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As a personal, psychological solution, sure. Blame whomever you want.

Society doesn’t have that luxury. If student debt cripples 50 people, we could collectively decide to ignore them. If 50 million people are crippled then there’s probably a legitimate systemic issue somewhere. Blame doesn’t change the fact that those people exist, are economically crippled and our society can’t just wish them away. I’d also argue that if enough people do something then just telling them they’re bad is useless. I’d put it in the same category as abstinence education to prevent teen pregnancy - sure maybe it makes you feel good but it’s utterly useless for actually preventing teen pregnancy.

I’d support blame if there was any evidence it changes behavior. In this case there isn’t. We as a society want an outcome where most college students aren’t crippled in debt so it’ll have to be something else.

Also this covers up the fact that there are probably real policy failures that drive up the cost of education for everyone. Retribution conveniently lets politicians ignore the fact that college could be way cheaper. What schools are you referring to that cost only $3000 per semester? That kind of dates your info...

I'm currently attending Portland State University and it's about $3k-$4k / term (tuition + materials), paid out of pocket.

I also know lots of folks who went all over the country from my high school - a significant number of them will end up in high paying jobs and/or have decently large scholarships so perhaps that's worthwhile for them. I also know of a decent number of them who are going to fairly expensive places (especially with private schools) without scholarships and who aren't targeting fields with a low E(x) in terms of pay. I do wonder how they will fare in the coming years.

Student debt didn't cripple 50 million people. Fifty million people crippled themselves with student debt.

I joined the Army to get college money. (Same as my Mom and Dad did.)

I told my kids that I would help pay their college costs if they went after a STEM degree at a local school.

Daughter No. 1 didn't want STEM so she went to a service academy where she majored in social sciences.

Daughter No. 2 is getting a CS degree at a local state school. I am paying for it but she will pay me back.

It's not that hard. We all want things that we can't afford. Some people find alternatives or do without. Others just YOLO.

The bad actors here are the colleges that sell $50K vanity degrees to people that cannot nor will ever be able pay for them.

Thanks for your service.

I paid for my college via the USAF. I'm helping my kids with similar deals that you describe.

With hard work, part-time jobs, good ACT preparation and well-chosen schools, college is definitely in reach.

Thank you for the kind words.

I believe that children learn from observing their parents. It sounds like you are off to a great start.

If any of your kids are close to fitting the cadet/midshipman profile, make sure to encourage them to consider service academies. They are not impossible to get into.

I think all of the academies have week long summer experience programs for HS Juniors. My daughter went to two of them and confirmed that it was a good fit for her.

My oldest graduates and commissions this Spring and has had a wonderful experience, including spending a semester studying abroad, a couple of shorter overseas trips, internships in DC, and so on.

If college is simply a jobs training program, we ought to simply say so and do away with the bullshit about enlightened citizens and just get down to career skills and workplace training.

Right now, we have the worst of both worlds. The requirement that you must go to college to acquire "job skills," and the insane cost of an "enlightened education." The reality is that we get neither.

The two desperately need to be pried apart.

Pretty much this

My wife and I are complete opposites. I went to state school, commuted from home, studied engineering, did well enough, got my M.S. paid for by the school (which is fairly easy to do if you are open to schools), now making 300k

My wife went to a private college (40k per year), lived on campus, went into sciences, went to a private M.S. program (40k per year yet again) with no funding, now making 75k

Our timelines are staggered by a few years (she worked before going for her master's) and she works for a non-profit while I work in tech, but I still think it's a worthwhile comparison as we've both arguably "put in" the same amount of time

It's no wonder to me why people feel entrenched by student debt. Granted, my wife has super close college friends which I don't have. I'm not sure I'd trade for that though. Going to state school and keeping costs low in college was the best decision I ever made

> If you don't currently have a cash flow that would allow you to make a $500/month student loan payment, don't take out that loan.

Student loans are all about future earnings potential, right? This argument seems to fall apart when you realize you aren't shopping for a mortgage or car that you can _currently_ pay for.

Exactly. Schools have been pushing the idea that college graduates make more money for decades (and that graduates from elite colleges make even more money), and somehow it's the students' fault for falling victim to the constant brainwashing.

> Try a $3000/semester school instead of a $25000/semester school.

I challenge you to find a $3000/semester grad school. UC Berkeley is $9000 a semester, and that's in-state.

Aside from this, I think you've identified that student loans work differently than regular ones; hence, the usual rule of "don't take a loan you aren't able to pay off right now" doesn't apply. A college student making minimum wages is unlikely to be able to pay off their tuition, but they may have a good chance of being able to do so in the future. That's how the entire industry is structured, and whether that's a good thing or not is up for debate but that is the current situation.

Why go to grad school if the school isn't paying you to be there?

> Why go to grad school if the school isn't paying you to be there?

