Taking our a vast loan to study English literature might seem unwise, but it’s something I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding to do.

To this day, almost two decades after I left my philosophy PhD program (without a PhD), I still have massive student loan debt.

Even if I had completed my degree, though, philosophy PhDs aren't particularly lucrative. Tenured professors at major universities do ok, but the road to getting tenure-track jobs and then tenure is littered with the bodies of grad students.

I don't think starry-eyed 21 year olds deciding what to do are much different from starry-eyed 17 year olds deciding what to do.

It's worth noting, by the way, that the United States has a shortage of medical doctors.

That's a pipeline problem. What the U.S. actually has is a severe bottleneck in available places at medical schools and for residency training.

Instead, what does an uncredentialled Chemistry Bachelor do after dropping out of medical school? ...I became an electrician, which allowed me to help people without sacrificing my lifestyle.

If your goal also includes "make substantial sums of money," I always recommend to preMeds they consider all the different ways someone can make money helping people without having to sacrifice your entire early adulthood.

The majority of my medschool classmates refer to me as "the dumbest smart guy they know," but in confidence several have expressed jealousy at not having to work so much (for IMHO so little, as physicians). Just cogs in an overly-complex, wealth-extracting machine...

When you’re smart enough to understand the consequences the of your “dumb decisions” and have the EQ to navigate the aftermath.

To each his own. I think higher education in America is primarily designed to degrate and beat students into submission.

As I've heard repeated elsewhere, the road to tenured PhD is paved with grad-student bodies.

Additionally, while many may be knowledgable about the medications they prescribe, I have had nurse practitioners prescribe me medication they didn't even know existed, as in during my session I asked for a specific medication based on a personal recomendation from a freind in the field, they didn't know what the medication was and looked up on google and then prescribed it to me.

There are good nurse practitioners, but they simply should not be prescribing long term pyschiatric medication with the level of schooling they have.

It takes 2 years to become a nurse, and 3 years to become a nurse practitioner. Additional certification is required to prescribe certain medications, but even then the amount of training and classes a nurse practitioner will take to understamd medications is very small compared to a psychiatrist.

It's absurd. NP's have been the solution to psychiatist shortage and it seems no one cares. Most likely, because anyone who knows is zombified by SSRIs by shit NPs or is in the medical field so their vision is already clouded by bias. Nurse takeover is a joke. Anybody with 2-3 years of schooling should be relagated to changing bedpans and putting in IVs. Not functioning as psuedo doctors.

How human that this practitioner admitted to not knowing something; then took the time to look up the drug's factsheet; and then trusted you enough to take your friend's personal recommendation.

>There are good nurse practitioners

Agreed. And terrible physicians, as well as good.

>...but they simply should not be prescribing long term pyschiatric medication with the level of schooling they have.

Agreed – with the additional thought that even physicians overprescribe these mind-altering substances in far-too-abundance.

>NP's have been the solution to psychiatist shortage and it seems no one cares...Nurse takeover is a joke.

I think most people "on psych meds" really just need better friends / families / societies / healthcare . It is most unfortunate that we are our own worst enemies, sometimes; particularly in allowing US healthcare expenditures to be highest with no obvious benefit (to patients).

It all made me so sick decades ago that I quit before even starting.

I programmers were smart, they would:

1. Lobby the government to prohibit anyone from practicing programming without a license.

2. Limit the number of licenses granted each year

Available residency slots are dictated by the funding made available through the Medicare program and ultimately Congress.

Who is successfully lobbied by organizations of doctors

Congress doesn't make decisions in a vacuum

Broadly, it’s the same issue that all jobs have: it’s cheaper to hire pre-trained professionals than to hire and train.

Hospitals are really quasi-government entities. Their pricing structures have price controls based on Medicare reimbursements. A third of hospital revenue is Medicare and Medicaid.

Both programs have been slowing rate growth, which in turn impacts private insurance as well. The institutions haven’t been successful in reducing cost growth. ACA built out regional cartels^H provider networks, essentially eliminating competition.

In much the same way that a doctor in $FOREIGN_COUNTRY cannot practice telemedicine in the USA, I would expect the regulations to make a distinction between software (and services provided by software) developed by foreign and licensed programmers.

U.S. retired doctor here. This is a fascinating possibility that never occurred to me until I read your comment. Could a foreign doctor not set up a system whereby she/he could appear to be in the U.S. while being in a country that's essentially unreachable by U.S. authorities? And take payment in cryptocurrency?

No way you're getting consensus on this one, but even if you could, it's too hard to stop. If you charge for compilers, and only provide them to licensed developers, hippies will make and distribute compilers for free.

Consensus isnt needed, just enough beurocracy to make development expensive.

Imagine that every programmer would have to study, say, Latin for 4 years before being allowed to code.

But the pipeline of lawyers, doctors, MBAs, etc. is quite a bit larger than self-pay philosophy PhDs, and a large fraction of those professional degrees are full-freight, $70k/year (plus living expenses!) of pure debt.

Ironically, the ones we need the most are paid the least.

Of course, that's assuming students finish their degrees and get jobs. Plenty of people drop out of school, and they don't get refunds! Law students fail to pass the bar, etc.

That program has many gotchas, but at least this reflects a recognition that debt creates incentives that society may not want.

That isn’t ironic at all. If they were paid more, we wouldn’t have a shortage.

In humanities fields, if the department thinks you belong in the program, they pay you to attend. They'll give you fellowships, TAships, and RAships. If they don't give you those, they're telling you not to attend. This is a harsh truth.

However, I did in fact receive some TAships and lectureships while I was there, and even a dissertation fellowship. They didn't pay well though.

