[cooper_ganglia]

I feel the same way with student loans. I'm all for government sponsored state universities to compete with tuition at private universities, but to see people who are my age, in their 20s, complaining is so frustrating. I knew these people as teenagers, and I would ask them what their goal in life was. "To go to college" was a common answer. I'd ask them what about after that, and they didn't know, they just knew they HAD to go to college to get a degree and figure it out. They'd get upset with me if I pushed too hard on trying to ask them about specifics about anything, because they didn't care and didn't want to be bothered with it. They just wanted to hang out, have a good time, and not worry about the future.

My girlfriend in college had no idea how much her student loans were in total, how long they were financed, whether they were private or federal loans, etc. She just let her parents do all the financing work (they couldn't pay for her, but they did all the paperwork for her), and she just struggled with school while going out and drinking every night. Now she's graduated and we've long since parted ways, but she has a Bachelor's Degree yet she's currently working as a dog groomer and refusing to pay her student loans "because the government shouldn't force me to pay, I was only 18".

To see all of these people online now, complaining about how they were "groomed by the banks" to take out student loans drives me crazy. You made a bad decision. Your parents helped you make a bad decision. You need to live with that, and feel some form of "punishment" (in the form of not bailing them out) for not planning better for the future.