Editorial is from a woman that at age 53 decided to pursue her doctoral degree through a for-profit university, to show her kids how important education is. She racked up $300k in student debt, resulting in her own inability to assist in her own kids education.
She now wants the government to cancel all student debt including hers.
I fail to see the personal accountability here. She selected the university; she selected the degree program; she chose to finance these actions with debt; it’s unclear if she ever completed her course work and defended her thesis. And now she wants the rest of us to fund her decisions.
I see this “personal responsibility” thing come up often to defend for-profit corporations who lie and use persuasive techniques to get people to make decisions that benefit the corporation, not the individual. Sure, there is absolutely such a thing as personal responsibility, but it does not absolve bad actors just because they didn’t force the person to make the bad decision.
I don’t know exactly what happened in this case, but these for profit colleges have a history of lying about the cost and value of their education, and pressuring students into sunk cost fallacies. How responsible is the person when they are making a decision based on wrong information?
The point of forgiving college debt is that we as a society should make education cheap and easy to obtain, and we can lower the price of education retroactively by forgiving education debt. Complaints of that not being fair to the people who paid their debt, or paid their own way in college just lead to communist style “everybody is equal” conclusions. Sometimes things aren’t fair, and that is one of the prices of being in a society with mobility. People don’t complain about “not fair” when it means they personally get ahead.
I’d like to see the cold calculation of what an impoverished senior would cost society vs what forgiving her debt would cost society. Maybe nothing additional, as over-65s already have certain entitlements regardless. Does anyone know?
It sounds like she made a colossally stupid decision and that her current position is more out of self-interest than rational argument. It also sounds like it’s such an extreme case that it has no bearing on the larger societal debate over student loans and their forgiveness.
It is hard to understand how stupid an adult would have to be to run up that amount of debt for an advanced degree of little market value.
Sure, for profit colleges are (I assume all) indefensible. But this is a 65-year old person with a life’s worth of experience paying bills, handling credit, raising kids, etc. How did she - uh - not manage to look at a $300k price tag? What was she studying - something about the effects of slavery and globalization? And what kind of job paying what did she expect to attain with that education in her 60s?
And I don’t know enough of who financed this debt - whether it was the college, a financial institution, the government, all 3…
Having said all that, I guess the idea of eliminating - or at least greatly reducing - debt owed to for profit colleges in return for worthless degrees does not offend me. And if someone else bought their fraudulent loan portfolio, wouldn’t break my heart to see them take a hit.
But the fact that for profit colleges defrauded people really should have nothing to do with debt incurred while attending legitimate schools.
It does tend to catch your attention when someone publicly broadcasts, “I’m dumb as a post. Protect me from myself!”
In these debates about forgiving student loans, I often am frighteningly on the “conservative” side. “You didn’t have to take the loan.” Where’s the personal responsibility?
But, yes, a lot of young students don’t know what they’re getting into. I don’t have the answer for that.
But the woman in to OP? She’s sure a good example - of what not to do. If you can’t determine the financial viability of student loans at 53 years old, maybe you aren’t a good doctoral candidate?
This case also reminds of some of the underwater mortgages from 2008. Yes, people make foolish decisions, but we also have a collection of industry “experts” steering those people into those decisions, who get to walk away with their profits. Even if we forgave her loan, the real scumbags here got to rake it in.
Ultimately, many people simply have to eat the downside of their bad choices, but in a case like this, it’s easy to see how she may have been a couple years into her program, had the program changed on her, and looked at $50-100k of loans she just took out DOWN THE DRAIN, if she doesn’t capitulate.
This lady totally screwed up, public policy should not be based on her, but normal person screwups have a theoretical light at the end of the tunnel if things get really bad, bankruptcy. She doesn’t even have that option, it’s just dark to the end.
Part of the problem is that people don’t realize that a salesman’s interest and yours rarely are identical. It’s like those gold sellers. If gold were such a good investment why are they paying money to sell it? It contradicts in an obvious manner the message and yet selling gold seems to be profitable.
Why would someone trust an institution on the value of the good or service that that institution is selling? That should be a big signal to go check independent sources for the actual value of that particular degree, the projected long term prospects for that particular degree in a particular industry, and the actual reliability of the institution making the sale.
At some point, if we are not going to choose to continue with infantilization of adults, we need folks to understand decisions have life long consequences. Perhaps, we should require a set of attorneys and a fiduciary to be present and counseling with a cooldown period before large contracts can be signed. I’m not sure.
How did this older person believe she would ever pay back the loan? How long would she have to work to pay it off? This wasn’t a young person who expected to have the earning potential to pay the loan off some day.
People rack up ludicrous amounts of debt for all sorts of stupid shit. This strikes me as slightly less boneheaded and substantially more relatable than doing it for a fancy lifestyle you can’t afford.
Education should be taxpayer-funded or at least heavily subsidized, but that has to mean it must be merit-based and conducted at institutions with direct public funding and oversight. The taxpayer should be paying for you to do a PhD if you’re smart enough to contribute in a meaningful way to the body of human knowledge, not just because you want to.
From the article:
My biggest mistake was enrolling in a for-profit school.
I strongly suspect that she did not turn down scholarships at reputable schools to do this. Go to an institution where the only admission standard is whether you can write a check, and it’s caveat emptor.
Forgiving student debt would be fair if it involved also repaying people who scrimped and saved for college without loans. Let’s do both at the same time.
On the regular 20 year repayment plan, my repayment total more than doubled the dollar amount of the loans. Fortunately, I married someone who likes playing with numbers and was able to shift my aggregated loan from the 8.75% repayment to a 3% loan.
My college cost was $5-6k a year. I had loans, scholarships, work study, and summer jobs. My sister’s costs were higher simply due to the passage of time. Our parents decided to assume our loans for that reason.
My first master’s was funded by the school. I earned enough as a TA to pay rent and eat.
Myy second master’s was unfunded, not for profit, and in a different city, but was the only program in the region that would allow me to get the professional degree I needed for work and possibly a doctorate. I didn’t have to move or lose my part-time jobs, but did need to take loans for tuition and food.
I went to an unfunded, not for profit doctoral program full time, worked half-time plus gig jobs, and had half-time internships in the academic year, plus an ill-paid TA postion for one year, plus the cost of gasoline for the commute. When did I sleep? When I could, and not a lot. I had to move across the country for my doctoral internship that did not allow additional employment. All the ramen-based meals eaten shivering in my tiny apartments didn’t particularly dent the loan amount I needed, which with interest cost more than a house. I was very satisfied with my education, paid off my loans, and fully support subsidies for school loan repayments.
Hard finding concrete stats but according to this site: Average Student Loan Debt in America: Facts & Figures - ValuePenguin, People with more than $200,000 in student loan debt make up a whopping 1.3% of people with student loans. And my guess would be mainly made up of medical and law students. So why are we talking this weird, rare, and oddly specific case as in any way representative of the student loan issue?