I mean, maybe? I know a number of state schools, certainly not all of them, but plenty that can afford paid spots for PhD students in the humanities that are certainly enough for someone to support themselves on. It doesn't pay as well, nearly as well, as jobs that humanities student with a good GPA from a good university can get in the private sector, but its not bad at all.

I find it very odd that people are trying to deny my experience here.

I wasn't. But I'm not going to write an autobiography here. I already regret revealing personal details in this thread.

> in our experience its quite rare for a department not to have any funded PhDs with stipends.

Who is "our" and what is your "experience"? Are you referring to Telemakhos and yourself? Are either of you even former humanities PhD students? And how many departments have you surveyed such that you can make a judgment of rarity?

Look, its not your fault, some people don't end up in the right undergraduate programs, they don't meet the right people, make the right connections, and get into good PhD programs with funding. In any other case, if you don't have a lot of money and time to waste, its almost always a bad idea.

1) In your entire life, how many humanities PhD students without funding have you met? Perhaps you think that, somehow, you've magically met most of them, since you seem to believe there aren't that many.

2) It's just your opinion whether an individual "should've been pursuing a PhD".

> if the department you were in was so poorly funded that it couldn't give out stipends, then it's likely that you would've never found a job in academia afterwards anyway.

My former department has placed many tenure-track positions.

No, it was already said:

>>> We're wondering if you were perhaps mislead somewhat

>> I wasn't.

Nobody here has any evidence that their so-called "general" points are any more than their own personal anecdotal experience.

You're all trying to pretend that somehow you're experts and I'm just some clueless n00b, but that's ridiculous. At best, we're all on equal ground.

I think it’s fairly well established that better programs have better funding. This generally results in more funding for PhD prospects. It’s great that you want to share your anecdotal experience, but don’t pretend that it means it’s a incontrovertible generalizable truth.

>Nobody here has any evidence

When someone relies on absolute language like “nobody” or “everyone”, it’s a clue they are making an emotional rather than a reasoned argument. In this case, there is data about funding and PhD opportunities.

No. I don't know where in the world you got that from what I said.

> I think it’s fairly well established that better programs have better funding.

It's not that simple. Funding can vary widely by university and department. You want to make it uniform, but it's not.

The reputation of a program is determined by a number of factors, and it can change over time. A lot depends on the particular professors who happen to be there at a certain point. And sometimes giant public universities are able to compete with smaller elite private universities by sheer size, i.e., the size of the faculty.

I’m trying to be generous by helping to clarify what you mean otherwise it comes across as someone arguing for the sake of arguing.

>You want to make it uniform

Not at all, and that was never said or implied. My point is the opposite; that programs differ in funding. I just take it a step further to make the point that lower funding leads to less funded PhD opportunities. Take early during COVID; funding temporarily dropped when many foreign students could no longer attend meaning it was easier for a self funded student get into a top program (I know because that’s what I did.) That same funding dynamic plays out with lower ranked schools because they tend to get much less research dollars.

>the reputation of a program is determined by a number of factors

Again, I don’t think anyone is disputing this. The point is about how reputation is related to funding and funding is related to PhD opportunities.

It's funny how you don't think this applies to you, especially since you came in almost a day after the HN discussion started and long after everyone else stopped replying. In this way, you prolonged an argument that had already come to an end.

> That same funding dynamic plays out with lower ranked schools because they tend to get much less research dollars.

Well, the humanities tend not to get a lot of research dollars, period.

> The point is about how reputation is related to funding

And my point is that they're not as closely related as you seem to believe.

And it’s no coincidence that the humanities have the highest rate of self-funded PhDs.

>my point is that they’re not as closely related as you seem to believe

You may need to explain why govt research grants and endowments tend to follow the higher ranked institutions. And if you look at some of the ranking structure, they are explicitly tied to financial aid which is tied to endowments. I’m not saying it’s perfect or ideal, but ranking, money, and graduate positions are all intertwined.

Institutions. Not departments. Within the same institution, some departments may be very well funded, and some departments may be poorly funded. This is basic stuff that you should already know, and if you don't, then you certainly shouldn't be lecturing me.

My patience is worn out here. This back and forth is not interesting. I don't wish to continue with you any longer.

I have my PhD in Greek and Latin. I applied to many schools for my PhD program and, on the advice of professors who had told me what I repeated above, accepted admission to the department that gave me the best aid offer, not necessarily the one with the best reputation. They were right, and I never paid a dime for my education.

That's a personal choice, but it's an obvious tradeoff with downsides. If you have a non-monetary goal — after all, pursuing a PhD in the humanities would be a crazy way to make money — then why would you let money stand in your way?

> They were right, and I never paid a dime for my education.

They were right in what sense? You could also never pay a dime for your education by never pursuing a PhD. Regardless, you spent valuable years of your life on it. That's a big investment, and time is more precious than money.

I am glad that you admitted, though, that some more prestigious schools may have less financial aid. There appeared to be a kind of denial of this reality before.

Just because money isn’t a primary motivation doesn’t mean it isn’t a consideration.

I've been in different universities and the experiences for the same departments very considerably. You specify on your application whether you want your admission to be conditional on funding. One communications department for example would typically admit only 2 to 3 students per year on funding. I thought it was very competitive to get into. But of course if you tell them you're willing to pay your own way admission becomes much easier.

Other departments may not be that upfront with the deal but all people applying to grad school should understand these Dynamics.

That's presuming a whole hell of a lot, and it's insulting. You know absolutely nothing about me or my history except what I've already said, which is not much.

I'm not here to be second-guessed by anonymous rando strangers.

