Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
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Re: Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
#2In the US people can’t clear student loans in bankruptcy. It’s a shame, I think, given the constant upward tick in tuition and lack of resulting careers. They can even go after the students parents.
Re: Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
#3In the US people can’t clear student loans in bankruptcy. It’s a shame, I think, given the constant upward tick in tuition and lack of resulting careers. They can even go after the students parents.
Academia is a great example of what happens when you try to create a "market-free" zone: things get abused in unexpected ways while clever rent-seekers embed themselves in incredibly lucrative positions that you never knew you were creating. See: student loans/tuitions, pay-to-read journals (another front page HN topic).
The student loan problem is a result of the generalized "prestige economy" that's driving the problems with journals (and whose failures include that cascade of replication crises). To see this, realize that the only reason so many people are going to university at all is because a good name on your resume is now a requirement for getting any reasonably well-paying job. See the parallels between that and how academics need good names on their CVs in order to compete? It's a prisoner's dillema where the cooperation-case would be that every person who doesn't need their degree for their career would drop out at the same time that every academic switched to open-access journals.
Re: Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
#4Let's add another layer of abstraction and diversion, the trusty tax payer! /s
This of course, totally ignoring that government backed (everybody gets one no matter what) loans got us here in the first place...
Re: Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
#5In the US people can’t clear student loans in bankruptcy. It’s a shame, I think, given the constant upward tick in tuition and lack of resulting careers. They can even go after the students parents.
Academia is a great example of what happens when you try to create a "market-free" zone: things get abused in unexpected ways while clever rent-seekers embed themselves in incredibly lucrative positions that you never knew you were creating. See: student loans/tuitions, pay-to-read journals (another front page HN topic). The student loan problem is a result of the generalized "prestige economy" that's driving the pro…
Exactly. If you wonder why education and health care costs explode: when the party deciding is not the party paying, that's what happens.
I hadn't heard of pay-to-read journals being an attempt to create a "market-free zone".
Re: Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Academia is a great example of what happens when you try to create a "market-free" zone: things get abused in unexpected ways while clever rent-seekers embed themselves in incredibly lucrative positions that you never knew you were creating. See: student loans/tuitions, pay-to-read journals (another front page HN topic). The student loan problem is a result of the generalized "prestige economy" that's driving the pro…
Exactly. If you wonder why education and health care costs explode: when the party deciding is not the party paying, that's what happens. I hadn't heard of pay-to-read journals being an attempt to create a "market-free zone".
The journals occupy a position where the quality of the service they provide has nothing to do with why a person chooses to do business with them. It's a market in that you can choose who to submit papers to, but the incentives are so misaligned that it doesn't work like a market.
Re: Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
#7Although by inclination what I want to do is rant about the iniquity of this kind of robo-debt in education, instead what I am thinking right now, is this: how does this compare overall to the rate of default in debt for other purposes? how does it compare to car loan debt? mortgage debt? I ask, because debt is the same, except in as much as student debt is in principle seeking a path to be able to repay it. The asset based debt invites a repo man:
you can't suck knowledge back out of a graduates head (ancient egyptian practices to the contrary)
Re: Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
#8Let’s simply tax the new BTC zillionaires, and pay down the student loan debts.
Re: Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
#9Although by inclination what I want to do is rant about the iniquity of this kind of robo-debt in education, instead what I am thinking right now, is this: how does this compare overall to the rate of default in debt for other purposes? how does it compare to car loan debt? mortgage debt? I ask, because debt is the same, except in as much as student debt is in principle seeking a path to be able to repay it. The asse…
That assumes the person wasn't working too many odd jobs and hours to scrape by, so that they did receive a decent education.
Re: Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
#10In the US people can’t clear student loans in bankruptcy. It’s a shame, I think, given the constant upward tick in tuition and lack of resulting careers. They can even go after the students parents.
> In the US people can’t clear student loans in bankruptcy. It’s a shame...
Maybe you could explain this to me, because I really don't understand. Why do you think that it's a shame that people can't just discharge substantial, otherwise unsecured government loans?
To me, the real shame is high school employees pushing college on marginal students. One of the few things worse than spending too much money on a not-particularly lucrative degree is spending the money, but not graduating.
I believe the graduation rate at Bellevue College, the biggest and best community college* in WA state is around 25%. I'm sure they're not unusual in that regard.
* It's technically not a community college, but for all intents and purposes, it is.