> You aren't entitled...
While the person you describe probably exists, it's not all 18% of students struggling with payments. I'd just like to say that being aggressive helps nobody.
> Instate tuition at VA Tech is 13k for the year, if you live in Texas, UT is 4-5k a semester. While not cheap, this is far from unaffordable.
Are the people born away from the coasts out of luck then? There are dozens states in the Midwest with cheap tuition, but after graduation there aren't any jobs waiting.
The quality of education is usually poor when professors teach subjects for fields that they've never been a part of.
Students know these things, and feel it's worth taking on debt to get a better education and live somewhere with opportunities.
> Go learn a trade, get scholarships, join the military, work for a company that will pay for your education, start your own business.
I'm assuming you work in tech. Would your employer hire someone in their 30's with no relevant work history? I've worked at two of the large tech companies and two smaller companies, and I know they wouldn't consider it.
Apprenticeships are disappearing - low skill work gets automated now. Medium skill jobs are being outsourced or given to contractors. What you're suggesting isn't realistic.
An 18 year old assured by their parents this is the "right" move deserves sympathy when it all blows up in their face 150k down the road.
My Mother told me she would throw me out of the house if I took a job rather than going to graduate school. She also said all the loans I took out for undergrad that she claimed she'd pay she'd stop paying if I got a job rather than going to grad school.
The reality is some parents are so damn convinced that education is the magical key to a good life they'll go to some pretty intense lengths to get you to sign on the dotted line.
Blaming entitled kids for our debt-laden society and failed economy is not smart or useful. The truth is that there aren't enough jobs (let alone decent-paying jobs) for 1/4 of the tens of millions of kids who enter college every year. These kids weren't the ones who mismanaged society so that property taxes, mandated healthcare premiums, income taxes, and rents are so high.
That's false for several reasons. First, government debt impacts citizens directly through higher taxes (income, property, sales, and others), fees, deprivation of services, ect. Second, government debt is not primarily owed back to it's citizens. The biggest holder of government debt is the Federal Reserve, which is a collection of private banks. The vast majority of debt not held by the federal reserve is held by banks, financiers, and the ultra-wealthy. Third, working people and those on fixed incomes are crushed by ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), which has been implemented by the FED in an effort to prevent the mountains of debt load on every governmental level from exploding. What it has done instead is prevented people from saving (since artificially low interest rates that don't match the rise in cost of living mean treasuries and savings accounts lose value) and further inflate the riches of the ultra-wealthy who borrow at 0% and buy stocks.
This doesn't even touch on the fact that millions of people who have worked their whole lives for pensions are about to get the shaft and become destitute when states and municipalities are overcome by their crushing debt and default on their payments.
Pretty much the whole world economy is built on debt and creating more of it, that's because there is no such thing as "money" without debt, especially not with the US$ as the de-facto world currency.
In that regard, it's disingenuous to claim the whole problem only boils down to a couple of kids living above their standards, it's way more systemic than that.
You aren't entitled to having a loan repaid if the interest rate is too high.
...or if you loan too much money to someone who won't be able to afford it.
...or if you expect someone in a lower income bracket to pay more than X% of their income.
Common-sense laws that loosened bankruptcy and regulations on repayment amounts would fix student loans, credit cards, bad mortgages, and payday lending. Why do we always blame the person taking out the loan? The lender should have the expertise to know if a person is capable of repayment and should bear the burden of making predatory loans.
1/ Student loans are not dischargeable in bankrupty.
2/ Today, the government IS the lender.
The government has created a system of incentives (even before the student loan industry was nationalized) that encourages lending large amounts of money to anybody by eliminating the risk on the part of student loan lenders.
People can basically never get out of the debt, so you can lend arbitrary sums of money to Feminist Dance Theory majors and other sorts of poor-ROI nonsense.
"Predatory loans" is a misnomer. Predatory government is far more accurate.
Then you're an asshole. Young people with zero real world life experience make poor choices often. Sometimes critically poor choices. It's a part of growing up to fail and the fact that you can't squeeze together an ounce of sympathy for these folks suggest you have a lot of growing up to do yourself.
Just like we know diamonds have no real value, and you shouldn't go into debt to buy an engagement ring or have a big wedding.
But try offering your fiance a $5,000 bond instead of a fancy ring. It doesn't go well.
Social pressure is a real thing, and colleges are taking advantage of all of us by setting up expectations for normal that we just can't afford.
This is why I never really got behind Bernie's free college plan. We don't need the government to help make college free. We need to change why these costs are getting so out of control in the first place.
How are people spending over 50k in the first two years of undergrad? Basically wherever you go the core requirements that first year or two are the same before you pick your major. We need to be leveraging the best teachers and online classes to bring these costs down, especially for your basic "Philosophy 101" class that you are just taking to test the waters.
You build egos the size of cathedrals.
Fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse.
Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green gold-plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor becomes his own god.
Where can you go from there?
As we're scrambling from one deal to the next who's got his eye on the planet? As the air thickens, the water sours, even bees' honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity and it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There's no chance to think, to prepare. It's buy futures, sell futures when there is no future. We got a runaway train, boy." 'The Devils Advocate'
But you are. We have a right to an education. My parents paid literally $0 for their education, because university was free, in a time with much lower productivity and less wealth. The state could afford it then, so it can certainly afford it now.
You aren't entitled to 100,000 dollar education.
You aren't entitled to go down to Mexico every spring break.
you aren't entitled to eat pizza and hit the bar every weekend.
You aren't entitled to a college education.
Go learn a trade, get scholarships, join the military, work for a company that will pay for your education, start your own business.
Instate tuition at VA Tech is 13k for the year, if you live in Texas, UT is 4-5k a semester. While not cheap, this is far from unaffordable.
I have zero sympathy for junior who goes to some 150,000 a year liberal arts college and gets a degree that makes no money or requires another 2-4 years of school.