The Vexed Question Of Student Loans

449 thoughts on “The Vexed Question Of Student Loans”

1. All of this is why the payment pause – and more importantly the no-interest-accrual clause – that President Trump instituted during COVID was such a miracle. One could actually get ahead on paying down the principal.

   And as much as I hate to say anything nice about the FICUS, whatever changes they made to ease the requirements of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program also helped a bunch of people caught in the “I’ve been paying on this loan for 20 years, I’ve paid them at least twice the amount I originally borrowed, and I still owe more than when I started” trap.

   I wasn’t ever silly enough to try to consolidate my loans – not panicked enough to be unable to do math, not far enough out of school to be eligible, enough disposable income to make payments on everything – but I can understand why one would have – one monthly payment is so much easier to manage than three or four (because you get a separate loan for each school year)

   1. DH and I both benefitted from the expansion of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness. We were able to get rid of all of our grad student loans. It’s made a HUGE difference in our lives. We bought a house… FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER. Because prior to last fall, our “house” was hanging on the wall in the form of two PhD diplomas.

      1. And the fact that you’ve bought a house only at your age — shakes head. — Dan’s and my training is way lower and we were lucky it was practically free. And we first bought a house at 27. Which we fixed and sold, etc. Accounting for our being able to breathe free for the first time in our lives.

         1. Well, we might have bought one earlier, but by the time we felt like we were on our feet enough, it was 2008… so we waited, and waited. And then my parents moved out and we were dealing with that. And then when they died, we realized we didn’t want to stay in Philly any longer. In the end, it worked out perfectly for us.

            1. Bought our first house in ’80. I was 23. Hubby was 28. Moved out of it in ’85, sold it in ’89. Between the owl and Mt St. Helen, we couldn’t give it away. Not when $300k houses down our street were going for $100k. Ours was $68k, and older. On better soil foundation. It wasn’t sliding away. But still perceptions are everything. Then in ’89 there was a housing resurgence, and we could sell it. Sold for $72k, what we had into it and costs to sell it. (Made money on paper with renting it for 3 1/2 years, especially after the first year. But on the house itself, no money made.) Our current house we bought in ’88 (we had a steal on rent, so until it was sold from under us, and still having the other one, we weren’t looking very hard). Housing was just starting to sell locally too. So we got in at a good time. Paid $78k for current house. I was 32. Embarrassed on how much it is worth now. But if we were to sell it, we’d have to pay as much to replace it. Not worth it unless we are leaving the area. Right now that comes under “Why would we do that?”

2. It still burns my @ss. just sayin.

   I’d settle for a return to the undue hardship path toward discharge in bankruptcy, It keeps skin in the game and is actually honest. that’s the real shame of this, there really wasn’t all that much abuse in the system. Sure there was some, but the vast majority of people who ended up in bankruptcy simply had no money and bankruptcy ain’t free. It’s very costly.

   1. Now the abuse in the system is mostly on the government’s side.

      They had programs in place for getting student loans forgiven. And Congress – or somebody – kept changing the rules to that no one could actually accomplish it through the government programs explicitly designed to let them do that..

      1. Only about 2%

         1. A masterful, stunning post – I cannot comment beyond that. Superb. My knee is bent and the hilt of my blade is offered to you.

      2. Were the programs designed to let them do that, or just marketed/I> as letting them do that?

   2. bankruptcy ain’t free. It’s very costly.

      Definitely True.

   3. That path is still there. But what constitutes undue hardship has never been defined in law and is up to each individual bankruptcy judge to decide.

      1. No. It’s not. It’s now impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. Has been since at least 2010. I know. I sat through the explanations on it.

         1. The path exists. But as I said, it’s up to each individual judge to decide, and NONE of them are willing to actually accept that anyone could actually have hardship so bad that they can’t pay anything. Which is ridiculous.

            1. There’s more to it than that. Before 2005 it was common, now it’s very, very unusual. What looked like a trivial change in wording had far reaching consequences. It’s easier to avoid the taxman than the student loan man now,

               1. It wasn’t common even then. Specifically because the undue hardship thing wasn’t defined. And still isn’t. The 2005 law created means tests for many forms of bankruptcy (because it was supposed to be to “prevent bankruptcy abuse”) but didn’t apply them to student loans as such.

               2. Yep.

         2. September 12th 2009, Congressional law. I’m busy and can’t track down the exact subarticle junk, but we mediators got retrained on it, so I know the month and so on when it came into being.

      2. I mean it might be “possible” like winning the lottery is possible, but effectively the only way to do it is to be paraplegic and on disability. And even then it’s 50/50

      3. For the Rainbow-Haired Radicals, overhearing the Wrong Words spoken between two people at the far side of the room is ‘undue hardship’.

         1. We really need to stop looking at the exceptions rather than the rule. I have to be really careful, NDA and all that, but the facts of the case and the emotions of the case are not the same and I say that as someone who put three children through graduate school without loans.

            I’m the other side of that transaction since they would probably have gone someplace else were we not being frugal — though that might actually have worked out well all things considered — and I’m the one who would be out the opportunity cost. Even with the scholarships it cost me $250k. I can think of a lot of things I could do with that.

            As I’ve written before, it burns my @ss. Still, it’s sunk costs and it’s time to figure out what’s the best way forward from here. making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy based on the pre 2005 definition of undue hardship makes perfect sense to me. I doesn’t help the rich, really it doesn’t, and might really help those who are up against it. that’s what bankruptcy is for according to the law a “fresh start” when the burden of debt becomes too great.

            1. The rich paid. And sent them to better places.
               And yeah, we tallied. Between everything, over ten years it cost us probably around 200k. For state school. Two kids. And one of them still has prohibitive grad-school loans.
               And look at us. We’re not rich. I’m not asking for a refund. I’m not even asking for younger son’s loans to be forgiven. (He won’t let us pick them up) I’m just asking to let all the other people GO.

               1. [Sudden vision of Sarah standing before D.C. saying “Let my people go!”]

                  Then she raises her staff and parts the Potomac.

                  Revealing all the bodies at the bottom.

                  1. TBF I considered calling the post that. The US is anti-slavery and indenture. And we should remember that.

            2. 1) Make them dischargeable, period. When first created, student loans were treated the same as any other unsecured debt. Starting in 1976, bankruptcy discharge has become more and more restrictive. They are, for all intents and purposes, undischargeable now.
               There should be no undue hardship requirement.

               2) Change it so that ONLY schools can write loans. They can, if they want, contract out the PROCESS of doing so, but the school (or state gov’t) holds the paper and CAN’T SELL IT. It’ll be amazing how quickly the test of economic viability will gut useless programs. (hopefully). And how quickly the reduction in revenue will shrink the cancerous Ivory Towers. Eliminate any Federal guarantees. Sure, that will put a lot of folks at Sallie Mae and the Department of Education out of work. Boo hoo.

               3) The claim from BGE’s comment regarding student loan interest being 3rd largest source of government revenue is a curious one, I was unable to find any support for that claim. Perchance someone else knows of such support?

               Respectfully submitted.

               1. 3) someone else sent me exact proof, links. BUT I lost them. I’ll poke her when she surfaces online.

         2. Sure, but since they can’t prove that to a bankruptcy judge, that’s just their own emotions and has nothing to do with the problem at hand. Which is much further reaching than just the rainbow haired crowd, as Sarah has noted from her own personal experience.

         3. yes, but this is undue economic hardship.

3. I dropped out of college when I could no longer afford it (while working retail, no loans)

   I don’t have a problem with forgiving loans after 20 years of payments.

   I do have some heartburn with Biden crediting people for time they didn’t pay, and with them redefining the minimum payment from 10% of income to 5%

   the prior approach of forgiving a fixed amount based on your current income caused a lot more heartburn, it begged for new grads to game the system by taking a year off after college so that they would have no income (some people do this legitimately, mission work, etc) and then even if they will have a huge income in the future, they get treated as if they are dirt poor

   But the real fix is to stop the upward spiral. Make the schools liable for the amount of the loans that are forgiven after 20 years. It’s not a quick fix, but it will eventually provide the feedback needed.

   Ideally stop the ‘everybody needs college’ and ‘here’s free money to go’ attitude from the feds providing loans to everyone. Return it to private loans and/or colleges funding the loans (so that the people doing the lending have skin in the game and care if the student is likely to be able to repay it. What is their academic record, what are they deciding to major in, how much are they asking for, are they working while attending school or partying, etc)

   my nieces are in college right now, attending Christian colleges, and all are working while attending so they will graduate with fairly minimal loans. It can still be done.

   But I also remember a TV show where the main character was a streetwise cop and her partner was a super rich girl, they had a case at a local high-end college and the partner made a comment about “it’s not a shame to not be accepted” and was told that the main character had been accepted, followed by “why didn’t you attend then?”, with the response
   I realized that my father would literally spent his last dime to pay for it”. Students need to pick a school they can afford.

   like other charity, Scholarships fades when “the government will take care of it” becomes the norm.

   1. “Students need to pick a school they can afford.”
      This. My fantasy school was WAY outside my price range, so I didn’t apply. I went to a good but cheap school (Virginia Tech was a bargain in those days).

      1. Hon?
         NO ONE we’re talking about went to ivy leagues.
         THESE ARE STATE SCHOOLS.

         1. The costs at state schools are all over the map. There are still very affordable if unexciting paths. My niece spent two years living at home, working part time at a restaurant, and going to community college. It was a decent one, and cheap. She got better at things she had not much bothered with, and figured out what she wanted to do. Then, she went to a cheap state university for two years. After that, she headed to a different state for a Masters. It was free as long as she worked (in her field) in state for two years. It wasn’t where she wanted to live but she toughed it out.
            SHe is now married, working in her field and essentially without debt. Admittedly, not the most common of stories, but also not the rarest.

            1. BYU, right?

      2. K, go look at costs real quick.

         Going to cost about four times to put my kid through state university in the same state, different school but same fees, as it did me, 20 years ago. Since we are literally doing that this week, I happen to have spent a great deal of time on the dollar numbers. (My late grandparents and my late father and my mother funded college accounts for our kids.)

         In what is probably still and definitely was then the cheapest state college system in the country.

         Entry level income hasn’t quite doubled in the same time. I know what I made hourly, I know what my sons make hourly.

         So the correct answer to students should pick a college they can afford is . . . students cannot afford any college unless family can pay for it out of pocket or they get full scholarship.

         1. YEp. THis. And they can’t get a full scholarship unless they’re illegals or black WOMEN. Period.

            1. They can get what the schools CALL a full scholarship with good grades and an excellent ACT. Then you get hit with the “living expenses.” MO state school tuition is capped and all are reasonable. My kid got multiple full-tuition offers. At one state school, the “living expenses” were 1 1/2 times the tuition. They will get you somewhere.

               1. Our kid got full tuition offer for a private school across the country. He didn’t tell us. I wish he had. that school graduates people.
                  BUT the state school? Yeah.

         2. This. So much so.

   2. The state schools are worse. They seem cheaper, but they’ll scam more.

      1. It was literally cheaper for me to go to an out-of-state private school than it would have been to go to a state school or university. The two reasons were scholarships (and you can bet I applied for everything I was marginally eligible for) and the fact that I could, in fact, graduate in four years, even after switching majors in my sophomore year.

         Hell, my husband managed to graduate in four and a half (with a year and a half off in two chunks) despite going through something ludicrous like seven majors. And his career job (more than twenty years!) has nothing to do with his degree, other than that he has one.

         1. Yeah. Son should have taken Georgia tech with scholarship. And not hid the letter because he was 16 and didn’t want to move away from us.

            1. Tbh I’m apparently a complete abnormality. Georgia tech treated me right with a full ride for grad school although living expenses in Atlanta suck. But so did freaking ITT. My undergrad was bought out by them my senior year so in theory all I’ve paid on that loan will be coming back and at least my ugrad loans will be called null and void.

               Note that the crap they say ITT did is no different than any non-Ivy.

               1. No. Georgia tech is decent. That’s why I said son should have taken it.

                  1. Sending a young person 1500 miles away from home at 16 into the feral forest of mentally ill young people with no adult mentorship that is college would not have worked out well. He chose wisely.

                     1. We’d have gone with him. He didn’t choose wisely. The more expensive colleges rare actually graduating people.

                        1. You always find a way to prove you’re always right. Ok. But having attended such a tech school, they’re not such great places for highly gifted people. They graduate high achievers who fit in a box. That’s not their admitted 16 yr old. Now some of those highly gifted who don’t graduate become a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs but usually those are the ones with the resources to be buoyed up–which was by definition, not yours. A lot of those highly gifted 16 yr olds without help end up on 5 scripts while drugging out. Others jump. Some muddle through in 5, 6, 7, 8 years. Their stats look better because they cheat by retroactively removing those kids from the rolls.

                           I am not disagreeing that loans are bad or that the price to go to MIT isn’t cheaper than UVa for most middle or below- income fam, but those places where you think the grass is greener aren’t.

                           1. Yep. I get that. It’s just that weirdly the more expensive ones graduated more people last checked.
                              I’m not saying it would have turned out right. At 16 he was still terrified of talking to strangers.
                              And us going with him, would mean paying for his brother to live on his own, which would have other issues.
                              BUT I kind of am sad we didn’t try it.
                              Of course OTOH he has a job, he likes it a lot. It has the possibility of advancement. He’s doing okay. It’s not stable, but what is?

   3. it begged for new grads to game the system by taking a year off after college so that they would have no income (some people do this legitimately, mission work, etc) and then even if they will have a huge income in the future, they get treated as if they are dirt poor

      Not true. You have to send in your tax returns and recertify your income every year.

      1. once you have shown you have low income and get your debt forgiven, who cares what your income is after that?

         IMHO, that’s the fatal flaw with the claim that it will only be for those that need it, not the rich doctors/lawyers. Nobody makes a ton of money right out of school, so it is ripe for abuse.

         I fully support student loan reform, but I don’t support forgiveness of loans before we get the reform. Doing the forgiveness first doesn’t address the problem, just the symptom (just like we need to secure the border before we consider amnesty for illegal aliens)

         1. You don’t get your debt forgiven.
            BTW no one ever declared bankruptcy to evade loans. NOT REALLY. it was 1 or 2%. So, you were lied to.
            And WTF, what? People will never be able to pay off their loans. For 20 years. And aren’t. That’s not “everyone makes low income straight out school.”
            Geesh. Specious arguments.
            And again “doctors and laywers.” Envy is not a good look, and the ones you envy don’t make nearly what you think they do.
            Sure, one or two, but not the mass of them.

            1. this is all about forgiving the debt (or at least part of it)

               Biden’s plan that got shot down by the court was that if you make less than $X in a year you get a $10k or $20k of your principal eliminated. If you aren’t working (i.e. taking a year off to travel, doing missionary/charity work, etc) you have no income that year and so obviously qualify. Who can best afford to take a year off to do fun things? those who have enough money to not need the debt forgiveness in the first place.

               the ‘doctors and lawyers’ is a verbal shortcut for those who will make enough to pay off their loans, would it help if I added programmers, etc to that?

               1. Biden’s plan is an utterly bizarre thing and will not actually forgive most loans.
                  Apparently it might have to do with missing documents. it’s being dug into.
                  No. Doctors and Programmers are both under HEAVY third world competition and salaries aren’t crazy, IF THEY HAVE JOBS (In programmers cases.)
                  And lawyers we have over-graduated people. Again, “if they have jobs.”

         2. To be part of the income based repayment program, you must provide proof of income every year for twenty or twenty-five years. As you make more, your payment is adjusted accordingly.

            Now, if someone can figure out how to deliberately keep their net income low (and no, it doesn’t make allowances for cost of living or life situation beyond number of children and whether your spouse has loans as well) for a couple decades, and then suddenly start making money hand over fist, I wish they’d explain it to me. In this job market, the single biggest factor in how much a new job pays is how much your last one did. No new job is going to say “well, you were willing to accept crap wages for two decades to cheat the student loan program, but now we’ll pay you what you’re actually worth.”

            And ah yes, those stinking rich doctors and lawyers. I’m a lawyer thirteen years out from graduation. I make $60K a year as a public defender. My loan balance before thirteen years of 6.8% interest and payments that didn’t even touch the balance was three times that number. (You can rule of 72 that to get a decent estimate of what I owe now.) And yes, 6.8%, during a decade when mortgage rates were half that.

         3. Reform.

            Low Fixed Interest Rates on all new loans, and government agencies are forbidden in loan industry. Except schools themselves. Loans are chargeable (whatever the correct term is) in bankruptcy. Latter might ensure the schools quit jerking students around.

            Redo every existing single loan based on Low Fixed Interest Rates. Refund over payment of interest through tax refunds over multiple years if needed. Or Forgive outstanding balances, over amount of loan. Latter is easier (some will have overpaid, life isn’t fair).

            1. no disagreement from me on any of those.

               do that (or something similar) and then we can look and see what the situation is and if any debt elimination is needed

               1. I would throw in some sort of punishment for those pulling this scam. But that might be vindictive. Especially since I don’t have a toe in this fight (we paid off our loans, 34 years ago, our son doesn’t have loans). While being vindictive for others sounds nice, probably should leave that to them 🙂

               2. Make it dischargeable in bankruptcy

                  1. Oops forgot that one. Not everyone wants to take the hit of bankruptcy. Need options to allow people to be able to pay it off. With bankruptcy a valid, but distasteful option.

                     1. But they don’t even have that now.

                        1. I know. None of the remedies I proposed are available now.

         4. You have to do that for TEN YEARS. Ten years during which the people around you are contributing to retirement accounts. You know time in the market is the most important component of how much money you have in retirement, right? Compound interest, the 8th wonder of the world. Except when you owe it. And it gets compounded daily, or even monthly.

            Ten years in which you have to maintain that low income, and forget trying to start a family while you still have your fertility (or your wife does).

            It’s the same trap as welfare and disability, and that cliff is nasty.

            1. That’s the current process, not what has been proposed. What has been proposed is to look at your income at one point in time and if it’s low, eliminate some/all of your debt.

               1. seriously? NO ONE WANTS TO TAKE BANKRUPTCY at the beginning of their lives. It never happened. Saying it did was a scam by the left, as usual.

4. I would like to know how many of the people on the right claiming “It’s not fair!” have ever told others that Life Isn’t Fair.

   1. Heh, indeed…

   2. I don’t particularly care about fair. Everyone is going to get screwed and is going to benefit from other people getting screwed at some point.

      I care about precedent and procedure. Because if we don’t have those, then we’re simply being governed by fiat and we’ve had quite enough of that, thank you.

      1. Now run that logic the rest of the way.

         You have a massive scale fraud beyond the dreams of the most ambitious mesapotamian copper salesman.

         Is this the precedent that is to remain standing?

         1. No. And I didn’t say it was. Stop putting words in my mouth. “We have to do this the right way” is not “We can’t do anything at all.”

            Nor can I say there’s a lot of fraud involved. Extortion, sure, but those aren’t the same thing either.

            1. a) when was Obama ever so intimately involved in something that was not fraud?

               b) There were quite a lot of untrue statements made to highschoolers even twenty years ago, about utility of college degrees. The speakers may have been innocent enough that it was not lies. The ones I can think of were both probably innocent, and probably untrue.

               c) Schools are pretty heavily misrepresented, as far as I can really tell.

               1. Even ten years ago. There were “analysis” and serious articles places like WSJ too, like the ones about “english degrees.” which I saw.

               2. A. Obama wasn’t involved in anything at all. 2005. Bush was President. Tom Delay supported the bill. Chuck Grassley of Iowa sponsored it.
                  B. Not actually provable as lies, for a number of reasons. Misrepresentation you could probably get, but even then, with the way hiring was going such that applicants needed a degree to show that they had the aptitude employers couldn’t test for, people would still be pushing the credential even if they thought the utility was overblown. And the stats did show (and continue to show) higher earnings over a lifetime on average. It’s just that that stat leaves out a whole fecking lot, and most people don’t look deeper.
                  C. Depends on the school and what they’re representing, but the problem is the same with colleges and primary/secondary education. Students are the product, not the consumer, so they get screwed. Like I said, I am all for yanking accreditation and the ability to receive federal aid. Hit ’em where it hurts.

