Agreed, but keep in mind we aren't talking about loans in the traditional sense. Normally a loan requires some entity to take on the risk of default. With student loans this would mean looking at what the individual was studying, how much of their own money they were supplying, the typical default rate, etc. The amount that they will loan and the interest rate will be determined by the answers to those questions.
When you have the government making loans to students without asking those questions, you are no longer running a normal loan program. When you remove the way a loan program usually adjusts to the risks up front, you have to try to deal with the risk elsewhere. This is done by removing the bankruptcy option.
I think the solution is to account for the risk of the loan up front like we do with other loans. This probably means removing or decreasing the government's role in issuing these types of loans. Eventually, I could see colleges sharing the default risk with a private bank. Colleges who don't think their education is worth much would be less likely to participate in such a program, but that probably isn't a bad thing.
or just make them dischargeable by bankrupcty and let the market price in the default rate and see what happens.
it’s terrible policy & imo immoral to let people be stuck in virtual debt peonage their entire life because of loans they took out at 18.
These loans aren't coming from the market. If students had to go to a private bank and make a case about why they were a good investment, student loans would look a lot different--to say nothing about college in general.
Wells Fargo does offer a type of student loan, but it looks like you have to have someone cosign it with you (probably your parents).
Back in the 90s over 90% of student loans were Federal. I'm not sure what the percentage is now.
3 years of unskilled labor will leave a lot with just enough to support themselves while the cost of education managed to go up in those 3 years more than inflation. Meanwhile you missed out on years of good earnings at your chosen profession.
Working your way through school has become somewhat laughable. Your advice would leave the majority of people much poorer for following it.
If you have the time to work enough to pay for 3 years of college in high school and still perform well in the school itself and jump through all the hoops required to get into that prestigious school you always wanted with a plethora of extracurriculars you aren't learning jack in high school anyway and are probably doing severe harm to yourself working so many hours of the day.
Education in general is messed up, mostly because years 5-18 are almost exclusively a black hole of nothing for most people where you go to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic. Which most people will do by age 8. Then there's a decade of Shakespeare, algebra, and dissecting frogs which plenty of people use in their daily lives and that plenty of employers eagerly need more of in the workforce.
I mean, I get the real problem: just-graduated students have no assets, but a lot of debt, so they have no disincentive from declaring bankruptcy. Hard to come up with a solution to that, since—if the just-graduated student had assets—they'd just be able to pay the debt with them.