Because you need to in order to be a doctor / psychologist / counselor / MBA.

Besides MD's that have separate loan programs and a whole stack of post-grad financing options, the others are poor choices.

One of my kids newly minted 7th grade English teachers was salty because before going into teaching she had just earned her PhD in a social science and had significant student loan debt. ($200K+ I can't remember how much exactly but it was breathtaking). She made a poor choice. Her colleague, a math teacher, went to college at the US Military Academy and served time in the Army before following her dream of teaching. She made a better choice.

edit: typos

I don't understand the army argument - is that assumption that the entire college going class needs to be enlisted in order to have success? To have an education you need to gamble with your life? That's ridiculous and barbaric.

I'd argue that we need psychologists, counselors, and MBA's. If everyone was as painfully pragmatic as a lot of these comments suggest there'd be no art in this world, no one taking care of our sick or our poor, and no one remembering our past.

After two years of undergrad, my child has been accepted into the professional program for graphic design. At a state university. With no debt.

My child worked part time for a couple of years in high school. My child worked hard to get good grades. My child worked hard to get accepted into the program, while holding down a part-time job. My child is pretty pragmatic. Being free of debt will allow them to be a poor starving artist.

You can be pragmatic, debt-averse, and an artist, historian, counselor, or anything else.

Did your child have your help?

Your question below does not allow response, so I will respond here.

Cascadia College ~$4300/year tuition. Connecticut State Colleges and Universities ~$4300/year tuition. Northern Oklahoma College $4000~5000/year tuition. University of South Florida ~$6400/year tuition. Utah State University Eastern < $4000/year tuition.

This is not a list of the cheapest colleges. It is a random selection based on geography.

$5000 at $8/hour = 625 hours = 12.5 hours/week for 50 weeks.

That doesn't account for room and board, nor taxation.

I took a look at the Conneticut State Colleges and Universities Residents requirements and they say "On campus room and board is provided by the school at a cost of $11,816 per academic year." That's huge.

In fact, the amount they estimate(1) it'll cost is $25,152 - at $8/hr that's 3144 hours, or 251 weeks at 12.5 hours/week. That's 5 years of saving for one year.

If you live off campus at a cheap place ($600/month - I couldn't find a place that cheap, but I assumed that it must exist), that's $7,200 for the year for housing, which ends up being 4 years of work at part time.

Paying for university is actually the cheap part of living there.

1) http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/connecticut/central-conn...

Paying for university is the cheap part of most college experiences. That's part of the point. People are whining about student debt. But they are using that debt to pay rent, but cars, order another round of beer, buy another laptop...

If you want a college education, they can be had in quality for under $15,000/year total. Tuition, fees, books, rent, food, laundry, everything. No car, used laptop, state school. If there isn't one across the street from you, look around. My kids are spread across the country. So far, they all have degrees they can be proud of.

University of Nebraska has campus housing as low as $4000/year. Tuition and fees ~$9000/year. Boise State has 3 bedroom apartments for $825/month. Tuition and fees ~$8000/year. $2000 scholarship to residents with 3.3+ GPA. Arizona State has apartments for ~$5000/year. Tuition and fees ~$11000/year. Georgia Tech has apartments for ~$6400/year. Tuition and fees ~$12500/year

If you don't have the money, don't expect MIT. But you can get a decent--sometimes best-in-class--STEM degree from state colleges. Go in with five roomates on rent. Cook planned meals. Give up your smart phone and its $60/month plan. Pretend like you're really poor. Live like you're really, really poor. For four years.

Then when you're done, lose out on real big job offers to MIT grads and settle for something under 6 figures (read 7 figures in Silicon Valley).

All my love.

edit: Ok. I fed, clothed, transported, and housed them through the end of high school.

To be able to put yourself entirely through school while working part time is impressive. They must have been incredibly frugal and had a decent job to pay for all their needs and school. Were they able to take advantage of scholarships? Is the program they've been accepted to the same cost, or more?

See reply above. Now that I can reply directly, I will be more direct.

On campus housing + tuition = ~$10000/year

$12000/$8/hr = 1500 hours = 30 hours/week for 50 weeks

That's frugal, but I wouldn't say incredibly frugal. It's very doable. If the alternative is to live it up and rack $10K debt each year, then complain because you have to pay it back and they won't let you bankruptcy out of it...

Maybe you can talk your boss into a $1000 scholarship. Maybe you get some help from Rotary Club. Maybe you can pick up $500 from you department to help pay for textbooks. Every little bit helps. But even without the help, you can pay for college as you go.

Or you can sink $50K+/year at an ivy league and think the world owes you when you're done.

I replied to you in the other thread you started - according to one university website I read, you're not estimating the cost by half in that. Even here you're not counting food in your calculation, nor any other money for books or supplies, or any spending money. Also, you're working 30 hours a week basically all year long, that's a lot of work come exam time.

