10 ms·

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 disch

by 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.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    I remember rent was $1800 per semester for my friends, and they split that 3 ways. So about $600 for 4 months, or $150/month. To be fair, it was a bit of a dump. But that's less you have to worry about when having parties. I had a slightly nicer single room and closer to campus with parking and it was $1200 per semester, or $300 month. This was slightly over a decade ago. I was curious and did a quick check - seems the single rooms are about $600/mo and I saw a 3 bed for $800/mo. Still really cheap considering all the inflation that happened over the past decade.
  - saltylicorice 2y ago
    In 2001-2005, my rent was $120-$160/mo in a low cost area of the US. The places weren't fancy but they were good enough and safe. Tuition started around 4k/yr, but had worked its way up to 8k/yr by the time I graduated (which I thought was unaffordable).
  - wheels 2y ago
    My apartment shared with three other roommates in that era was $750 (four bedrooms and a giant living room in a trendy neighborhood of a decent sized city). So $150 checks out.
- grecy 2y ago
  Woah, you were paying off that debt with interest from 2005 to 2021? Damn I’m happy to live in a country with free university.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    1.5% interest is well under the rate of return I got in the market over that period. I was making minimum payments the whole time. The payments were tiered somehow. I think I was paying around $50 a month when I graduated and that ended up at like $140 by the time I paid it off.
  - dagw 2y ago
    I too live in country with free university, and yet I'm also paying off student loans. Tuition may have been free, but rent and food wasn't.
  - linotype 2y ago
    Now do wages and taxes.
    - grecy 2y ago
      and healthcare and safety
      - paulcole 2y ago
        US is outrageously safe. People are just terrible at assessing actual risk vs. perceived risk. What specifically do you think is unsafe about the US? Healthcare, yah that kinda sucks. We’ve got a really high ceiling and a really low floor. Other countries have a lower ceiling and a much higher floor. A significant problem in the US is that people don’t know how to navigate the health care system. That raises the floor quite a bit for the average person.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Heh, I paid off all my student debt, about that much, with the starting bonus from my first job after school. America educations are basically free if you don't do some goofy shit like go into debt to study literature.
- airstrike 2y ago
  > Had a 75% scholarship to help with tuition.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    State school was hella cheap (it was back when Florida’s lotto money mostly went to scholarships for in-state students). I think full sticker price would’ve been around $2500/year for tuition+fees at the time? I also started with enough credits to be nearly to (the equivalent of being in) junior year and took the bare minimum credits to keep the scholarship.
    - pc86 2y ago
      I'm sorry the match doesn't even remotely work. $20k in loans over 4 years, when full sticker price was about $10k for the same 4 years and you had a 75% scholarship, and started as a junior? That plus it somehow taking you 20 years to pay $20k in loans makes this smell pretty fishy. The real question is why make something like this up?
      - paulcole 2y ago
        Impressive work, detective. 1. I took more in loans than I technically needed for school and spent it on living expenses like video games, gambling, fun stuff, etc. 2. I signed up for 4 classes a semester, often in things unrelated to my degree. Figured since I had 4 years of scholarship (and 4 years of loans available), I may as well just hang around and have fun. 3. By my math, (feel free to double check) 2021 minus 2005 is not 20. Loan payments didn’t start until after graduation. It was about $50 a month for minimum payments when I started paying and around $150 at the end. Don’t remember the exact way the payments increased over time. It was just steps, but not related to income. Any follow ups?
      - mlsu 2y ago
        At 1.5%, you should strive to make the absolute minimum payment on your loan. That is pretty much free money.
- Izikiel43 2y ago
  20 years to pay 20k$?
  - pc86 2y ago
    Probably income-based repayment, based on the income of a job you could get in 2005 with a literature degree.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    Not 20 years. Payment doesn’t start until graduation. Also, why not take as long as possible to pay it off at 1.5%?
  - BertoldVdb 2y ago
    With a rate of 1.5%, paying the loan off might not be a smart move, as long as you don't mind not being fully debt free.
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.

