Do you sympathize with folks that racked up huge debt for private college?

[swampwiz]

I was reading this:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/looks-like-debt-to-me-miller

The author makes the point that she was in the edububble generation where all the folks that she looked up to for advice kept telling her to go to the best (i.e., most expensive) college she could get into, as the value of a college degree was "priceless".

I still remember when I told my high school guidance counselor that as one of the top 1% in ACT scorers, I chose State U with a scholarship that paid the tuition/books/fees and even a nice chunk of the room & board.  I told him that i couldn't justify spending any more money than I had to.

[nessness]

Yes, because I don't think most 18-year-olds have the capacity to understand the impact of their decision. And many of them kept bad advice from parents, guidance counselors, and other trusted adults. I have less sympathy for people who rack up debt for graduate degrees, because by that time you should know better.

[Kott308]

For the sect of the population who entered college when times were amazing and then exited in times of pure terror, I do have sympathy. Many of my closest college friends have stories similar to the author's; 3/4 of the way through a liberal arts degree when suddenly both parents lose their jobs/house/pension and folks spend the next decade telling you "oh well, you should have known better". Like the author, many of my friends are digging themselves out, one small shovelful at a time.

I went to college at roughly the same time the author did. I refer to this time in the US, before the financial collapse, as "Peak Complacency".

When I was in high school (2002-2006) times were good, and were led to believe that they would just keep getting better. Our guidance counselors never helped us choose a college based on cost. There were endless conversations and presentations about "What's your dream school?" Nobody ever said, "Hey, this is what your debt burden will look like!". And nobody could predict that 2 years later the economy would collapse (sans the players in 'The Big Short'). I didn't have much in the way of ambition and chose a low-cost state school simply because a teacher recommended it. I was fortunate enough to graduate with only a little debt that was paid off within a year.

My wife's story is much more similar to the author. Her parents took the approach of "just go; we'll figure out how to pay for it" without any modicum of a plan . It took us about 4 years to clear that mess up.

I work as a public school teacher now and our approach to helping students prepare for the future is SO different. Even our best and brightest are taken on tours of trade schools. Many of our students opt for community college and hybrid tracks that get them a trade cert along with their diploma. Many of our students are incredibly focused and aware of what a generation before them endured.

[Cranky]

Yes, I'm sympathetic to the fact that people make dumb decisions when they are 18yo, and parents want the best for their kids.

I'm less sympathetic to the people who insisted in 2007 that property values would go up forever, and then got burned, but I'm considerable less than sympathetic to the people who manipulated and profited from that.

[asauer]

Yes.  I think many kids in that situation were told by someone in authority that it was necessary or would get them ahead in life.  At 18, I think few people have the ability to go a different path than the one their family sets for them.

[Much Fishing to Do]

"Freshman year of high school, when I lost my yearbook, which cost $40, my mother very nearly wept. College, which cost roughly $50,000 a year, was the only time that money did not seem to matter."  That sums up what it does seem the general attitude is I hear when adults talk to teenagers making these decisions so it is hard to think the 17 year old had a chance at making a better decision.  I doubt I did, school just cost a lot less in the state and at the time I went, and I didn't get into the top notch pricey private school I did apply to, so I guess in a way I luckily wasn't smart enough to be able to make that mistake...... 

Tuition, room and board for my kids at our Flagship State U. is now $120k for 4 years (looking at what people actually pay its more like $80k at the low income parent end, still a lot).  I'm sure most people wouldn't naturally think going to the state U for 4 years would be a stupid financial decision, which is probably the general line of thinking rather than doing calculations that I shouldn't spend X dollars as I will likely only make Y dollars, all numbers that just have no meaning to someone who hasn't started their career.

[Zikoris]

Eh. Kind of? Is the way I generally think "Wow, that sucks" when someone's bad decisions come back to bite them. Maybe it's controversial, but I think that by the time someone is 18 they should have moved well beyond the stage of not questioning things and just doing whatever people tell them without thinking about it. And I definitely seriously question the judgment and intelligence of any adult who says thy ended up in a bad financial situation by blindly doing what other people told them to, unless, like, they grew up in a cult or something.

[PizzaSteve]

Yes.  These kids are trying to become the best versions of their possible selves by investing in a quality education. Money and FIRE isnt everything in life. Fancy private colleges often have fabulous resources and a great variety of peopke to meet, well worth the cost, if leveraged. 

Examples include study abroad programs and international alumni that help guide you to do something meaningful to do with your life, both pre and post FIRE. Not that cheaper schools are not also well worthwhile, there are many great ones, but it is a bit more likely that your classmates will be both stimulating and broadening at a top school.

[DreamFIRE]

Eh. Kind of? Is the way I generally think "Wow, that sucks" when someone's bad decisions come back to bite them. Maybe it's controversial, but I think that by the time someone is 18 they should have moved well beyond the stage of not questioning things and just doing whatever people tell them without thinking about it. And I definitely seriously question the judgment and intelligence of any adult who says thy ended up in a bad financial situation by blindly doing what other people told them to, unless, like, they grew up in a cult or something.

I can't say that I sympathize.  It's just another part of life.

@swampwiz , do you post a link to everything you find on the internet???  It seems like it.

[sixwings]

I went to high school in the US (I'm Canadian and went to UG in Canada but went to boarding school in the US to play basketball for them, all expenses paid), and the education in the US is starting to seem like a scam. There is huge money spent by colleges and universities to market themselves and put pressure on kids to attend their private school. We used to have people from private colleges come and give us individual sales pitches. Like taking a 16 or 17 year old out for lunch to tell them that you personally want them to attend their college and they would do well there is a powerful sales pitch. I avoided that racket by just saying that I was canadian and going back to Canada but many didn't. The marketing behind higher ed is massive and for an 16-18 year old impossible to really understand.