That figure does count food. And spending money.

30 hours is a lot. Yes. And...?

Do you want a great college education? Without debt? Without work? Without sacrifice? I can't help you. But if you are willing to work, and sacrifice a little, I can help you.

Many prefer to rack up huge debt, then complain about it.

> If you don't currently have a cash flow that would allow you to make a $500/month student loan payment, don't take out that loan.

But that describes the majority of students who take out loans to go to school full time. The entire point of the arrangement is that the thing you are taking out a loan for should improve your ability to actually pay off the loan. Our society and culture has encouraged students to go into debt with the promise that it will improve their future. But that is not panning out for many people. When so many people have the same kind of problem, we need to look at systemic causes.

We need to quit ignoring systemic causes. One primary systemic cause is that people are taking out loans they cannot pay back with their current income. Another systemic cause is that institutions are loaning money to people who could not pay the money back at their current income.

If a four year degree will cost $50K, and you agree to pay that back at 5% over 20 years, you need to be able to afford a $350/month payment. It can't depend on whether you win the lottery or whether you get a better job. It needs to depend on your current history, just like any other loan. If you can't afford to make a $350/month payment, you can't afford a $50K degree. It's that simple.

Ohio State undergrad tuition is < $11000/year. You could replay that at 5% in 10 years for ~$120/month. Working 20 hours/week for $8/hour should cover net around $120/week. That leaves you ~$360/month to pay for food/rent/laundry/bus/whatever. If you can't afford this, you can't afford it. You are not entitled to this. It is not a basic human right. If you can't find an apartment near enough to campus within this price range, this won't work. Don't take out the loan. No matter how much you want the product.

For your second year, if you can't make $240/month payments, don't take out another $11000 loan. Or negotiate a 20 year term for $75/month if you can afford last year's $120/month obligation plus this year's $75/month commitment. If you're still working 20 hours/week at $8/hour, maybe you can't afford a second year.

I know it stinks, but if you can't afford to pay for college, you can't afford college. That's crummy. That's lousy. That's a lot of things. But it is also reality.

Ignoring reality is a big systemic cause.

I think there’s a point where we have to ask ourselves if the systems we as a society designed in the name of efficiency are truly worth it. Do we essentially want to condemn a group of people (people for whom college will be financially untenable) to be a perpetual underclass? To have virtually no chance of improving their standard of living, perhaps for generations? Going to college is one of the largest drivers of social mobility after all. I think this argument can be potentially very paternalistic: you can’t afford to move out of your parent’s house, you can’t afford to have a child, you can’t afford to have any control over your existence. Calling it ‘lousy’ and ‘crummy’ trivialize it in my view. I think better adjectives are ‘existentially depressing’ and horrifying.’

Are we as humans so empatheticly deficient that we cannot say “I don’t really want to give up this money which will be spent on another person’s well being, but I’m not going to fight it”? I pay a lot of money in taxes that I’d prefer to spend on rent or food or healthcare or my family but ultimately I’m satisfied that at least some of it will go to making someone whose life is not very good just a bit better.

I'll give you 'depressing'. But I reject the notion that college is financially untenable. It is depressingly expensive. It takes a lot of hard work if you aren't independently wealthy. But it is achievable.

University of New Mexico costs ~$7400/year in tuition, $22000/year with room/board/books. A high school student working 10 hours/week at $8/hour can earn $2400 in one school year and another $4800 in a summer. Working for two years in high school, plus one summer, then working through their freshman year, they can earn $21600 before they start their sophomore year. If they step it up and work 20 hours/week as a college freshman, they can add another $2400. After taxes, they will come up only slightly short of the mark. That's depressing.

But if they write a brief summary of what they did to earn money, how much they need, and how short they are, they will know that they only need $1000 loan or scholarship. There are very few bosses that won't recognize that effort and spring for a $1000 scholarship. Or maybe a parent can help with $500. Or maybe the college will help. Or maybe they can work one more part-time job one summer.

The jobs might be menial. You might scrub toilets or bag groceries or scrape old paint off pipes or write html.

It's depressing. It's a lot of work.

It's doable.

Right.

It's pretty convenient for the creditor that we do not teach finance in American high school. It's pretty convenient for the creditor that student loans are unique in that you CANNOT default on them. It's pretty convenient to the creditor that these loans are being offered to children, optimistic at the whole life they have ahead of them, eager to sign whatever terms to make their dreams a reality. It's pretty convenient to the creditor that although he has ZERO risk of the debtor defaulting, we don't enforce any regulation on the amount of money that can be loaned out for certain fields of study or to certain schools (for-profit private colleges).

But, sure, blame it on the stupid millennials, 'cause they dreamed of being a success and listened to what society told them to do and went to college. Don't blame it on the debtor for lending money to people that shouldn't have ever been loaned money.

