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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

"I think at this point I owe about $40,000. I really, truly, honestly don't want to pay it back. Sure, I realize the responsibility I took on when I signed the papers and agreed to take out the loans, but I should have never had to do it in the first place. I feel some sort of civic duty not to pay them back, as if my small protest will make any kind of difference."

When I read a comment like that I really want to grab this person by the collar and shake some sense into them. I know many people of similar age who are actually responsible and either didn't take loans they couldn't afford, or are paying off the loans they did take out, and yet they don't get written up about, instead we leave the rest of the world with this impression. So sad on so many levels.

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I'm sure that if people could discharge their student loans via bankruptcy, many would. They can't. The basis of our economic system is that fees and interest offset the risk in a loan. With student loans they don't, they're the bank's cut of a system that transfers all the economic risk to a cohort in which desperate straights are the norm.

Your response is vague. Who are the cohort?

I disagree with you, btw, since much risk on some loans is passed to the US federal government.

It's childish behavior like running away and defailting that cause student loans to be expensive for the rest of us. Man up, it's not a lot of money.

I agree with this, and I think "Student Loans" are the subprime mortgage crisis of the hour. I get particularly incensed when we read reports of for profit universities convincing kids they will have great job prospects if they get their diploma and will be able to pay off any loans they get now. The banks collude with them because as you mention they aren't really pricing risk, there is no risk, they are just taking 0% interest money from the Fed and converting it into 8% interest money from delinquent student loans.

But that said, I would hope that people have enough responsibility to only take loans they intend to repay, and to work within the system to repay them, rather than assert after the fact that the system is broken and so the tax payers should bail them out.

I haven't had a new student loan since the 1990's so I may be wrong in assuming that the terms of student loans have not improved, But during the seventeen years between taking my first and last, there was always a 5% origination fee on top of the interest. Those came off the top before the school deducted their cut.

I'll add that as an 18 year old, I had no concept of what borrowing the money...a whopping $1500 which was half of one semester's tuition at a private university...meant. I wasn't sober enough to handle that sort of responsibility for another several years.

The system isn't broken. It's become corrupt. Banning discharge via bankruptcy was sold by saying that doctors and lawyers were the primary source of defaults on student loans. That's not the case today, and the student loan industry is largely built on reselling loans and collections.

The system is designed to leverage massive asymmetry at every point. Even down to, "why aren't you taking out a loan to insure your child receives the education they deserve?"

This was definitely frustrating to read. I graduated from college in 2008, and myself and most of my friends went to state schools with relatively low tuitions. We got some academic scholarships to cover parts of the tuition, and even then we had to work part-time and (some of us) had to take out some small loans. Reading about people who made such poor decisions is tough. The hardest to read (for me) were the sections about the person who had a full ride scholarship but got a D freshman year and lost half of it, and the person who went to a 54k/yr private college with no plan to pay back the loans. My opinion is that the the US should prioritize making education more affordable, but these loan-dodging students made conscious decisions that they are not taking responsibility for.

> but these loan-dodging students made conscious decisions that they are not taking responsibility for

The entire time I was growing up, I was told it was "college or bust". I was never told that it would be "college and bust", but that seems to be the reality.

Kids were told over and over that a college degree would ensure their future success, that they'd be practically guaranteed to get a career that made paying their student loans trivial, on top of a nice house and a car because that's the American Dream, isn't it?

It's easy as an adult to look back on it and say "wow, that was a big mistake", now that I know how jobs and the economy actually work, but first we had to unlearn everything our parents, teachers, career counselors, and college financial advisers told us in the first place.

A decade ago I was berating myself for my laziness and other personal factors that led me to going to a "backup" in-state tech school instead of the #3-in-nation that I tried for but could not get acceptance.

Now, seeing that the place I could not get into had quadruple the tuition as the in-state and almost double the room and board, I'm starting to believe that perhaps it was for the best that I did not get in that place.

There are definitely a lot of school officials that do a disservice to students by not explaining to them what the job market actually looks like. It would be amazing if more officials and parents were able to convey to students which degrees are in demand and which degrees have a higher likelihood of high (or just livable) salaries.

What stood out to me the most was being shown a chart in high school showing the average earnings of a high school graduate vs a college graduate. A college grad earned $1m more over their lifetime than the high school grad, and I never thought to (nor was I encouraged to) dig into those statistics any further.

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