[kcmastrpc]

While I can empathize here as someone with no degree and a job at FAANG, it's hard for me to have a lot of sympathy. I put the blame squarely on these institutions and our government for this situation.

The institutions should be held liable for this debt, not the tax payer, and our government should not guarantee or subsidize these loans. Higher education is important in our society, but the situation we're in now is a complete disaster.

18-year olds taking on huge debt for useless degrees that can't be bankrupted, what could possibly go wrong?

[kgdiem]

> The institutions should be held liable for this debt, not the tax payer, and our government should not guarantee or subsidize these loans.

This seems fair to me. Many universities have tremendous endowments and should be in a position to offer financing to their students. The extent of government subsidy could be no tax on the interest gained from the loans they write.

It seems like the paradise papers at large and especially the connection to higher ed have been largely forgotten and maybe never fully acknowledged in the mainstream.

https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/universi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers

[ThrowawayR2]

Anytime you hear somebody claiming that university endowments aren't being used or aren't fully being used to aid students, you can safely dismiss their other opinions as being uninformed.

There's a lot of articles out there about what endowments are and the restrictions on how they can be used, e.g. https://www.case.org/resources/debunking-5-myths-about-endow...

[webworker]

> Many universities have tremendous endowments and should be in a position to offer financing to their students.

This is exactly why every time my university comes calling for donations, I decline. Sorry, but I'm not making a donation that you'll use to rebuild a stadium when you're setting your students up to graduate with six-figure debt. Figure your priorities out, whether you want to educate students or play tone-deaf real estate developer.

[lapcat]

> The institutions should be held liable for this debt, not the tax payer, and our government should not guarantee or subsidize these loans.

A lot of the institutions are government entities, taxpayer sponsored public universitites.

It's analogous to suing police departments for police brutality: it's not the police officers who end up paying (police officers don't have millions of dollars to pay out) but rather the taxpayers of the cities.

[caseysoftware]

> The institutions should be held liable for this debt, not the tax payer, and our government should not guarantee or subsidize these loans.

Yes. I'd have a lot more compassion about the debt forgiveness if they were enacting some plan to FIX the problem at the same time.

[lapcat]

> I'd have a lot more compassion about the debt forgiveness if they were enacting some plan to FIX the problem at the same time.

The problem is that typically the very same people who are opposed to debt forgiveness are also opposed government-sponsored higher education that's free for students, like higher school and earlier; likewise, the very same people who are in favor of debt forgiveness also advocate government-sponsored higher education.

I don't think there is a fix as long as higher education is treated like a luxury good. And if that's society's choice, so be it, but then I don't want to hear another word about so-called "meritocracy" when it's pay-to-play.

[dansiemens]

> I put the blame squarely on these institutions and our government for this situation

Maybe we should advocate for some personal responsibility as well. Institutions may have offered dead end programs, banks may have financed it, but many individuals took out these loans quite thoughtlessly.

[silverquiet]

Systemic problems require systemic fixes; waxing on about personal responsibility might assuage your feelings, but it does not change the facts.

[jrozner]

I agree that personal responsibility is important and both things can be true. I also think anyone who believes our taxes are going to go down if we don’t bail students out is delusional. With that belief, I’d rather my taxes directly improve the lives of tens of thousands of people than funnel more money into defense contractors, poorly run construction companies that can’t build infrastructure, and other already wealthy people’s pockets who aren’t actually returning what I think is enough value to the country for what we’re paying.

[ElevenLathe]

> The institutions should be held liable for this debt, not the tax payer, and our government should not guarantee or subsidize these loans.

Isn't this just "dealer financing" but for college degrees? It's predatory in autos and real estate. Why is it a better fit for education?

[brodouevencode]

I too took a non-traditional route. My employer paid for my degrees, and they reaped the benefits of that. The whole notion of "you have to go to college right after high school" is rather ignorant.

[listless]

Ignorant is a bit of a strong word here. The reason why people index on college so much is they are looking at the data...

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/02/11/the-ris...

This is not to say that college is causal here, but it is a variable and at least one you can control.

The problem is that everyone wants to go to a nice college and live the dream. Nobody wants to do 2 years free at community college and then transfer to a state school even though the outcomes would be nearly identical as if you went to some high-end private university (ivy not withstanding). This is an entitlement problem, and the universities are exploiting it.

