Student Debt and Responses

[LordsFire]

That is important, but how is a 17 or 18 year old right out of high school supposed to know what the economy and job market are going to be like in a decade from now? Even experts have trouble making predictions like that and these kids are being misinformed by the majority of authority figures in their lives. Also, even if they go for "sensible degrees" at higher rates, then those degrees are likely to become saturated as well.

There is a fair bit of truth to the idea that culture and the education system have betrayed the youth of the nation, and many 17/18 year olds are extremely ill-equipped to understand or handle choosing a degree or deciding whether or not to take out loans.

That does not mean that an adult must be treated like an adult. If you are an adult, and you make a bad decision, you must face the consequences. The secular left's attempts to destroy the link between bad behavior and negative consequences is a huge portion of what ails our society, and in practically no circumstance is it right to push things further down that path.

 

[ShieldWife]

There is a fair bit of truth to the idea that culture and the education system have betrayed the youth of the nation, and many 17/18 year olds are extremely ill-equipped to understand or handle choosing a degree or deciding whether or not to take out loans.

That does not mean that an adult must be treated like an adult. If you are an adult, and you make a bad decision, you must face the consequences. The secular left's attempts to destroy the link between bad behavior and negative consequences is a huge portion of what ails our society, and in practically no circumstance is it right to push things further down that path.

True, there should be consequences for actions, that is an important part of a functional society. The late teens who took on student debt were doing exactly what society told them was responsible, what society told them was wise, what society told them was morally right. Should the consequences be solely theirs to bear or should the people who lied to them and profited from those lies suffer any consequences as well?

 

[BlackDragon98]

That is important, but how is a 17 or 18 year old right out of high school supposed to know what the economy and job market are going to be like in a decade from now? Even experts have trouble making predictions like that and these kids are being misinformed by the majority of authority figures in their lives. Also, even if they go for "sensible degrees" at higher rates, then those degrees are likely to become saturated as well.

Maybe that's the point.
Weed out all the idiots and raise up the ones with half a brain.
Also, I have a general dislike of authority figures and don't tend to believe what they say.
I just do my own thing, which is probably why I'm the person I am today.
#RENEGADE

 

[ShieldWife]

Maybe that's the point.
Weed out all the idiots and raise up the ones with half a brain.
Also, I have a general dislike of authority figures and don't tend to believe what they say.
I just do my own thing, which is probably why I'm the person I am today.
#RENEGADE

You mean take all of the “idiots” and trick them into spending 4 years of their lives to get indoctrinated with some of the most evil and destructive ideologies that have ever existed, going $10,000’s of dollars into debt to support those institutions while they are being indoctrinated, only to get out hugely in debt with few job prospects and 4 years of conditioning on who to blame for the problems in their lives.

Sounds like a great plan.

 

[ParadiseLost]

1) .Europe circumvented a lot of these problems with stricter entrance exam requirements.

You don't pass the entrance exam, you don't qualify for the University program.

In this way they weeded out most of the people who in the US would end up dropping out and getting into debt they can't get out of.

2). In any case, there's actually a good deal of evidence that the problem is students not taking enough debt.

For example, say a student wants to minimize their debt load (because they are overly concerned about student debt) and gets a part time job work 20 hours a week, lowering the required debt per year from $12K to $5K.

This lowers their debt grade, but the additional work severely hinders their ability to focus on classes, and they end up doing poorly and drop out.

There's actually a lot of evidence that this is happening at a large scale.

3). The average student in the US is still only graduating with about $26K of debt, most of which is government loans with 2-6 percent interest. That's plenty viable for someone to pay off if they have any work ethic or initiative at all.

The real problem is (a) poor to lower middle class people that go to excessively expensive universities and (b) grad students with low paying degrees.

 

[Zachowon]

1) .Europe circumvented a lot of these problems with stricter entrance exam requirements.

You don't pass the entrance exam, you don't qualify for the University program.

In this way they weeded out most of the people who in the US would end up dropping out and getting into debt they can't get out of.

2). In any case, there's actually a good deal of evidence that the problem is students not taking enough debt.

