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Comment by tejohnso | Hacker News Reader

> She earned a master’s in religious studies in 2017, with dreams of teaching at a college.

> But she couldn’t find any jobs in her field when she graduated

Why the hell would you expect to find a job in religious studies? If you're interested in that, great. Pay for that education if you can afford it. Don't borrow thousands of dollars for your indulgence and then complain that you owe money. That's how borrowing works. This has been going on for decades now. It has been a long time since getting any degree was some kind of ticket to prosperity. If it ever was.

On the other side of things, why isn't it considered class discrimination to require expensive degrees to work in jobs where high school education is sufficient?

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The problem I see is that unlike traditional lending, student loans are handed out without ever looking at the underlying "asset" that those loans are used to purchase.

A bank won't extend you a loan to buy a house for more than that house is worth, likewise they won't extend you a $100k loan to buy a Honda Civic because the car is not worth that much. But when it comes to education, it seems that loans are handed out without ever looking at what the borrower intend to use those dollars for.

Granted lending rules will be different than physical assets because you can't exactly value an education like you can a car or a house, but you could totally estimate the value of an underlying education with how much that person expects to make in the job market after college.

So if you want to become a doctor, the bank will extend you a loan of $200k to go to med school, same with a lawyer or engineer where that education has a high probability of landing you a well paying job. But we shouldn't be extending those same loans to folks that do other things, if you want to learn religious studies, the lender should only extend a loan that they think you can reasonably pay back with the job you will with your degree, so a religious studies major may only get $10-20k in loans.

She was 17 or maybe 18.

I would make my own college decisions slightly differently in retrospect, so I can't put all the blame on a 17 year old. She probably had lots of different advice, some of it contradictory, incomplete or optimistic.

I think this is the right take. It's really easy to nitpick the decision making in retrospect, but I think people need perspective. Are we expecting all 18 year olds to be good financial planners now?

I certainly wasn't educated on the long term consequences of debt when I was that age and I was relatively well off. We are, after all, discussing education. So the person who is striving for an education is being criticized for not being financially educated enough from the start?

I know that somebody is going to get on my case for defending ignorance. But maybe we shouldn't have systems in place that allow millions of people to make the same wrong decision? Fault can lie on both sides.

Maybe the difference here is that she chose to pay for a masters, which is a graduate degree. I think the personal responsibility argument carries more weight at that point.

Agreed. There's a lot of blaming 18 year olds for taking out loans (which many of them were encouraged to take) pursuing degrees that might not earn enough to pay off (while they were encouraged to follow their heart).

The real issue is that schools are too expensive. It shouldn't be a mistake that takes a lifetime to pay back if you pursue a degree that "the marketplace" doesn't reward with a six- or seven-figure salary.

> so I can't put all the blame on a 17 year old

Oh there's plenty of blame to go around for sure.

The banks, the schools, the government. Even the businesses supplying the job market with opportunities that over emphasize post secondary.

But at 17 or 18 you're not completely blameless either. You know there are consequences for the decisions you make and that you are ultimately responsible for your own actions. This is taught from grade school.

Is there any other decision with such long lasting consequences? Having children as a teenager, but I can't think of anything else.

We don't give large loans to teenagers for any other reason.

Meanwhile teachers, parents, older students, friends and so on say "follow your heart" and it will all work out.

> Is there any other decision with such long lasting consequences?

As a young adult? Let's see...

Drinking and driving, unprotected premarital sex, drug use and abuse...there are plenty. These are all decisions that a 17 or 18 year old has to make very regularly and the wrong decision can be very harmful.

To your point though, the decision around this massive student loan racket is the only one I can think of that was / is actively encouraged by so many parents and educators. Like I said, there's plenty of blame to go around. But that doesn't absolve the 17 or 18 year old of blame.

