Born poor, stay poor: what my $120k student debt says about class in the US | Hacker News Reader

Born poor, stay poor: what my $120k student debt says about class in the US

theguardian.com

19 pointsrntn39 comments

I am highly sympathetic to the problem, but if not being poor is a priority goal for a person, then being a writer/teacher is not an optimal career path. Hopefully this person's book makes a good amount of money.

I just don’t feel sympathetic for someone buying something really expensive and then complaining that it cost a lot of money.

Yep, yet I constantly have to be told by others that despite my deciding against more expensive schools and deciding to study computer science in lieu of a pet passion in art knowing full well that my immigrant parents wouldn’t support me, my outcome is due largely more to luck rather than to hard work and risk aversion.

You were lucky to have enough sense to make good decisions:)

I'm only semi-joking. I'm pretty sure good judgement can't be taught, though it can be learned, based on looking at siblings who make radically different life choices .

Depending on the state, being a Teacher is a good job. However, she probably should have attended a state university to save money.

We should add "teacher" to the list of careers not to pursue in school. That should end well.

Author's experiences aside, the American government looks like it really went through some absurd mental gymnastics when designing their college financial support policies. They intervened in precisely the manner they should not have intervened and got everything wrong, it's almost remarkable.

How did any policymaker with common sense not point out that playing the loan game would only end up in disaster? That it's downright moronic to forbid college loans from being eligible for bankruptcy and give every bank essentially a free pass to hand out as many bad loans as possible, and the colleges a free pass to charge as ridiculously as possible?

They could have done a hundred other things to make higher education affordable without landing in this mess - scholarships, price ceilings, subsidies... What the hell happened?

Lawmakers are elected on the basis not of wisdom or skill, but because they win elections.

Once in office, lawmakers have to worry about getting reelected. They aren't subject to an incentive structure that would encourage them to think long-term, etc.

Even so, this is so ominous anyone would be excused to suspect something more nefarious than sheer incompetence. Whether or not the lawmakers made it with vested interests, there should still have been someone to point it out! If the democratic setup of the most powerful country in the world can allow such degrees of stupidity it is quite concerning.

> If the democratic setup of the most powerful country in the world can allow such degrees of stupidity it is quite concerning.

Well, it's a democratic setup, so its competence is unfortunately proportional to that of its voting public...

edit: to be clear, my two comments in this subthread should not be construed to be the typical cynical "politicians are dumb and corrupt" opinion; many of them are smart and well-meaning, but the overall system is not conducive to allowing or encouraging anyone to do anything useful.

I think the obvious answer is they were thinking of what's best for banks not students or society.

> How did any policymaker with common sense not point out that playing the loan game would only end up in disaster?

This is your economy and government policies on neoliberalism. Students are obviously just self interested consumers and the proper polices entail extracting at much money from them as efficiently as possible. Loans that are insured by the government are a high quality asset. And loans like that drive up the price of education. So even more. What's not to like?

This is the typical politically oriented piece form The Guardian and as such it is indeed 'liberal' with facts.

Apparently, "At the median, graduates with a bachelor’s degree earn $2.8 million over the course of their careers, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, compared to $1.6 million for high school graduates" [1]

So a student loan seems like a bargain if the median return over a career is $1.2 million or 75% more income.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-salary-...

Brushing over individual experience with aggregate statistics. How utilitarian.

Much of the article is about the author's experience of being lifted out of her family's social level, only to find herself not belonging to any class. Her family mocks her, and the saddled debt makes it harder to keep up with her debt free peers.

Also, before cherry picking convenient statistics, it's important to control for other correlation, such as income compared to parents income, and college attendance compared to parents income.

Here are some more liberal facts: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/05/18/first-g...

Given that median income of first generation college graduates is 27% lower than their peers, I think it is indeed likely that there is greater issue here.

To plug the numbers into your above math, we're now looking at $2.05m vs $1.60m. Not bad, but frankly in real terms over 40 years they'd probably be better off putting the $120k against the s&p500. Which is probably what the author's debt free peers will be doing.

I still think for this individual college was likely the right choice and will lead to a fulfilling life.

I also still think loading up teenagers with $120k of debt is utter bullshit.

