I was talking to a lady that had somehow gotten into $500,000 of student loans for herself, her ex husband, and their son. And the payments are about to resume.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Don't worry, lenders must assume some risk, that's why we use bankruptcy -
Oh, right.
If the 18 year old borrower assumes all the risk for life, then the interest rate must be zero, right?
I mean, it'd be ludicrous to do anything else, since education is demonstrably a net economic and societal gain.
What kind of monstrous system would try to debt trap college students?
Right, that would be absurd
How do you rack up 500k in loans without telling your prodigy that they better do something with it or else its going to fuck everyone up? Like if they didnt go to become lawyers or surgeons then they essentially self sabotaged their entire family.
What happens if you just say no to them, because you don't have the money as inflation makes it that you can only afford beans.
They garnish your wages!
Yeah, they'll get blood from that stone somehow.
It's OK though, the shareholders got record dividends this quarter. That's what matters.
Do universities have shareholders too? Or do they just call it something different like how they hide their hedge funds under the title "endowments?"
Yes and no.
They sort of have shareholders in their Board of Trustees whose goals are to see the school grow. They also have shareholders in the form of their upper administration whose goals are usually to increase their own salaries. (Private universities are their own thing and have actual investors and shareholders and don't really count imo)
Really the problem with (public) universities though is the lack of any market pressure with no regulation to back it up. Student loans are federally guaranteed to never default, which means universities are guaranteed payment as long as students sign up. Incoming freshmen do not have the initial barrier to entry with loans, so their demand has zero response to price increases.Thus universities have zero market incentive to actually reduce any costs or optimize efficiency as a result, because fuck them kids, they're gonna get paid no matter what. It creates a poor feedback loop where the school's budget balloons, tuition is raised to make up the difference, students take out more loans, rinse, repeat.
Garnish wages, keep your tax return, take social security benefits and destroy your credit rating. They pardon the super rich for basically stealing our tax dollars and yet they will also destroy the financial lives of their citizens who have to make the decision of having the gas to get to work the next morning or having more than sleep for dinner. I'm of half a mind that if they are going to steal my money then they will have to pay to take more of it
You'll get a harsher punishment for not paying back a loan than some get for stealing LITERAL BILLIONS from people, and not even through tax loopholes, just regular old confidence schemes on a commercial level.
The only way that could conceivably work out is if everyone collectively protested their student loans together since it's such a massive problem for so many people. Even then, the government would probably buckle down and try to destroy half the country's financial viability before they caved and admitted this toxic industry preyed on kids that didn't know what that debt meant when they signed up for it.
Garnished wages and income tax returns.
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I’m going to mail Nelnet a box of dog shit every month.
don't forget to add some stanky interest on that principal
Can someone explain to me as a non American, what is the student loan? Is it college fee? In my country it's only costed 300-1500$ a year unless you take extra classes then it'll cost a bit more, you can also get groceries from the local market for months worth of food for really cheap and room for rent is 150$-300$ a month or you can live in pagoda for free
College is very expensive in the US, with the average “in-state” school costing $26K/yr for someone who lives on campus and $56K/yr for a private institution. Since a majority of undergraduates are teenagers with virtually no savings, they take on loans to pay for college. Also unlike traditional loans where you can declare bankruptcy, these loans are very difficult to get forgiven.
There obviously a lot more to it, but that’s the gist in three sentences.
Important note: Those prices are per year.
Oh that’s a very important note. Updated.
It's a way to force an 18 year old into a life of indentured servitude under the guise of "financial assistance" by simply clicking accept on a couple online forms, only for 40% of them to end up working jobs that don't require a college degree in the first place.
The job postings require a degree, yet a monkey could do it.
So back in the mid 1900's in the USA tuition cost a fairly reasonable amount (about 8-10 percent of a minimum wage income could be budgeted for school, depending on which one you went to) but from 1970-2020 we saw an explosion of college tuition that didn't match inflation/CoL/income.
So now in order to budget for a public state school you need to allot about 40% of your minimum wage income for tuition. OR you can sell your life to the military and potentially die that way (if you're even medically able and willing) in addition to the previously mentioned "go into debt until you're 60" method that we currently use.
Somehow, while costs have been skyrocketing the quality of schooling has been going downhill for awhile now as funding gets reallocated to the things that make the most money which is just sports essentially (also why it's so damn expensive.)
Tuition has gone up much more. The average US college will now require 157% of your minimum wage income, provided you can still work full time on top of school.
Average US cost of attending college in 2023-2024: $23,630 per year
Federal minimum wage: $7.25 per hour
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Even more fun:
The sports still cost the school money unless the team is popular enough to move merchandise.
Education isn't even the highest priority for a college anymore, it's the teams they can use to make MORE MONEY.
Unless it costs you money and you never make any! Guess we'll just pass that cost onto the students as well, fuck 'em.
It's a loan made of public money that universities seem to think is an open faucet and upcharge a ridiculous amount for tuition.
the average US public university is about $11,700 for tuition. that doesn't count room and board if you are staying in a dorm in campus. private universities are much more.
This is per year. And most degrees are 4 years, though it's not uncommon for them to run to 5. So by the time a student graduates they have on average ~$37k in debt.
For the 2023-2024 school year, the average cost of attending college in the US is $23,630
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