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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Disclosure: I work as a blue-collar engine mechanic. Ive never been to college.

That having been said, im familiar with debt after the 2008 housing collapse. I lost my truck and my trailer home, partly because of a shady home loan and partly because well, my employer went out of business. That having been said it was relatively easy to discharge these debts. the bank wasnt too upset about the home and offered to help me restructure payments, which I agreed to until I found someone else to buy it from me. The truck I sold back to the dealership...which incidentally also went bankrupt, but they were easy to work with.

I know people in this town with student loans that show up at the local watering hole every week and count their beers in dollars and their tips in change. One of them got her license revoked because she wasnt able to make student loan payments, and had to move back in with her folks. Because she has outstanding student loan debt, she cant qualify for section 8 housing or food stamps. Even her family gets harassing calls about the money she cant pay back fast enough.

She is a biologist, but all of her money goes straight to the loans. it has for 9 years now.

Why is it I can ditch close to 90 grand in loans lickety-split but students cant? how is education any different?

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The logic runs like this:

A secured loan should be easy and cheap to get, because if it goes bad, the lender can reposes the collateral. This is like your house and the truck; you ran up some debt, it didn't work out, you lost them both, but you also lost the debt.

An unsecured loan should be harder to get and pretty expensive, because it's riskier. If I run up $20k on my credit card paying for a fancy vacation, then can't pay, they can't take that vacation back from me. If I declare bankruptcy, I get a "free" vacation (I mean, not exactly, bankruptcy is complicated and expensive, but...) That's why credit cards run a 16% interest rate.

Student loans are for an education, which you can't repossess, but we also don't want to carefully vet applicants or charge them 16% interest rates. To try and square the circle, we've decided that student loans will be super easy to get and have very low rates, but then to try and avoid abuse we've decided they can't be discharged in bankruptcy. And then to try and avoid people being stuck with massive loans they can never repay, there's a bunch of complex income-based repayment plans and schemes where you can get balances forgiven in some cases.

> Why is it I can ditch close to 90 grand in loans lickety-split but students cant? how is education any different?

Education debt is different due to the combination of being inherently riskier than, say, a mortgage to buy a house, while still being something we want widely and cheaply available.

That being said, your biologist friend may have some better options if she looks into it.

>Student loans are for an education, which you can't repossess, but we also don't want to carefully vet applicants or charge them 16% interest rates. To try and square the circle, we've decided that student loans will be super easy to get and have very low rates, but then to try and avoid abuse we've decided they can't be discharged in bankruptcy. And then to try and avoid people being stuck with massive loans they can never repay, there's a bunch of complex income-based repayment plans and schemes where you can get balances forgiven in some cases

You say that like there was some master central plan, but I doubt that's the case. Would love to know the history of how our whole "system" / tangle of rules etc came to be, timeline of events, etc

Here you go: https://www.cappex.com/articles/money/history-of-bankrupty-d...

The parallel history to this is that the banks lobbied for the "mean" changes to the bankruptcy rules. The politicians were seeking reelection by guaranteeing that everyone could go to college at lower and lower rates, but they needed to keep the bankers happy too: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/student-loans/federal-...

Caveat: If you don't live in the US, neither of these histories apply to you.

> we also don't want to carefully vet applicants

Sounds like you don't want to vet them at all, when carefully vetting would be a good answer.

> Sounds like you don't want to vet them at all

I'm struggling to understand how you could read my comment and feel like you have any idea what I think should be the case. I am making a positive claim about US politics, not a normative claim about how it should be.

> when carefully vetting would be a good answer.

No doubt you have a citation for this? An example country that has implemented this with excellent outcomes?

What does vetting an 18 yr old for a 60k unsecured debt look like?

> and have very low rates,

The rates used to be very low. They are no longer very low. Lower than 16% yes, but 9% is not uncommon.

The much-higher-than-inflation rate turns a languishing undischragable loan into a debilitating time-bomb.

> Why is it I can ditch close to 90 grand in loans lickety-split but students cant? how is education any different?

