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Comment by pitaa | Hacker News Reader

How does anyone think it's a good idea to take out $1M in loans for an education? Yes, tuition costs are ridicules and in general students have no control over them. In general, I feel like students are taken advantage of. HOWEVER, students certainly can choose not to attend a certain school. If you choose to rack up $1M in debt, I feel like that's solely on you and your (obviously) poor decision making skills.

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His first year loans were only ~$43k, but then the interest rate spiked and tuition also got hiked. He might be able to make more of a dent in the balance, but it's high enough that the only way payments are affordable is using the 10% of income rule, which results in a number to small to even keep up with the interest.

At this point student loan debt is like a treatable but incurable disease - you take the meds / make the payments hoping you last long enough for a cure to be found / legislated.

This article focuses on a man who took out ~600k in loans to become an orthodontist. That interest has since compounded to 1mm. I would imagine he took the loans out because becoming an orthodontist was his highest-paying career option. Had he known that the variable-rate loans would be impossible for him to pay off he probably would not have taken them out. We should not be putting aspiring medical professionals in this position.

While we are at it let’s stop artificially limiting the number of medical professionals.

So the state will be increasing the budgets for university medical departments, then ? In contradiction to what has been done for decades now ?

So, what I mean to say is that we will be increasing taxes some amount (not much, but let's say 0.5%) to allow for this and other subjects to train more people ?

(medicine is actually one of the most expensive things to train, requiring lots of tools, infrastructure (literally entire hospital complexes), ...)

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