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Holding people accountable for their choices is sadistic?
by hiatus 1y ago
Holding people accountable for their choices is sadistic?
- throw-the-towel 1y agoI'm not American so I may have missed something, but isn't this a huge departure from established procedures which everyone was relying on?
- flerchin 1y agoIf anything, this is a return to normalcy.
- hiatus 1y agoNo. The loans were deferred for a few years. When people took out the loans they did so knowing they would have to pay them back
- 0xfaded 1y agoUnderstood as 18 year olds who were told everything would be okay so long as they just did what they were told. I was lucky enough to grow up and go to university in another country. The magnitude of the financial decisions I was making at the time were < 1k and I remembered how much money that felt like. IMHO blaming people for 100k bad financial decisions made under duress just as they entered adulthood is victim blaming.
- nyarlathotep_ 1y ago> IMHO blaming people for 100k bad financial decisions made under duress just as they entered adulthood is victim blaming. Especially when the implied social contract broke down--i.e low wages, horrific increases in the cost of living, limited opportunities. It's pretty common to find people that regret taking the loans to go to school and got little value from their education.
- hiatus 1y ago18 year olds have enough agency to sign their life away to fight on foreign soil but are too stupid to sign for a loan? Or are you arguing we should raise the age of majority to > 18?
- ru552 1y agoThey only stopped referring to debt collections in 2020 when Covid hit.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoThe debt isn’t real, it could be forgiven. If moral hazard wins, those who can will continue to leave the country, those who can’t will pay this tax, diminishing economic output, and less people will go to college in the future. If we’re going to keep speed running the decline of the US, it’s a fine strategy. The people making these choices will be long dead by the time the consequences arrive.
- andsoitis 1y ago> The debt isn’t real, How come?
- toomuchtodo 1y agoYou’re asking how a line item in a database isn’t real?
- hiatus 1y agoWhy not send me $100k then? It's just a line in a database after all.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoDid you incur that debt because your country is dysfunctional, doesn’t provide education at a reasonable cost, and you were told it was the only path to a good job? Probably not. [argument withdrawn]
- hiatus 1y agoI have plenty of friends that graduated from state schools and incurred no debt, all in the US. Does that invalidate your points about the inability to get an education at a reasonable cost? > I’m sure you’d have no problem burning millions of dollars of VC funding on a low value business idea, as if that would be of superior economic value. You know absolutely nothing about me.
- techpineapple 1y agoSometimes, yes, depends on the context.
- enraged_camel 1y agoDoing it while knowing that it will absolutely wreck them is, yes. Not to mention doing it with such short notice, and when we're on the verge of what will most likely be a serious recession.
- tacticalturtle 1y agoThis has been the plan for months, even during the Biden administration - the plan was to restart in 2025: > “Involuntary collections will not occur before 2025," a White House spokesperson said in a statement. "Defaulted borrowers won’t see collections until 2025.” https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2024/10/biden-administration-pushes-collections-of-defaulted-student-loans-to-after-election-00183178 https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2024/10/biden-adm...
- smileson2 1y agonot a one way street
- dfedbeef 1y agoCareful what you wish for
- disambiguation 1y agoWhich choice is that - pursuing higher education to have a better life, or being unemployed? What would be your advice to them, what should they have done differently?
- hiatus 1y agoGo to a state school. Go to community college first. Enter a trade.
- fnordpiglet 1y agoNone of these are free or cheap, and I’ll wager bottom dollar the majority of debt holders went to a public school of some sort. In fact student debt is most pernicious for people of lesser means and fewer opportunities, and who most need the debt to make it possible to go to school. These are also the people who are most incentivized to leverage public schools. (Quick google shows 62% of debt is held by public school attendees)
- hiatus 1y agoState school attendees face lower debt burdens than private for-profit schools. I can't find the data you are referring to that 62% of student loan debt is incurred by state school attendees. By these numbers [1], only 40% of public school attendees even incurred debt. [1]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-debt/#school-type-degree-student-loan-debt https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-d...
- tacticalturtle 1y agoIn my state (Massachusetts) community college is in fact free. In other states, for example Texas, it’s a little over $3000 a year on average for in state: https://www.communitycollegereview.com/tuition-stats/texas#:~:text=For%20Texas%20community%20colleges%2C%20the,is%20approximately%20%2413%2C996%20per%20year. https://www.communitycollegereview.com/tuition-stats/texas#:... That’s much cheaper than the tens of thousands for a public 4 year university. And we should point out that for trades, you are getting paid in an apprenticeship. That’s better than cheap or free.
- hayst4ck 1y agoI've rarely had my hate spiked so highly so quickly by a comment. Many of these loans are handed out predatorily to people classified as children, 6-8 years before their higher level thinking pre-frontal cortex fully develops, with no life experience, little work experience, a wide range in quality of parenting and childhood, with a society that has said "this is how you achieve the American dream of doing better than your parents." The loans themselves shield the lender from consequences and put risk squarely on the the loan taker. The seeming goal of these loans being the same for most of the structure of American society, to ensure desperate workers that have no freedom and no ability to say no to businesses. When society offered these loans to people who in no way would have been able to get them on fundamentals, which was already a failure of society to invest in the future, there was an implicit promise that they would lead to a better life and they didn't. You can't blame societies young for believing what their elders and even society at large tells them. Universities failed their students, society failed students and universities, our own culture decayed in terms of earning vs receiving credentials, and the people you want to pay the cost of that are the people that the system victimized the most?
- Ekaros 1y agoMaybe then ban giving them out for anyone under age of 25. Absolute total ban. Start solving the problem today. Anyone currently taking loans do not get any more of them until age of 25. Seems like most reasonable first step to take.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoRequires Congress to act, which will not occur in its current configuration. If what is reasonable is impossible, it's only a thought experiment. Can consider trying again after midterms in 2026, depending on outcome.
- piva00 1y agoUnreasonable if there are no alternatives to achieve higher education. You start solving the problem by cutting potential opportunities without no replacement scheme for it, only creating bigger problems. There's no easy solution to this, it's structural, it's systemic, the model the USA uses for higher-ed funding is structurally unsound and unsustainable. Replacement the model can only be done through a measured policy change but I don't see much of that coming from the US in the past 10-15 years, it's mostly flailing around with no clear vision for what it wants to be in the future, just an everlasting chase for GDP growth no matter how, at some point this narrow objective comes crashing down.