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I disagree about student loans. The entire system needs to be dismantled. Universities don't care if their majors will result in a job and the student loans ar

• etchalon 8mo ago
  So you believe universities have taken advantage of students by crafting, encouraging and financing education programs with an understanding that those programs would not result in jobs which would be sufficient to repay the debt needed to complete them, but you think the 18 year olds who were taken advantage of should be forced to suffer for their failure to make perfect decisions at 18. Cool. Cool.
  • sejje 8mo ago
    So you believe uninvolved taxpayers should be on the hook when the 18 year olds make bad decisions. Cool cool.
    • hparadiz 8mo ago
      Should post grad be funded by the government? Yes. Next question. Feel like I'm answering whether or not public schools should be a thing from some 19th century peasant.
      • AlexandrB 8mo ago
        It's a question of supply and demand though. Sure we should fund science post grad, I'm not so sure about humanities (supply already outstrips demand there). Saying we should fund "post grad" in general elides this complexity. Public school is as much about providing babysitters for parents that have to work as it is about education. Notice how hard it is to be expelled from public school. Grades are irrelevant. This is very different from how post secondary education operates.
        • hparadiz 8mo ago
          When compulsory education became a thing it met resistance from families that didn't wanna lose another pair of working hands on the farm. Babysitting is a 20th century post agrarian phenomenon.
    • jahsome 8mo ago
      Do I believe in community, empathy, kindness toward my fellow human beings? Why, yes. Yes I do. Am I willing to pay a few bucks to put my money where my mouth yes. Why yes, yes I am.
      • shermantanktop 8mo ago
        The unfortunate reality is that your kindness and empathy is a resource that is being exploited by unseen actors. You are being taken for a ride and you feel good about it. I absolutely support maximizing access to education and I'm willing to pay for it. I'm not willing to prop up a giant unsecured-loan grift that transfers financial risk onto those least able to bear it, while universities jack up their tuition to grab their slice of this new pie.
        • jahsome 8mo ago
          You are correct and I am making a conscious choice. I'm not being taken for a ride, I'm willingly offering one, even to those who would rob me blind given the chance. Of course there are those who would exploit. But I'm not going to punish the well-deserving masses because of the unscrupulous few. It's a very small sacrifice I can make each year, which has the potential to positively impact the lives of thousands of families, and for generations to come. Were I to refuse participation in such an opportunity to "protect" myself, I'd be no less selfish and greedy than those you warned me about.
          • shermantanktop 8mo ago
            We don't have the option to "refuse participation," so that's not really the point. We can feel better or worse about it, and you feel good about it, and that's great. I feel good for the individual students who benefit but do not feel good about the institutional corruption that this system represents. If we were to finally reform the student loan process without any protections for the students themselves, it'd be a painful correction for everyone. But the current system has massive pain in the form of students taking on massive debt to go to places like the University of Phoenix, and they often don't even end up with a degree. Some of them do, of course, so maybe under the current system we end up better off as a whole. It's hard for me to know one way or the other. But it is painfully obvious who the winners and losers are. The winners are the universities, debt collectors and loan servicing companies. The losers are some percentage of low-income students who get screwed and saddled with debt, the well-meaning taxpayers who fund the loan scheme, and the middle-class parents who pay ever-rising tuition that is fueled by loan money that they don't even qualify for.
    • bee_rider 8mo ago
      The decision to invent a new special type of debt for student loans was a political decision made by our representatives. To the extent that the voters/taxpayers are responsible for anything: this is our shared mess. I mean, the whole premise of representative democracy is that we’re responsible for the messes we send representatives to make. If we don’t want that responsibility, I guess we’d have to look at alternatives to representative democracy, but that’s a pretty big topic.
      • sejje 8mo ago
        I accept responsibility, let's fix it.
        • bee_rider 8mo ago
          I’d probably pause loan repayments (no need to dig a deeper hole), make student loans dischargable via bankruptcy, wait a bit for the market to figure itself out. Once we’ve figured out what the value of each degree is, we can refund the difference to everyone who’s paid. There’d be a bit of fudging as we’d need to adjust for inflation and the reputation of colleges fluctuate over time, but this seems like the fairest way to do it.
    • etchalon 8mo ago
      Federal spending is not derived from revenue and it's weird people keep thinking it is.
    • freejazz 8mo ago
      Why have police? Why have firefighters? Why have EMS?
