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As a current college student just finishing up my third year at a public state school in my home town (5k per semester), I feel sympathy for her. When I was first choosing schools it was between the easy-to-pay-for public schools or the somewhat-prestigious private schools. The sales pitches for these private schools seeps deep into the minds of high school parents. It’s hard to avoid choosing the private school when you think it will give you better connections, better education, better experience, etc. Really you’re making this decision when you’re in junior year of high school applying to universities.

I had friends who went the private school route and honestly I felt jealous that first year or so. As time went on of course I felt better as all my fears of public school being worse than private were simply over exaggerated. And now I am so relieved I was pushed in this direction by my parents. I can’t imagine the financial position I would be in if they weren’t as frank as they were back when I was deciding schools.

If there’s one big takeaway from this piece it’s that even though we are told we’re adults when we’re 18, there is definitely a wide range of maturity levels you can fall into at that age, and if you haven’t matured or gained financial experience by that age, you could easily screw yourself for the next 40 years or so just by being naive.

> if you haven’t matured or gained financial experience by that age, you could easily screw yourself for the next 40 years or so just by being naive.

I agree. Fun fact: you can say the same about the prison system, but people's reactions to that same comment will be vastly different due to demographics.

But there's no hint of a solution in this article. Should we raise the age to be an adult? Regulate private university marketing? Improve marketing of public universities? Allowing people to abdicate responsibility is a non-starter.

Well, I think abdicating responsibility is the solution proposed in this article. The staggering amount of horrific decisions made by the author (e.g. choosing expensive private school, willfully ignoring the word 'variable', choosing super-cool foreign graduate school, choosing to just not pay her debts for a year, choosing to live and work in ultra-expensive NYC, upgrading her apartment the minute she got a raise, etc) make it a bit challenging to sympathize with her situation.

While there are clearly issues with student loan practices and the cost of higher education, predatory lendors did not conspire to force all of these truely terrible decisions onto this poor woman. If she put the same amount of effort into a budget/financial plan as she did into this creative blog post, she'd already be on her way to a student debt-free existence.

I'd much rather have read a post describing all of the terrible financial decisions the author has made over the last decade and how they've put together a painful, realistic plan to get their financial life back on track. Perhaps with some lessons learned for people facing some of the same decisions. Instead, the author justs rails against the unfairness of it all without actually taking any responsibility for figuring out a solution.

> I had already taken out eight substantial loans totaling over $67,000, whose repayment I hadn't even begun to contemplate.

That's exactly the problem, not contemplating the consequences of our actions. I do believe in second chances and forgiveness, but also in thinking ahead and realizing that actions are not just for the moment but a permanent part of a life-long story.

I've seen so many people in low/middle income brackets with upper class cars/houses/spending habits. It's not because they earned these things but because they got a loan and want the reward before they've earned it.

It's hard to do when many people around you are getting these same things, but I do take solace in having little debt versus going to the best college or owning the newest car.

I completely disagree with this comment.

In 1988, Bill Clinton signed the Higher Education Amendments which made student loans NON-DISCHARGEABLE. Essentially, he handed the students to the bankers on a silver platter. These loans should be dischargeable and forgiven, because in my opinion they are FRAUDULENT.

I don't think you realize the amount of damage this has caused to US society as a whole. There is an entire generation of kids whose lives were ruined because they were told to get a university degree which turned out to be worthless and expensive.

Essentially you are saying she should have known better. I read your comment and you say that she is clueless, and I cannot help but think that you are also clueless because you also do not understand how the financial system actually works. But you are not alone, because all of the "expert economists" also do not understand, everybody is clueless.

Believe me, this is a crisis that will be felt for generations.

> In 1988, Bill Clinton signed the Higher Education Amendments

What? Clinton was a governor then. And, looking up the referenced act, it was signed into law in 1992, before Clinton took office.

Doesn't substantially change your comment but that detail threw me.

It was a typo of 1998, and it was Clinton

https://www.abi.org/abi-journal/congress-amends-523a8-to-eli...

> Congress Amends 523(a)(8) to Eliminate Seven-year Discharge Provision for Student Loans

Ah, I was looking at the 1992 act.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/senate-bill/115...

