[VWWHFSfQ]

This is interesting data but I'm having trouble understanding it. For instance, several years ago there was a blog posted on here about a lady that took a $250,000 loan to go to Duke University to get a Theater Management degree. She then discovered that she was, in fact, never going to be able to pay back that money, so she wrote this blog post about how awful and predatory the USA higher education system is, and that she was now running off to Russia with her (Russian) husband so that she could escape the crippling debt.

Now, there are certainly problems with the cost of higher education in USA, but that's not an example of it. Her problem was entirely different and pretty much of her own making, as far as I'm concerned. Nobody is going bankrupt trying to go to Central Detroit Community College. Or even most in-state universities. So I'm trying to understand these numbers.

[mensetmanusman]

It’s partly on Duke though, as the degree should come with a cigarette warning - this degree comes with a quarter million dollar debt, warning!

[kube-system]

Federal student loans come with multiple warnings, including a mandatory 30 minute training session:

https://studentaid.gov/entrance-counseling/

https://studentaid.gov/mpn/

The people who make these really bad decisions aren't unaware of the numbers. They're making those decisions for other reasons, like misplaced expectations on their potential for success, or strong immediate social pressures to ignore costs in their future.

[TrueGeek]

I don't know if it's different now, but when I took it the student aid entrance counseling was taught by a representative that worked at one of the banks funding the loans. He started by asking "How many of you are borrowing to maintain a standard of living?" and then went on to explain how it's totally normal, and encouraged, to borrow more than you need. He said it'd make college easier as you wouldn't have to work, you'd have a computer, you could relax by going out to movies when you were done with homework, etc.

[kube-system]

Ah yeah, it's different now. All federal loans are now through the Federal Direct Student Loan Program. The loans are issued by the Department of Education and there aren't any banks involved.

There used to be some other programs in which the government backed privately issued loans; that must be what you had.

[Retric]

News stories are always looking for the extreme examples, someone with 10k in student debt and a stage 4 cancer is also never paying back their loans.

However, Delinquency in the article just means they missed one or more payments. That’s really easy to do even for people who eventually pay back their loans.

[dan-robertson]

Default in the article is defined a few different ways (and they also talk about delinquency and loans in forebearance) but roughly corresponds to a year or so of missed payments.

[Retric]

Default should generally be 270 days.

[jrochkind1]

What don't you understand about those numbers?