Except with all those examples you gave, there are almost not parents that would encourage their child to do that. They would be cautioned over years not to do so. With college that's not the case at all. It is purely happenstance that I don't have loans from school. I knew college was expensive, but the extent of the expense, was not clear to me at all surrounded by a family who had never gone to college. I avoided loans because an in state school happen to be good enough for my teenage dreams and my state had a series of grants for poor and intelligent students. It could have gone very differently though and no one would have told me it was a bad idea.

> Why the hell would you expect to find a job in religious studies? If you're interested in that, great. Pay for that education if you can afford it.

Maybe we should (partially) reframe this is as: there's a widespread problem with long-term planning and financial literacy.

I agree that foolish wishful thinking is blameworthy. But out of love for future generations, maybe we can try to help them be smarter about this stuff.

(My point is simply that this issue should probably be part of any proposed solution.)

> On the other side of things, why isn't it considered class discrimination to require expensive degrees to work in jobs where high school education is sufficient?

Another question that nobody ever seems to ask: why do all degrees charge basically the same tuition, despite the disparate financial outcomes of holding those degrees?

Society needs people in all different fields. It would be awful if we simply abolished the arts, scholarship, and other non-profitable professions entirely. What a barren world that would be! The question is, how can we financially support necessary activities that aren't particularly lucrative?

Limiting public funding for college students majoring in arts programs hardly equates to abolishing the arts. Of the great artists throughout history, how many even attended higher education programs in that field? The more common path for great artists has been to go out and do more art. Practice makes perfect.

I think we would get better results by shifting arts funding away from education and towards just paying performers to put on free public events or buying art pieces for exhibition in public spaces. Focus on the results rather than the process, and let the artists find their own paths.

True, but it's also worth taking a systematic look. Universities can freely raise their prices because there's an infinite amount of government-guaranteed loans to fund them. Notice how universities are affordable in most countries without this system.

The government essentially distorted the market, with colleges reaping all the upside and virtually no downside. If the government wants accessible public education, the easier solution is to fund colleges directly instead of going through a middleman that'll skim a lot before delivering that service (the student loan ecosystem).

It's so easy, in hindsight, to be harsh on people who chose degrees with seemingly little job prospects, but I remember how college was described in the late 90s and early 00s by most parents, teachers, and guidance counselors.

It was pitched to most kids as a panacea for poverty.

    Just go, get a degree, and everything will work out. It did for all my Baby Boomer peers who went to college, and it will for you. Don't worry about those loans, you'll definitely be able to pay them back!

Only now, looking back, after an absolute flood of children followed that advice, do we collectively realize how misguided it is. And how much more thought is required by parents and educators to really do a cost benefit analysis on tuition cost relative to employment prospects and properly guide kids to a financially healthy future that fits their unique circumstances.

> It was pitched to most kids as a panacea for poverty.

Late high school years in the mid 90s, I remember looking into job placement rates that were part of the pitch from higher ed schools. We knew that the purpose was to get a job, not just to go and get any degree and hope for the best. I recall the phrase "a degree in basket weaving" was common. We figured there are degrees that are just garbage. So maybe I was more fortunate in my circumstances. Then again, some people did go for those basket weaving degrees even though they knew they were garbage. I think there was a lot of pressure to do anything but work toward a trade skill and get a job.

I'm baffled by the parent comment being downvoted.

We're talking about factors leading to irrational choices about college costs, and the parent comment (correctly) describes one of the factors present in 1990's USA.

> "It was pitched to most kids as a panacea for poverty."

Nah, I'm pretty sure the joke that ends in 'The liberal arts major asks, "Would you like fries with that?"' has existed at least since the 1970s-1980s.

[EDIT] The point is not the joke, the point is that, contrary to the parent poster, the public has known for a long, long time that liberal arts degree programs usually didn't lead to high paying jobs for most.

I think both statements are be true.

IIRC, some people pitched college as a panacea (some guidance counselors, some well-intended government officials, some parents, etc.), and others made the French-fries quip.

You don’t need a high school degree for those jobs either. Hamlet and biology isn’t needed day to day at most workplaces

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