When you initially took your loans, your lender assessed your credit and made the lending decision accordingly. Any individual loan won’t pan out, it on average the portfolio will, because the lender controls what loans are made. Student loans are completely different. The lender (the federal government—which originates almost all student loans) makes loans almost without assessing your credit or ability to repay. (There may be a filter, but if there is it’s extremely lax.) Your interest rate, moreover, doesn’t depend on your credit. Finally, there is no collateral the government can repossess to recoup its loss. It’s nothing like an ordinary loan.

The assessing is done by the school as they are a trusted third party. And then the school inflates prices to bring in more money for the endowment and administration. The selling line is something like: "Don't want to have a shit life and no options? We didn't think so, so sign this paper and go cram for tests and don't worry about the bill. People with a degree earn more than those without." And then the jobs are shit or gigs or just not existent. Unless you have a good network to use.

> The assessing is done by the school as they are a trusted third party.

That might be for some loans, but from my understanding everybody is guaranteed a loan, regardless of their grades. The point was the government would back the loans so those who were less affluent could also go to school.

The end result is we tried to help the poor, and screwed everybody else along the way. Not only did the poor get a bad deal, people who could have normally afforded school got slotted into these bad deals too.

People like to blame the schools for raising the prices, but that simply how supply and demand works. Schools can hold X people, if > X people want in then the price goes up. Schools can also only expand so fast.

The fact is, not everybody needs to go to a 4 year school. The process of making it near mandatory lowers the value it brings in general as curriculum is adjusted for a much wider group of people -- generally by lowering the bar. This is in part because you now have a bunch of people given loans who without getting that degree probably won't be able to pay back that first year of school they failed out in -- even more so when that is north of 20k.

Before we started guaranteeing loans it as either your money, your parents money, or somebody loaning you money who truly was invested in vetting candidates abilities to finish school, get a job, and pay the loan back. With prices generally being lower the loans were smaller too.

A much better way to have addressed the issue with poor people would have been to set up grants, vetted students based of merit, and provide grants for those kids who showed promise. The end result is paying a lot less than the mess we have today, and it would have not dragged down those who would have probably been able to afford school on their own accord before this mess happened.

"but that simply how supply and demand works"

Are you sure? Because the normal way of thinking about "supply and demand" is to suggest that prices will go down if supply grows faster than demand, which is what happened for nearly all of the 20th Century. And if that process has stopped, then we need to ask why. Please consider the data here:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_302.60.a...

Try to explain these 3 data points:

(Young people in college)

1970 25.7%

1996 35.5%

2016 41.2%

There was no price surge when youth participation going to college went from 25% to 35% but there was a huge price surge when participation went from 35% to 41%. And the early surge is a much larger surge. So why did prices only go up during the latter era?

Those numbers need adjusted for population size. But I would guess that schools stopped growing. I also think looking at the past to predict the future is probably a bad way to look at things. I know I would not buy stocks that way.

There was a price surge from 197[1] to 1996.

Taking the 25 year period from 1971 to 1996 and then the 20 year period 1996 to 2016, the CAGR in the first period was 7.6/6.7% and in the second period was only 4.6%/5.3% for 4-year public/private colleges respectively. Data: [0]

That data shows there was a higher rate of price increase (in nominal dollars) during the first period than the second. Now, general inflation was also higher in the first period (5.1%/6.9% CAGR of wage increases for men/women vs 2.5/3.4% in the latter period).

Taking the mathematically unsound step to average the public and private increases and average the wage increase rates for men and women, and compare the two, it seems that college costs rose 1.1% faster than wages in the first period and 2.0% faster than wages in the second period. Is that effect driven by college costs rising faster or wages rising more slowly?

[0] - https://college-education.procon.org/view.resource.php?resou...

Because students generally are poor and so don't have much to lose by declaring bankruptcy. They shrug off massive debts are left with an (ostensibly) valuable degree. Lenders are unable to secure the loan against the borrower's assets, as would generally be the case for a home, auto, or business loan. It's possible that if student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy that, absent a government guarantee, the lender would need to charge a high enough interest rate where the student loan market simply wouldn't function. And a government guarantee combined with student loan dischargeability in bankruptcy would leave US taxpayers holding the bag.

Preventing the student loan market from functioning as it is now is a feature, not a bug.

In the UK, student loans are not dischargeable via bankruptcy. But repayment is income based (9% of income), and is only due at all for people who are earning above a certain income (currently ~£21k). This seems like a decent way of dealing with this issue.

