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U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

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Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#201

Post by smallgovt »

As someone who graduated from a top tier school, I'm constantly befuddled by society's expectation/belief that college degrees are useful.

I learned absolutely nothing during my 4 years of undergrad that is practically useful to my current vocation, and I can say the same is true for 90% of my peers.

For some areas of study, college IS worth the cost. For example, hard sciences. But, for the vast majority, it's not (think: business and administration, art, history, economics, etc.)

I would guess that in 90% of cases, graduates would be more valuable to companies and potential employers if they spend those 4 years and $300K (tuition + lost wages) learning/practicing their specific trade/industry.

So, when are we as a society going to realize that 90% of us are wasting 20% of our most productive years on useless learning? This really seems like a travesty to me.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#202

Post by ianai »

pxeboot wrote: post #150
rubyn00bie wrote: post #138

Let it burn down. No one should pay back their student loan debt. Seriously, just stop. This is a scheme in which they've fucked over a large portion of the population with the skyrocketing prices of education. Further, this education is the regularly accepted means of increasing your production. Society says you have to do this, and then continuously increases the price, without reason. The gist of this is; some shi…

This would be beautiful to see. Considering the scope of the population affected, there would be little to no recourse if everybody collectively decided to stop paying at the same time. If you trash every millennials credit score, the scores would become worthless.

If it were ever going to be possible to orchestrate at scale, now’s the time. It would take a vast amount of people acting as a bloc.

I wonder if some sort of cloud sourced banking could be worked out to make it feasible. Trying to float a startup bank with student loans, for instance - but that’s clearly outlawed. Maybe some crowdfunding of a bank start up through small monthly contributions. Instead of needing a good credit score to be able to purchase things, buying into a monthly alternative to the credit market.

Flying by the seat of my pants here -

Maybe sell gamified returns for appropriate length investments. So the customer signs up at cost X. Every month they contribute X dollars. The company stores those funds in cash equivalents. At any time, the customer can pause or cash out their payments to that point. After a year, the company stores those funds in instruments that pay out in a year, maybe, or the company just keeps them in cash equivalents. After a year, the customer can qualify for a loan of 12*X+Y through the company. Y being 0 or some present value of the customers promised future payments.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#203

Post by tfolbrecht »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #146
tfolbrecht wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an 8 hour day with a lunch break. 11am-8pm ET, If you want people, you can always go to the local coffeeshop, library etc. I agree colleges killer feature for a young person is networking, friendship, and dating. You just have to find alternative places to get it.

8 hours of lectures? Then more time on computer for homework/project work?

It's an hour of reading/ a small code exercise, two hours of lecture, lunch, a small project and a brief meeting in a smaller group.

It's equivalent to a 40 hour work week.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#204

Post by loosetypes »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #6

Education is important. Access to education is important. But our current system of giving out student loans with no regard to if the student will ever have a realistic ability to repay borders on predatory. If we can't do anything to solve that portion of the problem, we should at least restrict the mandatory fees that are tacked on for non instructional purposes. No student should have to pay for decades to prop up…

> .. current system of giving out student loans with no regard to if the student will ever have a realistic ability to repay borders on predatory.

This morning my university sent me an email about a `Summer Funds & FAFSA Workshop` to `receive guided 2019-2020 FAFSA filing help.` In their words: `an open lab session to help you complete the FAFSA .`

Schools seem of the opinion that the money is already theirs; If they could file it without the students they would.

Just because it's systemic doesn't it's not predatory. With admins focused on the money and teachers focused on research, how are universities any more than glorified testing centers?

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#205

Post by cortesoft »

smallgovt wrote: post #201

As someone who graduated from a top tier school, I'm constantly befuddled by society's expectation/belief that college degrees are useful. I learned absolutely nothing during my 4 years of undergrad that is practically useful to my current vocation, and I can say the same is true for 90% of my peers. For some areas of study, college IS worth the cost. For example, hard sciences. But, for the vast majority, it's not (…

I think the disconnect is that a university degree is NOT vocational training, and it never has been.

What happened is that for a long time, only a certain class of people got to go to a university, and that class of people were the same ones that got the best jobs. In fact, many companies used a university degree as a filtering mechanism to select that class of person.

Other classes saw this, and assumed that if they also got this degree, it would open up that other class. It worked for a bit, but soon there were simply too many people getting the degrees for it to work anymore as a way to select a limited group. It is no longer the gateway into a higher class lifestyle.

