Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 374 posts

Re: The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

#131

Post by throwawayjava »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #120

The 'for profit' chart there is the whole story. If your business model is that you can give someone money and then force them to pay it back without any ability to discharge it, you have essentially re-invented indentured servitude. And it attracts scumbags more strongly than a half dead bleeding seal attracts sharks. We have gone through a couple of very public shutdowns as some of these for profit schools lose the…

8.5% of private non-profit students default, and 13.5% of public non-profit students default.

Those are both pretty high numbers, and those are just the defaults; i.e., the worst-case scenario. It's not counting the tens of thousands of people who defer housing, defer saving for retirement, defer saving for their own children's education, or end up on a perpetual treadmill of loan payments that will destroy their ability to retire.

We are heading is the worst possible direction wrt regulation of private for-profit institutions; the available data incontrovertibly demonstrates they should be subject to more scrutiny, not less. But that's definitely not the whole story.

Re: The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

#132

Post by darkerside »

drcode wrote: post #62
thatjsguy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody getting a break doesn’t bring you down, it just brings them up. I’m sorry you had to pay off your loans. I’m paying about $100,000 myself. But even if I didn’t get amnesty, I’d rather not have one more graduate who, like me, has sincerely considered whether simply being dead would be easier to deal with. And there are a lot of people like that. I’d rather be in debt forever if it means that subsequent multit…

> Somebody getting a break doesn’t bring you down, it just brings them up. Well, the assumption here is that the money to "bring them up" can just be materialized out of thin air and doesn't have to be taken from other people, in turn.

Economics not being a zero sum game, it can actually work that way. We can all be better off, and it's only win/lose in the most myopic of viewpoints.

Re: The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

#133

Post by troupe »

thatjsguy wrote: post #47
drcode wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must say, as someone who made quite a few sacrifices to pay off my school debt, I'll be pretty miffed if less responsible people from my same generation get a break on their loans.

Somebody getting a break doesn’t bring you down, it just brings them up. I’m sorry you had to pay off your loans. I’m paying about $100,000 myself. But even if I didn’t get amnesty, I’d rather not have one more graduate who, like me, has sincerely considered whether simply being dead would be easier to deal with. And there are a lot of people like that. I’d rather be in debt forever if it means that subsequent multit…

So if person A got a degree that they can use to get a job with $40k of debt and has worked hard to pay it off, but person B has incurred $40k to get a degree that isn't going to lead to a job, you seem to think we can just forgive the debt of B without having any impact on A. Where do you think the money to pay for that debt will come from....well people who have jobs and are working. So basically person A has to pay for their degree in something that led to employment as well as the degree person B got that didn't lead to employment.

Is that worth doing? Maybe, but don't pretend it has no impact on the people who did pay off their loans.

Re: The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

#134

Post by UncleEntity »

thrownblown wrote: post #115
drcode wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, nice to have a single person agree with me. That said, I also agree that my personal situation (be it through luck or responsible behavior) now makes it possible for me to be generous to others, and I'm certainly happy to pay extra in taxes, to an extent. I guess what bothers me is just this sense of entitlement of people that originated from my same social stratum who now argue "the game was rigged" when I n…

i'm ok with student debt amnesty as long as it comes with compulsory civil or military service.

Pretty sure they already have that, when I was in the reserves they would have paid down my student loans if I had ever bothered to fill out the paperwork.

And a lot of (all?) places have programs where they'll forgive student loans if one stays a teacher for 10 years -- which, as an aside, always boggled my mind that you have to go into major debt to get a public teaching job that pays peanuts but people happily do it.

Re: The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

#135

Post by troupe »

thatjsguy wrote: post #67
drcode wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somebody getting a break doesn’t bring you down, it just brings them up. Well, the assumption here is that the money to "bring them up" can just be materialized out of thin air and doesn't have to be taken from other people, in turn.

Taxation has been around forever. Society gets to vote and decide how to divide up shared resources. I’m perfectly fine with tax dollars going to education (coupled with drastically-reduced tuition, like it used to be a short couple decades ago). I’m curious why everyone thinks it’s so impossible to have affordable education, when not even a generation ago we actually had it in the US.