Same is true in the US.

So, after the 6 months of "grace period", does only students with and a minimum wage get to pay it? I thought you just had to start paying after 6 months.

If you enroll in income based repayment, you pay 10% of discretionary income for 20 years. I'm not sure how "discretionary income" is calculated but its probably similar to the UK threshold

[0] https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans/in...

Don’t forget that any remaining balance that is forgiven at the end gets counted as income on your taxes.

> Why is it I can ditch close to 90 grand in loans lickety-split but students cant? how is education any different?

Because most student loans are to the federal government (~93%) [0]. Generally if you owe money to the government, you're kind of on the hook. And even if you discharge your loans after 20 years of income based repayment, you still owe a tax bill on the amount written off since that's a windfall.

One argument to get the federal government away from making student loans. They offer a one size fit all interest rate regardless of the economic viability of the degree and ability to pay back. Private lenders offer better rates to students with lower risks (better schools and highly lucrative majors, mainly graduate degrees).

[0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/student-loans/student-...

Losing a professional license (or even a driver's license) based on a student loan default is asinine. [1]

I've never heard of outstanding student loan debt limiting eligibility for food stamps (SNAP) or section 8 housing. Can you point to any resource which can confirm this? My understanding is that both programs are based on household income.

[1] - https://studentloanhero.com/featured/unpaid-student-loans-fa...

Because your loans have collateral to return (home, car) and education does not.

Education has yourself as return.

> Education has yourself as return.

That is not something a lender can repossess.

* free market intensifies

Not as they currently do it, no, but I imagine (at least with future loans), it could have the penalty that the university would not issue your transcript or vouch for your degree when the loan became delinquent enough. That would be similar in spirit repossession (except that the bank couldn't sell it).
But of course, they wouldn't get to take back any of that valuable knowledge and human capital you acquired there /semi-s

Schools already do that with debts, but most student loans for accredited schools aren't issued by the school, who has been fully paid by the lender.

College degrees are mostly about signaling. Employers can already check your credit history, so this wouldn’t tell them much they don’t already know.

The whole point of repossession is that he bank can sell it to recover at least some of their loss. Without that, it’s just destructive punishment. You’d be making society poorer by restricting this person’s job prospects, with no gain anywhere to offset it.

I don’t know how you get “the whole point” as being that. The credit scoring system likewise doesn’t give the lender anything to resell and merely punishes the borrower, but we recognize it as having positive sum effects for the credit system. A program of revoking degrees would behave the same way.
(Even if you have criticisms of the credit score as it exists today, most at least see the merit of “hey, other lenders, this person doesn’t repay loans, proceed with caution.)

The point of credit scores isn’t to punish the borrower, it’s to allow future lenders to better gauge risk. No value is destroyed when you put a negative mark on someone’s credit report.
Revoking degrees would be equivalent to burning down houses in foreclosure. Such destruction of value is obvious madness.

> Revoking degrees would be equivalent to burning down houses in foreclosure.
While I agree with your larger point, I think this particular bit is a little weak.
A revoked degree can easily be un-revoked, while a burned down house needs to be re-built from scratch. This is why it is socially acceptable for schools to withhold transcripts for students who owe money to the school.

It would be problematic for rich people who do not need loans, and destroy the trust on schooling system. Diplomas need to be irrevocable except for serious procedural issues.

Yeah, good point, universities never revoke degrees over objectionable behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cosby#Rescinded_honorary_...

Honorary degrees are, as the name suggests, different in kind from normal degrees.

If you can't find gainful employment with your new degree, not much worth repossessing, is there?

We teach kids they can be whoever they want to be, then stick them with a massive bill and say 'ha ha only kidding you miserable debt slave.'

The first half of that sentence is the problem, in my opinion. We treat all college degrees as having equal value and offer loans for massive sums of money, with no regard to their likely ability to pay it back. $150k to get a law degree? Ok, that's likely to work out. $150k to get a degree in Russian Literature? Or theatre? That's not a good investment. Of course there are people who have degrees like that and they end up in high paying jobs (often not in the field they studied), but they're the exception to the rule.
We seem to have stopped explaining how supply and demand works. Companies have a demand for employees with certain skills. If you can supply those skills, they will pay you. The higher the demand for those skills, the more they pay (IT, medical, many trades). If you have a skill that nobody has a demand for (say, theatre, or russian literature), you're in trouble.
Of course if you have a degree that isn't in demand, there's a way out. Find a way to take the skills you have and turn them into someone that companies want to pay money for. Turn your english degree into a career in copywriting, or your degree in theatre into a career in... something.

