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Comment by jknz | Hacker News Reader

> Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices.

I am not sure families are the ones to blame here. Astronomical tuition and loan interests that cannot be forgotten in bankruptcy is a predatory combo.

In the European countries you mention no student start their professional like with $50k-100k in unforgivable debt.

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Parents and their children choose these astronomical loans when there are much more affordable options. Every student coming out of a mediocre private school with $120,000 in debt could have received the same education for less than a third of that. They're absolutely sharing a large portion of blame when they make that choice.

What? A predatory system isn't predatory because poor, uneducated people should make better decisions? That is exactly why the European systems don't have gotchas.

The US system sells dreams that don't come true, and you blame them for believing that they can do better in their life than their parents by getting an education? Absurd.

The gotcha in the German university system is studying 4-5 years and then dropping out without degree, because there is very little support and a culture of expecting knowledge and not teaching knowledge, which hits underclass students the hardest.

I'm not saying that it is perfect, but it is better than the institutionalized slave labor system in the USA.

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