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Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

>The entire notion of taxpayer funded student loans is a scam on both taxpayers and students. It’s a system that allows the colleges/universities to charge any tuition they want and guarantees there will be an artificial demand.

Just for what it's worth, Australia has a taxpayer-funded student loan scheme (HECS) and the obscene fees you see in the US simply aren't a problem here. A full 4-year Electrical Engineering degree from Monash cost me about A$30k back in 2012. It looks like now they're around $40k. Even for an arts grad, this is something one could comfortably pay off in 2-3 years.

I don't know the specifics as to why this is the case, but it's clearly something that can work with proper regulation.

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I have to say those prices still seem very high to me, that's 10.000$ a year. Maybe salaries are just outrageously higher in Australia than where I live, but I find it hard to believe most artists can comfortably pay back 1000$ a month. At least in Germany that would be a big ask even for a fresh engineering graduate (source: I'm a fresh engineering graduate).

For comparison, student loans are a problem in the UK as well to some extent, where tuition is ~9000£ a year. Student loans get forgiven after 30 years and most graduates will never pay backtheir loans in full because they won't be done after 3 decades.

To clarify, most people don't pay off their student debt that quickly (we have a system where it's automatically rolled into your tax returns and paid off slowly).

However, with typical grad wages here (you're looking at around 60k on average; a little more for engineering and a little less for arts), one very comfortably could.

>Just for what it's worth, Australia has a taxpayer-funded student loan scheme (HECS) and the obscene fees you see in the US simply aren't a problem here. A full 4-year Electrical Engineering degree from Monash cost me about A$30k back in 2012. It looks like now they're around $40k. Even for an arts grad, this is something one could comfortably pay off in 2-3 years.

What do you mean that "the obscene fees you see in the US simply aren't a problem here"? $40k across 4 years is $10k/year. The average in-state tuition in the US is $10,338k. Those are pretty close to each other.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...

10k AUD is 7.4k USD, combined with the fact that Australian HECS loans are repaid only when income passes a certain threshold ~54k AUD per year, at a rate of 2% of your gross annual income. This scales to a maximum of 10% of your income around 90k AUD until the loan is paid. The loan also has no interest, besides adjustments for inflation.

>What do you mean that "the obscene fees you see in the US simply aren't a problem here"?

Typically when people talk about the ridiculous cost of college in the US, they bring up these obscene $200k bills that can never be paid off. I agree that $40k isn't ridiculous, and small change compared to the opportunity cost of not working.

> I agree that $40k isn't ridiculous

That is about the average student loan amount on graduation in the US, but the hidden truth is the average student will end up having to pay twice that amount or more due to interest. The students with $200k will usually payback closer to $400-$500k over 40 years.

The typical person with high student loans in the US is a dentist and will definitely profit off of having them.

The worst case is when you drop out of school, don’t get the degree, but still have the loan. There’s nothing good you can do about that right now except flee the country.

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