But why should everything be subject to laws of supply and demand? That's just slavery with extra steps. Alice is rich and got to follow her passion (even though it maybe took a long time), Bob was born poor and so any passion on his part must be subordinated to his ability to be employed by Carol regardless of opportunity cost.
Is this somehow Bob's fault for being born into the wrong circumstances? Obviously not. But if the aspirational messages that we provide to all people in society are only true for a privileged few, then the communication of same to a larger mass of people for whom it is not is a form of fraud perpetuated on those least able to detect it.

If anything, the fact that tuition rates have skyrocketed, and people continue to pay any price using loans they later struggle to pay back, is a textbook example of how separating what people have to pay from what something actually costs is a terrible idea.

Why shouldn’t it be subject to the laws of supply and demand? If my passion is Russian Literature, you’re saying that someone (who?) must create a demand for that so that I can make a living pursing my passion?

I literally know a person with a Russian Literature degree who thinks that. That's exactly what some people say.

I know. The story I referenced about Humans of New York was exactly that: “I have a degree in theatre and I can’t make above minimum wage. That’s unfair, theatre is important and I should be able to make a living doing that.” I know people personally who are like this, and when you engage with them and say “Have you thought about getting a job doing X at company Y” or “There’s a huge demand for nurses, have you thought about getting a nursing degree”, the response is something like “I don’t want to do that, I wouldn’t enjoy it.” There’s some sort of fundamental disconnect here between how they think the world works and how it actually does.
At the end of the day, free college is not going to solve the problem, and I firmly believe it would make matters worse. With no skin in the game, people will get all manner of ridiculous degrees, and the universities will be more than happy to give them to them.

You are not required to apply for student loan. You can earn a tutition waiver and/or scholarship if you are deemed successful (OK, not in all cases); or you can pay the expenses by yourself if you are rich enough. All student loan does is enabling lower-middle income not-so-successful people to climb the income ladder more easily and/or faster.

Do you think that people who complete high school should be expected to understand compound interest and that people who can be legally tried as adults should be trusted to enter into a contract and abide by the terms thereof? When you grow up, one of the things you can choose to be is an adult.

But the repo process for brain cells is a little too gruesome for bankers.

Students treat college as a jobs training program and as an investment of their time to get into a better life.
However, both the government and the schools do not treat college this way. If the government was wisely investing, they'd decide STEM Folks can get huge loans due to the long-term need for them and their relative scarcity, but "luxury" degrees such as art, history, music, etc majors can only take out tiny ones due to the lack of economic utility, with quota's set for each so that you do not over-supply the market with more labor than it can absorb. You need both long-term and short-term feedback systems and you need to fail people in programs who are unsuitable early on.
Furthermore, because college is about "building character and life skills", there's no control on accredited institutions that do not provide economically viable candidates. Which college students in what programs repay their loans vs do not? Where's that data? Surely that information is a matter of public record but students go to college courses, get A's, and come out the other end jobless or under-employed.
The net effect is children who's parents have never gone through college or continuing education programs, especially minorities, don't know to ask the above questions or how to navigate the system successfully, and the college administrators in order to make their millions, screw those kids and their families over 9 ways from Sunday as hard as they possible can because it's a dog-eat-dog world and screw em'. Think about it; please fill out your FASFA and tell me exactly how much money you make so I know how much to charge.
It's an unsustainable system and the only thing that gives it a some amount of legitimacy is the fact the loans are given by the government and people are allowed to do what they want with them. It's a system that is begging for regulation.

> She is a biologist, but all of her money goes straight to the loans. it has for 9 years now.
Federally owned student loans, which are the vast majority, have income driven repayment plans available. There are a lot of details but most are eligible for a plan that requires the payment of 10% of income after 150% of poverty line.