I am fortunate to have made my decision to go back to Canada and not try to go down the US private school road. I went to a community college for my first 2 years which cost $1000 a semester and then transferred to a university for my second 2 years that cost around 3K a semester. I had a full time job at a hotel that I worked throughout and graduated with 0 debt, some savings, and a solid job. That wouldn't have been possible at a private US college. I was in college 2006-2011. (took an extra year for me as I was working full time and didn't want to do full course loads + full work, it worked out well for me).

[Kay-Ell]

I was born in ‘87, which means I was 18 in 2005 and 22 in 2009. A lot of the people I know graduated into a crappy economy with a lot of debt, some of them working entry level positions in restaurants or hospitality. It took, on average, about 5+ years for most of them to get to the career equivalent of an average starting place for someone with a degree. Making them late twenty-somethings with unattractive resumes. So yeah, I have sympathy. I don’t think high school students are well equipped with the tools they need to evaluate the ROI on their chosen degree at their chosen school. I definitely don’t think 18 year olds in 2005 could have been expected to know what was coming in the economy. I don’t think 18 year olds in general are sufficiently cautioned against taking on  unnecessary discretional debt during college either. And while I think they’re old enough by then to bear some responsibility for frivolous expenses in college, I don’t think it helps that they’re told (by many) that the debt you rack up in college is “good debt.”

My own personal story, culminated with me being FI at 29. And a lot of that that is because I didn’t graduate college. I dropped out after 1.5 semesters at a CC, and went straight into full time work at age 19 (2006, when the economy was good). By the time 2009 came around and my friend’s were graduating into a bad economy taking jobs as wait staff in restaurants, I was making around $36k per year, with zero debt, and was just starting to contribute to my 401k. All the while I felt like I was the screw up, college drop out, without an impressive degree because every adult I knew valued college so highly that even in a particularly unfavorable time to have racked up debt and missed out on work experience nobody was running the cost analysis. Fast forward 5 years, when a lot of my friends were finally recovering from the missed economic opportunities, able to get good jobs and finally making serious headway on their student loans, my own salary had grown to around double (70k), I’d seen some impressive 401k gains, and was beginning my journey into real estate investing. It wasn’t until I bought my 2nd rental property that anyone in my family started thinking that maybe, just maybe I hadn’t irrevocably screwed up my life by not going to college. They are all frugal and financially savvy people with bachelor and/or graduate degrees who would have been proud (and less concerned) to see me chipping away at my student loans. And while that path would surely have lead to FI too, given the specific economic realities of my age at high school graduation, it would have taken a lot longer if I was taking on debt in 2009 instead of investing in the market, or paying off debt a few years later instead of buying property.

[Mezzie]

In my area, we have a number of affordable, great quality community colleges within bus-riding distance. The community college in my city offers one year absolutely free to students who graduated from one of our high schools, and it has guarateed transfer programs to all CSUs and UCs. The high school I teach at waives the LSAT for students who graduate from our law academy and finish their GEs and a few more law classes at a local community college. If students get a great scholarship to a big-name school, more power to them. If not, then it seems pretty silly to not do GEs at one of our community colleges and then transfer. I like to remind my students that have been taught to look down on CCs that my degree only says the name of the university that granted my BA; no one would know I did my GEs at a CC unless I told them so (which I do). Also, many of my profs at the CC taught at the local university, too. The difference? I had smaller classes and paid less (example: my logic class had 25 students; the same prof taught the same class at the university to a room of 300 students and paid $33 for that class instead if $2,000).

So I don't have pity for people in my town that have been exposed to these benefits and still chose to take massive loans for a private college instead. I sincerely hope they found their experience worth it (and if they did, they probably aren't among the complainers). Outsude of my bubble, I don't know the circumstances or challenges. I'm well aware we have the best CC system in the country* and that people in other states don't have the same opportunities.

*We certainly say we do, anyway. :p

[Fishindude]

I'm pretty disappointed in parents who sit back and watch their kids bury themselves in this kind of debt.   We've got some friends who's kid just graduated college and has $300,000 in student loans.   Problem with these student loans is they aren't real specific about what the kid can use the money for, so they just treat it like a credit card they'll never have to pay back.

[marble_faun]

Yes, I have sympathy.

I'm an older millennial (raised in the pre-recession mindset of "follow your dreams" and "do what you love") and attended a fancy private college. 

Fortunately I got out with relatively low student loan debt (four figures). I remember being hesitant to even accept that much. When the loan papers were put in front of me, I was a 17-year-old who had only worked minimum wage jobs, and it seemed like a enormous amount of money.  But everyone around me minimized my concerns and encouraged the debt, saying it would be worth it for the good jobs I would get in the future and the experience of an elite-level education. So I signed the papers.

For me college worked the way it's supposed to.  I got launched into a decent career with the help of the alumni network. The loans were low-interest, so the debt didn't grow much. Eventually I paid it all off, and that was that.

For a lot of people... the story is similar except maybe the loan amount is five or even six figures, the interest rate is insane, and maybe the particular college isn't an institution that will open doors.  But trusted authority figures will encourage the teenager to sign on anyway, saying it will all be okay in the end. Someone could have a far worse outcome, very easily.

Now, I do think that by the time of graduate school, a person should have a better head on their shoulders about these things. But even with grad school, there's a lot of misinformation and awful advice in circulation. After the recession a lot of people went back to school to sit out the bad job market, racking up more loans. Even in seemingly lucrative, professional fields, this can be a horrible idea. Law school in particular seems to have put a lot of people into useless debt.

[ender]

I find it difficult not to empathize with people who by no fault of their own start their adult life off following terrible advice from the people they have trusted their entire life and result in massive debt.