Nowhere did the OP say she should declare bankruptcy, so I’m not sure why you said the OP is clueless. I believe the OP understands the author is stuck with the loan.

Your opinion about fraud is also unsupported. Even the author conceeds she didn’t read the contract, nor did she express any understanding of how her interest rate is set.

Frankly, she still doesn’t seem to understand the basics of how loans work.

“I will have paid nearly $170,000 to my original $95,000 loan.”

The above quote is meant to express her outrage, but it’s meaningless. She’s missing the time component.

I pity her and I think the student loan business is in a terrible state, just remember who the politicians were who got us here and what they said these laws were for.

The road to hell is surely paved with good intentions. Which is why it’s better think selfishly rather than altruistically.

Do you mean Reagan? Bill Clinton became president in 1993, Bush I in 1989.

GP typoed the year. s/1988/1998/

If you make student debt dischargable, the cost of the loan must also include the cost of insuring against borrower default. I.e. students who don't default must pay for those who do, plus an additional amount to due to uncertainty in future default rates.

Welcome to the world of lending. Thats how its supposed to work.

a similar line a reasoning led to the housing crisis, didn't it? Everyone should be able to get a mortgage!

> I.e. students who don't default must pay for those who do, plus an additional amount to due to uncertainty in future default rates.

The whole concept of interest on lending was to insure against defaulters, that is before bankers wanted their cut of the pie.

You misinterpret my intent, batteryhorse.

I fully agree that this debt should be dischargeable, and universities (both public and private) should be on the hook.

My point is that the author is NOT the Rosa Parks of the student loan crisis; there are far better standard-bearers out there.

I’m not sure if it’s the view from your high horse or the tint from your glass house, but the majority of 18-22 year olds aren’t contemplating the implictions of macroeconomic disasters upon their individual lives - or you know, probably not at all.

I’d suggest taking yourself a little less seriously and having a bit of empathy rather than raining down criticism. Soft skills are important, too.

Cheers ;)

Yeah i agree with this comment. The only thing I’d say is that the point is hard to make in a friendly way. People borrow without consideration all the time, be it money, belongings or even favours. In all these cases there is little respect for the value of the debt the individual has been granted. It leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth when i see people continue to take credit upon themselves without any thinking forward as to how they will service it, or what limitations it may place on them in the future.

I didn’t come from a wealthy background, my parents didn’t go to university, i had debt...but i sure though long and hard about its impact to my life and how i would return it to the lender. I think most of our problems could be solved by simply not over extending ourselves, and when people do it i often am left thinking how inconsiderate they are. This person took nearly $100,000 in debt and had next to no income, how is that sane or responsible?

Good soft skills can certainly land this point better, but at some point someone’s needs to tell people to stop doing stupid things and it won’t feel great hearing it.

Your suggestion is that people who were fiscally responsible at that age should take things less seriously? That people who are unwilling to criticize themselves should be critic-free?

I exaggerate, but while I get your point this article irks me because I know it is an issue, but the author's situation is not typical and she goes to great lengths to distance herself from her own decisions. Here's how I could stomach this better: "I screwed up in not realizing 100k is a metric shit ton of debt to take on even as my mother told me it was a horrible idea. This is something we as a society can improve by....."

> When she had $67000 she decided to take another $24000 loan? With a variable interest rate? In the year 2010, 2 years after the financial crisis of 2008 she didn't understand how a variable interest rate was disastrous?

They're students... of course they don't? Lots of adults don't even understand things like this.

And I don't see how you're arguing for public universities as if they're the obvious, common sense solution, when private universities are an extremely popular option (and really, more often the 'default' for a lot of people).

Keep in mind, the 2008 financial crisis happened because a tipping-point number of people didn't understand how variable interest rates worked & after that crisis, we did exactly nothing in our public education system to explain how they worked. It's not like 2008 happened and everyone had an epiphany. The predatory loan practices simply continued in the student loan space.

There's also ways to consolidate loans under more favorable conditions. Basically have somebody else buy out your loan and pay them back at a better rate. Also, just pay it back early yourself.

The best way to turn the high price of student loans around is to deny the student loan industry their future earnings.

The best way to reduce the prices at private institutions is to not go.