Your other responses are excellent.
But I want to say this is another TANSTAAFL. You worked, had skills, and otherwise "worked" for your loan.
If loans are "free" like student loans, the costs can end up being even higher.
What will happen is that once there's enough examples like your biologist friend, the government will forgive them with a TARP like exercise. That might be OK if the underlying system changed and we stopped loaning out money to people unlikely to hand it back.
And the money ends up bloating the academic bureaucracy anyway. Not enough ends up improving or providing education.

Can you clarify if you meant "she lost her driver's license" or if you meant some kind of professional license?

Education loans, especially the highly-regulated and specific form currently practiced[0], do not have collateral. If you fail to restructure your other debts, there is property to control; if you fail to restructure your student debts, the lender is out on their ass. Student loans are pretty soft on borrowers, the way I look at it. What perhaps should be done is to make the liability conditional on income: loans for nonsense degree mill "educations" would become dramatically more expensive, which I think would be a good thing; but so would loans for anything lenders didn't find promising.
Of course, in the U.S, the government is involved in a lot of the lending, which means that they'll probably do whatever irrational thing pleases whoever they're trying to please; except this time around when they're doing the thing they are responsible for doing (actually enforcing the terms of the loan agreements) rather than the popular thing.
Here in Canada, I feel the system is pretty unfair to people who did not require higher education; I'm stuck paying for the useless, pompous ignorami who make private life harder and more boring for me with their prefab ideas and vague bloviation, and I've been paying net taxes into it since I was 17.
When I move to the U.S, I hope I'm not paying even more for the same garbage that convinces smart people that they are useless without college, and convinces dumb people that college has automatically made them useful.
[0] As long as the conversation about the tremendous amount of student debt held in the U.S. is centered around loan forgiveness, lenders have no incentive to improve their practices. The federal government can't just steal their property, so they figure they'll get a sweet settlement and a smooth exit, just like the lenders who were publicly scapegoated, and privately rewarded, a decade ago.

> One of them got her license revoked because she wasnt able to make student loan payments, and had to move back in with her folks. Because she has outstanding student loan debt, she cant qualify for section 8 housing or food stamps.
All that's missing are weekly whippings...

Wait, why are people losing their driver's license because they can't pay a debt?

Because there were assets tied to those loans (the house and the car)

We want everyone who can, rich or poor, to be able to go to college. So everyone gets a loan no questions asked.
No private bank would do this so it has to be government. But we want this to cost the government nothing, so the loan is uniquely inescapable.
And we want Universities to charge essentially whatever they want, so the loan required is close to unlimited.
We'd need to change one of those to fix the problem. Forcing private banks to issue unlimited loosing loans, telling universities what they can do or, only alowing the rich into uinversitys are all unacceptable. Which leave one option, the one other developed continues use. Which is hammered with words like "socialist" or the like.

> We want everyone who can, rich or poor, to be able to go to college. So everyone gets a loan no questions asked
That doesn't mean the loan needs to be unlimited. Pretty much every story you hear about unreasonable loan repayments are from people who went to a private school and spent $50,000 a year on a major that doesn't have good job prospects. I went to a public state school and most of the people there were because it was cheaper than going to out of state schools or private schools and they majored in subject that had good job prospects.
A simple cap on college loans per major would force people to choose cheaper schools (like starting at community college and going in-state) and/or more job economical majors so they don't drown themselves in debt that they cannot pay off.
> Which leave one option, the one other developed continues use. Which is hammered with words like "socialist" or the like.
Except that solution involves subsidizing everyone to go to college despite how economically useful going to college is for each person. For a prime example, see this topic [0] where european colleges were losing all of their top AI professors because they wouldn't pay their AI professors market wages because they got paid at the same rate as un-economically useful majors.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15600275

Or, we make the applicant apply and only give them a lone we think they'll be able to repay based on their skill, the school, and the choice of major. If they start doing poorly then we don't give them future loans. It's really not that hard -- get the government out of the loan business.

Because your loan didn't come from the taxpayers.

Because a few people got fancy degrees and discharged their loans.
I'd totally support discharging your loans and having your degree placed into some sort of ADMINISTRATIVE HOLD so it has no value until the loans are being paid back. You can easily pick up the payments once you're fully employed.

