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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Thats how its supposed to work, in the UK at least. Student Loans are like a distributed tax that only gets paid by the grads who earn enough to repay.

edit: Also, in the UK, once you do earn enough, payment is automatic via deductions from payslips.

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That's a terrible system, IMO. Why should we be rewarding B-Ark people while at the same time punishing people who get degrees in Engineering and Medicine? I can understand the logic for tax-supported universities (not necessarily agree, but understand), but this just seems... intellectually dysgenic.

The same way you tax more people earning more money ?

Because perhaps there's a view that its worth something to society for people to study things that dont necessarily lead to a high salary?

I can't think of anything that would be as valuable to society as engineering or medicine, say, and still wouldn't land you a remunerative position.

Anyway, that's an argument for taxpayer-supported universities, not for universities paid for by the students who choose to learn skills other people will find useful.

Punishing,really? It's not an unfair burden for those people and hardly be unsurprisingly for them.

The threshold for payment is quite low, around £20000 pretty year in salary before tax. I'd expect most people to make some payments, although compared to an engineer the artist might take a few extra years to reach the minimum salary.

At least the lender can make extra considerations. Career choice, academic history, etc. Better than lending any amount to anyone and still have a guaranteed payment.

The article talks about many grads who could repay, but simply don't for whatever reason.

That is because they have other debt they are prioritizing over their student loans

Right, but just because they're taking on new debt that they're prioritizing over old debt doesn't mean that they weren't financially able to pay back the original debt.

The important piece there is that the new debt has ramifications for non-payment that are much more obvious than the student loan debt.

So the UK is basically subsidizing worthless degrees.

Yes, the UK has an obsession with pushing out more graduates, meanwhile we have to import trades people because demand isn't being met.

The Government is (pretending to) do something about this - we've had a huge increase in "apprenticeships", but a lot of those are just shops counting their shelf-stackers as apprentices because it means they don't have to pay the minimum wage.

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