While I agree with your sentiment in general, do you really think it's normal to be in a house 5 years after graduating? That's still "first steps of my career" phase. Completely unheard of even when I was growing up where I'm from - you would have been seen as doing very well to own a home in your mid/late-20's.
Weird, for boomers in NA it was normal to be in their own house immediately after graduating. Not many lived with their parents after the 18-22 range. Not having a place by 23 would have you defending your reputation.
> Not many lived with their parents after the 18-22 range.
There's this amazing thing called "renting." Not owning your home doesn't mean you live with your parents.
The notion that you should be able to immediately buy a house at the beginning of your career is ridiculously entitled.
Also, one doesn't have to approve loans for the full education. Approve loans per semester. If major changes the creditor could choose not to extend anymore debt. Likewise, creditors could require transcripts as part of qualifying for loans beyond the first semester. A students grades would have weight in whether to continue extending credit (granted some [particularly for-profit] schools might cheat and inflate grad…
So you're incorrectly implying that people aren't successfully graduating? The problem is that people are graduating with huge debt and can't get jobs that pay well enough to pay off their debt.
Did you read the article?
A large number of the people who default on their debt never graduated.
If this happens, do I get benefits on the debt I've already paid off? I would be pretty pissed if I didn't. I worked my ass off to pay my loans.
I always loved this quote, “The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them.” I'm almost done paying off my student loans, and because of that, I don't want anyone else to have to endure paying for student loans, even if I myself don't get the benefit.
No one's stopping you from cutting them a check. Ideally you would not hold a gun to my head and demand I do the same.
You may be right that it's a poor financial decision, but I still hope to one day live in a country where people can pursue education in any subject matter (not just STEM/other money makers) for the pure purpose of educational fulfillment. That can only be done with a system that helps pay for education instead of letting the market decide which degrees are most valuable in terms of pure capitalistic measures
Let me know when you find the hole in the ground that is shooting money up into the air that enables us to have luxuries like this. Frankly, we have thousands of other problems, highlighted by basic health care, that we should probably prioritize first.
Note that this is literal in some cases. Norway, being one of the major neo-socialist successes, is also a major oil exporter in the region. They have holes in the ground shooting money up that help enable social programs.
The two proposals they explicitly call out, allowing employers to subsidize the debt, and allowing farmers to write off their debts, are the exact kind of special carve-outs that caused the damn problem in the first place (the genesis being the non-dischargability & government guarantee of education debts, which was an enormous give-away to the higher ed sector).
This is eerily reminiscent of the pre-revolution French or late Soviet Union trying to keep their spinning plates of state obligations, onerous taxes, and corrupt subsidies aloft.
I think the idea of offering loans only for 'vocational' degrees is extremely damaging. It leads to people taking 'Software Engineering' degrees rather than computer science or maths or physics when really these less directed degrees generally allow people to explore what they are really most passionate about. The idea of a university is not a place where one goes to get a piece of paper that certifies one as compete…
> university is a place where people should go to learn about things that interest them and inspire them in the company of other like-minded people whilst simultaneously growing as an individual As long as we continue to believe this, nothing will change. Universities indoctrinate, lets not be naive. Most schools have little interest in widening the perspectives of students. They are on a mission to unify perspective…
OK well there are all sorts of programming, and DNA is one of those, so is culture, so is family. We're programmed to say pledges to flags, desire an education, get married, buy houses, go into debt, have children, have more debt, etc. It's all programming. But what you're doing is putting a very broad value judgment on a particular variety of programming. I don't think it's terribly interesting to only criticize university doctrination without exploring the opportunity costs. Let's say all the kids want to go to Costa Rica and retire instead of going to college, oops, small problem. So I'm unclear on what your scalable alternative is.
TL;DR The health of the economy is more important than your moral high ground. Same reason we let people walk away from homes (or not walk away, simply not be able to afford them), but we'll still give them a mortgage 3 years after their foreclosure; the economy needs the monetary velocity to survive.
> Same reason we let people walk away from homes (or not walk away, simply not be able to afford them) Like I said in my comment, I recognize that there needs to be some option for people who can't possibly repay their student loans. Defaulting on your mortgage is not consequence-free: you lose your home and hurt your credit. We don't let people just forgive their mortgages and keep their homes without hurting their…
> We should treat student loan debt like any other debt.
We should! There's no asset to secure the debt, so just mark the trade line as unpaid/collections and have it be a black mark for 7 years.
If Congress isn't going to fix this, Millenials can max out unsecured credit, pay off their student loans, and then go bankrupt on the unsecured debt; 7-10 years of bad credit is better than the federal government pursuing you for the rest of your life.*
* Not legal advice. Confirm with an attorney first if you attempt such a feat to ensure you stay within the law by doing so.
As a college graduate, I'd be ok with student loan relief as long as it's funded by a tax on college graduates (and it has to be preceded by something preventing this occurring in the future, like making student loan debt dischargeable under certain circumstances) Seems twisted to tax the rest of the country who decided not to or weren't able to participate in college in the first place
what state does that exist in? No state school here in NJ is under 10k a year, and none of them are ranked decently except for maybe Rutgers, Stevens, and NJIT's architecture program.
The University of Texas has in state tuition for below 6k a year, and in some cases out of state tuition can come in at below 10k as well. [1] This is just tuition and administrative fees and doesn't include housing and textbooks. [1] https://admissions.utexas.edu/tuition/cost-of-attendance Edit: Sorry I misread. These stats are by semester, not year.
Right and also tuition doesn't mean cost of attendance where there are all kinds of additional fees, books, room and board, etc. Cost of attendance is easily double that of tuition. So it's actually in the vicinity of $25K per year for a state university.
State college and community college in particular can be a lot less, and it's possible to even split the difference and do 2 years community and then graduate from the university by transferring credits. Of course, you have to have your ducks in a row to pull that off.