[codexb]

Ok, but forgiving student loans doesn't do that. It signals to borrowers that they don't have to repay high loans if their career can't support it. It tells borrowers that they can make risky loans without a chance of default. It tells universities that they can keep charging exorbitant tuitions because kids can still get loans to pay them.

The solution is to allow judges the discretion to default them in bankruptcy after X number of years after graduation. Lenders need to accept the risk. With no risk, they can loan as much as they want and have guaranteed repayment. This drives tuition higher and higher.

[Aurornis]

I’m always surprised that student loan forgiveness appeals to anyone who should otherwise be able to think about all of the bad second order effects.

The more we inject money into the education system, the higher prices go. Setting a precedent that the government will just pay off your loans if you don’t pay them off only encourages more people to take out loans without thinking about paying them back.

There are so many things wrong with this idea that I can’t believe it continues to be popular. The only thing I can think of is that it’s a litmus test for who can and cannot consider second order effects of economic decisions, or who believes money can spent en masse without altering the system.

[amluto]

If this were done in a less ridiculous manner, it might actually have the desired effect. Make student loans dischargable in bankruptcy (just like any other loan) and don’t give them government backing. Then private lenders could decide how much money to lend out, and the answer might well be “not very much.”

[TimorousBestie]

What are the second-order effects of a subclass of citizens permanently encumbered by debt that (with rare exceptions) cannot be discharged through bankruptcy?

Perhaps your analysis of second-order effects is not thorough and complete? Have you really considered all of them?

[horsawlarway]

Not really sure why this is getting downvoted.

I don't really think we need to forgive student loans - I think they should absolutely be dischargeable through bankruptcy, though.

Bankruptcy isn't a "get out of jail free" card - it puts a huge burden on a student relatively soon after graduating that makes it harder to start a family or buy a home. So it incentives are still aligned for the students taking the loans.

But the option that a student defaults brings some real light and transparency into a loan system that just feels wildly disconnected from reality right now. If a student can't pay the loan back with the job options in the field and is like to default... don't issue the loan.

I think it's absolutely abusive that student debt can't be discharged, and is pretty heinous as policy.

[rootusrootus]

Yeah it's pretty amazing that we have loans which you can never escape and yet have high interest rates in spite of that. If I cannot declare bankruptcy, then at the least the interest rate should be 0%, appropriately reflecting the risk.

[LorenPechtel]

No.

1) Zero risk does not mean 0% interest. True zero risk should have the same yield as treasuries.

2) No bankruptcy does not equal guaranteed payment. Some will die without having repaid.

[AnimalMuppet]

Only if treasuries are truly zero risk. That may not be a valid assumption anymore.

[TimorousBestie]

> I don't really think we need to forgive student loans.

Neither do I. I was happy with the status quo ante Trump where many classes of public servant could get their student debts forgiven after on the order of ten years of service. (An imperfect program with too many disqualifying loopholes, but it was better than nothing. Now, almost no one qualifies.) The Overton window has foreclosed on that kind of solution to the problem, however. Even military personnel have been disqualified from attending certain schools as part of their meager education benefit.

> Bankruptcy isn't a "get out of jail free" card

Indeed. One’s mid-twenties are arguably the worst period of one’s life to live with damaged credit.

> I think it's absolutely abusive that student debt can't be discharged, and is pretty heinous as policy.

Absolutely, it needs to go.

[BobaFloutist]

The reason that you can't (default) discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy is that your degree can't be seized and sold off, so there's a pretty weak incentive to not declare bankruptcy as soon as you're handed your degree.

[angmarsbane]

What if a degree could be seized? For example, what if bankruptcy courts could require a debtor to stop "representing themselves" as having a degree as a condition for discharging debt. If a court revoked a degree, it would effectively reset the graduate to the status of a dropout removing a significant amount of the degree's value (I know knowledge has its own value, but credentialism is a big part of a degree's value too).Universities already have the infrastructure to flag students. For example, many institutions withhold official transcripts or diplomas for academic fraud, moral infringements etc. Could this create enough of an incentive to pay back loans and not declare bankruptcy?

[BobaFloutist]

I don't think that would fly, since it would provide no benefit to the owner of the debt and would just be enormously punitive and feel pointlessly cruel.

It would be like if instead of a foreclosure they just took a bulldozer to the house, then salted the earth with asbestos and lead so nobody could ever build a house there again. What's the (acute) benefit in just destroying the value? Plus, it turns the four years into a complete waste of time, no matter how hard you worked to get the degree, just because you couldn't find employment after.

