Nobody was forced into taking a large loan to get a worthless degree that is useless in the job market. Be glad for these people, may their mistakes and poor judgement serve as an example so that others and their kids do not make the same ill-informed decisions.
When I was 15/16 years old I was promised by adults I trusted (teachers, principal, parents, family members, speakers at my school) that if I got a college degree I would be guaranteed a good paying job when I got done. At 15/16/17 years old, you are a child and you follow the advice and leadership of adults. In my senior year of high school, my parents started taking out loans in my name (called a Parent Plus loan) to pay for my college. Could I have refused? Yes, but remember I had been promised by every adult that I needed this to get a job. "A bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma" I remember being told over and over [1] [2]. If you don't want to work at McDonalds, you have to get a degree.
So yeah, no one put a gun to my head and forced me to take on student loan debt. Instead they put poverty to my head and threatened that I would sleep in my car and work for minimum wage if I didn't.
When you are a child and the adults tell you this is what you need to do for your future, you listen. What you're doing is blaming children for the bad advice their parents and mentors gave them.
On top of society strongly directing people to university, we also intentionally mislead people about their future potential. 'You can do whatever you put your mind to.' Ostensibly it's good for young people to believe this, but it is of course not true. Loan companies are able to exploit this false belief for the sake of profit. 47% of people age 18-29 think it is very/somewhat likely that they will become "rich." [1] If you restrict that just to those that attend university, the number is probably even higher. So what does going 6 figures in debt matter if you'll be a millionaire a decade after college?
Your parents didn't give you bad advice at the time (that is without the hindsight of current knowledge). At that time it was GREAT advice. The problem with advice is it only works in hindsight.
I'd suggest anyone going into college right now get a CS degree, but in 20 years that may be automated away.
Who knows. People gave you advice in good faith, they weren't trying to steer you wrong. It's what they were told was the best thing for their kids. Blaming parents or kids or even mentors is the wrong thing. It's how everything entwined that created the situation. No one tried to create it and society couldn't see it coming.
I'd like to agree with you, but how could "society" not see what would happen if you increase the percent of college graduates from e.g. 5% to 35% in a matter of just several decades? And this started to happened about the same time that we nearly doubled the labor force by first "allowing" and gradually starting to effectively require that women also work.
Skills are valued for their rarity. Get rid of the rarity, get rid of the skill's value. The most realistic concern for the value of a CS degree is not automation, it's other humans. Add far more people pursuing CS degrees, without a proportional growth in the job market, and you'd see wages and demand for it plummet.
And there also factors like China in the future. Outsourcing only really stuttered because the quality of the outsourced products was consistently poor. But there's no inherent reason this must always be the case. If China can start being a source that companies can turn to for high quality software solutions at a low cost, run of the mill software development could go the way of industrial manufacturing.
I think the best way to see how society could not see what would happen is to watch any TV show that has ever tried to predict the future ever.
Smartphone? Rarely seen but critical to our society.
Twitter? Ha.
Facebook? People actually spoke to one another.
Global warming? Didn't see that coming...
Flying cars? Nope not yet.
Pervasive Nuclear? Nope not that either.
Humans suck at predicting the future. We're so terrible at it. Market crashes, war, etc. We just have no idea. While what you're saying make sense to an economist, that's not how society works. The best ideas don't always win out the most popular ones do. People WANTED their kids to be better off, so they sent them to success factories that told the parents they'd be better off because in the past people were better off.
Until they weren't.
EDIT: I'm not saying no one saw this coming. I'm just saying a most people (society) didn't.
I don't really think any of those were comparable. The situation with the devaluing of an education is an extremely simple case of supply + demand. When usable skills are rare, they have a high value - when they're not, they don't. Again the same thing that makes it easy to predict what the longterm outcome of 'get [everybody] in computer science' will be. It'd devalue the skill to the point that it'd be worthless, much the same way that when you 'get [everybody] a college degree' those degrees, in and of themselves, become worthless.
Put another way, I can't imagine how anybody could predict anything else besides exactly what has happened.
Again with blaming children for the bad advice and mentoring that their parents gave them. Absolutely none of those questions mean anything if you're a 15 year old and your parents say "time to start looking for colleges!"
We know now, as adults, looking back and seeing that it was a bad idea. But 10-15-20 years ago when your parents told you it was time to go to college and you'd be homeless without a degree, you, as a child, listen to them.
Applying for college, yes. Applying for loans at 15? No. In the U.S., loans are generally applied for on an annual basis and disbursed on a semester basis. So once again, we return to these people being 18-22 (adults).
My actual point was that yes, parents/teachers/principals/other adult advisers do bear some responsibility, but let's also not pretend the actual students are unable to reason about future income and debt.