                  1. Obama was. And I can’t tell you how, but I know that in the orientation it was all about how president Obama had made the loans guaranteed by the government. I remember, because I got the cold sweats.

                     1. Have you considered the fact that you were being lied to? Like Biden being the great forgiver and fixer of loan issues that were basically just “this stuff was already supposed to happen, but I MADE IT HAPPEN, aren’t I the awesomest!”

                        Aha. Just looked it up. He didn’t make the loans “guaranteed” by government. He “reformed” the process (don’t make me laugh) by making the government the actual lender.

                        And that was, again, passed by CONGRESS. The “Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009” passed as a rider and amendment to the “Affordable Care Act.”

                        It’s amazing how the words “fiscal responsibility” and “affordable” mean their opposites when used by Democrats, doesn’t it?

                        So it’s two separate issues here. One is changing the administration of loans so that the government is the lender. Ostensibly to save money, which it clearly did not because that date marks a huge inflection point in soaring college costs.

                        But that was only thirteen years ago, so it can’t be the only issue, because the problem’s been ongoing for at least twice that long. It just got intensified in 2010.

                        And the second is the dischargeability thing, which has been an issue for close to fifty years, and I still don’t get how a three term Representative was able to push that legislation through.

                        You know, I really think sometimes that our obsession with cutting government spending can bite us in the ass. This legislation (making all loans direct loans) was sold as a way to cut the deficit. I wonder how many people would have voted for it on those grounds if given a choice.

                        1. That was the representatives elected in 08? Right? When OFA bragged of making up two million votes for Obama.
                           It’s been wrong for a long time.

                           1. Looks like, yes. The entire Obamacare debacle. Wheels inside wheels.

                              The thing is, it’s not usually the Congresscritters reading all the legislation themselves and then voting. It’s impossible for them to do so. So they have “legislative staff”, six or eight of them, or more, each with their little area of expertise, who do all the planning and writing and reading and liaising. Legislative aides and directors don’t have to show when they meet with lobbying representatives, either.

                              Isn’t “democracy” wonderful? /sarc

                     2. The non-dischargability in bankruptcy happened in the 2005 bankruptcy code reform while GWB was president; if I recall correctly the colleges were big supporters of the change because if discharged loans were too high a percentage of loans an institution made, they got punished by the Feds.
                        The federalization of student loans occurred under Obama and the changes were actually part of the Obamacare legislation, and thus was tied to Obamacare’s intended slow nationalization of healthcare. It was an effort to nationalize too large financial areas at the same time.

                        1. Non-dischargability in bankruptcy didn’t happen in one fell swoop, but rather was something that crept in like a poisonous fog over three decades.

                           “First they made the loans non-dischargable only when…”
                           “Then they made the loans non-dischargable when…”

   3. But don’t touch Medicare and socialist security. They paid for that.

      1. Want me to not take any of those that are left? Just return my contributions with investment return. Otherwise, I did pay for them, in lost opportunity if nothing else.

         1. I sometimes get crap when people find out I’ve been collecting Social Security since I was 70. I tell them it is as close as I can legally get to restitution for the money that was taken from me for over 50 years. (actually I usually intersperse the preceding with a few choice vulgarities but I don’ t want to offend the refined ladies here.)

            1. There ARE refined ladies here? Dear Lord. How do they survive?

               1. On fainting couches with smelling salts, mostly. 😎

      2. Those two monstrous Ponzi scams need to be phased out. Start by making them voluntary. Let anybody permanently, irrevocably opt-out of Socialist Stupidity and Medicare at any time BUT — they don’t get back what they paid in.

         For some, that will be a hard choice — abandon 20 years of sunk costs, or continue to be bled white supporting an unsupportable system, hoping it won’t implode before they ‘qualify for benefits’.

         Well, tough. It’s not the government’s job to spare them from making hard choices. At least that way they’d have a choice.
         ———————————
         Those who do not remember the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the mistakes. Those who do remember are doomed to watch everybody else repeat them.

         1. Yep. They were going into the general fund since decades before I was born. They’re just income tax with special name. You “paid in”? You got your peace dividend, your cheap college, your pension, your house at a year’s salary, your early entry into the 401k goldmine. Easily worth more than 80k in the overpriced college degrees that most people since the millennium have had to look at if they didn’t want to either compete with Jose and Co that your politicos brought over to dilute the few blue collar jobs still in the US or otherwise be a waitress your entire life

            1. we didn’t get any of that.

               1. Neither did we; a few too many “you” and “your” in that post, plus a fairly significant amount of bitterness, IMNSHO.

                  FWIW, I got curious and ran a spreadsheet of my SS withholding (initially billed as “not a tax”) from my working years, 1962 – 2006, and computed what the final value would be if I’d invested the money myself, from both my withholding and my employer’s, assuming an average 5% return; it came to almost $800k (2007 dollars). I somehow doubt I’ll see all of it…

                  1. Oh, and BTW, that ~$800k was in 2007, the year after I retired. It’s now had an additional 16 years of ROI, making it almost keep up with disbursements. Which, BTW, are taxable income, even though tax was withheld from that “withheld” SS when it was extorted.

                     “It’s good to be the king.” Or in this case, the Feddies. 😦

                     1. Actually, that was incorrect; the assumed average 5% return exceeds the disbursements. By almost double.

                     2. BTW, are taxable income, even though tax was withheld from that “withheld” SS when it was extorted.
                        ………………..

                        Um. Tax is on net earnings after SS paid. At least federal and State. We always had two taxable options. SS taxable (everything). State and Federal taxable (minus SS, insurance premium co-pay if any, 401(k) contribution). So, no, State and Federal weren’t paid on the SS amount paid out. SS was paid on 401(k) contributions.

                        Our SS is not taxed by the state at all. Our SS fed taxed is 80%, of SS received, maximum.

                        Not denying the “extorted” definition. 100% was.

                        Hubby started taking SS at age 62 in 2012. Mine started late 2018 (October), also age 62. Based on average ROI, we are each pulling more than ROI that the feds use (3 – 5% more than the “extra”/year monthly “extra benefit” had we waited). Live long enough we’ll get *back everything put in and the ongoing ROI (again ROI the feds use); odds are in our favor. But in contrast the reason we started SS at 62 despite discounted (more for me than hubby, because ages of “full” SS) is because we are earning triple the ROI the feds use, more than beating even today’s inflation, on our own money. Thus using SS now to preserve our own funds. But that does bring up the point that using our own ROI on extorted funds, we would have been better off forced to save into our own SS accounts than being extorted to fund the SS in the general accounts. Wasn’t our option, so the other way of looking at SS is more realistic.

                        (*) Both maternal grandparents (age 94), paternal grandmother (age 80), did, and mom already is past what she and dad paid in combined (she is also past what she paid in for her PERS, that is on a $500 current monthly benefit, after 27 years, and counting, COLA’s).

                        1. I stand corrected; it’s been quite a while since I looked into this at all. Like you, my SS is not taxed by the state (AZ), and we’ve paid zero federal income tax for at least the last 10 years; the RMD may change that in the future, depending on…?. And FWIW, your situation sounds quite a bit like ours. 🙂

                           1. We aren’t getting away with “no taxes”. But we do get a bundle back from both the state and the feds. We’d prefer to pay but short of not paying taxes on hubby’s pension and IRA’s (not RMD, just legal without penalty) as pulled, and pay quarterly, which hubby doesn’t want to do. (Not paying feds on SS or my “pension”, otherwise known as “Oh! My turn to pay for dinner!”. Although under Bidenonmics is rapidly not enough for even that. $121/month 🙂 ) When hubby’s RMD kicks in, refunds are not likely. Current rules, that is 2 years. For me it is another 6. Right now the withholding on what we do withhold on is set to the lowest percentage allowed, sort of 0%.

                              FWIW, your situation sounds quite a bit like ours. 🙂
                              ……….

                              We would be typical.

         2. 20? You wish.

            1. Folks into the scam for more than 20 years might choose to stay in.

               At least they’d have the choice.
               ———————————
               VOTE FOR CTHULHU
               — We’ve had enough of all these lesser evils.

            2. 38 and counting for us. And mine sucks, because most of my money went for that ultra special self-employment tax. Doctors and lawyers weren’t paying. So they needed to skewer all penny ‘a’penny freelancers.
               And btw, the doctors and lawyers were too paying. At least the ones we knew.

      3. But don’t touch Medicare and socialist security. They paid for that.
         ………………..

         Legalized ponzi scheme. But I’ll accept seeing that drawn back before I’ll accept them confiscating our 401(k)/IRA, or Roths. I knew when we were paying into medicare and SS that we were paying those currently drawing it. Knew with the bubble without enough paying into it behind us it likely wasn’t going to be there when we wanted it. Did changed the terms on us. But it was there when we were wanted to take it. Surprised? 100%

         1. Give Bidenflation a few more years and it’ll be essentially worthless.

5. Sarah, I think you may have identified two separate problems here. And there is a third that you have not mentioned.

   The first issue is college curricula that waste the student’s time with unnecessary courses and unneeded prerequisites. Plus scheduling issues. There’s a side-issue with regard to using graduate students (who may or may not be proficient in English) to teach undergraduate classes. In my years at Virginia Tech, I can recollect ONE non-lab class session not taught by the instructor of record (he was sick that day).

   The second is deception in college loans. Not sure if I agree with you there.

   The third, one you didn’t mention, is the plague of administrators at most colleges. Fifty years ago, the management overhead was fairly low. Today…well, those Useless Studies graduates had to be hired by SOMEONE, and the colleges can pass the bill on to the students.

   Recommended corrective actions:
   1. Concur on making student loan debts dischargable in bankruptcy.
   2. Tax endowments heavily. Possibly at 100%.
   3. Make Federal college loans contingent on the major. Not one penny of taxpayer money for Useless Studies.
   4. Federal qualification standards for colleges – if you want students to be eligible for Federal loans, if you want your tuition to be tax-deductible…you meet standards. Both for an honest curriculum that gets students into the workforce promptly and for keeping overhead under control.

   1. Addition: When possible, offer student loan work-off plans. Yes, you will be underpaid. Yes, you will be sent to the nasty places of the United States. But you can get clear of debt.

      1. Part of me really likes this (and I think there is some provision that working as a doctor in underserved areas counts as multiple years or something like that)

         but I also cringe in thinking of the abuse that could be done. Think of the useless studies folks getting their loans forgiven for doing Climate Activism (aka Community Organizers)

         There was a TV show years ago about a rural town that funded a doctor’s scholarship with the proviso that the doctor had to practice in the town for X years after graduation, the doctor was a big town guy who assumed that he could get out of that requirement, but they held him to it. We need Scholarships like that, full agreement going in what you are signing up for in exchange for the funding.

         1. Yes, there is, but they deny the forgiveness on bureaucracy slip ups even then.
            And again, do you LOVE having doctors indentured to the government? OF ALL PEOPLE?

            1. This already happens with military, if you go to school with a ROTC scholarship you commit to X years of service after you graduate. If you decide to bail on the service, you end up liable for the scholarship money.

               I see nothing wrong with this.

               I see it like the make-work projects during the Great Depression where the govenment was passing out money, but required some work in exchange. Some of the work was real (building hoover dam), some was makework (living history, going around and interviewing the elderly). I think we should do more of this sort of thing for welfare, and I see no reason not do do the same thing for college funding.

               And like in Starship Troopers, they should ALWAYS be able to find some job (IIRC ‘counting caterpillars by touch if nothing else’)

               1. Yup.

               2. The make-work stuff in the Great Depression was a horrible abuse by FDR.
                  I don’t understand how you see nothing wrong with indenturing people to a leftist government. I’m honestly stunned.
                  Do you not understand how it corrupts society and opinions and everything?
                  Also, for the record, ROTC is the agreement made AHEAD. This would be “let’s punish people who were basically defrauded! Let’s make them indentured slaves.”
                  I’m stunned this occurs to any liberty-minded person.
                  OR that any liberty minded person approves of FDR’s boondoggle that increased the duration and severity of the depression.

                  1. ROTC is the agreement made AHEAD
                     …………….

                     Also except for the academies, ROTC scholarships do not necessarily bind the student. That typically doesn’t happen until start, and sometimes end, of the 3rd/junior year.

                     1. The Reader remembers that differently. An actual ROTC scholarship committed you to service at the point it started. You could be in ROTC without a scholarship (the Reader was) for the first 2 years of college without a commitment. At the beginning of your junior year you had to decide.

                        1. You could be correct on the ROTC actual scholarship. Son never had one of those. He’d get small grants and awards over the 3 years.

                           beginning of your junior year you had to decide.
                           ………………

                           What we and son thought too. But that isn’t what happened. He didn’t have to decide until almost through with his senor year (with another year to finish because of one class). Then couldn’t because Obama administration cut everything hard. He could have changed the direction. Chose not to. Partly because the ROTC program he was involved in, sat down every student that they couldn’t contract with, and laid out what was going on, and their view of it. Not one student went with another ROTC program that would have otherwise taken them in.

                  2. I am only talking about agreements made ahead of time.

                     1. Sure, but these weren’t. And kept getting altered.
                        And if government takes its boot from people’s necks, we’ll have plenty of scholarships for whatever that do cover college.
                        Particularly since colleges will have to get real about what is actually taught and how, and stop raising costs every year.

         2. All my loans were from Alaska State Student Loan program, that had the proviso that if you returned to Alaska after graduation they would forgive 10% of the principal every year for five years.

            But that would have meant living in the same city as my parents when I was already feeling like a failure for dropping out of law school, so I did not avail myself of it. Cue up three decades of interest-only payments, no payments at all, interest + $10 payments, and then finally paying it off with my first big end-of-year bonus.

      2. What on Earth is with everyone being AOC?
         NO. NO.
         That already exists. And it’s at the government’s pleasure.
         Do all these conservatives really want people indentured to the government?
         Make the college expenses reasonable and allow people to work-study.
         The rest is nonsense.

         1. If the feds get out of the business or making loans, there are people who will not qualify in a risk-based lending evaluation. Some of those should not go to college, but there should be ways for people willing to work for it, so I think having ways for people to pay off the debt with service rather than dollars is reasonable.

            1. There should be, but that would be contracts made up front. there should also be private scholarships, and scholarships based on merit, not skin color and sex.

               1. If it’s private individuals, I don’t care if their criteria is left handed redheads.

                  Now, if it’s government, the schools themselves, or banks making loans, then yes, merit only.

                  1. It’s the government. And the ONLY people getting loans pretty much are black females. Plus illegals get college for free.

                     1. Which really says what the powers that be think of black women and their capacity to do well in a meritocracy, doesn’t it? I mean, talk about insulting.

                  2. Ooh! I happen to be a left handed red head! (or at least I was, back when I had hair) Where do I sign up for the lovely free money???

         2. Do all these conservatives really want people indentured to the government?

            Do I need to remind you how many conservatives get… excited… at how Things Were Better in such and such Decade, always being a decade where the government had its boot firmly on the necks of the population?

            1. Can you name a decade since 1913 where the government HASN’T had its boot firmly on the necks of the population?

               That’s outside of living memory. How do you expect people to name a decade they’ve never lived in and don’t know what it was ACTUALLY like? That includes you AND me, BTW.

               1. Since it was at its peak in the early to mid part of last century and has been waning, I expect them to not name one of those decades.

                  I also expect people who were (for example) adults in the 90s to have had a better idea of what was going on in the culture than someone who was less than 10 years old at the time. And yet I routinely hear people making fools of themselves in that way.

      3. “When possible, offer student loan work-off plans.”

         They have that. It’s called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

         Congress keeps changing the rules so that everyone who tries to get out that way never quite meets the requirements. Y’know, when they don’t just lose your application and all your supporting documents.

         Until FICUS eased the requirements so that people who had been trying to get their loans gone through that program suddenly could.

         1. THIS. It’s indentured slavery. For the most straight forward ones: medical degrees, where you think paying off by working in rural or whatever area would be OBVIOUS only 2% of the people who try to follow all the rules get their loans discharged.
            Oh, and that year it counts as income, so people who’ve never made over…. say 85K are on the hook for 350K “income” in taxes.

   2. Those are all related. We need to get government out of the system. It enabled everything else.

      1. government loans are a large part of the problem (and I agree they are enabling a huge amount of the problems), but there were problems before the government loans. If we just eliminate them without looking at why it was done in the first place, we aren’t really solving the problem.

         1. There really weren’t “many problems”
            And college was much cheaper. opening the government spigot into college coffers was a BAD idea.

         2. The first federal loans were in 1958, for national defense, and they’ve only expanded since then. And the number of college students has, as well. What problem do you think is being solved by federal student loans freely available and unsecured that would come back without those loans?

   3. Federal loans are given to students at schools with Higher Learning Commission accreditation, and programs with gen ed courses.

      There is no way to just avoid ‘useless studies’. People in officially legitimate degree programs are being driven insane by the useless studies stuff mainstreamed on campus.

      Yes, right now feds hire engineers, and have programs to fund engineering degrees.

      The status quo results in a situation where the public trust can maybe no longer support that federal employment, and one might as well shut down both it and federal funding for engineering degrees.

      1. Engineering degrees require you to take a semester of various studies. Ask me how I know.

         1. Computer science required a minor, at least where I went. My response was “Already have a full 4 year degree.” “Does not matter choose a minor.” “Fine. Forestry.” “U of redacted doesn’t offer Forestry.” “Already have a bachelors in Forestry.” Pause. Signed off on by department chair and my advisor.

      2. Plus people have different definitions of “useless studies.” The number of people recently who have gone on about polisci being a useless degree….
         Which it is not, but even if it were, the fact is, Marxist crap has been creeping into STEM, too. Feminist theories on glaciation and “indigenous ways of knowing” and “the unbearable Whiteness of Classics” and such.

         While I like the idea of having to submit an essay including information from the Occupational Outlook Handbook about how you plan to use your degree and what the outlook for jobs in that field is, I’m not sure how actually practicable that is. I’m concerned about issues with who gets to choose whether each applicant gets aid or not, too.

         Today’s “no aid for useless studies degrees” is tomorrow’s “we’ve had enough cis hetero white men in physics/engineering/medicine. We need more black/indigenous/trans/lesbian/disabled people.”

         1. THIS. And btw that’s already happening. You’re more likely to get engineering scholarships if you’re female.

         2. This. Any scheme that rests on “government shall regulate the existing government system to serve our desired ends” fails on “pray I do not alter it further” and bad actors gaming the system with the aid of the courts. The only reform that will work is just to kill the existing system entirely and let the chips fall where they may for everyone dependent on it.

         3. Look at a lot of the Federal funded/support for graduate STEM, and look how many have explicit or implicit demographic carve outs.

            Beyond that, if you are in Demographic, the relentless drumbeat around that may result in you finishing a hard STEM MS, but then deciding to quit that career and do some sort of useless NGO thing instead.

            Or maybe you get convinced that you are a race traitor for studying math, or cannot be good at math, despite evidence, because of race.

            Or you are driven insane by the gaslighting from your twentieth or twenty fifth consecutive year inside a very curated to federal government agenda school.

            This before considering potential future insanity in administrator efforts to ‘correct discrimination’, engineering education ‘research’, ‘evidence based’ changes in teaching methodology, and such things as eliminating grading.

            Is there any clear objective justified criteria for distinguishing ‘useless studies’ that woudl not see potential positives on modern STEM?

            A lot of graduate work in engineering right now involve ‘data’ and machine learning. Some of that seems to be legitimate engineering study. Almost certainly some of it is an approach that relies on assumptions that can be shown to be incorrect, and which absolutely does not belong in a serious engineering school. A clear set of rules for distinguishing those cases does not seem to be well established in the literature.

