Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
I left college with ~$3k in student loan debt. I went to a liberal arts college that costs ~$60k a year with room and board. My family definitely could not have afforded to send me there, but I got a lot of scholarships and financial aid. I ended up with a job that had nothing to do with my education there. I value the experience I had there, but it was not worth $60k a year by any means.
There is a lot of benefit to college education, but not everyone needs to go to their dream school. Not everyone drives their dream car or lives in their dream home.
Yes, they did work part time. But 100-200 a week from a part time job doesn't go far. That's gas and lunch.
They certainly got some aid other than loans, but I do not know the level of scholarships they received. Might have been their problem!
Doesn't seem much, if you continue the same student life style after getting a job, that kind of debt can be seen through in 1.5-2 years.
After that every thing you earn is yours.
The rule of thumb that I use is total student debt shouldn't exceed the normal starting salary for a job in your field.
If you are getting an engineering degree, go ahead and feel free to drop $60k+ on an education, but if you are going to be a teacher start looking for grants.
I don't think where you did undergrad makes a whole lot of difference, if you are talented and motivated to pursue research. Where you go as an undergrad will dictate how much research you are exposed to during your degree however.
I think we need to do more to help educate parents and prospective students that in most cases a college degree is next to worthless. For-profit schools like the University of Phoenix get a lot of negative press, but how about these little known colleges referenced in the story that charge nearly as much as top of the line schools? Sadly, many colleges (most?) are simply outgrowths of an overgenerous loan subsidy program run by the government.
If you want to enter a credentialed field, be it education, medicine, or law—by all means get a degree.
Likewise, if you're going into a highly technical field, it's a wise investment to study intensively.
Most psych/business majors would be better served working their way up through the ranks.
In 90% of creative fields you're much better off just "doing it." I got my job at Wired by writing on my blog and getting the attention of the editor-in-chief. If you want to be a filmmaker, make films—same with music, art, etc. I essentially got paid for my "graduate school" in writing.
This is easier said than done when most entry level gigs require a college degree, but you can still get an affordable degree at most state universities. Also, we should be talking more at the political level about vocational education and non-degree training programs to prepare people for the workforce.
Do you have a source for this? The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the exact opposite. [0]
>Most psych/business majors would be better served working their way up through the ranks.
Source? Again and again, people only seem to look at the cost of education like education is a product that you buy at a store that could be gotten cheaper if you follow this One Weird Trick. College education is an experience, an exposure to new ideas, a gradual development of ancillary skills.
>This is easier said than done when most entry level gigs require a college degree, but you can still get an affordable degree at most state universities.
Why would anyone bother to get an affordable degree when they are "in most cases... next to worthless?"
Again, another person who went to college advocating that other people don't go to college. Every time this topic comes up, people who have clearly benefitted from higher education start claiming no one else needs a college education.
The same attitude that led us into the student loans debacle -- "education is a product" -- is the same attitude that pervades every thread about this topic, but somehow the participants think they've 'hacked' the system by advocating people not get an education. It's bizarrely short sighted by otherwise educated individuals.
Not to mention that this is not a controlled experiment. Maybe those who earn degrees would have earned more anyway. (Though I do suspect that college is very beneficial, for the reasons you cite.)
Exactly. I don't have any issues with getting a degree. I think it is very beneficial both financially in the long term and emotionally. But you shouldn't overpay for it. There is nothing wrong with community college. There is nothing wrong with putting off college for a year or two to save money. Obviously every situation is different, but I think we should be educating high school students about their options and their prospects.
Positively agree. In fact, I think entering college directly after high school is absurd. We should encourage if not require everyone to take a year off to really decide what they want before entering college. Lots of people I know who ended up dropping out with debt and no degree reported to me that they were not ready for college and they only went because it was the "thing you're supposed to do."
Now I am not saying that waiting a year or two would have helped me pick a better major, because I still might not have found my passion for programming. But I do know that I would have studied harder and learned more during those years. My grades were fine, but I really did just enough to get good grades. I didn't take advantage of the learning opportunity because I was immature. I would love to go back now and really learn.
--
Few people are saying college has no value. Mostly people say what you get is not worth what you pay. My own anecdote - I am by all accounts a successful "business degree" person. While I went to my four year college with a business major, I also started my career in business/marketing, starting at $10 an hour in freshman year, and getting to the 99th percentile of income for my age by age 24. The growth I received from college was a rounding error compared to the growth I got from work experience in the same 4 year period and same amount of effort. And I was paid to get the work experience...