I'm reminded of that quote from Interstellar: "I never really fully considered the possibility that I wasn't the one."

No, I was just googling for stats, and that's what I was able to find. Here's something else though: "46% of federal student loan debt belonged to graduate student borrowers in 2017." https://educationdata.org/average-graduate-student-loan-debt

That figure would be heavily skewed by medical school students.

they are the same though for the federal student loan program.

same with law degrees

In this particular conversation Harvardbro was obviously and factually incorrect, but his pompous rhetoric usually gets everybody else to silence themselves (not in awe).

Interestingly, Harvardbro only got accepted into the two schooltypes you mentioned (and no 2nd tiers).

Anyways, my main point is universities should focus more on tangible skills - accounting, engineering etc and should not have random useless degrees of little value. Maybe English major is still valuable, but I personally don't see the tangible value in it - other than being an English teacher.

A student who studies English, on the other hand, is given skills specifically to critically engage with a text in such a way that they can ask these kinds of questions about why they are doing what they are doing, why they are talking to certain people and not others, why, even, they ought to study one thing or another, why one guy runs the show and they do all the work. None of this is very helpful if you want to be a good worker bee who meets all their deadlines and collects a pay check and goes home at the end of the day and never thinks about doing anything more with their life, but, if you want to have more in the world, you need to know how to question it.

I hate to use an example, but look at Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir. He has a PhD from the Institut für Sozialforschung, also known as the Frankfurt school, which is a research center whose members feature quite prominently on the syllabus of many English classes at the university level. Not exactly the same, but his education bears a remarkable resemblance at an advanced level to what many students with undergraduate degrees in English would have. But you wouldn't know that as an engineer; you would just be some employee, entirely replaceable.

It’s very fair to argue about the ROI of the average undergraduate English degree given the outrageous prices that universities are charging for them. But if you cannot see the tangible value in English language expertise, I don’t really know what to tell you.

the universities also fairly say "choose your major we can't choose it for you"

so if too many people go for that english degree, at best you can make them aware the job market is tiny. But it is their choice to take their shot at their passion, a hypercompetitive field, not far different than being a hollywood actor.

the issue isn't any of that, that's all fine, the issue is why does it cost a gorillion dollars to get that english BA degree.

the spirit of it all is "pure learning is purely good, let us have you learn", and so we have english majors, that's all fine spirited, the issue is somewhere along the line someone at this so-called non-profit decided it costs 9999 gorillion dollars to reimburse the educator for this degree

> don't believe art can be taught in universities as a degree program

what does that have to do with studying English literature?

There's research that also shows smart people who get degrees from "non" top schools do just fine as well. They studies those who got accepted to top schools but went to "lesser" ones. Implying top schools select people who will be successful regardless, rather than helping make people successful. It's important to not confuse the causal relationship.

* It's also worth noting the authors of those studies found a caveat with people on the lowest ends of the socioeconomic strata getting more benefit from the top schools.

That's the addendum to the "most important part." These people without an education in complex debt instruments are the vast majority of the time either children, or were children quite recently. Even when it comes to the ones in grad school, I have jeans older than their legal ability to sign contracts.

I guarantee you that law/med school students have an education in "complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged."

Because before the current law was passed, they were the ones abusing the old "complex debt instruments" to discharge debt they knew they'd be able to pay back once they started making bank. The law was passed because they were doing this in large numbers. For these serious med/law students, the old system was free money. The new system is a reasonable risk.

Did you know this? If so, why did you write "by definition?" And why go off on a tangent about English literature students?

It’s funny. That everybody is mad at the banks and schools. But the politicians and do good laws passed are what caused all of this.

Banks did it want to give loans out for shitty degrees to people who would probably not pay them back. So laws were passed to force banks they had to give out loans.

Schools did not want to accept everybody, but only the top of class. But laws were passed forcing them to widen their acceptance criteria.

This creates the perfect storm we are in.

Before the system was self limiting. Banks only gave out loans for degrees and to people who had high probability to pay back. Schools accepted only the best students who had a high probability of succeeding.

The loans were low risk, high reward, and the schools were able to provide a higher level of overall education to those who did go.

Banks didn’t?

Many banks were fine not offering loans if it meant they could not decline offering loans for specific degrees, schools or even based on the applicants grades.

All the people here claiming they know a good degree from a bad one as if they have divine providence of what will happen in 5 years

And I gave them a $100,000 and ask them you to buy and hold a single non-FAANG or meme stock for the duration of their degree you would probably loose money. Or to predict if you should hold shares vs bonds for 5 years, without adjusting their position, like you do with a degree.

You could start a degree as a VFC artist and in 5 years your job might disappear with AI.

Instead, all I was told was to go to college.

So... the people that made me woefully sheep like and "financially innocent" then sent me to the wolves because they believed in me.

Seriously, they made huge changes to the way people were accepted into college - created High School "career counseling" (college/University recruiters) to tell everyone kid they were smart enough to go, and the dumber down tests convinced enough to convince the rest.

The loans went up each year - the costs more than doubled between my Freshman and Sophomore year and just never stopped going up - the more you owe the more you HAVE to finish to get the job to pay the loans.

Before all this, when less than 1% of all student loans had been defaulted on, the loan debt was made unforgivable by 6 people - a committee of bankers created by the people in Congress they bought.

It was setup so that of a millennial "Wins" it means they can afford to pay their loans - so the bank wins. If we lose we still have to pay/often must pay more with all the fees and added interest - bank still wins.

During the time I lived thru all this I was reading shit about how lazy all f are bc we don't own as many houses as we are supposed at our age - this is still true to this day actually.