         4. As stated elsewhere job markets are not stable. Who would have said anyone in computers would be facing layoffs? Especially in any of the big firms? Is that true now? Has that been true for 25+ years? Anyone hear of the .DOT COM bust? Timber was golden in the PNW. Is it now? (FYI. Foresters who managed to get in and stick it out are now retiring. Demand so low that now it is a field to get into. Want to get into Ranger for the park systems, both state and federal? They are begging for people. But be aware you also have to pass being law enforcement for either. That was not true 30+ years ago. Was heading that way fast. But was not there, yet.) Welding. Know of someone who was a welder for two decades. Now he works retail in the warehouse for a local hardware store. He started after his son did. Both started on the floor in different departments. Son moved up to training. His dad had to take the employee orientation and training from his son. (Dad was a proud papa student.) Heck that is just in my direct experience.

         5. Case in point:

            https://www.thecollegefix.com/feds-paid-300000-to-study-why-white-male-physicists-dont-fight-racism-sexism-in-stem/

            1. Why do these academic ‘stoodies’ begin with a conclusion and then make up shit to support it? That’s all I ever see.

               There aren’t many women in physics and engineering because not many women are interested. Believe me, us geeks would welcome them eagerly. Maybe too eagerly… 😛

               Should women be forced into scientific and engineering careers to make the numbers ‘correct’?
               ———————————
               Imposing your idea of “equity” on people is every bit as evil as somebody else imposing inequity on them.

               1. I started college with a major in engineering. Got a little over a year in when I realized that I could do it, but I’d hate it. Or as my dad put it, “If you really loved it, you’d be getting straight As.” (Note that this advice does not apply to everybody. He just knew me.)

                  Now I’m working a perfect job for me, task-based telecommuting where I can clock in or out at will, enabling me to do the stay-at-home mom things and make money doing something I enjoy. At a job that didn’t exist when I was in college, in a manner that didn’t exist half a decade ago. Would I have made more sooner in engineering. Oh heck yeah. But I’d have spent a lot on things to make me happier that wouldn’t have been as effective as the path I chose…

   4. “3. Make Federal college loans contingent on the major. Not one penny of taxpayer money for Useless Studies.”

      Absolutely not. No federal loans, for anyone, for anything.

      The federal government should never have been allowed the influence and power that comes with having people owe them money.

      1. No federal loans for anything. I AGREE. Because even engineering requires a semester of “studies.” Or more, now.

      2. “Absolutely not. No federal loans, for anyone, for anything.”

         THIS. And make sure you include grants.

   5. Alternate Suggestions:
      1) No alternate, agree. Only they are dischargeable under the same terms as they were when student loans first became a thing, i.e. the same as ANY other unsecured debt.
      2) Uh, no. However, #4 below will take a chunk out of those endowments and get them in use edjumikating again.
      3) Eliminate Federal college loans COMPLETELY. If you want Uncle Sam to pay for college, join the Army.
      4) The college (or state/local gubmint for public schools) is the loan holder and CAN’T SELL IT.

      5) Hugely important. Legislate away the idiotic Supreme Court decision that turned the college degree into the only legal proxy for intelligence testing, a decision that is a large part of the explosion of credentialism. Note that there are two sectors that are not limited by the decision. Law enforcement and the military.

      1. 5) Today’s college degrees are more like a proxy for stupidity and incompetence.

         1. Yes. But they still require them.

6. Well…I got caught by the, “your class work in X isn’t good enough for us, take it over,” thing. I took pre-calculus and Calc at the local community college, but the state university wouldn’t accept it so I had to take them over. At least, I could afford to pay university tuition, one class at a time. But it added another year to the time it took to crawl through my Management of Technology/MBA program.
   Our son already thanked us for getting him through without debt.

   1. I know of a case where an adjunct professor taught an art class at both a community college and a state university in the same city. She taught the same class both places, same materials, same syllabus, same grading standards, but the state univ. would not accept the CC credit.

      1. Yep. That is exactly what they do.

   2. Which is why, at least 20 year ago when I was in, OR had a program where you couold fulfill the pre-req’s all at a CC, if you graduated with a AA/Oregon Transfer Degree.

7. I’m glad I got my loans (which weren’t much) paid off in 2012. I don’t think anyone would listen if I told them not to go to college.

8. Until this hurts the colleges, it will continue.

   As long as they can get people to borrow money for degrees that a sane gerbil would know won’t be able to pay them off, and as long as they don’t get penalized for low graduation rates it will continue.

   All those administrators that didn’t exist 70 years ago, and all those tuition increases exist because the colleges are lapping up the gravy from the trough.

   1. If you’re blaming colleges for student loan debt being non-dischargeable, you are barking up the wrong tree and have the wrong solution in mind. That’s a Congress and federal government thing.

      Now, if you want to blame colleges for scheduling issues designed to keep students in school and unable to graduate, that’s a separate issue. The way to tackle that one is the accrediting institutions. Colleges are taking longer to graduate students? Clearly they are not in the business of education. Yank their accreditation, and make it so they can’t received federal student aid of any kind (including grants and scholarships. THAT’S how you hurt them.

      1. If you’re blaming colleges for student loan debt being non-dischargeable, you are barking up the wrong tree and have the wrong solution in mind. That’s a Congress and federal government thing.

         And if you think these are wholly separate entities which never communicate in any way despite all being staffed by the same people I have a bridge to sell you.

         1. I never said anything of the sort, and you REALLY need to stop putting words in my mouth. That’s twice, and on neither occasion did I say anything CLOSE to what you are implying I said.

            Identify the problem correctly so you can put through the solution that SOLVES THE PROBLEM. Unless you think it was colleges telling Congressman Ertel that they were concerned about defaults and bankruptcies on loans that weren’t owed to them. Several years before the tuition rises started.

            1. No, the conversation probably went something like this: “Gee, Congressman, it would be a great thing to encourage college attendance. Please make sure your legislation does that, and we have some suggestions…”

               1. How in the name of anything logical does “People are going to college and then immediately declaring bankruptcy, it’s outrageous!” in any way encourage college attendance? How exactly does placing a five year moratorium on declaring bankruptcy (without “undue hardship” that is STILL in effect) encourage college attendance?

                  Seriously. That not only doesn’t follow, that’s completely the opposite of how it would work.

                  NOT TO MENTION the fact that the Higher Education Amendments were incorporated into the Bankruptcy Code in 1978 because the CODE was being amended and updated because there was a general sense of problems with bankruptcy abuse. (Possibly because there was an expansion of credit use around that time, which led to several credit and banking crises a few years later.)

                  1. Yes, there was a “general sense of problems with bankruptcy abuse.” And that sense was so well sourced that when Congress passed the first law restricting the ability to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, they didn’t present a single case of it happening.

                     Doctors and lawyers declaring bankruptcy immediately after graduation is about as real as strangers poisoning Halloween candy and teenagers having parties where they empty the contents of the medicine cabinet and eat a handful of random pills.

                     1. It was a scam. Yep.

            2. The feds effectively nationalized the schools when they shifted the loan rules.

               There is a faction in fed gov that wanted to turn a bunch of various generations into indentured servants.

               Loans are part of that.

               The other part of that is the universities being made appendages of the federal government, and getting marching orders to run the costs up way high.

               The dear colleagues letter, and the universities moving sex crimes to their privately run star chambers.

               Governmnet funding for ‘economics research’, and how many ‘economists’ are ‘studying’ the impact of government programs as a primary driver.

               Government funding for race oppression studies, and race oppression history, that just so happens to result in ‘scholars’ who are spokesman on behalf of the government, claiming that current government push for white supremacist terrorism is totally different from the 1920s and 1930s white supremacist terrorism that did very similar things in very similar ways.

               Then there is the law faculty.

               Then there is the medical faculty, who just so happen to have ‘officially’ lined up with the arbitrary, capricious, and insane government demands.

               The hypothesis that the universities are independent of the federal government requires either the assumption of a remarkable statistical coincidence, or mainly close involvement with a tertiary school that I would suspect to be anomalous or having had no close contact with the inside baseball of a loan receiving tertiary school during the past five or ten years.

      2. “That’s a Congress and federal government thing.”

         Gee, I wonder if colleges have lobbyists, not to mention alumni, who “consulted” on how that law was written.

         1. The problem is going to congress and the federal government will take another 20 years of enslaving students. By that time there will be no children, except among the illegals, the welfare recipients and the very rich. No one else can afford marriage or children.
            At this point the stupidity on stupidity needs to be hacked to the root.
            Oh, and you bet your bottom dollar the legislators will JUST make it dumber with more stupidty.

            1. It’s the only thing you can do. There’s just no mechanism for blanket loan forgiveness, nor should there be. For one thing, it neither stops the problem from happening again nor lowers tuition costs in any way (probably encourages them to raise tuition further, in fact), nor does it solve the course sequencing issue that is so blatant and ridiculous.

               And it is politically untenable. No matter how much you argue that it isn’t just the blue-haired grievance majors–and I agree with you that it isn’t–the perception exists that it IS. And the fact is, a large part of the student debt burden is for graduate education. Yes, I know that’s because people go back to school to avoid having to pay loans–you can see the spike in tuition costs around 2009-2010, during the financial crisis. That still creates a perception issue. That issue is real and you can’t just handwave it away.

               It’s honestly exactly like the election issues. The mechanism for protesting blatant fraud and rerunning an election or even auditing it just isn’t there.

               1. Oh, there is a mechanism. I’m 100% sure there are laws to deal with indenture and debt-indenture from the time of company towns.
                  We need a supreme court that stands on two and goes “Oh, that is so illegal” to the feds.
                  Of course, we need a case that gets to that point.

                  1. Um. I’m not sure that it will actually work that way. The 13th Amendment forbids indentured servitude, but the definition of such usually includes “contract to work without pay/salary” so I’m not sure that the Supremes will agree with you that public service incentives constitute indentured servitude. Still less general federal loan borrowers being indentured.

         2. Seriously, dude. You have no idea what you are talking about, and even if you did, sure, Congressmen can be lobbied. And IT IS WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING RIGHT NOW. It isn’t only the other guys, the bad guys, that lobby Congress. They’re remarkably responsive to threats of losing power.

            1. we can’t, because ‘we’ isn’t a group. It’s a bunch of families and individuals, most of whom are ashamed of being in this situation.
               And that’s the problem.

               1. Correct, but if you’re going to say that “the Right” needs to step up and realize that it’s a universal problem, then “the Right” needs to have a policy plan in place, and that policy plan is

                  Repeal or replace the parts of the Bankruptcy Code dealing with student loans to make them dischargeable just like other unsecured debt such as medical bills and credit cards.
                  Require any student loans from here forward to be simple, not compound, interest, and all loans should have mechanisms for students to be able to direct payments to principal
                  Good-faith payments made over twenty years (perhaps scalable by income) result in discharge after twenty years that does not get counted as income by the IRS
                  Accreditation agencies are required to take a hard look at graduation rates, tuition rises, and course sequencing effects and must renew accreditation every two to five years (I actually have no idea how often they have to be renewed now) with those factors taken into account

                  Give families and individuals something to rally around. A plank for friendly Congresscritters (to the extent they exist) to stand on. Something we as individuals can point to against those who say it’s all grievance studies majors unable and unwilling to pay their bills.

                  If we’re not willing to organize and actually make things happen, then we’re just whining.

            2. We’re at a considerable disadvantage. We’re not organized, with nothing better to do with our lives, and spending $billions of other people’s money on our own obsessions.

               Instead of just threatening to cut off government ‘aid’, cut it off. Completely. Permanently. Get the feral government the F*K OUT of the education business. Abolish Jimmy Carter’s Department Of Education that has spent 45 years and $2 TRILLION wrecking our schools. Stop them stealing our money and ‘awarding’ it to their cronies. Knock down the whole government-academic complex and post warning signs around the toxic rubble.

               Aren’t a hundred years of abject failure enough?

      3. I noticed that you were complaining that others were putting words in your mouth.

         Yet here you are doing the same thing to me.

         Did I say anything about bankruptcy? No!

         I was just pointing out that the colleges are the ones who are profiting from all this. And that they have an incentive to continue accepting student loans for ridiculously inflated tuition when they are not hurt at all by default or forgiveness.

         Who benefits? Cui Bono. The colleges/universities.

9. “And the hours tend to be weird, I’m not sure if because management is sadistic, or because they just don’t care, or because there’s stupid regulations in the mix.”

   When it comes to retail work, invoke the power of “and”, as well as “all of the above”.

   “Well, one of the ways to PAUSE the student loan payments is to head back to school half time. When all else fails, you borrow more, and feed the dysfunctional system more.”

   Can confirm. And at one point had no options other than to do that because I had nowhere I could go, no resources, no vehicle, no help, and it was either “go back to school or leave the house and starve”. Literally. Dagnabbit.

   (Try getting a job from nothing but the clothes on your back. Just try. That was all I had. Plus some books.)

   I inherited some money at last – what my brothers didn’t cheat out of the estate – and so I paid off my loans. And… I have one 21 year old car, some clothes, some books, and am just – barely – scraping by with one of those retail jobs because I have a massive gap in my employment history from near a decade of caregiving. Which I couldn’t get out of either, because one sibling would have reported me for elder abuse if I did run with nothing but the clothes on my back. He made the veiled threat, and I know him, he would have made sure it stuck – pay to take care of his mother, never, but to make sure I got jailed? Oh yeah.

   If loans had been dischargeable in bankruptcy I’d be in a much better place today.

   Then again, if that’d been the case I’d have been able to avoid the entire trainwreck of the past 15 years of my life, because I’d have been able to leave well before my mother became impaired, and it could have been her beloved sons’ problem instead.

   Am I bitter? A bit. Do I want the entire student loan system burned to the ground? Oh Bleep yeah.

   1. I work in IT (currently in cybersecurity) and while there are a lot of people applying for the jobs, there is only a small percentage of people who are good at it and enjoy it (and, like programming, the difference between the run-of-the-mill person and someone with a talent and enjoyment isn’t a 10% or something like that, it’s more like 10x or more)

      I managed to get in the door at Google without a college degree, in spite of that being a listed requirement (it didn’t work out) but recently they have dropped a degree from their list of requirements, as have several other Big Tech companies

      1. They’re tired of all the college-educated idiots.

         1. And yet Google et al cheerfully support the Democrats (abetted by too many Republicans) who have enabled that idiocracy.
            You get what you vote for, even if YOU don’t want it.

            1. The majority of the people at Google and other Big Tech companies are VERY left.

               They went to college (many with graduate degrees, almost always with loans/scholarships/etc) and then were scooped up by the companies and pampered. Probably 90% of the people working there have never had any other job (let alone been fired or needed to worry about money)

               They don’t need to conspire together, they just all ‘know’ the right answer

               1. It’s a prospiracy.

         2. No, thats not the reason. The reason is they can’t meet their hiring goals for race or gender with college degree requirements.

            What is missing from this discussion of make work and weed our colleges is something Sarah missed because she lives in the stratosphere of intellect and so do her kids

            The overhwleming majority of kids in college cannot read 500 words at a newspaper level, cAnnot write a coherent sentence, and can’t compute simple arithmetic on fractions.

            It really is the case that most kids entering college need a year or two of remedial schooling, and those courses cannot count toward graduation requirements. They cannot function at the college level. So no, calculus is no longer calculus is no longer calculus.

            The make work classes are made to make up for it. The endless computer based options of problem sets designed to avoid written arguments of length–make a video, add a flip grid, participate on a discussion baord–are all the students can do. In science, the endless homework exercises is to ensure everyone passes. The neurotic young women manage it because it’s all about executive function and not about content.

            Now these kids are unemployable in any job requiring following directions, reading or writing, computing simple arithmetic. And the assumption by corporations is they’re unemployable.

            What’s going to happen is more colleges will be totally govt subsidized with no loan to the student, and they will be giant employment factories for their own graduates.

            1. Oh, I know that. I’ve written about the kids’ I’ve tried to tutor, and screaming I wouldn’t allow my kids to write those essays in 3rd grade.
               No, the problem is they push these on EVERYONE. Including very prepared and smart people.
               Correction, they didn’t do it 15 years ago. BUT they did it ten years ago.

               1. Yes they do. Because that’s 90% of the students. The first two years of college are now garbage.

                  But with the demise of the SAT, that’s every school. The “elite” ones are no better. Understand there’s nowhere else that’s “better.”

                  You’re better off instead working your high school CIS or dual enrollment program to take those courses as a high school student. In my state, even homeschoolers can enroll. Yes you need to work the system and pay close attention and not assume credits transfer. You can’t assume the system is designed to educate or wishes to help. But if you do that you’re advantaging your kid beyond the others.

                  .

                  1. Our college didn’t accept the dual credits they’d given. So, you know….

   2. Have you put the years you worked as a home care giver on your resume? Seriously. It shows the reason for the gap. When asked your wage. It was slavery. List the brother who threatened for contact. Okay. Maybe not. But definitely let be known why not providing references for that time.

      1. Yes, exactly. In-home caregiver is a valid profession.

         1. Only if you get paid for it.

      2. Um. I don’t know how caregiving for an elderly parent is treated in your social circle. Where I live IRL, nobody cares that it was involuntary servitude.

         Nobody. Cares.

         As far as anyone I’ve spoken with is concerned, I was supposed to do it and I couldn’t possibly have asked my brothers for any help at all because they’re married. They have families to support.

         In fact, if I hinted at all that I did not want to be there in that mess, or couldn’t take care of someone 24/7/365 AND hold down a job at the same time, I’d never get hired.

         1. Blink.

            I just know Elderly Care, locally anyway, is considered a job, for a family member or not. But then locally being coerced into unpaid parental care is considered abuse.

            Glad you are out from under that. Have you moved out of the area?

            1. Couldn’t move too far, I didn’t have the resources. I could and did move with no forwarding address to all of the other parties involved.

               That was, BTW, tricky and a near scrape in itself, because she died intestate, meaning ALL of us were stuck legally entangled with the house. I managed to land a rental and move out, but was coming back to make sure the place stayed intact until legal stuff could be arranged – and one of those times I came back, found a new lock on the door.

               A brother claimed to know Absolutely Nothing about how that had happened. And yet, somehow, when the real estate agent asked who had the key? He did.

               So. Yeah. Hire a locksmith to lock me out of the place he thought I was still living, sure. Send any money even to help care… nope.

               It has been so nice not hearing from any other family member. So nice.

               1. That bio family is a nightmare. I hope you’ll be able to shake them off with distance sooner rather than later.

                  1. So far. So far.

                     …Now I just need to get a better financial footing so I can untense enough to write faster….

                  2. This.

10. “Yes, you can take technical certificates. I’m starting to look a little askance at how many people are taking welding, and wondering if there are jobs for all of them. I haven’t heard.”

    Several years ago, in the comments over at Ace’s blog, someone talked about this. Based on what was said, all of the various jobs of this type follow a boom and bust cycle. There’s a shortage of workers in one of these trades, so employers start offering more money. But this draws more and more people to that specific trade, and you end up with a glut of employees, which pushes the wages back down. So, fewer people learn that particular trade, which causes the number of new employees to dwindle, which causes the wages for that particular trade to increase to attract the more limited number of workers, etc…

    IT support is in a permanent glut state. I work it. I actively encourage anyone who asks to only get involved in the field if they really like working with computers. I’ve had jobs where I probably would have been getting paid better if I’d worked in fast food, instead. I could probably move to Network Admin with a little effort, but I’m focusing on Cybersecurity instead right now. And you don’t need an IT support background for either of those fields.

    I was a Comp Sci major for a very short while. One of the classes I had to take was basically digital logic (AND gates and the like; I can’t remember what the actual class name was). The instructor was a young kid from East Asia. I remember at one point, one of the students in the class asked him about one of the homework problems from the textbook. The kid took a look at it… and couldn’t figure it out.

    /sigh

    I admit I’m not overly keen on the idea of debt forgiveness, but at the same time I acknowledge that it does sound like there are a lot of problems in the system. Things clearly need to change. I do like the idea that Glenn Reynolds has frequently suggested of making the universities themselves responsible for the loans that their students take out.