For example, say a student wants to minimize their debt load (because they are overly concerned about student debt) and gets a part time job work 20 hours a week, lowering the required debt per year from $12K to $5K.

This lowers their debt grade, but the additional work severely hinders their ability to focus on classes, and they end up doing poorly and drop out.

There's actually a lot of evidence that this is happening at a large scale.

3). The average student in the US is still only graduating with about $26K of debt, most of which is government loans with 2-6 percent interest. That's plenty viable for someone to pay off if they have any work ethic or initiative at all.

The real problem is (a) poor to lower middle class people that go to excessively expensive universities and (b) grad students with low paying degrees.

I know people that have done better working and paying for college that way then people getting loans.
It depends on the person and knowing how to request hours and things.
That is a personal issue more then the student loans fault

 

[DocSolarisReich]

You mean take all of the “idiots” and trick them into spending 4 years of their lives to get indoctrinated with some of the most evil and destructive ideologies that have ever existed, going $10,000’s of dollars into debt to support those institutions while they are being indoctrinated, only to get out hugely in debt with few job prospects and 4 years of conditioning on who to blame for the problems in their lives.

Sounds like a great plan.

Attacking the progressive-industrial complex that churns out cultural revolutionaries using our children as the raw materials is the single greatest counter-revolutionary goal we could potentially achieve in the near term, with the biggest pay off. That we can also at the same time attack the golden chains of unjust usury in the system is just a bonus. While we're at it, we should also look at taxing the foundations universities use to launder elite money into propaganda.

Defending student loans is prima facie evidence of a false right.

 

[ParadiseLost]

That is a personal issue more then the student loans fault

For one, none of this a personal issue; its a societal issue.

We're going to run off an economic cliff eventually if things keep the same way they are, so dismissing it as personal misses the point.

I know people that have done better working and paying for college that way then people getting loans.
It depends on the person and knowing how to request hours and things.

I've done 18 credits every regular semester and worked 3/4 semesters so far, I've done 15 credits while working 25 hours a week (summer semester), plan to do a similar thing this summer (12 credits while hopefully working full time).

I know its possible. However, I'm also self aware enough to realize that a lot of people don't have the intellectual abilities or psychological fortitude to be able to pull things off like this.*

And that's the problem. For every person like me, there's 5 other people who try to do what I'm doing and wash out. Which is a problem.

As it is, a lot of graduate programs specifically cap the number of hours students are allowed to work to prevent this; I think undergrad should do something similar, with a maximum number of work hours based on GPA (with the exception being businesses owned & operated by the students themselves).


* For the inevitable: "if they just worked harder": when you have many classes and a significant number of working hours, its not about working 'harder' per se, but working smarter, which requires intelligence. Its also about managing high levels of stress and burnout, which requires psychological fortitude. In fact, just working more is actively counterproductive at a certain level: I've found that 3 hours of playing video games / having fun + 7 hours of studying is far, far more effective than spending 10 hours studying.

 

[Zachowon]

For one, none of this a personal issue; its a societal issue.

We're going to run off an economic cliff eventually if things keep the same way they are, so dismissing it as personal misses the point.



I've done 18 credits every regular semester and worked 3/4 semesters so far, I've done 15 credits while working 25 hours a week (summer semester), plan to do a similar thing this summer (12 credits while hopefully working full time).

I know its possible. However, I'm also self aware enough to realize that a lot of people don't have the intellectual abilities or psychological fortitude to be able to pull things off like this.*

And that's the problem. For every person like me, there's 5 other people who try to do what I'm doing and wash out. Which is a problem.

As it is, a lot of graduate programs specifically cap the number of hours students are allowed to work to prevent this; I think undergrad should do something similar, with a maximum number of work hours based on GPA (with the exception being businesses owned & operated by the students themselves).

I am in the military.
Paying isnt the issue, but if there are service members who can get Masters and Doctorates while working in the military, and doing it the long way, anyone can do it.
The thing is, it is that people that have never worked that hard, do not know how to manage it, and jump right in doing such large amounts. When it is easier to work and do a semester, or hell, even a few classes at a time, to save on workload.