If you are ambitious and "want it" badly enough, the lack of a degree shouldn't slow you down, and if you aren't ambitious or don't "want it" then no degree will magically make you marketable. Most ambitious will probably choose to pursue the degree anyway, so it's self fulfilling to an extent. The point of the article stands sharply though, the "experience" isn't worth the cost, and the debt we incur is choking other parts of the economy. How many millenials do you know that drive a brand new vehicle or own their own home?
As for the citations you requested, I'd point to the raft of sob stories that have been published over the last few years which feature unfortunate stories of people six figures in debt, but working jobs that require no training. It could be these are cherry-picked examples to help advance a faulty narrative (e.g. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html), but to the extent they reflect a real problem we should examine the broken logic that created it.
So why would I suggest anyone go to a state school? As I mentioned in the last paragraph of my previous post, since WWII we've become more credential-focused and made a BA the bare minimum for many professional career paths——something that should be remedied in my opinion, but the reality.
You suggest the commodification of education is the problem—I'd argue the problem is that we don't treat college enough like a product. Because we treat it like a rite of passage for young adults, and subsidize it heavily, you have horrible colleges offering degrees at the same price as elite schools. Instead of analytically valuing the degree based on the quality of the education offered, we treat degrees as fungible goods and splurge emotionally to obtain them.
In many parts of America you need a car to participate in the workforce. We don't offer subsidies so everyone can go out and buy a Bently.
If you can afford college, go, it's a great, mind-expanding experience for a young mind. It is a good rite of passage into adulthood in the US, but so is joining the military or going on a religious mission. So is night school after you've found a career path you like, but need further education to advance in.
I don't understand the reflexive desire to turn the protection of 3rd rate colleges into a cause célèbre.
It's not the rite of passage that raises the cost, but the cheap student loans that incentivize colleges to raise the price of tuition and hire middle-level administrators. This says nothing of the 'value' of education, only the 'cost.' I'm with you that college is too expensive. But the solution is not forgoing education so that the ultra rich continue to have better opportunities. It's making education cheaper so that more people gain more knowledge.
And apparently our society doesn't take this rite of passage too seriously, since only 40% of Americans have a college degree [0].
>I don't understand the reflexive desire to turn the protection of 3rd rate colleges into a cause célèbre.
Me neither. But the existence of third rate colleges is not an indictment of colleges. The post I responded to of yours said that "in most cases a college degree is next to worthless". I'm taking you to task on that claim as being demonstrably false.
I'm sorry that you didn't get what you wanted out of college, I truly am. But please stop advocating for the wholesale elimination of the most accessible path to success for millions of low and middle-income Americans who are not exceptional. (You advocated for this when you suggested we tell parents the college education they hope their children can get is "next to worthless.") More educated adults means a more informed electorate and the higher chance of American innovation that allows the country to be competitive in a global market.
[0]http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/percentage-americans-col...
40% of Americans aged between 25-64 covers anyone who graduated in the last forty years. You should look at recent graduates to remove any bias from older generations who may have been educated before the 'rite of passage' idea became popular.
On the other hand, the actual figure is around 35% for 25-29 year olds so it's not far off. It goes up to 45% if you include associate degrees. While that doesn't seem like much, it's more than 1 in 3 and 25 years ago it was 1 in 4. For a qualification that was once an elite bit of paper, that's a lot of people. It's also showing no sign of decreasing, increased costs or not.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_caa.asp
> But please stop advocating for the wholesale elimination of the most accessible path to success for millions of low and middle-income Americans who are not exceptional.
Is there a citation for that? Median wages, over time, have not improved in line with a more educated populous. More people getting degrees has not translated into a more wealthy population.
Note that in the UK at least, some of the larger firms have stopped asking for degrees and simply require you to pass in-house testing.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/e...
A little anecdotal story backing this up...
My wife started as a paraeducator (teacher's helper) at a school after graduating from high school. A few years later she started working at another school, helping homeless & migrant children. She eventually left that job to work with migrant/bilingual daycares. This process took 8 years.
She then pursued a degree in psychology. Why? Because her next advancement required the state to check a little box on her form that says: "Applicant has a B.S. in social studies or similar". Where did she go for the degree? The cheapest, online college she could find.
