So yeah, no one put a gun to my head and forced me to take on student loan debt. Instead they put poverty to my head and threatened that I would sleep in my car and work for minimum wage if I didn't.
When you are a child and the adults tell you this is what you need to do for your future, you listen. What you're doing is blaming children for the bad advice their parents and mentors gave them.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-th...
[2] http://www.msnbc.com/jansing-co/college-degrees-are-becoming...
Why would you be homeless if your parents have a home with a room for you?
How old are you? The student debt crisis is 20 years old already.
If it's your parents' fault, take their money to pay back the loan. What's your parents' excuse for taking out large bad loans?
I do agree that parents/teachers/principals etc bear some responsibility, but surely so too does the individual student, no?
You mean the child? Following the advice of their parents and mentors?
My actual point was that yes, parents/teachers/principals/other adult advisers do bear some responsibility, but let's also not pretend the actual students are unable to reason about future income and debt.
I'd suggest anyone going into college right now get a CS degree, but in 20 years that may be automated away.
Who knows. People gave you advice in good faith, they weren't trying to steer you wrong. It's what they were told was the best thing for their kids. Blaming parents or kids or even mentors is the wrong thing. It's how everything entwined that created the situation. No one tried to create it and society couldn't see it coming.
Skills are valued for their rarity. Get rid of the rarity, get rid of the skill's value. The most realistic concern for the value of a CS degree is not automation, it's other humans. Add far more people pursuing CS degrees, without a proportional growth in the job market, and you'd see wages and demand for it plummet.
And there also factors like China in the future. Outsourcing only really stuttered because the quality of the outsourced products was consistently poor. But there's no inherent reason this must always be the case. If China can start being a source that companies can turn to for high quality software solutions at a low cost, run of the mill software development could go the way of industrial manufacturing.
Smartphone? Rarely seen but critical to our society.
Twitter? Ha.
Facebook? People actually spoke to one another.
Global warming? Didn't see that coming...
Flying cars? Nope not yet.
Pervasive Nuclear? Nope not that either.
Humans suck at predicting the future. We're so terrible at it. Market crashes, war, etc. We just have no idea. While what you're saying make sense to an economist, that's not how society works. The best ideas don't always win out the most popular ones do. People WANTED their kids to be better off, so they sent them to success factories that told the parents they'd be better off because in the past people were better off.
Until they weren't.
EDIT: I'm not saying no one saw this coming. I'm just saying a most people (society) didn't.
Put another way, I can't imagine how anybody could predict anything else besides exactly what has happened.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/154619/Americans-Having-Rich-Cl...
The real problem here is that the colleges responsible for high tuitions (thus high debt for graduates) and useless degrees are not held responsible for the outcomes of the educations they confer. Because the government guarantees many of these loans for students, we're effectively handing out money to anybody who asks for it -- at the expense of a potential entire life spent in debt if you choose poorly or even sub-optimally.
It's hard to be glad that these people are suffering under high debt loads when you realize that we will all be affected. When they retire with no savings and pull money from the system funded by taxes on your income and investments, you will likely not be happy. No man is an island and all of us are affected by macro-trends like this.
And instead of a single flat interest rate for all student borrowers, actuaries should set interest rates based on the school and major. So students entering programs that produce a lot of defaulters would pay higher rates. That would provide a clear market signal indicating we have a surplus of people with that education, and encourage students to look at other options.
The really sad thing was that there was a lot of push for lower class kids to go to college which means taking out loans. I was a part of a program for first generation college bound kids (basically lower class) and they spent some time helping us apply for scholarships and grants but everyone knew it was pretty much not a sure thing and that we'll all most likely resort to loans.
Also I feel the explosion in for-profit colleges in the 2000's were largely due to the easy access to loan money. I had it bad but these kids that fell for the for-profits had it worse.
The baby boom generation pulled up the ladder behind them, and is now pouring boiling oil down on the generation trying to catch up.
I'm not sure of a great solution and it's way outside my knowledge/expertise but ignoring the issue and basically just saying "should have got a STEM degree idiot" isn't good for society
And seriously, figuring out which degrees pay takes literally one google search. A 17-year-old can easily do that.
I imagine upper class kids just get their education bank-rolled by their parents so who cares. And I didn't live the life of a lower class kid (my family was middle or lower middle) so I can't speak to their experience - but that middle class suburbanite definitely isn't going to get a check from their parents to cover their full schooling.
Not everyone can magically be smart enough to truly understand what they are getting into, and what ramifications it will have on their later economic life. What is your advice for the people who aren't doing more research ahead of time? "just get smarter dummy" ?
"Kids" have been making this decision for decades. Kids also chose to serve in each of the World Wars at younger ages. Kids at a younger age can also get married in most states.
45-55% of the (albeit distant by social class) peers of college freshman are NOT going to college, but working jobs that don't require degrees. Not going to higher ed is as much of an adult decision as taking a loan.
I've known very smart people who, as late teens, were told all sorts of lies by colleges, about employability in the fields in which they ultimately got degrees.
It could've been wishful thinking on the part of the department (e.g., "Every industry needs Philosophy majors!"), and it could've been professors out of touch (e.g., "Hey, I got degrees in literature, and I got a professorship, coincidentally at the same university where my mom was head of a department, so anyone can do it! And my friends who didn't get professorships all got jobs at the hedge funds run by friends of their dads!").
And everyone was telling these teens that they need a degree, and everyone they knew was doing it.
And regardless of who is paying, society just doesn't value liberal arts degrees.
So the burden to pay is on the voters who voted to put this system in place, and those who continue to keep it in place by not voting for politicians that provide alternatives.
Ok, sure, but why did the loan officer approve it? Because student loans can't be shed off in bankruptcy, so it's guaranteed. What loan officer wouldn't approve such a loan?
If we're going to blame the victim, let's also look at the market structures that allow it to happen in the first place. If the lender took on some of the risk instead of passing the buck to our modern-day debtor's prison, then these degrees wouldn't be fundable if they are as worthless as you suggest.
If your argument about a generation-wide problem involves blaming individuals, instead of looking at the wider factors that caused this outcome to be predictable, you're missing an opportunity to improve matters.
The way we educate children in school is predatory when it comes to college and loans. We tell them to follow their dreams and that they must go to college. Of course you're going to have 18 year olds (who we know aren't fully developed until 25, who've been conditioned through schooling / society, etc.) make choices that turn out to be wrong in the long run.
For some reason, the older generations of our country (along with many others I would say) have decided they would rather eat their young.
None of this is an accident. It's to fund someone's luxurious lifestyle or retirement.
Why build housing when we can force the next generations to rent from us until they die?
Why have healthcare when we can use that to drain the accounts of any cancer stricken family who might have some actual savings built up? (healthcare related bankruptcies are staggeringly high in the USA)
All these things make someone richer. And if it's not you, you should probably be questioning why our country is making these decisions. They aren't the only decision we can make, other countries have proven that.
Empathy is hard. Sometimes people can't imagine the viewpoints on these things until someone in their family experiences it (gets cancer, loses their job, etc.).
I guess I would say, realize that no one is trying to get into these bad situations where they can't pay off their loans. They didn't wake up at 18 years old and say: "By golly, I sure would like to be hating my life in 10 years." They had hopes, they had aspirations, they had extenuating circumstances and a childhood that was different from our own.
The point is, almost no one sets out to make their life awful. Life happens.