Student loan garnisheeing topped $176M in three months

boing
41

True, I don’t get my facts from “here.” Check out Google. Fascinating tool. I highly recommend it.

Here’s a fun fact: There are predatory schools! Wow! High cost, terrible degrees (if any). They should be avoided. It is possible to make an informed decision to avoid them.

Sadly, too many people get suckered into them. I actually do feel sorry for those people. Trying to make a good decision and getting screwed. Wanna talk about those debts? I’d be for suing the schools, their owners, and administrators into oblivion. I consider what is happening there to be so extreme, I don’t even associate it with what we’ve been talking about.

4 year colleges, yeah, there are price differences. Heck, in state vs out of state costs if nothing else!

42

Nice strawman. But I’m all for fixing things to make education affordable. And fixing loan systems. I’m not happy about the system at all. It’s messed up. But I’m not sure how all the plans to forgive debt or pay for college fix the system. Rather, I see it as making it worse. The system will continue to suck up all the money it can. Feeding more money into the system makes it suck more. And those who built up debt poured a lot of money into the system. They made it worse. I’m not sympathetic to them. Kinda pissed.

Interesting how you say people are rational enough to not get married, have kids, or buy a house while they have debt. Yet somehow these seem to be the same people who weren’t rational enough to avoid taking on debt they couldn’t service. It may be true. Sad that people have to learn to be careful the hard way.

43

It’s not a strawman if I’m only asking if that’s what you’re saying rather than asserting that that’s what you are in fact saying.

You’re basically blaming the victims for making the system that has victimized them worse. When you talk about how feeding the system is making it worse, you’re speaking abstractly about students getting educations that are increasingly necessary to earn diminishing levels of income for middle class workers. You can’t fix the system by just telling people not to go to college if they can’t afford it. You can’t have a generation of people with no college degrees trying to compete against those who were privileged enough to be able to afford it. So until the system is fixed, it will be necessary to “feed it” or else you’re screwing a bunch of people out of the possibility of a better life (and it’s really twisted to have to defend the system in this respect).

People are rational enough not to make big life decisions that they can’t afford when they’re older. I have a lot of friends who never got married and still aren’t able to buy a house in their late 30s because of their student loan debt and a mediocre job market. It’s when they’re 18 that they’re less likely to make rational decisions. It’s not sad that people have to learn to be careful that way. It’s a result of how the system is set up to take advantage of people who aren’t necessarily capable of that level of rational thought and planning with minimally useful information.

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44

The thing is, the entire ecosystem around the students changes. Rent, food, coffee, books, clothes stores - all start charging more as more cash liquid flows into the local financial ecology - because they CAN. That drives more money in.

No-one should be saddled with debt for more than 3 years out of tertiary education. They need to get on with their lives, not on with paying banks and profit-making institutions.

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45

From countries where those degrees don’t cost as much, presumably. Or is the whole plan to continue down this road until there is nobody that can afford an accounting degree?

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46

No, I’m not saying don’t go to college. I’m saying people need to be careful. Some could certainly do better with trade school. Have you seen what a CNC machinist makes?!?! Plumbers, electricians, etc do quite well. We do need to stop denigrating god jobs at the expense of college. But that’s not what I mean by being careful.

What I mean by making tings worse is this: If students seek out colleges that spend lavishly, colleges will spend lavishly. If students seek out colleges that are bare bones, colleges will go bare bones. Somewhere in the middle is probably best. But colleges are going to follow the money. Time to make them compete on value, not conveniences.

Students can do it themselves, or it can be imposed upon them. I’d prefer the former since it allows people to make the oddball choices that might be right for them. But there are varying degrees of the later. Some better than others.

As for debt forgiveness, I personally loathe it. If people had identical spending, but differing means, that’d be one thing. But debt forgiveness just seems to reward those who racked up the most debt. It sends a signal to those who are careful that they are chumps. Might as well live large. Get the single apartment. Get the new car. Use the student loans for everything. You can get them forgiven. Not many people do that, but it sure would push people in that direction. Tells colleges to jack up the bills, because there is endless cash.

I’d be all for something like a 528 style grant. Here’s a block of cash you can use for any type of education, but it’s limited. Accountant or chef, your call. Couple that with being able to discharge debt through bankruptcy so that banks don’t shovel loans out so willy nilly. Figure out a way for schools to not get full payment unless students graduate and or get jobs. Lot’s of things.

And everyone can yell at me all they want, but my personal opinion that none of you are forced to agree with is I have no sympathy for someone who complains about their student debt. I have my personal reasons. It does not mean I don’t think there is a problem. It does not mean I think people should not go to college. It does not mean a lot of things everyone keeps insisting it means. It means “I have no sympathy.”

BTW, I also hate bananas. Ready, aim, flame!

47

Fun fact. ALL degrees are terrible at this point unless you are independently wealthy. Your argument using the stereotypical liberal arts degree is nonsense. Its pretty much all colleges and all degrees which are joining in the student loan scam.