The degree didn't matter for 8 years. The place the degree came from didn't matter at all. The price of the degree mattered only to us. She would have gained nothing by pursuing the degree immediately, and racking up any sizable debt from this degree would've just been silly.
If you can't afford or didn't save for college, go to a cheaper school. In-state tuition and fees at most state universities is more than it used to be but still generally under $10K a year. There is no reason to go into six-digit debt for an undergraduate degee.
With very few exceptions, once you get your first job, nobody cares where you got your undergrad degree (if even then).
Yes you can, that is a myth perpetuated by lenders. And for Plus loans there are multiple programs available for parents to discharge their loans directly with the US Dept of Education, and as the baby boomers continue to age more and more will qualify for discharges.
Also, expect to see more of these types of rules, since many student loans are backed by US Government entities: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2015/12/...
> A new enforcement provision passed by Congress and signed into law earlier this month allows the government to revoke the passports of seriously delinquent tax scofflaws — people who owe more than $50,000 to Uncle Sam.
How will they know? AFAIK, my country, which has pretty lenient rules, only asks for proof of no criminal record at the time the application is filled.
On the other hand, you can and will be extradited to the U.S. if you were found breaking their laws and their legal system does ask.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-cryn-johannsen/student-loan-...
Sorry, but the whole point of college today is resume padding. So yes your college name matters. Almost every big web company if you belong to their Ivy league alumni.
In India, there are small companies which explicitly state if you aren't from the IIT's you shouldn't even bother applying.
So yes from where you get your degree matters a lot!
Sure, it'll help if your parents were rich enough to give you a good chance of going to the Ivies in the states but you can easily do well in the states without purchasing a brand name for your resume. Might be mildly more difficult (more internships!).
Sorry to let you know but you don't have 'large diploma mill churning' or 'cheating at the university level' in India. In general, the situation is same as in US.
Alumni connections will take you places your hardwork won't take you in the next 7 lives. Same in India, same in the US. I hope we could all graduate from coursera and be considered the same as people from Stanford. In reality, University education has very little to do with 'education', its a membership to a club that takes care of you all your life.
He's especially interested in a Hollywood career, but has found it hard to land a job there.
These folks went into debt to the tune of nearly 4x the average american pre-tax income, for a theater degree.
No, the lenders shouldn't have let them do that... but come on.
I went to an affordable, in-state university. My father was wise enough to advise me that I was taking on debt for myself, and should think very hard about the economic consequences of my decision.
Some parents are just way too nice to their kids, and these two are in that bracket.
I've found it very amusing as I've grown up to notice this is a pattern in otherwise well-meaning, financially successful baby-boomer parents: in stark contrast with my father and other parents like him, they seem to encourage their children to pursue their dreams without any regard to reality. I suspect my father's financial struggles gave him a sense of practicality that some of the executives I work with never had in advising their own kids.
I have 3 executives I've reported to in the past year. One of them subsidizes her 30 year old daughter's life of studying Middle Eastern cultures. Another subsidizes his son's death metal band (which he abandoned his Music degree midway for), and the third is paying for his daughter's failing business, openly complaining about the fact that she doesn't seem to show up for work very often and has hired people despite lacking revenue to even pay for herself.
Parents enabling bad decisions is never a good thing.
Here in the US, there's still some expectation that there's a good chance that, if your parents can afford it, they'll buy your first car. Certainly not an absolute, but definitely a much more commonplace expectation.
Some of this is due to other factors too, admittedly. Parents in the US seem to spend more time as chauffeurs than in Australia, often due to the mostly inferior public transit systems.
I can at least sympathize with 17-year-old kids who sign papers without adding up the numbers, but can't feel bad for parents who willingly let this happen.
Smart move. Maybe he will pay it all down some day. In this thread there are a lot of people saying you shouldn't take out a lot of loans to get a degree like journalism, and you shouldn't. I agree that is the type of degree that I would encourage someone to get as a second major, and/or from a state school.
Part of the problem here is that all of these people's parents grew up in a different time period where having a technical major was less important, schools were much cheaper, and it was easier to find jobs in general. Combine this with the utter lack of skilled and proper advising for freshmen coming into college.
