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Comment by iratewizard | Hacker News Reader

In a sense, student loan forgiveness is making the financially responsible (self-taught, self-made, more valuable degree, worked through college) pay for the financially irresponsible.

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Those who work through college are more likely to have worse outcomes, and they're still likely to have a high debt. Those who went to college and have no debt are more likely to come from wealthy families. And if we say "only those who can afford it should go to college", then you are discouraging pretty much the best opportunity for social mobility.

College isn't an opportunity for social mobility anymore. The cost of tuition shoots up as the curriculum relaxes. It's an investment trap for people who can't do the math and listen too closely to what their midwit school teachers believe about the world.

And yet, you can usually go to community college and then a reasonably well regarded state school without taking on crazy debt. It is when you go out of state and live in campus housing that costs balloon.

Community college can be a great investment in some cases, definitely. Especially for people who struggle with setting goals and self-discipline. If you have self-discipline and know what you want to be able to do, there can be a lot of unnecessary time waste in the classroom.

I would be curious to break down and audit time against 4 buckets of things you will learn. Things you "need to know", "ought to know", "don't need" and "don't actually understand". I wonder how long it takes to fill each bucket and how much faster the latter two grow.

Experience is the best teacher of all and additional schooling is the biggest barrier to useful experience.

but those 'financially irresponsible' people include those who work in professions that don't pay well but the rest of us rely on, like those that care for kids or people with disabilities.

They also include people who have any other unexpected event in their life that affects their employability or income.

If you want to go into charity work, don't expect to be paid like a brain surgeon. If you can't afford the education required to go into charity work, start a GoFundMe or choose something more attainable. Stop spending other's money because of vague handwavey "we need it and it doesn't pay well"

You're picking two extremes that make your argument sound very simple. But what do you think about teachers? Should we:

a) Forgive their student debt

b) Discourage non-wealthy people from becoming teachers

c) Force schools to pay them more

d) Pay them more via GoFundMe

e) Have less educated teachers

f) Rely on teachers less and let their value be established by the free market

Being forced to pay a school that your children don't attend is rent seeking. Strip schools of all rent seeking funding, make tax money follow the child and let the parents on vote what education style works with their children's attendance.

If you've got the answers to these difficult problems, what's stopping you from enacting them?

The problems I'm paid to solve pay a lot more. More than triple the maximum salary of government officials.

Anyone can give an untested hypothesis and claim it will solve the problem. Executing a plan competently and being held accountable for the result is a much bigger challenge.

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