
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me - HelloFellowDevs
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/looks-like-debt-to-me-miller
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dokein
But... I thought taking English classes and reading literature was supposed to
provide one with critical thinking skills? How many years of "critical
thinking" does one need to take before realizing that $200K on 6% variable
interest is a whole lot of loans to take for no job prospects? How poignant
and vivid should one's description of poverty be (parents crying over a
yearbook purchase) before actually thinking about their own responsibilities?

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fzeroracer
How much critical thinking does it take to realize that living in a society
which purposely takes advantage of the poor and downtrodden to ensure that
they live a life eternally in debt might be a bad thing?

We're not talking about people running up credit cards buying useless crap.
We're talking about a system designed to push people through college and
towards the 'American Dream' while pushing them into the deepest depths of
debt.

Now consider the following: Over 50% of the US Govt's financial assets are in
student loans [1]. I think the advice of 'just don't go that far into debt,
dummy' falls flat when we can see how absolutely huge the student loan
business is.

[1] [https://community.finimize.com/t/graphic-of-the-
week/1044/25...](https://community.finimize.com/t/graphic-of-the-
week/1044/25?u=anders_finimize)

~~~
dokein
For the sake of argument, let’s grant that his B.A. was someone else’s fault.
But the masters? After four years of undergraduate, presumably at a decent
university, was he still uneducated and unable to think for himself? If yes,
that degree is worth even less than I thought. We should immediately clawback
the tuition from the university—-at least, it would definitely be the wrong
approach to have society systematically agree to pay for such a fraudulent
product.

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pseudalopex
The author may have enrolled in a 5-year BA/MA program. Even if not, 2008
wasn't a great time to graduate with a BA in English, and advice to ride out
the recession in grad school was pretty common.

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charmides
I feel really sorry for the author and the author's parents. I know so many
people who spent so much time and money on degrees like English literature,
history, arts, sociology, etc. Today, most of them cannot find a job in any
related field. In fact, I only know a single person who managed to make a good
career out of studying a subject like that.

As a teenager, I was close to choosing this type of major myself. Almost
nobody tried to talk me out of it. Instead, there were many people around me
who encouraged me to choose something I found interesting and let the rest
take care of itself. Reading articles like this, it reinforces my belief that
this is almost always terrible advice and those who say things like that to
young people should feel ashamed.

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brm
There’s more to learning and the life of the mind than how much money it can
make you. College shouldn’t entirely be a STEM trade school. Creativity and
innovation require cross pollination and I bet if you look harder you find
plenty of studio art majors and linguists and English majors doing just fine
in the modern world. We can’t all be engineers but we can all learn to apply
ourselves across disciplines and that works both ways. The problem seems to be
that people believe that college is the only ticket they need and that they
don’t need to apply themselves further or continue learning and adapting.

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PhasmaFelis
> _College shouldn’t entirely be a STEM trade school._

Then colleges need to stop pitching themselves as the gateway to a career.

People don't believe these things because they're stupid. They believe these
things because colleges systematically lie to them.

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HelloFellowDevs
I don't think the buck stops at college, we've even gotten to a point where
HS/MS teachers are aggressively marketing for colleges as a way to an instant
career.

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bcatanzaro
I think this system would be greatly improved if the universities sponsoring
this debt (and profiting from it) had some skin in the game. If the
universities suffered financially when their former students did, they would
get much wiser about how they encourage students to take on debt, and they
would stop inflating their costs to match all the subsidies we provide.

I think the modern university business model is predatory and needs to be
regulated.

~~~
ryrobes
OR allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy - that would give the
schools a hell of an incentive to not ship overtly-debt-addled peeps into the
workforce.

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candiodari
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-than-40-of-student-
borrowe...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-than-40-of-student-borrowers-
arent-making-payments-1459971348)

So $200 billion.

Assuming this doesn't double or triple when you announce the rule changes,
that's 6% extra taxes to pay, per year.