You get there and you are 18 years old, have little concept of money and underdeveloped judgement skills. Then you go to your advisor who is a scatter-brained English professor with books all over his office. Advising for him is just one of those things you have to do as a professor but he isn't really there to advise and has no idea what to tell you, or his 100 other advisees. So then he asks you what you like and you tell him you like writing. There you go, major in journalism. Even then, some people might want to sign up for CS or Business but they lose the class signup lottery because those departments are under funded and don't have enough sections. Then they lose again for the next 3 semesters and are forced to declare a major in classes that they already have experience in.
There is no point where they explain the value of a degree to you and it can be difficult to understand for most people until they are 2 or 3 years in and suddenly realize that they are stuck in this path and can't go back to change majors because it would take more school and they can't take on more debt. You can't drop out and start over later because then you have to start paying those loans and don't have a degree at all.
tl;dr; it isn't just these kids making bad decisions, it is a dysfunctional system that leads people down paths that are convenient for the school, not necessarily for the students.
... or he could have just driven 40 minutes north and gotten a CS degree at George Mason University, which is a far, far better program than Mary Washington. OR if out of state tuition is not an issue, he could have driven another 30 minutes further and gotten a CS degree at U Maryland, which hovers in the top 15. Both of which are basically the same price as Mary Washington. Is it worth mentioning that the Navy has close connections to both schools? Particularly GMU.
Indeed of nearby schools, the following are all superior to Mary Washington in CS and cost about the same: GMU, U Maryland, Virginia Tech, UVA, ODU, VCU.
So one son decided to blow $200K on a journalism degree, and his parents helped him. Now the other son, already $60K in the hole, is going back to school, and has picked the worst of several options to get a computer science degree. And no doubt his parents are helping him again. One wonders if the problem is the parents.
$129,000, not $200K. $189K is the combined amount of the two sons.
(And "blow" largely because he got a journalism degree, apparently, for what appears to be a goal of an acting career, which is just mind-bogglingly weird, and not particularly because of the $ amount.)
So his mother and father, who both work for the Navy on the taxpayer's dime, got their son connected with an internship program for the Navy on the taxpayer's dime.
I have no doubt that this was 100% through merit, and had nothing to do with both of them having jobs there.
The Navy has another paid-internship and training program for college graduates with no job: it's called ENLISTING.
The Navy (and other services are similar) actually has lots of non-uniformed internship programs for current students ; I suspect the biggest advantage of having family in the military is that they are likely to be aware of these things.
I disagree. In a country with free press, journalists play a critical role in uncovering truths and disseminating the information among the public.
The problem is that the vast majority of people with the title "journalist" today aren't really journalists. They're just brain-dead writers for news conglomerates and PR firms. And yes, getting a degree just for that is dumb. But if you want to become an investigative journalist, then getting a degree for it is a very good idea.
The popularity contest that is the online blogosphere is more important financially than hard work and legitimate, high-quality journalism that they teach. There's almost no money in that business anymore.
Which generally don't even have journalism programs.
It wasn't $200K for the journalism and media studies degree (it was $189k total for two students, only one of which got a journalism and media studies degree.)
And, maybe the journalism and media studies degree from Rutgers would have been a good investment -- if the student wanted to be a journalist; instead, he seems to have wanted a Hollywood film career, but for some inexplicable reason paid for a fairly expensive journalism degree, rather than seeking a film-related degree.
A Rutgers journalism degree might be a good choice (though still probably not going to pay off quickly, in net financial terms) if you want a career in journalism.
If you want a career in Hollywood, you probably want to get a film or related degree from a school where the department has Hollywood connections; I've heard (though I've never seriously researched it, since it was never my interest when going to school) that UCLA is fairly good in this regard. (And, you probably want to research what it takes to actually make a career in Hollywood, and be doing that while you're in school, rather than hoping that just getting a degree is going to magically open doors.)
Schools have far too much incentive to lie about the value of different degrees. Parents and high school advisors don't have the necessary information.
A market device would give students the feedback they need to plan their futures.
Plus if large employers ever complain about the skills that grads are lacking, they can be asked to invest in the appropriate student loan category.
Securitizing student loans by major and having a liquid market for the securities is an interesting idea, but its hard for me to imagine that the information provided would have any impact on this problem. If students, counselors, etc already ignore the plentiful labor market statistics available, a I'm sure they'll have no trouble ignoring a proxy for those statistics.
They'd still be retiring earlier than anyone that I know who isn't wealthy. Ideally they'd have cut the taps at some point before their child spent $130K on a "journalism and media studies" degree in order to be an actor, but I understand that nobody's invented a time machine yet.
