Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me | Hacker News Reader

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me

thebaffler.com

But... I thought taking English classes and reading literature was supposed to provide one with critical thinking skills? How many years of "critical thinking" does one need to take before realizing that $200K on 6% variable interest is a whole lot of loans to take for no job prospects? How poignant and vivid should one's description of poverty be (parents crying over a yearbook purchase) before actually thinking about their own responsibilities?

I'm surprised at the number of computer savvy young people who never google "starting salary by major" or such before college or while in college.

When I went to college (before the internet) the starting salaries and job markets for the various majors were well known and talked about by the students.

When my parents couldn't spare $40, I took a job at a local motel. The author, in contrast, asked them to cosign for $200,040.

Seems what was missing was a sensible discussion along the lines of "why not go to State U which would cost about half that. Or maybe community college which is much less than even that."

This assumes that they even knew this existed. I can tell you that my parents, nor I knew at the time, however the internet was a bit farther along by the time he went to school.

$50K/year is an elite university. The bulk of your high school peers would be going to State U and would be talking about it. It'd be like buying a Mercedes because you don't know about Fords. I find this hard to believe.

The bulk of my high school peers couldn't afford to go to college, the ones that could were on full ride athletic scholarships. This wasn't recent and it was harder to get in to colleges at the time, and Google wasn't as useful as it is today but thanks for the assumption. Ironically the State University was actually more expensive than where I ended up (and still is pretty expensive). I eventually ended up joining the military and after I was discharged getting a couple of degrees from a school a few towns over that I didn't even knew existed.

Before the internet, school guidance offices and your local library had printed catalogs and cross-referenced directories of colleges. Magazines like US News & World Report would publish their annual college rankings.

This wasn't hard information to come by.

It's hard to believe you didn't know about your home state university. Your athlete friends surely followed the fortunes of their football team. Around here the State U team is constantly in the newspaper and on the nightly local TV news sports roundup. This has been true in every place I've lived in, decades before the internet.

How much critical thinking does it take to realize that living in a society which purposely takes advantage of the poor and downtrodden to ensure that they live a life eternally in debt might be a bad thing?

We're not talking about people running up credit cards buying useless crap. We're talking about a system designed to push people through college and towards the 'American Dream' while pushing them into the deepest depths of debt.

Now consider the following: Over 50% of the US Govt's financial assets are in student loans [1]. I think the advice of 'just don't go that far into debt, dummy' falls flat when we can see how absolutely huge the student loan business is.

[1] https://community.finimize.com/t/graphic-of-the-week/1044/25...

For the sake of argument, let’s grant that his B.A. was someone else’s fault. But the masters? After four years of undergraduate, presumably at a decent university, was he still uneducated and unable to think for himself? If yes, that degree is worth even less than I thought. We should immediately clawback the tuition from the university—-at least, it would definitely be the wrong approach to have society systematically agree to pay for such a fraudulent product.

The author may have enrolled in a 5-year BA/MA program. Even if not, 2008 wasn't a great time to graduate with a BA in English, and advice to ride out the recession in grad school was pretty common.

Should society and trusted authority figures not be held responsible, on any level, for bombarding people with false or harmful messages? When a religious fanatic does something unpleasant, we don't hesitate to hold their religious community partially responsible.

We don’t hesitate to hold the terrorist responsible either. That’s the wonderful thing about responsibility: multiple people can have it, without dilution!

I feel really sorry for the author and the author's parents. I know so many people who spent so much time and money on degrees like English literature, history, arts, sociology, etc. Today, most of them cannot find a job in any related field. In fact, I only know a single person who managed to make a good career out of studying a subject like that.

As a teenager, I was close to choosing this type of major myself. Almost nobody tried to talk me out of it. Instead, there were many people around me who encouraged me to choose something I found interesting and let the rest take care of itself. Reading articles like this, it reinforces my belief that this is almost always terrible advice and those who say things like that to young people should feel ashamed.

There’s more to learning and the life of the mind than how much money it can make you. College shouldn’t entirely be a STEM trade school. Creativity and innovation require cross pollination and I bet if you look harder you find plenty of studio art majors and linguists and English majors doing just fine in the modern world. We can’t all be engineers but we can all learn to apply ourselves across disciplines and that works both ways. The problem seems to be that people believe that college is the only ticket they need and that they don’t need to apply themselves further or continue learning and adapting.

