[Aleksdev]

A lot of people in America were tricked to go into college and take out huge loans that they may never be able to pay back.

The common push from the majority of generation x to millennials was to finish college. What they don’t understand is that world has changed and even now a college is more of a business as opposed to a learning center. You have for profit scam college everywhere and useless degree mills.

I suggest going to college but only if you really understand the loans your taking out and have a plan to pay them back. I think college is not for everyone and that’s fine.

[standardUser]

It depends on the size and terms of the loans. I still pay about $75/mo at 3.8% for my loans (20 year later). Going away to college was far, far, far more valuable to me (in terms of fun, adventure, etc) than the cost of that monthly bill.

[Aleksdev]

Right, like I mentioned. If you understand the loan and your ok with it then go to college. If you don’t know basic finances or how interest compounds then sit home until you figure things out because your playing with fire.

[betaby]

Is that a typical rate? Youtube showed me scary cases of 9%.

[standardUser]

No it is not! I was appalled years later to learn that government-backed loans were being given at such high rates. It just seems cruel. The government has no obligation to turn a profit on student debt.

[_heimdall]

If you're in the US, the government isn't really profiting on school debt. The government guarantees the debt, but that is a play to protect the banks rather than to drum up profits. Profits really don't matter to a government that can print any money it needs but doesn't currently have.

[verdverm]

https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/interest-r...

6.5 / 8 / 9 according to their own website

These are about the same as when I was in school during the great financial crisis

I have/had loans from 2.5-6.5

[daemonologist]

Depends on when you went and whether your loans were federally backed. 9% for recent students is possible but pretty high; federal undergraduate loans in the past 10 years have been ~3-5%. (Private loans can have much higher rates but represent a relatively small fraction of loans and loan balances. [1])

More information: https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-interest-rate

[1] - https://www.enterval.com/#reports

[_heimdall]

Loan rates just depend on the terms you accept (fixed vs variable) and the base rate when you take out the loan.

20 years ago the base rate for any debt was cheaper than it is right now.

What anyone has to decide is whether they are willing to take on debt at today's rates. You weigh the pros and cons and decide for yourself.

Personally I wouldn't have gone to college if I had to take on debt to do it. That was my choice though, and it was only right for me in my situation.

[nunez]

One of my loans out of college was 13%.

[kjkjadksj]

The real crime was tricking these kids to go to out of state schools for $60k a year that offer the exact same curriculum as their in state school going for $12k a year.

[Aleksdev]

Especially for computer science. If you need 4 years and 60k a year to learn how to do a Left join in SQL or what OOP is then you are better off using that loan for an actual investment. You can just get 4 years of experience instead and be more marketable.

[whimsicalism]

not everywhere has a good in state school

[kjkjadksj]

I'm curious what state even has a "bad" one. At least bad enough to the point where its worth being over 100k in the hole for the alternative.

[whimsicalism]

well i grew up in dc and we didn’t have jack

[kjkjadksj]

You had the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant Program that you can apply towards any out of state school. Also most private school aid packages are very good, if you are poor you will probably get a full ride at a school like American or GW.

[whimsicalism]

TAG is $10k/yr at the max and continually threatened by congressional defunding. The different between in-state and out-of-state at most public schools absolutely swamps this difference - for the public schools I got into, it was $40k difference in in-state vs out-state.

> Also most private school aid packages are very good, if you are poor you will probably get a full ride at a school like American or GW.

entirely orthogonal point - this equally applies to any poor student, doesn't matter that you live in DC. anyone who wants to go to a public school has access to this

[black6]

DC is not a state.

[azemetre]

People still live there and the lack of a public school still affects them. Now I’m kinda curious if DC residents get in-state tuition in Virginia or Maryland or Delaware?

[whimsicalism]

right, my only point was that not everywhere in the US has a good/affordable state school you can go to. when asked for an example, i gave the example of where i grew up

[Aurornis]

College has a positive ROI in most cases, despite the high price tag.

There are exceptions like the people with useless $200K degrees working at coffee shops, but you have to ignore a lot of common sense to get that far. For most people, college really does have a positive ROI.

[chii]

> were tricked

they aren't "tricked". They saw the last generation's results of going to college, without thinking for themselves and making a better decision.

[darkerside]

These are kids, and I'd say in most cases, parents are making the choice to take out excessive loans on their children's backs so they can feel like successful parents without paying the price.

