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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> were tricked

they aren't "tricked". They saw the last generation's results of going to college, without thinking for themselves and making a better decision.

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These are kids, and I'd say in most cases, parents are making the choice to take out excessive loans on their children's backs so they can feel like successful parents without paying the price.

Exactly, this is why you I’m happy the younger generation doesn't listen to us. We listened to generation x and got into a lot of trouble for it. I knew parents who would encourage 100k of debt for their child for an art degree..

I don't really think that's it. When I was in high school, I didn't see my parent's or my friends' parent's success and think "I've got to go to college". I was busy doing what most kids are doing: having fun with my friends and trying to get close to the opposite sex.

What made me think I needed to go to school was the constant inundation from counselors and teachers that my options were college or a mcjob. To a kid that just wakes up one day every late summer and walks into a new classroom without doing anything to make it happen, it seems like college is just the next high school. It's just what you do. Nobody, ever, not once, talked to me about the financial aspect of it. Lucky for me I didn't wind up going beyond a month at a community college which I quit for other reasons, but without those reasons I'd have continued with it because I, like most people my age, didn't know what to do with myself. I had a rough time after that for a few years, but today I can say that I am financially and in general living a much better life than my peers who went to college, and I have a few that also didn't go and several of them are doing wildly better than me. I don't know a single person that went that isn't stuck on a treadmill trying to play it safe and pay down debt. That's their lives, they'll get old on that treadmill, and mine is mine alone.

Long story short, yes, from my observation, most people are tricked. The only people that need to be going to college are people who want to be in medicine, lawyers, people that want to go into academics and do research as a career, and people who's families can afford to give them a liberal arts education just for the sake of it. The rest of us are better served just starting to live our lives.

Ah yes, teenagers who have never lived in the real world should be able to predict that their future would turn out to be entirely different than the pattern that their parents & parent's parents followed, and that they were explicitly told to follow, and that said teens are still told to follow by almost all socially important institutions and leaders.

Truly, the children are to blame.

So the teens are rebellious when convenient to label them as such, and sheeps when convenient otherwise?

They are adults choosing their life's course. They are not children. They have responsibility to think for themselves, and to accept the consequences of their choices.

college debt is crushing because they chose to have it. They could've gotten into apprenticeships instead, or a community college which costs less.

There are opportunities in high school to discover whether studying higher education is for them. The parents also have a role to play here - paying for extracirricular activities to test out or discover their child's talents and interests (which, of course, is only affordable for the wealthier parents - a form of inequality of opportunity, and have nothing to do with blinding going to college at any cost).

So no, i do not agree that the "children" are not to blame.

Many of them are presumably 17 when they make this decision. Minors.

and yet at that age, they would be tried and convicted as adults if they committed a felony.

so, i dont agree that just because they're 17 that they're not capable of making decisions that require planning, gathering information and rational thought. It's just that a lot of them aren't doing it, and play the victim when the inevitable results aren't desirable.

They cannot point to their parent's generation and say "i did what they did, why don't i get the same outcomes".

I think most school systems have failed to teach how to do research and critical thinking. Information has been around now what decades... Just go on google and search your degree. Read some horror stories and some success stories and evaluate them for yourself... Form a worldview...

That is where entire school system should take people. Give them tools to make at least someway reasoned decisions. If they love something, they can do it, but know that there might not be greatest financial rewards involved.

Would it be ok with you if i didn't take teenage rebelliousness seriously as well? And, in fact, if I considered it another strong piece of evidence that teenagers are in no position maturity-wise to predict large scale social trends a decade out?

I agree with you to an extent. The problem is they weren’t taught finances at all. Most kids don’t understand that just 5% annually can compound to a crazy amount.

I don’t feel bad for the current kids or anyone who grew up with the internet because they know better. If you have an internet connection and didn’t research loans before taking them out then that’s on you. The new gen or the iPhone generation as I call them are much smarter than us because they see most millennials got a useless degree and work somewhere unrelated. Which is why they don’t listen to us but I don’t blame them. Good on them.

In my experience they were taught finances but were little shits who didn't take it seriously or pay attention at all. Then the exact same people years later complain about not being taught.

Naw. There were a huge number of scam colleges taking advantage of people who didn't know how to evaluate them. That was a consumer protection issue. Scam colleges are a wholly different thing.

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