> Brushing over individual experience with aggregate statistics

That's the only way to discuss such issues. There'll always be good and bad experiences so wee need to look at aggregates, not individual data points.

This is indeed utilitarian: yes tuition may be expensive and yes a student loan may be a significant amount as a consequence but this is an investment decision and if the return is indeed worthwhile so what? And if it's not then it's also one's decision.

Or the complaint is on the political/ideological aspect of paying for education (this is The Guardian after all), not the practical, utilitarian aspect.

I think what GP is getting at is that you have to separate selection effects of university admissions from actual effects of the university.

The people who don't attend university are not in aggregate equivalent to the people who do - I think I remember seeing a study once that people who were admitted to MIT but chose not to attend had similar career outcomes (and incomes) to people who did end up attending MIT (as one example). In that case the signal was the selection effect of being admitted to MIT, not anything that MIT specifically did to help people make more money over the long term.

So attending University might look good on average and lead to higher career earnings, but it could just be a selection effect of people who would have made more money either way.

Absolutely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36644126

You also need to be careful of averages when people like Gates and Zuckerberg drop out of Harvard - the opposite skew!

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-match-school-and-studen... links to a study showing it might not be worth it:

  An oft-cited paper, Dale and Krueger, appears to find that, controlling for applicant characteristics, people who attend more selective college don’t earn more money later in life.

> Her family mocks her, and the saddled debt makes it harder to keep up with her debt free peers.

Her choice of career is a nontrivial factor in her continuing to lag behind financially. It basically accounts for most of the problem, really.

> I also still think loading up teenagers with $120k of debt is utter bullshit.

Maybe, but even assuming that's so, there are career paths where, in the end, that doesn't matter because one makes enough money to overcome that in the long run.

edit: also, her family mocking her just means her family is shit lol; unlike the economic issues raised by her story, it's not a societal problem that merits consideration.

It's not just that her career was a bad choice, it's that she went into $120,000 in the name of that career. If you spend a few years chasing your dreams without going into six figures of debt, it's a lot more sensible than just ignoring all advice we deem to be unpleasant and ending up like the author.

Going to an ivy league school and taking on that debt without any plan to pay it off is just careless. That isn't about systemic poverty, it's the poor choices individuals make and assume "it will all work out later."

Her talent is examining heartbreak she says, and my response is, "Did you think honing that talent is worth $120,000? Could you have honed it by spending half that amount somewhere else?"

Certainly.

Granted, I also did this lol:

> Going to an ivy league school and taking on that debt without any plan to pay it off is just careless.

Luckily, I can be a software engineer--but that's just luck, at this point (I didn't major in CS)

That is 40k vs 70k per year if you take 40 years of working towards the 1.6 or 2.8 mio $.

Or 3’333$ per month vs. 5’833$.

Not that much for a mean if you look at it that way.

Betcha the average return isn't there for teachers and writers.

It's just one person's story, and it's sort of the curse of a person who writes a memoir in their early 30s to lack perspective. This story isn't super dissimilar from mine. I was the first person in my family to ever go to college, on either side. My parents were stable at least, poor when I was a small child, but at least middle class by the time I was an adult, just still not enough to provide any meaningful level of support. Further generations back were doing almost exclusively low paid domestic labor or farm work.

I was an exceptional smart kid who stood out from my family. I spent most of my free time in the library, got a perfect SAT score in 6th grade, won a television quiz show when I was still a kid. No idea where it came from. My dad is street smart but failed out of every level of school. My mom is the kind of person who thinks flouride is bad for you and believes in crystal healing. But I had a serious break down my first year of college (going to which was also my first time ever on a plane), so Ivy League was out of the question. Nobody was going to take me after what happened, no matter how smart I was. I spent a few years at LA City College before going to a Cal state, but was so directionless, I went to grad school just because I didn't know what else to do. At one point, I'm sure I had 120k in student debt.

And it didn't quickly get a ton better in my 30s, even though career started to go reasonably well and I was no longer poor. I had serious spine problems and could only inconsistently work for a few years. I couldn't even dress myself for a few years.

