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This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#2
1000 words later...

She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. [...] "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me."

Words fail me.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#4
Seen from another angle, she spent $100,000 of other people's money and is asking to never repay a penny of it.

This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot the last two weeks, since client work has me doing some calculating from federal data on what the current value of a degree in $FOO is likely to be. (I'm sure you will not be surprised that neither religious studies nor women's studies appears near the top of the list.)

I'll blog on that subject if folks are interested in it.

Some of the solutions, like cutting her off at $60k, are just insane. She'd be halfway through her college degree then. If she'd quit then, she'd be unemployed, have no sheepskin, and still owe $60k with no expectation for salary much higher than a generic high school graduate.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#5
So, basically, these people decided "hey, college, dunno if it's right for me, probably isn't, at least now, since I have no clue what I want to do with my life. However, I shall totally spend as much as possible to get a degree."

There are reasons that the community college system is being built up in several (many? I know CA at least is doing it) states.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#6

1000 words later... She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. [...] "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me." Words fail me.

If you're going to get a liberal arts degree, either have enough money to afford it, or be so intensely interested in the liberal arts that you're willing to pay back your damn loans. There's no human right to be educated in something useless at no expense to yourself, and I say that as someone with a BA in philosophy.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#7

1000 words later... She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. [...] "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me." Words fail me.

what's really disgusting is that she spent $100,000 on such a useless degree

maybe she should suck up her pride and take a night job at Fedex, McDonalds, Starbucks, etc. to pay that off.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#8

1000 words later... She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. [...] "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me." Words fail me.

This woman has some major balls to blame her shitty choice in a major and subsequent debt on other people.

She made a poor choice and she needs to pay for it. This is a systemic problem and the only way to cure it is to enforce personal responsibility.

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#9
It was her decision to take the loans and go to that particular college. Now it was probably the wrong one but she decided on it and would have been able to see where the debt was taking her if she looked into it properly, the terms of these loans haven't changed.

It goes back to the problem of people perceiving the value for money all wrong, would you pay 5 to 10 times more for a similar functioning car just based on branding?

Not to pick on certain degrees I know little about but perhaps someone here does, with an arts degree majoring in religious and women's studies is it even a good chance to begin with that you are going to land yourself a job that can easily pay back a loan of this size?

Re: This Woman Has $97K in Student Loans. Who's to Blame?

#10
post #7

1000 words later... She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. [...] "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me." Words fail me.

what's really disgusting is that she spent $100,000 on such a useless degree maybe she should suck up her pride and take a night job at Fedex, McDonalds, Starbucks, etc. to pay that off.

Occasionally articles of this kind evoke some sympathy with a tough position, but more often than not it appears the person up for the loans made some really bad choices.
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