At the same time, though, I think it is a bit dismissive to call the education useless. I learned a ton studying philosophy at a university, even if it doesn't directly apply that often to my work. It helped me understand the world, its history, and how we think. I am very glad I did it.

However, it was not training me for a job. Not everything we do is for job training.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#206

Post by rayiner »

RGamma wrote: post #127

From a European perspective I can only shake my head at this. It doesn't seem like a good idea at all to indebt a significant part of the young population (which I presume creates a lot of avoidable stress) while the rich gain in wealth and power year after year. But I guess longer-term thinking has been thrown overboard in economic decision/policy making anyway, because that would make the numbers not grow fast enou…

The education bubble has nothing to do with the rich. It’s entirely a middle class phenomenon—a wealth transfer from young middle class people to older middle class people (professors and administrators). To the extent that state colleges aren’t more heavily tax subsidized, again its primarily the fault of the older middle class. (The biggest difference between US and European tax rates is for the vast middle class. Rich Germans pay somewhat more in taxes than rich Californians. Middle class Germans pay twice as much or more.)

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#207

Post by leetcrew »

zanny wrote: post #124
wtvanhest wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are being honest, sports and minor non-instructional costs are minor vs the cost of small classrooms and professors. We need to vastly cut costs and sports and non-instructional costs wont move the needle.

The fact that many universities have tenured masters of their domain still having to, even with as many grad students as can fill a lecture hall, oversee 100 level courses that would fit in better at middle school than university is ridiculous. Good professors are an extremely expensive thing to have, and students of merit deserve time with such masters that maximizes knowledge transfer. That almost always means not…

I don't know what your experience was like in undergrad, but at the state school I went to, the 100-level "intro to this major" type courses were actually quite challenging. none of the individual pieces were that complicated, but the breadth of material and pace were simply too much for most high school students, let alone middle school.

I also dispute your claim that 100-level courses should just be assigned to grad students. of course any grad student should have a firm grasp of the intro material, but intro courses aren't _just_ about learning tools and building blocks for understanding advanced material. they are a department's first opportunity to get students excited about their discipline and get them to start thinking about how all the little pieces fit into a larger perspective. simply throwing grad students at these important courses is a great disservice, imo. to be fair, the current practice of shoving 200+ students into a huge lecture hall is not much better, no matter how good the instructor.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#208

Post by bronco21016 »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #138

Let it burn down. No one should pay back their student loan debt. Seriously, just stop. This is a scheme in which they've fucked over a large portion of the population with the skyrocketing prices of education. Further, this education is the regularly accepted means of increasing your production. Society says you have to do this, and then continuously increases the price, without reason. The gist of this is; some shi…

It sounds great but good luck. I’ve been struggling with my $97k student loan debt for 9 years and I’m finally on the downhill slide. There’s no way I’m wrecking all the work I’ve already put in at this point. I suspect many others would feel the same way.

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#209

Post by jtolmar »

gnicholas wrote: post #147
RGamma wrote: post #127

From a European perspective I can only shake my head at this. It doesn't seem like a good idea at all to indebt a significant part of the young population (which I presume creates a lot of avoidable stress) while the rich gain in wealth and power year after year. But I guess longer-term thinking has been thrown overboard in economic decision/policy making anyway, because that would make the numbers not grow fast enou…

I’m curious about the juxtaposition of the indebting of young people and the rich gaining in wealth and power. Is there a causal linkage between student loan debt and the rich getting richer? It’s true that we could levy higher taxes on the rich to pay for college, but as others have pointed out, part of the problem of spiraling costs is the heavy governmental subsidies. Or am I missing the point on how these two thi…

> Is there a causal linkage between student loan debt and the rich getting richer?

The lenders are rich. That's how lending works - you have money (are rich) so you lend it now for more later (get richer).

Re: U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

#210

Post by 8bitsrule »

College students in the previous century had a remedy. It was removed in 2005.

Forbes: "In 2005, Congress passed, and President George W. Bush signed, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which exempted federal and private students loans from discharge."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_an...

IIRC correctly, the number and size of student loans grew greatly after this Act. College students who received advice which encouraged them to take on huge debt loads - on speculation - were essentially thrown into the water to see if they could learn to swim.

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