When it’s relevant, yes.
Most college degrees put you further ahead than if you did not get the degree. While some degrees will earn more money than others, the notion that English and other humanities degrees leave you jobless and poor is largely a conservative delusion.
Serious question here. Do you have even one iota of a clue as to how student loans work?
I just said I borrowed money for a degree that had and has marketable value. So, yes, I have more than an iota. I also paid mine back in full. That’s the thing about adult decisions and signing contracts, reading them, understanding them, and having a realistic plan are all key. For far too long adults are treated like toddlers and we act surprised when they act worse than toddlers.
They definitely aren’t worthless. But two factors need to be taken into account with salary and that is what the pay is and the employment rate for that field. With that in mind one can make an educated guess about how much a particular degree is worth.
After tax income - cost of living is another consideration. Someone making 70k vs someone making 45k might actually have 6x the discretionary income in the same area if the cost of living is ~40k/year. Now, I am not denigrating anybody’s choice of study. I’m saying that if one is to borrow money to study they need to do financial analysis and do a proper comparison. Hell, even if school is free it’s still 4-6 years of life spent.
I’m sorry I said it was a “conservative” delusion. I think it’s a common misconception across the board.
I fundamentally agree that better financial planning is in order. But I think it’s a lot to ask from an eighteen-year-old. I grew up poor but my mother always told me student debt is good debt. She could not conceive at the time how much things had changed since she went to college. I legally emancipated at 17, and I had no concept of how money worked. I was living paycheck to paycheck but I would have buried myself in debt to go to my dream college. I was an elite student who wanted to go to an elite school. Fortunately I got a full ride scholarship plus grants to help with living expenses and came out of a super expensive undergraduate school with a measly $10,000 in debt. Any more and I probably wouldn’t have been able to go to graduate school. I made so many financial mistakes in my early twenties. I’m not sure kids that age should be allowed to make financial mistakes that big. Would an 18-year-old qualify for a $50,000 loan for anything else but school?
I think my graduate school choice would have been a mistake if I weren’t married and we weren’t looking at household income as a whole. My husband’s earning potential was a factor in my decision. But I dunno, what constitutes a mistake? Whether something is worth it or not is not a purely economic decision. Social work isn’t just something I do, it’s fundamental to my identity. And I came out of that specific program with a unique skillset that is still in demand. There’s something to be said for a job that survives an economic crisis and a pandemic. Maybe that still would have been worth paying off student loans for the rest of my life.
The whole system is just a mess. I don’t think debt forgiveness is going to fix it. I don’t think expecting 18-year-olds to make economically rational choices is going to fix it either.
Can you show your work to demonstrate that doctors paying of medical loans is the cost of high healthcare? I think the general consensus is that it’s because care is mediated by outrageously wasteful insurance companies.
I mean yeah, if frogs had wings and all, but what’s the plan for making medical degrees cost less?
If you’re suggesting medical school should be free, please disregard this post with my hearty approval, because I agree.
“part of the reason”, as I said. Not only do they have loans to pay, but the high cost of the education justifies the high salaries they demand.
I’ll agree that the insurance companies compound this effect, and have their own issues as well.
But, a GP can’t just open up a practice and charge peanuts for service when they have considerable personal costs themselves.
I do agree that it should be free, and also should have more openings. Another reason for high doctor salaries is because of supply/demand. The demand is going up, but the supply doesn’t seem to be increasing as quickly.
We certainly shouldn’t be lowering the bar and accepting subpar candidates to enter medical school, but the high costs and difficulty in getting in may deter people with the capabilities to be excellent doctors.
I think “many” is an overstatement - according to this article there are fewer than 20 institutions that meet 100% of financial need without loans. ( Military academies should not be on this list). And that “need” is what’s left over after the family/student’s contribution is calculated - I just used Harvard’s net cost estimator and the family contribution would have been $38K per year. It’s great that Harvard will give my kid a $37K scholarship - but I can’t afford the remaining $38K if I ever want to retire.
Then there’s a list of colleges that meet 100% of need with no loans for certain students and another group that meets 100% of need with loans.
There are about 75 institutions on the three lists - compared to the thousands of private institutions that participate in student loans. Of course, a lot of them are not as prestigious as Harvard - but I must say , I’m not sure why so many people I’ve known live with their parents and commute and take loans to attend local private institutions like St John’s or Long Island University when they could live at home and commute to a public university for less than a quarter of the cost.
Personally, I’d like to see some kind of breakdown of what percentage of student loan debt holders are actually dealing with crushing debt, versus being in basically the same boat as you (and I). I keep hearing all sorts of horror stories about young people who basically took out absurd loans for college degrees that they can’t even use, and how it’s basically a giant anchor around their necks that’s economically stunting them.
But I’d like to see some statistics about what the average loan amount is, what sort of jobs the borrowers have, where they live, and so on. I mean, if it’s a nationwide thing where some huge percentage of college grads from public and private schools in the past decade and a half or so all have upwards of 50-60k in debt and the majority aren’t working in jobs commensurate with their education and experience allowing them to pay their loans off effectively, then yeah, I think it might be money well spent.
But if it’s a situation where it’s only a narrow segment of grads (private schools, liberal arts degrees, living in NE/NW, etc…) then I’m not so sure that forgiving everyone else’s loans is worth bailing them out.
Podcast from the Marketplace team on some of the issues around student loan cancelation. They mention a number of things from earlier in the thread.
Interesting to me was that the average debt amount is $30,000 - I don’t want to say that’s nothing, because it isn’t nothing. $30,000 is a lot of money. But because a lot of the stories about student loans feature people with much, much, much more debt, I expected the average to be much higher.
My apologies that I’ve been busy for the past several weeks and didn’t reply to you promptly. I’m also replying to you without reading further downthread. I take it from your sarcasm that you planned to be a successful lawyer in monetary terms, and fully intended to pay off your student loans when you undertook them, but life turned out differently. If there’s a different or more descriptive explanation of your intentions, please elaborate.
Beyond the above paragraph, I’m not going to focus on you at all, but I’m going to ask the question of how much the public should be responsible for a person’s bad luck, especially if the person is pursuing a potentially lucrative career, Likewise, how much should the public be responsible for a person who takes out loans knowing that their future salary based on their degree will be insufficient to pay for those loans?
I’m not familiar with the 2007 loan “abatement” program, and I’m not even sure if abatement is the best possible term. I’m sure, at least to me, it is a better description than the loan’s program than forgiveness.
It’s an interesting hypothetical, and I want to make clear that at this point I’m not discussing Jimmy Chitwood. If someone chose to pursue a public service career, knowing that they’d have their education debts paid for by the government over ten years, then I fully support that decision. I’m presuming that the debt relief is known about beforehand rather than applied for a few years after graduation.
I think I’d like to see the government have a budget and a sensible prioritisation policy. First priority to new law students exchanging future government loan payments for agreed upon service, second priority to those already in law school, and third priority to the graduates taking public service jobs before graduation. I’ve no objection to an agreed upon prid quo pro based on public service. But the idea of post-facto relief with no risk for the law students up front seems to be creating a risk-free hazard, that benefits undergraduates able to get into law school, which isn’t the sector of society most in need of government benefits.