Student loans: on that NYT piece. . .

Last updated on: June 7, 2015 at 2:51 pm by Jane the Actuary

Student loans: on that NYT piece. . . 2015-06-07T14:51:33-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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There was a piece in the New York Times yesterday in which the author defended his decision to default on his student loans. It’s not fair, he said:

Years later [after graduation from a private college], I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.

He writes this at the age of (presumably) 58, that is, 40 years after his first student loan, and, though he doesn’t say how long ago it was that he first decided to cease paying down his debt, he asserts that was the right call for him, and should be the answer for anyone else with unpleasant debt levels. He advises readers to get multiple credit cards before defaulting, find a “stable housing situation,” pay your rent on time, and “live with or marry someone with good credit.”

And what happens if everyone defaults? Only good things, he says:

The collection agencies retained by the Department of Education would be exposed as the greedy vultures that they are. The government would get out of the loan-making and the loan-enforcement business. Congress might even explore a special, universal education tax that would make higher education affordable. . . . Instead of guaranteeing loans, the government would have to guarantee a college education.

Now, you might imagine that I’m skeptical of assertions that the federal government should just make college free for everyone — and you’d be right.

This particular individual, whose attitude toward life is encapsulated in his statement that he was unwilling to surrender his “vocation” in order to pay down his debt, accrued his debt at an unspecified private college. Does he imagine that in his “free college for all” world, the federal government would fund that sheltered world he lived in, with small class sizes and all the idealized elements of private colleges? So far as I know, in no country with free tertiary education, is the system anything like this. In Germany, of course, you have to pass the Abitur, in France, the Bac, in the UK, the A levels. There’s no such thing as going to college with a GED. And in Germany, there are no frills in college, no hand-holding advisors, no rec centers, and the Mensa serves meals that any American student would turn their nose at. I imagine it’s pretty much the same anywhere else.

Is the “free college” wing willing to give up the Residential College Experience to achieve it?

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