    I’m also reminded that when The Lord led the Israelites out of Egypt, and gave them the Mosaic law, He instituted a periodic Jubilee Year, in which all debts were forgiven (among other things). Perpetual bondage isn’t right, no matter how it comes about.

    1. +1 on soaking the colleges.

    2. One of the classes I had to take was basically digital logic (AND gates and the like; I can’t remember what the actual class name was).
       …………………

       Discrete Math is where I got that logic class. Summer. TA taught. At least not an emigrant TA. Different visualization but nothing that I hadn’t been doing by then for years.

       What frustrated me to no end through 3 degrees (BS Forestry, AA Programming, BS Computer Science) was class names. The one that irritated the hell out of me was Statistics and Linear Math (more on latter below). I had to take the dang thing twice: Biometritcs, and Statistics Math. Biometrics spent the first 4 weeks covering the material the entire term of Statistics Math did. Then the rest of the 2/3 term applying statistics to practical forestry application situations. Had to take it twice, not because I had a bad grade, but because “Biometrics” <> “Statistics Math”. Grumble.

       What I did run into, and it was the same when son attended the same university, was where most the math classes were taught by foreign English second language professors or TA’s. The only one I chose to retake because of this was Calculus (and because it had been 10 years).

       Linear Math that was gotten again in 3rd term calculus and more in 3rd term Discrete Math. While I didn’t explicitly remember it, did well enough the first time, that it came back quickly enough to ace it. Still would have to review the math to use it. Took awhile for it to go away, it has now. Math is something I can do, but I have to do it all the time or I forget the processes. Even though math was a critical component for the CS degree (but not the programming one), math isn’t something I used either programming or design work. I used one theorem in a program. But never used math for code analysis, not once in the 7 years before getting the CS degree, or the 26 years after. For the CS degree I was required to pick up as many math classes as I was upper division CS classes.

    3. I’m ABSOLUTELY for making the universities responsible, but no one is going to do it, while the government can use it to create debt slavery to themselves.

       1. They can… but voters need to get sufficiently agitated about it.

          1. Unfortunately this is one of those private shame things. People feel guilty for owing money and being in a trap.
             AND THEN hearing other people say “pay up dead beat” they don’t talk about it.
             So our side goes around thinking anyone who owes money are pink haired “studies” majors. And it goes on.
             I knew some people would be mad at me because of this post. BUT it HAD TO BE written.

             1. Which benefits those like AOC that have no shame.

             2. There are ways to raise awareness to the public at large without dealing with what you’re talking about. However, it would trigger a strong backlash from the universities, as well as need to confront a number of cultural beliefs that might not be true at this time.

                We’re seeing elements of this. A pushback against DEI on college campuses is in evidence right now, which likely would have been unthinkable (due to the revered status of higher education) a couple of decades ago. The universities might end up tearing themselves down, which would make action over debt easier for the public to consider.

       2. Responsible how? Like, what is the punishment or discipline mechanism? I’ve suggested yanking accreditation, and with it the ability to receive student aid of any kind. Do you think a series of fines (levied by whom?) that could go to paying the loans of students affected by the inability to schedule classes in a timely manner would work?

          1. IIRC, the idea that Glenn Reynolds generally floats involves the universities being on the hook for the loans if their students can’t find a job that will allow them to pay down the loan in a timely fashion.

             1. Yep.

             2. What constitutes a timely fashion? Who is judging it? What do the students have to do to show that they’re looking for work?

                Will it be like the welfare offices where people have to fill out a certain number of applications per month to show that they’re “looking for work?” Will the college send out employment listings to alumni?

                1. You’re jumping the gun. Yes, things would need to be hammered down in any such deal. But before that happens, people would first need to actively consider it.

                   Also, a deal like this would act as an impetus for universities to help their graduates find well-paying jobs. If the university knows that it could potentially be on the hook for its students’ loans, the university will be very enthusiastic about making sure that its students are making lots of money. And it will likely phase out degrees that have very limited employment opportunities.

          2. well, accreditation, don’t get me started.
             No, make the loans come from them, or make them responsible for a portion of them, if people can’t pay.

          3. Don’t forget the accrediting agencies are generally not government, and are generally run by Leftists.

             1. COMPLETELY taken over. COMPLETELY.

             2. I don’t know this for sure, but it would not surprise me at all if the accreditors are in a revolving door relationship with the universities they accredit, just like government bureaucrats and the industries they regulate.

                1. Who would know better than a fellow academic what standards a university program should have to meet to in order be accredited?

                   1. Gags.

                      1. XD

    4. “He instituted a periodic Jubilee Year, in which all debts were forgiven ”

       And the Israelites’ elites spent hundreds of years figuring out ways to avoid doing it for THEIR debtors. One of the things that the prophets tended to mention when issuing their doom-and-gloom warnings.
       And recall Christ’s parable of the unjust steward, who begged forgiveness out of his lord for a massive debt, then demanded payment of a trivial one from a fellow servant.
       His lord was not pleased.

    5. The original law that made student loans not dischargeable (except for undue hardship) actually made it thus only in the first five years after graduation/the beginning of the repayment period. Which was later extended to seven years, and then went away altogether.

       Honestly, I think a five year forbearance period after graduation (with no interest accrual) to allow people to get set up and find a job before beginning repayment might actually work fairly well in terms of letting kids start getting out from under the burden.

       On the other hand, springing a big payment on them after five years of spending as much as they make is probably a bad idea, and how many of them are actually going to be saving money to make payments once they start? Very few.

       1. Still makes more sense than making it so they can’t make or save money.

          1. Agreed. And you can do a lot in five years. Especially if you allow them to make periodic payments in that five year grace period that goes only to principal WITHOUT it starting the repayment period. And most importantly, keep interest from accruing during that grace period. Like, even one payment a year could drastically reduce the principal, and if the semi annual reminders actually worked to get you to put money away, hooyah. Could even offer a reduced payment-in-full thing at the end of the grace period. Like “pay 50% of the remaining balance in the first year of the repayment period, and that will constitute paid in full.” Give them an incentive to save during the grace period.

    6. The modern equivalent of Jubilee Years is Dischargable in Bankruptcy.

       More generally, student loans are a mess with no good solution but only a choice of bad ones.

11. re: welding, etc. There is a significant shortage in pretty much all blue collar work. There may be local surpluses in spots, but not a lot and not for long (there is a very large percentage in all the trades that are hitting retirement age)

    1. As – purely by accident -I have ended up working in a little engineering workshop which does of welding and bespoke machining (I was going to do 15 hours a week, which with the stress of bureaucrats seriously impairing my writing was something to keep me busy and provide some money – only I proved quite good and reliable so now I end up doing something like 50 hours a week and desperately trying to cut back without hurting my employer who is a really nice guy.) I can confirm. The truth is that while the pay is good, the work is physically hard, dirty, dangerous and often outright unpleasant. It can be very tedious too (fortunately this is not too bad with this particular job). This is not the future most young people dream of. It has little status, and the owner (who works 10 hour days himself, often as not) has tried desperately to get young apprentices or employees.

12. It was in the 1980s when alarmist folks talked about deadbeat college graduates declaring bankruptcy and walking away from their precious student loans. They got Congress to pass legislation making those unable to be discharged in bankruptcy.

    Not coincidentally, that is the inflection point when college costs started rising faster than inflation.

    For that reason alone they should be made to conform with standard non-predatory lending.

    1. Yep.

    2. Mid-late ’80s when we started getting “if you do this we’ll discount what you owe.” Nope. We paid down to a few thousand on each loan (his was $19/quarter, mine was $29/month) and paid the balance off, in ’89. I was back in school while paying on both ’83 – ’85, and ’86 – ’89, but didn’t suspend payments or take out additional loans (granted ’86 – ’87, employer paid for successful completion of class, but earlier, and after that all on us).

    3. 1970s. Early 1970s at that. 1976 is when the Higher Education Amendments were passed.

       1. Okay, we went over this. Foxfier did a deep dive. there’s modifications more recent after the oughts that made it FAR worse.

          1. I did a deep dive. The modification you are thinking about was in 2005 (I mention it in my reply below), and it still doesn’t change the fact that the 1970s is when it started, NOT the 1980s as state.

             1. Fair. It’s still the inflection point for when college costs started rising out of step with other expenses.

       2. I THINK it’s in the post two days ago.

       3. 78, but yeah.

          YOU EXPECT TO BE PAID FOR THIS?!?!?! by Foxfier

          1. I mean, 78 is the change l mentioned, not the specific bill cited.

          2. 1978 is when the Higher Education Amendment of 1976 was incorporated into the Bankruptcy Code. As I said. Which is also STILL NOT THE 80S, mid or late. It IS the mid and late 70s, however, AS I SAID.

             1. Totally agree, I just wanted to link the data.

13. Yes it is a scam.

    I would also be against bailing out investors in a Ponzi scheme without shutting down the scheme and putting the person running it in jail. Otherwise all the bail out does is perpetuate the Ponzi scheme and encourage others.

    Simple answer is to forgive student loans only in conjunction with no longer guaranteeing lenders repayment

    1. Of course. You shouldn’t guarantee lenders repayment.
       Here’s the thing, though, this is a ponzi scheme that the entire society encouraged young (and not so young) people in.

14. If the problem was that the colleges were fraudulently preventing them from getting their degrees, loan forgiveness is unjust.

    You need to recompense the students who paid full freight and who paid off their loans, too.

    1. No, you actually don’t.
       Because, yes, they were harmed. Let them sue for it, if they so want.
       BUT the point is to stop debt slavery harming the nation. It is literally “For the good of the Republic.”
       Sorry, life ISN’T fair.
       That money is wasted. Sure, go ahead, sue the college. But the point is stop further harm.

       1. Then let the students in debt sue, by the same logic.

          1. Sue the government? That would work. No.

          2. You’re missing the point. Slavery is immoral and should be illegal. These aren’t normal loans. They’re indenture to government.

             1. These are “most of the issue would be fixed by MAKING them normal loans” loans, even.

15. I was extremely fortunate that I had parents who were able to pay for my college. I didn’t I raised several kinds of hell when I went back to school last year, pointing out previous agreements and documents that said that I could finish my degree program in one semester, not two.

    (And boy, did they try like hell to get me to do those two semesters!)

    All for a degree that for the most part most companies won’t hire because they don’t need technical writers, they can just make their current employees work extra hours or use ChatGPT to generate the documents. (And yes I heard that. In professions that requires lots of precision.)

    I also know a lot of people that work in tech, and more than I care to think about got their jobs sideways. Either because they knew people or they had skills in esoteric fields of Internet technology.

    College loans are this very sad and terrifying Chinese finger-trap that is going to hurt to get rid of, one way or another. Just like far too many things created by our intellectual class of idiots.

    1. Precisely.

       1. I wouldn’t have as much of a problem if you COULD discharge the loans in bankruptcy. That the colleges HAD to have skin in the game. That they weren’t selling useless White Collar Union Cards to desperate people.
          If there was any kind of justice, there would be a lot of crucified administrators on the college lawns.

          1. Don’t get the chorus in the back of my head started. They want to crucify EVERYONE along highways. Mostly politicians, to be fair. And bureaucrats. But the chorus is very earnest. Roman ancestry, you know. And I’m very angry.
             The worst part of this is that I’m not even close to the most excitable on our side.
             And the left is utterly oblivious to this anger. They think if they stop us talking, we’ll stop thinking and feeling.

             1. The chorus in my head is watching as we sort through these people. The ones that with a proper diet and letting their hair grow out might be attractive to people.
                The ones that are strong enough to do the labor needed to repair all the damage.
                The ones that were just foolish or believed that it was their duty to support our enemies.
                But the rest? The crosses are waiting. And the nails. And since I am in command, the first one is my responsibility to get right.

             2. I was once very excitable for those nominally on ‘our’ side, to the extent that we have a side.

                These days, except for moods between 10% and 1% of my waking hours, I am actually pretty calm where our side is concerned.

                Opposition would be smart to give up the game, stop pulling shit, and figure out how they need to think in order to live peacefully with others.

    2. Computers. I got into computers on career change because the jobs were there. They weren’t in timber. Both hubby and I were in timber ….

       Let’s compare hubby’s continued timber career (~35 years): One employer. Lots of lack of work time off without pay, for his entire career. Even if toward the end it was only two weeks to a month max per year.

       My computer career, from the time I switched (~35 years): Five employers with two extended lack of work stretches totaling 24 months (not counting the 6 months after son was born). Never made 6 figure salary that “everyone else” seems to get. (Heck our combined household income has gone over 100k, 3x’s, barely. That fact shocked my sister. She figured I had to have been making what she and her husband each made working in the tech industry, $300k+. Um. No.)

       In addition I know a lot of programmers who once they got riffed (company failure, not their fault) never got back into a programming job.

       My first major IT job, after CS degree completion, and my last major job were because the person hiring (or someone on hiring committee) had an indirect connection. First time it was someone in the class behind me who knew who I was (having both forestry and computer degree, and requesting a reasonable salary for location, helped). I didn’t remember him (there were a lot of guys in the forestry program, not so many women). The last job, the owner had rented AS400 time in ’88 to build his original program, from the employer I had ’85 – ’87 before they moved their company to Portland so they could be in on the AS400 rollout. Wasn’t the only factor. But can’t say it didn’t help. The job between? I got lucky. I also got a job interview with a large big IT tech because of someone I knew (little sister). Didn’t get the job, but did get an interview. (For the best, shouldn’t have applied, because we couldn’t move anyway for me to take the job. Was getting desperate. My experience wasn’t as tight as the job was going to require. Got the phone interview because of her. Got the in person interview on my own.)

16. A modest proposal might be to require the universities and colleges, well-endowed by alumni and Federal government, to provide a warranty of merchantability for their product. That is, if appropriate employment cannot be found within 5 years, all tuition refunded.

    Lab fees and books, like meal tickets and rents, would be considered expendables.

    Make those charging ridiculous fees for their services put up or shut up.

    1. I’m perfectly okay with that.

    2. If you can enforce that, and have a decent definition of “appropriate employment”, I’d be good with that.

       1. I can’t enforce anything. And neither can society. See the case of Oberlin College and Gibson’s Bakery.

          1. In the good news, Oberlin is now suing its insurers to cover the damages.

       2. They’re doing it for Law schools. they NOW have to disclose how many of the graduates found work in the field. They don’t disclose how many work at substandard rates, of course, but IT’s SOMETHING.
          I guess work “x above minimum wage” might work.

          1. IIRC, the US News and World Report rankings track this as well for those in their first year after graduation. But some universities were caught cheating (I can’t remember exactly how they did it, though I think it involved jobs that looked legit but were only short-term one year jobs for graduates who couldn’t find a real one) in order to boost their rankings. Of course, the USNWR rankings only track (tracked?) the one year, which made the cheating easier. The longer you track the careers of the graduates, the more expensive and difficult that particular method of cheating gets.

             1. Doesn’t matter. The students who try to sue their law school for fraudulent starting salaries and placement rates? They lose, in the grounds that law students are sophisticated customers who should know better than to trust self-reported data.

                The SEC wouldn’t let that fly with a stock prospectus for licensed stockbrokers, but that’s okay for 22 year old?

       3. Or “starting salary average for this field” being disclosed and truthful.

          1. average income of graduates over the first 5 years after graduation

             1. Okay.
                For instance, the degree son was pursuing turns out to pay exactly what he’s getting in a very junior trainee position in the publishing field (Not a remarkably well-paying field.) For the first ten years. Suffice to say none of us had any idea.

                1. (Not a remarkably well-paying field.) For the first ten years. Suffice to say none of us had any idea.
                   ………….

                   We knew that forestry wasn’t particularly well paid, especially with USFS or BLM until moved way up the pay scale. In fact getting on, past temp seasonal summer through fall work, meant permanent seasonal, required to take X weeks off in the winter. One of the reasons we took the jobs we did after graduation (It somewhat broke me because it wasn’t what I wanted. Which is why decade or so later when a chance came to go back? Hell no. Not just related to already into my career change.) Our starting monthly trainee salary (not exempt, so overtime paid), was higher than the monthly salary equivalent of the managing District Ranger at either district I had worked at. Within 6 months we were making double what we made as trainees, not counting overtime. (There was a reason the pay was very good.)

          2. Better yet, “starting salary median for this field”

             1. Correct.

    3. But let’s not forget that college textbooks are one of the biggest rackets going, with minor revisions making earlier editions “obsolete” and destroying the used textbook market.

       1. Amen, brother! But I did my bit during the last decade of my teaching career by adopting as many “free” textbooks as possible, and choosing low cost options when necessary. For 5 years, my most expensive freshman course required a $25 online course package, and my upperclassmen used e-books covered by their library fees. Instructors who don’t do this don’t respect their students.

          1. Even when I was in school college books were outrageously expensive. School of Forestry at least used the university press, paperback with spiral binding. Even sold to other programs. (See one on a forester’s desk. Say something. Response “Your program used the same material?” Answer, “Yes. I had the author as the professor.”) What this meant, instead of $50 or more, we were paying $10 – $20, for material you intended to keep.

       2. Oh, sure. Let’s see, older son, state school, when he started (when ended it was more, and for his brother it was more than double 4 years later) 14k a semester. Books 5 to 6k.
          Books were covered out of pocket from my earnings. Half tuition for each of them, too.
          Oh, Colorado has an extra special tax for the self-employed to catch “doctors and lawyers” who get around paying taxes, of course! Those tricksy doctors and lawyers. Without it, I could have covered the guys tuitions, full. With it, I was working at fiction, writing the max articles that PJM would take from me (at one point five a week) and between what I made and the leftover of Dan’s, we were barely squeaking by. My parents couldn’t understand why we couldn’t afford to visit. Our friends couldn’t understand why we weren’t going to cons. Etc. Ten years, between the two guys, just skin of our teeth and finding new ways to save. So, you know, yeah, it swallowed a lot of our money. I have sympathy for those who paid out of pocket in full. If we could, we would have. (Weirdly, for medschool, the well off parents do. And everyone was better off than us. EVERYONE. They published worth of families of students, anonymized, but it wasn’t difficult to know who we were. We were dead last by a country mile. The next people made double what we did.)
          Anyway, at this point the thing is to stop the fricking debt slavery to the government of all entities. We all lost money and time. Mistakes were made. Free the young and now middle aged to make their way without this on their backs.
          I’m beyond overjoyed younger son has found something he loves doing and where from outside he seems to be doing well. It worries me a little because the field is unstable, but these days what field isn’t. I’d pay off his debt from my earnings in a year, if he LET ME. He doesn’t let me. So we’re going to write the Cat Valor series together and he’ll pay it off that way. (Besides, writing together is fun.)
          We’ll be okay. I just wish we’d got here 9 years ago, without major depression on his part and frantic worry on mine. Or the years wasted pursuing something always held out of reach.

          1. field is unstable, but these days what field isn’t.
             ……………..

             Truth. 100%

             “Learn to Code!” Laughable. Then OMG they are serious. Shakes head. Not just the lack of employability for the above middle age. Seriously if you are over 50, or pushing 40, with experience, unless you are in an under served niche area, it is not easy. Doable but not easy. If you are not experienced? Better be on a program where your salary is half paid until you can prove yourself. I speak of experience on the former. The latter saw it happen.

             1. Yep. That. Finding a job as a coder, it’s almost impossible these days. we have tried to help people.

                1. we have tried to help people.
                   ………………..

                   No guaranties. Pass on https://www.cascadegovsoftware.com/ to those beyond this forum. It does mean interacting with clients, but not sales (not general public, but are dealing with governmental employees). It is mostly coding. All I can say is I know they are short programmers. The programmers work from home (since the pandemic, not going back). I have no idea what the salary structures are.

       3. Au contraire. The new method is a bigger scam. The publishing world has moved away from textbooks entirely.

          There are no physical textbooks in college anymore.

          You “buy” digital access to a “digital book” no one reads because you must have digital access to the system where you submit your homework. That “key” expires at the end of the term. So does your “book.”

          No one has books. No one can look up something in an old book. No one needs books, they say. Think about that longer and the student loan problem pales on size of the civilizational issue.

