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Meet a teacher with $303,000 in student debt who says Biden's $10,000 loan-forgiveness plan 'is not even a drop in the bucket'
https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-te ... ugh-2022-5

Meet a 34-year-old with $250,000 in student debt after 13 years of barely keeping up with her monthly interest payments: 'I never felt like I could get a handle on it'
https://www.businessinsider.com/millenn ... lan-2022-5

Whether parents, churches, home schools, private schools, public schools, or any combination thereof,
why aren’t students learning BASIC MATH that will PREVENT egregious debt - BEFORE they ever hold down a full time job?

1968:
My first full-time job: $.95/hour working in the office of a local bakery. (No car. My mother drove me to work.)
My first loan: $100 borrowed from a local bank to buy a portable standard typewriter. (not electric)
Credit cards did not exist.
Definitely NOT for anyone who did not have a current job, and credit history. Very difficult to get a loan.

Bankers were the security guards on money. They required strict accountability.

i don’t recall the payments. i made every one on time, it felt like it took FOREVER to pay that loan.

Valuable lesson. ^^^ Easy to borrow, hard to repay.

- - - - - - - -

2009:
My 2 year old granddaughter received her first unsecured credit card offer.

This is not ok. It’s a form of economic slavery. Indentured slavery.

If teachers cannot handle their own budgets, should they be trusted to teach students? What will they teach?- -Where to get loans?!
No one can teach what they do not know.

When i was helping with high school Sunday school classes, we bought some Christian texts on money, credit, checking accounts, etc.
We WARNED about unsecured credit card offers.

This thread is to discuss what students NEED to be taught. Before 18.

Money Matters for Teens
https://www.christianbook.com/money-mat ... 7/pd/46361


This is from the series we used, for middle school and high school. There may be better.
Our goal was to initiate the discussion. Most students said their parents had not discussed checking accounts or anything.

“THE TALK.”

“Money and possessions are the second most referenced topic in the Bible –
money is mentioned more than 800 times –
and the message is clear: Nowhere in Scripture is debt viewed in a positive way.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sherylnanc ... ial-guide/

I had to click through the link to read about the teacher with $303,000 in student debt because that is ridiculously off the charts. The vast majority of teacher training programs in the US are 4-year programs at public universities. Here in WA I think the largest school of education is at Western Washington University where the current total direct cost of attendance for in-state students is about $22,000 for tuition, room, and board. Tuition and mandatory fees are only $9,000/year if you choose to live at home and commute. And most residents of the state live within commuting distance of some kind of teacher training program. I expect that is somewhere near the national average give or take. So if a student funded the entire 4-year program with student loans including room and board, and didn't chip in a single dime of her own money with part time jobs, summer jobs, etc. she would still have borrowed less than $100K. And since this woman in question ran up her student loans a decade or more in the past you can reduce those numbers downwards by whatever the education inflation rate has been in the past 10 years. For someone graduating in say 2010 the total cost for four years at a teacher's college was probably closer to $50,000.

Currently the federal borrowing limit for federal student loans is $12,500 annually and $57,500 total and it was proportionately lower in the past when tuitions were lower. So there is no way an ordinary student could come close to borrowing multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars for an undergraduate education. In order to go over those limits you generally have to get what are called "parent plus" loans which are actually loans taken out by the parent not the student.

I was curious what the averages are and this site tells us that the average student loan debt is $32,731, while the median student loan debt amount is $17,000 https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-student-loan-debt and I think that is for all students both undergraduate and graduate. So the average is probably distorted by grad students borrowing heavily for med school, law school, and business school and the median is probably closer to the average undergrad.

The article doesn't give many details about this particular woman's circumstances except that she got an English undergrad degree, an education masters degree, and ran up her debt totals while her loans were in forbearance. What is sounds like to me is that:

1. She probably got her English degree at some sort of expensive private college like an Oberlin or Swarthmore, found out she was pretty unemployable with just a BA in English, and then went on to attend an expensive MA program in education to get more marketable degree, probably also at a private college. Probably running up big private school debts all along this 6-year pathway, probably through parent plus or other unsubsidized private student loans. Which was very unnecessary because there are alternative teacher certification programs at many community colleges which provide a pathway to earning a teaching certificate for people who already have bachelors degrees. I attended one myself. It cost only a few thousand dollars and I was in the classroom earning a salary while I was completing the program. In other words, she probably took the most expensive and longest possible route to getting a teaching certificate. The vast majority of teachers do nothing of the sort unless they are wealthy and parents are paying.

2. She also probably spent a lot of years defaulting on her loans which probably doubled or tripled the original loan amount. Student loan debt it relentless if you don't manage it. The article makes no mention of how much she originally borrowed but I doubt it was even half of what her current debt is.

The larger point is that there are always going to be outliers who have made extremely foolish decisions over the years and who have done things like run up over $300K of debt to get a teaching degree. But they are not the norm. The median student debt in the US is actually $17,000 and a $10,000 loan forgiveness will have a meaningful impact on most of their lives. It ultimately becomes a question of priorities. Money spent forgiving student loans is money not available for other programs. I would personally virulently oppose any proposal to forgive all student debt because that would grossly benefit a lot wealthy doctors, MBAs, and lawyers who can well afford to pay what they borrowed.