These people in the article are the population we've got, not the population we want to have; Monday morning quarterbacking is completely useless, as the debt is already accrued. To state it again: this is the population we actually have. They are not technically skilled, but they are educated and heavily indebted. They were told "go to college, get any degree, and you will have success." This was not accurate, and now, we have an entire generation that is suffering.
Student loan debt is smashing the potential of the millenials and is now increasingly seen as a massive burden on their parents and (mostly uncreated, due to insufficient funds) children as well. Large-scale debt relief is mandatory at this point, as all of the money siphoned to debt maintenance is severely limiting the amount of demand that the economy's primary consumers are able to create. Millenials aren't buying homes, aren't having kids, aren't buying cars, aren't able to put their parents into nursing homes, etc.
The parents of the millenials typically have some wealth that can be extracted, and so, it's on the chopping block. This is why loans have cosigners-- so that their bank accounts can be emptied, too.
Debt slavery is the reality we live in, and predictably, debtors parents aren't thrilled that their retirement is being siphoned away by their children's debt.
As I said, this debt is a massive drag on the economy, and debt relief is mandatory. Unfortunately, there's not so much going on politically right now, so I think that a mass student debt boycott is a better decision. It's unlikely that the lenders will be bankrupted, but it'll send a message at least. Sure, they'll ruin everyone's credit and dock people's wages, but that can only be sustained until there's white riots due to poverty. And it'll probably take riots to end this debt slavery-- it takes riots to fix things in a broken country.
The real problem is that we've been indoctrinated to overvalue education and artificial college rankings. If you're a Virginia resident, going to UVA will cost you almost $30,000 a year, in-state, including room and board (unless your parents happen to live in Charlottesville). But you can go to George Mason for only $11,000 a year living at home. But few people who can get into UVA go to GMU because you're giving up a lot of job prospects in the process, plus have to deal with the "commuter college" stigma. And employers don't really ascribe a much higher value to a UVA education versus a GMU one--they just want to sort people who managed to get into UVA from people who didn't.
It's probably the second biggest monetary investment in their life (if they buy a house), but probably the least educated investment.
Now, some people get amazing help in high school while making this decision. They have extremely intelligent parents, a very supportive school counselor/teachers etc.
But a lot, and I know this from experience have zero help. I know today that if i'm going to invest a hundred thousand dollars in a college education I should probably try to know what the market 5+ years from now will be (good luck with that) maybe I should know what the ROI is on that degree... maybe I should know how competitive the labor market is/will be.
When i was 18 graduating from school I had zero help with this process. Zero. I was told "pursue what you love". How do you expect an (average) 18 year old to make this evaluation?
In my perfect world, we would increase business taxes to pay for higher education, those taxes would then be given directly to programs. Programming industry needs more programmers? easy give more money to computer science education. Students of course will still apply to programs they're most interested in, but in a competitive industry they'll get rejected BEFORE they make the major investment. If it takes a congressional act to change industry taxes, you can be assured someone is going to do some studies on how much each program will need. It's better to have a professional do that, than to hope the student maybe looks into it.
Finally how many jobs ask for a bachelors that just don't need it? If you start asking companies to pay for that education, they might make a better evaluation if its necessary.
Things just get more efficient, perhaps less "fair", but I don't life crippling debt is fair either.
In contrast, European Union asks Greece (and other PIIGS countries) to set the minimum retirement age at 67 if it wants to stay a member...
Things would have to have gone really well to retire before 60 in USA. Most Americans don't even consider retiring until at least that, often 65.
As someone who was a lecturer for a top CS dept, I can tell you that professors do not get compensated the same as CEOs. You can use google to check salaries for public university professors in many places (since this information is public). When a CS PhD accepts a job at a University, they take a pay cut from what the private sector pays. A full professor makes under 200K, and that is at the top of the stack. The average take for assistant and associate profs (at top CS schools in North America) is more like 130-140K. Not what CEOs make!
Those adjuncts are often contingent, low-paid workers: http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/poverty-u-many...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/19/opinion/your-waitress-your...
http://www.thenation.com/article/why-is-college-so-expensive...
The numbers you present themselves are in the top 25% or 33% (depending on which measure you look at) of earners as professors, all inclusive. The idea that most professors are well-compensated on the whole is absurd. Wasn't the old deal supposed to be "decent compensation, but not great, made up for with great benefits and tenure?" Now it's "terrible compensation and no benefits, no tenure."
