Hacker News Reader

Comment by oberheitz | Hacker News Reader

"Life is hard, and it’s most certainly unfair… perhaps more so for our generation than any previous."

Uhm, have you ever heard of World War II? I'm pretty sure the MacBook-toting hipsters you describe have a slightly easier life than those people had to serve in Vietnam or World War II.

View on HN

I considered pointing this out, and the great depression too. I can't say (and didn't say) that our generation is definitely harder off (I wasn't born during the previously stated time periods), however... from everything I've seen, youth today are in for a really, really shitty time. Perhaps saying "worse than its been in a long, long time" would have been more balanced.

At least if you died during WWII you were done. Now you can volunteer to rack up $200k+ in debt that will take you 10-20 (or more) years to pay off. It's not slavery in that it never ends but many students end up being very nearly indentured servants for a long time. Which is worse, death or debt "slavery?"

What's the criteria for downvoting? I don't get it.

I hadn't downvoted you (yet), but you seem to be suggesting an equivalence between:

i) Dying while fighting in trench warfare

ii) Paying back money loaned to you for your education (presumably, while living in a comparably safe and climate controlled apartment)

It's fine to say things people disagree with, but this is just non-sense.

If I'd been a soldier soldier deployed in battle, or if I'd lost a family member in battle, I would find your comment one of the more offensive things I've ever seen on HN.

WWII wasn't trench warfare, that was WWI.

I guess what I meant was "at least it was over quick" meaning that you died and that was the end of it. I'm not saying that paying back a loan is definitely equivalent to dying, but there are plenty of people killing themselves over debt that they cannot escape.

The problem in my mind is not that it was loaned to people to pursue their education (that's good!) but that it was loaned to them with no regard for their ability to pay it back. $200k for a finance degree or engineering or something like that with a reasonable chance of paying it off is good. But $200k loaned to someone to get a bachelors in sociology is not a good bet since they have little prospect of paying it off. And no recourse once they find out how stupid they've been.

In WWII people made tremendous sacrifices for the good of the country and quite possibly freedom world-wide. That's incredibly noble. The leaders who had to make tough choices did so knowing that they would be sending many people to their deaths and (hopefully) took that responsibility seriously.

I doubt many private university presidents really truly care how many lives they're ruining by allowing totally egregious interest rates.

EDIT: debt driven suicide on google pulls a lot of hits: http://www.google.com/search?q=debt+driven+suicide&oq=de...

EDIT2: Thanks for at least telling me why you think I'm an insensitive clod. I appreciate it.

Easy access to debt isn't really a harbinger of a really, really shitty time.

If anything, the fact that the debt 'crisis' is global will end up making student loans easy(er) to repay (because inflation).

It's less the easy access to debt that's the problem, but the requirement of going into debt for a chance to not be in debt. For a very significant portion of people, they only chance at a decent job is college - there really aren't that many decent jobs available for the "no degree" people. Of course the degree isn't a guarantee of a job, just a prerequisite. And of course most people can't just up and pay for college, so the debt load is a becomes part of that prerequisite.

So the requirement of debt for a chance, is probably a harbinger of a really, really shitty time.

(NOTE: please... no "but I am different in w.r.t. that stuff" posts... the terms "many", "significant portion", and "most" mean some aren't in that category, but that doesn't change the statistics).

Yes, college is a poor, expensive employability filter.

Still, it hardly takes a $50,000 psychology degree (people just looking for a credential should be fine with a state school) to get a job in a high tech factory, a $10,000 or $15,000 technology certificate is a lot more sensible.

And I don't mean to argue that these choices are easy or that it is great that people face them, but going $150,000 into debt is not the only path out there.

Take the children of the great depression. Born in poverty then conscripted into the military for ww2. Those still alive raise their children in the shadow of imminent nuclear annihilation. Then have their children conscripted for Vietnam.

Oh and if they managed to avoid ww2 they get to spent a few years in Korea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com