As a promotion Burger King has contest to randomly pay off people’s student loans. Good for them!
How very, brutally sad our nation has become.
How is that indicative of our country becoming brutally sad?
Once upon a time, young people could graduate from school, get a job and start a strong family. Now too many are enslaved by predatory loans that cripple our young families, and so our society. But we might hope some rich corporation might take pity on a lucky three hundred people and grant them pardon.
What I find “very, brutally sad” and even nakedly, unfathomably shocking and savagely abhorrent is that some seem to think that McDonalds french fries are better than Burger King’s.
I weep for the children, and for the unredeemed souls of the forgetten ancients.
(I also forget when taking out tens of thousands of dollatrs in student loans became mandatory for Americans, but it was probably when I was futility preaching to the ignorant, enslaved masses about Burger King’s superior fries)
But if they didn’t take out those loans, who would pay for the giant sports stadiums, team uniforms, buses, airfare, hotel costs, meals, etc. for the athletes?
Yes. It is the poor’s fault they are poor. In the same way, the Rich are rich because of virtue.
And let’s not forget that natural disasters are a sign that our rulers no longer enjoy the Mandate of Heaven, and witches sink. Or float. One of the two, but they definitely can drown.
Yes, it is brutally sad.
Why do they work so hard, now people mortgaging their lives to work harder, and to be so much more productive when the result of all that increased productivity is funneled into the pockets of so few? The answer is simple, people are infected with the same greed and envy as those who reap the benefit of the their labor. It is the desire to be wealthier than one’s neighbor no matter the cost to their lives.
I’m pretty sure it’s people who make bad decisions are responsible for the results of those decisions.
I have a lot of student loan debt. It wasn’t six figures, but the high fives. Some of my bad decisions were as a result of ignorance: I did not know that graduate education wasn’t usually self-funded. How would I? Who did I know who even had a four-year degree, much less a PhD? I didn’t know what to ask. That’s on me, yes, but I think the university program also bears some responsibility for never even broaching the conversation about money: how long it would take to complete the program, what it meant to be un- or (more ususally) underfunded. And certainly neither the university funding nor the student loans took into account the actual cost of living (=rent and transit, mostly) in a large city.
Also, when I entered grad school, I had no reason to expect that a PhD from a top university would lead to chronic underemployment, because I had no way of foreseeing how the model of academic hiring would change completely while I was in school. So while I trained and qualified to be a professor, I have instead been an adjunct. Same work, a lot less pay. So the debt was a bad decision, maybe, but one that looked like a good bet at the time.
I worked it out: were I paid what a tenure-track professor is paid for teaching the university courses I have taught, even at the lower end of the scale, I could have easily paid off my loans in five years. And yet here I am, 15 years in and $36K to go.
But thanks for the blame. And by the way, I have no access to a pension and student loan debt to pay, so save some blame for when I’m poor in my old age, too. Clearly my fault that my employers have exploited me to save a buck, and yet I feel strongly that teaching people to think critically is a worthwhile occupation in this day and age, so I keep doing it.
(Also, I have never missed a payment, nor made a late one, but I can tell you that it’s fucking embarrassing to not be able to meet a friend for a cup of coffee when you’re a working professional with a PhD. And I’m pretty frugal: don’t drink, don’t smoke, old car, bring sack lunches.)
All in all, student loans are just another way to destroy the middle class and add a few pennies into the pockets of our betters.
Just want to say my student loans are the absolute LEAST of my debt worries.
I, too, have a 5-figure student loan sum, but the monthly payment is one of the least I have of my bills.
The fact I have student loans isn’t the problem. The problem is everything else is so damn expensive and the job market pays less than that because they can and that’s not looking to change any time soon. I don’t know if student loans are a straw man or a scapegoat or whatever…but they ain’t the issue.
Sorry to hear that, but did you just think a graduate degree was free? You didn’t know how much it was going to cost? You didn’t know that you’d have to pay rent to live in a place? You didn’t ask how long it was going to take?
I don’t understand how someone could get into high five figure debt without asking these basic questions.
I would suppose young people inexperienced in the world can be easily led down the wrong path by those who make money doing so.
The ironic part is, the people who have student loans are the ones who went to college so they wouldn’t have to spend their lives working at Burger King.
I thought this would be about gladly paying Tuesday for a hamburger today…
I did not think a graduate degree was free, no. I DID think that the job that came after the education would make the debt worthwhile. That was always a gamble, but the circumstances changed dramatically between the time I made that decision and the time I entered the job market. In the 1990s it was a reasonable gamble. Less than 10 years later, it turned out to have been a stupid one, but I really couldn’t have anticipated that.
I didn’t know how much it was going to cost, no. One example: there was something called ICFOG, where students who had finished their classes and were only researching writing their dissertations would have a reduced tuition. That was removed when I was in my final year of classes. That meant that my education ballooned in cost by some twelve thousand dollars when I was almost through, and there was no way for me to have anticipated that. More generally, tuition and rent costs were not stable, and increased ahead of inflation.
Another factor was that the faculty stressed the importance of travelling to and presenting papers at conferences, so I thought I should. However, the only option was self-funding. I made excellent professional connections, but also increased my debt by a couple of thousand dollars each year, perhaps adding another $10,000 to the cost of my education. Purchasing the optional extra, if you like.
A lot of it was my fault. I entered the program at 22, and I was very ignorant about a lot of things. I didn’t know how long it would take: I assumed four years, like a B.A., and I didn’t even think to ask. I didn’t think about housing costs at all, just dealt with them. I cringe looking back at what I didn’t think to do. Frankly, I probably could have got more funding if I had just gone to the Chair and laid my situation on the line. But I was young, I was on my own, and I was ignorant. I also fell prey to the Sunk Cost Fallacy.
The question is, how long is it reasonable to pay for that? Yes, I bear the lion’s share of the responsibilty for my debt. That’s why I keep paying it. But there is also some institutional and systemic responsibility, and I’m paying for that, too. That is not fair. I mean, life isn’t fair, I know that, but going forward, shouldn’t we try to do better?
I agree in principle, but I know kids/people can be pretty ignorant. What we need are some laws requiring for loan forms to have big numbers on them (like the gas mileage number stickers on new cars).
You are signing up to take on $XX,XXX debt.
The average regional monthly salary for your chosen major is $Y,YYY
You will be required to pay $ZZZ a month from your paycheck for X years to pay off this loan.
Sign here (in blood):
Will most people still sign them? Absolutely. But ain’t nobody can say they weren’t warned. If people want to take that chance, let’em have it.
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We had something like that. I also remember the line “This is a LOAN that must be paid back.” I remember thinking, “as opposed to some other kind of loan?”
The math was clear, and I’m good at math. But I was balancing at against my future salary, which was a cipher. I thought I could afford it. I was wrong. (Well, not totally wrong: I’ve managed, but it’s had a major dampening effect on my quality of life.)
The problem was that he mistakenly thought that a graduate degree wasn’t free. What’s normal is for a school to pay its grad students tuition and a small stipend. But he didn’t know that, and so he got suckered.