Comment by fiftyfifty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fiftyfifty | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

We just need to reduce or eliminate government backed student loans and the problem will take care of itself. This "crisis" is almost a replay of the housing crisis we just had, government backed loans encourage lenders to lend out money to people who are not qualified for the loan. It doesn't make sense to keep loaning out tens of thousands of dollars to 18 year old kids that have no income [yet] and no real plan to make any money for the next 4 years.

Can you imagine if someone submitted a business proposal asking for a $100,000 investment or loan and the proposal was "think I'll take some classes and then figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life"? We need to end the insanity and turn the spigot off. Then the institutions will be forced to lower their prices and manage their budgets again. Maybe one day we'll get back to the point where a young person can pay for in-state tuition with a part-time job, like it was about 25 years ago.

But without the student loans, the under privileged will not be able to afford said education - I don't want to see a society where only those who can afford it go to university.

This simply isn't true. Schools offer crazy financial aid and there are junior colleges / state universities that offer 100% of aid to impoverished individuals.

The people taking malinvestment (student loans for unproductive means / negative ROI) are firmly in the middle class bracket, both lower/upper sides of it.

financial aid is such a tiny portion that it effectively doesn't exist for the vast majority of university goers.

People taking on too much loans for higher education is a multi-pronged problem. Loans have a place, and if people choose to mis-use a loan to study an "unproductive" subject, i expect that the fault lies with them.

however, when the loans to study law/medicine is in the 200k range, i find it hard to believe that the fault isn't with the university and vested interests in making money with the loans.

And who decides what constitutes malinvestment? I'm guessing there will be plenty of funds made available for tech work, what with Twitter, Ubereats and Facebook being so critical. How about the arts? How about history and culture, you know the stuff that makes living worthwhile beyond your usefulness to line the pockets of capitalists?

Or how about we just confront the problem dead on, remove the money and profit aspect entirely, and offer free college like dozens of other nations do, and have for many years, somehow without their economies imploding? Why must we sacrifice yet more of our society on the altar of profits? Fuck good investments. Fuck investors. Fuck this entire screwed up system that decides that anything that cannot be monetized is worthless.

> who decides what constitutes malinvestment?

the unemployment rate by major, assuming it wasn't already a bad investment due of the student lacking the skill or willingness to finish the studies.

> How about the arts? How about history and culture, you know the stuff that makes living worthwhile beyond your usefulness to line the pockets of capitalists?

Do you ever think about the possibility of people making art or studying history without going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt?

Considering I just said make college free, yeah I think I've considered the possibility.

Even going past that, though, if studying History can't get you a job that makes enough to pay off your debt, then why does it cost so much in the first place?

That's what free/cheap university in Europe managed to achieve.

Don't most countries in Europe offer student loans? If not to the same degree as the US. Even if tuition is free, rent and food isn't.

If I am a bank, I’m absolutely giving a loan to an underprivileged kid with good grades who wants to go to college for a useful degree.

If you are a bank, you issue loans only on things that are likely to have a positive ROI. With a mortgage, you know what the property is worth and can foreclose on it if the borrower isn't able to make the payments.

No such equivalent with a college student. 18-year olds for the most part aren't going to know for sure what they want to major in, so "a useful degree" at the time the loan is signed, might change 2 years in, when they actually have to declare a major.

We can easily conceive of loans that are contingent on the major not changing to something useless. I don’t believe flaws in the current system have to stick forever.

You get exactly the same benefit if government only backs 70% of each student loan. Then it's not profitable loan if the student cannot pay back.

But if you keep significant government backing, then the student loans would get lot lover interest rates. Which is probably good for absolutely everybody.

this but you also have to have affordable education because it's the most reliable, predictable and virtuous of all class mobility mechanisms, and trade school don't provide that for the most part because those are optimized to make corporate drones, not self thinking individuals

I'm pretty sure any competent welder and machinist running a small business custom-fabricating high performance automotive parts (or a similar field, like oil pipelines) would take umbrage with your description of their profession as "corporate drones who aren't self-thinking".

exceptions exists everywhere, do I have to introduce a disclaimer for the 1% of everything or can we have a discussion of the general case without people having to nitpick every word?

heck, I even didn't use an absolute

> for the most part

Yes. Do you think 99% of people who go to college are self-thinking and not corporate drones? Why do so many of them move on to work at corporations?

> trade school [] are optimized to make corporate drones

I mean, I'm not a native English speaker but it seems pretty clear to me I was NOT talking about college output, quite the opposite actually.

You must understand that we’re talking about trade school as an alternative to college, so if you point out some stunning detractor toward trade school, you’re implying the detractor does not exist for the alternative.

Maybe I took that implication to an extreme end, but calling out trade schools for producing “corporate drones” absolutely bears the implication that you believe the alternatives are different / not as bad.

> you’re implying the detractor does not exist for the alternative.

no? what kind of crazy dichotomic logic is that? you're way overthinking it.

> Do you think 99% of people who go to college

moreover college output has a lot more variation than trade school output, so assuming that the proportions of outcome are the same is as well something that was never claimed.

> You must understand

you just dropping things I never said and argue as if I said them, how does one go and debate or understand that? it was never my point to begin with!

jesus, 6 post ago I made one point: trade school aren't providing the titles one would go get to optimize for class mobility, heck, the rest isn't even a point of discussion really, the whole idea on which trade school are based on is to bake blue collar workers.

Haha, whatever you say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com