Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That seems like a bit of an unfair reading to me.

Yes, ultimately everyone is responsible for managing their own finances, and it seems like the author acknowledges that and her own part in their mismanagement.

But expecting young people to make rational, fully-considered choices about taking loans in order to receive education is a tough sell. Higher education is often - sometimes unfairly - seen as an essential requirement for making progress in many careers. And in a situation where so many people are struggling with unmanageable debt, it seems that “every individual is responsible for their own choices” is a less useful position than “what is wrong with this system nationally and how can we fix it”. It’s kind of like US healthcare: participants are almost obliged to participate in the system, and for various reasons can’t be considered fully rational consumers.

There are lots of things that can be done, though. A change in culture making college education less essential; better loan programs; excision of bureaucracy; single-payer education systems; the list goes on.

The answer is a lot more complex than “college students need to make better decisions”.

It's not just an unfair reading it's a laughably short-sighted reading.

These loans are ultimately guaranteed by State and Federal governments (meaning the banks take zero risk beyond servicing costs) and yet they magically generate billions in profit. Where do you think those billions come from? What do you think actually happens when this woman effectively defaults on her loans? Who really loses when this woman can't afford to start a family or start a startup because she's paying thousands of dollars to banks and collection agencies who, again, took zero risk?

Really, the American tax payer might be the dumbest type the planet has ever seen. The genius of the student loan racket[1] is that Americans are paying billions to the government to steal billions from other Americans and then give those billions to banks -- who are working full-time to further undermine American democracy. It's a scheme whose boldness goes beyond the outright slavery and peasant-bondage paradigms of the past. The elites have actually tricked their victims into paying for their own chains.

[1] https://abovethelaw.com/2010/09/the-student-loan-racket-now-...

Completely. Nobody sat me down to explain debt, they just explained that it was an option to go to the school I wanted to go to. I'm pretty much an idiot now, I can barely comprehend how stupid I was at 18. So to think that I somehow could fully realize the repercussions of student loans is less than unrealistic.

It's a many many billion dollar industry versus some (mostly) naive kids. I'm on the side of the idiot kids on saying that the moment in time we are living through is brutal. I hope we find a fix for future kids.

> I'm pretty much an idiot now, I can barely comprehend how stupid I was at 18.

HN expects one to add to the discussion rather than simply quoting and liking, but it's hard to add anything to that quote :-)

Its legalized extortion. In other countries healthcare and education are viewed as core to national security, in the US these become legal platforms for hardcore extortion of vulnerable people whether its the student desperate to move ahead or the person who needs to take out a second mortgage on their home to afford a copay.

I live in a country with free healthcare and free education, people like the woman in the article aren’t better off here. They just take the same huge loans to buy, cars houses and generally live above their means for years until the debt comes crushing down.

The american education and health system needs reform desperately, but not because of financially irresponsible people can shoot themselves in the foot, that will always be the case unless you start completely dismantling the financial freedoms of the individual.

I live in a country with free healthcare and education (well, nationalized) and we have much stronger protections against predatory lending. The problem with US student loans is that they can't be defaulted on.

You are, like the article making the very unfair and very wrong equation of her financials and every college student in America. I’m not saying that “college students need to make better choices” I am saying that this is an article about one individual who knowingly made bad choices and is now trying to claim ignorance and blame an industry that did nothing wrong in this specific case.

We could ban loans altogether on the grounds that some people cannot handle the financial responsibility that they bring about. Or only allow loans to people who are 50 years old+ but what sort of world would that put us in? The solution she wants is for someone to say “you don’t need to pay any more money, you already payed enough so we’ll let you off the hook” the actual solution would have been someone telling her before “you don’t have the money to take the education you want, go find a 9-5.

I don’t think I am making that mistake.

What I read in that article was something like: “I made some bad decisions about financing, but the wider system is a problem for the following reasons.”

You’re right that from a technical point of view nothing was done wrong. A college student signed up to a loan, agreed to the terms, and was subsequently shocked by the extent to which it was difficult to pay it off. I disagree that she’s asking to be “let off the hook” but is instead using her case to highlight the wider problems in this system.

There are wider-ranging options than banning loans or restricting them to older people. Making college more affordable, or regulating interest rates, or providing a government-backed system for college funding are all alternatives.

At some point, if a huge number of people are struggling with a system, it’s reasonable to ask how it can be reformed - because this isn’t an isolated case. The focus on individual decisions risks missing out on a discussion about how that wider problem can be solved - that students feel the need to get into this debt in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com