          1. “The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable”

    4. “Lab fees and books,”

       Aren’t those part of the product? Could you get “the product” without paying for these things?

       I have no problem with meals and rents; you are going to be eating and living somewhere during that time.

       1. A “modest” proposal, not the one setnaffa thinks is actually “just”… insert “that smile” from The Merchant of Venice here…

    5. Consider what griefers would do with that. You’d have to ensure it went back to those who paid.

17. I had figured I was going to argue, but finding out that the gov’t apparently can completely screw up their loan accounting and simply demand you pay?

    Yeah, make them dischargable and walk away.

    There is no other remedy that would be either viable or just.

    1. Precisely. And no, don’t guarantee payment to the college. Let the colleges die or reform. Because they’ve been going crazy. Literally with younger son, we had tuition go up to double every year. (Note I’m not saying refund the part we paid. Just forgive all the college loans.)

18. I’ve already mentioned this during a prior post when college cutting shenanigans came up. Can’t address it prior to ’74 when I started, but even then almost 50 years ago, the first two years were to weed out the “not dedicated”. The C and below students. Only allowed to take one degree class, “Introduction to”, rest were prerequisite and “rounding” filler classes. When I started the junior level classes in my degree, to a person, every single professor and TA started the class with “Now that the C+ and below students are gone, grades are no longer based on the bell curve, but are straight. No reason everyone can’t get A’s.” I wisely kept my mouth shut. I was a solid C – C+ student on the curve. Funny how I suddenly started pulling mostly A’s in the forestry classes.

    OTOH if this had been 12 years later, I never would have had a chance to slip through. The degree I had, and the *CS degree I did for the career change, the process had changed. One’s GPA had to be 3.25+ to be allowed to take the upper division or higher level CS classes. Honestly mine weren’t. But a number of factors got me in provisionally. By the time I finished up the average was 3.25+.

    My college years, never ran into the required class not offered every year, scam. Were classes that were only offered twice a year, and once you started a sequence, stick to that schedule or else. Nor, especially when you were a senor, you had priority, period. Plus classes with labs were not separated credit wise. Sign up for class, sign up for lab time. Since some of our forestry labs were 3 to 5 hour labs, scheduling classes on Tuesday and Thursday was a PIA. (OTOH we had forestry labs during the school year. We were not required to go to summer school forestry lab camps. Could actually work during the summer, at forestry jobs, should you be so lucky; I was. Other forestry colleges that was not true. Benefit of having school forest on the edge of town.)

    Note, by the time son was in college, starting in ’07 he was suppose to have senor priority on required classes. Also sometimes one could get the lecture but not a required lab, because while linked separate credits, and not tightly linked. Then when the class is offered once a year and there are more senors needing it than slots available, then it comes down to when you are allowed to sign up for classes. Make this problem with more than one class? That is a scam. He got lucky in that he only had to take an extra year, one term he needed for other classes. He was able to get some other classes he didn’t think he would be allowed to take to fill in (because that is the way it worked given the situation). So that made him happy. But still.

    (* Hey never would have gone back to school except that one employer wanted me to, and by the time they left town, I was almost done anyway.)

    1. By 1998 when I started there were sequences of eight courses you must pass to graduate in order. Declare your major your freshman year, and if you change your mind by sophomore year you’re adding a year. Junior and you’re adding two years.
       My mom changed majors her junior year and graduated in four years. If I had done so it would have taken me six.

       1. EIGHT courses? In sequence? WOW. That’s ridiculous. For all majors, or a specific one?

          I can see something like “you have to take calculus or test out of a calculus class before you can take calc-based physics” or something similar, but I just don’t see how there can be that many sequential classes.

          1. Simple. Some college bureaucrat made a rule. ‘One Syllabus to rule them all, and in darkness bind them.’

          2. Yep. For all the majors that I knew well enough to have gripe sessions with. Includes agsci, physics, archetecture, and business.

             As a music major, 8 semesters of lessons, 2 at the 100 level, 2 at the 200 level, etc. Likewise 8 semesters of the large ensemble designated for your major instrument. (So you couldn’t count choir and orchestra and band.) Other stuff was . . . less blatant, but you had five semesters of theory under different names, which were prereqs for various music history, which were also prereqs for each other, which were prereqs for conducting, etc., all of which were offered only one semester a year. Unpack the spiderweb of prerequisite courses and it was four years. Most of us were taking our last general education requirement the last semester of our senior year. (I wasn’t, because I’d got the dean’s sign off on twenty-two credits every single semester. I was far over number of credits to graduate, just had to pick up the last required music classes.)

             Looking at it with the kiddo this week, Biology’s got the same thing going on.

             1. ah-yup.
                Word to the wise. Older son was VERY good at exiting toxic courses early, and finding another, no matter how seeming far fetched that covered the requirements. If the kiddos let you, I URGE you to stay on them about this. (Younger son wouldn’t let us.) Example of swap “women’s history” was the only one offered to fulfill the (in a stem degree) chained women’s studies requirement. But it was DUH toxic, including self-denunciation for the males. SO he poked, and prodded and found out an Austen course which was English Lit also fulfilled the women’s studies req.
                It’s just no one told you.
                So, stay abreast of it, and be ready to extricate them from the sludge.

             2. That is ridiculous extortion. There’s no other word for it.

                1. And it’s universal.

          3. Nope. They’re ALL chained. And if one is missing and you can’t start paying right then? you take other stuff to fill in. People accumulate minors and secondary degrees, just because they have to stay on.

          4. We had sequences of 3 classes. But required to take certain sequence before allowed to take another 3 sequences. So, yes, essentially a 6 sequence class was required. Get blocked from one of the two latter sequences and it got interesting. At least both sequences restarted every quarter. Not true for some of the latter 2 class sequences (usually setup to be Fall/Winter, then Spring/Fall, I got the latter.)

             Then there are the engineering targeted “basic classes”. Calculus based chemistry and physics, while taking calculus sequence. Talk about weeding out students.
             Add English as second language TA’s with heavy to impossible accents. Even those who took multiple years of HS calculus, and did decent on the AP calculus test, often struggle.

19. Looking at your post here, I can’t help but think RFK Jr.’s no interest repayment of loans will have the Marxist left foaming at the mouth, because it may actually be able to solve the problem.

    And as someone who worked an extra job to pay for three kids college, I wouldn’t be offended at principle only repayment, I didn’t pay interest, I’m fine if they don’t.

    But I think that solution could ruin the Marxist lefts party.

    But then again my ears are open to RFK Jr. And Trumps ideas because they’ll solve problems, instead of pretending to solve them so you can enslave people like the marxists want to do.

    Oh, and my retirement fund is pretty much non existent. I did all the extra effort for my kids. So forgive me if I’m still a little miffed at the parents with newer cars than me and better houses than me who’s kids are hoping for loan forgiveness. I won’t stop holding the grudge against those parents.

    1. we didn’t. We ran cars into the ground, after buying used, etc. Please don’t let the politics of envy taint you. Everyone I know with newer cars and better houses PAID THE KIDS LOANS.
       You’re seeing a curated sample.
       All our friends who could afford it, and lived better than us, paid for the kids.
       We could have paid for one. we had two.

       1. Oh, I’m fine with that, just I know people who make as much as me who have awesome houses and their kids all have loans. For the job I do (I do make good money) people are shocked at how small our house is. Again I have no problem with RFK’s no interest repayment. But boy howdy will the banks back Biden because they will be the ones holding the bag under RFKs plan. But I’m ok with the banks taking in the shorts because of his plan. In fact the banks OWE us all after what they got in 2008. Time for THAT bill to come due.

    2. I can get behind the no interest paid on the loans too. Even the long term ones where the interest has now been folded in. No. They pay back what they borrowed. With a provision for students defrauded by their university because they couldn’t get required class timely. Example, for our son that would be two quarters of tuition. He should have been able to get it the prior year when offered. (Too many senor students? Open additional sessions. Whatever. Deal!)

       1. Yep.

       2. Yep. And going forward, if for some reason there MUST be interest on student loans, simple only, not compound.

       3. My wife dropped her Fisheries Biology major and converted her English minor to a major because the only course she lacked for her degree would not be offered for a year, and maybe not even then. The female dean of the biological sciences college begged not to do it, because she was their star student, but she walked anyway.

20. Sarah,

    I had been pretty strongly of the opinion that that loans should not be forgiven, that students should experience the consequences of their choices, etc….

    Your conversation has caused me to full stop.
    I am going to take a fair bit of time and think through the points made in your essay and contributed by this enjoyable community.

    One thing, I have not stopped seeing red when it comes to the educational system and the government.

    I have paid off my loans. We unfortunately used loans for my daughter (both she and us via PLUS). She is not really making much uses of her finance degree, but is working, living at home, and aggressively saving.

    I don’t know how I might be able to get through to younger son. He is going to be finishing CC, but it is a transition to university associates. He would not consider anything else. He is not willing to consider marketability when looking at bachelor’s major.

    Thank you for this.

    1. The universities no longer take CC. They say they will, but they don’t. This is one thing they kept telling us to do. But it doesn’t work.
       The entire system if crooked. And please, try to stay away from plus loans. they ruined friends of ours.
       Also, yeah– it’s…. the education system is rotten and college is predatory.
       DO try to talk to the kid. Most art and such degrees are worth nothing.

       1. CC = Community College
          His associate’s degree will be the one that exclusively sets up for transfer/assured admittance to one of the NC state universities. Has no other real world value.

          I already have the PLUS loans from daughter (good news on that, we are on track to pay off in less than a year; she is making solid progress on her loans as well). Will not do the same for son (though it stabs the treat my kids equally button pretty hard — wont do it)

          Have tried, and continue to try to discuss with son. I don’t care what work he does, as long as he pursues it deliberatively and thoughtfully. That includes very careful examination of ROI and job prospects. Will not give up.

          My professional pathway as an RN turns out to be one of the better things to happen to me (I had flunked out of Medical school — long story). I have been much happier with nursing than I would have as physician.

          1. yeah. Younger son gave up, though he might maybe go back.
             He stumbled into a job he actually loves, and which might offer a path for progress (hopeful, not certain). His plan to pay back loans is to write books with me. He got interrupted by working three jobs for six months.
             But his loans aren’t horrific. Four books ought to do it. Wasting years burns me more.
             He’ll probably be okay. And if this pathway works out, it’s actually passion as well as income for him.
             So sometimes failure is not the worst thing.
             Older son… well, his loans are far more significant, but he has a plan. And if I can get off my behind and write more, I can help too.
             My kids are tough, smart, and aren’t slackers. There’s pathways out. but it’s important to understand while some people can escape…. not all can. And even for my kids, their plans might mean I never have grandkids. they’re not alone. That’s why birthrates are dropping.
             I know many people absolutely trapped, and i dont’ like that.

          2. Thank you for explaining that, because I totally thought CC was credit card and was going to be like “my college allowed me to pay by credit card, and break the payments up over several months.” Which worked for me because I had a job, but by the time i was reduced to paying for it myself (instead of using tuition assistance), I was down to one class per 8-week term, anyway, so much more manageable.

             1. But again, at least for us, everyone kept telling “have your kid go community college first” but (like the dual college/high school, btw, for which we paid, and which the kid loved and did very well at) the college just wouldn’t take it. Period. They might give you a fractional credit (usually in “extension”) for all of them combined.
                It’s like IB where they tell you colleges will know it’s an advanced program etc (it is. Older son was in it, and it’s rigorous and very difficult.) BUT colleges had no idea what it was and instead gave preference to AP which is FAR lighter. Shrug. Our education is a shambles.
                I hope Don’s state is different, but in CO going through CC was just another way to burn money and time.
                And btw, we have plans to pay off the guys’ loans. They’re annoying, and might cost me the chance at grandkids, just because of the time, but we have plans. WHAT really, really, really burns me is the years wasted for younger son. (For older too, but that’s just because the path to where he wants to be is stupid af in the US compared to anywhere else in the world.)

                1. Some states have contracts or “transfer paths” set up, but even then, you have to really look at it to make sure that you’re setting yourself up for success because of pre-reqs.

                   I really wish there were more testing-out capabilities, too. I ended up leaving the University of Illinois and then later having to finish my degree online because they wouldn’t let me test out of the foreign language requirement. I spent three years in Spain before I enrolled! I could have studied up for a month or two and then taken a test and be done, but noooooo, I had to take at least one class.

                2. As far as community college and transfer to 4 year state school:
                   Well…. North Carolina.
                   What is stated is essentially guaranteed admit/transfer to a state 4 year school as long as academic performance is adequate in community college (and that is a reasonable GPA).

                   What the actual practice is like? Don’t have direct experience.
                   I don’t think school of choice is assured.

                   We shall see.

             2. I paid by check for the ’83 – ’85 (CC*), ’86 – ’89 (uni.), classes too (’86 – ’87, employer paid, one class at a time). Paid by CC** for books.

                (*) Community College
                (**) Credit Card
                🙂

       2. try to stay away from plus loans. they ruined friends of ours.
          …………….

          I can’t point to the reason. But when it came to the parents plus loans I felt they stank. We declined.

          Had intended to use home equity once all the pre-set-aside college funds were exhausted, but then in 2009 we got credit jacked (home equity set to what we’d actually borrowed + 1k). So. F that. We refinanced into 3.233% for what we owed between mortgage and house equity balance. Had enough equity to have gotten extra cash to make things easier, chose not to.

21. Student loans were made not dischargeable by bankruptcy proceedings in 1976. Nearly fifty years ago. BY LEGISLATION. The Higher Education Amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965. More accurately, it stated that such discharges were only possible five years after repayment started, or if “undue hardship” would be imposed if not discharged during that five year period. Two years later it was added to US Code, with verbiage reading that it applied to all loans backed “… in whole or in part by a governmental unit or a nonprofit institution of higher education.”

    Same thing with the undue hardship verbiage, too: “unless excepting such debt from discharge under this paragraph would impose an undue hardship on the debtor and the debtor’s dependents, for—
    (A)
    (i) an educational benefit overpayment or loan made, insured, or guaranteed by a governmental unit, or made under any program funded in whole or in part by a governmental unit or nonprofit institution; or
    (ii) an obligation to repay funds received as an educational benefit, scholarship, or stipend;

    Then in 1998, they took out the time provision altogether.

    Then in 2005, the death knell really started with the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which made basically all student loans “backed by a governmental unit.” And none of these laws ever clarified what “undue hardship” was.

    All of which is to say, we CANNOT simply wave a magic wand and forgive student loans, make them dischargeable in bankruptcy, fix the interest issue, or anything else. We need to repeal or update these pieces of legislation.

    And may I suggest as part of the update providing that educational loans may only be simple interest?

    As far as university scheduling issues, which I have run into myself, I don’t know what the solution is, and I generally hesitate to suggest regulation, but perhaps a line or two in said legislation about loans not being put into repayment status if a student is prevented from making satisfactory progress due to circumstances beyond the student’s control (such as oh, say, a global pandemic or university scheduling.) And also trigger an accreditation check if a significant percentage of students experienced such delays. Put some teeth into the threat.

    When I pay my mortgage, there’s a menu that asks me if I want to pay additional money to principal. There’s no reason why that kind of thing shouldn’t be possible for student loans, and I have to ask on what authority do these lenders think they are allowed to prevent anyone making a principal payment? That sounds like a regulation issue that needs to be addressed as well.

    TLDR: Attack the problem at its source. That means lobbying Congress for changes. Make THEM do their jobs.

    1. When I pay my mortgage, there’s a menu that asks me if I want to pay additional money to principal.
       ……………….

       Vehicle loans work this way too.

       1. Yep. It’s effing ridiculous how patchy and patchworky the student loan system is/was. I did a refinance of my truck loan in about fifteen minutes on my credit union’s website. The same credit union through which I have my mortgage, and that one did take a little longer, sure, but the process was straightforward.

          The process for applying for financial aid (and remembering your PIN/password a year or more after you last logged into the website) or setting up loan repayment is labyrinthine and ridiculous. It makes applying for Obamacare look easy and simple.

          1. Because the government just prints money and sends it through. The whole point is to keep a vote farm.
             Prove it isn’t. by their fruits thou shalt know them.

       2. And personal. The first question out of my mouth for any loan is “Do you allow early re-payment without penalty?” I have run into a few who said no. My response is “See ya!”

          1. Two requirements for us for loans:
             (1) Must allow prepayment without penalties, and simple month to month, interest. Any extra in payment must go to principle without explicitly stating so.
             (2) We pay taxes and insurance. Not lender.

             No to either. We walk.

    2. “There’s no reason why that kind of thing shouldn’t be possible for student loans, and I have to ask on what authority do these lenders think they are allowed to prevent anyone making a principal payment? ”

       I don’t think they actually can. I can only speak from my personal experience and I have no idea what is going on on the back end in the accountant’s office, but I’ve been paying more than the minimum payment on my loans since I got out of school. I think I’m on a level repayment plan.

       If I read the statements right, they’ve set the minimum payment so that if one makes the minimum payment every month without fail, one’s loan will be completely paid off in 10 years. Or maybe 15. When one makes a payment in excess of the minimum, it is recorded in their system as having fulfilled the payment for the next payment on their schedule.

       So I’ve currently got a message saying that my next payment due is for March 2025, or something along those lines.

       Payment does go to the interest first, but if you make a payment that is greater than the amount of accumulated interest, then the remainder of the payment has nowhere to go except to the principal.

       They don’t stop you from making extra payments all of which will go the principal, and there’s no penalty (yet) for paying off the balance of the loan ahead of schedule.

       That and the last four years of no interest-accrual thanks to Trump’s loan pause, has allowed me to pay off three of my loans (which I suppose could also be read as “make 10 years worth of payments”) in five years, and get the last one down to less than half its initial balance. (I’ve been getting my car repaired the last couple of years instead of paying that one off.)

       So… yes, you can make a principal payment, as long as you’ve paid off the accrued interest first.

       1. it’s common for loans that if you just send them more money, they apply it to your next payment. you have to explicitly say that you want to apply extra money to the principal to have it happen. I have loans that default each way.

          I can see arguments both ways on this as the default. applying the extra to the next payment prevents someone who has paid ahead but then gotten in trouble for a month from going into default, but if you are going to be able to keep making your payments, it’s better for you if the extra payment amount goes directly to the principal.

          1. I guess I don’t understand the difference. If no interest has accrued, or if the amount of accrued interest is less than the amount paid ahead, then the payment, in whole or in part, does go to the principal.

             So you can make principal payments just by paying ahead.

             1. not necessarily.

                for some loans, if you have a 1k/month payment (say 50-50 interest/principal) and make a 2k payment this month, you will pay $500 in interest and $1500 in principal. If you don’t send in a payment next month you are in default

                for other loans, if you just pay $2k, they will apply it as your payment for this month and next month, so you pay $1k in interest and $1k in principal, but if you don’t send in a payment next month, you will not be in default

                (and yes, this is simplifying things a bit as interest will go down depending on the principal)

                I have some loans where they default to one approach and some where they default to the other. In all cases I can override the default.

                I just had to override a loan that defaulted to the first approach because I’m doing something that gives me money in lump sums every 6 months rather than monthly, so I need to make payments in advance, not pay off a large amount of principal.

                1. Hah, interesting.

                   No the student loan I have, at least for the particular loan servicer that I deal with is you have your loan balance that has accrued $50 of interest, and your $100 payment made on or about the due date pays the $50 interest, the remaining $50 goes to principal, and it records you as having made your payment for the month.

                   If you make another $100 payment a week later, when the accrued interest is only $10 then $10 goes to the interest, the remaining $90 goes to the principal, and you are recorded as having made your next payment. I think.

                   So there’s no fixed dollar amount to go with the interest, it’s just “whatever has accumulated since your last payment.”

                   Of course, making those extra payments is much easier on the website when one can do a direct transfer and choose the “payment effective” date for one’s-self. If one sent in a check, I have no doubt that they would just keep it until the next payment due date on their schedule.