I know we're talking about tweaking incentives to make it not worth it to game the system, but this would also screw over people that found themselves in that position through no fault of their own, plus it would waste all the time and work of everyone that taught that person and contributed to their education (even though they got paid, people largely aren't in education for the cash).

I don't know, I think it would be too much of a bummer to work.

[DangitBobby]

When student debt becomes dischargeable, market forces will finally price degrees according to their actual economic value relative to the risk of poor returns. Currently, that price discovery is broken; the cost of a degree bears almost no relationship to its real-world payoff. No need for degree seizure to correct it. Lenders can decide for themselves which degrees lead to returns, which in turn provides degree seekers with actual financial signals instead of vibes-based "go into programming" propaganda from FAANG.

[irishcoffee]

> What are the second-order effects of a subclass of citizens permanently encumbered by debt that (with rare exceptions) cannot be discharged through bankruptcy?

A harsh lesson in personal responsibility. If you went to an out-of-state school to major in criminology hoping to be the next CSI, and you borrowed 180k to do it, you've learned a valuable lesson.

Don't give me "they're only kids, they aren't able to make these decisions!"

[TimorousBestie]

> Don't give me "they're only kids, they aren't able to make these decisions!"

You’re responding to something you imagined I said. We’re talking about economic effects here, not your vengeful little morality play.

[irishcoffee]

Just heading it off, not imagining anything.

[zbentley]

Maybe, but that precedent has been set before for other types of loans, and in a limited way for student loans, and the sky didn’t fall. The upward price pressure on university prices is far more influenced by other factors (which should be fixed!). Loan forgiveness probably is a drop in the bucket, I suspect.

[gruez]

>Maybe, but that precedent has been set before for other types of loans.

what is this referring to?

[cj]

Allowing student debt to be canceled during bankruptcy would be a good first step (possibly even better than canceling student debt across the board).

To your point, making it easy to cancel debt teaches borrowers that debt isn’t a serious thing.

Requiring someone go through bankruptcy (and all of the associated negatives on your credit score, etc) seems like a good tradeoff. Allows you to get out from under the debt (the entire purpose of bankruptcy in the first place..) while not letting everyone pretend the debt never existed (need to live with the impact of bankruptcy on your ability to borrow in the future)

I don’t know why we don’t hear more people lobbying for this. I guess it’s because the sound bite isn’t as sexy.

[AnthonyMouse]

Bankruptcy affects your credit score for 7-10 years. Someone who graduates from college in their early 20s with six figures in debt could file for bankruptcy immediately and have it be off their credit history by the time they've saved up a down payment and want to get a mortgage.

There is also the obvious drawback that if more people can discharge the debt, the interest rate goes up, and then everyone else has to pay for the people who took out loans they didn't pay back.

[46493168]

> Someone who graduates from college in their early 20s with six figures in debt could file for bankruptcy immediately and have it be off their credit history by the time they've saved up a down payment and want to get a mortgage.

So change the bankruptcy law? It’s a pretty easy fix. Create a whole new chapter if that’s what it takes. Make it dischargeable only after 7 years of nonpayment, do means testing… bankruptcy law already has these kinds of nuances built in.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Make it dischargeable only after 7 years of nonpayment

You don't really want to give people an incentive for nonpayment.

> do means testing

Bankruptcy already does that. But what are your "means" the day you graduate from college and haven't yet found a job, or temporarily take a low-paying one on purpose to meet the eligibility requirements?

You would need something like, deferred payments while you're unemployed but if you subsequently find a job then you have to pay, instead of one-time permanently discharging the loans. Except that's how it already works.

[46493168]

The questions you have are best put to a judge. The law is not meant to cover every possible permutation of circumstances and motivations.

If student loans are dischargeable in bankruptcy, lenders will price it in or refuse to lend without a gurantor.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The law is not meant to cover every possible permutation of circumstances and motivations.

This isn't a permutations issue. We know the specific shape of the problem: 18 year olds from poor and lower middle class families don't typically have existing assets with which to secure a loan, so if they can't secure it with their future earnings, they can't get one, and then they can't afford to go to college.

> If student loans are dischargeable in bankruptcy, lenders will price it in or refuse to lend without a gurantor.

That's the problem. The inability to discharge them allows the borrower to get a much lower interest rate than they otherwise could for unsecured debt issued to someone with minimal credit history, or find someone willing to loan them the money to begin with.

