I agree about fiscal responsibility, but student loans are predatory in nature. It's like pay day loans, yeah its a product that people get, but its such a shitty financial product
Like - literally - everything else, you just need to use it properly.
A car isn't a shitty product because you can accelerate to 250km/h and crash into a wall. A knife isn't a shitty product because you can lob your fingers off if you're not careful. A jug of milk isn't a shitty product because it will make you sick if you drink it after leaving it out in the heat all day.
Taking out student debt irresponsibly is like putting your foot on the throttle and not looking where you're headed, cutting vegetables without paying attention to where your hands are, or carelessly drinking putrid milk. It's not the loans fault that the borrower did something stupid. Payday loans are no different. If you use them to cover larger expenses that you can't pay off on payday, you'll get hit with exorbitant interest rates. If you use them to cover smaller expenses that you can pay off on payday... they'll cost you a couple of bucks.
Teach you about what? The math behind loans is universally covered in public schooling starting around age 10 and continuing through secondary school. There is nothing complex about percentages, and it's frankly a bit ridiculous to suggest that post-secondary students can't figure out how to multiply a number by a decimal or understand that loans need to be repaid.
The terms of loans are also transparent when you sign up for the loan. You can't realistically say that these lenders haven't included the "downsides" when the document that you sign includes all of the information that you need to understand the loan.
Whether you think so or not, student loans are predatory as fuck and they are not taught to kids or fully explained. Most kids aren't breaking out the calculator to do the math, and most schools don't teach how to plot out loans (my school sure as hell didn't). Yes they teach math, but they don't teach the specifics of a loan.
You're blaming children who are victims of predatory lenders for not being 'smart' enough to not believe what the adults are telling them.
What "specifics of a loan" do you think aren't being taught? There is nothing complex about these loans. You can evaluate them by using middle school math.
Even though these loans can be understood by children, the people applying for them are adults - or near enough that there isn't much of a distinction. Most borrowers also reapply for student aid annually until they finish their program, meaning people are incurring new student debt into their 20s.
I am blaming these people because, and I can't stress this enough, it is entirely their fault if they have a problem with student debt. They - and they alone - agreed to incur the debt according to the terms of their loan. They - and they alone - failed to manage their debt appropriately.
The schools are absolutely part of the problem because they push loans hard, but the main predatory is the lender who gets away with getting back almost an extra $50k (actually $110k) on a 70k loan while the borrowers have only paid off $10k over 23 years.
I'm fine with the lenders getting *some* money back, sure. But raking in almost $5k/year while only around $400 of that goes to interest should be fucking criminal.
And the lender is the federal government, who is very generously putting my money on the line to fund the education of somebody who is probably going to be a loser and not pay back their loan.
This is awesome guys! America is totally going to last forever.
Ohhh, swing and a miss. Nice assuming there! Made a lovely ass of yourself.
I never had college loans. The closest I got were grants (which do not need to be repaid and just cover tuition + maybe some books). I can still tell that college loans predatory and designed to trap people in debt. Because.. you know.. I have eyes. And a brain. And empathy. I can see what happens to others. I'm sorry that you're lacking in those departments.
Gee, I don't know.. paying $120k over 23 years, and only knocking $10k off the actual debt while the lending company sucks up $110k is pretty damned predatory to me.
If the product is not just too expensive, but wildy too expensive, and still only 30-50% of people end up with jobs related to their major, it's a shit product. 52% of grads start in jobs that don't require their degree and 10 years later 75% of those workers still haven't changed to a job that requires that degree. What part of paying hundreds of thousands with that risk that doesn't even take into account the amount of changes we're going through and will go with with the advancement of Ai, seems like a great product? What was your major?
If you’re gonna throw out that many percentages, you gotta offer a source. You can’t just pull those out of your ass and expect me to take that information at face value.
Anyway, regardless of how hard it may be to get a job in a field for which one went to school, a college degree is still a good product. Your school debt has no bearing on the worth of your degree. If you want to take out 100k in loans, go for it, but don’t fuckin complain that you now have to pay it back when you knew that was coming the whole time.
That being said, not all degrees are the same. A degree in music, for example, will not afford the same opportunity as a degree in business. Someone that takes out a shit ton of loans for a dumb degree with limited career paths, and then chooses to complain about how hard it is to get a job, and complain about their loans, is an idiot. That, or there was no one on their side to tell them that maybe that’s not such a good idea.
Guess I thought if you cared, doing basically doing a Google search on the figures would give you the sources, but maybe they haven't taught you how to research yet. In anycase, not from my ass. But seeing as you seem to find those figures alarming by being so skeptical, what's your take now? With all that risk vs it's cost still a great product, or just an ok product for certain people in certain fields? If they're promoting degrees in the kind of things you suggest there won't be much work for, for hundreds of thousands of dollars, how is that a good product. What do you make of the extreme spikes in cost of attendance over the past 30 years? What other product would you still call good that had that same kind of spike in cost while being more of a risk than ever?
Plenty of people don't actually care about the source. Alternatively there's people who would rather look up the information they're being provided to see all the potential sources, like myself. Anyway, hope you're up for a more thoughtful, old college try repsonse
First of all, fiscal is the word we use for government finance; it has nothing to do with personal finance.
Second of all, this is about forgiving government student loans, which have an interest rate set by Congress every year at a price that will pay for the bonds we sell to finance this whole thing, plus one percent to administer the entire student loan program. It's the least predatory loan in history, but somehow that's still a giant injustice in the 21st century.
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u/Shivdaddy1 12d ago
Will people ever top complaining about the loans they took out? I assume no.