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Comment by fiveoak | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to say that but kids (yes, kids) that are age 17 aren't really the best equipped to make great life altering decisions in the first place. People fuck up all the time and our response as a society shouldn't be "well, too bad" because 1) that's a terrible way to treat other people 2) if a ton of people are bankrupt due to student loan payments it WILL affect you indirectly, and potentially your own children/family members/friends

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

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> but kids (yes, kids) that are age 17

"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.

And the 17 year-olds are in an adversarial environment.

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.

So if you're not ready to take on responsibility of a large loan, maybe don't take one out, wait a few years, research the market, maybe work some jobs that don't require a college degree.

And seriously, figuring out which degrees pay takes literally one google search. A 17-year-old can easily do that.

Maybe go to community college for a bit as an alternative and figure out if it's right for you before taking out a large loan.

Most middle class kids coming out of school see college as an extension of the education required to compete in the market - they're also told that trade schools are a rip off and community college is for underachievers, so they end up diving into university before giving that option any real critical examination.

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.

Where I lived as a middle class teenager at least - a generic suburb in SoCal - I, and every other student, was told the community college we had has an excellent program to transfer students into a 4 year college with minimal debt. It definitely takes effort as a community to ensure graduating high school students understand their options in full.

I find that the community college grada are better professionals than the kids who jumped into uni because they didn't know anything and grasped at straws. It's an expensive but revealing mistake that shows which young adults have good judgement and self awareness.

You're talking to the wrong people. A child looks to the advice of their parents, and if their parents say go to university, that's what happens.

This is a catch-22 though, if you are ignorant enough to not realize it is irresponsible, you are not the person who is going to be waiting a few years to research the market and make an informed decision. The people whose job it is to stop semi-ignorant people from making a poor uninformed decisions, are the same loan officers rubber stamping loans.

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" ?

I remember being told that you were wasting your life if you didn't start college immediately after graduating from high school, and employers would look down on your resume as some sort of failure.

Great, if people were that smart we wouldn't have had the 2008 housing crash. You have to make these structures idiot safe or the idiots destroy the economy.

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