I think as others said, many students aren’t doing the ROI calculations.

For me, the government loans are 3.75% which is totally reasonable IMO. One could easily outpace this with an ETF fund.

The private loans are more expensive at 6% and up but the lower end is still totally reasonable.

The real issue is that people taking these loans lack the financial skills to pay them back. A friend who is out of school for 10 years has a near six figure loan debt that he refuses to pay down despite earning six figures. Learning to budget and live frugally is a required skill to escape the debt that many don’t have.

I also know very few that have visited financial aid to get a second look at their scholarships / grants. I went every semester and walked out with something. A friend walked out with $14k extra in financial aid from one meeting. Those in the worst positions financially also get vastly more aid. I had some savings going in but still paid a fraction of the tuition sticker price.

In all, the experience worked out well in my favor with a paid research position and other breaks along the way, but given any other situation I would recommend going the state school route which is often a tenth of the cost.

My school wouldn't give anyone extra aid even if you went in in person and asked (the only case I know about is a student's mother passing away halfway through undergrad) and you'd get a little less every semester because tuition kept going up.

Top schools tend to be more generous despite the higher sticker price. My sister graduated from one with around 1/4 of the debt that I did. 2 years was with the same FAFSA for both of us.

But, from a non-European perspective, Europe doesn’t seem to be doing well? It seems the EU is slowly disintegrating, and the monetary union isn’t working. Also the political landscape seems to be in turmoil as well.

The EU is making progress every year: I grew up near a border which was gone by the time I was a teen and nowadays using my mobile phone in any of the EU28 will cost me extra. It's those small things that the people do love about the EU and would miss if they'd just think harder about it. It's also boost regions otherwise neglected by their respective country's government. No one in Westminster gives a fuck about the North or Wales, the EU does, with lots of money being invested.

I hope we see a decade of consolidation and more unification e.g. in the tax, finances and transparency. Junker's own blunders as Luxembourg's prime minister are unforgivable.

While the Americans seem to not be operating as a democracy for a while and are instead a Corporocracy. It became fairly obvious after the GFC. The three “super powers” in the world are not democracies.

Moving on, we Europeans are making a decent profit from selling weapons to the Middle East and African countries. We might as well take on those refugees driven out by the violence our weapons cause.

Europe's history, even the years since WWII, is full of migrations: Post-war displacement affected more than 10 million people, refugees from East to West Germany, Brits fleeing the rain for sunny France and Spain (they are a few hundred thousands), Hungary 1956 dispersed 200,000 hungarians of which 70,000 crossed this little bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C3%BCcke_von_Andau and the last decade saw a massive flow of young people from southern Europe to the north which causes long-lasting problems for the southern countries. The list goes and and will go on. Some EU countries have 10% or more of EU-nationals in their population which in my eyes will become a hot topic in terms of higher level elections as right now you are only allowed to participate in local elections if you are not a native.

I make it US, EU and China - 4 if we count Russia for the 8000 nukes but not by most other measures.

I'm not saying the European countries have it wrong, but their systems seem far from free college for everybody (how it is often reported in the states) and much closer to free college for the worthy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

When you have finished your Hauptschule or Realschule (lowest and mid path) you usually start a job but part-time you also go to a job-school (Berufsschule) where you learn more specific things that are useful for your job. This dual-education works great and is being exported to other countries where german manufacturers get active but don't find the skilled workers they are used to.

Actually, this particular part of the thread you're responding to is about wealth inequality, economic policy, short-term political thinking, whether the EU is doing well comparatively, and policies that create a large amount of potentially avoidable anxiety - among a few other topics.

Education is only a related topic for this specific comment chain.

The purpose of the EU is to prevent war. The EU hasn't had a war in 75 years. That is the longest that Europe hasn't been at war in its recorded history.

Also, I understand that Russia is considered less and less "European" with each passing year but the Ukraine and Russia (or at least all of its centers of power) are located within the European continent by definition. There's also the issue of the IRA's war against Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole, while that conflict doesn't meet the commonly agreed definition of "traditional warfare", it was the very template every modern insurgency bases itself upon. In a sense that was a war by any modern definition since traditional warfare seems to have become a relic of the past.

The EU was a necessary prerequisite of the peace process in northern Ireland, as is being brought into sharp focus now With Brexit.

The EU is if anything a force against peace, as it takes a totalitarian "you obey us on everything or we work with you on nothing" approach which may appear to create temporary peace, but only by suppressing dissent. The USSR was also by this approach very "peaceful".

1. Selecting a very expensive, non-prestigious private school.

2. Selecting a major that has no ROI for the cost of tuition.

To give concrete examples:

Option 1.

   4 years at U of Texas at Austin.

      Tuition = $40k.

   2 Years at Tarrant County College.

   2 years at U of Texas at Austin.