It's easy for me to imagine that situation happening to me. Hell, I went to an out of state "state school" and it cost something like $10k/year more than where my siblings went and I had no idea at the time about the magnitude of that decision. And that's with reasonably financially savvy parents.

A kid who has parents who pressure the "college is the key to success in life!" attitude is basically screwed if their parents (or school) pushes this attitude on them.

[jlcnuke]

I have a hard time being sympathetic of people who had the information available to make a better decision and didn't. I sympathize with them only on the fact that those they trusted should have, generally, been able to give them better advice and failed to do so. The choices that ultimately led to their debt burden were their own and controllable, so I don't sympathize with them for the outcome itself.

[Zikoris]

Who do you propose they ask? What infallible and credible source is there out there to clearly help them decide if a major investment in school is or isn’t worth it? Even people here on this forum have described their expensive education as worth it in terms of networking, education and experience.

Personally, I don't think they should ask anybody. If I want to know how much this job or that job pays, I look it up on Glassdoor. If I want to know what the job market is like for a specific role, I check out job postings on any of the big sites (narrowed down by location). If I wanted to know how student loan payments would be, I'd google "student loan repayment calculator" and use one of those. There's also the "talking to people who are currently employed in the role to see what they think" method.

[Erica]

Yes, because I don't think most 18-year-olds have the capacity to understand the impact of their decision. And many of them kept bad advice from parents, guidance counselors, and other trusted adults. I have less sympathy for people who rack up debt for graduate degrees, because by that time you should know better.

Spot on. They are too young to understand their parents don't understand either. It's taking advantage of a population who isn't equipped with the ability to know any better. Disgusting.

At least California has 1 year free College education now.

[jlcnuke]

I have a hard time being sympathetic of people who had the information available to make a better decision and didn't. I sympathize with them only on the fact that those they trusted should have, generally, been able to give them better advice and failed to do so. The choices that ultimately led to their debt burden were their own and controllable, so I don't sympathize with them for the outcome itself.

Harsh.

Geez man.
I work in financial consulting exclusively with people who have doctorates and high incomes. These are smart fucking people and even they frequently get misled into terrible financial decisions due to trusting people who are supposed to be trust worthy. Professionals who other smart people vouched for.

No one has the capacity to question everything. Everyone has a limit to their info bandwidth. Everyone makes a lot of major decisions based on expert advice. If a young person consults everyone they consider to be an expert on the matter and they all consistently give the same advice of “go for it!” “It’s worth it!” and “don’t worry about the money, it will work out in the end and you will get so much further going to that private school” then why would they question further?

Some might, and good for them, but I certainly wouldn’t expect it of a young person. They haven’t yet learned just how fucking fallible “experts” are yet. They’re not cynical enough to protect themselves yet from the people they trust. Learning to do that usually requires a lot of suffering.

Who do you propose they ask? What infallible and credible source is there out there to clearly help them decide if a major investment in school is or isn’t worth it? Even people here on this forum have described their expensive education as worth it in terms of networking, education and experience.

The entirety of the internet exists and in that vast information resource it has answers for pretty much any question out there. That includes the thousands of articles on "is this school worth it", "is this degree worth it", "should I borrow this much for school" etc etc. If a person is too ignorant to even ask the questions and try to find an answer before taking on large loads of debt then I don't feel sorry for them. If they ask the questions, then decide to take on the debt then I don't feel sorry for them because they made an informed decision.  20 or 30 years ago there was little chance of researching the costs of colleges and comparing that to career salaries based on major. Now you can do that research for a given college and every major you might be interested in within a day or two. With all the information at our fingertips these days, ignorance is not an excuse, it's just a result of laziness in not asking the questions that should be obvious.  People are accountable for their actions and inaction, and failure to bother researching what you're getting yourself into for 4+ years and taking on massive debt while doing so is something they should be held accountable for if they make that choice to not bother looking into it.

Note that I never said taking on a lot of debt for college was never worth it. There are times it's worth it. Taking on 6-figure debt to get a high-paying degree from Harvard can be a smart move. Taking on the same debt to get a degree in underwater basket-weaving from Harvard would not be a smart move however.

P.S. https://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm most jobs are covered by verified information giving pay etc. You can even look up expected growth of the field etc very easily. Sitting right there on the government website waiting to be read.  The hardest part is imagining what career you might get with that degree you're going for. Quite frankly though, if you can't even think of a career you're going to college for, why would you spend the money to go in the first place?? That would be like ordering food before deciding what you'll eat. Maybe you'll eat it, maybe you're just throwing money away...

[magickelly]

Who do you propose they ask? What infallible and credible source is there out there to clearly help them decide if a major investment in school is or isn’t worth it? Even people here on this forum have described their expensive education as worth it in terms of networking, education and experience.

Personally, I don't think they should ask anybody. If I want to know how much this job or that job pays, I look it up on Glassdoor. If I want to know what the job market is like for a specific role, I check out job postings on any of the big sites (narrowed down by location). If I wanted to know how student loan payments would be, I'd google "student loan repayment calculator" and use one of those. There's also the "talking to people who are currently employed in the role to see what they think" method.

You have high expectations for 17 year olds. How many kids know exactly what they want to do when they are 17? How many 17 year olds can even name 75% of the roles at big corporations? Who at 17 or 18 says, "Gee, I want to be a claims adjuster / a textbook sales rep / market researcher / compliance specialist / project manager with a PMP! " .... and so on?

As someone else posted, most degrees don't lead straight to a specific job and a great many jobs don't require a degree in anything specific other than skills that you'd learn from a strong liberal arts curriculum - problem solving, analytic and synthetic thinking, solid written and verbal communication skills.