[yareal]

A lot of neurological development happens between 18 and 24, college is not just a practical skills education, it's also a space you're allowed to practice being an adult while that neurological development happens.

Ideally everyone can go to college and the costs are manageable and the counselors there help people understand what their degrees might be worth to them at the end of the process.

[alistairSH]

In general, the lifetime earnings for a college graduate exceed those of a non-graduate by in excess of $1,000,000. There is nothing "ignorant" about choosing college.

The debt situation isn't sustainable. But "go to college to earn more money" continues to be largely true.

edit - fixed a typo

[derbOac]

I agree with you, but also think corporate hiring and HR practices also deserve a lot of blame as well. I think this is a big part of the antimeritocracy sentiment that's started rising in the US. It's not so much antimeritocracy as much as it is anticredentialing, and I'd go so far as to say debates about standardized testing fall under the same umbrella. It's a general pattern: take some thing — a degree, a test score, whatever — that bears some legitimate but also weak signal of skill, ability, or aptitude, and then mindlessly apply it as a criterion as if it were the underlying thing you're interested in.

If corporations and HR wouldn't use these kinds of credentials mindlessly, there wouldn't be quite the unchecked demand that allows universities and colleges to feed off of it, and we wouldn't have all these debates about student debt. I've seen it in practice in administration at large companies, making certain kinds of degrees required for positions that absolutely do not require them, even of people currently working very successfully in those positions (i.e., they have to go get a degree to maintain a position they already have), because HR basically decides it will make the company look good, and the management gets a monetary bonus for implementing it successfully as policy.

Debtholders get a lot of criticism on HN, but I usually feel very differently in these discussions. I have no debt, but it's hard for me to blame people getting masters in religious studies when they see people will other bullshit masters degrees in administrative positions basically because HR has decided a masters degree in something, anything, is required for administration. It's also absurd that we can see the value in a manifest self-taught computer science or math skillset but then somehow imagine that someone getting a degree in philosophy means they can't also have those skills.

There's probably a lot more that could be said about a general problem in our society, of using weak metrics and algorithms as if they were precise, substituting poor measures for the thing itself. We have these neverending debates about whether the test score, or degree, or whatever, is a valid indicator of skill or not, as if that's the actual problem; it's never that these things aren't valid indicators of something, it's how much of an indicator they are and whether we should rely on them so heavily. It feels like it comes up everywhere: educational debt, medical regulation, everything.

Reading stories of earlier times are really sobering to me. I'm sure there's a certain amount of survivorship bias in the stories themselves, but it never ceases to amaze me how often people would actually apprentice in positions, or actually work themselves up the ladder, or just show up at places and get jobs. That still happens today but it's like we can't function without a rubber stamp that has the flimsiest of basis to it. It feels like admittance and hiring decisions are basically nonsense in a lot of places, so rather than fix it we just play pretend with these proxies.

[ryandrake]

> If corporations and HR wouldn't use these kinds of credentials mindlessly

Keep going down the root-cause trail. Corporations would not be using "college education" to filter for people who are literate, numerate, and can accomplish basic tasks if high schools were graduating people with that baseline. But K-12 education is not doing its job, and a high school diploma is no longer a reliable sign that someone can even function as an adult.

[nradov]

Educational credentials are just an easy way for HR departments to filter applicants down to a manageable level when there is a labor surplus. They quickly throw out that requirement as soon as they have trouble filling jobs.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-degree-job-requirement/

[Traubenfuchs]

> taking on huge debt for useless degrees

That‘s the one and only mistake here and for societies sake, it would probably be best to forbid this. If someone wants to take a loan for a useless degree, they are not mentally fit to do so.

[spywaregorilla]

You don't think it's their fault but have no sympathy for them?

[kcmastrpc]

The two aren't mutually exclusive, and that's also a misrepresentation of what I said. I believe I said something to the effect of I don't have a lot of sympathy for them

18-year olds make poor life choices all the time, but not all of those choices have repercussions which last 30-50 years.

[pc86]

This seems good in theory but as someone who just started grad school in my late 30s I have forgotten just how Kafkaesque dealing with higher education administration can be. I'm in the midst of an ordeal trying to get an itemized $25 receipt right now for my employer reimbursement. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's been weeks, talking to multiple departments and multiple people in each department. I still do not have a receipt.

I can think of no scenario where letting these idiots manage financing for 18-year-olds ends well.