I don't understand how that would work.
I can see 2 values in a degree: 1 the ability to put the degree on your resume, 2 the knowledge and enjoyment you got from the degree. I don't see how it's possible to remove 2. I guess you could remove 1 by making it illegal to put on your resume, but then how would you become "fully employed" when you can't put the degree on your resume?

It prevents high power careers like lawyers and doctors from 'doing away with their loans' as removing those degrees means you can't practice while making lesser degrees dischargeable.
It would also make lenders want to make your succeed (it is their money)

I still don't see how the person will later become "fully employed" when the person isn't allowed to practice.

College educations don't really impart substantial knowledge. It's the ability to put it on your resume that counts.

I got substantial knowledge from my degree.
But regardless of whether you got any knowledge from your degree, you could still get enjoyment from your degree. And even if you didn't get any knowledge or enjoyment from your degree, if you remove the ability to put it on your resume, how is someone supposed to become "fully employed"?

Your thoughts on the value of a degree are indicative of the massive disconnect we have in our society between an education and a credential.
The reason student loans can't be discharged during bankruptcy is because the value of the degree can't be repossessed by a bank like a house or a car if you default. You attend college to learn and grow, not to pass an HR screening.
I could very easily acquire a job as a developer simply by knowing the material and how to write code - how I choose to come by that knowledge is my own prerogative but if I take out a loan from a bank to acquire that knowledge then they have nothing to repossess.
You don't attend college for a degree you attend it for the knowledge and experience you gain - a degree is worthless, it can't be resold if a bank were to "take posession" of it.
And trust me if banks and financial institutions could create second-hand markets and derivatives for degrees they would, but that would obviously be pointless. I can't just buy and sell PhD's on e-trade.

> You attend college to learn and grow, not to pass an HR screening.
What? No. I attended college because it let me be hired nearly everywhere with much less hassle than having to "work my way up" - nearly everything I learned was useless or rapidly obsolete (if it wasn't obsolete as it was taught).
>You don't attend college for a degree you attend it for the knowledge and experience you gain - a degree is worthless, it can't be resold if a bank were to "take posession" of it.
Except to HR, which is frequently where it matters the most, in actual dollars
It sure would be nice if a college education was about learning and growth and discovering oneself and all the hoopla they feed you during visits and orientation, but it's a structured credentialing system that involves professors for some reason, and it's effectively mandatory for making an above-median wage.

You just accurately described many of the problems in this world.
For the record though I don't have a degree myself and I've never been denied for it during the HR screening process, I'm a developer and I use my existing work to market myself. I understand that in other fields this is either very hard to do or near impossible (Doctors, for example, could never do that).
In an ideal world, if we could restructure society, we'd have corporations take on the burden of educating their workforce entirely - for instance perhaps out of high school if you were interested in being an accountant you'd intern or do a 2 year rigorous learning/onboarding process at company X where you'd agree to work for less or stay on for Y amount of years. I think a system like that would work a lot better for a lot of people and ultimately bring the cost of higher education down for the people who simply can't avoid it.

It's not even close to mandatory for making above median wages. You can make over median being a mechanic, a firefighter, cop, truck driver, oil rig worker, plumber, carpenter, retail manager, salesperson, software developer etc etc.

> It sure would be nice if a college education was about learning and growth and discovering oneself and all the hoopla they feed you during visits and orientation, but it's a structured credentialing system that involves professors for some reason, and it's effectively mandatory for making an above-median wage.
College is what you make of it. It's 4 years to spend at least half of your waking hours learning new things. You can waste a bunch of that time and still get a credential with vanishing return, or you can invest all of that time in building highly valuable skills (while also getting the credential).
N=1: I was offered a $70K coding job out of high school. I made over 4x that amount at my first software job after graduation. They definitely weren't paying 4x more because of my degree, and most of my graduating class was making less than 100K. But it would have taken me longer than 4 years to get those skills and knowledge if I were working full time. More importantly, I would have had very few options a few years later when I got bored/burned-out with programming and decided to move into research.
College is a space to develop your human capital. The official curriculum is there as a guide and baseline, but it's your responsibility to use your course project time and especially free time in an effective way to build on top of that curriculum. Unfortunately, very few students understand this.

Sure, let’s block a valuable worker from contributing to society because they didn’t pay their loans. This is vindictive thinking with no gain to anyone.

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