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Comment by dokein | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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!

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