up the people who passed these laws and the arguments they used to promote them, but in the end it hardly matters. What matters is disassembling the mudsill machine.
- Aunche 2y ago
  This is barely relevant to college debt. If anything, it contradicts the parent comment because it would be the white collar middle class resting on the "mudsill" of cheap global labor. The Internet also underestimates how hard labor jobs are on your body. It would have been even worse during the golden age of American manufacturing, when there were 10 times as many work related deaths. When people imagine a world of we didn't outsource factory work, they assume it will be exactly like ours but where all unemployed English majors become unionized factory workers. In reality, any policy comes with trade offs. People like Steve Jobs would have entered blue collared work, like their parents. Consumer electronics would be significantly more expensive when made by domestic labor, and that means there would be less competition and innovation in this space.

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spencerchubb 2y ago

Unless I missed it in the article, I don't think the author mentioned one of the biggest factors. The big lenders in America are effectively extensions of the US government, and the government guarantees over 90% of loans. That means there is no risk (for the lender) to give out student loans. The taxpayers take on the risk

freitzkriesler2 2y ago

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brigadier132 2y ago

In your 4 step process where do you blame the not for profit schools for raising tuition by completely absurd and unsustainable amounts? If we are going to forgive student loans, tax payers should not be on the hook. The loan originators and most importantly the schools should pay since they are both the primary beneficiaries of this disastrous policy.

JoBrad 2y ago
The cost of student loans is nothing compared to the value that those degree holders will provide. In my opinion, your first degree at a public university or community college should be paid for by the Federal government as long as you keep a certain grade average, and stick to a reasonable timeline. If it matters to anyone, I paid off my loans entirely, but also received Pell grants.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  If your opinion were correct the degrees would pay for themselves and we wouldn't be having these discussions. We have people paying $160k a year to study in fields that are increasingly having their fundamental research completely debunked and exposed as fraudulent (see Political Science and Pyschology). There is also absolutely 0 reason these degrees should cost so much. If we want to keep a guaranteed student loan program it should be restricted in the amount that can be borrowed and it should only be usable at local community colleges that cost under $5k a year. Nothing about education necessitates spending more than that.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    The degrees do pay for themselves on average. Bachelor's degreeholders have median earnings $525/week higher than high school graduates (https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/education-pays.htm https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/educa...), which over the course of a career would cover even the most egregious student debt loads. That's precisely why it's a hard problem; we could just warn kids not to jump into the debt trap if it weren't genuinely worth the cost.

api 2y ago

You forgot: 5) Systematically under-build housing so that future generations will be unable to simultaneously repay these loans and afford a place to live.

schmidtleonard 2y ago
Also: 6) Intentionally train too few doctors for the explicit, stated, out-in-the-open purpose of pumping doctor wages. Continue this policy until it is too late to train enough doctors for the coming wave of Boomers.

spamizbad 2y ago

I feel like the key thing missing from this discussion are the employers who still demand these degrees. Let's say we reformed both higher education and student loans - does that have any meaningful impact on the demand side beyond pushing the salaries of degree holders up (thus increasing the value of a degree, thus making larger loan values easier to justify, thus...)

fallingknife 2y ago
If we stopped subsidizing the degrees less people would have them, but employers would still need the same number of employees. They would be forced to drop necessary degree requirements or go understaffed.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Who knows what would happen? Maybe they'd do their own educational curricula with requirements that would require minimum tenures with payback requirements. (Not sure of all the US laws in this regard. There used to at least be relocation payback requirements.) But I suspect a lot of people here wouldn't like 1 year bootcamps for jobs that included an extended employment commitment.
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    I suspect they would like it better than paying for 4 years of education with no guarantee of employment at the end. But most likely it would be nothing of the sort. Most jobs that require degrees don't actually use any of the material in the degree (any job that doesn't care what your major was). Those jobs could just hire HS grads without any other changes.
VirusNewbie 2y ago
Most good employers, especially in tech, don't require degrees these days.
- Izikiel43 2y ago

abnry 2y ago

Re: 4), isn't forgiving loans awfully close to having power of the purse? That is explicitly congress's role. You have some really perverse incentives too if you allow loan forgiveness by the executive branch, something close to buying votes.

mbostleman 2y ago

For number 2, how did you come up with the very narrow 15 year window of birth from 1980 to 1995? I was born in 1963 and for the entirety of my upbringing it was a forgone conclusion that the lack of post high school education had a dire and inescapable consequence in future earning and socioeconomic status.

