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Comment by jamisteven | Hacker News Reader

Stopped reading at "Variable interest rate" and "may have been explained to me at the time (I truly don't remember), but I know I didn't fully grasp what that meant". Uhhhh yea well, you not grasping "what it meant" and not doing your due diligence is what got you into this mess, jackass.

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In her defense, when I went to college, we had financial aid advisors whose job it was to explain the options. I can say unequivocally I was not prepared to make that decision on my own at that age. Years later, it came out that Banks were giving those advisors kickbacks to steer students to their most profitable loans. In typical fashion, the banks and schools paid a small fine and promised not to do it again, with 0 recourse for the students.

Fortunately I didn't get stuck in something this ugly, but i definitely could have.

Our schools do a VERY poor job of educating students on fiscal responsibility. It's actually something I think every high school should have as a required course.

I think it should begin earlier. In primary school, kids should learn that debt is bad. Animal Crossing has done more for this than schools have.

I believe nations do this on purpose. Educating people on savings and thrift can have bad economic consequences

> Our schools do a VERY poor job of educating students on fiscal responsibility. It's actually something I think every high school should have as a required course.

I think it's actually that the nation is trying to do away with money, probably since before the Civil War, and up through the abolition of the Gold Standard. The reasons for declining literacy and numeracy (especially financial numeracy) are probably as simple as, "A really good job is being done & many find no use for these skills."

Then, for those more-or-less willfully literate, for many years analogies were used as the assessments for entrance to the Universities. That baffles me for obvious reasons.

While that's true, it's worth remembering that the primary audience for student loans is 17-18 year old high school kids who have a lot of social pressure to go to college and not much financial education.

That’s what you got out of the article?

I think the point of the article is that we shouldn’t have predatory loan companies that are going after kids who are trying to get higher education.

Maybe you haven't read but we're in the age where "personal responsibility" doesn't exist.

You're not wrong but you're not right either. There are organizations that prey on people because they estimate they won't do their due diligence. These organizations are leeches on our society.

A man without a job goes to you to ask for a loan. He wants the money for a trip.

You perceive a high risk and demand a 100% yearly interest rate. He accepts.

Did you make the right choice as the lender?

Lending has a ceiling on the capacity of the borrower to default. The issue with student loans is that the lender has no downside to giving defaultable loans.

> ... the lender has no downside to giving defaultable loans.

How, in this way, are student loans different than other forms of loans? The students feel strongly compelled to take the loan?

That they cannot be defaulted. If you go bankrupt you still owe the money, and the lender has no risk as he passes it to the government.

I'm guessing that was a reference to the nondischargeability of student loans in bankruptcy. If student loans followed the usual rules for unsecured loans and credit remained as available as now, then almost any rational med students would borrow all they can, and then default upon graduation.

Lawmakers could have fixed this with a longer discharge period, or rules to forcibly shift the loans to income-based repayment, or something that gave the judge discretion to decide what value you got in exchange for that debt. Instead, they just made the loans impossible to discharge in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. "No downside" was an exaggeration, since you can't get blood from a stone; but student loans are certainly easier to collect, since you have the borrower's entire lifetime to squeeze.

ETA: And yeah, some (but not all) student loans are government-guaranteed but issued by private companies. There, the "lenders" were basically just brokers, taking zero credit risk and collecting a commission for any loan they could convince the guarantor to accept. The biggest program for that (FFEL) ended in 2010, not sure if any other exists.

Came here to say this. The photos didn't help sell her story either, making her look a bit clueless and entitled.

It's a shitty situation, to be sure, and I definitely think there needs to be some fixes put in place for outrageous student costs, but this article just doesn't help the case.

She's not smart. No amount of college is going to fix that problem either. She states that she knew her parents thought this was a bad idea. But she wanted to take the loan because if she didn't she would have to transfer colleges or drop out, and those two choices meant she would lose friends.

She chose a college she couldn't afford, and when the warning sirens were blaring in her face she doubled down.

The whole article reads as a “it’s not MY fault, it’s the crooked banks’ fault this happened”. There are plenty of interest calculators online where she could have predicted this outcome. This isn’t rocket science. With every story like this the writer had zero issues with taking the money and the moaning only starts when they are forced to pay.

I mostly agree, but I don't see the need for name calling.

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