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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

And this is why the US will never have EU-like free healthcare

"Why should the healthy people pay for the sick's treatment?"

Sick people by and large don't choose to be sick. Picking a major with no earning potential and borrowing 100K to complete it shouldn't be my (the taxpayer's) problem

I agree but then we should also shut down 80% of post HS education or at least stop promoting it with predatory loans.

This is an okay analogy on the surface, but there is another dimension to the student loan debt situation. The borrowers are not the poorest/most vulnerable of the population. They are disproportionately from upper income brackets.

Most of the student debt is from students who attend for profit colleges who do not complete their degree.

That's just not true. “While 39% of borrowers did not complete a degree, they account for only 23% of debt borrowed” [1]

The stats clearly show the vast majority of student loan debt is held by degree holders and disproportionately by graduate degree holders with extremely high earnings potentials (doctors, lawyers, MBAs)[2]. Remember debt is a financial instrument, not necessarily a bad outcome. Graduate degree pursuers often hold a lot more debt, but will become much better positioned to repay it a few years after graduation.

[1]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/12/alma-adams...

[2]https://www.brookings.edu/research/student-loan-forgiveness-...

I don't think that's true in aggregate, and certainly isn't true when adjusted for population size. The average doctor has far more school debt than the average dropout.

Now, a pause on the first 30k of debt (or any other number under 100k) would solve that issue. 30k was chosen because that number seems to be proposed at a lot as a cutoff.

In this case it’s more like “why should the lower middle class pay for the upper middle classes interpretative dance history classes”

Educational institutions in general are utterly obese with bloat and it’s a direct consequences of moves like this. I don’t really put the same weight on somebodies right to learn within a brick and mortar institution instead of being auto dictate learning from the internet as I do on peoples right to healthcare, especially considering the economic argument for it has long gone out the window due to elite overproduction. The more money we pump in as well the more degrees flood the market and the more the credential requirements are raised to get any job forcing students to waste years of their life stroking the egos of incompetent teachers so somebody will give them a job.

A pox on fuelling the education cartel with more and more debt. Starve the beast.

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