As a recent CS grad who had around $20k of debt (and 16k of that is now paid off 9 months later) the terms are not generous. I had to take subsidized stafford loans each year just to qualify for my state grant, since it was supposed to be "needs based". My last loan is only 3.5% interest though, so I'm taking my time on it.

The other poster covers it in greater detail, but after 6 months they expect payments, and deferring them only lasts so long (and I don't know how long).

And you can't ever get rid of them.

The answer still isn't to bail everyone out. It just perpetuates the problem. If higher education is to be a for profit business (at least in many cases) you can't create artificial lending markets like student loans, it just causes the absurd bubble that has popped up in the US. It should be flat "heres the cost, go try to get a loan for it" like you would a car or house. When the government starts handing out free money no questions asked with a repayment plan, schools just pile that on top of their tuition fees as profit.

It doesn't hurt that we really should be looking to having online certifications for either free (MIT courses, etc) or extremely low cost. While the K-12 years also have a function as day care, hopefully adults don't require that cost, and stuffing them into giant brick buildings often thousands of miles away for months on end is really inefficient.

I agree that bailouts are not the answer.

The answer is to let these loans default. That's how the lending system should work. No bailouts, but simple defaults.

You as a lender are responsible for factoring in the probability of a default. If you haven't - sucks to be you. Same goes for government loans, e.g. you create an institutionalized Banking system (like the Federal Direct Student loans).

And if you survive the coming mass default (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-28/delinquencies-stude...) - without gov. bailouts - you'll have learned a valuable lesson on lending: Don't give out ridiculous loans on ridiculous terms to people who can't afford them. And rest assured that the education system will find a way to adapt - probably by making education a lot cheaper again.

A student loan default is not the same as a typical loan default: the government will start by taking whatever tax returns you get, and follow up by garnishing your wages. Fortunately, there are ways to get out of default status that can wipe your delinquencies off your credit report as long as you begin and continue to pay on time.

There would be very few people who qualify for student loans if we treated them the same as traditional loans, and virtually all of them would be the children of the wealthy or upper middle class.

IMO they should default just like typical loans. These student loans wreak havoc with the lives of those that cannot pay them back - best example are doctors that are not allowed to practice anymore because of their student loan delinquencies.

> There would be very few people who qualify for student loans if we treated them the same as traditional loans

True, but that is not the problem - the problem is that college and education costs have risen almost exponentially. This problem will certainly not be solved by pumping massive amounts of bad loans into the bank accounts of already overpaid colleges.

In addition, there is supply and demand at play. If the free handout money suddenly dried up, some schools might cut back on the 50,000 square root gyms and renovating every other building every year, but they would still need to fill their classrooms and empty seats is just wasted opportunity for them.

The prices would drop. Less people would be able to get in college, absolutely, but those people are the ones most likely to graduated with 50k+ in debt they can't fathomably pay off, especially when they get degrees outside STEM.

The only downside I see is that right now, there is a strong sense of scholarly meritocracy going into the college system because, since usually it is just trading loans for grants and scholarships, you get the peak number of people applying - if some people are locked out for financial reasons, and they can't get the scholarships to fund an entire education, they just end up never going, even if they have great potential and discipline.

But in the end, college is a rigged market, just like telecom, oil, banking, etc are right now. There is a billion dollar industry invested in keeping the status quo in check, and any changes to stafford loan policies inherently have to come from the federal level due to their nature, and those are the most easily bought politicians of them all. I don't see the situation changing any time soon for that reason.

The problem with your solution is that the majority of student loans are government insured Stafford loans and a "defaulted" loan is still paid back to the lender for full principle by the American taxpayer. Support for this solution would be miniscule.

In an aside, loans made to college kids to get a quality education is not a ridiculous loan on ridiculous terms to people who can't afford them.

I believe the American Taxpayer will have to pay for this either way, the choice is between effectively destroying the lives of those that default or giving them a fighting chance.

> "In an aside, loans made to college kids to get a quality education is not a ridiculous loan on ridiculous terms to people who can't afford them."