This is an intolerable and disgusting thing for a society to do to an entire generation - any group is wrong but to plan out the demise of a generation of, at the time all this was first set in motion, we were literal Elementary Students.

These loans destroyed lives, relationships, sets parents against their children, divided families.

- All just part of the plan.

Not everything can be, or is supposed to be, taught by schools. Your parents should've taught you those things, and if they didn't do that they failed you.

I can't imagine a whole class being dedicated to these topics, but then people who only need to fill out a 1040 also complain they "weren't taught how to do taxes"; i.e., fill out a form with simple instructions provided.

At some point we have to recognize the bar is already pretty low. There is no wizardry involved in "financial literacy" unless you start getting into advanced investment / retirement topics. It just takes a very simple attitude shift. The problem is not that most people are too uneducated to figure out that a 40k/year job doesn't pay for a 100k degree: they learned that in elementary school. The problem is they never even think about it, and if they do, they don't care. I don't even mean this in a negative way: it's a lifestyle that would stress me right into the psych ward, but millions of Americans never worry themselves about how they're going to pay for something so long as they can keep the lights on and eat this month.

If they did care, they would go to cheaper schools to get the degrees; look how many of these degrees come from outrageously priced private schools when cheaper options are readily available. Look at how many people drive around 50-80k SUVs. Americans complain a lot about prices but they are not actually that price sensitive. They just assume they can do whatever they want and the system at large will just work everything out.

Great, now take out a mortgage at a good time, predict interest rate and house prices manage your savings and plan your retirement, be self-employed for a year and correctly identify what is tax deductible and what isn’t, recognise when you are being sold a bad financial product.

There are all things a middle class person needs to deal with.

Nobody can do this. It’s not part of basic financial literacy. A few people who make careers out of investing or real estate attempt it and many of them fail.

If you are a normal person, you find a house that needs your basic needs in a decent area that you can afford and you buy it. You don’t try to throw darts at a board to figure out if the housing market is going to crash or the fed is going to lower rates. If you could reliably predict these things it’s your day job.

> manage your savings

Simply putting your savings into a savings account pr even under a mattress is more than most Americans do and is self-evident. Are there more optimal places? Maybe but if it matters to you you have the time to figure it out; Americans are doing well to accumulate 500 in emergency savings anywhere. Worrying about 5% interest money markets vs maybe an index fund for some portion is pointless at that level. (Ed - median emergency savings is 5k. This doesn’t require management.)

> plan your retirement

This becomes important as you approach retirement age, sure. Until then all you need to worry about is stuffing away as much money as you can because of that “compound interest” thing.

> self-employed for a year and correctly identify what is tax deductible and what isn’t

There’s a public website for the IRS where this is all laid about, but even Americans with easy standard taxes pay an accountant because they don’t want to add a few numbers together and look at a tax table.

> recognise when you are being sold a bad financial product.

If you are worried about “financial products” and you’re not at retirement age, all you need to know is “it’s a scam” or you’re very rich.

Please be charitable. Your comment is unnecessarily mean. Unless you know the commenter personally, I don't think anyone can diagnose the commenter's upbringing from a single Internet comment.

In a situation where the person's parents are hoping their child will be the first to be university educated with the hope that their education would help them break the cycle of poverty (i.e. they are not university educated themselves or that they don't have enough high school education to be able to teach their child about the pitfalls of taking an interest-bearing loan), what happens?

There's this famous saying that: "You cannot teach what you do not know".

What if I was raised in a foster care and I never knew who my parents were?

And what if my parents don't know these things themselves?

There are many ways that this logic goes wrong. The school should teach that because it is very important lesson to engage in a society and be a good citizen.

If you are assuming a guardianship role over a child, however temporary, you have a responsibility to teach them things, full stop.

I've known several foster parents over my life who would be outraged at the implicated that they are somehow lesser to the children they raised and are raising.

The US is obsessed with racial inequality, but from your life's perspective, it is better being black than being a foster kid, and no one bats an eye on the latter. Harvard won't certainly introduce any pseudoquotas on foster kids anytime soon.

The problem of financially illiterate people doesn't go away when we find someone to blame for not teaching them. Parents "should" teach a lot of things they often don't, and one of the values of schools is that they plug some of those gaps to help produce better educated members of society. Whether or not schools are the right place to teach those things is irrelevant if the end goal is for people to actually have the right knowledge to be successful.

Who is the genius that decided that you need a school and government neurotics to teach a kid to play basketball, but post gold-standard factional reserve banking is best taught by parents?

And who taught your parents, and their parents before? Do we go all the way back to cavemen for investment wisdom? You’ve got a bootstrap paradox.

Also in 1970’s we dropped the gold standard and the whole game has changed, did someone issue free adult education to being all the parents at the time up to speed?

The system is complete nonsense, you’ve got to be on copium.m to defend it.

If we taught money properly maybe voters would not elect fools and frauds to run things

Fresh High School grads are a terrible demographic where good credit is concerned, there aren't many 18 year olds you could loan 6 figures to and expect to see that money again.

But now we're so deep in this rabbit hole that neither side has incentive to back down. Nothing shy of government intervention, or mass protest of the system, is likely to change it in my opinion.

I kind of disagree with this. At least in my high school this was definitely taught, but at the time we were all dumb 14-17 year olds who didn’t care about any of that stuff we just wanted to know what is needed to get an A and then forget about it, and that was the good students!

A problem about teaching life stuff in schools is that I don’t think many of the teenagers in high school are in a place where they can absorb that stuff long enough for it to be relevant many years later.

This is not teaching, it’s a fabrication

Can you teach swimming to a guy who has never left Sahara desert and has never seen water?