I will give you, it is both a socialtal and Personal issue. Society wants people to go through four years of college in well, four years, when it doesnt have to be.

 

[AnimalNoodles]

Third Position's economy is the same as communism's economy. The difference is social policy. So yeah, it seems I was right when I said that smelled of communism.

Third Position - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

No it isnt. There are many forms of third position economics that dont follow the usual binary. Take social credit for example..social credit nationalises credit, eliminates finance capital, implements a kind of UBI while allowing for private ownership. Another would be Distributism. A third would be Dirigisme.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Student debt is one of the key reasons why everyone younger than the baby boomers are wage slaves having to split the rent on a $3,000 a month apartment as 30 year olds, never owning their own house or able to afford to start their own business or have a family until their late 30s/mid 40s.

Cancel all student debt. For private debts, the government buys the endowments. This will give people the ability to settle down and have kids. The younger you have kids, the better because you have more energy to do it. Will also lead to small businesses emerging, bolstering local economies.

 

[Captain X]

I and many others I know, worked thier way through school, having no loans, or had scholarships.

How long ago was that, out of curiosity? I ask, because that's literally no longer possible.

 

[FriedCFour]

The college and education system as a whole is pretty deeply despicable. Right now it’s preached constantly that you must go to college to have any success, said college is skyrocketing in prices, the debt system is uniquely terrible in that you can’t dismiss anything as bankruptcy, and degrees aren’t as worthwhile, further compounded by “merit” based immigration depressing wages and taking away jobs from much of the rising industries. All of this needs pretty comprehensive reform addressing all of it. Personally, I’d like something that forces the colleges to pay back student debt or generally smashes our entire higher education system with a hammer so we can rebuild it better. That and the banking system.

 

[ParadiseLost]

Student debt is one of the key reasons why everyone younger than the baby boomers are wage slaves having to split the rent on a $3,000 a month apartment as 30 year olds, never owning their own house or able to afford to start their own business or have a family until their late 30s/mid 40s.

Cancel all student debt. For private debts, the government buys the endowments. This will give people the ability to settle down and have kids. The younger you have kids, the better because you have more energy to do it. Will also lead to small businesses emerging, bolstering local economies.

1). Not based in reality.

Average student debt is $32K. Median student loan debt is $17K. Average and median interest rates are about 6 and 5 percent respectively.

All of this means that student loans are far easier to repay than a mortgage. Median is actually more representative at the national level - the average is skewed by people going to universities that cost $50-$60 thousand.

Repaying the average student debt would take $350 a month payments over 10 years

Repaying the median student debt would take $170 a month payments over 10 years.

Neither of these are incredible financial burdens

The reality is that there are certain general rules people should be following when going to college if they don't have parents they can afford to pay; for example, you should go to an in-state public university. Going local will make it even cheaper.

2). Quite frankly, if you're splitting the rent on a $3K a month apartment, you're a fool, and you could almost certainly instantly get an effective 20%+ pay raise by moving somewhere else. Part of the problem is that many people feel they should be entitled to be able to live anywhere they want.

If you can't afford to live in NYC, LA, or Chicago, guess what? You should move. You should not expect society to heavily subsidize your continuing presence there.

If poor people would start moving out of NYC, LA, Chicago, etc., what would happen is cost of living would fall (due to decrease of demand) and wages would rise (due to decreases in supply) until eventually it would be viable for lower class people to have living wages in those places.

3) Increases in wealth doesn't actually correlate with having more children.

(I mean, that's not entirely true, but that's generally true. Many people in society value having children way less than they used to; its been a big cultural shift in America. Currently due to COVID we have a baby crisis and will likely have a global population crisis over the next few decades, but it'll hit America even worse because we're likely to have a Japan or China level population pyramid.)

If you want to increase the number of babies, changing values will do more than changing paychecks.

The college and education system as a whole is pretty deeply despicable. Right now it’s preached constantly that you must go to college to have any success, said college is skyrocketing in prices, the debt system is uniquely terrible in that you can’t dismiss anything as bankruptcy, and degrees aren’t as worthwhile, further compounded by “merit” based immigration depressing wages and taking away jobs from much of the rising industries. All of this needs pretty comprehensive reform addressing all of it. Personally, I’d like something that forces the colleges to pay back student debt or generally smashes our entire higher education system with a hammer so we can rebuild it better.