by scoofy 2y ago

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.
- giantg2 2y ago
  I remember rent was $1800 per semester for my friends, and they split that 3 ways. So about $600 for 4 months, or $150/month. To be fair, it was a bit of a dump. But that's less you have to worry about when having parties. I had a slightly nicer single room and closer to campus with parking and it was $1200 per semester, or $300 month. This was slightly over a decade ago. I was curious and did a quick check - seems the single rooms are about $600/mo and I saw a 3 bed for $800/mo. Still really cheap considering all the inflation that happened over the past decade.
- saltylicorice 2y ago
  In 2001-2005, my rent was $120-$160/mo in a low cost area of the US. The places weren't fancy but they were good enough and safe. Tuition started around 4k/yr, but had worked its way up to 8k/yr by the time I graduated (which I thought was unaffordable).
- wheels 2y ago
  My apartment shared with three other roommates in that era was $750 (four bedrooms and a giant living room in a trendy neighborhood of a decent sized city). So $150 checks out.
grecy 2y ago
Woah, you were paying off that debt with interest from 2005 to 2021? Damn I’m happy to live in a country with free university.
- paulcole 2y ago
  1.5% interest is well under the rate of return I got in the market over that period. I was making minimum payments the whole time. The payments were tiered somehow. I think I was paying around $50 a month when I graduated and that ended up at like $140 by the time I paid it off.
- dagw 2y ago
  I too live in country with free university, and yet I'm also paying off student loans. Tuition may have been free, but rent and food wasn't.
- linotype 2y ago
  Now do wages and taxes.
  - grecy 2y ago
    and healthcare and safety
    - paulcole 2y ago
      US is outrageously safe. People are just terrible at assessing actual risk vs. perceived risk. What specifically do you think is unsafe about the US? Healthcare, yah that kinda sucks. We’ve got a really high ceiling and a really low floor. Other countries have a lower ceiling and a much higher floor. A significant problem in the US is that people don’t know how to navigate the health care system. That raises the floor quite a bit for the average person.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Heh, I paid off all my student debt, about that much, with the starting bonus from my first job after school. America educations are basically free if you don't do some goofy shit like go into debt to study literature.
airstrike 2y ago
> Had a 75% scholarship to help with tuition.
- paulcole 2y ago
  State school was hella cheap (it was back when Florida’s lotto money mostly went to scholarships for in-state students). I think full sticker price would’ve been around $2500/year for tuition+fees at the time? I also started with enough credits to be nearly to (the equivalent of being in) junior year and took the bare minimum credits to keep the scholarship.
  - pc86 2y ago
    I'm sorry the match doesn't even remotely work. $20k in loans over 4 years, when full sticker price was about $10k for the same 4 years and you had a 75% scholarship, and started as a junior? That plus it somehow taking you 20 years to pay $20k in loans makes this smell pretty fishy. The real question is why make something like this up?
    - paulcole 2y ago
      Impressive work, detective. 1. I took more in loans than I technically needed for school and spent it on living expenses like video games, gambling, fun stuff, etc. 2. I signed up for 4 classes a semester, often in things unrelated to my degree. Figured since I had 4 years of scholarship (and 4 years of loans available), I may as well just hang around and have fun. 3. By my math, (feel free to double check) 2021 minus 2005 is not 20. Loan payments didn’t start until after graduation. It was about $50 a month for minimum payments when I started paying and around $150 at the end. Don’t remember the exact way the payments increased over time. It was just steps, but not related to income. Any follow ups?
    - mlsu 2y ago
      At 1.5%, you should strive to make the absolute minimum payment on your loan. That is pretty much free money.
Izikiel43 2y ago
20 years to pay 20k$?
- pc86 2y ago
  Probably income-based repayment, based on the income of a job you could get in 2005 with a literature degree.
- paulcole 2y ago
  Not 20 years. Payment doesn’t start until graduation. Also, why not take as long as possible to pay it off at 1.5%?
- BertoldVdb 2y ago
  With a rate of 1.5%, paying the loan off might not be a smart move, as long as you don't mind not being fully debt free.

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.

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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.