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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Why should people who can't (or won't) pay their student loans be considered worthy of having money spent on them? Invest in the people who know how to handle financial responsibility: they are far more likely to create economic growth and provide jobs for the people who otherwise couldn't pay their loan obligations.

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Because despite your assumptions, there are many reasons someone might be in debt beyond "not knowing how to handle financial responsibility", especially when it comes to student loans. Why do you think financial numbers are a good metric for whether someone "deserves" to survive without excessive struggle/pain?

Don't buy into the contrapositive of the American Dream; the Dream isn't true, and so neither is its contrapositive.

Well put. Plus, I learned a new word: contrapositive. Always a good day in a writer's life ...

Oh, and less we forget, the cost of higher education has increased substantially, so it's easy for someone who got through a four year college with < $10,000 - I myself graduated in '91 with <$8000 debt - to blithely attribute to financial acuity what in reality is the simple luck of growing up at a time when higher learning was more easily obtained.

Why has the cost of higher education skyrocketed? One theory is that government-guaranteed loans created too much demand for college education, a problem many colleges "solved" by jacking up tuition. But did the quality of what was learned go up accordingly? I can't help of think of the line from Good Will Hunting: "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."

We have the internet now, arguably even more information and more accessible than the library. And yet, how many people end up more ignorant after "doing their research" online than they were before they started? The problem with self-education is that there is at least equal parts information and misinformation available. Part of a structured education like university is both filtering out the cruft and teaching people how to filter out the junk on their own. It's not only about being exposed to facts to memorize.

Where education fails is teaching people how to think. What good is access to information if you don't know how to process it? What good is access to facts and data when you cannot define what truth even is? (Your use of the term "contrapositive" tells me you have studied at least a little philosophy... hopefully in the Aristotelian vein.)

> Where education fails is teaching people how to think.

I disagree with this, and in fact, it's my point.

I did study philosophy -- at uni. But I didn't learn about contrapositives in that class, I learned about it in a dedicated Critical Thinking course -- also at uni. I also took a couple of formal logic courses and a few psychology courses there, all electives, and none related to my career (except maybe tangentially in the formal logic of computation). I learned so much in these courses about not only how to think, but common ways people incorrectly think and how to notice and avoid that. I even learned theories of the neurology behind why some of those common mistakes happen, and the importance of each step in the scientific method regarding which of these fallacies each attempts to counteract.

Public K-12 education may fail to teach people how to think, but high-quality universities do not. Which is my point: higher education is so important and should be as accessible to as many people as possible if we're to create the best society we can for ourselves and others.

The concept (and truth value) of a contrapositive is something I learned in a university elective class. It's amazing how higher education might actually provide more value to both individuals and society than job opportunities, isn't it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Kids are heavily pressured to go to college. Some kids are in fact under the threat of going to college or getting kicked out of their home at 18. That kid doesn't really have a "choice". They can't live off the minimum wage jobs that are the only thing they qualify for (and this assumes they'd be hired). As a bonus, the loans you're able to get depends on the income of your parents despite you being an "adult" and regardless of whether your parents help or not. You can end up with a ton of student loan debt without being irresponsible. We are treating 18 year olds as "adults" only as long as it's convenient.

The world is a very hard place to live in and we do very little to prepare 18 year olds for adulthood. Can't get a job or afford a place to live on their own. God forbid they make a mistake. It's cruel and predatory to give them loans they'll be stuck with for the rest of their lives unlike any other type of loan.

> The world is a very hard place to live in and we do very little to prepare 18 year olds for adulthood.

Financially coddling those 22+ is doubling down on failing to prepare them for the future.

22+ wasn't mentioned in the quote...?

18 years old plus 4 years of college.

The real reason here is that the lenders have the same view you have. They would rather lobby the government to force everyone to pay those loans than gamble on getting money back from students who struggle to get jobs with their degrees.

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