[ender]

The entirety of the internet exists and in that vast information resource it has answers for pretty much any question out there.

Ah, but how many 16/17 year olds:

• Know enough to know what to look for - knowing the questions to ask is the hard part
• Distrust their primary sources of input on college (parents, guidance counselors, etc)
• Are willing to tell their parents "no" regarding college - for many, this is a massive expectation they place on their children
• Are willing to buck social pressure from their entire school of classmates (don't underestimate this pressure), most of whom are probably going to college, too?

I might be incredibly financially savvy now but when I was 17... I was not - I never thought to even question whether college was a good idea. It just was the next step I was obviously supposed to take.

I'm pretty libertarian on most political views yet I see the entire college/university system as one that takes advantage of millions of minors every year. Even though I graduated with zero student loan debt myself (barely..).

[OtherJen]

Who do you propose they ask? What infallible and credible source is there out there to clearly help them decide if a major investment in school is or isn’t worth it? Even people here on this forum have described their expensive education as worth it in terms of networking, education and experience.

Personally, I don't think they should ask anybody. If I want to know how much this job or that job pays, I look it up on Glassdoor. If I want to know what the job market is like for a specific role, I check out job postings on any of the big sites (narrowed down by location). If I wanted to know how student loan payments would be, I'd google "student loan repayment calculator" and use one of those. There's also the "talking to people who are currently employed in the role to see what they think" method.

I wish those tools had been available when my peers and I were applying to universities in 1995. I managed to graduate without debt but some of my classmates took a decade or more to pay off the loans that their teachers, guidance counselors, and parents all strongly encouraged. As far as I can tell, kids 10 years younger (here in the USA at least) faced even more pressure from trusted adults, paid higher tuition costs across the board (for example, tuition at my alma mater doubled in that time span), and graduated into a terrible job market. I do have sympathy for people caught in that clusterfuck when they were (in most cases) too young even to vote and had very little real world experience.

[Cranky]

Yes, because I don't think most 18-year-olds have the capacity to understand the impact of their decision. And many of them kept bad advice from parents, guidance counselors, and other trusted adults. I have less sympathy for people who rack up debt for graduate degrees, because by that time you should know better.

Spot on. They are too young to understand their parents don't understand either. It's taking advantage of a population who isn't equipped with the ability to know any better. Disgusting.

At least California has 1 year free College education now.

California used to have 4 years of free in state tuition. Why are people willing to settle for so much less now?

[FINate]

Presumably the added cost of a fancy private university is "worth it" so no, I don't sympathize with those who go this route and rack up lots of debt. It's worth it and will pay off in the long term.

I completely sympathize with those who were misguided/mislead info a field of study and/or college with poor ROI. My feelings on this are independent of debt incurred or if the schools is public or private. What matters is the cost to that person relative to the value derived.

We don't have a "student loan crisis" - we have a "cost of education crisis" resulting in large amounts of student loans. Focusing attention on the debt is a clever misdirection from the root problem.

Therefore, when I read a sob story about someone with huge debts after attending Fancy Pants University (any school really), and yet that person insists that it was worth it...yeah, no sympathy here. Stop trying to have it both ways. Either it was a worth it or it wasn't. If it was worth it then pay your debts and stop complaining. Otherwise, stop perpetuating the myth that an expensive education is "priceless."

[Cgbg]

DH and I sat our 18-yo niece down one year. She’d wanted to talk to us about co-signing for her student loans. She wanted to be a high school teacher and wanted to attend an out of state private university.

We prepared spreadsheets in advance and planned on what we would say. It made so much more sense for her to stay in state- live at home- and commute to the local public university. It was easily affordable just by borrowing some federal student loans (she would’ve qualified for the maximum Pell grant) which really was her best case scenario.

Our conversation with her didn’t go well. She slammed the door as she left. Her grandmother signed the private loans for her and she ended up with over $100k in student loans (private and federal.) She’s now a public school teacher, which means she needed a masters degree too. For years we’d get calls from creditors for her.

I doubt she’ll ever pay off her loans.

Kids don’t always make the best decisions. That experience definitely made us talk even more often to our kids about not borrowing $ for college.

[familyandfarming]

In the early 2000's I wrote a college guide for my state. During that time I started to figure out that cost of college was climbing FAST! We sat down as a family and made a strategy. When they turned 14 they started working 40 hours a week during the summers as lifeguards and WSI instructors. My husband and I did everything we could to make them comfortable in their work lives; we filled the car with gas, kept it clean and running, packed great lunches, and washed their clothes.

When they were 16 they began 12 hour days 5 days a week at the pool during the summer. They drove a very crappy 1991 LeBaron to school and at age 18 picked up certifications that would pay better than minimum wage (CNA & Pharmacy Tech). They applied for scholarships like crazy and made sure their grades and ACT were top notch. They applied to colleges that were known for good financial aid. While in college they worked those better than minimum wage jobs. Our three girls graduated with highly marketable degrees; Radiology, a triple major of finance, marketing & PR and a double in accounting and finance.

As parents, we pulled our financial wagons in a circle. No vacations. No extras. We did this for the 10 years our 3 children were in college and some years before and after. We told our kids that they could only have $20,000 of student loan debt maximum. We had meetings often to strategize how we as a family could make this work for each of them.

They are all now debt free before 26 and none ever lived at home after college graduation.

Was it a tough go? Sure. Did they still have fun and party like the rest of their peers? Heck yeah! Did they work more than most? Maybe. Do they now know how to work adult jobs and save their money? I think you know the answer.

[use2betrix]

I sympathize more with people who were told by everyone to go to the best school and that they must attend the best college.

To this day - I have a much harder time comprehending how people chose majors with seemingly no job outlook. No real career even in mind when they chose their major, just something they were “interested in.”