      Tuition = $24k.

   4 years at Southern Methodist University.

      Tuition = $250k.

And, while I would support further taxes to support state schools, I have no desire to support students who are personally selecting to attend a school that will cost 10x just because they want to. And I have no desire to forgive their loans, either.

Citation needed. My personal experience paying taxes in both EU/NL and US/TX is that I pay slightly more in the US, in pretty much the same situation (family of four, two incomes)

http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/oecd-tax-rates-on-labour-income...

I am not an American, nor that knowledgeable about their tax system, but my impression is that their system has a lot of layers (like state/county/local), which might make it unfair just to compare national level taxes.

I always feel like tax should be measured in "if my employer pays 100 extra, how much more can I give another company for a good/service".

I don't know about US but for Germany the answer is between 25 and 40 depending on how low your income is and what your family situation is.

Long-term thinking may mean less burden in society by making the incentives based on debt

I also think people forget that the US is a superpower in part because of the brain power it has, that brain power in part comes from the folks coming out of university. When you look at Uni's top 100 rank, 58% is American & 22% is European. Although this might be a simple correlation vs. causation scenario, I think it is worth accounting for in conjunction with a variety of variables.

I still agree that the tuition $ in the US is exorbitant and that governments need to teach people the values, risks, etc of going to university just like I think everyone should have at least 1 personal finance class in high school, it would help a lot of people.

P.S. I am not American

Wealthy people tend to be owners of businesses (directly or indirectly) that buy this labor, and they have a better negotiating position.

Young people with all the time in the world, an education, and no debt are also in a good position to establish new businesses. Having fewer of those reduces competition.

In essence, what we're talking about here is a massive wealth transfer from people seeking post-secondary education to those offering that education (sometimes public, sometimes private)... except (critically) the effects are future loaded.

We've indebted an entire generation, but it's an invisible anchor dragging on their economic aspirations.

If you ask me, we should do three things to fix this: (1) haircut absolute public loan amounts to a manageable amount in exchange for public service (more funding & new opportunities), (2) haircut private loans to a manageable amount (too bad, they shouldn't be able to offload risk to the public and keep their profits), funded by new taxes on underperforming (read: abnormally large numbers of deliquent loans) private loan vendors AND institutions generating said loans (both of whom benefited from originating poor quality loans), (3) continue efforts to tie government-guaranteed loan eligibility to positive outcomes (your graduates don't find jobs in their fields, your program(s) are no longer eligible for loan guarantees).

My thinking was more along the lines of: shouldn't the haves fund/enable the future success of the have nots instead of having them turn into (hopefully temporary) "have even less's"? In my mind it doesn't seem very sustainable to fuel education with debt even with government as creditor, especially in case should economic downturn occur...

I'm a university student myself and thanks to publicly funded universities I pay ~300 EUR per semester here (including an IMO quite generous public transit ticket). Obviously someone else is paying all the rest (plus the cost explosion is probably not nearly as bad here). The thought of having to personally indebt myself however, not knowing how things'll play out in this increasingly crazy world, seems quite scary. Looking at the situation of US students makes me all the more grateful to not be in their shoes.

I admit my original comment wasn't very well thought out, just something I wanted to vent (reading certain subreddits may have had something to do with this). There's obviously more forces at play concerning US higher education (and the welfare state in general), many of which I'm sure I can't see.

The lenders are rich. That's how lending works - you have money (are rich) so you lend it now for more later (get richer).

Beyond that don't trust what you read online about the US. It is all grossly exaggerated. Remember the US is a large country with a wide variety of people with different priorities.

European here as well, but best I'm aware what you're saying is not how it works.

The US government is the student loan lender at the end of the day when you work through the insurance chain. And in contrast with mortgages, car loans, credit cards, etc. where you can declare bankruptcy to make the debt go away and start anew, you can't default on the US government.

The real story here is that an increasingly large number of US citizens are having or stand to have their wages garnished by the US government. Debt bondage comes to mind...

Exactly, it just becomes a deferred tax. There are also laws that cap how much a person's wages can get taken specifically with student loans. It maxes out at around 10%.

Again, I do not agree with it. But to pretend the sky is falling is false. That's also why, as you've noticed, laws have been adjusted in the wake of the abuses of the for profit university industry. As well as accreditation crack down on the organizations that accredited these for profit universities.

I'm not saying it's right or just. I'm only saying it's intentional and not some giant debt bomb surprise that the government is not expecting.

It's just kind of how the US tries to do things. By having loans they are trying to apply market forces. The idea is that students will do a better job as a whole deciding what schools and programs continue. And again again, I'm not saying I agree. Just relaying that there is an actual design behind it.

For the European model to work in the states, many schools need to be shut down, so as to reduce the freedom of picking whatever major at some school.