But where you stand at 32 is not the story of your entire life. I am no longer in any debt and am by far the most prosperous person in my family. Maybe somewhat ironically, I also wanted to be a writer for most of my 20s, but I not only never achieved any level of success, I never even really tried. I finished one novel, but didn't believe in it enough to even try sending it to a publisher. But I guess maybe that was a blessing in disguise if this is the life of a best-selling author. My best friend from college ended up winning an Emmy at one point, but is still poor, has never married, struggles with continuing mental illness. If there is a lesson here, I'm not sure it's don't go to college or don't go into debt or the poor always stay poor. It's that creative careers are a fool's bet almost no one wins even when they win.

I graduated from a state school 10 years ago with $11,000 of debt. I worked two jobs, took 15 hours every semester, and paid that loan off in 8 years.. everyone has a different struggle, but it still boggles me how someone could have so much debt from education.

Maybe there should be a cap on how much you can borrow.

Maybe the cap should be close to zero since the advent of loans and grants to college students was fairly swiftly followed by an incredible increase in the price of a secondary education in the United States.

And some other countries, the secondary education is free, but there is a test. My understanding of politics in the United States is that would never fly.

Very good point. The size of University bureaucracy has exploded. Someone suggested that when students don't pay back their loans, the universities should be on the hook. This could work but it might make higher education out of reach but for only the best, or limit majors to only those with "viable" career earnings. Whatever that would mean..

Where I grew up any student who could maintain a 3.5 or higher could go to a state school for free, no loans. I even got a stipend. So in some places it might work.

[EDIT: to clarify, I grew up in the United States and in a not particularly progressive state.]

If it were general policy, the minimum gpa these days would be 3.5 because anything different would go against the misguided "all students college-bound" dogma.

I've never noticed any issue with GPT4.

I graduated from a state school with a BS and MS 26 years ago with $2000 in debt that I paid off in full the instant it came due.

Times have changed and not for the better, as you found out.

There should be a cap and it should be $0.

It should depend on the type of study. It makes sense to collectively invest in productive education of the younglings, it makes sense to have lones for things less certain and it makes sense to not fund things with poor roi.

Could also have a feedback loop so that educators get rewarded/punished for the success of their students (relative to the cost). If someone offers expensive education without career opportunities it seems fair to tax the shit out of it. It makes it more exclusive.

> I imagine it’s disorienting to hear the voice of your exploiter come out of your child’s mouth. They said I had lost my common sense, and they were right. I had entered into an imaginative place inconceivable to them, one where I dreamed of better things for them, and for me.

Despite all the talk about how her family chided her for "losing common sense", there's no single, specific example, of what exactly they objected to. There are allusions to it, like how (expecting?) a reprimand from your employer for taking sick leave is common sense, or how "dreaming of better things" isn't common sense, but those come from the author, not her family.

Maybe you think it's unfair to expect such specificity from an opinion article/book promotion, but as a result, I have no idea what her conversations with her family were like. Was it really "Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't get fired for missing work when sick/things were better?" "Hush child, you're talking nonsense. All that book learnin' got your head all confused."

I can't imagine it was, but those are the only hints the author gives.

She implies it was all that liberal education used by their capaitalist overlords to oppress them.

Perhaps she should have majored in Marxist studies.

That way, not having money would then be considered a virtue! Problem solved.

What nobody talks about is there is a process for social class advancement. Getting $120K in debt right out of the gate is not part of that process. Poor folks have to utilize community colleges and state colleges and even then, they may have to attend part-time. That's what I did. It's not glamorous and it's not the "all-American" college experience complete with extensive networking - but it will advance you to the next social class. Instill those values and "hacks" into your children and they'll be able to advance further.

What you can't do is play the game as though you were already in the social class you're aspiring to. There's one set of well-known rules for them, another set of lesser-known rules for you.

The obsession with Ivy League is unhealthy. Combining that obsession with an unrealistic career path is doubly so.

It's not clear to me after reading the article if she borrowed $120k or that it somehow due to interest and other things ended up being $120k.

I think the main issue this person is having is with their own expectations.

Things do get better, but it doesn’t always take just one generation.

Here's a site where you can look up average debt at graduation by school [1], and what percent of students borrow.

[1] https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student...

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