Note: All it takes is changing the law back to the way it was before - debts forgiven in an ordinary bankruptcy.

All this would do is ensure that higher education is utterly inaccessible for anyone not rich enough to pay cash.

Good!

Let education be paid for by grants and the student own income, most grants. Plus force the universities to make their tuition cost effective.

Edit: However many years ago, public universities charged a fairly nominal tuition and survived for many doing that (financed by their respective US states). These public universities today have massively expanded their costs, primarily based on capital spending and follow the model of private universities.

While I attended college, tuition costs almost doubled, but since haven't increased much per year. It wasn't massive increased spending, it was the state cutting off basically all finding. There's certainly fat to be cut, but the admin costs are mostly imposed on high.

I know people who would GLADLY throw away two years of their life in bankruptcy proceedings if it means they could be free of their crushing student debt.

Some enterprising law students figuring out they could get a loan to learn how to get out of the loan - and end up with a very valuable degree out of it that could not be repossessed - and by the time they needed good credit, it would be off their records.

It took awhile for word to get out, and then they banned getting out of student loans.

So blame the lawyer (students) I guess?

Harvard in particular is so wealthy it always charges tuition based on ability to pay. The poor who go to Harvard pay nothing. But, of course, the poor seldom go to Harvard because they aren't admitted.

Just saying. There are mid-range school where, all else being equal, your scenario might be true. But those school depend on those same lower income students and, well, I'd be in favor of them buckling and charging less.

If underprivileged kids represent anything above about 5% at Ivy's I would be shocked. One stat from Boston Globe was that only 3% of Harvard comes from the US bottom 20% economically.

The Ivys do more to perpetuate the existing power dynamic than they do to raise anyone up. They are far too small and far too nepotistic to do otherwise.

If you want to raise the middle/bottom up, you need to look at the large state university systems which are orders of magnitude larger.

Also there are lots and lots of programs state and private to fund low income higher Ed. It is not a dichotomy.

Good. When I got my degree, almost nobody had student loans. The kids from lower middle income and below tried for scholarships, Pell grants, and even had jobs that slowed them down due to fewer hours available for school. Tuition was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Oh, and a couple years taking transferable courses at community college was a thing too.

If you want to help the poor, then do that but dont corrupt the system the way it has been the last 25 years. Now everyone is screwed.

I went to a good university, majored in history, took out 100k in debt totally for said degree, and have been working as a programmer ever since.

Why does my outcome feel so rare? I think 100k was a fair enough price. (25k per year including food and a room).

Every professor or co-professor I know gets paid peanuts, gets poor support, and gets waaaay too many students. These folks are at Yale, Princeton, etc. It’s a scam and the money disappears into the machine with little accountability and a ton of hand waving.

My tuition was around $15,000 per year. You are more than welcome to investigate where that disappears to (presumably not all to staff salary), but requiring me to pay $100,000 upfront would have killed my career before it ever started-- unless of course you convince employers that a degree isn't needed.

$15k for tuition alone (not counting books/materials/food, room and board) obviously makes that impossible.

It isn’t going into teaching staff. It goes into administrators salaries, bloated programs/overhead in sports, recruiting program costs, fees for housing, fees for food, and ever larger endowments that somehow never trickle down - among other things.

For what is being taught 99% of the time, the economies of scale make $2500/yr for tuition perfectly doable in a typical undergrad environment - if anyone wanted to. And it is done all the time in Europe, for instance.

If you’re taking out a loan to cover all your living costs + tuition than obviously that is going to be more expensive than tuition alone. In Europe where school tuition is covered, there are also separate programs to cover student living costs - which are also not super high generally. My ex-gf got her physics degree from a well known university in Spain, and they paid her $500 per month or week (forget) to cover living costs at the time I believe which was more than enough.

She wasn’t eating imported caviar, but students in general have always been able to get by (and have fun/a social life) without big expenses.

Then few students would want to stay poor for ten years just to get rid of loans. But lenders would also have incentive to not back very poor career paths.

Which would cause significant negative price pressure on that education.

Meanwhile, really useful classes that students wanted and professors wanted to teach didn't exist, because the school wouldn't fund the extra class time.