It is still possible today. There are schools that are an extremely good value. I've even seen some state schools where you can graduate pretty much debt free working a part time minimum wage job during the school year and full time during the summer. If people were acting rationally they would be flocking to these schools. Instead they are taking on massive debt to go to expensive schools. So basically to answer your question, the reason education is so expensive is largely because of the way we loan money to people to go to school.

Re: The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

#136

Post by darkerside »

s3m4j wrote: post #118
rayiner wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making unsupported assertions can’t make them come true. College should controversial. College, as it exists today, entails large expense and opportunity cost. We became a very advanced society sending only a small percentage of people to college. There is little reason to think tripling the proportion of people who go to college will improve the fundamentals of the economy.

Every piece of historic evidence tends to prove that higher education for an ever growing part of the population seem to correlate with better living standards.

That doesn't necessarily have any bearing on cause and effect. It seems trivially obvious that, as living standards improve and people have higher levels of disposable income, we would invest it in educating our children, possibly at extremely poor rates of return.

Re: The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

#137

Post by drcode »

darkerside wrote: post #132
drcode wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somebody getting a break doesn’t bring you down, it just brings them up. Well, the assumption here is that the money to "bring them up" can just be materialized out of thin air and doesn't have to be taken from other people, in turn.

Economics not being a zero sum game, it can actually work that way. We can all be better off, and it's only win/lose in the most myopic of viewpoints.

In order to invoke the "not a zero sum" defense you have to also give a rational argument as to who specifically should hand over their money to pay for this and why their interests have less societal benefit, so that the sum of the transaction does indeed end up positive. Additionally, you have to explain why debt forgiveness does not lead to a "negative sum" scenario due to moral hazard.

Re: The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

#138

Post by kermittd »

Latty wrote: post #60
drcode wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must say, as someone who made quite a few sacrifices to pay off my school debt, I'll be pretty miffed if less responsible people from my same generation get a break on their loans.

The attitude of 'I suffered so others should have to' is really damaging. I get why that's the instinctive response, but it's also going to lead to a worse society. By all means argue for a solution that also helps people who made sacrifice in the past, but people who didn't or couldn't being left to suffer is not a solution. To be clear - I get you are not saying you don't want to solve this because of that, but unf…

Couldn’t agree more. Why should we help anyone by such destructive logic?

Re: The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

#139

Post by toast_coder »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #18

It's a damn shame we've let this crisis reach this scale. Along with healthcare, climate change, the debt, our inauguration, and so on, we've been essentially frozen for most of my life as politicians concern themselves more so with existential power struggle. The right wants to bring us back to the gilded age, the left makes headlines but is barely relevant, and the center is trying to squeeze bandaid solutions whil…

If you dont wont to be in debt, dont take the loan. Saying that you not getting your secondary education paid for by somebody else dooms you to a life of serfdom just sounds like you whining

Re: The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined

#140

Post by ChuckMcM »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #120

The 'for profit' chart there is the whole story. If your business model is that you can give someone money and then force them to pay it back without any ability to discharge it, you have essentially re-invented indentured servitude. And it attracts scumbags more strongly than a half dead bleeding seal attracts sharks. We have gone through a couple of very public shutdowns as some of these for profit schools lose the…

I tend to integrate under the curve[1]. Sub prime mortgages didn't tell the whole story either, but what they did was take an at risk population (people who wanted to own a house but didn't have the credit to get a loan) and fix them up with loans they couldn't repay.

That doesn't have anything to say about the folks who could qualify for home loans on their own under the stricter rules and could pay them off. That business was fine as well.

There are large numbers of for-profit schools who have taken that playbook and replicated it exactly, find people who "want college" but have either not been able to qualify for a state school, and provide a "college product" bundled with a "loan product" knowing that many of those students will never be able to repay the loans. But everyone in the pipeline gets a bit richer in the churn, and the people who take it in the shorts are tax payers and these poor kids who have a bunch of debt and still no way to pay it off.

[1] 88 percent of graduates from for-profit colleges had loans (average debt of $39,950) -- https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/

Post reply on HN