Sadly too, you are spouting off endlessly about things which either no longer exist or are so changed that you won’t recognize them anymore.

Wanna talk about those debts? I’d be for suing the schools, their owners, and administrators into oblivion.

Being done as we speak. Unfortunately banks and universities have far better representation in both courts and legislators while people like you make excuses for their bad behavior.

The big problem is even public colleges have joined in this massive bilkfest due to decreased funding from their usual sources. Conservative politics on 2 different ends are making college education into peonage or nearly impossible for the middle class than it once was. One one end they reduce the funding to public schools out of alleged “fiscal responsibility” (aka privitization schemes to enrich cronies). On the other end, they remove all accountability to the student loan process from lenders and schools.

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48

Here in Canada this is about to have some dire consequences.

We have a real estate bubble, especially in Toronto and Vancouver. The cost of housing has gone up far more than incomes in the last couple decades. The baby boomers, far more than the generations before them, put all their money into real estate rather than other savings. And larger houses than those before. McMansions are common.

And so over the next few years as the baby boomers retire, they’ll all need to downsize into smaller houses and apartments. And that’s a LOT of baby boomers. As before they’ll be depending on all those university graduates with university graduate incomes to buy their houses.

Except that the university graduate aren’t getting university graduate incomes. And they’re graduating with debt for life; they aren’t in a position to take on more. And so the baby boomers, if they wait much longer, are in for a bad shock.

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49

The problem with your proposed solution is that students don’t act in coordination with one another and the higher cost colleges won’t necessarily see a trend of students choosing cheaper colleges because their enrollments will still be filled with students who want the prestigious degree from a more expensive institution, even if the return isn’t necessarily great compared to the cheaper college. The system has to be changed from outside, not through some kind of coordinated consumer effort. Making 4 years or even just 2 years of public education tuition free would go a long way to dealing with the issue.

The point I’m ultimately making is that you’re an inadvertent chump regardless of whether you partied hard or bootstrapped yourself. Having to take the loan at terrible rates that don’t apply to corporate loans or bailouts already makes you a chump. You seem to dislike others having it easier than you did. That seems really petty. You made the decision to buckle down. Good for you. That doesn’t mean others shouldn’t have the good fortune to get out of a sucker’s bet regardless of whether they’re lazier than you were. And not all of them were lazier, but were just more unfortunate.

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50

What?!?! How dare you come on here and preach class warfare!! You don’t know how hard it is to live on a billion a year! I can barely afford three houses, two yachts and the alimony payments to my 3 ex-wife’s!!

  • 1% whiner
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51

Hey now, Moloch has been really good to us, and if we just keep up the infant sacrifice for just a few more decades, perhaps that divine favor will trickle down to the rest of us. You don’t want to maybe lose the deity to a country with more amenable policies, do you?

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52

Tell that to the creatives!

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53

TANSTAAFL

A.k.a. your story of responsible hardship is horseshit. I choose to be skeptical of your claims because the loudmouth assholes that use this initialism invariably turn out to be lying rich boys or fourteen-year-olds trying to be big men on the Internet.

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54

You, my friend, have summed it up nicely.

55

Really? So did my husband and I, and we still have student loans. I saw a ridiculous increase in tuition and books between 2000 when I started, and 2014 when I finished. (Returning adult students, and we tried to pay as much as we could so it took forever for both of us.)

The difference between us, is even though I have less student loans for my accounting degree than my fellow graduates, I think nobody should have to be saddled with debt like this. I do not in any way begrudge a fix, even if it means the people coming after me will struggle less and owe less or nothing.

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56

This assumes the primary benefit of a degree is its market value for the recipient.

Not everyone wants a policy that incentivizes more plastic surgeons and M&A attorneys.

Some want policies that result in doctors and lawyers who can help all communities without having to first accept the prospect of lifelong debt service.

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57

Is this where my rubber mask is ripped off an I yell “And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you kids!”?

Sorry. I would love to be rich or 14. And the story isn’t crap. I might call BS on it too if someone else wrote it. But it’s true. I didn’t live in a dark cave. I just didn’t spend money I didn’t have.

58

Agreed. Good policy. Let’s figure out how to put it in place. Again, I just get pissed at those who, in the absence of such policy, complain about debt they took on for a career that doesn’t pay enough.

59

It doesn’t seem like the substantive point has really sunk in yet …

If we want to change policy, we should welcome and encourage complaints about unreasonable student debt service by those we also want to consider serving low income communities. Then the policy changes to remedy the complaints.

Or … use magic! :smiley_cat:

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60

the story isn’t crap. I might call BS on it too if someone else wrote it.

It’s not just that you expect us to think you’re special in that sense, but you ascribe every data point under the curve of the actual problem to your fantasy of moral failing. You cannot actually know that. To say what you did is false and immoral as well as imprudent. Knock it off.

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