Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

We don't need student debt reform (and I say that as someone who has a lot of student debt). Student loan debt is a middle/upper middle class problem. 2/3 of millennials don't have a college degree, disproportionately in the lower and lower middle class. The majority have no student debt. Public money spent on college or debt reform would be a regressive benefit to those who are already better off than the median person. It would be better to spend that money figuring out how to improve the plight of working class people for whom college isn't in the cards.

View on HN

I would argue that the problem isn't "if the poor are screwed, bad. If the rich are screwed, ok."

I think the problem is eqch individual is pushed to go to college to find a good job which raises demand of college, which raises price. But those good jobs are barely out there for the graduates. And the college institutions didnt guide people down paths of success, instead gave enough freedom to find their own path to failure.

Now, you have a lot of intelligent hardworking (college is not easy) people who are in debt with a very abysmal perspective on their future. Their debt makes them worse off than working poor because any low income job would simply put them in the black. And the gov has their habds tied because america is a great believer in the free market yet a huge group of hardworking young people are effectively worthless and the coming generations are likely to fall in the same trap.

It's really hard to work through the framing you've created here, where it's supposed that going to college is a requirement to find a good job, the rich are "screwed" by college debt, and the poor are... what? Screwed from multiple directions simultaneously?

Further: if college is a necessity for a good job, and that's why students are going to college, and they're leaving college with a mountain of debt and no means to pay it off, then college is not achieving the promise of securing better jobs, and the answer isn't to plow even more money into the system but instead to stop sending kids to expensive colleges that have no positive impact on their financial futures.

It would be nice if college in the US was free. If one could wave a magic wand and reach that outcome, one certainly would.

But since we don't have magic wands, we have to prioritize, and we're generally not keen to prioritize the financial well-being of the wealthy before that of the less well-off. In matters other than finance, sure, we don't discriminate that way; we don't, for instance, send the rich off to wars first (we do rather the opposite).

Disclaimer : I am a self educated programmer with $0 in debt.

You say this with 20/20 hindsight and a unique perspective on supply and demand. You say this with what sounds anger and resentment towards successful people. I hope you view success and upperclass as a goal, or areat least a believer in independence and hardwork

The mass majority of americans are sheep that are expecting the gov and society to guide them towards a better future. These individuals worked hard for 4, sometimes more, years. What these people are lacking is an understabding of tge employment economy abd supply/demand. Since they dont have mbas its quite understandable to be this naive.

So now we have thousands of intelligent hardworking people who were led to the cloffside to jump. Arguably that is an example of survival of the fittest. Theres only room for cockroaches doing the dirty jobs and allstars doing the big ones. But considering our future depends on the survival and success on understanding the universe, it is in our best interest to ensure these hardworking individuals can be rewarded somehow and that future sheep understand how the world works so that their cliff is one of choice not of ignorance or force.

So your telling me

- tough luck, let them die

Im telling you

- these sheep were simply going down the path they were told

- they were ambitious, smart and hardworking enough to survive 4 years and graduate

- the economy only selects the best and the rest are left to compete in the same income bracket as the lazy, stupid, young, immigrant, unskilled etc.

Is it on the best interest of the united states as a nation to punish ambition? How do we guide people from here?

I'm a self-educated (1 semester at UIC and nothing else) programmer with $0 in debt. I just sold a company a few years back. I do not have "anger and resentment towards successful people".

I do not think we should spend large amounts of money to help refinance the debts of some of the best-off people in our society. I think that's a bad use of funds.

I also do not believe that college selects for "ambition". The overwhelming majority of middle class high school students go on to college. They're not all ambitious. They're just lucky.

Everything else I have to say about this comment, I already said in the preceding comment.

Its clear you wish to end this discussion so I will give you the final word after this.

Luck only goes so far. You need grades or sports to get in cheaply. The inflation of college prices isnt related to only the "1%" going to college. Nearly everyone goes [0], 68% in 2014. And if you dont, you either couldnt get in or smarter than the system could handle. To graduate you need to study, pass exams, write essays. College is not a free lunch only for the upper class. Its a bet the the american government guarentees because they believe a well educated workforce is a better workforce.

[0] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cpa.asp

Only 35% of millenials have student loan debt: http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/188984/americans-big-d.... As you concede, if you are part of the one-third that doesn't go, it's probably because you couldn't get in. But to the extent the government should be spending public funds to help people, those are the people who it should help first. Moreover, on a dollar basis, it's the people who have the most education that will likely have the most debt. E.g. interest free student loans will help those who do a couple of semesters of community college a little bit, but will really help out the doctors, lawyers, etc. who take on six-figure debt.

This is part of a larger phenomenon of the American welfare system helping people who are already relatively better off. Own a million dollar house? You can deduct tens of thousands of dollars a year in mortgage interest! Have $200,000 in debt after going to a private college and getting a masters degree? The government will forgive it! Did you make a six figure income during your working years? Great, the government will not only give you the disproportionate share of social security benefits, it will pay out more than you put in!