kungito 2y ago
Because at that time an engineering degree still had some weight because not everyone can get it. This inflation 9f degrees caused the degrees to have way less value only for the next generation
ryandrake 2y ago
I was born in the mid-70s, and nobody told me "Just go to college, any college, and major in anything." That was never the narrative. It was "Go to a top-N college, major in one of these very carefully enumerated majors that tend to result in good career trajectory (business, engineering, medicine, and so on), and maintain a very good GPA throughout." The messaging was very clear, from parents, teachers, and guidance counselors: Don't go to film school or a Tier-2 university and major in history, if you want a career. I'm not sure when the "Go to any school, and do whatever" messaging started but it was not happening in the 90s when I was in high school.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  I grew up in the latter half of the 90's and the narrative I remember was that it was a time when even like entry-level secretary jobs started requiring degrees (a phenomenon which may or may not have been exaggerated), and the reasoning was "it doesn't matter what it's a degree in, they just want to see that you have the capability to see something through to the end and not drop out"
  - pokerface_86 2y ago
    was still told this and i graduated college in 2024. it did work out for me, but for the vast majority of ppl in my graduating class, unless they double majored from B School or did a proper STEM degree, they’re unemployed

User23 2y ago

> cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans You present this as though it doesn't make sense, but as far as the federal government is concerned forgiving a debt is spending (which is why the IRS will tax you for forgiven debts, income is the other side of spending). And spending is explicitly under Congress's authority.

diob 2y ago

5) Don't forget the massive rise in tuition. My brother went to college a few years before me, and by the time I got there (born before 1990), the price was double what it was his first year. It was only 2 years of increases. 6) Only allow help for families making under a certain amount, so those from abusive homes are shit out of luck.

IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago

>>> 1) move most careers...out of the country....to the benefit of shareholders. You've hidden very carefully the causality in this sentence. Who moved them? Why? Its perhaps implied that since shareholders benefited, that they did it. Yet a careful examination reveals quickly the elephant in the room in that thesis: why did outsourcing now, and not before, if the benefit to shareholders has always been there? why did this happen mostly in the US, and not other countries? Of course, the reality is far more complex and reveals that the road for manufacture hollowing in the US was a road paved with good intentions. History is there for anyone who wants to read it.

bobthepanda 2y ago
There is outsourcing in places like the EU but it looks different and takes place within it, because the wealth disparities between EU countries are so much greater and US GDP per capita is so high. The state with lowest GDP per capita, Mississippi, is on par with Belgium.
sieabahlpark 2y ago
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doctorwho42 2y ago
Well one of the reasons for outsourcing was the idea that becoming a service economy would improve our country and it's citizens... Unfortunately that turned out bust.
- chii 2y ago
  many citizens' lives were improved. The cheap material consumption and availability is an improvement. It's just that the benefit is so widely available that people stopped thinking of it as a benefit. It used to be that owning a TV or radio was an expense you planned for and it had to last. Of course there are those who were hurt from the move from blue collar manufacturing, but overall, the aggregated benefit is higher than the losses from those who were laid off. And it's not as if new industries did not spring up.

to11mtm 2y ago

> 2) Tell everyone born between 1980 and 1995 that they'll be unable to compete in the global marketplace if they don't get at least some post-high school education, and imply that the mere presence of a degree will help instead of having a specific type of degree Yes but I'm conflicted on this for a couple reasons. The second part, became less true for anyone graduating after 2004 or so. Where I still get -vexed- are the people I know who, about to hit or are into their 30s, start in a program for (or, wind up finishing with) a non-marketable degree as their first degree. And the best example I can think of, was a specific not-colleague that started in some sort of program because they wanted to get into prostetics (I warned them about 3d printing upsetting the industry, they yelled at me for raining on their parade,) the 3d printing paradigm shift, surprise surprise, caused an upset into the marketability of their program, and they shifted into, at least last I was on speaking terms with them, women's studies. I think part of the reason for the second half however, is an odd balance of 'younger people can be naive' and it's better to have them think that and finish than drop out a year or two because their major isn't panning out, i.e. switch to something else. I say -that-, mostly because I know a lot of folks in my school would wash out from Engineering into Business or something else and while it's possibly not 'ideal', finishing some semi-useful degree is better than dropping out with some percentage of the full debt and nothing to show for it. I will note that almost everyone I saw 'leave' an engineering/CS/STEM type major flipped to something that was still, on some level, marketable. > 3) Have next-to-zero standards for public funds used in grant and loan programs for college education, meaning people can take out loans for any sort of degree program at almost any sort of institution This is a large blowback effect of various laws to prevent discrimination/etc against historically ethnic universities and programs. Unfortunately it's led to the 'Underwater Basket Weaving' meme. > 4) Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other types of debtors. You cannot discharge them through bankruptcy, it's very difficult to renegotiate, and SCOTUS has said that the chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case, the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans. Well, there's the 'flip' side, which ironically, due to all the other arms of the Kraken, contributes to the problem. They are difficult to negotiate but have various outlying circumstances, i.e. IBR and time periods associated with that, certain discharge conditions (I have a colleague who's student loans were completely forgiven because she had ADA paperwork and they neither offered her a reasonable accommodation nor warned her when she started said program, at least -that- part of the system worked,) and the lovely 'indentured servitude with extra steps' Nonprofit forgiveness program, where if you work for a nonprofit long enough, you can get a discharge. But then, you do get all these folks that 'wash out' into non-marketable degrees, they keep working at Starbucks or low paying jobs so they get the IBR, what does that do to the rest of the system though? it puts a fuckton of stress on it that we see in the rates. All of that said, I feel like there's a 'number' where the loan should just be treated like any other debt. e.x. oh you've got $4000 in student loan debt and $50,000 in other debt? Fine wash it too. Or 'hold' the degree till it gets paid back, IDK.