It was set up this way so that people could go to college.

[cj]

Imagine a world where lenders charged different interest rates depending on the risk profile of each school.

Lower interest rates for schools where graduates repay their debt, higher interest for schools where many people default.

Assuming it wouldn’t disproportionately affect disadvantaged populations, that could be an interesting way to incentivize schools to get their shit together and prepare students for starting their career

[LorenPechtel]

I've suggested a very different approach:

Don't have a dollar amount that you repay. Rather, your student loan payment is x% of (your income minus the average rate for those with a high school diploma) for y years. Forgiveness programs for certain fields go away--instead, the tab gets picked up perhaps with a multiplier. Disability, death? Irrelevant--a dead person generally makes nothing, the amount owed is $0. (Generally makes nothing because there can be ongoing income from something they produced. That would be subject to the loan repayment.)

[cj]

Devils advocate: I don’t think this would work due to the cash flow uncertainty the models causes.

If universities don’t know how much they’re going to bring in over the next few years, they won’t be able to budget effectively.

And then there’s the question of whether it’s acceptable for the lender to collect more than what was borrowed. E.g. if I graduate college, start a company, and sell it for $100 million.. am I then paying my alma mater (or lender) millions? If so, would universities make more money from the commons or are they banking on a very small percent landing extremely lucrative gigs post-graduation? I don’t think we want the model to resemble startup financing, where nearly all fail and a small handful pay for the rest (that works for startups, doesn’t work for people’s careers)

I like the concept though. In 2010’s when I was entering college, I actually made a website trying to solicit someone to pay for my education in exchange for a percentage of my future earnings. I found no takers at the time.

[AnthonyMouse]

That effect would be drowned out by all the people defaulting en masse because getting out of a six figure unsecured debt is worth more than a temporary hit to your credit score.

[cj]

If that’s true, why isn’t everyone already doing it? Especially if 87% of student loans are forgiven during bankruptcy - maybe people just aren’t aware it’s possible.

[AnthonyMouse]

"Possible" and "easy" are two different things. 87% is of the people who applied for it, but they would be the ones most likely to have it granted because there is little reason to pay lawyers to file a form which is likely to be rejected. But the more you relax the requirements, the more people do it, which is of course the problem.

[SpicyLemonZest]

People who start lobbying for it quickly discover that 87% of people who petition for their student debt to be cancelled in bankruptcy get it (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/29/bankruptcy-student-loan-borr...). I support removing the special treatment entirely, but ultimately most student debt holders don’t go bankrupt.

[isleyaardvark]

> Still, few people pursue the option because of a “pervasive” myth that the loans can’t be included in the proceeding

It also says nothing about whether the person actually goes bankrupt, just which debts are discharged, which is one of the key parts of the bankruptcy process. Certain debts are discharged because the person can’t pay them back, which is the point of going into bankruptcy court.

[drakythe]

That's why it should be a one time event in conjunction with reworking the whole system.

Why can I, as an 18 year old, sign for a loan that _cannot_ be forgiven, graduate into a crashed economy, and still be held accountable for choices that impact me when I only had a small part in them? The system needs reformed, and we need to do something for the people still on the hook of the old system (and I say this as someone who has paid off all my student loans).

[scottyah]

Same reason you can sign up for war, or ride a bike without a helmet (in some places). The world is a dangerous place and the less legislation we have blocking people from making decisions, the more likely they are to be capable of making their own. In 2009 when I graduated, it was common knowledge that any private colleges or abnormal degrees were an oddity only for rich people to buy a piece of paper for their more disappointing kids. I don't know what changed (or if it was just localized), but whoever convinced you to go for the scam is at fault here in your circumstance- not the "system" for allowing other people to benefit.

It's a bunch of able-bodied people who took the elevator instead of stairs thinking it was a shortcut, but the effort put in was the whole point. Anyone who told you otherwise is to blame. Punishing people who took the stairs sends a clear message to everyone else deciding which way to go.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Why can I, as an 18 year old, sign for a loan that _cannot_ be forgiven, graduate into a crashed economy, and still be held accountable for choices that impact me when I only had a small part in them?

Because you took the money promising to pay it back, spent it on something you wanted, and now it's gone and someone has to pay the money you spent.

It's like saying why can I, as an 18 year old, purposely drive a car into someone else's house, cause six figures in costs, and then be expected to be on the hook for that because auto liability insurance doesn't cover intentional acts? You're the one who chose to do that.