If only they didn't go to that Art school and eat avocado toast for breakfast...

Look: if a bank gave me a loan to build a six-thousand foot marble statue of my asshole, and I defaulted and couldn't pay it back, pretty sure no one would feel sorry for the bank. They'd say, what a dumb fucking bank!

But oh how the tables turn when it comes to millenials. Give them some money for school, even when we know it's a bad investment, and we blame it on the kid for taking it!

Next up, we'll be giving loans to drug addicts and blame them for spending the money on drugs...

Schools that offer financial aid have professional financial aid counselors, academic advisors, and career advisors.

I am pretty sure where the blame should go.

edit: why is this comment down voted? Every time I took an aid package I has a meeting with a financial aid officer. Surely, their role and responsibility should be more than just pointing out where the student should sign on the promissory note for multi-thousand dollar loans.

I got into an ivy league school and ended up going there because I was offered a fairly generous financial aid package. Then in my final year my grants went from covering 80% of my tuition to practically 0 because my father was working 80 hour weeks and made 5k more than the previous year. I thought I would graduate with around 20K in loans but ended up having closer to 70K because of that.

That seems crazy to me. If your dad made 5K more that year, then shouldn't your loan have only gone up 5K? I'd be interested in the math behind whatever bullshit justification the grant issuer(s) used to warrant that sort of cut.

That sounds like a nasty surprise. Could have bought your dad a few weeks' unpaid leave (in Monaco!) if you'd known. I didn't know (but am not that surprised, sadly) that they re-calculated every year.

Was it worth it? You could have went to a cheaper school?

Having a CS degree from a top school on my resume has opened a ton of doors for me so I'd say it was worth it. I have high school friends who ended up getting CS degrees from state schools with pretty good GPAs who couldn't get interviews with any of the top companies and ended up doing IT or working at banks.

Okay. So the system worked as designed.

"If you don't currently have a cash flow that would allow you to make a $2000/month mortgage payment, don't take out that mortgage. If you don't currently have a cash flow that would allow you to make a $500/month student loan payment, don't take out that loan."

I used to feel the same way, and it's easy to vilify students who get to experience a more expensive education and place the onus on these students to pay back the debts. However, I realized that there's much more to this. Students typically apply for such loans while they are still in high school, in October of the year prior to starting college. It's uncommon for students to have the financial foundation needed to understand the significance of taking out such huge loans. I mean how could they possibly know what they'll "cash flow" four years when they graduate (or if they even do graduate)? In contrast, an adult who takes out a mortgage for a home after earning steady income has his/her assets, liabilities, and income meticulously scrutinized by the loan officer of some major bank. The adult is much more equipped with the information and experience to understand the commitment of this debt, and it's reasonable to place blame the adult if he is unable to make his mortgage payments.

Things get tricky when determining if a teenager is qualified to make a decision about taking out a student loan. We have regulation in place to disallow teenagers from smoking, gambling, and drinking, and yet a teenager can sign off on decades of indebtedness and financial insecurity without the proper regulation or warning labels. The phenomenon of teenage students misinformed-ly taking out loans is almost identical to how banks had issued subprime mortgage debt to debtors during the 2008 financial crisis by speculating and overestimating to these debtors their ability to pay back these loans.

So under the premise that students are not fully qualified to make such financial decisions and entitlement aside, solving this problem of insurmountable student debt across the country starts with better financial education for young kids and stricter regulation on banks for issuing unreasonable student loan debt. This is necessary because a bank cannot "repossess" an education, yet there is no recourse for students who are faced with snowballing debt.

You seem to have misunderstood me.

I don't suggest that the student take out a loan based on future earnings. I agree that this is difficult to impossible to predict.

I suggest that the student doesn't take out a loan at all, or if they do, base it on CURRENT earnings. That is, if they can currently afford $100/month, only take out a $100/month loan at most. That could be a $15000 loan at 5% for 20 years. Or a $5000 loan at 5% for 5 years. If you cannot pay for school with this loan, don't take out the loan.

It's not a crime to work for a year and save up before going to college. But you have to save--not buy a car or a house or a party every weekend. 2000 hours * $8/hour = $12000 after taxes. If you're supporting yourself, you can't save for college and you could never repay a student loan. Go find a $10/hour job and save $4000 in a year. Then you can pay your way through school.

Then, if you're lucky you can pull in 6 figures 5 years out of high school. If you're not lucky, you can double your income. If you're unlucky, you got a college education debt free.

That took three paragraphs to explain. I don't think it is beyond the grasp of a high school senior. If it is beyond their grasp they should definitely not take out any loan whatsoever.

Perhaps this should be a story problem on every single SAT or ACT test. Getting it wrong should divide your score in half.

Dead on. Caveat emptor.