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Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

>I understand chasing dreams, but be prepared for the outcome.

Since when is a degree about “chasing a dream”? We aren’t talking about starving artists or people pursing acting or becoming a professional athlete.

These are 18 year old kids who are pursuing an education and wind up in a mountain of debt they will service for the rest of their lives (at least 30-40 years).

In a world where the system is set up so these 18 year olds have to take on debt to obtain an education. These kids shouldn’t be blamed for the shit economy that doesn’t have jobs and the jobs that are available won’t be sufficient to repay their loans.

1million student loans are defaulted on every year, these are not dreamchasers its an entire generation that is finding there is no more middle class in this country rather a new unemployed/underemployed/indebted class.

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But these kids are living in a good economy. College isn't "an education", they already have one. College is additional education that doesn't teach you many skills that will help you find a job. Some majors do, but most don't. If you pick a major that doesn't lead to gainful employment then you are buying a luxury product.

>But these kids are living in a good economy.

If they were living in a good economy then there wouldn’t be 1,000,000 student loans going into default every year.

Sure corporations are making record profits, but wages have been stagnant for 30-40 years, workers have never seen a higher wage gap, and the economy has the lowest social mobility of any 1st world country.

> the economy has the lowest social mobility of any 1st world country.

I'm not disagreeing with your general point here, but an interesting dimensions to this fact:

There's some recent evidence that social mobility net of transfers in countries at the top of these rankings are no better than the US's. Now obviously the redistribution itself makes a big difference to QoL, but it's an interesting wrinkle in the claim that inequality is driven by skewed access to good schooling, childcare, parental benefits, etc. It seems theoretically obvious, but the data apparently doesnt support it: either a counterfactual Denmark with US policies would have much lower mobility or these investments are ineffective.

I'm still in support of all of these policies, but it is pretty troubling that they don't have the effects you'd expect.

>If they were living in a good economy then there wouldn’t be 1,000,000 student loans going into default every year.

Why? Going to university doesn't guarantee success. They clearly made a bad decision when they took those student loans. In a country where education is subsidized many of them might not have been able to go to university at all.

  Since when is a degree
  about “chasing a dream”?

When a high school student asks a high school english teacher whether studying english is a stupid idea, what do you suppose the teacher says?

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