It would be sensible to google one's career prospects before taking on major debt.

You are absolutely right (I lament the passing of the classic, well-rounded liberal arts education) but you don't have to be an accounting major to realize racking up $100k in debt for an English lit degree just isn't wise.

"College shouldn’t entirely be a STEM trade school."

I appreciate the feedback, but here you are distorting my argument. There is not a binary choice between getting a STEM degree and going into debt for the rest of your life because you spent more than $100,000 on two English degrees. For instance, I think more people should consider learning a skilled trade.

"I bet if you look harder you find plenty of studio art majors and linguists and English majors doing just fine in the modern world."

There are millions of people with degrees in studio art and linguistics and of course plenty of them are doing just fine. That says little about the wisdom of pursuing such degrees.

"The problem seems to be that people believe that college is the only ticket they need and that they don’t need to apply themselves further or continue learning and adapting."

This I agree with.

> College shouldn’t entirely be a STEM trade school.

Then colleges need to stop pitching themselves as the gateway to a career.

People don't believe these things because they're stupid. They believe these things because colleges systematically lie to them.

I don't think the buck stops at college, we've even gotten to a point where HS/MS teachers are aggressively marketing for colleges as a way to an instant career.

This conception of education ... brings me at once to state my own view of the purpose of university training. It is exactly the opposite of that of the eminent and learned gentleman to whom I have referred. It is that the purpose of higher education is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects. And by this series of mixed metaphors I mean to assert that education is not to teach men facts, theories, or laws; it is not to reform them, or amuse them, or to make them expert technicians in any field; it is to teach them to think, to think straight, if possible; but to think always for themselves.

Can you clarify: does inflaming one’s intellect require one to NOT understand what 6% of 200,000 is?

I think this system would be greatly improved if the universities sponsoring this debt (and profiting from it) had some skin in the game. If the universities suffered financially when their former students did, they would get much wiser about how they encourage students to take on debt, and they would stop inflating their costs to match all the subsidies we provide.

I think the modern university business model is predatory and needs to be regulated.

Government intervention, in the form of easily accessible student loans, is a huge part of what brought us here.

why is everyone blaming the government and universities? in what sane universe do people see the student loan crisis we have, and google starting incomes for their degrees and still decide to get massive loans for majors which don’t pay much? do people themselves deserve no blame or is it all someone else’s fault?

It's not all someone else's fault, but the people who are making those decisions are very young and easy to exploit.

they are young but:

1. They have parents which should know better. (especially when cosigning loans).

2. They dont have to go to the most expensive school. I could have gone to a much more expensive school like NYU or USC but chose to go to a UC because thats what my family could afford and I didn't want 100k in loans.

The universities keep increasing cost of tuition way above the inflation rate in order to pay for increasing numbers of non-teaching administrators and fringe services like activities for students and sports facilities. The universities are the ones who are increasing tuition rates to better market themselves to future students.

The government, by way of elected leaders, promise increasing amounts of loans to college students under the guise of helping these students access increasingly costly schools of higher education, yet they are really just buying future votes (see, I made it easy for you to get someone else to give you a gigantic loan for a 4-year vacation! Now, vote for me again so I can try to forgive your debts, a la Bernie Sanders).

We also blame the banks for 2008, when by far the largest responsibility (in total $ liability) lies with ordinary Americans taking "balloon payment" loans to pay for houses they couldn't afford.

This is a great idea.

It's a simple enough solution...

X = average starting salary for degree

Y = some predetermined payback period for student loan

Z = some acceptable percentage of income to put towards student loan

X * Y * Z = max available student loan for your degree track

I think it might be far, far simpler to simply demand that it's forbidden to give anyone loans with balloon payments, like student loans.

Clearly too many people cannot be trusted with the decision these loans require.

This article is filled with statement after statement after statement showing that it's somehow wrong to require a person to predict the consequences of their actions, or expect them to take it into account, like the oft-cited learning another job, or just ... not getting a loan.

Having to pay premiums from the second you have a loan would at least make the consequences extremely obvious.