The price of tuition and the expectation that you pay back the money are not secrets kept from you until after you've already signed, or if they somehow are then maybe fix that.

[thatcat]

The money can't be spent on a house or any useful asset that could be resold. They wouldn't give you a loan for that at 18 because it'd be irresponsible since they know you don't know anything about finance or economics as you likely don't have an education yet. They'll give you a high interest credit card with a 500 dollar limit to buy what you want though.

[AnthonyMouse]

They give you the loan because the asset is you. In general if you get a degree, your future earnings increase by more than the cost of the degree.

The "problem" is that if you don't pay a mortgage the bank takes the house, but the only thing for them to take if you don't pay your student loans is your future earnings, which is just the thing where you have to pay back the loan.

[thatcat]

A educational program using "your future earnings" as collateral only really has a claim to some percentage of the delta between what you earn and what you would earn without the degree (after 4 years experience), which would incentivize them to not to structure programs in a wasteful manner or misrepresent the future economic value of a given program.

In many cases, that delta is negative. The school and lender should at least be forced to disclose that reality when you're filing FAFSA and taking secured loans.

[scottyah]

First, there's no way to track that.

Second, that doesn't hold true for other assets like mortgages so why would it apply here?

Third, the lender reaaaally should not be telling anyone what career they should do.

Fourth, If the lender and school made no claims that any degree would guarantee extra earnings, why on earth would they need to disclose the opposite? If you saw any marketing copy that claimed you'd be guaranteed more money you can definitely sue for false advertising.

At the end of the day, neither of those industries are guilty of more than helping rumors spread. There may be a specific person who felt ok to lie to you, but it wouldn't make it past their legal department.

[tartoran]

> Because you took the money promising to pay it back, spent it on something you wanted, and now it's gone and someone has to pay the money you spent.

How are they supposed to pay it back with a crashed economy? Look, I get it with personal responsibility and all that but these people were following the rules, did their part and now are burdened to their death while Big Co gets bailed out over and over and never learns responsibility. Why the double standard?

[AnthonyMouse]

Bailing out corporations went very poorly. They reinflated the housing bubble like they wanted to see how big they could make the balloon this time. I mean look at this:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1M8KZ

The peak in 2007 was the massive housing bubble that crashed the whole economy. Where are we now?

The only reasonable way to solve that is to stop bailing out corporations.

[derekp7]

Except that no one has been preaching at you for your entire academic life that you MUST drive a car into someone's house at 18 in order to be able to get more than a minimum wage hard labor job.

[AnthonyMouse]

But now we've arrived at the source of the trouble. Why are people being preached at to get a degree in subterranean cat washing instead of engineering or nursing, or for that matter forego a degree and pursue a trade?

[chasd00]

As a parent of a 16 and almost 14 year old i'm effectively home schooling personal finance with them. My wife and I got none from our parents and were preyed upon constantly. I think I was 45 when i finally got my student loans paid off. My wife did many years in a dangerous, low-performing, HS as a teacher to get hers forgiven. Sending an 18 year old off to college without a solid understanding of finance is like throwing an 18 year old in the ocean while bleeding profusely and tasking them with swimming to shore, maybe a couple make it but the sharks will get the rest.

[WalterBright]

It's a crying shame that public high schools do not teach basic finance, basic accounting, and how a business works.

In other words, they don't teach anything about how our economy works.

[jancsika]

https://www.wunc.org/show/due-south/2024-06-10/personal-fina...

[bdangubic]

they do. maybe not where you live but they do. my kid has had personal finance classes since 4th grade

[WalterBright]

I attended 4 different public schools growing up, and none of them did. I see that some today do.

But I still see college graduates ranting on X who clearly do not understand compound interest on their student loans.

[WalterBright]

Why should other people be on the hook for your decisions?

[bombcar]

If there are decisions that are so bad people shouldn't be on the hook for them, we should prohibit those decisions.

Banning credit for a large portion of the population would be a net good but we can't have that conversation.

[WalterBright]

I'm not suggesting banning credit.

A deal between loaner and borrower should be a free agreement between them, not something imposed by the government.

[drakythe]

Thanks to the crashed economy I was on the hook for hundreds of other people’s bad decisions and the degree I went for did not result in a job despite prospects being more than good when I began the program.

People who want loan forgiveness anbd to rework the financial aid system aren’t looking for a get out of jail free card, they’re looking yo even the playing field a bit.

