> Either you get the freedom of being an adult along with the responsibility or your leader decides what is best for you and you no longer have freedom.
Maturity, experience, and knowledge are all complicated. Nothing magical happens to you when society deems you an adult; you still need to learn things. That's why there should be laws and regulations to protect people from situations like this, because you shouldn't be able to get into this kind of debt, and especially not at the beginning of your adult life.
> She decides to fly abroad and just assumes that the loan holders won't require her to start repayment.
I think you shouldn't be so dismissive. She went to grad school overseas. A lot of people come overseas to US grad schools and that's great for us, and a lot of our students go overseas to foreign grad schools and that's good for us too. Diversity of background, experience, and culture are important, and we all benefit from it. It should be a fundamental part of education.
Furthermore this isn't her point. She couldn't get a deferment because Navient's software systems didn't have a key for overseas grad schools. That's so mind boggling to me I don't even know where to begin: Navient couldn't add a row to their DB, and it cost her over $7k (more, after it keeps getting compounded).
> But even before that, she realizes in the middle of her undergrad that the tuition is to much.
It's more likely she hit the cap on her government loans. Pretty much everyone does, which is why we have loan corporations like Navient and Great Lakes. If you look at her balance sheet, there are a lot of gov't loans for small amounts, then a couple big Sallie Mae loans.
> But she decides to get a loan on bad terms because she doesn't want to loose her friends.
Unless you're in a pretty lucrative program (like CS or engineering) or you're pre-professional (pre-med, pre-law), often one of the most valuable things you get from your college experience is a social network of professors, administrators, and fellow students. I pretty much owe my entire career to a few of my professors in college and if I'd had to leave that behind it would have cost me dearly financially.
> But for irresponsible people like the author, I don't think any laws can protect her from herself.
I do think she was irresponsible. I think private universities are generally a terrible deal unless you get a scholarship or you're in a top-10 school, I think going overseas for grad school and defaulting on her loans because she couldn't get a deferment was a bad move, and I think she probably should have taken a gap year and worked. I also think she should live somewhere cheaper with a better commute -- although it's really hard to get a job when you need to relocate, and again with that network thing.
But I also think everyone is irresponsible, and that the penalty for being irresponsible in this way shouldn't be essentially a lifetime of debt. If Sallie Mae weren't legally allowed to lend her that $24k, she'd be remarkably better off. We have all kinds of laws that prevent people from entering into extremely bad deals (can't sell organs, can't agree to work in super hazardous conditions) because we recognize the power of institutions and society to coerce people into making these choices. We need to realize that the loan industry is one of these things that needs similar regulation.