I'd like to disagree with you and I believe that a default rate of > 13% (and rising sharply - http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/first-official-three-y...) supports my statement.

It doesn't hurt that (at least for me) the ONLY reason I went to college was for the degree saying CS. I had been programming for years, wrote some WoW addons, and was bored out of my mind for 3 years straight taking lectures on things I could have easily read in textbooks or even off wikipedia. But the number of job opportunities when you have BS of CS on your resume are just orders of magnitude larger.

That is colossally stupid. We need a better way to certify people for things than wasting years and tens of thousands of their dollars on this nonsense.

I basically agree with you, but these ARE loans made to people without a specific, current means to afford them.

That seems perfectly appropriate to me (and I assume to you), but this lack of being able to predict the future income stream of an individual is a large driver in making them not dischargeable, because that allows the product to exist.

Because I agree with you(r presumed position) that these are not ridiculous loans and that their availability should be encouraged, I'm strongly in support of the terms necessary to make them available.

Excellent question. I hope someone with more knowledge vis a vis the US student loan system chimes in, but I'll add where I can.

To begin with, in the US, it's important to distinguish federal loans from those issued by the private sector. The former are issued by the government, the latter by private institutions (banks, et al).

Federal loans : The IBR (income based repayment) plan was recently introduced [1]. It appears similar to the UK plan, except the implementation details are different (15% of income over 25 years). There are of course eligibility requirements that (shock of shocks) are not always crystal clear [4]

Private loans : nothing whatsoever AFAIK, nor much planned future legislation

Lastly, it's important to note that both public and private US student loans are notoriously difficult to have discharged, including in the event of bankruptcy. The bar is set high enough to almost be considered de-facto impossible [5] (opinion).

This, IMO, makes the astronomically high figure presented here all the more alarming. An affordable education is possible in this country, but we haven't been good at educating the public in this regard (ironically, I guess).

For a general breakdown on the differences between federal & private loans, see the linked chart [6]. While I guess I should have known this already, I was surprised to note that some privately issued loans come bundled with pre-payment penalties.

[1] http://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/understand/plans/income...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income-Based_Repayment

[3] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-12/business/sns-2...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/your-money/student-loans/e...

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/business/shedding-student-...

[6] http://studentaid.ed.gov/types/loans/federal-vs-private

The easy fix would be to make non-governmental student loans the same as every other class of loan: able to be discharged in bankruptcy. This would really cut back on the market, but probably not eliminate it.

There are very few legislation/regulation-based restrictions between the level of one's income and the repayment schedule/amount of one's student loans here in the US though it depends largely on how the education debt was financed. The vast majority of loans are made from a large commercial bank to a private citizen. The bank makes these high-risk loans because the US Federal Government "co-signs" on the loan for the student receiving the funds. In the event of an economic downturn or financial hardship, if the former student has limited income (underemployment) but can pay something, the student negotiates a payment amount with the bank. If the former-student is unemployed or has such severe economic hardship that they can pay nothing, the borrower's loan can go into what they call forbearance. Been a long time for me, but I believe you can have a total forbearance time of 36 months over the life of your loan. If, for a variety of reasons, you default on the loan, the lender can/will submit a claim to the Federal Department of Education and the lender will be compensated for the remaining amount of principle on the loan. At this point, your loan is now "owned" by the Department of Education who has substantially more latitude to get their money out of you than a commercial lender does (they can garnish your wages through your employer and keep annual income tax over-payments). But, getting back to your question, there are no established laws that dictate a lender can extract more from you than you can reasonably pay depending on your circumstances. Lender's are incentivized to work with you for 2 reasons, 1) the loan is guaranteed by the Federal Government so they will not lose a dime of principle 2) the longer you carry the debt, the more money the lender can make from interest.

Note: Congress did pass a law that stipulates that student loan debt cannot ever be included in a personal bankruptcy. The loan, theoretically, can and will follow you for as long as you live until you pay it off.