          2. I’ve been rounding my mortgage payments up to the next $100 for years and they’ve always applied that to the principal. I’m more than $8,000 ahead of the amortization schedule.

             I set up a LibreOffice mortgage tracking spreadsheet years ago, so I can watch the progress.

             1. I do something similar for my mortgage, but I have other loans where if I just round up like that, it is applied as early payment for next month’s bill instead, and before I caught it, I ended up as having ‘pre-paid’ 6 months ahead rather than having paid down the principal a lot more.

       2. Of course, there is always the niggling problem of if you pay your loan down to less than $5, you can’t make the payment through the loan service website. And then the loan balance sits there until it accumulates enough interest to be above $5.

          So that’s something to watch for.

22. Sarah, thank you for your thorough and nuanced view of this issue. I knew a certain amount of it of course.

    I was already aware that it took 5 or more years on average for a student to graduate from our local universities through no fault of the students. I could tell it was a deliberate scam that had already started by the early 80’s, as was the courting of foreign students because they can’t qualify for discounted in-state tuition (in California). Adults, please research and advise your offspring carefully. They don’t know any better. If they can get all the credits they need for 2 years of undergrad out of the way at a Community College, MAKE them do it. No employer cares about where you did your first 2 years. They care, if at all, about who ultimately issued your degree.

    Thank you for explaining the nuances of the proposed bills although I still find it difficult to trust they will stay as sensible as they propose. I’m glad if the pause in payments and interest has helped victims, er students, pay down the principle…for those who actually did that. There are many cheaters I’m sure who waste the opportunity and want to just cheat the system. See confession below for relevance of that.

    The non-discharge thing? That’s something else you can hate us baby boomers for. I knew far too many people who waited 2 years and filed for bankruptcy. It was all too easy. For instance, 4 years out of college, I owned nothing but a 15 year old car and was making $6,000/year. It would have been easy to declare bankruptcy. All the “smart set” that went to expensive universities (yes, not all universities were expensive back then), did that. Hence the government which guaranteed the loans (even private ones) took the hit, and put in the no discharge law, unfair as it is to those who truly need it.

    The universities are greedy and evil and sold multiple generations down the river. They quickly hiked their tuition 4 times, 5 times, what is had been 10 years prior. Then they used the extra money to construct new edifices and fund the administrative staff to unprecedented degrees. So much so that administrators now outnumber teachers 3 to 1. Not only that, the universities cheat their “adjunct faculty” by paying them a pittance to teach most undergraduate classes, while the tenured faculty doesn’t feel the pain. They are the ones, not the public, who need to pay for their malfeasance. How many billions does Harvard have in its endowment? Punish the malefactors at least much more so than the poor deluded customers.

    Of course there’s also the whole “public service” scam. As I understand it, if you can stay on the government payroll for 5 or 10 years (as a good dues-paying, unionized public school teacher or civil service job holder), your loan gets forgiven. That info. may be outdated, but last time I looked that was true.

    Why do I distrust the proposed solutions so much? Because government has a long history of being “non-judgemental”, in other words treating willful cheaters the same way as deluded victims.

    1. The “people are declaring bankruptcy to get out of paying their loans” thing was ALWAYS ridiculous. The commission found somewhere between 1-3% of loans had ever been discharged in bankruptcy. Compared to an 18% default rate. It was nonsense from the start.

       1. Thanks Chrismouse for the information. I had only anecdotes to go on.

          Of course that is one more reason to note that the government action to solve a crisis almost always ends up making the problem worse. EPA, cough, cough. Department of Education cough, cough.

          Congress usually acts on false information, manipulated statistics, and anecdotes provided by grievance mongers. Most Congressional staff are the same ruthless social climbers who went to “all the best schools”, that would be the progeny of those who have learned how to cheat or manipulate the system.

          You might recognize the foregoing as an example of that evil, manipulative rhetoric that I decry in that very statement. That is how the Left works. Such has it always been. Maybe we should “fight fire with fire”, as a certain presidential candidate is famous for. Or maybe some of us could learn to be like Jordan Peterson, calm, humble, in complete command of all the facts and capable of being reasonable while effectively pointing out the unhinged hysteria of those who confront and oppose us.

          Otherwise, “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Stick it to the Man!

       2. Yep. It was done to create a trap.

    2. Last I heard, Haahvahd’s endowment fund was over $40 billion.

       1. Several years ago, Harvard grad Ron Unz described Harvard as a hedge fund with a small educational unit attached to it. He tried to get a proposal in front of the board of directors to use the endowment to make tuition free for all students. As you might guess, it went nowhere.

23. I’m in the trap. Been there a long time, unlikely to ever get out. Income-based repayment meant that I could actually pay rent and buy groceries — but it’s also mathematically impossible to pay off my student loans at any income level I’m ever likely to achieve.

    The loan forgiveness after 20 years of repayment sounds nice…but from what I’ve read, it has to be uninterrupted repayment, and there was that 6 month period after a major surgery wrecked my finances a decade ago, so I’ll be well over 60 by the time I qualify. If the option still exists.

    The one good thing about them (if I haven’t got it wrong) is that unlike other loans, student loans die with you, so at least my wife and kids won’t be stuck with them when I’m gone. (My daughter has her own student loans, against my advice; but that’s another story.)

    So yeah, I’m on board with ending student loans. Not just forgiving the debt or allowing it to be repaid sans interest, but killing the whole program/system with fire. Burn it down and salt the earth where it stood. And I say this as someone who worked in higher-ed for over 20 years and once loved it, but if universities go down in flames along with it, good fucking riddance. (Me, angry? Not at all. I say this with calmness and resolve.)

    1. Yep. The loans die with you. I wonder if anyone has tracked the recent spate of suicide in young married men to that. Because as the mother of one ….. One has had to say “No” very forcefully more than once. Also, his wife would reanimate him and kill him again, and he knows it. Bless that woman. I have been very lucky, because DIL and DIL-to-be are the daughters I never had and I love them as my own. VERY LUCKY.

    2. I bet you if loans couldn’t be obtained, the costs would come down right quick, and the multiplying requirements go down to a level to allow work-study again.
       Because you know? Market forces.

24. All of this is rather foreign to me, but does make me glad my degrees and my sons’ degrees were not taken in the US. To give you my totally dispassionate outsiders view: All loans MUST be dischargeable into bankruptcy. If your colleges and banks stand to lose they won’t lend on bad risks – and fees will come down. Over the years I have become convinced that all the injunctions against usury were spot on. Combined with government power, near untrammeled evil, and bound to destroy all they touch.

    1. In the US, pretty much all of the banks have exited the student loan business with the federal government taking over.

       There was a stupid congressional hearing on student loans a few years ago when the Democrats in charge called in representatives of a half dozen of the largest banks to scold them on the topic, and each one pointed out that they had no student loans.

       currently the colleges are guaranteed to get whatever they want to charge from the government loans, so they can just raise their prices with no impact on the colleges or most students (until the loans come due when the students take the hit)

       1. THIS. And the prices are absurd and the programs designed so the students CAN’T work.

    2. “If your colleges and banks stand to lose they won’t lend on bad risks”

       Dave, I recommend you look at the Community Reinvestment Act, and the resulting housing mess. Basically, the home mortgage lenders were told that if they applied the same lending criteria to everyone, that was “raaaaacist”, because for whatever reason fewer People of Melanin could meet them. And community organizers like Barak Obama organized “occupations” of the lobbies to basically overwhelm the ability of the banks to serve actual customers.

       Well, the first reaction of the lenders was to at least threaten to simply stop writing home mortgages. And Congress and the states said, no, we won’t let you write ANY lending. And we’ll call you raaaaacist. The banks said “well, if you’ll cover the risks by buying our bad loans, we’ll do it.”

       So the lenders started writing to lower standards, and then their People of Pallor said “you can’t apply different standards because we don’t tan”. So they pretty much dropped standards for everyone. And the government guaranteed it.

       And that was how Fannie Mae, etc. ended up backing bad mortgages and caused the 2008 crash.

       Point being that there will be powerful pressure for the government to continue subsidizing risks, and I’m not sure we can buck the tide.

       1. The counterargument, the universities are in the public trust business, that public trust underlies the government scams, and they have really damaged the public trust with the recent scams.

          THere are three trust bits that are vital to the univesrity business. Trust in research quality, trust in skills training, and trust in credentialing.

          It is vital that they not tell the marks that they are marks, and that they not obviously tell the marks to go fuck themselves.

          With covid and with the 2020 election fraud, they did so tell the marks to go fuck themselves.

          The courts no longer are as persuasive in resolving disputes, because the thumb is too obviously on the scale when ti comes to certain disputes.

          Etc.

    3. These come directly from the federal government, which means the cost of college has gone up to 10 times what Dan’s was. (Dan had scholarships for most of it, but still.) And that’s the thing. The government just printed the money. The money is SPENT.
       No one needs to pay it back. Taxes don’t need to be raised. We’ve already all paid for it in inflation.
       BUT they’re keeping at least 50% of the young and a lot of people up to my age in thrall of the government and paying amounts to…. well, among other things to support Obamacare. It’s a Boondoggle.

       1. When I started at Flat State U, a three hour grad class cost $300. So $100 per credit hour. I took four classes, so my tuition was $1200/semester, plus some fees (irksome but not too bad). When I finished 7 years later, it was $1200 per hour. For nothing more than what it had been when I started. Still in-state tuition.

          My undergrad college costs didn’t change, aside from the dining hall fee going up $20/year because the utility company raised rates. However, after I graduated? My half-tuition scholarship (then) would only cover part of one semester (now), rather than half the four-year cost. [rude words in cat]

          Highway robbery, anyone?

          1. Plus the kids HAD to pay gym fees. And entertainment fees. And worse, mental health professional fees, and other stuff that if they ever used (one of my idiots tried) were substandard and harmful.

25. c4c

26. I have a novel idea. Let the universities forgive the loans. They can afford it. And it goes with the Marxist principles that so many universities espouse.

    1. The loan isn’t from the universities. It’s from the government.

    2. Universities didn’t loan the money. BUT, they can get rid of many of their non-academic administrators and save money that way, thus allowing them to lower tuition costs and help students.

27. accents that were well nigh incomprehensible.

    I recall a fellow who said it took at least two weeks for him to work out that one professor was meaning ‘resources’ and not confusingly talking about ‘racehorses.’

28. I haven’t read everything yet, so apologies if this has been mentioned already. Where did all the money go? To the schools of course. My thought is to let the schools contribute to a “forgiveness fund”. Perhaps it should be tied to the size of their endowments, especially those with the largest. Let them get a feel for what a wealth tax is like!

    1. It went up the spout into “new dorms” and stuff that’s now withering in the vine.
       And into the pockets of beardo the weirdo, commie with tenure.

       1. And the administrators. It’s no coincidence that governments started directly disbursing loans with no limit at the same time as Wokeness exploded, with students demanding safe spaces and a bunch of Studies Centers and Support Departments sprang up all at the same time.

29. You can bitch and you can wrangle, but the truth is this: until very recently, and many places even now, you couldn’t get a job in retail management without a Bachelor’s. Even if you came in as an employee, you’d not get promoted without that piece of paper.

    My husband got away with a federal “hack” because of the “military service can count like a degree for promotion” thing.

    He still has to pull out his paperwork a lot, for jobs they literally send you to school for when you join.

    1. Yep.

30. Not only are student loans not dischargeable in bankruptcy, but they’re not even dischargeable in death. Your estate will have to pay out and if it can’t your heirs. It is fraud and hugely predatory lending practices all wrapped up into one enticing package.

    I am very fortunate that my parents were able to pay for my undergrad degree, but that went up by $1k every year… not coincidentally so did the amount you were allowed to borrow. My master’s was paid for by my employer and that wasn’t taxed as income at the time. I got it in the form of a reimbursement. The Phd was partially grants and partially loans. Yes, I knew what I was doing, yes I read through everything, yes, I still did it. Why? Because becoming a college professor was my lifetime goal at that point. I worked summers saving everything I possibly could to the point of moving home one summer and living with my parents to save money, and then during the school year in the computer lab for as many hours as I could get (not work study, didn’t qualify. This was just straight up work). I taught as an adjunct before I’d finished the dissertation, pulling in as many classes as people would give me. Pay was usually about $3k per 3-credit class. Max you could work at any one school was one class below what they considered a full time load. That meant becoming what we called a “freeway flier”. You taught one class at one school, hopped in your car, drove like a fiend to your next campus (usually across the LA metro area) hoping to make it on time for your next class and then back again for (if you were lucky) your third class. You did this 3-5 days a week depending on how many classes you were able to get. Then, by the time you paid for gas, you were close to losing money again.

    1. We Thought they were discharged in death? At least older son thought so.

       1. It depends on if you took them out while married. If so, widow/widower is on the hook.

       2. Maybe now, but I clearly remember reading my loan papers when I signed in 1993, not married, that the loan was not dischargeable in death. Then, after we got married, we each were on the hook for the others’ loan.

    2. Not only are student loans not dischargeable in bankruptcy, but they’re not even dischargeable in death. Your estate will have to pay out and if it can’t your heirs.
       ……………..

       Estate on death. That I can see. Heirs? How can they enforce that? Sure they can take whatever is in your estate, which takes it from your heirs. But they can’t make the heirs pay for something they didn’t not sign. Not even sure how they get their hands on 401(k), IRA, or Roths. Because the minute the school loan debtor dies, those accounts now belong to the person, or persons by percentage, stated, and not to the estate. Executor of the estate can’t even get their hands on it. (Oh. I am sure student loan lenders would try and even find a way. But dang if I know how.)

       1. Oh. If you owe anything on your house? The student loan can’t take the house, sell it and take the money. Banks will not let that happen. They will get what they are owed first, then the loans can have the rest. (House free and clear? Different outcome.)

    3. A college friend of mine (Williams ’87) found making a living as an adjunct so impossible that ten years ago she literally had to move to Mongolia to teach.

       1. I have friends who made a miniscule living. I don’t know how they survived. Note Made. Now they’re being got rid of in favor of ADJUNCTS FROM ABROAD. Because cheaper, I think.

       2. I survived as an adjunct instructor for 20 years. It took 4 classes (two from two different colleges, since adjuncts were not allowed to teach more) to make it. It was still less than the starting pay for a full time instructor, who only had to teach 3 classes.
          I realized that I was never going to be hired full time, because I was wrong-think.
          Screw them — higher ed delenda est.

31. Sarah, the Reader thanks you for this. You have given him a lot to think about.

32. Not having read the post yet, I have some thoughts on the issue.

    No forgiveness without the colleges covering half the cost.

    You should be able to discharge the debt through bankruptcy, but you must give up the accreditation.

    The total amount of repayment should never be allowed to exceed 200% of the total.

    I think this would help.

    1. WHY must you give up accreditation? Why punish the people who were scammed?
       A lot of people seem to want to punish the scammed AT ALL COSTS.
       Also do you know what percentage of people have student loans and NO accreditation?
       I bet you about half at least. Probably more.

       1. I hadn’t thought about people who got the debt without the degree, but if your degree can’t pay for itself, then giving it up to get rid of the debt seems fair.

          Didn’t the whole thing start with med students getting the degree, then declaring bankruptcy so they didn’t have to pay for it?

          1. No, apparently that was just propaganda. the bankruptcy was 1 to 2 percent. Yeah.

33. Another thing… when I was pregnant with #2, I got “a talk” from my aunt, because there was no way I could possibly afford to put more than two kids through college.

    It happened to be in the same room as my mom (did two jobs through college) and Navy vet had the free college sign up me, so it didn’t go far….but lacking that?

    No kidding folks aren’t having kids. They’re attacked at below replacement.

    1. Oh yeah. “How can you be so irresponsible, having kids you can’t pay college for.”
       Well…. maybe they won’t all go to college. I’m not even joking, listen you with kids under 18: if I had to do it again, the money we spent helping them through college would go into a fund, divided in half, for them to START a business, or take it to buy equipment to do something they really wanted to do. Or to learn something they wanted to learn, with a plan how it would pay off. Not college, but “I want to learn to write aps, so I can make this ap, that has all this potential” or “I’m going to start this computer repair shop.” Or even, younger son’s dream job “I’m going to try to be a you-tube inventor.” Maybe he’d have failed, but really he’d probably be no worse off.

    2. And they JUST changed the way the “expected family contribution” was calculated. Used to be they would take additional children in college at the same time into account, but not anymore.

       Because it’s “fairer.”

       1. They didn’t take it in account for us. So it wasn’t “just”. they assumed we’d pay the full amount we could with EACH child.
          So…. yeah

       2. Oh really? Scumbag feds…
          When my sister and I were still in undergrad, a few decades ago, we were applying for Pell grants (free money for the needy), but we were told that since we weren’t 24 yet, our parents should pay for our school.
          Yeah, right — I don’t know how they calculated that, but it was a garbage number. I come from a family of 6 kids, and my father worked for the Dept of Agriculture, which in no way paid enough that they could put any of their kids through school.
          But when we turned 24, suddenly we were independent, and got the full Pell Grant.
          Gee…thanks. Too bad about the other 2-3 years.

    3. College now is arguably for crazy people.

       There was the discussion of ‘useless’ degrees. Difficult to verify that any are not useless.

       Suppose a program that has a reasonably plausible business case, and will not drive you insane. Would still be a fairly situational sort of effort.

       There’s a argument in diving into the BLS occupational outlook handbookm and making a statistical case, or thinking about how narrow the slices of training that we can verify utility of are. BLS is also clearly forecasting crazily when you are used to looking that up, and thinking.

       With most degrees hot garbage, and with economic uncertainty, the major arguments for tertiary schooling are for people with a very specific grasp of what they want or need.

       If you have two kids, or ten kids, it is really unlikely that all of them will be such that college would be a wise experience.

       Saying /nothing/ about intelligence/ability, and mostly speaking of factors economic, factors sanity, adn factors only within self-knowledge.

34. “NOTE that I don’t know if reader is correct that this was designed to pay for Obamacare, but it wouldn’t surprise me, because the government guaranteeing the loans WAS at about that time.”

    From the horse’s mouth:

    Personally, I’m thinking of changing my name to “Cassandra” because for decades I’ve been calling the idea of letting an 18 year old sign for bankruptcy exempt loans sheer madness.

    All these other machinations–well, this post has been an eye opener. Too much to absorb at once; it’s like sipping from a fire hose. I had no idea. And yes, it sure sounds like indenture, not indebtedness…

    But first, asked from my own ignorance:

    Can’t one of the vaunted administrators hired by these high-falutin’ skools come up with some contract with a freshman that says “If you sign here and pass these classes, you will graduate in 4 years on this schedule”? Then if the school doesn’t provide said classes, refund the tuition or provide some other relief?

    1. Sure, they could come up with it. But what’s in it for them, when they can just get money on and on from the feds?
       Also, for the record, ours weren’t even 18. They were 17 and 16.

       1. Sadly, I fear you’re right. Sure looks that way, anyhow.

          My wife wanted to take a single class at a local CC to get a new job skill. She told me they seemed confused that she wanted to pay cash, repeatedly offering her several student loan options.

          Selling a student loan as “aid” was always a lie. At best, a necessary evil, at worst…pretty much what you wrote here.

          I’m starting to hear “Sixteen Tons” playing in the background…

          1. repeatedly offering her several student loan options.
             ………

             I ran into this too at redacted CC and later redacted university. My response was “don’t qualify, here is my check.” Besides we were still paying off the first degree loans for each of us. Wasn’t adding to them. Son ran into it too at redacted university up the highway. His response was the same. Difference was he didn’t give them a check, it was all paid online.

    2. That looks more like a horse’s ass to me.

       Apologies to actual horses.

    3. There’s also this, from the Hill, on how repayments are considered assets, and how the government could actually lower the interest rate to borrowers.

       https://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/dick-morris/151801-loans-subsidize-obamacare/

    4. Oh, sure they could. But they won’t. My “favorite” thing that I saw throughout my time was the admission of kids I called “wealthy but dumb.” Their parents could pay cash, they didn’t have any scholarships, so they paid full freight. School took their money for a year, maybe three semesters before “sadly” explaining to parents and student that student might not be cut out for college right now. They knew that when they admitted the kid. I knew it the first time I met kid in class. It was nothing more than highway robbery.