Tying loan repayment to a percentage of income is a good idea. Under a certain amount you pay nothing, over that you pay 5-10% annually.

This realigns the loan companies to make investments with the students vs. selling them a presidigous ego degree with no real value in the market place.

If there is anything governments ought to do, it’s to help align the interests of all parties Via creative legislation.

This exists in a couple of different forms on government student loans (Income Contingent Repayment for example), but it's the government that takes the hit, not the university. The university's incentive is to talk about the benefits of a well-rounded education, and I agree with that (One of my majors was Philosophy), but for a university to take what is now exceeding $100/hr of instruction on credit, for years on end, with no reasonable hope of hardship-free repayment sounds like Scientology or some other cult.

OR allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy - that would give the schools a hell of an incentive to not ship overtly-debt-addled peeps into the workforce.

Again, the universities aren't the ones originating the loans, it's the taxpayer. The universities would have already gotten their payment.

And unlike capital resources, the originator isn't able to come after the borrower and take their education away since it's inside the brain.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-than-40-of-student-borrowe...

So $200 billion.

Assuming this doesn't double or triple when you announce the rule changes, that's 6% extra taxes to pay, per year.

Realistically, you'd expect this to double in the beginning, then rapidly taper off. So that would mean 10% extra in income and payroll taxes (and 10% higher corp tax, and all imported goods 10% rise in price), then dropping to, say, a 3% rate that lasts indefinitely.

I'm pretty sure people are in universal agreement that this is too high a cost.

These articles pop up every now and then and I'm struck by how many include a similar line to "a B.A. and an M.A. in English literature, with more than $100,000 of debt..." If your goal is an MA in English, to be a writer, why would you go anywhere even approaching $10k a year? This notion that you must attend an expensive school is a huge fallacy that people need to understand.

I feel bad for the author's parents, thankfully he got his dad taken off as a cosigner. I also think the author should be willing to accept 100% blame for the debt, which it seems like they aren't.

>What an irony that the decisions I made about college when I was seventeen have derailed such a goal.

If it is indeed true that they were suckered in to this bad deal at the age of 17, the blame may belong with the group of people who profit from the exploitation of people who are by any measure, minors.

You know, all of that money is going somewhere.

> I also think the author should be willing to accept 100% blame for the debt, which it seems like they aren't.

This isn't a productive way of treating bad debt - and it is particularly questionable in light of the treatment the major banks received in the 2008 crisis.

The system, and it is a pretty good one, is that the lender is responsible for judging the risk of who they are lending to. If they judge correctly and the venture succeeds, the money comes back with interest. If the venture fails, then the money is lost in bankruptcy and the slate is wiped mostly clear.

Debtors prisons are stupid, holding people to the past is foolish. Once someone can't pay money back, then they can't pay it back and that should be the end of the matter. This idea that student loans can't be discharged through bankruptcy is one of the grossest unfairnesses that the US foists on its young people. Pretending that a lenders hands are clean when they have given $100,000 to somebody studying an English major is crazy.

One more thing, debtors' prisons take a private debt, and then compound it with public spending.

Prisons aren't cheap. They get outsourced. And then private debt becomes a vehicle for private profit (at taxpayer expense).

Follow the money.

P.S. I didn't actually RTFA, yet. The contemporary resurgence of support for "debtors' prisons" and the like, pushes my buttons. As well, letting Wall Street and kin off the hook while foreclosing on (and, per the previous, maybe locking up) some of their suckers.

I personally went through defaulting on student loans and being hassled by bill collectors, so I can relate to that situation - it totally sucks.

I also agree that the laws pertaining to bankruptcy and student loans should be revisited. I also think predatory lending practices are a big problem.

But despite all of that, I really feel like the author should own responsibility. It can simultaneously be a bad system and still be his fault.

The quote,

"My debt was the result, in equal measure, of a chain of rotten luck and a system that is an abject failure by design"

really kind of made it hard to be empathetic for the rest of the article. In equal major, someone decided to go deep into debt obtaining not one but two degrees in English literature in the late 2000s when this was already well known to be a terrible idea.

I think student debt should be reformed and it should be possible to discharge student debt through bankruptcy (with modifications to the previous status quo, I think), but this is just kind of grating.