But a better Federal program would be to start forcing states to both (1) better subsidize their public universities so that tuition costs are closer to what they used to be in the past, and (2) reduce much of the administrative bloat and gold plated nonsense like luxury stadiums, lazy river pool complexes, and an endless array of high-priced assistant deans in charge of endless nonsense or nothing much at all. The reason student debt is risen so much is because we have basically reneged on the old social contract where we provided affordable public education for all. The current federal student loan program basically just shifts all those costs onto students because they have made it too easy to get money and every time the borrowing limit goes up, tuitions and fees go up too. If you give colleges and universities more free money in form of student loans they have proven they will figure out extravagant ways to spend every last dollar.

As for the other woman in the second story with $250K in student loan debt? She went to NYU which is notoriously one of the most expensive private universities in the country and also one of the stingiest in terms of student aid. The current estimated cost of attendance at NYU is $83,250/year which you can contrast against Western Washington University which I mentioned above at $22,000 per year: https://www.nyu.edu/admissions/financia ... dance.html

No one needs to go to college at one of the most expensive universities in the country, in the center of Manhattan, the most expensive city in the country. And the rest of us certainly don't have to pay for it.

Ken,

Could you describe to us what you think someone with $300k of debt who works full time but can't find jobs better than being a barista, etc. should do?

Debtors' prison?

Josh wrote: ↑Mon Jun 06, 2022 7:42 pm Ken,

Could you describe to us what you think someone with $300k of debt who works full time but can't find jobs better than being a barista, etc. should do?

Debtors' prison?

Ok, I’m officially convinced that Josh is an AI programmed to disagree with Ken no matter what.

temporal1 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 05, 2022 6:53 pm “Money and possessions are the second most referenced topic in the Bible –
money is mentioned more than 800 times –
and the message is clear: Nowhere in Scripture is debt viewed in a positive way.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sherylnanc ... ial-guide/

.. What will they teach?- -Where to get loans?! ..

i see i inadvertantly bunny trailed this topic by beginning with extreme reports.

this thread is not intended to be about where/how to secure student loans.
evidence is, acquiring debt is not a problem for any student.

TRY AGAIN??

“THE TALK.”

Josh wrote: ↑Mon Jun 06, 2022 7:42 pm Ken,

Could you describe to us what you think someone with $300k of debt who works full time but can't find jobs better than being a barista, etc. should do?

Debtors' prison?

People make bad decisions all the time. If you want a society in which people are not ever held accountable for their bad financial decisions then you are describing a socialist or communist society where the state assumes all the responsibility and we are all just wards of the state.

There are few kinds of debt that I would be relatively sympathetic with. Medical debt, for example. If you took on $300K of debt to save the life of your child in the pre-ACA days when insurance wasn't available to all then I would be sympathetic and bankruptcy and a fresh start might be the answer.

But if you run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt studying Elizabethan poetry or Queer Studies at an absurdly expensive posh private college then double your debt by letting your loans slide into forbearance while you backpack across Europe, study in an ashram in India, or work as an underground activist then I'm not especially sympathetic to your plight. Would you be? And yes, lots of people do exactly that sort of thing.

“THE TALK.”

Here’s a question to mull over: BANKRUPTCY.

When gov started interferring with college, i.e., grants and guaranteed student loans .. loans to young ones who often had never worked a day in their lives, no credit-worthiness whatsoever, etc., they also very neatly wrote in bankruptcy protection for banks.
In case of bankruptcy, student loans are one of the very few debts that cannot be written off.

HOW NICE FOR BANKS. $$$$

Does anyone bother to try to explain to young ones with zip life experience what FOREVER DEBT means?
Is it possible to relay the gravity to young ones whose brains have not finished maturing?

When i was making $.95/hr and had to repay a $100 loan, THAT was a practical life lesson.

Today’s young ones casually look at $50,000, $100,000 debt, and think nothing of it. THAT’S A PROBLEM.

Ken wrote: ↑Mon Jun 06, 2022 12:23 am I had to click through the link to read ..

Ken,
sorry to trouble you.
could you request your posts be moved to start another topic on how to acquire student loans, or other?

i’m sorry to have tempted a bunny trail with the extreme OP links. i apologize.
i was pretty sure those reports would be recognized as extreme without deliberation.

this topic is meant to focus on BASICS in math, esp avoidance of debt and why it’s important, how to handle checkbooks, those sorts of things. about how Christians view money+debt, important matters in scriptures.

your post is interesting, about how to avoid egregious debt, but, justifying debt, nonetheless.

“THE TALK.”

When gov started interferring with college,

This would be an ideal place to remove gov.
Return higher ed to “pay as you go,” self-responsibility, etc.

In the very least, allow student loans to be included in bankruptcy proceedings.
This, alone, would cause banks to return to former methods of ACCOUNTABILITY, CREDIT-WORTHINESS requirements for loans.

No more, “everyone gets a degree!”
Which has degraded the value of degrees, and increased the cost of higher ed, many times over.

University institutions would have to be more accountable.

If student loans were allowed in bankrupty discharges, there would be no need for ALL taxpayers to be looking at paying off student loans, or even considering “free” higher ed.

“Here’s who qualifies for the $25B in student loan forgiveness already approved”
https://thehill.com/news/wire/3509803-h ... -approved/

A shameful mess - all due to gov interference, incompetence+corruption.