Students refuse to pay back loans to failed for-profit college

Did the students get a loan from the college or a bank? Did the bank fail? Can I refuse to pay back my mortgage if my house burns down?

What about the people who were just scammed a little? The people who just don't want to have to look hard to find a job after they graduate and so just want to call their degree worthless and get their loan canceled? Because as soon as you draw the line, people are going to challenge where it lies. It's really dangerous to allow someone to externalize all of the consequences of a particular bad decision.

Altruism's great and all, but you need to think very hard about what it means to provide a benefit to everyone. It's not just the people who were legitimately scammed.

To pay for infrastructure repairs someone else must be taxed. Why is it better to tax a working person in order to repair roads instead of just having drivers pay for the proportion of roads that they use?

>So basically students enroll in a scam college to trick people into thinking they are well educated, and then complain when the scam is revealed.

I don't think so. There are colleges (mostly online and often postgraduate only) where the 'student' is in on the scam. They mostly serve markets where promotion or pay prospects are tied to box ticking possession of a masters or PhD with no real consideration of the academic rank of the programs. Those really are about trying to trick people into thinking they are well educated - although you could argue that if no-one cares about the quality of the 'degrees' they're not really scamming anyone.

What Corinthian was doing was charging large sums of money to students for nearly worthless, marginally accredited or unaccredited education while telling them that they were receiving valuable, career enhancing education and recognised credentials. They were the marks and not in on the con.

Of course I absolutely agree that people need to take responsibility for their actions but we need to consider the context and determine what is a reasonable amount of due diligence to undertake.

First of all, our society relentlessly pounds the message into people's heads that they need to go to college to succeed in life. Think of how often an 18 year old will have been told of the importance of going to college by teachers, counsellors, and other authority figures in their lives (all of whom have themselves been to college). How often their parents (who usually will not have been) will tell them that this is what they need to do to succeed. How often the media portrays going to college as the right thing to do. In every sitcom set in a high school or with high school aged main characters, applying to and getting into college is eventually a major plot point.

Now compare that with how often those same sources mention the difference between applying to a community college, a state college, a private non-profit, and a private for-profit college. If they even know the difference (which parents who haven't been will almost certainly not).

Think about the government services which poor people tend to interact with, and the American attitude towards public provision and realise that the educational superiority of publicly owned community colleges over privately owned colleges is actually anomalous. (and in fact the most prestigious American colleges are private, just a different kind of private). How on Earth is a teenager supposed to figure that out.

Should we expect an 18 year old to understand that regional accreditation is better than national accreditation? I mean, does that actually even make sense?

So while I agree that there is a case for people taking responsibility for their actions, I think that young people doing what society told them to do and making some poor decisions after being lied to have met the test for contextually reasonable due diligence.

I think the reason many students put up with increased costs is because they have access to subsidized loans, mainly from the government. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that out of the $1.2 trillion in debt, $1 trillion are estimated to be guaranteed or held by the federal government [0]

I may be in the minority opinion, but I think college is still pretty affordable.

> In 2014-15, average published tuition and fee prices for in-state students at public four-year institutions range from $4,646 in Wyoming and $6,138 in Alaska to $14,419 in Vermont and $14,712 in New Hampshire. [1]

CUNY for instance is $6,030 a year [2]

The tuition is higher than it has been in the past but attending college is a lot more profitable as well. I know the state school I had attended has raised tuition over the years, but I can't help but look around and think that all the money went into a new stadium ($33 MM), new athletic gym and new (very impressive) dorms.

The average student attending an expensive for-profit (less credible) college isn't the same person as someone attending a good state school. A lot of time these colleges attract more marginal students. The payoff for most colleges is still very high and worth the cost. But there should be some cost as to discourage less productive ventures and to have some skin in the game for the student.

[0] http://www.consumerfinance.gov/newsroom/student-debt-swells-... [1] http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table... [2] http://www.cuny.edu/admissions/tuition-fees.html