DavidPiper 2y ago

From TFA: > Lenders keep issuing loans without regard for the borrower’s ability to repay, knowing the debt can’t be discharged. ... Meanwhile, lenders—both government and private—keep the money flowing. Why wouldn’t they? With loans that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, they’re guaranteed a return, even if it takes decades to collect. From the first chapter of David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years". > “But,” she objected, as if this were self-evident, “they’d borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one’s debts.” It was at this point that I realized this was going to be a very different sort of conversation than I had originally anticipated. Sounds like the perfect way to create a system where the only way out is some kind of black swan bubble burst. I (genuinely) wonder who will be protected from the shockwave when it does: the number of people on the debt side is presumably enormous.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>SCOTUS has said that the chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case, the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans. Yes, because the power of the purse rests solely with the House of Representatives. Despite terms like "the President's budget", the White House has next to no authority in regards to what budget they get and how it will be spent. The legislature (House of Representatives) legislates and the executive (White House) executes; the executor cannot legislate. This is why the often mentioned PPP loan forgiveness was fine (it was codified by the House) but Biden unilaterally deciding that certain debts to the government are forgiven is not.

WalterBright 2y ago

> 4) SCOTUS ruled that the President exceeded the authority over this that was authorized by Congress. I.e. it's Congress' purview to do this, not the Executive. The Executive does not get to make up laws.

WalterBright 2y ago

> Move most good careers that do not require a college degree out of the country for the benefit of shareholders The economic law of comparative advantage means that expenses go to where they are the cheapest. The solution is not to punish companies, because if you do then the entire company moves out of the country. The solution is to look at why foreign labor is cheaper, and what can be done to make domestic labor more competitive.

nothercastle 2y ago
Sure just allow slavery, unlimited pollution and no safety requirements or liability then the US would have no problem competing. Otherwise you have to regulate to create a level playing field
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The law of comparative advantage applies even to the states. It applies everywhere.

qwerpy 2y ago

I'm glad that everyone is calling out that it is in fact a very good thing that the President is prohibited from arbitrarily deciding who to gift free college to. Loan forgiveness should rarely if ever be used. Too much opportunity for abuse by politicians who would love to dangle it as a carrot during election season.

WalterBright 2y ago

> Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other types of debtors. You cannot discharge them through bankruptcy That's because other types of debts are backed up with collateral. 18 year olds have no collateral, and so can easily just declare bankruptcy - and what is the note holder gonna do about it? That means the note holder needs some sort of guarantee to get paid back, otherwise they are simply not going to grant the loan.

rayiner 2y ago

> Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other types of debtors That’s because these loans are made using standards that aren’t applied to other loans. The government basically does not consider credit risk or traditional underwriting standards when making student loans.

sp527 2y ago

> SCOTUS has said that the chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case, the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans It's really amusing how the unitary executive oscillates in fashionability according to which political tribe is currently in power. Congress is responsible for appropriations. Full stop. Whenever this has been bypassed via some loophole, by Bush, by Trump, by Biden, etc, it has been at its core unconstitutional. And it is in our collective interest that it remains that way.

jklinger410 2y ago

Someone should be in jail for this. And the boomers and older who enabled it should feel embarrassed about feeding their children into this debt machine.

Log_out_ 2y ago

5) Have a massive elite overptoduction that becomes an anti elite toppling your democracy .