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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

The age argument is an interesting one. Should we be redefining what the age of majority is? Because if 18 year olds aren't competent enough to make borrowing choices for college, it follows that there are plenty of other consequences they shouldn't face.

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The barrier is always complicated. There's also other issues, like financial literacy. I come from a upper middle class and still fell prey to the "fixed interest" claim. I'm pretty sure kids from families less well off are going to fall prone to even more egregious predatory tactics. It gets complicated really fast because one of the major goals we want from education is it to provide a means to climb the socioeconomical ladder. If we use predatory tactics in any form, then we're biasing towards targeting those people even more. Beyond that, with age, it is hard for an 18 year old to conceptually understand a 10 year loan. I'd argue that you don't start to understand that magnitude till 30 (You've lived 10 years as an adult). But that's way too late to take out a school loan.

The problem comes down to a simple one and I'll put it in the form of a question (this question generalizes to a lot of other areas too btw):

Is a deal/agreement fair when one side has an elite team of lawyers and psychologists and the other team has a high school degree?

I honestly think this is a question a lot of us, especially working for big tech companies, need to internalize and address. I'm not sure there are any easy answers either, because whichever side you fall on (I'm assuming people will say "{yes,no}, but..." instead of a strict black and white answer) there are nuances that are going to play major roles and tip the scales. I'll hint at my personal answer by saying I agree with Blackstone.

As to the question of "bail us out so we can participate in society" I think that is a little different. I think the problem is that the structure has rapidly changed and become out of hand. Incentives were misaligned. We tried to create a system where everyone could get the means to attend college but that incentivized an environment that creates predatory lending and increased financial obligations (upwards of 1k% increases). There's clearly something wrong with the system. I think many people claim to have the answers but I'm sure these are all far too naive. Something this complicated isn't going to have trivial solutions.

In the US, an 18 year old is too young to drink, old enough to vote, old enough to send to war, old enough to be tried as an adult in a court of law, and too young to rent a car.

It seems our age of majority is already an arbitrary measure.

Unless students are educated in financial literacy and professional life as part of the curriculum, I'm not sure we can expect them to be making competent, experience-based decisions on the cost benefit of education on a 20+ year timescale.

And that's not to mention that many loan providers use predatory tactics, including the companies that administer federal loans.

No it just means that their environment is manipulative.

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