  • paulsutter 8mo ago
    No they’re saying that the schools should repay the loans, not the government
• codexb 8mo ago
  Ok, but forgiving student loans doesn't do that. It signals to borrowers that they don't have to repay high loans if their career can't support it. It tells borrowers that they can make risky loans without a chance of default. It tells universities that they can keep charging exorbitant tuitions because kids can still get loans to pay them. The solution is to allow judges the discretion to default them in bankruptcy after X number of years after graduation. Lenders need to accept the risk. With no risk, they can loan as much as they want and have guaranteed repayment. This drives tuition higher and higher.
  • cj 8mo ago
    Allowing student debt to be canceled during bankruptcy would be a good first step (possibly even better than canceling student debt across the board). To your point, making it easy to cancel debt teaches borrowers that debt isn’t a serious thing. Requiring someone go through bankruptcy (and all of the associated negatives on your credit score, etc) seems like a good tradeoff. Allows you to get out from under the debt (the entire purpose of bankruptcy in the first place..) while not letting everyone pretend the debt never existed (need to live with the impact of bankruptcy on your ability to borrow in the future) I don’t know why we don’t hear more people lobbying for this. I guess it’s because the sound bite isn’t as sexy.
    • SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
      People who start lobbying for it quickly discover that 87% of people who petition for their student debt to be cancelled in bankruptcy get it (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/29/bankruptcy-student-loan-borrowers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/29/bankruptcy-student-loan-borr...). I support removing the special treatment entirely, but ultimately most student debt holders don’t go bankrupt.
      • isleyaardvark 8mo ago
        > Still, few people pursue the option because of a “pervasive” myth that the loans can’t be included in the proceeding It also says nothing about whether the person actually goes bankrupt, just which debts are discharged, which is one of the key parts of the bankruptcy process. Certain debts are discharged because the person can’t pay them back, which is the point of going into bankruptcy court.
• hparadiz 8mo ago
  You take on the risk every time you pay the local school district's real estate taxes. Well to be fair that's even riskier. After all you have no idea if the kindergartner will go on to get a college degree and start paying taxes. It's actually riskier than student loan bail outs.
• dbspin 8mo ago
  Great example of narrow rationality. Huge amount of Americas current problems can be traced back to a poorly educated population. Universal access to third level education, combined with a school system designed to educate - in direct opposition to current goal of producing labour units for corporate; would massively improve pretty much ever aspect of American life. The market lens is myopic, the market cannot be expected to produce social goods in proportion to necessity - that's not any part of its function. I agree that the student loan system is insane. Students need grants to cover cost of living while they focus on learning, education itself of course should be free.
  • WalterBright 8mo ago
    > in direct opposition to current goal of producing labour units for corporate I never understood this characterization. How do the schools implement a goal for producing labor units? > education itself of course should be free People don't value what they get for free. If you sign up for a course in welding, are you going to be more or less diligent in learning it if you have to pay the tuition?
    • dbspin 8mo ago
      > People don't value what they get for free No education is free, it's paid in time and effort. I value my degree because it was difficult, not because it had a cost attached. One that could be purchased without effort would have no value.
      • WalterBright 8mo ago
        Paying tuition out of one's own pocket motivates one to learn the material.
        • dbspin 8mo ago
          That's factually wrong - extrinsic demands decrease intrinsic motivation. There's a tonne of research on this. Similarly negative conditioning is less effective than positive.
• Starman_Jones 8mo ago
  I agree with you about student loan forgiveness, but disagree with your assessment of universities as a system. The humanities (which are highly profitable for the university) are suffering an existential crisis because their funding keeps getting cut, while STEM programs (which have low or even negative ROI after lab/equipment/resource costs) keep getting expanded. There's obviously more nuance to that, but at a high level, universities are prioritizing majors which have higher job placement at the expense of their own bottom line.
  • PlatoIsADisease 8mo ago
    Is this actually true? I think about my lab classes and typically these were separate credit hours. More money to the university. Outside chemistry, we were using outdated equipment that wasn't getting refreshed/bought new. If what you are saying is true, Humanities needs to cut costs of their credit hours or double down. For entertainment degrees (art, music), its prohibitively expensive to casually obtain the education. For business/politics/psychology, there is at least some sort of return on investment to be expected.
