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More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

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Re: More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

#81

Post by DanBC »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #71

The Education Department has assembled a “behavioral sciences unit” to study the psychology of borrowers and why they don’t repay. “We obviously have not cracked that nut but we want to keep working on it,” said Ted Mitchell, the Education Department’s undersecretary. He said many defaulted borrowers dropped out of school and are underemployed. This is surreal. Could they be any more patronizing?

"behaviour sciences" sounds like they're looking at nudge-like approach to see if they can make more people repay, rather than just being clueless about the fact that unemployed people have no money.

Re: More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

#83

Post by siegecraft »

igetspam wrote: post #27

My wife is one of these borrowers. She has a master's degree in teaching. It cost her over $100k to get and she can't find job that would pay her enough that she'd be required to pay anything back. I've seen her loan repayment docs and her minimum payment due is $0 every month. While I think her decision to get a masters in education was a bad one (before we were married) I laugh at an institution that would loan her…

Have you looked into the tax burden you'll face whenever the loans are completely forgiven? Just curious, it's something I was wondering about since I am in a similar position.

Re: More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

#84

Post by ars »

shampine wrote: post #40
ars wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't work for me - it hasn't in a long long time.

Worked fine incognito for me.

I tried incognito - still did not work.

They don't like my IP :(

Even stories linked from Google News homepage don't work for me - I wanted to complain to google about why they even include them. But I guess it's just me.

Re: More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

#85

Post by cryoshon »

rdtsc wrote: post #47

> The Education Department has assembled a “behavioral sciences unit” to study the psychology of borrowers and why they don’t repay. Ha! There is a bit of a hypocrisy there -- if big banks / companies piss away money and choose to strategically default then (and some even get bail-outs), it is just business. If people do it for whatever reason, well clearly the are immoral, deficient somehow, their psychology needs t…

>If people do it for whatever reason, well clearly the are immoral, deficient somehow, their psychology needs to be studied by a special committee.

Yeah. There's also the marginal utility of money. The banks can piss away billions without really getting that hurt. Their debts are business agreements that can be broken under the profitable circumstances.

Student loan payments each month hurt people far more, yet defaulters are looked down on.

The solution is a mass debt strike, until there's a student loan bailout or other large concessions. Threatening to crash the economy further got the banks their trillions during the crisis, so why don't normal people team up and do the same?

Re: More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

#86

Post by onion2k »

sh1ps wrote: post #22

A big takeaway from this article (for me) is that people are surprised that 17 year old kids don't understand what they're doing when they take out that college loan. Shock and astonishment despite there being little to no preparation for this kind of financial understanding previously in their education. That surprise and shock shocks and surprises me. Honestly it kind of reminds me of the whole Yelp minimum wage th…

What should really be surprising about the Yelp thing is that Yelp didn't understand what would happen. A company that spends money to recruit and train a member of staff but doesn't pay them enough to stay in their job is just throwing money away.

That a company the size of Yelp can't see this really obvious situation arising is amazing. I'm surprised their HR people don't get fired over it.

Re: More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

#87

Post by surds »

That is a sad state of affairs, though I must say I have seen worse numbers back in India. Last time I talked with them, I was told that I was one of the 3 active accounts out of 20 granted ones that was repaying the loan.

That's 17 out of 20 in default - a massive 85%. Some of them were actually not in a situation where they could pay back the loan. Others didn't want to. This was the situation at that single bank branch. Don't want to imagine how large the total default amount must be.

Re: More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

#88

Post by drumdance »

sh1ps wrote: post #22

A big takeaway from this article (for me) is that people are surprised that 17 year old kids don't understand what they're doing when they take out that college loan. Shock and astonishment despite there being little to no preparation for this kind of financial understanding previously in their education. That surprise and shock shocks and surprises me. Honestly it kind of reminds me of the whole Yelp minimum wage th…

I would think their parents would help in making that decision.

Re: More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

#89

Post by shogun21 »

AJ007 wrote: post #42
sh1ps wrote: post #22

A big takeaway from this article (for me) is that people are surprised that 17 year old kids don't understand what they're doing when they take out that college loan. Shock and astonishment despite there being little to no preparation for this kind of financial understanding previously in their education. That surprise and shock shocks and surprises me. Honestly it kind of reminds me of the whole Yelp minimum wage th…

A big problem is that at age 17, all of the adults are saying go to college & take out these loans. Guidance councilors, teachers, parents. The most compliant high schoolers will just do what they are told without thinking about it further. I imagine this will start changing. When I was a kid, that group of adults had the benefit of cheap degrees. Today, now that group of adults is us and we did not go to school chea…

I saw taking out student loans as just another hurdle I had I cross. Same with taking the ACT and writing admissions essays.

I'm doing fine now and paying back my loans. But I wish I better understood APRs and monthly payments and what those numbers actually meant in context.

Re: More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

#90

Post by brbsix »

roymurdock wrote: post #73
kdamken wrote: post #13

Not surprising. Lots of kids are holding out hoping that someone will get elected and wave a wand to magically erase the money they borrowed.

I'm a recent graduate. People don't go to college because they think they'll have their debt absolved. They go to college because an undergrad degree is now the equivalent of a HS degree 30 years ago. It's simply a prerequisite, and every parent/counselor is pushing children towards it. Besides, the students described in the article graduated long before Bernie sanders arrived on the scene. He was clearly not a facto…

He's suggesting that people are refraining from paying off existing debts, not that they're accruing new ones with the hope or expectation that they'll be absolved.
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