It isn’t hard to look up average salaries, job outlooks, etc. I changed my major 2-3x before one stuck and I was a lot of $ in the whole and barely got an associates after attending a tech school. To this day each of my original majors I believe I would have been successful in financially. I have found a bit of a niche where I’m at, but the others would have been good as well.

[ender]

To this day - I have a much harder time comprehending how people chose majors with seemingly no job outlook. No real career even in mind when they chose their major, just something they were “interested in.”

That surprises you?

Our culture in America right now is all about this sort of thing. "Do what you love" or variants of that are super popular perspectives right now.

Perhaps this is changing but when I was in high school 10+ years ago nearly no one was advocating choosing a major that had career choices and in fact, more often than not you'd hear something like, "you won't know until you get there" or "most people change their majors" -- both of which are entirely antithetical to having that poor high schooler pick a career.

Not to mention most colleges/universities are by design not intended to be career prep institutions but rather "experience" or "adventure" based types of marketing. When I was in Germany for a summer ~10 years ago, the university students I interacted with were surprised by how many non-major electives we have to take. Apparently, there it's much more focused with nearly all coursework relating to future field of study.

And to top this off, many degrees frankly don't have a job outlook, yet universities/colleges are more than happy to graduate students from those programs. I highly doubt that if someone wants to change majors to philosophy or psychology anyone ever tells them, "you realize this is basically a grad-school track degree, right?"

[use2betrix]

To this day - I have a much harder time comprehending how people chose majors with seemingly no job outlook. No real career even in mind when they chose their major, just something they were “interested in.”

That surprises you?

Our culture in America right now is all about this sort of thing. "Do what you love" or variants of that are super popular perspectives right now.

Perhaps this is changing but when I was in high school 10+ years ago nearly no one was advocating choosing a major that had career choices and in fact, more often than not you'd hear something like, "you won't know until you get there" or "most people change their majors" -- both of which are entirely antithetical to having that poor high schooler pick a career.

Not to mention most colleges/universities are by design not intended to be career prep institutions but rather "experience" or "adventure" based types of marketing. When I was in Germany for a summer ~10 years ago, the university students I interacted with were surprised by how many non-major electives we have to take. Apparently, there it's much more focused with nearly all coursework relating to future field of study.

And to top this off, many degrees frankly don't have a job outlook, yet universities/colleges are more than happy to graduate students from those programs. I highly doubt that if someone wants to change majors to philosophy or psychology anyone ever tells them, "you realize this is basically a grad-school track degree, right?"

I graduated in ‘06 so I’m familiar with the timeframe/generation. I can see sympathy in being influenced by school choices and cost, but again, how in the heck someone can not put two and two together and think “we’ll, my career is based on my major, maybe I should decide a career path and perform a 5 second google search for the wages and outlook?”

If someone told you to eat a pile of crap, would you? At some point people need to be expected to have some common sense, and choosing “what you love” with no thought on what you’ll do after, makes about no sense.

Maybe a required high school reading should be “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.”

[ender]

I graduated in ‘06 so I’m familiar with the timeframe/generation. I can see sympathy in being influenced by school choices and cost, but again, how in the heck someone can not put two and two together and think “we’ll, my career is based on my major, maybe I should decide a career path and perform a 5 second google search for the wages and outlook?”

If someone told you to eat a pile of crap, would you? At some point people need to be expected to have some common sense, and choosing “what you love” with no thought on what you’ll do after, makes about no sense.

Maybe a required high school reading should be “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.”

I've known quite a few people from really rough family situations who found themselves in college with no plan.

It's easy to sit in my Armchair of Privilege and say, "they should have known better" to faceless people making obviously bad decisions. But when you meet and know someone who has lowlife parents and ends up in college with debt for no reason, who never had good parental guidance to not do that, it's a lot less easy to judge from the Armchair of Privilege it was entirely their fault.

I would also find it far easier to "blame" students if colleges and universities weren't basically preying on them because they know students can get nearly unlimited access to money. The college isn't liable for the loans, so they really have minimal incentive to not ruin the financial lives of students who attend.

This problem of student loan debt would be dramatically reduced if loans were dischargeable. No where else can you get a loan for so much with so little as collateral (in most cases, literally nothing). Would a bank make a $100,000 personal loan to a broke 17 year old making maybe minimum wage, just because that 17 year old was planning on going to college? Absolutely not.

[mozar]

For this article I'm surprised that in 2011 it was still that easy to get bank loans. I definitely have sympathy, just a year ago I talked my 17 year old cousin out of majoring in psychology. My cousin had no interest in psychology but her mother kept telling her over and over again to major in psychology because "we'll always need therapists." Crazy. Last I heard she was deciding between engineering and computer science (phew). I literally had to pull her aside and argue with her about it.
As dumb about money as most people are (have you seen the overheard at work thread?) I don't expect  16/17 year old kid to somehow be a genius and overcome all the bad info out there.

I went to a fancy private school but it was not that expensive when I started. While I was in college the school I went to actually increased its tuition by 52%. https://www.forbes.com/2007/01/19/most-expensive-colleges-biz-cx_tvr_0119college.html#56fd597e4203
How in the world was I supposed to know that when I was 16?

[Penn42]

Lots of interesting conversation going on in here.  I am somewhat torn based on my own experience. 

On the one hand I definitely agree with many that it is ridiculous to expect children to be able to make such a large financial decision soundly. 

On the other hand, even though I consider college to have been a waste of money for me, it was a majorly important step in my personal development.  Whether or not it was worth it in that sense I do not know because I don't know what I'd be like today had I not gone to college. 