In short, out of all the school's top priorities, the students were nowhere to be found. Change that, and maybe I'll change my mind too.

These days almost all student loans (90+% of the dollar amount) are being issued by the feds.

> These days almost all student loans (90+% of the dollar amount) are being issued by the feds.

Well that makes it easy. Forgive those loans and then stop issuing them. Force the universities to come up with reasonable programs with reasonable tuition. Universities have gone from institutions of learning to scams exploiting students and low-paid lecturers alike.

And what about the people who have already paid off their federally backed loans via their own hard work? They seem to get the short end of the stick in this case.

Yes! I would not want to see these loans forgiven if they didn't also stop them at the same time.

There's pretty clearly not, not even in the dominant wing of the Democratic Party, despite people—mostly in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—expending a lot of effort to try to build it. It's possible there might be in the future, even perhaps the near future, though having a plan to prevent the problem from recurring and tying it in with the forgiveness makes that a lot more likely.

> Prior to 2010, Federal loans included 1) direct loans originated and funded directly by the United States Department of Education and 2) loans originated and funded by private investors and guaranteed by the federal government. Guaranteed loans were eliminated in 2010 through the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act and replaced with direct loans because of a belief that guaranteed loans benefited private student loan companies at taxpayers expense, but did not reduce costs for students.

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

> Most student loans — about 92%, according to a June 2020 report by MeasureOne, an academic data firm — are owned by the U.S. Department of Education.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude...

The MeasureOne link: https://www.measureone.com/resources

Weird what happens when the government assumes liability. Everyone wants to blame the banks for '08, and they have some fault but it was all enabled by federal encouragement and liability. At least in the private sector the companies live and die by their decisions and the banks were held accountable /s.

We don't blame BestBuy for having prices that are too high, or not educating shoppers that their quantum dot TV's will be obsolete and valueless in a few years.

The main problem is that not only is the government subsidizing the loan, but they're never dischargeable in bankruptcy.

The banks are the ones that truly have no skin in the game. Universities at least need to be able to point to graduation rates and successful graduates of their programs, the quality of their internship opportunities and career services department. Not that they're worth $250k/student, but the universities at least have some vague reputational stake in this that will impact their ability to recruit more students. For a little while when someone google's the quality of Columbia's program they may see these posts. The more these issues come out, the bigger the impact on schools.

Banks on the other hand? They won't lose money, business, reputation, prospective employees... Nothing.

They were easily the best junior developers we had hired, and all have done quite well in their careers.

Perhaps we just got lucky?

He had a mech engineer background, two years out of engineering school went to code camp.

Ceo was an idiot and payed him 90k starting which was a lot more than one of the other seniors who was an self taught English grad. He worked his ass of an was performing as a senior. Ceo stiffed him on the raise, he didn't know any better until he found out code campers salary and was gone in two weeks.

My director left shortly after and so did I. They haven't kept a lead for more than 6 months since, that was 3 years ago... Sorry I digress.

Bear Stearns had a hiring mantra of not liking MBAs and instead hiring PSDs: "Poor, smart and had a deep desire to be rich" :-)

I can think of a dozen people who got schnookered into 3+2 business/mba programs. They graduated with $150k in the hole (this was in 2000) and ended up in retail banking or working for the government in some civil service job that required 15 accounting credits.

The classic example of this phenomenon is art majors, who are basically unemployable in a “job” outside of teaching, and those job openings are usually cyclical.

I'm dubious that many art majors wind up $300k in debt. Undergrad doesn't cost that much.

More than I thought, and enough to call "many", but perhaps still an acceptable level.

Schools that have always graduated successful people with valuable degrees will prosper, and schools which prey upon idealistic young people will quickly find themselves only able to entertain rich dumb kids.

It's an indirect solution which will fix future and past wrongs, without giving any University the right to sue. It doesn't impose any unreasonable burden on institutions, other than the most reasonable one, that they're giving young people educations that actually have value.

This seems to be kicking the can down the road a little. College applicants and students absolutely should bear some responsibility in making sure that their programs, degrees, and desired careers are actually feasible and practical in the long-term. Where you're spot-on, though, is that they don't bear all the responsibility.