Can you teach teaching driving to a guy who’s never touched a car?

Then how do we teach finance/banking to a kid who has never earned a salary, paid bills, and probably never even held more than $100 at all?

you can teach someone about financial concepts, without having the actual monies. These are not physical activities requiring actual mediums like driving or swimming. They are mental concepts - an extension of critical thinking and maths, with a bit of instruction following mixed in.

The real complaint is the lack of being told exactly what to do that leads to a path of automatic success. What they were told to do did not lead to automatic success, but is in fact, fraught with traps and dangers, most of which is avoidable but only for those with the foresight.

But i am a believer of personal responsibility, and that following the crowd (or common advice) without thinking critically about it will merely lead sheep to slaughter.

California became the 26th state a few months ago to require all students to take a personal finance course before graduating. About half the remaining states require students to take a combined personal finance/economics course (source: https://www.ngpf.org/blog/advocacy/how-many-states-require-s...).

and "alcoholly irresponsible". I want to know do these loans also provide for booze or binge drinking that happens in college campuses.

Basically for 5-8% or so of my (estimated) lifetime I was completely free to goof around. Great value for someone who dislikes working.

Consolidated the loans after I graduated at 1.5% interest. Finished paying them off in 2021 with the Biden Bucks.

Pretty sure that kind of deal doesn’t exist anymore.

I also started with enough credits to be nearly to (the equivalent of being in) junior year and took the bare minimum credits to keep the scholarship.

$20k in loans over 4 years, when full sticker price was about $10k for the same 4 years and you had a 75% scholarship, and started as a junior?

That plus it somehow taking you 20 years to pay $20k in loans makes this smell pretty fishy. The real question is why make something like this up?

1. I took more in loans than I technically needed for school and spent it on living expenses like video games, gambling, fun stuff, etc.

2. I signed up for 4 classes a semester, often in things unrelated to my degree. Figured since I had 4 years of scholarship (and 4 years of loans available), I may as well just hang around and have fun.

3. By my math, (feel free to double check) 2021 minus 2005 is not 20. Loan payments didn’t start until after graduation. It was about $50 a month for minimum payments when I started paying and around $150 at the end. Don’t remember the exact way the payments increased over time. It was just steps, but not related to income.

Any follow ups?

Also, why not take as long as possible to pay it off at 1.5%?

Tuition started around 4k/yr, but had worked its way up to 8k/yr by the time I graduated (which I thought was unaffordable).

It was located in a low lying area and once after a tropical storm we had to wade through hip-deep water to get to class (the apartment itself was miraculously high and dry). Coming home one night I saw a little gator swimming along near me as I trudged through it.

After we graduated my roommate moved to Manhattan for an engineering job. His month’s rent up there was significantly more than he paid for a year in college.

I ended up moving to Portland, Oregon in 2007 and my first rent here was $550. Now in 2024, I’ve finally tacked on that missing 0 and my rent is now around $1500.

I ended up finishing at ASU. This highly educated ChE/Math imbecile took out a $12K student loan near the end because it was "free"[1]. Got to silicon valley and started learning the maths about house loans and income tax interactions and took a glance at the student loan interest payments (something like 6%? I don't remember) and freaked out. Paid it down immediately. Needless to say we advised the daughter different.

[1] The application was like: name, address, and school. Less than a page.

Damn I’m happy to live in a country with free university.

The payments were tiered somehow. I think I was paying around $50 a month when I graduated and that ended up at like $140 by the time I paid it off.

Healthcare, yah that kinda sucks. We’ve got a really high ceiling and a really low floor. Other countries have a lower ceiling and a much higher floor. A significant problem in the US is that people don’t know how to navigate the health care system. That raises the floor quite a bit for the average person.

I went to college before I had internet access and my decision on what college degree to get and where to go to get it was based upon the salary I would receive upon graduation and my ability to repay my loans. I went to the library to figure these things out for myself.

Nowadays, you don't even have to get up out of your chair. If you are a young person and you make stupid decisions on your college education and student loans, that's a YOU thing.

I personally think college should be free because education is a worthwhile endeavor for everyone. But since it isn't, I'm not willing to make excuses for those who attend without weighing the costs and benefits. It's one of the easiest things in the world to do.

Your regular reminder that debt bondage is a form of slavery, and is illegal in most countries.

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

There are only two options with debt: bad debt are written off, lender takes a hit and the lender must be careful who they lend money to.

Or bad debt lingers forever and accrues lucrative interest, in which case giving out bad debt is the whole point for the lender’s operation. The only risk is that the debtor might die. If the debt also passes to the next of kin, you have full-on, real slavery.

a student does not pledge their services as security for the debt. It's not debt bondage at all.

I mean it's a pretty simple concept that you borrow money and you must pay it back.

However we agree that the failure is that we do not educate them enough already in the first 12 years we force upon them. For that I blame a lack of options, government "standards" which become ceilings instead of floors, and the unions that protect bad teachers, also I'll note as a foreigner in the US. The US Schools i've seen (and i'm extrapolating here to most public schools) are ran like social clubs and have far too much time devoted to bs that does not help the kids. I'm talking about extracurriculars that impede with a quality education. Football is not a subject we should be prioritizing as a nation... Formals, homecoming, spirit days etc are such a distraction from what highschool kids should be focused on -- Growing up and making a viable future for themselves.

People note that Highschool rankings in Canada are excellent, well guess what? None of that happens in Canadian highschools (that I'm aware of), there might be a school dance or two, and "Prom" is very low key, relatively. High school football is small time...

Of course, focus on footballs, elaborate dance, and other sports can be excessive. I merely object to the excessive focus on academics, the rat race, and pressure cooker environment to get education at top ranked colleges.