However, now that I think about it, I feel pretty confident saying that if my debt had been much larger than it was (as in if I had gone to a private school, which is was this thread is about after all) the experience would probably not have been worth it. 

In conclusion: yes.

[Penn42]

To this day - I have a much harder time comprehending how people chose majors with seemingly no job outlook. No real career even in mind when they chose their major, just something they were “interested in.”

That surprises you?

Our culture in America right now is all about this sort of thing. "Do what you love" or variants of that are super popular perspectives right now.

Perhaps this is changing but when I was in high school 10+ years ago nearly no one was advocating choosing a major that had career choices and in fact, more often than not you'd hear something like, "you won't know until you get there" or "most people change their majors" -- both of which are entirely antithetical to having that poor high schooler pick a career.

Not to mention most colleges/universities are by design not intended to be career prep institutions but rather "experience" or "adventure" based types of marketing. When I was in Germany for a summer ~10 years ago, the university students I interacted with were surprised by how many non-major electives we have to take. Apparently, there it's much more focused with nearly all coursework relating to future field of study.

And to top this off, many degrees frankly don't have a job outlook, yet universities/colleges are more than happy to graduate students from those programs. I highly doubt that if someone wants to change majors to philosophy or psychology anyone ever tells them, "you realize this is basically a grad-school track degree, right?"

I graduated in ‘06 so I’m familiar with the timeframe/generation. I can see sympathy in being influenced by school choices and cost, but again, how in the heck someone can not put two and two together and think “we’ll, my career is based on my major, maybe I should decide a career path and perform a 5 second google search for the wages and outlook?”

If someone told you to eat a pile of crap, would you? At some point people need to be expected to have some common sense, and choosing “what you love” with no thought on what you’ll do after, makes about no sense.

Maybe a required high school reading should be “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.”

In retrospect I absolutely agree with you.  Even if I had enjoyed my college experience I still would have come out with a completely useless degree.  But I didn't enjoy the experience and have no interest in anything having to do with the degree anyway.  I would have approached it completely differently if I knew what I know now.  Perhaps I would have had a better experience too!  Who knows?

However, at the time I was making those decisions I'm unsure if I had the mental capabilities to see through the bullshit.  I don't think I was dumb, but misled.  All the folks giving the "follow your passion" advice looked successful to 17-18 year old me, after all.  Had I known they'd likely be far more successful if they'd made more pragmatic decisions in the past I might have taken the grain of salt, but I'm unsure there was any way for me to know.  I don't think this version of events is particularly rare, either. 

I kinda wish I wanted kids so that I would have an opportunity to break the vicious cycle, haha!  But alas, it's not to be.

[Nate79]

No, I spend more time thinking about the absolute stupidity of the parents who don't teach their kids to make better decisions, don't tell their kids no, don't refuse to cosign these idiotic loans, as well the brain dead morons who loan kids and their parents this amount of money.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

[mbl]

Reading the article and noting the comments above.
I agree to a point that many parents and schools in some manner encouraged the "reaching" to borrow and attend expensive colleges.
Without ever calculating what the loan payments could be upon graduation.   And that applies to English majors or medical students.   

That being said,  I never really read any direct statement of responsibility on the part of the OP or the parents.
Instead a focus on placing full blame on the system, the banks, the schools, the economy and any other entity that came to mind.
Now, an illness is a game changer and could have led the OP's parents to bankruptcy in and of itself. 
It might not have made a difference.  And most certainly, that would for the most part have been out of their control.

But, I suspe, the parents were not fully responsible with money well before the OP went to college and before the Mom got sick.

I felt that they were jacked up to the limit of their income and might not have had any fiscal sense to begin with.
JMHO

[BTDretire]

I can sympathize with their situation right up to the point where they
want to take money from me to pay for it.

[skp]

I think it's interesting that most of the people here that are sympathetic, ended up with no loans.
I am the total opposite.
I graduated in 1980 from a fancy pants private college in nursing, when I could have gone to the local hospital nursing program.
I thought I was smart.  I wanted the prestige. I did have a good experience there, but it was not monetarily worth it.  I was never ambitious and ended up working the same job as the diploma nurses all my life.  By the end of the fancy pants program I owed about 1/2 a years salary. I paid it off in 2 years.
My parents had 8th grade educations and did not guide me in my decision.  All my dad cared was that I could take care of myself.  But while they didn't guide me educationally, they did instill in me the value that I was responsible for my own decisions.
That fancy pants private school tuition has increased signifigantly.  But so have salaries.  If I graduated today, I would probably owe a years salary.  It might take me 4 years instead of 2 to pay it off.  But I made the decision, dumb or not, and I am responsible for it.

[Spitfire]

I sympathize to the extent of the kids being ignorant about the true cost and consequences and those with a terrible situation at home that they need to get away from. Not everyone has financially savvy parents or a nice home life that allows them to stay there through college.

I do not feel bad for those who are guided to think about the financial aspect and decide to go the debt-heavy route. If they have good information and advice but don't want to listen, that's on them.

[Warlord1986]

I sympathize with people who were given bad advice and got in a bad situation.

I don't sympathize with people who got in a bad situation and then time, energy, and money making it worse.

[Pigeon]

Yes, I do.  I think very few people know a whole lot about the world at the age of 17.  Most young people know a little bit about common careers, like being a doctor or a teacher or a mechanic, but don't have a realistic idea of what those people actually do, what educational and experiential requirements are, or what the total employment picture is like.  They know nothing about a host of careers that they haven't had direct exposure to.