I'd take a look at Coursera.

There's currently (especially in the tech industry) a rise in certifications being offered by companies like IBM, Google, etc. There's also an increase in straight-out-of-high-school internships and apprenticeships.

What I think will eventually happen is that (hopefully) certain certifications will rise to become 'gold standards' in terms of qualifications and knowledge.

Over time, having a certain certifications will (again hopefully) be eventually seen as a good substitute for having a college degree, and will be enough to get people entry level positions in IT or programming. I think its a distinct possibility over the next few decades.

Hopefully, other industries will follow.

 

[FriedCFour]

Over time, having a certain certifications will (again hopefully) be eventually seen as a good substitute for having a college degree, and will be enough to get people entry level positions in IT or programming. I think its a distinct possibility over the next few decades.

That’d be better, but colleges currently pose an existential threat to the nation. They are dominated at high levels by people actively seeking to destroy the country and reshape it in their own woke, borderless, anti-white paradise. That can’t be tolerated and if you can utilize student debt to do it, which seems somewhat viable to me, all the better.

 

[prinCZess]

Cancelling student loans or alleviating them shouldn't happen unless it is accompanied by the same compensation for those who paid for their university education or who outright worked instead of going to college.

An element of selfishness in such, because I happen to belong to the former group in the above and it was a draining and oftentimes shitty time organizing my time and effort to manage it, even as I had jobs that I tended to enjoy.
But, then, others getting the debt they took on cancelled or alleviated is selfish of them as well.

Of course, higher priority over compensation, and something which would HAVE to accompany such as well is rejiggering loan policies going forward and removing the a lot of the university-govt funding...and in the US there's need to remind from a cultural perception that university is not supposed to be an 'experience' of sex, drugs, and rocknroll out of mom's basement.

...Should probly talk about how High Schools consistently fail in teaching as well.

It's a layer-cake of failure and selfishness on the part of students, teachers, university admins and political assholes.
So nothing will probly ever get done.

 

[ParadiseLost]

Cancelling student loans or alleviating them shouldn't happen unless it is accompanied by the same compensation for those who paid for their university education or who outright worked instead of going to college.

An element of selfishness in such, because I happen to belong to the former group in the above and it was a draining and oftentimes shitty time organizing my time and effort to manage it, even as I had jobs that I tended to enjoy.
But, then, others getting the debt they took on cancelled or alleviated is selfish of them as well.

Have to second this. I don't want the government to cancel anymore student loans beyond my current balance.

 

[Navarro]

When in the past did they do that? What is this glorious golden age you want to return to?

As he's previously stated, the 13th century. But with totally "traditional" innovations like 17th-18th century absolute monarchs and 19th century eugenics.

Sure, people lived in shitty peasant villages where they never travelled more than a few miles from their birthplace and only knew the same dozen or maybe a hundred people in their lives. And what happened to those villages? They were outcompeted or conquered by larger groups which could better coordinate effectively. And here you are, wanting to do the exact same thing and thinking that it's going to change. I think we all know what to call that.

Not to mention the whole economic basis of the premodern era can't be reconstructed. Farmland and agricultural labour is no longer as all-important as it once was.

This is not an argument, seeing as all I advocate for is what our people have done in the past. Capitalism and Usury are false gods.

Talking about false gods is rich coming from somebody who believes the Kali Yuga of Hindu mythology is nigh.

 

[Zachowon]

How long ago was that, out of curiosity? I ask, because that's literally no longer possible.

Mine was two or three. My friend is still doing it

 

[ParadiseLost]

How long ago was that, out of curiosity? I ask, because that's literally no longer possible.

Its totally possible if you're living at home, going to a local, in-state university, with your parents and the state heavily subsidizing your living and education, respectively.

It also becomes a lot easier with the fact that military scholarships are often very favorable, and frequently universities will offer additional scholarships beyond what the military provides.