Student loan cancellation is in the news today.

How have student loans affected your career choices?

Would you have chosen a different path if yours were cancelled?

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I think that colleges need to change, too. They are all competing with amenities like it’s a freaking county club. And so tuition rises. And the market falls for it because the market is 18 year old kids who truly cannot comprehend what the debt really is. And parents who feel like they have no choice, since raising their kids to get into a “good college” has been society’s directive since forever.
But, as to the debt forgiveness, I think it’s important to realize that a generation ago (mine/GenX), kids came out of undergrad with 10’s of thousands on debt, and now its hundreds. Yes, they should have know better, yes their parents should have known better, but it happened really quickly and society has not had time to adapt. And we may not want to adapt, because deciding that expensive colleges are only for the rich feels un-American.

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Yeah, every time I tell myself “I paid off my debt and it wasn’t that hard” I look at how much tuition has gone up since I went to school and cringe at what people have to pay now. It’s out of control, I feel really bad for younger adults who are saddled with this massive debt that just didn’t exist when I was a kid. I think people just don’t realize how much worse it’s gotten.

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I graduated with around $50K I’m student loan debt. I went to a school that didn’t provide good post-graduation resources. Therefore, I was left to fend for myself.

I made t-shirt graphics, I’ve gone client-side, and I have worked at a very toxic agency all for the money and pressure of being crushed by my student loan debt.

If I didn’t have student loans, I may have been more selective with my job choices and waited for something better to come. It took 5 months after graduation to land what I did.

To this day I recall my dad telling me to apply at the local grocery store or do anything needed since I had a loan to pay.

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If I could have afforded it, I would have liked to have been a doctor. I avoided college because my family couldn’t afford it, and thus I have little prospects outside of advertising.

Cancelling student loan debt means I will then be paying taxes to help those who grew up with better means than me get even further ahead of me. I’m a bleeding-heart liberal, but this seems wrong to me.

I think the solution should be to zero out the interest, cap monthly repayment amounts, take a percentage off, etc. But not a total forgiveness, that’s really unfair. Or should I run out and start on a medical degree before this law kicks in?

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Edelman 1: So you’re saying that I am uninformed because I implied 1) some student loans have interest, 2) are sometimes billed at an unaffordable rate even if the person has a lower paying job, or 3) are sometimes just too large an amount? So you disagree with these things? Are you sure you’re only replying to me, or to someone else?

Yeah, I would have gotten a crazy expensive degree and done something less emotionally backbreaking.

I know it’s a very unpopular opinion but it’s rewarding bad mistakes. Something needs to be done about loans but this ain’t it.

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At the end of the day, the recession was more caused by the packaging and selling of junk mortgages than the junk mortgages themselves.

Student loans lasting through bankruptcy helps in that. They’re also not a marketable asset since you can’t sell your degree to someone else.

Make student debt defaultable and no bank will lend an 18yo a quarter million dollars for a college education. By making loans defaultable, schools will not be able to charge what they are today because no one would be able to afford it. Prices will come down across the board, and largely what will be cut is the amenities and bureaucracies schools have built as a response to this new price premium. It's not like college professors (the education givers) are rolling in dough; and hell, so many of these courses are farmed out to poorly paid adjuncts anyway.

Prices shot up when student debt was reclassified as a non-dischargable debt by Nixon in 1972. The logic then was that you can't give back your education to the bank so you shouldn't be able to walk away from that debt. 47 years of tuitions rising at roughly double the rate of inflation has gotten American students to where they are today.

Don't throw more gov't (i.e., taxpayer) money at the problem. It will only make the problem for future generations worse and further enrich lenders.

And I say that as someone who always has and always will vote progressive.

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Why would it "go for the rich and only the rich"? Theoretically, prices should come down in this situation, thereby making it more affordable for all. Coincidentally, this is also the situation that Boomers had when they brag about they paid for their education doing summer jobs.

Admittedly, this solution only helps tomorrow's students, not yesterday's or today's, but I don't see your logic at all.

My student loans are crazy. I’d probably own a home now if I didn’t have to pay on them. But I can kiss that dream goodbye.

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Nah, I thought the same until I got the pay bumps needed to make it happen. It’ll come in time.

It’s been covered a lot, but when you offer cheap loans from the government and make the money easier to get, colleges can increase prices. By flooding the market with essentially free loans, we created a gold rush for colleges and built a situation where financially inexperienced teens were taking on loans they can’t afford. The solution is a tough one. If you make loans harder to get, prices will come down, but fewer people will be able to go to college. And if you forgive all the current debt, you’re solving nothing and kicking the can down the road to the next generation. The balance of ensuring a population is well-educated without becoming burdened with debt is one very few countries have figured out. While I think debt forgiveness is a nice idea, it’s a lazy idea that doesn’t take into account the ripple effects of the federal government assuming more debt than the GDP of many small countries.

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SVP if you break it down equally by population it's about the same for those with secondary education and uni degrees as those abroad.

Something is broken in the system. There are fewer and fewer tenured professors... it’s a lot of adjuncting now and that doesn’t pay a living wage... tuition is insanely high (and it’s not to pay for those nonexistent professor rolls).... so what’s happened????

I think college/undergrad should be free or minimal cost like in Europe and other countries around the world.

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There’s an interesting debate happening right now about if we should funnel kids into employment-focused educational programs at younger ages for the same reason. Whether or not a student can afford college, the majority will need to join the workforce and our current system is incredibly inadequate to prepare them for that.

I dropped 250k on an advertising/art direction degree and can't even land a job. I'll take that cancellation please.

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54k a year $36k tuition, the rest for living. Plus interest goes up for prior years school loan.

For people who got screwed by for profit colleges, yes. Everyone else, no.

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Forgiveness makes sense for certain fields like social service- but not a high-earning field that is not helping towards the social good. And these fields already have forgiveness. I’d just like what I’ve already paid to go towards the principal.

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What do you mean I’m not helping the social good!

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I would have never gone to college knowing I’d be making this much, having leveraged not ONE THING from that experience. It didn’t even put me in the position I’m in now. The debt hanging over my head sucks. Just enough to negate the benefits of my high earning salary. It’s like I need to keep pushing for raises or jumping to agency just to get ahead in pay, to allow me small luxuries in my mid 30s. It made my mom super happy though...

likeuplifting

Having student loans has shaped how I think about money. I’ve learned so much about finances and self discipline in the last 12 months since I’ve started aggressively paying mine off. Stop ubering your eats and cook for your damn grown ass self

Eisenhower had a 90%+ top marginal tax rate and presided over what the most conservative among us consider "great" enough to be returned to.

We have not explored the outer reaches of what proper progressive taxation can provide us in services like education, health, space and more since the postwar era. Cancel debt. Raise taxes. Restore humanity. Do people right and they'll flourish.

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