    • Starman_Jones 8mo ago
      "Labs" as in the physical facilities, not the class credits. Computer labs are one example - my school had a Linux lab that, uh, wasn't much used outside of CS/IT/maybe EE. There's also lab equipment for research professors - a nice oscilloscope can cost more than a new car, and students won't ever actually get to use that. Not saying it's wrong - I really appreciated that Linux lab - but it's definitely not equality between departments. For your second point, I've never heard of a university that charges different credit rates for different majors (outside of special stuff like paying for certain PE classes), but that seems like it would be a university policy, not a department policy.
      • patmorgan23 8mo ago
        [dead]
  • 8mo ago
• ajross 8mo ago
  That doesn't work, because the Universities benefitting from the high-risk student loans are not the ones making bank from their grants and endowments. This is an imagined enemy fallacy. What you're really doing is demanding that Harvard somehow make whole the defrauded students of the University of Phoenix. Now, sure, there's a genuine argument that those diploma factory schools aren't providing valuable service and are just parasites subsisting on public loan guarantees while their students bear the risk. But that's not a financial argument, it's a regulatory one. No one thinks that people shouldn't be allowed to float a Stanford degree on loans, and "dismantling the entire system" just guarantees that we return to the era where only the rich could afford Ivy degrees.
• Braxton1980 8mo ago
  If you had a choice between nothing being done and forgiving student loans which would you pick? Second. Let's say universities did take on the burden of loans, of course that would be via a bank right? If that's the case. How would they enforce risk? Based on certain majors? Who would give a loan with no collateral to young people with no credit on the hopes the major they picked had a viable job market years from that point?
  • thaumasiotes 8mo ago
    > Who would give a loan with no collateral to young people with no credit on the hopes the major they picked had a viable job market years from that point? Who gives out scholarships now? Let's also note that the obvious response to the risk of the job market shifting after several years is to shorten the number of years required to pad out the degree, which is pure societal upside. The standard model of a four-year college degree only has you taking classes from your major during the final two years.
    • Braxton1980 8mo ago
      >Who gives out scholarships now? Many different of groups of unrelated people and organizations. >he standard model of a four-year college degree only has you taking classes from your major during the final two years. This has always been the case in traditional universities in the US. As many have stated here the goal of education is not just to teach you how to do things but also teach you how to learn. I do see value in vocational schools that only teach exactly what you enroll in to save money.
• a_better_world 8mo ago
  if college education produces a public good (a more competent workforce), then it should be funded through public funds-- government should pay for education. If it does in fact lead to better outcomes, then the higher tax will cover the cost. running it through the private system builds in too many perverse incentives.
  • logicchains 8mo ago
    >if college education produces a public good (a more competent workforce) It doesn't achieve this; the % of college graduates has vastly increased over the past few decades, but this hasn't contributed to any significant improvements in standardised measures of graduate knowledge or intelligence. From a business perspective the primarily usage of college is as a filter, a proxy for intelligence and willingness to follow instructions, but its usefulness as a filter has been steadily decreasing as it becomes easier and easier to attend and graduate from college.
  • zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    The US government already subsidizes higher education. And all the state governments do as well. So this is already happening. It’s not at all clear we need to increase the level of subsidy, the rate of college attendance is very high right now compared to past history.
  • odie5533 8mo ago
    In theory that sounds good, but in practice our private system has created the best universities in the world and educates an immense number of students to highly employable levels.
• onlyrealcuzzo 8mo ago
  The German model is pretty good. Tuition prices are reasonable. If you're studying something statistically considered a good investment - you get free tuition. If not, you pay for it. The American model is terrible. The tuition prices are insane because no one pays for it now, and there's endless appetite to lend because your borrower is a systemically non-financially literate CHILD who is signing away their future wages with no right to default EVER. No one would ever lend to the majority of these at these insane tuition prices. We'd quickly end up with reasonable tuitions like in Germany. And then most of the problem goes away. Suddenly schools and degrees that WEREN'T good investments become good investments again.
• abeppu 8mo ago
  If universities should take on that risk, should they also receive some share of the student's future earnings? Do you want all schools to work like the US military colleges, where is admitted you get free tuition but also are agreed to work for the school's parent organization for a period?
• teeray 8mo ago
  It’s interesting that not being able to discharge the loan in bankruptcy is because “you can’t take back the knowledge.” While true, you can still make the credential mostly useless. Everyone needs to do certain verification in a new job (e.g. I-9). If a job was posted that requires some degree, and a new hire used the degree they discharged in bankruptcy to get that job, the debt can come roaring back into existence when it’s caught during onboarding. Like anything, there are edge cases (e.g. starting a new company). But even there you might be able to have gates at financing stages that would trip the debt resurrection.