I'm comfortable with the words I've already had here. As with my previous comment: there's no response I have to this that I didn't already write in my first response to you.

the economy only selects the best and the rest are left to compete in the same income bracket as the lazy, stupid, young, immigrant, unskilled etc.

As a homeless person with more than 6 years of college who was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class, I think you are ...ill informed, to put it very mildly.

I turned down a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of school at age 20 with no student loans. I have one student loan that will be paid off about next July that is for a Certificate in GIS that is the equivalent of Master's level work. I have also had a college class on homelessness and public policy and I run (at least) a couple of websites aimed at addressing problems of the most desperately poor in the U.S.

In the vast majority of cases, poor people are not lazy, stupid or unskilled. In the vast majority of cases they are one of the following:

Female -- Poverty is a gendered issue and there are many factors that make it a gendered issue, more than I care to go into today as I am trying hard to resolve my own serious financial problems by doing as much paid work as I can here lately.

Chronically ill (or maimed for life) through no fault of their own -- One of the side effects of all of our modern medications and what not is that we can often "cure" things like cancer, but we don't really know how to get people well. We keep them alive, but often in a state where they are limping along and not able to work full time while saddled with high medical bills. (I have heard that more than half of all bankruptcies in the U.S. involve high medical bills, even when the person has good medical insurance -- I know this from someone very informed on the subject.)

Mentally ill -- and there is increasing evidence that mental illness and associated problems, such as alcoholism or addiction, have biological roots. So it may be called "mental illness," but it really is still a form of physical illness, one that even modern medicine does an incredibly poor job of addressing. We still don't have this one figured out all that well as a society.

Unable to find affordable housing -- There is a dearth of affordable housing in the US. This is a problem that goes back many decades and is only getting worse with time. I don't have time to find stats right now, by the shortage is really extreme and the result is, in part, increasing levels of homelessness nationwide.

Bailing out people who borrowed too much money for college falls far short of my priority list for trying to fix the problems in the U.S. Fixing those other problems would help all people, regardless of their educational achievement, income level or other details.

It would even help the fools who borrowed far too much for college. I dropped out specifically because I knew two people with a completed bachelor's degree and some form of college beyond that who were both delivering newspapers. One was living with his mother in his 30s. The other was mooching off his fool of a wife who eventually got wise and divorced his sorry ass.

I very much doubted this assertion (Regarding 2/3rds of millennial not having a college degree) given that I'm a millennial who grew up in a relatively rural area where nearly everyone from my high school still either went on to either a technical or 4-year school. The census [1] (Table 1) clearly contradicts my intuition.

I would like to note that while 2/3 of millennials don't have a bachelor's degree, 2/3 of millennials did go to college. The argument, then, that the median person would not benefit, then, is not substantiated given that some college does still afford some cost. I do wonder why 19% of millennials did not complete college to any degree and if less debt would have aided them.

I would like to question a central premise of your comment, which appears to indicate that regressive benefits are less useful than progressive benefits (Please, correct my assertion if you think otherwise, I'm referring to the sentiment of your last two sentences). Given that measures such as these, which would likely allow more students to graduate (I assume a subset of the people who did not finish were for financial reasons) and to better focus on their studies (Working one to two jobs during the school year, like I did, can definitely be a distraction). The investment may be worthwhile in the long run, given that education is linked with earnings (And, by the transitive property, taxes paid). Additionally, it may make careers that are more focused on a "collective good", such as social work and teaching, more tractable (Even though debt forgiveness plans do exist in some situations in these fields).

[1] http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...

High-income high school graduates are 30% more likely to enroll in a 2- or 4-year college program than low-income high school graduates.

But of course, that statistic conceals a much bigger gap:

* It measures only those who complete high school. In most of the US, the completion rate for low-income students is between 65% and 80%. In nine states it's below 65%.

* It captures vocational and community colleges which cost as little as $1000 a year alongside Bowdoin, which costs $50,000 a year. Obviously, it's the low-income students going to community college.

* It measures only enrollment rate and not completion rate, where there is another giant structural gap (for instance: high-income students can afford to take more than 4 years to see a degree to completion).

Student debt financing assistance is a benefit that accrues mostly to the higher end of the income spectrum.

This reminds me of something Laurence on Project Runway recently said, "Either I'm going to be rich or I'm going to be poor, but I'm not gonna be in between."

Why work so hard when your discretionary income is barely higher than those on welfare?

I don't have numbers but people borrow for associate degrees and some college or to go to Trump U. I would guess most millennials have educational debt and don't have >= bachelor degree.

It would be better to spend that money figuring out how to improve the plight of working class people for whom college isn't in the cards.

We need a great deal more genuinely affordable housing in this country. That would be an excellent start.

some of that 2/3 flunked out or are perpetual students.

>We don't need student debt reform (and I say that as someone who has a lot of student debt). Student loan debt is a middle/upper middle class problem. 2/3 of millennials don't have a college degree, disproportionately in the lower and lower middle class. The majority have no student debt

You comment basically boils down to "not too many people even go to college, let's not do anything to improve that".

What a shame, you really don't want to improve anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com