Kids at that age are more influenced by their peers than they are by their parents.  That's sad, but it's true.  We had always told my kids that we would pay for 4 years of public university and if they wanted something more expensive, they would have to figure out how to make that happen.  It was extremely hard for one of my daughters to listen to the non-stop trashing of the state's excellent public education system by her friends who came from wealthy families that placed incredible pressure on their kids to go to top tier privates.  It made her feel like she was making a huge mistake by not taking out whopping loans.  She ended up going to a public college, but even there, she's got friends who are living on financial aid (loans), doing semesters abroad that will put them on the 5+ years to graduation path.  They are having much more fun than she is.  She knows they will be paying off loans she won't, but still...Delayed gratification is hard and I think more so when you are young.

There still are lots of people telling students to follow their bliss. 

If you're mature enough to know what you want in life and how to get there at age 17-18, that's awesome, but most people just aren't there yet.

[SimpleCycle]

I have very little sympathy for whining about your lot in life when you are the recipient of a fancy college degree and have a job as an editor at the New York Times, which was probably partially the result of said fancy college degree.  He basically is a good outcome, and can't see it.  The author also chose at 21 or 22 to continue on for an M.A. with borrowed money.

I have much more sympathy for people who are victims of predatory lending for low-value college degrees.  They are the ones who were led into a bad investment by the "need" to go to college no matter what and the advice of people they trusted, and have much less capacity to recover from that error.

Edited to add: and I have a fancy private college degree and a fancy public masters degree that were obtained with a substantial amount of debt.  I am also a good outcome, and I am very thankful for the opportunities I have had.

[almcclur]

I was the first in my family to go to college. My mom was a single parent and we were super poor but she always emphasized education and specifically how important college would be. I got good grades, and tested well and got into the colleges I applied to with some scholarships and plenty of government loans and grants. I really wanted to go to Emory for some reason but when I saw the loans I would end up with I ended up choosing a state school instead. My mom was always very clear about how bad debt was. We save our money, and don't spend what we don't have--I learned that early. What she couldn't help with was college, though. I gave my major no thought at all. I enjoyed reading so I became an English major and took lots of art classes. I had never known anyone with a professional degree. I know it sounds so dumb but I literally had no idea that there was a process to getting those kinds of jobs. I thought--you go to college. Get good grades. Graduate. And then the jobs will be available to you. Really shockingly ignorant in hindsight, but I can only offer that the internet was new and unusual then and I didn't have a computer anyway to research such things. I know so many people would have been happy to help me figure these things out, but I didn't even know that I didn't understand. All that is to say, sometimes kids are dumb and make dumb choices.

It seems like at the very least there ought to be one class in high school about the logistics of college.

[mathlete]

Yes. 18 year olds are ill equipped to borrow that kind of money and make those kinds of decisions.

What's more, we don't place enough blame on the banks that lend them the money in the first place, or the government who encourages them to lend the money, or the corrupt private interests who encourage the government.

[therethere]

As someone who graduated with 100k debt from a private school. Yes, I do have sympathy for those who took on high levels of debt in the era of "just go to college!". However, I do not have sympathy for those who took on debt and now believe it isn't their responsibility to pay it back. Or those who have 10 years of payments and can't understand why the balance is growing. Those people, barring medical problems, really have no excuse to at least be attempting to pay it off.

I've said this many times. College decisions are starting to be made when you are 16/17. You are barred from so many things but not making major decisions that could affect your life for 15-20 years. 25+ with REPAYE. You can't be trusted to buy a can of spray paint at Home Depot but you can take on 25k in loans a year indefinitely!

Also, when I was in school they made it virtually impossible to transfer credits to other universities. This basically forced you to stay to finish the degree at that school or quit and start over somewhere else. Every year my financial aid stayed the same, but tuition went up 5% or more like clockwork. At least 10k of my 100k loans could be attributed to rising tuition alone. Proving even if you did turn to be cost-conscious miraculously at the age of 18, you would still be stuck with tuition increases you can't control and credits you can't transfer.

[mm1970]

Eh. Kind of? Is the way I generally think "Wow, that sucks" when someone's bad decisions come back to bite them. Maybe it's controversial, but I think that by the time someone is 18 they should have moved well beyond the stage of not questioning things and just doing whatever people tell them without thinking about it. And I definitely seriously question the judgment and intelligence of any adult who says thy ended up in a bad financial situation by blindly doing what other people told them to, unless, like, they grew up in a cult or something.

I don’t think that’s a fair assessment.

I think it’s very reasonable for an 18 year old to feel like they are making a sound decision when every authority figure they ask advice from is telling them that it’s a good idea. Guidance counsellors are supposed to be experts, parents are supposed to provide grounding guidance. It takes an enormous amount of self assurance to decide that every person that you trust to be wiser than you is wrong.

Plenty of adults make dumber decisions based on less guidance, so I really don’t fault a teenager for not being able to wrap their minds around the financial impact of their decisions.

It’s also incredibly difficult to wrap your mind around the real-life impact of debt when you’ve never actually had to support yourself before. I was quite savvy about finances when I took on my quarter million dollar debt for my professional program, and I knew the math would work in my favour, but even then, I wasn’t able to predict the real world impact of what that debt would mean for me.
It’s hard to understand until you live it.

Mine was also a situation were everyone from every walk of life shrugged off my debt because I was going to be a “doctor” I would be “able to afford it”...no one knew my particular industry was about to take a MASSIVE and potentially irreversible hit and be in the worst state of decline it’s ever been in, making salaries and working conditions a nightmare for most new grads...oops.

I constantly have parents asking me to help push their kids towards my profession and I’m like “do you actually know anything about it? Do you know the math? Do you understand the implications of the debt?”

I actively mentor young students looking to get into my field and even at ages 22-35, highly intelligent and educated people still have a hard time wrapping their minds around the debt load and lack the ability to assess if it’s worth it or not. Especially since every single person out there except me is telling them it’s an idiot-proof decision and that if they can get in that they’ll be set for life.

