My point is just that there are payoffs other than monetary ones. Nothing wrong with monetary, but nothing wrong with the others if that drives you.
The issue is that college imposes a very real and life changing monetary cost on people attending. If you fail to achieve a high paying job after college you will be far behind your peers who never went, and dramatically more limited in your life choices. College debt is the closest we have to indentured servitude in the modern world.
For those who just want to learn, continuing education or course auditing is the better solution. I do wish colleges would expand upon these programs.
You pay 10% of your disposable income (income above 1.5 times the poverty level) for up to 20 years.
Not sure that's really far behind. For a family of 4 making the median household income that's roughly equivalent to a cable bill.
IBR operates very similar to welfare - including the embarrassing intrusion and analysis of your private life by your lenders. It is a last resort option and not something we should be encouraging.
Cancelled debt is only taxable up to the point of solvency meaning that most people who have a substantial amount of debt cancelled won't owe anything.
>IBR operates very similar to welfare - including the embarrassing intrusion and analysis of your private life by your lenders. It is a last resort option and not something we should be encouraging.
I've done it. You provide your tax return. They don't care about anything but income. It's by no means intrusive and shouldn't bhe thought of as a last resort.
What percentage of college subjects don’t have readily available high-quality material across the Internet for free? Libgen is free. SciHub is free. Whole semesters worth of lectures are available for free on YouTube.
It would be stupid to take out loans for a degree that will never break even, when more knowledge is out there for free than ever before in human history.
I trained in a field that might be classed under "areal studies" more generally for a certain stretch of Eurasia. (And not a "useless" humanities subject, but something that does bring desirable job prospects.) The vast majority of literature in that subject is not available online. More recent publications might be created in PDF format, but for the most part students will need to hit the library shelves, even at the undergraduate level.
Sure, I have scanned and uploaded a great deal to Libgen myself, but I appear to be the only volunteer doing so for this entire field. Most volunteers on LibGen or r/Scholar don’t want to undertake any more effort than downloading already-digitized materials from behind paywalls and then uploading them to Libgen, they don’t want to do the hard work of scanning thousands of pages. I suspect there are a lot of academic fields where it would take decades for the handful of Libgen volunteers to adequately upload the standard publications in that field.
I'd guess former bomber pilot but the rest of your comment makes me think otherwise.
More importantly, while I can use thesearch to learn something I know quite a lot about already, I would not know where to start in things I know nothing about. And let's not start about things that I don't know they exist (which my school covered).