[downrightmike]

Student loans currently carry no risk. They can't be discharged. Interest is the payment to the lender to accept risk. There is no risk in the current state of student loans. Therefore they should never-ever charge interest.

Also schools need to be reigned in, if GA et al can pay each student athlete $40,000 a month, they MUST be held accountable for burdening the students and the state with unscrupulous debt.

[chasd00]

> Student loans currently carry no risk. They can't be discharged. Interest is the payment to the lender to accept risk.

you make a good point, if there's no risk there should be no interest. Or at worst, the interest rate should track COLA adjustments to social security. Some basic adjustment relative to inflation so the lender gets back what they lent out.

Now that schools can pay their athletes I hope the rest of the student body take notice and start asking questions about school funds allocation. It should make it plain as day to the average student that their school has plenty of cash and choses to force them into debt.

[gruez]

>you make a good point, if there's no risk there should be no interest.

Even loans to the US government pays interest. If you meant "no premium beyond the risk-free rate", why would anyone want to lend to students, when they have to deal with the hassle of dealing with lenders and the political risk of it getting discharged, when they can just led to the federal government instead?

[downrightmike]

College grads also pay on average 10x the taxes above a HS grad, so there is a huge disconnect on the repayment the lenders get. Once you pay the SL amount in taxes, you should be done.

[zeroonetwothree]

Around 6% of student loans are defaulted on. Some of those end up never being repaid while others are delayed substantially.

Also interest is payment for the combination of losing use of money + risk + inflation.

[Ekaros]

They should charge rate. But rate should be similar to say interbank rate. Maybe plus something like 0.5%. This is how standard loaning often operates. You have risk free lending so you get loan from somewhere else and then take some margin.

[fwip]

One downside is that money lent for a student loan cannot otherwise be invested. If paid back later with no interest, the money will likely have lost value to inflation in the meantime.

I think I agree with your broader point - just quibbling, here.

[trothamel]

Interest also compensates for the other things that money could be doing. If I didn't loan it to you (or a student), then I would be doing something else with the money, even if just buying a government bond.

[thatcat]

I'm not sure that is accurate. You need a borrower to do that. If there were other low risk borrowers they would also lend them money, it's not a zero sum game. I'm no banker, but pretty sure the bank doesn't lend itself fractionally reserved loans and buy t-bonds.

[downrightmike]

College grads also pay on average 10x the taxes above a HS grad, so there is a huge disconnect on the repayment the lenders get. Once you pay the SL amount in taxes, you should be done.

[andrewaylett]

Surely the first step is to stop issuing loans in such a way that will cause the next generation of students to suffer the same problems, freeing us up to sort out the problems of previous generations without moral hazard.

The UK had what I think was a really nice set up, although it's now not nearly as palatable. My student loan had an interest rate tied to inflation, and repayment was a fixed amount of my income above a limit, collected via the same mechanisms used for income tax. Any unpaid loan would be written off when I turn 60.

The modern system is similar, but the interest rate has been decoupled from inflation which means that instead of paying back essentially the same value, no matter how slowly you pay it off, it's now definitely better to pay more earlier. Which makes it much more like a regressive "graduate tax" that you only have to pay if you don't earn enough.

[BoxOfRain]

> The UK had what I think was a really nice set up, although it's now not nearly as palatable. My student loan had an interest rate tied to inflation, and repayment was a fixed amount of my income above a limit, collected via the same mechanisms used for income tax.

My problem is that it's presented as a loan but is in effect a tax. I would rather have a graduate tax which was honest on the face of it rather than wilfully misleading students that it's an ordinary loan. The 'loan' framing is harmful in my opinion, because if student loans were regulated like actual loans the government would have much less room to effectively change the deal after the fact.

I also feel a lot of the current social and political toxicity around the student loan system comes from it being effectively a tax which you can get out of by lucking into having rich parents who pay your student fees upfront, it rubs people up the wrong way on class grounds. A graduate tax would avoid this problem as well.

[andrewaylett]

With the system as it existed in 2000, it was very much "free money". That was before the introduction of fees, which are still not applicable for Scottish students studying in Scotland, and in combination with the interest rate increase would very definitely tip the balance for me.

I have a decent career that means I've paid off my loan. I can easily imagine that many folk with fees and modern loans won't ever even cover the interest payments.

[nly]

It _is_ a loan because you can pay it off.

