Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

I think more than anything right now, the advice to give is how to avoid debt. Savings is certainly important, but increasingly a luxury, as friends still have school debt even as they contemplate having kids. And then think it's normal their kids will have school debt too.

School debt is not normal. That used to be for only the classic professions: teacher, lawyer, doctor. College was either paid for by family, by grants, or you worked your ass off but had no debt after the undergraduate degree. Now everyone thinks debt is sane.

If I were a parent, I'd plot with the kid how bankruptcy is part of their normal college education. Not debt.

View on HN

We gave our kids the same amount of money toward school. One went to community college, graduated basically debt free. The other went to a brand name private school and has taken on a painful amount of debt.

The difficult advice I would offer is this: If you are not a top X% student, and the only way for you to pay for your education is to take on debt, you are making a mistake. Full stop. Find a cheaper school. Find another way, work part time and go to school part time. See if your church/mosque/community group/etc will give you even $500/semester toward school. Live at home or with a relative. If you still get gifts for Christmas, ask for money instead and put that toward books for Spring semester. Stop eating out, learn to make your own food, the meals on campus are too expensive. Find something that you can buy in bulk and sell one at a time on ebay. And of course, the best choice is to go back in time and be born into a wealthy family.

You can make it work, but you have to be willing to set aside whatever vision you have about how college should be. Take what is available and make it your own.

Student debt is unconscionable. We’re taking young people, giving them 13 or more years of “we’re taking care of you,” “you’re too young to worry about this,” and suddenly they are legal adults, and the choice is theirs, but they really should consider taking on some debt to pay for school, because look at this pretty chart showing how someone with a college degree has so much more earning potential than someone who does not.

It’s difficult to process just how expensive school is becoming, how quickly. Right now, California community colleges charge $46 per semester unit, or $1,104 full-time for 1 year, plus maybe $40 in miscellaneous fees. If you want a heavy course load, 17 units all year, that rises to $1,564. A bunch of students qualify for the Board of Governors Fee Waiver, but that generally means the their families have poor financial situations, too. How much did community college cost when you were a young adult?

And that’s just the community college, in-state fees. 4-year colleges and private colleges are becoming ever more expensive, too. Adjusting for inflation, Stanford increased from $10,600 per year in 1960 to $59,600 now, just tuition, not counting miscellaneous fees or the cost of living in Palo Alto. And then there’s financial aid, of which there are nice grants for the destitute, enough to cover books and stuff, but mostly it takes the form of bankruptcy-immune student loans. Is it even possible to work part-time, go to school part-time, and graduate without debt, anymore?

It certainly doesn’t help that most of the kids learn fantasy-world liberal social policies, and increase their own fees. For example, I watched the students at UC Santa Cruz protest the wages and working conditions from the prison-food multinational that ran the cafeterias, and they “won” when UCSC agreed to turn the service workers into UC employees. The next year, instead of cutting the salaries of the executives, UCSC made cafeteria meal plans mandatory for everybody. And then these kids grow up into adults who vote for every bond and regressive tax that plagues my ballot.

As a caregiver and mentor, I’m not sure I can tell my kids to go to college.

> s it even possible to work part-time, go to school part-time, and graduate without debt, anymore

For my personal experience, the answer was yes. I went to a Midwestern in-state school and worked IT jobs part time (full time in summer) to pay for my school.

25+ years ago, when I went to in-state school all 4 years, it was $75/credit hour for my undergraduate. My friends that went to CC for two years paid $35/credit hour for CC.

Right now, the community college that one went to is $100/credit hour. The private school is $1200/credit hour, although they charge a flat rate for full time admission. There are a lot of fee waivers in there that lower the actual amount to about $700/credit hour. For both, books ran about $500/semester, and that reflects strategically not purchasing some books.

For all of the above, the targets were 30 credits per year.

As far as I understand, it is very difficult to clear student loan debt via bankruptcy.

I think the parent meant bankruptcy as in not having any money for anything in your college years.

You are correct Student loan debt can not be discharged in bankruptcy.

It is. People came up with the same plan. I believe it was popular with lawyers, but I could be mistaken.

Get your degree, file for bankruptcy. Since they can't take your degree away and you have no collateral, there wasn't much they could do.

The inability to relieve debt through bankruptcy is a result of that scam.

Yes, it was doctors and lawyers. Get out of school, declare banktupcy on $100+k of debt (abnormal at the time except for those degrees) and then in 7 years, start over with all the money you saved as a Junior doctor/lawyer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com