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Comment by calhoun137 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with a lot of what you are saying here. But the education system functions as a means of enforcing class divisions and preventing economic mobility.

The major issue is student debt, regardless of any other legitimate criticisms of college culture/education, this is literally the largest source of debt in America today. There is more student debt than there is real estate debt. In many ways, college has become a scam designed to entrap young people in a life time of debt servitude. We dont have to fix all the other problems with college at the same time. I am lucky to have no student loans, but most people I know are saddled with massive debt. I want to do something to help them.

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Agreed, student loan debt is the worst part of it.

I’m not sure the debt situation can be fixed until we deprogram people to stop seeing college as this one, singular, necessary thing, though. We can transfer that debt around, but I think the key to really getting rid of the bloat is to change how people think about college and to get them to pick the specific things they need/want most.

I’m not sure how you do that without creating competitive, viable substitutions for the different purposes colleges seem to serve that people are willing to do instead of college. I think a lot of those alternatives exist already, people just don’t accept them as substitutions. EX: apprenticeship programs, online classes, meetups, conference organizations, maker spaces, etc. I think part of the key to that is coming up with a reliable measure of performance in and quality of alternative programs.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think there’s an easy solution; I think a lot of things need to change. I’m pessimistic about our ability to reign in the bloat/debt from a top down approach before any of that other stuff happens. I think that any solution that doesn’t solve those other problems will result in student loan debt of about the same size just being passed on to taxpayers.

> I’m not sure the debt situation can be fixed until we deprogram people to stop seeing college as this one, singular, necessary thing, though.

This is an interesting point of view, and I would like to push back on this.

In my view, it is not a practical suggestion to "deprogram people" like you describe, anymore than it is practical to "deprogram" the general population to no longer fall victim to ponzi scheme's or other scams like fake ICO's etc... This is because con-artists prey on fundamental aspects of human nature and employ sophisticated social engineering techniques to manipulate the behavior of their victims. In order for the social engineering of "our side" (i.e. deprogramming people) to overcome the social engineering of con-artists, we would need to be better at it than they are! We are not going to beat them at their own game, and attempting to do so is a losing strategy.

The student loan industry is a predatory and hostile industry which is backed by the biggest banks and has enormous political influence in congress. The main goal of their lobbying is to prevent being regulated.

This is a smart strategy for them because in my opinion, history has clearly demonstrated that the best solution to this type of problem is government regulation which prevents the worst abuses of a free market system.

There used to be laws where you could clear your debt by filing for bankruptcy, but this is no longer possible for student loans. If my generation had more political power in DC, we would pass laws to allow this as well as cancel a very large percentage of outstanding student debt.

So I strongly disagree with proposal that people need to be "deprogrammed" because I don't think this is a practical approach to address this major problem.

Fair point about bankruptcy.

I definitely agree with allowing people to file for bankruptcy to clear student loan debt, and agree it’s a much more practical step than changing the culture. That will cause lenders to be much more cautious and prevent people who can’t afford college and aren’t going into high paying fields from being saddled with enormous debts.

That being said, I don’t think we should ignore the cultural problem, as legislation tends to reflect the culture, whether that be through enforcement of the culture or abuse of the culture. There’s a complex feedback loop going on, and it goes both ways, but I think an approach that only looks at adding or reforming legislation, while maybe more practical in the short term, will eventually lead back to where we are now. A side effect of allowing bankruptcy will be a reduction in the amount of people going to college, since fewer will be able to get the loans to afford it. They will likely demand access to college and get us back to where we are now, or a future where college is “free” and everyone’s taxes start to look like student loan payments.

I think what people currently want is quite expensive, even if we could trim all the fat. Someone needs to pay for it. We could add roadblocks in the form of legislation to prevent lenders from abusing what is often an unnecessary want rather than encouraging it, but as long as that want exists, there will be a large incentive to take advantage of it.

I’m also not sure about the history of this problem. I think a lot of it stems from legislation rather a lack of legislation. Federally backed student loans seem to be a major part of the issue.

So to be clear, I’m not against legislative reform, I’m just worried that it’s not sufficient, and that the current public conception of post secondary education is inevitably going to be too expensive to sustain. In my opinion there are much cheaper and more effective ways of doing what colleges do. The most effective long term solution is to accept more of those alternatives and force colleges to compete.

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