[palmotea]

> The solution is to allow judges the discretion to default them in bankruptcy after X number of years after graduation. Lenders need to accept the risk. With no risk, they can loan as much as they want and have guaranteed repayment. This drives tuition higher and higher.

This. The whole student loan mess is a direct result of their special treatment during bankruptcy.

> It tells universities that they can keep charging exorbitant tuitions because kids can still get loans to pay them.

I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of tuition claw-back from schools, when a student loan goes into default (but only by the government, not private lenders). The universities need more skin in the game to keep tuition under control.

[Braxton1980]

>. It signals to borrowers that they don't have to repay high loans if their career can't support it.

The loan forgiveness wasn't a thing when many students took out the loans.

[rootusrootus]

It would be a signal to future borrowers.

[Braxton1980]

Since credit card debt isn't forgiven why hasn't this stopped people overspending?

[OsrsNeedsf2P]

Why would I work hard once I found out I was going to be defaulted X years from now?

[mschuster91]

That's not a solution at all, because it will price out way too many students.

The solution is to do what Germany and most of the EU does - pay universities with tax money and do not charge students anything at all (or maybe a few hundred to thousand euros).

[disgruntledphd2]

> The solution is to do what Germany and most of the EU does - pay universities with tax money and do not charge students anything at all (or maybe a few hundred to thousand euros).

This is a totally fine system, but would change US tertiary education massively. Much of the state university increases in tuition since the GFC have been driven by exactly the opposite behaviour (cut state funding, make it up in tuition).

[codexb]

Germany and other EU countries that offer free tuition begin segregating students into vocational and university tracks starting around age 10. Only about 30% of students qualify for university. The rest stop school around 15-16 and go into vocational training. These aren't student choices, their dictated by the school system.

The US would never approve of a school system that told parents that their children weren't allowed to go to university and had to go into vocational training.

[wahern]

Most states already have affordable tuition for in-state residents. California is middle of the pack, and CSU tuition is less than $10k/year. (Nationwide, public in-state 4-year tuition ranges from ~$5k/yr to ~$15k/yr.)

For most students at public 4-year universities in the US, room & board costs significantly more than tuition. Even in those EU countries where tuition is free, average student loan debt is often >$20k USD because of this. By way of comparison, average student loan debt in the US is ~$40k USD, and that includes private school and out-of-state student tuition as well as room & board. Note that at least for the US, $40k is the mean; the median debt is <$30k. And these numbers are totals, not per year.

Perhaps one of the best ways to address the college affordability "crisis" would be to build more dormitories. The capital expenses could be publicly funded, and then charge students maintenance costs. But for various reasons, including NIMBY development barriers as well as modern expectations (see, e.g., the vitriol spewed about the windowless UCSB Munger Hall bedrooms), schools have long ago neglected this aspect.

[rootusrootus]

That is what we did in the past, and why my undergrad degree didn't cost me nearly as much as someone would pay to get the same degree today from the same university. We've decimated state funding for public universities.

[WalterBright]

When students have "skin in the game", i.e. they are paying for it, they will work to get their money's worth out of it.

People do not value things they get for free.

[mschuster91]

> When students have "skin in the game", i.e. they are paying for it, they will work to get their money's worth out of it.

For one, Europe's academic system works well enough to disprove this zero-sum ideology.

Making everything financialized has two serious downsides: first, it excludes a bunch of people - those who financially cannot afford to take the risk of failure (because you can't discharge student loans in a bankruptcy) even if they get a stipend, and then it leads to humanities and "niche" subjects being either killed off entirely as the chance of ever earning back the student loan is very slim, or the only students for these subjects are those who "come from money", both of which has negative impact for society at large.

[WalterBright]

I went through free K-12 public school. The caring about getting educated was performative, not reality. Neither the teachers nor the students particularly tried.

Yes, there were a handful that did try.

[zeroonetwothree]

How many German universities are ranked top 40 globally? How many American?

[disgruntledphd2]

> How many German universities are ranked top 40 globally? How many American?

University rankings are mostly nonsense. They generally over-weight English speaking universities because most of the "high impact" journals are in English. The UK also does well by these metrics, but fundamentally academic research and teaching are very different things, and incentivising high output research institutions to focus on the research breaks the social purpose of universities which is to turn out educated undergraduates.

The German model is to focus more on teaching, which is a more sustainable approach than chasing the finite research dollars.

[thatcat]

so take the money back from the universities in all cases where they negligently misrepresented the future job market of the field of study to the borrowers or what?