While I agree with some of this, few of these people are fully responsible for their situation. Anyone born after the year 1980 or so has been force-fed the "go to college" meme so much that it's difficult to imagine any alternative. Ask millions of not-yet-fully-developed brains to choose between "go to a college, make new friends, get away from mom and dad" and "start working a minimum wage job and get your own cheap place" and you will likely have few takers of the minimum wage option.
The real problem here is that the colleges responsible for high tuitions (thus high debt for graduates) and useless degrees are not held responsible for the outcomes of the educations they confer. Because the government guarantees many of these loans for students, we're effectively handing out money to anybody who asks for it -- at the expense of a potential entire life spent in debt if you choose poorly or even sub-optimally.
It's hard to be glad that these people are suffering under high debt loads when you realize that we will all be affected. When they retire with no savings and pull money from the system funded by taxes on your income and investments, you will likely not be happy. No man is an island and all of us are affected by macro-trends like this.
I remember high school in the 90s. Basically if you had 2 braincells to rub together you were dissuaded from even considering the military and even trade related classes. I didn't even know apprenticeships were even a thing in the US until well into my 20s because nobody ever told you about it unless you had family that was a tradesman.
The really sad thing was that there was a lot of push for lower class kids to go to college which means taking out loans. I was a part of a program for first generation college bound kids (basically lower class) and they spent some time helping us apply for scholarships and grants but everyone knew it was pretty much not a sure thing and that we'll all most likely resort to loans.
Also I feel the explosion in for-profit colleges in the 2000's were largely due to the easy access to loan money. I had it bad but these kids that fell for the for-profits had it worse.
Colleges need to have some skin in the game. Lenders should require that colleges pay out at least a small percentage of the loss when borrowers default.
And instead of a single flat interest rate for all student borrowers, actuaries should set interest rates based on the school and major. So students entering programs that produce a lot of defaulters would pay higher rates. That would provide a clear market signal indicating we have a surplus of people with that education, and encourage students to look at other options.
The loans are foisted on people who aren't even trusted with the decision of whether or not to drink alcohol. It's predatory, and at the same time the cost of education has absolutely skyrocketed. Baby boomers could emerge debt free from college with a minimum wage job. If they ended up with loans they couldn't afford, they could declare bankruptcy.
The baby boom generation pulled up the ladder behind them, and is now pouring boiling oil down on the generation trying to catch up.
It's easy to say that but kids (yes, kids) that are age 17 aren't really the best equipped to make great life altering decisions in the first place. People fuck up all the time and our response as a society shouldn't be "well, too bad" because 1) that's a terrible way to treat other people 2) if a ton of people are bankrupt due to student loan payments it WILL affect you indirectly, and potentially your own children/family members/friends
I'm not sure of a great solution and it's way outside my knowledge/expertise but ignoring the issue and basically just saying "should have got a STEM degree idiot" isn't good for society
"Kids" have been making this decision for decades. Kids also chose to serve in each of the World Wars at younger ages. Kids at a younger age can also get married in most states.
45-55% of the (albeit distant by social class) peers of college freshman are NOT going to college, but working jobs that don't require degrees. Not going to higher ed is as much of an adult decision as taking a loan.
And the 17 year-olds are in an adversarial environment.
I've known very smart people who, as late teens, were told all sorts of lies by colleges, about employability in the fields in which they ultimately got degrees.
It could've been wishful thinking on the part of the department (e.g., "Every industry needs Philosophy majors!"), and it could've been professors out of touch (e.g., "Hey, I got degrees in literature, and I got a professorship, coincidentally at the same university where my mom was head of a department, so anyone can do it! And my friends who didn't get professorships all got jobs at the hedge funds run by friends of their dads!").
And everyone was telling these teens that they need a degree, and everyone they knew was doing it.
So if you're not ready to take on responsibility of a large loan, maybe don't take one out, wait a few years, research the market, maybe work some jobs that don't require a college degree.
And seriously, figuring out which degrees pay takes literally one google search. A 17-year-old can easily do that.
This is a catch-22 though, if you are ignorant enough to not realize it is irresponsible, you are not the person who is going to be waiting a few years to research the market and make an informed decision. The people whose job it is to stop semi-ignorant people from making a poor uninformed decisions, are the same loan officers rubber stamping loans.
Not everyone can magically be smart enough to truly understand what they are getting into, and what ramifications it will have on their later economic life. What is your advice for the people who aren't doing more research ahead of time? "just get smarter dummy" ?
I remember being told that you were wasting your life if you didn't start college immediately after graduating from high school, and employers would look down on your resume as some sort of failure.
