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Many Senior Citizens Expect To Die With College Loan Debts.
(portside.org)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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For many the choice to not take loans mean they cannot go to school at all. For some reason, even the most mundane and menial office job requires a college degree. This means for a lot of people they are effectively stuck working minimum wage.
Student loans are only a part of our broken system. But its one that unfortunately is forced upon many people if they want to make a living wage.
That was me in 1996. My parents worked in factories when I was in elementary school, getting paid a piece rate for work. By the time I graduated from high school, their factory jobs had been sent overseas or to Mexico, and they were working as a handyman & selling shoes at Walmart. Combined, they made somewhere in the low to mid $30k per year range, and had 3 boys to raise. I had to take loans to go to college. I worked as much as I could to try and cover my bills while in college. I had the GI Bill from the national guard providing a couple hundred dollars per month.
I ended up dropping out of college after a few years because I couldn't keep up. I went back after my daughter was born, and used the max federal Stafford loans (~10k/yr) to help pay living expenses because I was working 2-3 part time jobs to work around my schedule and helping to pay rent, utilities, and food for myself, my wife, and a baby while my wife went to school as well. I worked so much that I barely remember my kid before she was in 2nd or 3rd grade. I don't think I could have worked more.
But now, conservatives say that I shouldn't have taken loans. I shouldn't have gone to school because I couldn't afford it. What is the alternative? A life of raising a family making minimum wage delivering pizzas? Relying on public assistance and tax credits? Or working my ass off for a few years, taking some loans, paying them back slowly with maybe some forgiveness at some point, and now paying 13-15k per year in taxes?
Kind of weird to be told to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", do that, and then be told that you should have just stayed poor because your parents couldn't afford to pay for college for you.
There are plenty of ways to go to college without significant loans. It often means not going to U of _ or _ state, you can easily save $20k+ over 4-5 years by just choosing a less expensive school. There's need based scholarships, community colleges, tuition reimbursement plans, military service, academic scholarships, sports scholarships, and more. You do need a plan to get through in a reasonable time frame, just taking some classes and hoping to eventually wander into a degree is a recipe for crushing debt.
Career planning is just about the biggest scam we're sold when selecting an education.
Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, can predict what the job market will look like 5-10-15 years into the future, and yet we're asking people to gamble in the casino of life to get an education and take on debt (even if you are going to a less expensive school - the person you're replying to had parents working minimum wage, nobody in that situation has the kind of spare capital to fund any education without a loan) in hopes that their chosen profession will a) still exist when they leave university b) remain viable long enough to repay their debt and c) the economy doesn't contract significantly while they are in school, resulting in a "lost generation".
You need to have a seriously high powered crystal ball to make a prediction that accurate, or just admit that we're effectively forcing kids to gamble with their futures.
Not just people, we are asking TEENAGERS to gamble on what they even like ornare interested in doing in 4+ years. These are kids!
And let's not forget that the majority of college grads are not even working in the same field as their degree.
You don't have to be a fortune teller to know a bachelor's in psych is basically useless on it's own, but no matter what you choose, getting in and out in 4-5 years is critical, 7+ years of even modest loans is going to crush you. That's the bigger point.
That's not the point I am trying to make. The point is that even those "common sense" judgements change over time, and even if you manage to get out in 5 years or less that career you picked based on common sense might be going through a recession, regression, is being replaced by foreign labor or technology, etc. etc.
Yes the employment market fluctuates, but it rarely dies. Lawyers probably had the worst of it recently, but very few majors end up with limited options rhat didn't start that way. People that entered education knew the pay sucked well before they enrolled. Tech had layoffs at the beginning of the year, but places are already hiring again.
All of the things you mentioned require extra work from an individual that inevitably means others who don't receive those things will be left without. No one should have to jump through those extra hoops and many just can't for various reasons. And people should also be able to "wander into a degree", lives and plans change. Sometimes people have to switch tracks or leave and return to college and there shouldn't be repercussions for that.