[Aleksdev]

Exactly, this is why you I’m happy the younger generation doesn't listen to us. We listened to generation x and got into a lot of trouble for it. I knew parents who would encourage 100k of debt for their child for an art degree..

[big-green-man]

I don't really think that's it. When I was in high school, I didn't see my parent's or my friends' parent's success and think "I've got to go to college". I was busy doing what most kids are doing: having fun with my friends and trying to get close to the opposite sex.

What made me think I needed to go to school was the constant inundation from counselors and teachers that my options were college or a mcjob. To a kid that just wakes up one day every late summer and walks into a new classroom without doing anything to make it happen, it seems like college is just the next high school. It's just what you do. Nobody, ever, not once, talked to me about the financial aspect of it. Lucky for me I didn't wind up going beyond a month at a community college which I quit for other reasons, but without those reasons I'd have continued with it because I, like most people my age, didn't know what to do with myself. I had a rough time after that for a few years, but today I can say that I am financially and in general living a much better life than my peers who went to college, and I have a few that also didn't go and several of them are doing wildly better than me. I don't know a single person that went that isn't stuck on a treadmill trying to play it safe and pay down debt. That's their lives, they'll get old on that treadmill, and mine is mine alone.

Long story short, yes, from my observation, most people are tricked. The only people that need to be going to college are people who want to be in medicine, lawyers, people that want to go into academics and do research as a career, and people who's families can afford to give them a liberal arts education just for the sake of it. The rest of us are better served just starting to live our lives.

[recursivedoubts]

Ah yes, teenagers who have never lived in the real world should be able to predict that their future would turn out to be entirely different than the pattern that their parents & parent's parents followed, and that they were explicitly told to follow, and that said teens are still told to follow by almost all socially important institutions and leaders.

Truly, the children are to blame.

[chii]

So the teens are rebellious when convenient to label them as such, and sheeps when convenient otherwise?

They are adults choosing their life's course. They are not children. They have responsibility to think for themselves, and to accept the consequences of their choices.

college debt is crushing because they chose to have it. They could've gotten into apprenticeships instead, or a community college which costs less.

There are opportunities in high school to discover whether studying higher education is for them. The parents also have a role to play here - paying for extracirricular activities to test out or discover their child's talents and interests (which, of course, is only affordable for the wealthier parents - a form of inequality of opportunity, and have nothing to do with blinding going to college at any cost).

So no, i do not agree that the "children" are not to blame.

[recursivedoubts]

Would it be ok with you if i didn't take teenage rebelliousness seriously as well? And, in fact, if I considered it another strong piece of evidence that teenagers are in no position maturity-wise to predict large scale social trends a decade out?

[Symbiote]

Many of them are presumably 17 when they make this decision. Minors.

[chii]

and yet at that age, they would be tried and convicted as adults if they committed a felony.

so, i dont agree that just because they're 17 that they're not capable of making decisions that require planning, gathering information and rational thought. It's just that a lot of them aren't doing it, and play the victim when the inevitable results aren't desirable.

They cannot point to their parent's generation and say "i did what they did, why don't i get the same outcomes".

[Ekaros]

I think most school systems have failed to teach how to do research and critical thinking. Information has been around now what decades... Just go on google and search your degree. Read some horror stories and some success stories and evaluate them for yourself... Form a worldview...

That is where entire school system should take people. Give them tools to make at least someway reasoned decisions. If they love something, they can do it, but know that there might not be greatest financial rewards involved.

[Aleksdev]

I agree with you to an extent. The problem is they weren’t taught finances at all. Most kids don’t understand that just 5% annually can compound to a crazy amount.

I don’t feel bad for the current kids or anyone who grew up with the internet because they know better. If you have an internet connection and didn’t research loans before taking them out then that’s on you. The new gen or the iPhone generation as I call them are much smarter than us because they see most millennials got a useless degree and work somewhere unrelated. Which is why they don’t listen to us but I don’t blame them. Good on them.

[Nasrudith]

In my experience they were taught finances but were little shits who didn't take it seriously or pay attention at all. Then the exact same people years later complain about not being taught.

[hiddencost]

Naw. There were a huge number of scam colleges taking advantage of people who didn't know how to evaluate them. That was a consumer protection issue. Scam colleges are a wholly different thing.