"In my sophomore year I had a professor tell me I didn’t belong in college and things like that really stuck with me and haven’t really fully made sense to me in my mind, but as I’ve gone through my journey as a student and as an educator, I know that I have something powerful to share with the world and all of my students do.
“I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in history. I graduated from Columbia University Teachers College with a master’s of art in higher and post-secondary education, and I graduated from Harvard most recently, 2016 with a master’s in education in learning and teaching.”
So you tell me, at what point should he have been cut off from federal loans, at which degree?
I think the current limits are probably about right. My only issue is the one the OP originally brought up.
If after getting these degrees from these top schools, he shouldn’t be allowed to stop paying his student loans, even if it takes him 40 years. Certainly by the time he got his graduate degrees he was no longer a kid and should be responsible for his actions.
You couldn’t have found a better illustration of what I have been suggesting. Chapel Hill is a public school with a tuition of ~$13k. If you live on campus it’s another $11k, but if you live in the area, that’s a big expense you don’t need to pay. The average debt of a Chapel Hill graduate was ~$20k upon graduation in 2015. Perfect example of a great place to encourage the majority of college eligible students to attend. The guy above started in that school, got, I’m assuming, really good grades, and parlayed that in to Columbia. Columbia led to Harvard. In a program that uses a combination of major and academic success, he’d be able to receive a sizable loan amount based on his 4 - 5 years at Chapel Hill.
You also can’t just pick the unicorn from the crowd and say “See? Everyone is a unicorn”. There are close to 30k students at Chapel Hill. Should we just give all of them massive loans to attend more expensive schools regardless of their merits and majors? Most of the time those “more expensive” schools are just public colleges in other states. Why pay $33k for Florida State when you can spend $13k for Chapel Hill? The way our student loans are set up today, a student can receive a loan for either place, just because he likes watching Seminole games or prefers the Winters in Florida over North Carolina. But that choice will result in $80k - $100k of additional debt upon graduation. That’s insane.
That’s IBR though. It’s income based. It seems unlikely that someone like that young man isn’t going to be able to pay. He won’t rake in the money like someone on wall street, but it’s very likely it won’t drag him down for years to go. If you’re 72, sick, and unable to pay your bills I just don’t see the benefit of continuing to drag that person down. They took a risk and it didn’t pay off… but they tried. I don’t know too many individuals who could get sick right out of college, like really sick, and not suffer a long time for that, health wise and financially. Some of the students will just up and die too, and we forgive that… as we should.
This young man’s a unicorn. Obama’s a unicorn. What am I, a unicorn? What example will you actually accept? We have to have room for opportunity, and I’m not convinced that what is being suggested here won’t just screw the poor, the minorities or even the first gen college students. They don’t have the experience to know how to make good choices, and that young man was told by someone he was not college material… imagine if that was the same professor who decided whether or not he got money to go school.
Chapel Hill is , outside of academic fraud shenanigans a good school. It’s a lot better than many private schools.
Going to a flagship university is good.
I still think the best solution is to let student loans be dischargable in bankruptcy. That will produce enough of a chilling effect that the bad investments will stop, and bankruptcy is enough of a negative that people won’t do it willy-nilly.
Student loans are dischargeable in bankruptcy, it is just that burden is on the debt holder to prove that paying them would be an undue burden.
On another forum, I met bankruptcy attorney who did get several of his client’s student loans reduced and a couple of cases completely discharged.
I think making the completely dischargeable is a bad idea. First, you have the case of the folks graduating from medical school or law school, and taking a low paying job at a non-profit, wracking up a bunch of credit card debt and then declaring bankruptcy.
More importantly, if student loans were easily discharged it would send private student loan rates up from their current 8 or 9% up to level of unsecured debt for people with poor credit scores. Thus increasing the expense of college by thousand or even tens of thousand of dollars for anybody who obtained private student loans.
Trying to figure out how to fix the student loan situation is treating the symptom, not the cause imo.
The problem is that as a society we have put such an emphasis on a college degree that we force people to go to college even when they have no idea what they want to do, then get annoyed when they get debt getting a degree that won’t do anything for their career.
We need to encourage more trade school programs and enrollment into certification programs. My wife is taking certification classes to do medical billing and coding because she was tired of working at day care. She’s almost done with the 2 year program (and its’ only 2 classes at a time) and in the summer she’ll be able to get a job in the field which has salaries here between $40-50k. I think we’ve spent about $6k on classes so far and I think by the end it will be no more than $10k.
There is absolutely no reason we shouldn’t be encouraging people to go down routes like these as well. There is nothing demeaning about things like this, yet people think that if you haven’t gone to college you’ve failed in life. Meanwhile before I formed my own company I was making $95k (in FL with very low cost of living) at a job that used literally no knowledge I gained from my college education, and I rose into that position starting in non-game QA for $40k entry level just a decade ago, which doesn’t need a college degree outside of prejudice.
I won’t deny there are some overall good reasons for a college education dealing more with having a well rounded education, but that should be part of the k-12 curriculum and not part of a job preparedness aspect of life, and that shouldn’t cause people to be in debt up to their eyeballs for the rest of their life (unless they specifically chose to go to an ivy league school).
She’s taking it through the local community college. It’s taking a few years because their program has 8 courses you have to take, but you can only take 2 at a time due to the way they have pre-reqs setup. I don’t know if she’s planning to do it at home or not but that’s good to know.
Where I work a college degree is a requirement. It’s not really a good screening device either, interestingly… getting a good developer in the south is like finding a diamond in the rough…
Well I know this is in the early stages, but I am guessing there are a number of student loan olders who had Sallie Mae that don’t fully realize this involves them because when they paid it off… it was Sallie Mae.
Local Atlanta news story about the government reneging on its Public Service Loan Fogiveness if one opted to work for ten years in public service or. On profit. What a swift kick in the balls for those who signed up for this.