Most middle class kids coming out of school see college as an extension of the education required to compete in the market - they're also told that trade schools are a rip off and community college is for underachievers, so they end up diving into university before giving that option any real critical examination.
I imagine upper class kids just get their education bank-rolled by their parents so who cares. And I didn't live the life of a lower class kid (my family was middle or lower middle) so I can't speak to their experience - but that middle class suburbanite definitely isn't going to get a check from their parents to cover their full schooling.
Where I lived as a middle class teenager at least - a generic suburb in SoCal - I, and every other student, was told the community college we had has an excellent program to transfer students into a 4 year college with minimal debt. It definitely takes effort as a community to ensure graduating high school students understand their options in full.
I find that the community college grada are better professionals than the kids who jumped into uni because they didn't know anything and grasped at straws. It's an expensive but revealing mistake that shows which young adults have good judgement and self awareness.
Great, if people were that smart we wouldn't have had the 2008 housing crash. You have to make these structures idiot safe or the idiots destroy the economy.
It is easy to take potshots at people who got Art degrees, but what people never want to engage with is those who didn't do that. Investing 50-100k in a software degree may provide job-market-value and the ability to pay back the loan, but a huge loan is still a drain. A huge loan that was taken out to pursue a very economically viable career path still delays basic things like owning a home, marriage, children. The effect is more extreme on certain degrees than others, but that 60k still causes harm to the economy regardless.
Who benefits most from having an educated workforce and a rich market? Company owners, aka rich people. It makes sense to me that taxes on the rich should pay for most of it.
The 60k comes from the loan officers, who work for institutions that are regulated by the U.S. Department of Education. And after you have graduated, your loan servicer is assigned to you by the the DoE, you don't get to pick that either.
So the burden to pay is on the voters who voted to put this system in place, and those who continue to keep it in place by not voting for politicians that provide alternatives.
Ok, sure, but why did the loan officer approve it? Because student loans can't be shed off in bankruptcy, so it's guaranteed. What loan officer wouldn't approve such a loan?
If we're going to blame the victim, let's also look at the market structures that allow it to happen in the first place. If the lender took on some of the risk instead of passing the buck to our modern-day debtor's prison, then these degrees wouldn't be fundable if they are as worthless as you suggest.
I was 17 when I chose my undergrad. I got a degree in a field I didn't care about for the sole purpose of being employable. Then the 2008 recession wiped out entry-level mining and then oil sector jobs (my field). I jumped into software development, which I've been doing since. I don't have a degree in it but I make a good living.
If your argument about a generation-wide problem involves blaming individuals, instead of looking at the wider factors that caused this outcome to be predictable, you're missing an opportunity to improve matters.
Even people with "nonworthless" degrees that get hired have a hard time paying off their debt. I was lucky enough to get out of college without debt and into my engineering job.
The way we educate children in school is predatory when it comes to college and loans. We tell them to follow their dreams and that they must go to college. Of course you're going to have 18 year olds (who we know aren't fully developed until 25, who've been conditioned through schooling / society, etc.) make choices that turn out to be wrong in the long run.
For some reason, the older generations of our country (along with many others I would say) have decided they would rather eat their young.
None of this is an accident. It's to fund someone's luxurious lifestyle or retirement.
Why build housing when we can force the next generations to rent from us until they die?
Why have healthcare when we can use that to drain the accounts of any cancer stricken family who might have some actual savings built up? (healthcare related bankruptcies are staggeringly high in the USA)
All these things make someone richer. And if it's not you, you should probably be questioning why our country is making these decisions. They aren't the only decision we can make, other countries have proven that.
Empathy is hard. Sometimes people can't imagine the viewpoints on these things until someone in their family experiences it (gets cancer, loses their job, etc.).
I guess I would say, realize that no one is trying to get into these bad situations where they can't pay off their loans. They didn't wake up at 18 years old and say: "By golly, I sure would like to be hating my life in 10 years." They had hopes, they had aspirations, they had extenuating circumstances and a childhood that was different from our own.
The point is, almost no one sets out to make their life awful. Life happens.
I actually believe that society today has enough wealth that we can allow people to pursue both their vocation and their interests - I don't think people need to go to college to learn their trade (out of a few specific fields). Instead they benefit from that learning by living a more fulfilling life - and, sneakily, they also end up developing their soft skills quite a bit and soft skill proficiency is classically what has allowed American labour to retain it's value.
Sure. Just as long as you agree that the loans should be dischargable in bankruptcy. The lenders here should also bear the consequences of making a poorly thought out contract.
Why do you people always assume that the degree we chose to pursue was useless? I chose to pursue Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. I had to leave school prior to completion due to financial circumstances beyond my control at that time and have been unable to get my foot in the door without a degree since then.