    5. wow. As I pointed in a different comment, the Hill columnist Dick Morris, noticed this years ago that the point of moving the debt to the Federal Government was to use the repayments to support ObamaCare.

       “According to the Congressional Budget Office, $8.7 billion of the money collected in student loan interest payments actually goes to pay for ObamaCare.”

       And the loans could be cheaper:
       “Alexander notes that the federal government borrows the funds for the student loan program at 2.8 percent and then lends it to the students at 6.8 percent, a markup of 4 percent.”

       https://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/dick-morris/151801-loans-subsidize-obamacare/

    6. Can’t one of the vaunted administrators hired by these high-falutin’ skools come up with some contract with a freshman that says “If you sign here and pass these classes, you will graduate in 4 years on this schedule”? Then if the school doesn’t provide said classes, refund the tuition or provide some other relief?
       ………………..

       Not exactly that. But it used to be the college curriculum the year you declared your major was the “contract”. Which detailed when each required class for a major was offered. If the terms changed then it was up to the college to proved reasonable alternatives to the class no longer offered. Or wave that requirement. If you changed majors, then the year that major declaration is made is the college curriculum that is followed. This was good enough to have parental medical insurance consider me “enrolled” when I ended up in the hospital early in what would have been fall term, and was working, but not enrolled in school classes. The program had a requirement that 6 months had to be worked in the degree industry, before graduation. It was not a pay for credits work program. This was listed in the college curriculum. I was full filling that requirement. (Did it have to be 6 continuous months? Not telling.)

35. Something has changed. My student loan servicer sent me emails reminding me of the upcoming end of the pandemic pause on payments. I’ve been long term unemployed and was on an income based repayment plan before the pandemic, but with all the changes, I was stressing about having to come up with money I couldn’t to pay on my astronomic debt. I couldn’t log in to their website even using my SSN and DOB and received a message I needed to call them. So, this morning I did just that. Call ended just a few minutes ago. The service agent informed me that the criteria for income based repayment plans has been changed and as of now, my entire student loan debt has been forgiven. It was well over $220,000 thanks to many periods of extended unemployment, coupled with capitalized interest. Now, it’s gone at the stroke of a pen. I hope other people in similar situations to mine get the same good news.

    1. Congratulations!

    2. I’m so happy for you. I really, sincerely am. Breath in deep.

    3. Make sure you get that in writing. Notified, signed, etc.

       But congratulations!

       1. He said I would receive a final statement showing the discharge and zero balance within 7 to 10 days. I’ll be diligently visiting the mailbox daily next week.

    4. I don’t want to rain on the parade, but beware the IRS……..

       1. Supposedly, there’s no IRS ‘taxed as income’ until 2024. I think it’s 2024. Some states are taxing it as income, though. 😦

          “Debt forgiveness usually must be reported on an IRS Form 1099-C, which details the amount of the canceled debt, the type of debt and the date of the forgiveness. A financial entity provides the borrower with the form if more than $600 in debt is canceled.

          But the IRS has directed student loan providers to refrain from filing or furnishing a 1099-C to any borrower who qualifies for the tax exclusion from Biden’s pandemic rescue law.

          Keep in mind, the legislation provides temporary tax relief only until 2025. After that, student loan forgiveness would be considered taxable, unless Congress takes new action.”

          https://www.forbes.com/advisor/taxes/student-loan-forgiveness-taxes/

          1. Welp, that’s what I get on just copy-pasting. It dies in 2025.

          2. ” Biden’s pandemic rescue law.”

             Wow. They just can’t stand to give any credit to Trump – WHO INITATED THE ENTIRE THING

    5. Mine was forgiven last year for some inexplicable reason. After years of jerking me around about the Public Service Forgiveness.
       I did not have to pay taxes on it.
       Good luck and Congratulations 🎉
       I know how relieved you feel 😁

       1. Congrats to you too!

          1. Thank you very much.

36. I switched majors to English because I discovered that I would need either a second bachelor’s or a masters to get a job in linguistics. Since so much of the class work overlapped I already had everything I needed to graduate in English.

    Linguistics had a lot of those classes that are required for graduation but only taught once a year. It took me ten years to graduate and I took a lot of electives those last few years.

37. John Stossel, in Taki’s Mag, has a piece on college rip-off and student loans some here might find interesting; https://www.takimag.com/article/college-rip-off/

38. I just realized why this whole thing sounds familiar.

    When I worked for a military supplier, I once questioned a piece of bureaucratic stupidity, pointing out it was wasting time and money. My boss simply told me that “We aren’t in the business of supplying the government with products; we are in the business of billing engineering time to the government. ”

    So, schools aren’t in the business of education, they are in the business of charging for education services. The more, the better.

    Actually educating someone us just a somewhat undesirable byproduct?

39. “snatching brands from the fire”
    (commenter note: This is my first WordPress comment. I beg forgiveness for any errors.)

    A GiveSendGo-like site allows donors to learn of student-loan debtors and to contribute to fund student-loan repayments.
    Option 1: Using an existing site, such as GiveSendGo
    Pros:
    Low startup and continuing costs
    Open to all
    Cons:
    No privacy for debtors
    No vetting of debtor information

    Option 2: Creating an invitation-only site
    Pros:
    Debtor information is vetted
    Donors sign non-disclosure agreements to maintain debtor privacy
    Cons:
    Higher startup and continuing costs, in both time and money

    1. P. Theorn, one problem is that there is a penalty for early re-payment. Yes, it is foolish to put it mildly. No, it is not right, since you can pay down a house or car early without getting punished for it. That might complicate your idea.

       1. Which loan servicer is that?

          Mohela doesn’t have penalties for early repayment. (that I’ve seen so far)

          1. I don’t know. It’s not me, but a good friend. I boggled when I was told. You just get to pay all the interest and all the principle right quick pronto, rather than benefitting from paying down the principle and thus reducing interest. And then you are at the mercy of the feds if they change something.

             I was soooooo fortunate that I got a huge academic scholarship to college 1.0 and didn’t have to take out loans or apply for grants, and had enough saved to cover grad school.

       2. Foolish?

          No. That is Evil.

       3. depends on the particulars of your house loan

40. I still think the loans should be divided up three way, as follow:

    First, the banks should have to eat a third. What kind of fool makes a loan w/o first making sure that the borrower can pay it back? But, they figured the taxpayers would bail ‘em out.

    Second, the universities should have to eat a third. They knew that a lot of their “degrees” would be worthless. But they, too, they figured the taxpayers would bail ‘em out.

    Lastly, the students should have to pay a third. They didn’t do their due diligence in making sure there would be a market for their degree. And they can consider it tuition in the The School Of Hard Knocks. Plus, TANSTAAFL.

    Under no conditions whatsoever should one damn red cent of taxpayer money be involved.

    I still think the loans should be divided up three way, as follow:

    First, the banks should have to eat a third. What kind of fool makes a loan w/o first making sure that the borrower can pay it back? But, they figured the taxpayers would bail ‘em out.

    Second, the universities should have to eat a third. They knew that a lot of their “degrees” would be worthless. But they, too, they figured the taxpayers would bail ‘em out.

    Lastly, the students should have to pay a third. They didn’t do their due diligence in making sure there would be a market for their degree. And they can consider it tuition in the The School Of Hard Knocks. Plus, TANSTAAFL.

    Under no conditions whatsoever should one damn red cent of taxpayer money be involved.

    I still think the loans should be divided up three way, as follow:

    First, the banks should have to eat a third. What kind of fool makes a loan w/o first making sure that the borrower can pay it back? But, they figured the taxpayers would bail ‘em out.

    Second, the universities should have to eat a third. They knew that a lot of their “degrees” would be worthless. But they, too, they figured the taxpayers would bail ‘em out.

    Lastly, the students should have to pay a third. They didn’t do their due diligence in making sure there would be a market for their degree. And they can consider it tuition in the The School Of Hard Knocks. Plus, TANSTAAFL.

    Under no conditions whatsoever should one damn red cent of taxpayer money be involved.

    1. Why do you think borrowers didn’t do due diligence? No, seriously? it’s just that they were lied to. And it has nothing to do with degree. Degrees with lots of need you get yanked around MORE.
       Also, nothing to do with BANKS. The government printed money and sent it to the colleges directly. Which is why i doesn’t need a red cent of taxpayer money. You’re not looking at what the SCAM is.
       The government already inflated the money in your wallet to pay for it. it’s gone. Keeping people in debt servitude gets you nothing, except a vote farm for gov-varmint.

       1. Keeping people in debt servitude gets you nothing, except a vote farm for gov-varmint.

          False. It gets the Lawful Stupid types a fuzzy feeling of having done justice, no matter how deranged it might be.

    2. “Under no conditions whatsoever should one damn red cent of taxpayer money be involved.”

       Then petition your Congress-critter to eliminate the federal department that issues student loans. Because that’s what student loan are: money from the federal government.

       And while you are at it, tell them to stop spending money on the other stupid things they spend trillion of tax payer moneys on.

       Or – and I know this an impossibility on the Internet – don’t propose “solutions” when you are completely ignorant of a) how the system functions and b) what the problem actually is.

    3. Lastly, the students should have to pay a third. They didn’t do their due diligence in making sure there would be a market for their degree. And they can consider it tuition in the The School Of Hard Knocks. Plus, TANSTAAFL.

       In that case, why not the parents and teachers? They are the ones who in your story failed to teach the kids to do due diligence, or in all too many cases railroaded their kids into college, thereby screwing them over.

       1. Or company xyz for requiring a MS to be an administrative assistant. Or a BS for a pilot or cop. Since the oughts it’s been essential to have a piece of paper for anything but self employment. And most professional self employment (architect, engineer, medicine, law, etc) cannot be done without a more expensive piece of paper and govt permission slip.

          Also, for those in govt or corps, they protected their own paying for employee degrees. Ms. Ed and PeD degrees as well as many business masters (anything for a corporation) aren’t coming from loans but are built into the prices you pay the corps.

          This is why burn it all down is the only option

41. Excellent post.

    I’m an oldster who’s still paying off a student loan. It’s killing me.

    For the first ten years, I paid the monthly suggested loan amount with the little booklet. Then, the economy tanked and I got grossly underemployed. I took their forbearance suggestions — they made it sound like it would be good for me. And then I started on the income dependent payments.

    That went on for about ten years.

    Then, I took a class on finance. I learned the wonders of Excel and computing the costs of loans. I also started tracking all my finances. I set up an Excel work book with my monthly income and expenditures. And I noticed that my student loan never went down by very much each month. I’d pay their suggested amount and the next month, I’d still owe about the same.

    Then I added calculations to my work book: if I pay X amount each month, when will the remaining about of the loan be paid off?

    It’ll be in a little less than two years. Five years earlier than they planned on it, but they still got a **** ton of money out of me. I’ll have paid it off after 25 years.

    My home loan is only a fifteen year term!

    Your credit card statements tell you how long it’ll take to pay off your balance if you only pay the minimum amount, how much you’ll pay off you only pay off the minimum amount, how much you have to pay monthly to pay or of in the years, and how much you’ll be paying to do that.

    Student loan paperwork didn’t do that.

    I could’ve paid a hell of a lot more in monthly payments prior to the economy tanking. I was an idiot. But Excel barely existed, and I had my little coupon book telling me to pay $Y per month… And not a single thing in all that paperwork that said, “And in thirty years, maybe, just MAYBE, you’ll be free!! And we’ll have bled you for an amount considerably more than what you originally borrowed!”

    I’m hoping to have it all paid off before I retire. Fingers crossed!

    1. it’s worth noting that the reason why your credit card statement has that information is that Congress passed a law requiring it.

       But the federal government doesn’t do it for their statements.

    2. I’ve known that since I was introduced to amortization in 10th grade math class.

       Of course, 10th grade for me was before Jimmy Carter and the destruction of education.

       Depending on the terms, if you make just the minimum payments on a student loan the time required to pay it off ranges from 150 years to ‘Never’.
       ———————————
       The government can mandate stupidity, but they can’t make it not be stupid.

42. Oldster, here, again.

    When I was an undergrad, a million years ago, I spent my parents’ money profligately. They were middle, middle class. They could afford to send me to an in-state college, with room and board, without too much pain, and no student loan. The same university for an in-state undergraduate degree costs MUCH, MUCH more than what my parents spent covered to present dollar value.

    At the major university I attended, all of the Deans were Deans of actual colleges or schools within the university. And they taught classes. (I took a class with the Dean of Arts and Sciences, the largest college at the university.) They had a staff of one. Now, there are Deans of Diversity! With staffs of five to ten!

    The dorms had no air-conditioning, with shared bathrooms down the hall. (Now they’re air conditioned, and the recently renovated a few to add private bathrooms!) The gym was pretty basic, huge, enormous, but basic. (Now, it’s an amazing spa!) The Foundation relied on student volunteers to phone alumni to tap them for money. (Now they’re paid!)

    1. So, our kids never lived in dorms. They lived at home, to save money. We worked our butts off, but we could only pay half of it.

       1. Back then, the dorms were affordable. They weren’t fancy; they did the job. Like I said, they weren’t air-conditioned, bathrooms down the hall, cafeteria food of overk=cooked canned vegetables, and inexpensive meat: ground beef, chicken, some kind of breaded fish filets.

          But the whole thing: Tuition, Dorms, books, fees, and “spending money” was about $8000. (I spent money on a lot of other things — sporting events, theater tickets, clothes, eating out… If I had been much more frugal, my parents’ expenses would have been closer to $7000. It pains me to think about how much of my parents’ hard-earned money I wasted.)

          1. cafeteria food of overk=cooked canned vegetables, and inexpensive meat: ground beef, chicken, some kind of breaded fish filets.
             …………………..

             Definition of “What is the Freshman 15?” Because most freshman gain 15#s because of the dorm food. Most, because I lost 20#s. I couldn’t tolerate the fatty foods so I ate (mostly) salads. (While meat and potatoes, were the basis of home diet growing up, meat was wild game: deer, elk, trout, and salmon. Low fat diet.)

             1. I lost 20 pounds because I was exercising and following Weight Watchers™. By the time I graduated, I’d trimmed down enough that people were concerned because I was so thin. (I was still heavier than WW recommended for my height, because they didn’t allow for bone structure back then.) Note: I went to a women’s college, so the fare tended to be lower fat, aside from hushed and reverent tone Southern Sunday Dinner.

             2. I got my Freshman 15 and then lost it in four weeks working at summer camp because of a horrible lead cook. (Who was then fired.) Never gained back that specific way, especially in later years when I had to feed myself more.

                I only had two meals a day in the cafeteria. Usually not breakfast, because yogurt and bagels were much easier before an 8AM class.

43. Nuts. My first comment got lost because I wasn’t logged in when I wrote it. And there is no way I can write it all again.

    Basically, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Well, it’s a nail with many heads, kind of Medusa-ish. And you’ve hit all those snakes’ heads.

    I took out a student loan in my thirties. I’m still paying it off. I’m hoping to retire in five years, at sixty-seven. But I can’t until my student loan is paid off. I hope I live long enough to enjoy some of my retirement. I’m afraid my estate will have to discharge anything left of my student loan debt.

    You people who write about doing some sort of public service to pay off student loans: it’s not like they’d send you to some rural place where they might be thankful for you. It’s not gonna be “Northern Exposure.” It’ll be Camden, and you’ll be lucky to not get shot or beat up.

44. Pingback: The vexing question of student loans – Glendale, Burbank, Crescenta Valley, Sunland and Tujunga Republican Assembly

45. I’m very late to comment but I have been thinking very hard about what to say.

    Here’s how I was treated with my student loans.
    I went back to school late after child #6 was in middle school. When I first started hubby and I were paying for the credit hours out of our savings. It only took 3 years of me working my tail off to get my BS in Network and Systems Management an AS in Network Administration. In three short years the price of credits quadrupled. So I did take out a loans for the last three semesters. Even though I had 2 nice scholarships, our son had two surgeries and the medical bills were killer. But I moved into a much better job at the school I worked at because of the degree so I WAS actually making more than the loan payment was, therefore, it seemed like a reasonable choice.

    Enter Obamacare. In order to pay for it, the government took over all the student loans so they could use the interest to “pay” for Obamacare. The three loans I had signed for each went from 2.4% interest, 4% and 4.5% to 6.8% for the bundle. You see THEY can change the terms of the loan any time they want. And if you don’t like it you can just pay it off. But they don’t actually want you to because they need that money so they horse you around every which way. And suddenly because of the interest hike the payments were way higher. So they said, if you consolidate your loans, because you work for a school, in ten years they can be forgiven. I did that. Oh, btw, we are raising your interest rates too. Again. 7% now. Payments are a hardship? Go income based. By the time I got to my ten year mark, I had paid more than the original loans in payments and I still owed a ridiculous amount. Then I fill out the paperwork to get loan forgiveness, and guess what? There was a mistake made when my loans were consolidated and suddenly I only had to do ten more years of payments. Sad. Sorry you can just pay it off though.

    For some inexplicable reason during Biden’s first push to forgive loans my case was one that made the cut. I have no idea why I just know I got a letter saying my case had been reviewed and my loan paid off.

    I alternate between feeling guilty and happy. Guilty because I feel like someone who’s been scammed by a huckster and needed bailing out and happy because I truly do pay my debts and we never even tried for medical bankruptcy when we qualified. I fulfilled the terms of the contract I signed and they reneged at least twice. I paid quite a bit more than I ever took out in loans.
    But it’s a giant scam so they have one more income stream to blow on payments to Ukraine and skim off the top.

    1. My loan got turned over to another company. The interest is still the same — so far — but it will never be “eligible” for any forgiveness. I am paying on it till after I die.

    2. paid more than the original loans in payments and I still owed a ridiculous amount.
       ……………………………..

       This is why a class action suit has to be done. Public trial with information disclosures would highlight the problem. Page after page of initial amounts owed, with how the various interest rates, different “help” offered to show the blatant being “scammed by a huckster”.

       Also why we said no, and kept saying no, to Parent Plus Loans for son. Initial, 2007, variable rate starting at 6%, with no fixed period on when the rate could go up, because it sure wasn’t ever going down vary, and payments and interest start immediately on distribuiton. More than double a personal loan interest rate, let alone what we did do refinancing the house (we had enough equity, even then, to pull out double cash needed to cover shortfall for son’s 4 years of college, and still be 25% mortgage to house value, and this was after the housing crisis in 2008).

       In comparison. Hubby’s student loan paid out at $19/quarter (do not know initial amount), interest was simple 3%. My student loan was, $30/month, 6% simple interest on $10k initial balance, neither interest or payment started until 6 months after non-enrollment. I started paying in ’79, hubby started paying before we started dating. To be clear. Paying 3% and 6% simple interest on loans when standard savings interest rates were running 8% and loan interest rates were above 10%. In comparison, our second house purchased in 1988 was an initial 13.5%, 5 year balloon, variable reset every 5 years (yes, we got refinanced ASAP). Point is, we had no incentive to pay off the student loans early. We could (and did) put the amounts owed, in money market savings at 9%, and still come out ahead.

       It wasn’t just intuition the Parent Plus Loans stunk. I knew they stunk, just in the first paragraph. How bad? You outlined that. Your loans don’t appear to have been Parent Plus type, but at least no interest until payment is started, then you illustrated what happens.

       After reading Sarah’s Loan blog, all the comments, capped by this. Loan forgiveness 100%, to the amount borrowed, or even less if prove university incompetence (class scheduling fraud), not a penny more. Maybe recalculated to include if simple interest from the very beginning (don’t say “can’t be done”, any competent *programmer write a program written to recalculate the millions of loans. Heck individually it could be done in a spreadsheet. Data entry? Data is already in a computer. Data dump into new system.) Easiest is just to the amount borrowed. Someone like you, who has already paid the over what they owed? Immediately done, free and clear. Paid over in interest? Well as someone stated, nothing is perfect, and life isn’t fair.

