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 didn’t know of them then, how do you know you could have gotten them? You might not have qualified for them. You might have missed a deadline. You might have been beaten out for them by others who filed earlier. You might have gotten all you could, but it still wouldn’t be enough. You specifically said that there were ways of going to college without getting loan debt, but your own examples are false (paying as you go - unless you already have a decent job or you find the cheapest, unaccredited institution to get a “degree” from) or insufficient (based on your own claimed experiences with grants).
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.
Yes, every 18 year old kid who’s been told since middle school that he has to get a college degree to go anywhere in life is fully aware of the corrupt system and all the other options available to him, like going back in time and being born to wealthier parents. He’s also fully informed of the fact that all the advice he gets from his parents and grandparents on the matter is irrelevant because each graduating class has been graduating with more debt than the previous one for a while now. And once you start to get in debt, you might as well get into more debt and finish the degree because incurring the debt without finishing is even worse.
You’re one flag-planting on the moral high ground away from a just world fallacy.
So why not default? If it’s not immoral, why not simply refuse to pay it?
I don’t default because there are practical consequences. Morality has nothing to do with it (though I do feel as if I bear some guilt for perpetuating the corrupt system, but I consider it less immoral than being a financial burden on my family because I can’t get a decent job, despite the fact that my unrelated degree qualified me for an interview for the job that I could have done with the skills I had before going to college). The cliche middle class house of cards could crumble if you default. There goes your marriage and your mortgage and your retirement savings.
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.
Unless theoretically means definitely could without a significant negative impact on one’s life, I would disagree with that statement. You’re acting like Siegel intentionally incurred debt in order to default. He’s saying that things were already difficult to begin with when he incurred the debt and he finally got to a point where he decided not to pay for Guy de Maupassant’s Necklace instead of ruining the rest of his life to try to do so. That seems practical to me.
Your approach means that no one should ever declare bankruptcy. Suddenly those who experience unforeseen tragedies are immoral? You’re also arbitrarily absolving those who have contributed to a system that is set up as a debt factory. Would you say that it’s morally correct to pay someone money that you bet them if you found out later that they rigged the game so that you would lose?
