I think it's hard to absolutely assess the value of a student loan —however predatory— without considering the prospects of having a higher education. Some degrees are worth a dodgy loan. Some really aren't.

You could also say that many students wouldn't be in higher education without the loan. That is especially true here in the UK. That might not be a bad thing except that we've gone through an arms race so that every junior post needs five bachelor degrees and a decade of experience. Experience alone used to be enough.

It'd be nice to get back there. Our focus on getting everybody into higher education —and underwriting indefinite liens on lifetime income— has also meant that universities care more about the number of students than the quality of teaching. That alone probably isn't news, what has been recently in the UK is the remuneration of higher management staff.

They can apparently justify the 10-20× bump over senior lecturers (plus benefits like housing, cars, lunches) to their boards by saying they're the only people who can attract all the money from the students. It's disgusting and vicious cycle.

It’s similar in the U.S. people going six figures in debt for degrees that qualify them for $30k jobs is a problem, but that is a dirt-simple ROI analysis.

Forcing nearly everyone into the college-bound track is a huge problem. Politically, vocational training is deemed classist or racist, and such utopianism creates a sad disservice to lots of young people who could be learning skilled trades and setting themselves up for comfortable living.

Just like everyone at the university level is not med-school material, not every high schooler is college material.

Six figures?! I'm sure some people manage to clock that up, but the 2015 average[1] was $30,100 at graduation.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, that's still a huge pile of money for a worthless degree, or something you should have learned "on the job"... But it's a long way off $100k+

[1] https://ticas.org/posd/map-state-data

It sounds like a partial solution to this is an infographic that must be provided by each college before allowing loans to be taken out showing:

* The degrees you're interested in

* The total cost of ownership of each of those degrees, based on the dollar cost + interest

* The years you'll have to work to pay off the degree based on the median salary of whatever career requires that degree

* Placement rate in the career you're obtaining you're degree for after obtaining your education (colleges usually fudge the numbers here by considering a student getting any job as "placement" after going through their pipeline)

Very similar to truth in lending requirements for credit cards and mortgages.

https://www.occ.treas.gov/topics/consumer-protection/truth-i...

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

You can't expect the college to give you a realistic prospect when they are the ones who stand to (non-) profit from your matriculation.

At the very least, they will give you a best-case scenario instead of a worst-case or median-case.

That's why you use the law to do it, like we do with credit card and mortgage products.

Sadly, in the US, we don't teach ROI. That comes in your 2nd year of college. Its a trap!

Pretty easy to assess if you google for some basic employment information (at least for the US). [1]

Doing so results in seeing that a sociology degree from an expensive school means you'll basically never be able to pay off the loan.

Get an engineering degree from a state school, and the interest rate almost doesn't matter. (yes, of course the interest rate matters - I'm just being a bit cheeky in the comparison.)

[1] This is literally the first link under google when searching for "starting salaries by major": https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2015/07/02/the-colle...

The problem is not the lack of personal responsibility of students in their decision to take out loans. The problem is the systemic failure to provide high quality education to those qualified to pursue it. Those who are qualified to pursue higher education should not be prevented from doing so by questions of personal finances, inherited wealth, etc

Very cool that you are doing this.

I had an AP English teacher that took us 'off book' after we finished our tests to teach us real-life stuff (how taxes work, credit cards, etc.) for a few days. More students should be getting such a primer before college.

But, you can't predict whether your going to finish college or not. or whether your going to get a "college grad" level job. or whether your going to get pregnant and not finish.

Analysis is great for aggregate decision making. But for the lotto of life. sometimes you can make the best decisions and still get screwed.

That is really wonderful. Schools everywhere, regardless of country, should really have a mandatory basic financial literacy course. So many people fall into various debt cycles and I feel such a course would be very beneficial at preventing a lot of people getting trapped.

Care to share your instructions? I’m an adult and I just use the web calculators haha.

Here's a pdf version of the assignment:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lAG9o3f106qwLBODURsglUChsBs...