       (*) A brilliant programmer would just get it implemented faster. I am saying this as a programmer somewhere between competent and brilliant.

46. Yep no Parent Plus loans. The contracts I signed were for pretty low, fixed rates. We did the math and we would have still come out ahead with my better job and loan payments. And I needed to get out of being a teacher aide for my mental health.
    Thank you so much, Sarah Hoyt, for posting this. I felt like the only person who got shafted but now I realize that not only was I not the only one, after further reflection, I realize that they never meant for this to be fair. I didn’t want to push for forgiveness because it seemed like a conflict of interest. And I was ashamed. I consider myself a smart person. I obtained challenging BS and AS degrees in three years working full time and taking care of my 3 youngest. Summa Cum Laude. We work hard and never, ever, expected anyone to pay for anything or give us any help.

    I had stopped homeschooling to go to work to pay medical bills but it seemed like the harder we tried to do the right thing the more they took advantage of us. But they reneged. They altered the deal. We f’d up. We trusted them. I felt like a stupid loser not to see what they were doing.

    Now do Obamacare.

    1. Don’t make me do Obamacare. Besides, everyone knows that’s a scam.

    2. “And I was ashamed.”

       And they are counting on that. The conmen get away with things because people feel bad about getting scammed, and don’t speak up.

       1. THIS

       2. Which is Why evidence like SusanB’s needs to be out there public. People scammed need to know they are not alone. People like me, hubby, and son, who either got loans but didn’t get scammed, or where the 3 of us worked to get son through without loans, know what in the hell happened. Loans to be forgiven like ours, even with the shenanigans of the universities (which does need to be dealt with), that I have more a problem with. But what SusanB listed? Hell yes, burn the loan system down.

          FYI. We thought son and his classmates were the only ones being jerked around. Should have known better.

47. Honestly, the first thing that needs to happen is making the phrase “student loan scam” common parlance. Say it casually. Say it often. Share your horror stories when you get the chance. But say it. Say it until everyone who hears the words “student loan” autocompletes them with “scam”.

    Why? Because it’s inarguable. Because everyone has been bitten by it or knows someone else who has. Because student loan proponents will have to write a whole paragraph just to dispute a single, fleeting word. And most of all, say it because agreeing on the problem is the first step towards agreeing on the solution.

    Say it until it sticks. Say it until the shame is gone and the anger remains. Say it until it ceases to be a partisan issue and starts to be a human one. Only then will we get a chance to fix it.

    1. You are correct.

48. “What do unskilled people do? Oh…. retail. That’s literally about it.”

    Also landscaping, construction, driving trucks, things like that. And I believe you can still get in on the ground floor with traditional blue-collar trades: carpentry, electrician, plumbing, etc.

    Sadly, none of this gets to the core of the problem, which is that we are currently led by stupid, senile people who formed their views of the world sixty and seventy years ago, and who never realize just how stupid their ideas are because they never suffer the consequences of those ideas.

    1. Not as much. Because illegal immigration.

49. He voted against it.

    https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/08/19/dem-lawmaker-takes-flamethrower-to-radical-left-elitists-in-defense-of-student-loan-plan-vote-1388222/

    1. He is also lying. The taxpayers ALREADY PAID FOR IT IN INFLATION.
       Preying on idiots who misunderstand how out of control the government is, is no virtue.
       Let my people go.

       1. Of course he’s lying. And ignorant. He’s a Democrat.

50. It would be interesting to see one of the student loan recipients a few years out of school challenging the system on 13th Amendment grounds. Because this certainly sounds like involuntary servitude.

    1. To which the response will be “you didn’t have to take the loan so it wasn’t involuntary”.

       1. is the term ‘involuntary servitude’ if ‘indentured servitude’, indentured servitude was voluntary as well

          1. Heck, salves were for real paid for. And it was a big part of not freeing them. “Why should the middle class who never owned slaves be affected by what it will do to the economy to lose all those slaves.”
             And yeah, slaves had done something to deserve it. Lose a war. Be born to a slave mother.
             I’m going to be blunt: we already forbid scam lending in every other front. Yes, a lot of 16 and 17 year olds signed these loans….
             Was it legal?

51. Sarah, you make some good points. Particularly that the Fed debt will never be repaid, so the “education” money is already lost, and that the GOP will be blamed by the new serfs as they labor under a heavy debt load.

    But a wholesale loan writeoff doesn’t work without wholesale elimination of government in education loans, and of making the colleges co-signers of the debt.

    So, no, unilateral loan forgiveness by the Executive power doesn’t work… because it perpetuates the system and worsens the problem for future students.

    1. OF COURSE you need to get the feds out of education. BUT if you just let the loans be discharged in bankruptcy, you’re at least not sending people back to college so they can pause the loans. you’re at least not feeding the beast. That’s all I’m saying.

52. I remain unconvinced that I should bail out people who majored in polysci, women’s studies, etc and now cannot (or don’t want to) pay off their loans.

    Give me a guarantee I won”t support people who essentially graduated in basket weaving and I would be more amenable.

    It’s a hard row when people who have outstanding loans they want forgiven try to convince me. I paid mine off. Any appeal that I be merciful to others is exactly that, an emotional appeal.

    1. The majority of the people didn’t major in those things. It’s a scam. it’s a complete scam.
       I’m happy you paid yours off. HOW LONG AGO?

    2. We paid our loans off too. 34 years ago. Before they were a scam. Government loans administered by the bank. Guarantied by parental (at least mine was). But, and this is huge, 6% simple interest rate, that they could not change.

       Read the case examples that people are listing. Fixed interest rates, that aren’t. Enticed into consolidating loans that also appear fixed interest rates, then aren’t. Enticed into income based or location served payment plans that then, not on the part of the applicant, but the government agency, “mistakes are made”, voiding the original agreement. Either pay of the new balloon total owed or “by golly another X years will see you clear this time!”

       These are the type of cases that need to brought together with a class action. “You didn’t have to take the loans out!” isn’t a valid legal excuse for predatory private loans, it shouldn’t be for the government either!

       By comparison the more recent experience (a decade ago) of getting our child through college without loans, despite the college pulling required class scheduling shenanigans, we got off light. Took all three of us. Was coming up with tuition, fees, and books, the term before due. Rent and utilities the month before due. We got off dang light.

53. Pingback: The vexing question of student loans – California MAGA Coalition

54. We have the money (as a nation) to send multiple billions of dollars overseas to any nation that expresses even a vague hankering for it. We don’t constantly.

    I therefor have no problem at all with the idea that we should just start forgiving debts of Americans at the same time (since we have all that cash to toss around like candy). We should actually start insisting that ever dollar going to places that have nothing tangible to do with us, should be match by a dollar or two to the debt of ordinary Americans. Maybe move on to things like car loans, and credit for buying gas, etc.

    That or stop collecting all this extra cash (taxes) from us so we can pay the stuff ourselves.

    1. That though is bullshit. You don’t owe your car loan to the government.
       The student loans are a particular case, which are a huge, screaming scam.

       1. I agree. But you missed my point, perhaps. Simplified, if we have the money just laying around to send to Zelenskyy every time he needs a new missile, in a war that we have no purpose in, not to mention the million other ways we spend a trillion dollars on non-American causes every time the wind shifts, then “we” (our government) has the money to start paying off debts that will actually help Americans. ALTERNATIVELY, “we” have the money to demonstrate conclusively that government collects too much money and just looks for odd places to spend it, in which case, like paying people’s debts, let people keep more of their money to pay their own debts. Either way, help Americans.

          Normally, I’m 100 percent with the idea that people should make responsible choices and bear their burden. No more. Our government is all-in on helping the rest of the world, tossing around (and just plain losing) billions of dollars like it doesn’t matter. I served in the Marines after Vietnam and literally got nothing for it. There was no GI Bill for us. Not to mention, selectively prosecuting anybody that objects to their BS crony elitism. I simply no longer care about what was the right thing to do at one time. It’s no longer 1950.

          1. Meh. we do have an interest. Though I think it started because Biden conived with Putin (who wanted to put his stooge back in) so he could obliterate proof of his bribes. But Zelenski didn’t run as they expected.
             Now it’s out of control. But we have reason not to want Europe swallowed.
             Europe does too.
             I didn’t miss your point. I think it’s misguided. Note, I don’t think we should send people.
             And I don’t believe — and have reason for this — we’re even sending what we say we are. I think most of it is going to the Big Guy.

             1. Actually, we are sending what we say we are, and it’s not pallets of cash, it’s billions of dollars “worth” of stuff. Stuff that’s largely obsolete or about to be replaced. Stuff that we’re counting at the original purchase price, not what we could sell it for now that it’s been sitting in warehouses for decades. Also, sending the cluster munitions and MLRS rockets so that Ukraine can shoot them off at the Russians is actually saving us money that we had plans to spend to deactivate/destroy them.

                1. I understand some of the stuff we’re sending doesn’t actually get used, because there is nothing to use it on/with.

             2. Well that may be, but I’d say it’s Europe’s problem to face ab initio. I know they are also contributing, but it is also true that the only land affected so far, with only vague reason to prognosticate further, is Ukraine’s. This is not, so far, the Nazis annexing (or former Soviets). If it turns into that, then we may well have an interest, until it does, we do not. We are not, automatically, the world’s police force. Especially for a Europe which can barely be goaded into looking out for itself. And we do have troops on the ground there. My neighbor, who pilots for United, has ferried them over. I’m sure they are “advisory,” but we all know how MACV turned out.

                As you suggest, our “interest” may be nothing more than an operation stemming from some need to cover something up, or guide things to someone’s interest. But that still doesn’t make it important for America.

                As a conservative, I am constantly surprised by conservatives who never met a country that they didn’t either want to save, or bomb into oblivion. As this is off topic here, I cut out.

55. Reading this article opened up my eyes to a couple of things I hadn’t thought about. Let’s talk about degrees in disciplines that are vocational in nature, and what is required as a pre-requisite to the degree.

    For me it was computer science. However in order to get a bachelors in that degree I had to take many unrelated liberal arts classes. These pre-reqs were often worthless toward succeeding in my chosen career path. Yes, I did come out more rounded but they didn’t necessarily give me critical thinking skills. It was just knowledge, but for what?

    Looking back now I realize that these classes extended the amount of time and money spent for my education. Both with a cost. The added time for the undergrad pre-reqs set me back on starting my career path by at least 1 – 2 years. This is lost productivity. Worse, it forced me into more student loans, guaranteed by the federal government of course and sold many times over since graduation.

    This is a scam. Especially for state schools.

    When I went to school it was english lit, today I fear it is much worse. People are taking loans to help pay for grooming along ideological social engineering lines. Politicians and activists have a stake in perpetuating this scam.

    Solutions are many, but will be met with never ending roadblocks by those that stand to profit or yield power by the system that is in place today.

    1. For me it was computer science. However in order to get a bachelors in that degree I had to take many unrelated liberal arts classes. These pre-reqs were often worthless toward succeeding in my chosen career path. Yes, I did come out more rounded but they didn’t necessarily give me critical thinking skills. It was just knowledge, but for what?
       ………………..

       For me it was Forestry (’79). Plus required to have 204 class hours overall (so even with non-Forestry required classes there were a few hours to find something). The degree could be completed in 4 years, IF took average 17 hours each quarter for 4 years. I tried. Couldn’t sustain. Took me two extra quarters. (If I count the one fall I took off to work to full fill the work in forestry for 6 months requirement. Who am I kidding. I needed a car. That was the only way to afford one. The requirement was real. Just not 6 months continuous.)

       I am sure the computer science degree (’89), also had the pre-reqs. But I came in already having those done, and then some. But, there is more. In addition a minor in something else was required. They tried to force that on me too, when I already had an unrelated degree. Got rid of it. But dang.

56. I agree with a lot of your points. I think student loans are awful and I think the government should get out of the business all together. However, in my experience, there’s a LOT of low-cost college programs that can be done if one were willing. I’ll give a couple of examples that I did in the last decade, so not some long ago in a land faraway examples: I went to Western Governors University and got an accounting degree. This is a quasi-government online college which offers four year degrees at budget prices – roughly $6k a year. You can take as many classes as you can complete in a semester, meaning that if you’re focused, you can complete the degree in a short amount of time. I also worked in a large company that had a call center. Call center employees could be hired with only a high school degree, but they had a clear pathway to advancing their career – they could work their way up to a relatively high-paying job if they were willing. This was a large company that you’ve all heard of. They also paid college tuition benefits. Starbucks, UPS, Amazon, FedEx, and other large companies have partnered with online colleges to provide full or partial tuition for their employees. This is a good option for people.

    I just don’t get the “woe is me, the only way is to take out $100,000 to get ahead” attitude. There’s a TON of options out there that does not include taking out student loans. There are jobs for those willing to work. Even when I worked in food service and retail, I knew lots of managers who had started at the bottom and worked their way into being store/restaurant managers.

    1. Dear LORD. There are SOME options. or were ten years ago. Did you miss where I said it gets worse every year, and it gets more expensive every year.
       Also depends on what you want to and CAN study. (I could never do accounting, for instance. Digit dyslexia.)
       So, cute, but no sale. it’s a scam.

    2. Online options are relatively new. They weren’t there when our son was attending college, not even as he was finishing up. (Not to mention when we were attending college. You know in the stone age, before calculators. Seriously, I used a slide rule, until mid junior year.)

       Sure. I want a doctor or lawyer taking classes online (sarcasm, JIC). How does that work for Chemistry, Physics, or other physical science, labs? Note, I can come up with some additional ones to list too. I know of entire programs, at some universities, where undergraduate students cannot work during summer break because they have to attend summer school lab camp. (I was lucky that that type of program had the facilities nearby so that summer school portion wasn’t a requirement.) This is just off the top of my head where “just take online classes” does not always work.

       FWIW. Call Center? OMG into torture much? (Some people thrive. Me? Just shoot me now.)

       Okay. Now let us do some math. Required *204 hours for degree (actual example). At average 4 hours/term, 4 terms/year, working full time so one class per term. Math works out to 204/4/4 = 12 years and 3 terms. Even 34 years ago when I finished up my second 4 year degree, the universities were not accepting any required classes completed 10 years prior toward a degree even if taken at the same university. So how does that work out? Oh, I know! Take two online classes? Working full time? Note. Not entirely being sarcastic. Because even online (not available when I was getting any of my degrees), I’d find it difficult taking more than one class if working full time. (Note, second degree, I did take one class at a time for 6 terms working full time. Then completed it in 2 more years full time school, half time work. But then I only needed 12 classes, 48 hours, for that second bachelors degree.)

       (*) Can be whittled down if not required to take things like writing, or history, by about 12 hours, so just 12 years.

       1. Not just call centers, customer service in general is only for a very, very specific kind of Odd, and I am not that Odd. I seriously don’t know how I survived three years at a huge retailer in a job everyone craps on (more literally than you’d think). And this is before you even factor in the ways that those jobs are set up to enable abusive customers to do whatever they want.

          1. I can (could?) deal with customer service, just not retail, sales, or call center customer service. It was internal division *help desk customer service for 6 years. Third tier service for 6 years. Direct *help desk customer service for 12 years. Middle was dealing with bugs that the help desk couldn’t deal with when I asked to get directly involved (“I can’t recreate the complaint”, very little, most was just passed on). First and last was “What do you want?”, “Why do you want it?”, if complaint “it is broken” then “why is it broken”. Then either do whatever, or go to big boss and ask here is what is wanted is it under “maintenance agreement hours” (not that the hours used were tracked) “or create a quote”.

             (*) While technically help desk type work I spent most my time programming. Going from one assigned (or not) tech ticket to another (once we actually had a communal system, otherwise kept my own list). When I announced my retirement to the clients I dealt with regularly (after giving notices), the responses were “Nooooooooo!”, “You were suppose to wait until I retired!”, “Noooooooo!” Not that the guys didn’t help them too. Difference was I didn’t just give the answer, I told them “Why”, without being asked. Even the male clients I worked with weren’t put off by this personal flaw. (More likely to be told “If I wanted to know why. I would have asked.” In other aspects of my life.) My point is, “If I say why now. They won’t call back, again.” Again. Again. Again. The instruction just might sink in.

    3. I had to fight with my parents to be allowed to not go to college.

       Now, my background is…. odd…. but I damn well guarantee you that I’m not even close to the only one. And for every young person who didn’t have quite the same situation, they also had all of their teachers and school counselors driving it into them constantly that college was the most important thing.

       The self appointed adults in the room keep saying that the kids need to take responsibility for their mistakes. Strangely the self appointed adults don’t seem to be particularly interested in taking responsibility for pushing kids into College Uber Alles.

       “You fools! You listened to us!” appears to be the motto.

       1. My daughter finished 8th grade this year, and before heading off to high school I had a talk with her where I said “you should strongly consider NOT going to college right after high school” with all the reasons we’ve all discussed here a million times: colleges aren’t serious places anymore, student loans are a trap, and most importantly, people who go to college after working for several years are much more serious and focused because they’re there to learn something specific rather than just drift and party.

          She got in to the alternative high school (“$REGULAR_SCHOOL feels like an institution,” she said, “Well, that’s because it is” I replied), which for all that it’s like the Evergreen College of high schools at least has a program for kids to intern and apprentice at various trades and occupations, from construction to nursing to what we used to call “secretarial”. I suggested the electrical trade, because it’s mostly done indoors and takes more brains than nailing up 2x4s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

          1. Great-nephew, with his mom and younger sister, are in your neck of the woods, somewhere (Greater Seattle). He took a HS/tech degree program combo, so that by the time he graduated from HS at age 19, he had the tech degree too. That would have been 2019 or 2020 (haven’t seen him or his mom since he was 4, when we went to SIL’s funeral. Never met they great-niece.) Niece works for Disney from home. We are connected through Facebook when niece posts. (Lack of connection thing is a long story.)

       2. The guidance counselor at Day Job strongly encourages students to look at ALL options for after graduation, from high-power universities to apprenticeships to vocational degrees to the military to what-have-you. Apparently this is somewhat Odd, but welcome.

57. I graduated with a BA in 90. Despite the government’s formula, my parents did not have the money to pay for my college (other than once when they bailed me out with a tuition payment). So for a few years, student loans and small academic scholarships, plus working 30 hours a week at two jobs, were enough to pay for tuition, books, rent, food, etc. Halfway through my undergrad, suddenly I became eligible for Pell Grants.
    It took me 5 years to complete the BA. I ended up with a whopping $6,000 dollars in student loan debt for my undergrad, because I lived my budget and went to an inexpensive school. The loan was from a credit union, however, and it was paid back fully about 25 years ago, after a year of teaching English abroad.
    For my MA, at the same school, I borrowed nothing. Scholarships and 30 hours a week work, plus just taking the minimum number of classes possible to stay active in the program, helped me afford it. It took me 5 years to complete what is usually a 2 year degree.
    I doubt what I did is possible for most people in current years.
    I’d love to see colleges take it in the shorts for the student loan scam; it’s really helped inflate the costs a lot (since “nobody” is actually paying the money).
    But after months of reading and thinking about it, just wiping out the whole system of debt, if it removes the Fed so that they can’t keep doing it, sounds like the way to go.

    1. It’s possible for Mormons attending BYU. Maybe a few others. My kids were “lucky” to be at the bottom when the rolling started to get scared and the avalanche grew at speed.

58. End the Government Student Loan program! Want a loan? Go to a bank. Banks will only loan to people who they think will be able to pay them back. Want an expensive private college degree in Marxist Victimization Studies? No loan for you – too bad. US Gov has no business being in the loan business. Surprised you have not thought of it.

    1. We agree. What corrupted the entire system was the government pipeline directly to the universities. However, when have we managed to end a government program? We still have a helium reserve to fill all our military dirigibles.
       Seriously, the best way is to stop people having to go back to college to pause payments, by letting them declare bankruptcy. that takes some money out of the system, and then let word of the sheer crappiness of college nowadays spread.

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