I agree. That is why you pay them interest and the interest is also directly related to how risky the loan is considered. If you put a 10x asset on the line and have a history of paying your debts you pay much less interest on an x value loan, than if you are starting out.

The whole framework of student loans is simply crazy and is a factor of inflation of tuition. (Greater supply of capital available to universities.) I am sorry, but politicians' here played the Pontius Pilate card on U.S. citizens and claimed they provide you with the option of education any wealthy democratic country needs. Alas if you are poor and head into this path, you have to consider that you have to make an unattainable monthly payment 6 months after graduating. (The payments I see assume you enter a really good market and attain a good salary with your entry Bachelor's degree. Alas the market is tough.) If you are in debtor's market (high inflation) good for you. Otherwise you are doomed, as the author points out.

It is not the legal fault of the bank. (Morality aside.) The bank is going to earn as much of its assets (you that is) as the law allows. And the lawmakers gave the bank the high ground and killed the sentinel. You should NOT get a loan, if you can not invoke bankruptcy or do not have the renegotiate your debt. The bank provides you with a service. You are paying the bank the capital, the opportunity cost (expected gains from investment (comprises inflation)), and a risk buffer. In the case of student debts the bank is allowed to impose you with a risk buffer but practically has little to no risk. If the borrower and the lender are not in an equal footing prepare for disaster.

I find the author has slipped into a mental trap due to their predicament. Education is priceless for the democratic society, not always for the individual. (I am not going into authoritarian regimes and why they keep people uneducated here -- read any serious political science intro text). Democracy requires educated involved individuals exercising their power responsibly. As an individual you are better off with the best education you can get that does not kill you (financially). In a lot of countries, this is determined by your abilities as a student and you don't have to worry that much about dying financially. Not so here in the U.S. You can spend 200k to get educated, but you are putting a bullet through your head practically, because you have no way to default to the unsustainable payment options. It is the same as the gambler's fallacy. Say you have a probability of winning 90%. One could say you are going to win, go all in. With 10% you have gone bust and have nothing. Student loans are the same.

If 60% [1] of people have to take loans to study, I claim the system is broken and shall call you out as a hypocrite if you say people have equivalent opportunities to start their lives depending on their abilities and work. I say the canary in the coalmine is dead if people question if their kids should go to the university. That is not normal or a positive market indicator. I hope this question remains intrinsically foreign for me and people outside the U.S. How do you expect to compete and act as an individual, if you do/can not invest in yourself? Are you going to compete in unskilled manual labor with automation or "third world" countries (or slave countries like North Korea)?

[1]https://www.studentdebtrelief.us/news/rising-tuition-costs-a...

>My debt was the result, in equal measure, of a chain of rotten luck and a system that is an abject failure by design.

Bad luck and the "system"? No. The author and his parents are also responsible. They should have sat down and discussed majors, schools, and how to pay for them. NYU is not the only school with English Literature programs; so, he could have chosen a cheaper school. They could have discussed what sort of job he wanted. If he wanted to study English Literature because he liked it, make it a minor and/or study it throughout your life.

You can blame luck and the system all you want; but, you bear some of the responsibility yourself.

> Or was it my fault for not having the foresight to realize it was a mistake to spend roughly $200,000 on a school where, in order to get my degree, I kept a journal about reading Virginia Woolf?

If you read the article, she mentions a sentence like this twice, then immediately drops it. By contrast, the responsibility of "society", "government" is given pages of text.

Clearly it's not the author's intent to accept responsibility. At the end of the article it is pointed out how the reasoning in the group works:

"After the food was served, a waiter came by with a stack of to-go boxes, which sat on the edge of the table untouched for a while as everyone cautiously eyed them. The group was reluctant at first, but then Ian said, “The chicken was actually pretty good,” as he scooped it into one of the boxes. Mira shrugged, took a fork, and added, “This is a little tacky, but I’d hate to waste free food,” and the rest of the table followed her lead. Maybe the next generation would do better, but I felt like we were broke and broken. No number of degrees or professional successes would put us back together again. For now, though, we knew where our next meal was coming from."