That kind of dominant social discourse is difficult to go against.

+1

[mm1970]

In my area, we have a number of affordable, great quality community colleges within bus-riding distance. The community college in my city offers one year absolutely free to students who graduated from one of our high schools, and it has guarateed transfer programs to all CSUs and UCs. The high school I teach at waives the LSAT for students who graduate from our law academy and finish their GEs and a few more law classes at a local community college. If students get a great scholarship to a big-name school, more power to them. If not, then it seems pretty silly to not do GEs at one of our community colleges and then transfer. I like to remind my students that have been taught to look down on CCs that my degree only says the name of the university that granted my BA; no one would know I did my GEs at a CC unless I told them so (which I do). Also, many of my profs at the CC taught at the local university, too. The difference? I had smaller classes and paid less (example: my logic class had 25 students; the same prof taught the same class at the university to a room of 300 students and paid $33 for that class instead if $2,000).

So I don't have pity for people in my town that have been exposed to these benefits and still chose to take massive loans for a private college instead. I sincerely hope they found their experience worth it (and if they did, they probably aren't among the complainers). Outsude of my bubble, I don't know the circumstances or challenges. I'm well aware we have the best CC system in the country* and that people in other states don't have the same opportunities.

*We certainly say we do, anyway. :p

My CA city has a great CC with the same offer.  But I think it might be 2 years free.  I still have sympathy for people who choose the private college route, depending on their age.  The 2 free years of CC is fairly recent. 

[mm1970]

Who do you propose they ask? What infallible and credible source is there out there to clearly help them decide if a major investment in school is or isn’t worth it? Even people here on this forum have described their expensive education as worth it in terms of networking, education and experience.

Personally, I don't think they should ask anybody. If I want to know how much this job or that job pays, I look it up on Glassdoor. If I want to know what the job market is like for a specific role, I check out job postings on any of the big sites (narrowed down by location). If I wanted to know how student loan payments would be, I'd google "student loan repayment calculator" and use one of those. There's also the "talking to people who are currently employed in the role to see what they think" method.

And you are 31 years old.  We are talking about teenagers here, who probably don't even know what the fuck they want to be.  Probably doesn't help to ask people about certain jobs, what they are like, and what they pay when the world is a big ocean and you are just learning to tread water.

[Fishindude]

I don't think you should be too quick to let them off the hook for making poor borrowing decisions, just because they are young.  A great many of us were working and earning for ourselves prior to age 18, buying our own automobiles, our own clothing, etc.   And many of these kids are taking these loans still in their mid to late 20's.

Anyone smart enough to buy a car and work a job with a steady paycheck should be smart enough to know what they are getting themselves into when they borrow money.  What ruffles my feathers the most is the crying about having to pay back this debt.

[Slee_stack]

I don't think you should be too quick to let them off the hook for making poor borrowing decisions, just because they are young.  A great many of us were working and earning for ourselves prior to age 18, buying our own automobiles, our own clothing, etc.   And many of these kids are taking these loans still in their mid to late 20's.

Anyone smart enough to buy a car and work a job with a steady paycheck should be smart enough to know what they are getting themselves into when they borrow money.  What ruffles my feathers the most is the crying about having to pay back this debt.

I was thinking along the same line.

I wonder if the newly minted grads that find themselves in a student loan pickle every had any responsibility money-wise prior to graduating.

I learned very early on the value of a dollar.  Basically, I wouldn't be able to do or buy much of anything at all if I wasn't paying for it myself.  You realize COST and consequence this way almost instantly.   For me that was at 14 or 15.  Maybe these high-schoolers  never payed a single bill?  That's insanely foreign to me.  Live with scarcity...you quickly learn to be smart.

By the time I was looking at colleges...hell yeah...VALUE (Career options) and COST were the top considerations.  Honestly, there were no other considerations.

My parents weren't exactly financial role-models either.  They were definitely more of the 'choose the best...as in prestigious' mindset.

Yet, I'd already felt the pain of paying for things for several years.  It was easy to see I'd have much more pain with school costs.

In retrospect, my biggest regret was not picking the absolute cheapest school.  I chose the second cheapest.  Oh well.


So its tough to sympathize.  I'm more upset at their terrible parents....you can still make it past that.  At some point you have to take the blinders off and do a reality check.

[OtherJen]

Also, I think a lot of you have a disconnect about how much research was really possible online for the cohort that was graduating around the start of the Great Recession. If you graduated in 2007/8 you most likely started college in 2003/4 and were applying for college in the 2002/3 time frame. I didn't get broadband internet until around 2002 and when I was looking into colleges I used dial-up internet over a Lynx web browser (i.e. text only). I was looking up salary information using BLS reference books(!) that were two to five years out of date and I as at a good public library at the time. Despite all of that I still ended up getting burned (really hard) when the Dot Com Bubble burst and the college I was at lost all of its co-ops.

Yep. When I finished undergrad in 2001, we had dial-up that barely worked (I lived at home) and the only reason we had it at all was because my parents didn't want me on campus all night long (I attended an inner city university). My physical chemistry lab partner (also on dial-up) and I needed to use a particular website because it had a research model for calculations. Since neither of us had cell phones (not even Nokia bricks), that meant that we would discuss strategy on the phone, hang up, disconnect our phones, plug in the modems, get on the barebones and frequently crashing website, attempt the work, and rinse/repeat.

Also, Glassdoor wasn't founded until 2007. Google as a company was founded in 1998, sure, but I don't think any of us were using it then. I known that I was still using Netscape browser. I'm still amazed at how easy it is to get information now because I was limited to mailers from colleges interested in my SAT scores and my high school guidance counselor's office when it came to college costs (as anyone without internet access would have been).