The big problem, it seems, is that there's no safety-valve for those students who didn't (whether through their own fault or not) get the memo about programs being worthless. In those cases, making other stakeholders (schools, the state) have some skin in the game seems like it'd make the problem solve itself.

Like you said, if the students are the only ones incentivized to have universities give a good education, we're going to have a bad time.

C'mon. Google "starting salaries for [my major]"

- Job Growth (8% writers & authors, 12% producers and directors, 5% advertising and promotions managers)

- Average Salary ($73k writers and authors, 89k producers, 133k advertising and promotion managers)

Sounds pretty good right? the part that's missing is that the placement rate of "Film and Media majors" into these fields.

The average starting salary for a film and media studies is $22,656 per year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27828557

Now, given 2087 working hours in a year, and $15/hr, that yields an annual pay of $31,305. 50% MORE than a FAM studies college graduate.

All with a few seconds of effort, with a device in everyone's pocket.

It's very specifically the loan companies that do this and the universities just sell their stuff. But stopping would be good, yes.

Best disincentive: Debt forgiveness. Forgive those "unforgivable" and people will think twice about ever doing this again.

However, the federal limit is still sky high $31,000 for dependent undergraduate students. A loan cap of say 20k/year would dramatically change what goes on at these private collages.

> The loan limits for Grad PLUS and Parent PLUS Loans also differ from Stafford Loans. There is no annual limit as a set dollar amount, but students or parents may not borrow more than the total cost of attendance, less any other financial aid received.

Let’s assume 40k / year at say 5% interest compounded annually. That’s ~82k for a 2 years masters which is serious money. But tack on a 4 year undergrad at 40k/year with that same 5% interest and your up to ~272k all said which means that 4 year undergrad cost ~190k. Add a gap year and things look even worse.

Not that 40k and 5% are norms, but it shows how costly deferring payments is independent of graduate tuition rates.

$0-30k pays on average $10,245

$30k-48k, $3,409

$48k-75k, $6,864

$75k-110k, $14,421

$110k+, $41,002

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/columbia-university-270...

This falls comfortably below a cap of $31k, or even $20k for students with family income below $110k. But these financial aid packages are for their undergraduates; clearly they are not so generous with their graduate students, presumably because there's no cap to how much those students can borrow. Other Ivy League universities are very similar in this respect.

It seems clear from the WSJ these massive debts are just the balance that comes from graduate degrees:

> Undergraduate students for years have faced ballooning loan balances. But now it is graduate students who are accruing the most onerous debt loads. Unlike undergraduate loans, the federal Grad Plus loan program has no fixed limit on how much grad students can borrow—money that can be used for tuition, fees and living expenses.

> It has become the fastest-growing federal student loan program and charged interest rates as high as 7.9% in recent years.

> The no-limit loans make master’s degrees a gold mine for universities, which have expanded graduate-school offerings since Congress created Grad Plus in 2005. Graduate students are for the first time on track to have borrowed as much as undergraduates in the 2020-21 academic year, federal loan data show.

> “There’s always those 2 a.m. panic attacks where you’re thinking, ‘How the hell am I ever going to pay this off?’ ” said 29-year-old Zack Morrison, of New Jersey, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in film from Columbia in 2018 and praised the quality of the program. His graduate school loan balance now stands at nearly $300,000, including accrued interest. He has been earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year from work as a Hollywood assistant and such side gigs as commercial video production and photography.

> ...

> “As a poor kid and a high-school dropout, there was an attraction to getting an Ivy League master’s degree,” said Mr. Clement, 41. He graduated in 2020 from Columbia, borrowing more than $360,000 in federal loans for the degree. He is casting for an independent film, he said. To pay the bills, he teaches film at a community college and runs an antique shop.

The infographic here is making it clear that the debt for Patrick Clement is just from Columbia; from his website, it appears he went to the University of Kansas for his Bachelors.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/financially-hobbled-for-life-th...

So we are enabling private investment to profit from bad loans again? Have we learned nothing in 2008?

certainly not a root cause, but am enabling cause is whem student debt changed to not be dischargeable in bankruptcy. there is literally no longer a way to get rid of it.

seems like an obvious false dichotomy. perhaps we look at how much tuition "should" cost (god knows what that means) and make some percentage dischargeable. ~50%?