You are right about the bona fide middle middle or lower middle class; they are being shut out beyond their ability to possibly cope. In their day, an education at public universities and public polytechnics could reasonably be funded by young students themselves. Their calculation to not save for college was reasonably based on their own experiences, and the expectation that their kids could do the same when the time came. However, they are not the Times’ target demographic nor their subscriber base.
The Times readers who read and commented on the Siegel article were looking for a valid excuse to point a finger anywhere except the mirror.
You’ve made a false equivalency… And you’re running with it. Is it a crime to default on a loan? Nope.
Its the basis of your argument.
The vast majority of student loans aren’t going to be defaulted on by people like the author, but people who don’t have the ability to pay them back. Economies are cyclical, and especially ours. Those cycles have winners and losers. Except you can’t foreclose on an education.
The present system props of an education system that it pointlessly wasteful. It’s 2015. There’s a way that an education can cost nothing, but the University system is famously liberal, except when it comes to itself. Then it’s stupidly conservative.
If you tried to do anything the way it was done in 1950, it would be ludicrously expensive, because things change, and substitute goods replace now expensive goods.
A first class education used to be obtainable via a shelf of books six feet long and some self discipline. Now we can fit a digital copy of the library of Congress in the palm of our hands.
But education is not known for innovation. It’s known for hallowed halls of stupid opinionated pendants who’re getting it wrong wasting people’s time in the process.
There are also ways of going to college that don’t require loans, like paying as you go, or scooping up some of $3 billion in unclaimed grants and scholarships that are left laying around.
Do you have a college degree? If so, when did you get it? How much did it cost? How did you pay for it?
I got Pell Grants. They paid for about 1/16th of my tuition. I applied for scholarships. They were less than my Pell Grants. If I’d paid as I went to school, I would have been able to attend classes about every third semester. That wouldn’t affect your ability to keep current, now would it?
Here you have a point; I let hyperbole run away with me. So shift it: think you could default on a car loan or a mortgage because of “institutions and society at large”?
This is an entirely separate question from the rather simple matter at hand: is it morally right to purposely not pay back money that you agreed to borrow?
This thread has come up with very clever and verbose ways to say “yes” but I think the simple answer to the simple question is “no.”
That’s a very dramatic false choice you presented. According to you, the only way to avoid a minimum wage job is to take out a loan (and not pay it back, presumably)?
There is no guarantee you will be able to pay it back, nor a guarantee you’ll be able to use the education recieved. That level of risk is unacceptable when they are cannot be cleared by bankruptcy. Traditionally loans are a risk for borrower and lender. This is not a traditional borrowing relationship. It’s a farce.
As much as I love talking to an extra from “Leave It to Beaver” (“gramps”? Really? The best you could do?), you don’t know anything about me. I have student debt, I’m paying it off, and have taken multiple low-paying jobs to do so.
Am I happy about the situation? Of course not, but I signed the papers and that’s that.
I don’t think they should, as it happens. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to simply take their money with no intention of repaying it.
If the plan was to default, it seems like it went perfectly.
You asked me a question, now answer mine: Is it wrong to tell those you borrow money from that you will pay them back when you have no intention of doing so?
Pell Grants aren’t the only college money left unclaimed. There are hundreds of thousands of scholarships that never receive any applicants, and plenty of people take advantage of that.
(As it happens I graduated from college five years ago, I paid with a combination of loans and scholarships, and I’m still paying off the student loans by working multiple jobs. But who gives a damn?)
I have student debt, I’m paying it off, and have taken multiple low-paying jobs to do so.
So you’re saying that you didn’t take your own advice about going to college but not incurring loan debt like paying as you go and/or getting grants and scholarships OR that you did and it still didn’t pay for everything?
This revelation makes your earlier advice seem disingenuous rather than just ignorant of current college financing options.
This is an entirely separate question from the rather simple matter at hand: is it morally right to purposely not pay back money that you agreed to borrow?
It’s not an entirely separate question because morality in the real world isn’t some freshmen ethics course discussion where every factor in a hypothetical dilemma can be quantified or ignored for the sake of argument because the question exists in a vacuum.
The morality of not paying back a loan that you can’t usually discharge in bankruptcy isn’t isolated to a single question in a single situation. The answer, like most real life dilemmas, is that any decision could be an immoral choice or series of choices. Avoiding a decision because it could be immoral could also be immoral and thus useless. Perpetuating a corrupt system by being a willing participant, however distributed your guilt may be among millions of others, could be perceived by some to be far more immoral than not paying back funds that the loan holder never truly risked in the first place.
and I’m still paying off the student loans by working multiple jobs. But who gives a damn?
Millions of other people in the same situation give a damn. Just because you enjoy your perception of being on the moral high ground because you’re paying off your loan debt doesn’t mean people who also owe such debt are even able to find one job, much less multiple jobs, to pay off their loan debt.
I’m paying off my loan debt too. That doesn’t make me feel morally superior to someone who can’t or won’t pay theirs off. When you’re all rats in a maze, you don’t begrudge the rat who knocks down a wall to get some free cheese instead of memorizing the maze. Especially when the government pays back the wealthy scientist running the experiment for every piece of cheese lost.
Except many people go to university only because most jobs require a degree. Arguably, they’re going there for the express purpose of having the path through life smoothed for them.
Just because I wasn’t aware of financial options that I now know were available doesn’t make me any less culpable for the loans I signed.
If you don’t want to take part in “a corrupt system,” don’t take out the loan. But if you take out a loan, you’ve agreed that you’re going to pay it back.
So why not default? If it’s not immoral, why not simply refuse to pay it? Impoverishment is one thing, if someone simply cannot pay back the money; Lee Siegel and others in this thread are arguing in favor of the other thing, of purposefully defaulting, even though they could theoretically pay. That is simply wrong.
No, they’re there for the express purpose of receiving a degree. Why should finishing a BA automatically entitle you to a job, as the person I was responding to was arguing?
The degree’s a credential; for many people, it is meant to signal to an employer, “_____________ is competent in _________. Hire them.” But that is not happening.
As for why— if it doesn’t, that invalidates a lot of the advertising that universities do about paths to success.