Of course, the person you're responding to seems to be making their comment sarcastically in any case.
This is a first-world, lack of common-sense problem.
This coupled with a complete lack of understanding how student loans work or what I would be responsible for (I take 100% responsibility for this failing I just wish there had been more education on the issue). Now I've got some ~$60K left in student loans and I didn't even finish college because all of my job prospects said they didn't care about a degree if I could do the work required (software engineer). I am, thankfully, able to make the payments on them but (and again, I take full responsibility) student loans were practically billed as "Free money" and just "something everyone did"... The "good debt" to have... What a load of BS.
I liked my college experience and the life-long friends I made but knowing what I know now I might have cut my college even shorter or possibly not gone as I was able to get a part-time job (I could have worked full time if I had wanted) in my first semester at school in my field... This will not hold for all majors of course but the college (and high school) system sells college as a job ticket and that couldn't be further from the truth in today's world.
Actually, if you co-sign, its both, and primarily the son's.
So you can get a degree for 7k€ (if you live relatively well if you are thrifty it will be less than that. this without working part time, this includes living expenses) per year. So in total 21k€ max. That is 23k USD(Jan, 2016 rate). That is what you would pay in 1 year in a low level college in the US, without the living expenses! (All this even if you are a foreigner)
Why pay that when you can study in the Sorbonne or in the Freie Universität Berlin? There are even degrees in English.
Admittedly one needs to talk the language (french, german) but it is definitely worth it. Not to talk about the experience you get for the money.
PS: This is what I did, currently doing my masters degree in Engineering in France.
Unfortunately it seems like, journalism, acting, professional sports is not about talent but about who you meet and when :/
May be I'm a pessimist but that's how I feel about certain jobs/career paths.
Instead of discharging that debt, he could have offered to apply that balance to genuine, accredited programs (e.g. if the student had $80K in debt principal, she could get the first $80K taken from that balance instead of new debt). In other words, they made that money commitment in search of a degree -- they shouldn't just dump all that on the taxpayers with no societal gain from it.
Another parallel taxpayer-funded debt reduction done by the current administration was to change such windfalls to non-taxable (as regular income, as it always had been), again at the expense of other taxpayers.
-Federally guaranteed student loans can be discharged in bankruptcy (it is just a different standard than other debts); and
-Federal plus loans (a type of educational loan for parents) can also be discharged, not just through bankruptcy but also directly through the US Department of Education, for example one program is for permanent and total disability, and with the aging population more and more parents with $100,000's in loans for their kids will be eligible for this discharge.
As a practical matter, it is not dischargeable. The standard is nearly impossible to meet.
Not really, the standard is "undue hardship". The problem is the myth...Of ~900,000 bankruptcy filings in 2014 only ~700 listed student loans as a debt to be discharged, of that number do you know how many were successfully discharged? The truth is of ~900,000 bankruptcies vastly more were eligible to have student loans discharged but didn't because they didn't even try.
As a lawyer I have personally worked with a client to have a >$100,000 parent loan discharged directly with the US Dept of Education, and in no way would this client come close to being eligible for a normal bankruptcy.
In bankruptcy, available statistics show educational loans are discharged, in whole/part, 50% of the time when attempted.
My client's loan was discharged through the US Dept of Education. Unlike bankruptcy a lender can't contest, there is no adjudication because the matter does not go to court and a lawyer really isn't needed.
It surely isn't luck. While most people falsely believe student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, even more don't even have any idea there is a separate process to discharge student loans directly through the US Dept of Education.
Also, under which criteria did your client receive loan forgiveness? Total/permanent disability? TPD will only apply to only a small fraction of borrowers; bankruptcy is much more difficult to attain a discharge under.
In my client's case it was >$100k of parent PLUS loans, discharged under TPD. Statistics suggest TPD could apply to as many as 20% of borrowers. Again this number will only increase as baby boomers get older. I don't know if "small fraction" is a fair description or not of 20%, but that would still mean >$12B of parent plus loans alone are eligible for discharge under DoE TPD.
One problem I experience first hand as a lawyer is potential clients who actually are eligible but they don't believe it. Worse they think it is some type of scam, because they believe it is impossible to discharge student loans. Something tells me if I discharged >$100k in student loans for a parent as a SV startup rather than in my capacity as a lawyer, I might be hailed as disrupting student loan debt rather than lucky.