On the contrary education should be meeting the needs of the 21st century, teaching skills to create functioning adults that can navigate life's challenge, such as avoiding scammers, how to judge quality information, how to diagnose and solve emotional challenges. There will still be classes taught on academics such as learning to read, simple arithmetic.

Only when they're adults that their focus will entirely be on academics. Academics are easy if you're well adjusted and know how to learn.

where are the parent's? They're meant to be the ones teaching these non-academic education to their children.

School does not replace parenting. School is for academic studies - stuff that a parent won't have had the qualifications to teach.

School does not replace parenting. School is for academic studies - stuff that a parent won't have had the qualifications to teach.

This is rigid thinking. We should be adapting schools to the need of the 21st century and challenges our current population faces, rather than have people sink or swim.

Leaving it to parenting alone is basically sink or swim. Some do great. Some do shit. Some are middling. Never mind the fact that a large part of children time are spent in school. Schools are basically daycare. They're also 'raising' children whether we want to admit it or not.

That's pretty much the hard part. There will still be some needs for some academics classes. However, once you teach them how to learn, learning academics is easy to do.

But for me, I actually do prefer to live in the US. But it's a fallacy to think there aren't ways the best could be improved. IMO the US could stand to do a little bit of growing up, and get rid of this "life is a club/party, and partying is the meaning of life" mentality that I see is so the root of many different kinds of behaviors (that are not partying in and of themselves)

furthermore, i think not enough attention is being paid to the top 10% of students, most of whom are ignored as the teacher tries to wrangle a few shitheads poisoning the well of the classroom so to speak.

i think teachers should be paid roughly 5x their current median wage while simultaneously making it as difficult to become a teacher as a doctor , lawyer, or any other prestigious licensed position

the problem solves itself

They are not complicated. Compound interest is middle school arithmetic. Too bad the public schools are inept at teaching math.

I received a modest tuition loan when I went to college. There was no mystery about it. I made the payments after I graduated, and paid it off.

Ya the arithmetic is easy. Building up the associated algebraic expression(s) though is certainly high school level where I’m from.

I wish I understood why math education is the way it is. I really have no idea. I suspect the problem’s complexities are both wide and deep

As for "good at math", it's hard to see how a teacher with a degree can fail at 3rd grade arithmetic.

Then the students wonder why it's a 4 year degree with a full year wroth of non-major classes that seem unrelated, but tack on tens of thousands to the cost of the degree, plus whatever on-campus housing and meal plan, mandatory for freshmen, might cost.

Things can go wrong without people scheming to do evil. It's not helpful to twist "these and these circumstances combined to produce a bad outcome" into a plan description unless you bring at least some evidence that it was, in fact, planned to go like that.

And of course there is a cabal of evil schemers, they have hardly bothered to hide themselves, e.g.:

> Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon.

> The theory was first articulated by James H. Hammond, a Democratic United States senator from South Carolina and a wealthy Southern plantation owner, in a speech on March 4, 1858. Hammond argued that every society must find a class of people to do menial labor, whether called slaves or not ...

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

It gets worse from there.

You can go look up the people who passed these laws and the arguments they used to promote them, but in the end it hardly matters.

What matters is disassembling the mudsill machine.

When people imagine a world of we didn't outsource factory work, they assume it will be exactly like ours but where all unemployed English majors become unionized factory workers. In reality, any policy comes with trade offs. People like Steve Jobs would have entered blue collared work, like their parents. Consumer electronics would be significantly more expensive when made by domestic labor, and that means there would be less competition and innovation in this space.

If the OP's type of comment makes you uncomfortable, you might be leaning too far into putting blame on ineptitude by default, instead of a healthy at least 50/50 mix of blaming greedy malice. OP just listed the 20/20 hindsight of this all. If that makes it sound like it was all a scheme, well - who knows - but it's just as unhelpful to always suppose such circumstances could have just been incompetence with no clear evidence.

Here, there's a kind of "big picture malicious", Sith-Lord-level piece of action being sketched, and that's in my opinion a categorically different thing. No group of conspirators got together in the 80s and secretly schemed for decades to make America's universities debt factories, at times against their own short-term interests, and are now sitting at the country club making evil laughter sounds. This vibe is the road to nihilist fatalism, it adds nothing, it helps nobody, it's just throwing your hands in the air and saying "I give up! The world is terrible!"

I do get the reluctance there though to doubt collective conscious evil action. Which is fine - it's usually far more likely it was done in a "market incentives aligning" way, even when they're entirely conscious (still evil) moves. I think those dark board rooms do happen still, but they're subtle, or relegated to just approving preplanned media narrative directions and such. They do make long term concerted plans, and some of those plans can be downright dark - but they also just go with the flow a lot, or plain fuck up on executions with better intentions.

I think the takeaway should be that neither maliciousness nor incompetence is really required to make evil exist - it's an ever-present network effect potential of the [capitalist] system itself, which will trigger due to some mixture of the above regardless. You can't especially blame greedy people for capitalizing on it, nor incompetent people from dropping the ball with it. It's simply a complex system that's probably due for a better design - and/or it's something we need to try and live with (survive through). Though that could all just be my own personal bias as a systems engineer who considers those the start and end point of most discussions.

Glad my point made it across though, thanks for saying that!

5) Don't educate young people on what their degree would earn them.

So many young people think their hobby can become their career and pay for a nice life style. Unfortunately, it's not the case for many majors.

This reads to me as your career shouldn't involve doing something you enjoy. I think this mostly happens in situations where people are doing exactly at work what they'd do at home, and they don't like their job for any vast number of reasons. Usually that's only a problem if you don't have the security to find another job.