It's partly a cultural problem too. In this kind of a culture young adults (or maybe not even adults yet) have to make decisions about the rest of their life. In the US they even have to consider borrowing ungodly amounts of money to do so.

If it were culturally and economically more appropriate to go to university when you're 21-25 then a lot of these mistakes wouldn't happen. Maybe offer educational programs, where you can only apply to the program if you have x amount of work experience doing any job. Or the US could try to emulate European countries in university cost. Or it could be something else entirely, but it's fairly clear that something needs to be done. If not for this generation then for the next one.

A person can be indeed irresponsible and yet that does NOT mean we refuse to criticize entities that take advantage of and abuse irresponsible people!!

Very well said, and I think our system needs to do better for students. The issue is this however:

> I wouldn’t have been able to afford college without a student loan provider.

This sentiment is echoed by millions of students in the US, myself included.

The author's biggest issue is NOT her loan provider. The author's issue is that she made a stupid decision to go to a private university and pay it off with loans. For-profit universities are the bigger criminal in her story, but she either has not realized it or is unwilling to admit it because she had fun in college.

But WHATEVER the biggest stupid decision, the focus was (and deserves to be) on the nature of debt-traps. Paying $18k on a $24k loan and the outstanding principle is still $24k… I don't care if the stupid decision was to borrow the money just to gamble it in a casino (or to fund a naive tech startup!) or whatever… even then, it's misguided to look at an article with that focus and say "casinos are the bigger criminals". No, debt runs our system and is the core driver of power and inequity. Debt is what enables the private-colleges and casinos etc. and that's what the article was about for good reason.

Incidentally, she did NOT attend a for-profit college!! She attended a private college, i.e. a non-profit that happened not to be run by the state and get state funding. I mean, there's issues there too, but for-profit colleges are a whole other deal.

> With a variable interest rate?

The horror that you and other commenters show to variable rates makes me wonder if they work differently in the States to here in the UK. Here, "variable rate" typically means a fixed number of percentage points above the base rate set by the Bank of England (analogous to the Fed). The base rate is connected to inflation (although it's not exactly the same), so in some ways it's a actually less risky than a fixed rate, because it's value is more stable in real time. The fixed markup over the base is negotiated when you take out the loan, analogous to the differences between rates of fixed-rate loans.

In the US does "variable rate" mean something different? If it just means "the lender can vary it to anything it likes", how is that even legal - what's to stop them jacking it up to 1000%?

because she was 17 when she made the decision.

Also because she received a lot of information saying that she must go to a University and take the loan to be successful. Higher education is a social practice reinforced by dominant economic thought. Being literate and pursuing intellectual pursuits in free time is a better indicator of ability and success than attending the University.

She has to stack up and pay it off in large chunks to beat the interest rate. Unless this is impossible for her, in which case I think a court would look favorably upon her protest.

Henry David Thoreau turned down his $5 vellum diploma from Harvard, and was one of the most important abolitionist thinkers. He would probably characterize the student loan practice as farcical, advocate for its abolition, and describe default as a moral imperative (note that defaults are punishable under Law in many states). He might have even described it as illegal, though he did not strictly believe in Law, unlike Abraham Lincoln.

Not to devalue the contributions of myself & other college graduates. I think higher education is necessary, like we play the role of The Giver in Lois Lowry's book, maybe. Its high price is commensurate with the social price of holding on to things like history, philosophy, and chemistry.

No one should go hungry or without work for not attending the University. Probably no one should be working or supporting the institution of debts, technically speaking. But there are many people who cannot read, cannot live without electricity, do not have fuel or agricultural land, etc.

Variable interest rates are only disastrous if you ignore affordability in the future as rates increase. You should know at what rates the adjustments will hurt you and at which rates the adjustments will break you. Downside if that most people only base affordability on the current rates ( if they even consider affordability at all ).

>Why did she go to private university? There's no shortage of public universities with substantially better financial terms...

If my daughter would have had to take out student loans to go to public university, she would have likely been on the hook for around $30K a year factoring in room and board. With a part-time job, she may have been able to reduce that loan debt to $20K a year. At four years, that would have been between $120 to $80K in student debt, just to go to a public university.