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Comment by Latteland | Hacker News Reader

If you are lucky you can get money from renting. If you were unlucky and had a house in the rust belt and jobs disappeared then few people could buy or rent your house. So people can get trapped. At least you can expunge your mortgage debt with bankruptcy. Not being able to expunge education debt is what's holding our economy down.

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Not being able to expunge education debt is what makes education lending possible.

Otherwise, there’d be a line to file strategic bankruptcy after the last tuition payment was due...

Cheap borrowing drives up prices of goods. This is true in housing and it is true in education.

Revocation of a degree with the dissolving of student loan debt in bankruptcy certainly could work for some.

That doesn't make the lender whole, though; there's nothing they can repossess or foreclose on.

It's a mild deterrent for some cases, but for a lot of situations, having the degree isn't anywhere near as valuable as having the education.

Other (less fair) ways of doing it include requiring a co-signer or allocating some assets as escrow. Although, like healthcare, the problem is probably the cost not the financing.

Why would anyone file for bankruptcy right before paying their last tuition payment?

I think the OP meant “make their last tuition payment to the university”, in other words, they’ve fully taken on the debt of education and are about to graduate.

Indeed. I'm not quite sure how that was misread.

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