My personal experience is that it really helps to be able to be passionate about your work. It's fulfilling. You will perform better at your job, because you will be multiplying your experience from work with your experience at home. Sometimes my hobbies and my work have been literally exactly the same, e.g. I've been able to open source projects from work (which I then work on as a hobby).

The advice I'd give people instead:

Like your job. Get a degree in a field that you both enjoy and that pays well. That sounds glib, but so many people don't think about this at all (part of the focus of the article). You probably won't be able to align your career and the exact activity you enjoy the most, but you should shoot for them being in the same ballpark. Where they don't align? Sure, that's opportunity for a hobby.

If I were looking for a writing job today--which I did a lot of over the past 10 years--I wouldn't be looking to the New York Times or certainly a small city paper, I'd find an opportunity with a company that would doubtless have some guardrails but would also have other opportunities.

I suspect a lot of people here have had more linear and well-defined paths as the industry has matured.

I don't consider any of it a waste and I've enjoyed a lot of it. I've had conversations with people I've known for decades about it and they're kind of meh. You've done fine whether or not your formal training was necessarily on target for what you ultimately did.

I'll also add that working on newspapers has been probably been more useful than a lot of the technical stuff I've done.

We (as a society) tell kids all the time that their hobby can't be a viable career. Kids are just headstrong and don't want to listen to their parents/other adults telling them unpleasant truths.

That's absolutely 100% not true.

The bs message I see everywhere pushed on young people is "You can be anything you want to be".

We have a whole generation of kids who think they can be youtube stars, influencers, rap stars, etc.

I’ve gotten offers as well.

In general they do, it might not be a guarantee, but a degree helps pass hr filters. The only way to bypass that is having years of experience in a big company or a recommendation, for junior positions a degree is very necessary.

Maybe they'd do their own educational curricula with requirements that would require minimum tenures with payback requirements. (Not sure of all the US laws in this regard. There used to at least be relocation payback requirements.)

But I suspect a lot of people here wouldn't like 1 year bootcamps for jobs that included an extended employment commitment.

That means there is no risk (for the lender) to give out student loans. The taxpayers take on the risk

If we are going to forgive student loans, tax payers should not be on the hook. The loan originators and most importantly the schools should pay since they are both the primary beneficiaries of this disastrous policy.

If it matters to anyone, I paid off my loans entirely, but also received Pell grants.

There is also absolutely 0 reason these degrees should cost so much. If we want to keep a guaranteed student loan program it should be restricted in the amount that can be borrowed and it should only be usable at local community colleges that cost under $5k a year. Nothing about education necessitates spending more than that.

The median student that graduated from college starting in 2009 had more debt than what they started with after 12 years and it's only gotten worse.

So your belief that it will cover the most egregious is not true for the median student. Given that, I'm also interested in how those lifetime earnings increases are distributed across degrees.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/t...

(Can you come up with a story where the two numbers might be consistent? Probably, yeah. Thus the impracticality of disproving weird conditional statistics like this.)

You have some really perverse incentives too if you allow loan forgiveness by the executive branch, something close to buying votes.

5) Systematically under-build housing so that future generations will be unable to simultaneously repay these loans and afford a place to live.

6) Intentionally train too few doctors for the explicit, stated, out-in-the-open purpose of pumping doctor wages. Continue this policy until it is too late to train enough doctors for the coming wave of Boomers.

And then society turns around and mocks them later on for being “stupid” and “lazy” or whatever… fuck that shit. Society strongly told kids that college, any college, was the only way to have a future.

Yes its horrible to force 17-18 year old to make such an important decisions and also schools should have known better and counsel heavily beforehand. But lets not forget that for the state you are 100% responsible for your actions at that point including any crime, state will happily draft you and send you to get killed if the need arises. Loan management pales in comparison with this.

Truth is harsh, society is harsh and unfair in many aspects. I don't see this improving unfortunately anytime soon.

I get that there is a lot of societal bias toward blaming the person who got the loan for being a pile of shit deadbeat who was stupid enough to get a $70,000 “art history” degree… but dude. These people are basically kids. Or at best adults with very, very little life experience being given strong thumbs up by “the elders” who are supposed to know better…

The student does take some responsibility but society at large should take most of it.

I mean for Christ sake you had 18 year olds getting into huge amounts of debt that you cannot discharge in bankruptcy. There are very few financial tools in life that are so “iron clad” as a student loan and we handed them out like candy to the least experienced adults out there. What a shit thing to hand to somebody who just started out in the real world. Feed them lies and convince them to saddle up with a lifetime of debt that has absolutely no undo button besides death. It’s bullshit.

It was "Go to a top-N college, major in one of these very carefully enumerated majors that tend to result in good career trajectory (business, engineering, medicine, and so on), and maintain a very good GPA throughout." The messaging was very clear, from parents, teachers, and guidance counselors: Don't go to film school or a Tier-2 university and major in history, if you want a career.

I'm not sure when the "Go to any school, and do whatever" messaging started but it was not happening in the 90s when I was in high school.

You present this as though it doesn't make sense, but as far as the federal government is concerned forgiving a debt is spending (which is why the IRS will tax you for forgiven debts, income is the other side of spending). And spending is explicitly under Congress's authority.

6) Only allow help for families making under a certain amount, so those from abusive homes are shit out of luck.

You've hidden very carefully the causality in this sentence. Who moved them? Why? Its perhaps implied that since shareholders benefited, that they did it. Yet a careful examination reveals quickly the elephant in the room in that thesis: why did outsourcing now, and not before, if the benefit to shareholders has always been there? why did this happen mostly in the US, and not other countries?

