Always nice to see a comment set off the morality police! Been a few days and thought I'd log in to see what's up and can say I wasn't disappointed. Gotta be honest that this forum has been fairly piss at answering what I originally signed up for (seeking advice on how to get health insurance costs down as a self-employed person) but I always get a kick out of suggesting income based repayment in these loan threads and watching everyone swarm in!
Gonna be honest. Unless you are in a hard science where you need a lab, multi-million dollar equipment, etc. to learn, you are getting screwed paying even $1 for college. I do a lot of contract work with universities and you realize a lot on the business side. For one thing, how universities pay the majority of their adjunct teachers (who form most of their faculty) absolute piss to either develop or teach a class. Do the math. Intro level class with 50 - 100 students at $2k a pop. That is $50k - $100k. At even your *best* schools, the average non-superstar professor may make $10k. More realistically, $2k-$3k for a regular semester class. The school is gobbling up the rest of that money and you got yourself someone teaching the class who is probably on food stamps themselves (since they are too stupid to realize that academia is a sham and they just gotta do something with that worthless PhD in English). They predate on these professors who just have to be part of the "academy" and routinely pass them over for even the lowest level FT gigs.
If it pleases the morality police, I don't have a dollar in student loan debt myself (since I knew school was stupid in anything but a hard science and went for free), but ever since a late night search on a doctor's forum where I saw people with $200k, $300k, $500k, or more in debt effectively utilizing the income based loan system to keep more money to invest, I knew that it didn't make sense for the poor barista with a MA or office worker to eat rice and beans all day to pay off their loans. Hell, before there was this REPAYE system, I even read threads about doctors getting someone to take their online classes for them at a community college so that they could be "enrolled" and not pay a penny off on their loans. All the while they were stacking money to open their private practice or what have you.
Since I am just spewing junk, let me touch on something else. Think about our exalted leader MMM. Yeah he saved a shitton of his income, but he also got lucky making mega bucks ($100k+) just cause he was in the right place at the right time. Him and his wife both were making what, $100k a pop, for dev skills that are all outsourced to India nowadays. Shit changes. If he came out with a similar skillset adjusted for say "inflation" today, wouldn't be making nearly as much. I watch kids willing to move cross country wherever with *damn* good experience, skills, etc. in tech and they may just be at $10k+ more a year compared to just your plain old office grunt. Shit is tough out there and I don't blame people utilizing what is in the damn terms of their deal to try to make it all work.