Knowing that making decisions based upon personal status rather than financial sense is what got this group into trouble this sentence is more than a little disheartening.

This person really tries to absolve him and his family for anything. For one, don’t get how it’s valid to complain that banks were willing to give him loans. It’s his choice whether take them. In addition, this is exactly what people in the past campaigned for: loans for low income people to go to college.

Second he blames society for selling dream that any education was an uncontested pathway to success. Which, once again, is up to him and his parents whether or not they buy that lie

You don't think the people who lied to him have some culpability?

I find it deeply ironic that our legislators find that 17 and 18 year olds are too young and irresponsible to drink alcohol. That experience is reserved for the 21 and older crowd. Signing up for 4 year plan at 17 and 18 years old that gives the young person $100,000 dollars inexpugnable debt by the time the young person turns 21, no problems with this at all.

This whole system is headed for a major reckoning.

You're old enough to kill but not for votin' (1964) [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_of_Destruction_(song)

17 and 18 year olds have no assets and no credit history, so there's no recourse for the lender. The reason for the inexpungable debt is so lenders will be willing to lend to them.

Otherwise, you'll have people graduating, declaring bankruptcy, and getting a free ride through college sticking lenders with the bill.

So what you're saying is people would be robbing the banks, rather than the other way around ! That would be SO unfair !

Say, what happened in 2008, when lenders couldn't pay their bills ?

These arguments would make sense if they were applied consistently. But in practice, socialism for the rich, debtor prisons for the poor.

I didn't agree with the bailout.

The bailout should not have happened perhaps. Banks have trapped us into the too big to fail, we are above the law.

Think it like this: You have a sibling that is a bad gambler. They play roulette and lose big as expected and drive the whole families finances to the bottom. They then go to your parents complain that roulette is bad and ask your parents to bail them out. Your parents instead of punishing your sibling and make them repay the debt, say that it is fine please don't do it again and we don't want you to declare bankruptcy, but we will have your brother/sister (that is you) pay the bills.

Yeah, I know all that already. Those reasons and circumstances do not make it acceptable for young people to be permitted to sign away decades of their life to a debt servitude.

This system is putting a huge strain on the economy and national birth rate. Debt burdened people in their 20s and 30s can not buy homes, which in turn screws the real estate market, which in turn screws the home related cyclical industries. Young people are delaying having children because they can not afford them, which in turn impacts all child goods industries, and long term will affect the viability of our SSI / Medi* programs. This low birth rate is why we depend so much on immigrants to keep a stable population.

The way the entire system works is pennywise and pound foolish.

You spent over $100k on an MA in English from a private school in the most expensive city in the United States to live. Sorry, but that's on you. There's no math in the world to make that a good decision.

Humans reason based on personal status, and the whole article is full of personal status decisions ignoring economic reality time after time after time. Then, of course, society is blamed for providing loans, and for (I think) allowing personal status to exist at all ...

And the article is -unintentionally- terminated with a statement confirming that despite all these events, the author has not changed strategy since before he left high school: "M.H. Miller is the arts editor for The New York Times Style Magazine.".

Anybody who thinks this person can be helped is kidding themselves. This person can't be helped. Not with law changes, not with refinancing, not with financial education, not even with money.

According to sites like Glassdoor, the average salary for a New York Times editor is in the low six figures. The author made some bad decisions, but do you think switching careers now would be a good one?

"My debt was the result, in equal measure, of a chain of rotten luck and a system that is an abject failure by design."

No. The author chose to go to school out of state and also decided to pursue a master's degree with added debt.

College is not free. Debt compounds. Unwise decisions have consequences.

We need to start basic financial education, fast.

What is the expected career path for an English Lit major? I know there are lots of fields related to writing like copywriting, editing, news reporting, etc but is there a job that's a more direct application of the degree (besides English Lit professor)?

The fact that you cannot discharge student loan debt is what encourages risky loan behavior. I can say that I got myself into a terrible loan because I was told that the prospects of a career were far better than they were,unfortunately this information was significantly harder to find back in that time. I didn't even know community colleges existed and thought I'd have it paid off in no time. As it is, I don't know how long it will take me to pay off, but it's going to be years.

At least he helped finance a comfortable lifestyle for the NYU admin staff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com