Of course, the reality is far more complex and reveals that the road for manufacture hollowing in the US was a road paved with good intentions. History is there for anyone who wants to read it.

It used to be that owning a TV or radio was an expense you planned for and it had to last.

Of course there are those who were hurt from the move from blue collar manufacturing, but overall, the aggregated benefit is higher than the losses from those who were laid off. And it's not as if new industries did not spring up.

Thereby replacing one problem with another. The hope was that quality would be minimally impacted and repairs would be affordable. Instead, businesses are incentivized to quick-to -obsolesce products.

Disastrous garbage problems that impact everyone, even the wealthiest, though they are blissfully unaware.

> Of course there are those who were hurt from the move from blue collar manufacturing, but overall, the aggregated benefit is higher than the losses from those who were laid off. And it's not as if new industries did not spring up.

Trump’s rise in 2016 shows that this narrative is woefully inadequate.

Yes but I'm conflicted on this for a couple reasons.

The second part, became less true for anyone graduating after 2004 or so.

Where I still get -vexed- are the people I know who, about to hit or are into their 30s, start in a program for (or, wind up finishing with) a non-marketable degree as their first degree.

And the best example I can think of, was a specific not-colleague that started in some sort of program because they wanted to get into prostetics (I warned them about 3d printing upsetting the industry, they yelled at me for raining on their parade,) the 3d printing paradigm shift, surprise surprise, caused an upset into the marketability of their program, and they shifted into, at least last I was on speaking terms with them, women's studies.

I think part of the reason for the second half however, is an odd balance of 'younger people can be naive' and it's better to have them think that and finish than drop out a year or two because their major isn't panning out, i.e. switch to something else.

I say -that-, mostly because I know a lot of folks in my school would wash out from Engineering into Business or something else and while it's possibly not 'ideal', finishing some semi-useful degree is better than dropping out with some percentage of the full debt and nothing to show for it. I will note that almost everyone I saw 'leave' an engineering/CS/STEM type major flipped to something that was still, on some level, marketable.

> 3) Have next-to-zero standards for public funds used in grant and loan programs for college education, meaning people can take out loans for any sort of degree program at almost any sort of institution

This is a large blowback effect of various laws to prevent discrimination/etc against historically ethnic universities and programs. Unfortunately it's led to the 'Underwater Basket Weaving' meme.

> 4) Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other types of debtors. You cannot discharge them through bankruptcy, it's very difficult to renegotiate, and SCOTUS has said that the chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case, the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for loans.

Well, there's the 'flip' side, which ironically, due to all the other arms of the Kraken, contributes to the problem.

They are difficult to negotiate but have various outlying circumstances, i.e. IBR and time periods associated with that, certain discharge conditions (I have a colleague who's student loans were completely forgiven because she had ADA paperwork and they neither offered her a reasonable accommodation nor warned her when she started said program, at least -that- part of the system worked,) and the lovely 'indentured servitude with extra steps' Nonprofit forgiveness program, where if you work for a nonprofit long enough, you can get a discharge.

But then, you do get all these folks that 'wash out' into non-marketable degrees, they keep working at Starbucks or low paying jobs so they get the IBR, what does that do to the rest of the system though? it puts a fuckton of stress on it that we see in the rates.

All of that said, I feel like there's a 'number' where the loan should just be treated like any other debt. e.x. oh you've got $4000 in student loan debt and $50,000 in other debt? Fine wash it too. Or 'hold' the degree till it gets paid back, IDK.

> Lenders keep issuing loans without regard for the borrower’s ability to repay, knowing the debt can’t be discharged. ... Meanwhile, lenders—both government and private—keep the money flowing. Why wouldn’t they? With loans that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, they’re guaranteed a return, even if it takes decades to collect.

From the first chapter of David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years".

> “But,” she objected, as if this were self-evident, “they’d borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one’s debts.” It was at this point that I realized this was going to be a very different sort of conversation than I had originally anticipated.

Sounds like the perfect way to create a system where the only way out is some kind of black swan bubble burst. I (genuinely) wonder who will be protected from the shockwave when it does: the number of people on the debt side is presumably enormous.

Yes, because the power of the purse rests solely with the House of Representatives.

Despite terms like "the President's budget", the White House has next to no authority in regards to what budget they get and how it will be spent. The legislature (House of Representatives) legislates and the executive (White House) executes; the executor cannot legislate.

This is why the often mentioned PPP loan forgiveness was fine (it was codified by the House) but Biden unilaterally deciding that certain debts to the government are forgiven is not.

SCOTUS ruled that the President exceeded the authority over this that was authorized by Congress. I.e. it's Congress' purview to do this, not the Executive. The Executive does not get to make up laws.

The economic law of comparative advantage means that expenses go to where they are the cheapest.

The solution is not to punish companies, because if you do then the entire company moves out of the country.

The solution is to look at why foreign labor is cheaper, and what can be done to make domestic labor more competitive.

That's because other types of debts are backed up with collateral. 18 year olds have no collateral, and so can easily just declare bankruptcy - and what is the note holder gonna do about it?

That means the note holder needs some sort of guarantee to get paid back, otherwise they are simply not going to grant the loan.

That’s because these loans are made using standards that aren’t applied to other loans. The government basically does not consider credit risk or traditional underwriting standards when making student loans.

It's really amusing how the unitary executive oscillates in fashionability according to which political tribe is currently in power. Congress is responsible for appropriations. Full stop. Whenever this has been bypassed via some loophole, by Bush, by Trump, by Biden, etc, it has been at its core unconstitutional. And it is in our collective interest that it remains that way.