Realistically, you'd expect this to double in the beginning, then rapidly
taper off. So that would mean 10% extra in income and payroll taxes (and 10%
higher corp tax, and all imported goods 10% rise in price), then dropping to,
say, a 3% rate that lasts indefinitely.

I'm pretty sure people are in universal agreement that this is too high a
cost.

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Simulacra
These articles pop up every now and then and I'm struck by how many include a
similar line to "a B.A. and an M.A. in English literature, with more than
$100,000 of debt..." If your goal is an MA in English, to be a writer, why
would you go anywhere even approaching $10k a year? This notion that you must
attend an expensive school is a huge fallacy that people need to understand.

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newman8r
I feel bad for the author's parents, thankfully he got his dad taken off as a
cosigner. I also think the author should be willing to accept 100% blame for
the debt, which it seems like they aren't.

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another-one-off
> I also think the author should be willing to accept 100% blame for the debt,
> which it seems like they aren't.

This isn't a productive way of treating bad debt - and it is particularly
questionable in light of the treatment the major banks received in the 2008
crisis.

The system, and it is a pretty good one, is that the lender is responsible for
judging the risk of who they are lending to. If they judge correctly and the
venture succeeds, the money comes back with interest. If the venture fails,
then the money is lost in bankruptcy and the slate is wiped mostly clear.

Debtors prisons are stupid, holding people to the past is foolish. Once
someone can't pay money back, then they can't pay it back and that should be
the end of the matter. This idea that student loans can't be discharged
through bankruptcy is one of the grossest unfairnesses that the US foists on
its young people. Pretending that a lenders hands are clean when they have
given $100,000 to somebody studying an English major is crazy.

~~~
newman8r
I personally went through defaulting on student loans and being hassled by
bill collectors, so I can relate to that situation - it totally sucks.

I also agree that the laws pertaining to bankruptcy and student loans should
be revisited. I also think predatory lending practices are a big problem.

But despite all of that, I really feel like the author should own
responsibility. It can simultaneously be a bad system and still be his fault.

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foobiekr
The quote,

"My debt was the result, in equal measure, of a chain of rotten luck and a
system that is an abject failure by design"

really kind of made it hard to be empathetic for the rest of the article. In
equal major, someone decided to go deep into debt obtaining not one but two
degrees in English literature in the late 2000s when this was already well
known to be a terrible idea.

I think student debt should be reformed and it should be possible to discharge
student debt through bankruptcy (with modifications to the previous status
quo, I think), but this is just kind of grating.

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5555624
>My debt was the result, in equal measure, of a chain of rotten luck and a
system that is an abject failure by design.

Bad luck and the "system"? No. The author and his parents are also
responsible. They should have sat down and discussed majors, schools, and how
to pay for them. NYU is not the only school with English Literature programs;
so, he could have chosen a cheaper school. They could have discussed what sort
of job he wanted. If he wanted to study English Literature because he liked
it, make it a minor and/or study it throughout your life.

You can blame luck and the system all you want; but, you bear some of the
responsibility yourself.

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tspike
> Or was it my fault for not having the foresight to realize it was a mistake
> to spend roughly $200,000 on a school where, in order to get my degree, I
> kept a journal about reading Virginia Woolf?

~~~
candiodari
If you read the article, she mentions a sentence like this twice, then
immediately drops it. By contrast, the responsibility of "society",
"government" is given pages of text.

Clearly it's not the author's intent to accept responsibility. At the end of
the article it is pointed out how the reasoning in the group works:

"After the food was served, a waiter came by with a stack of to-go boxes,
which sat on the edge of the table untouched for a while as everyone
cautiously eyed them. The group was reluctant at first, but then Ian said,
“The chicken was actually pretty good,” as he scooped it into one of the
boxes. Mira shrugged, took a fork, and added, “This is a little tacky, but I’d
hate to waste free food,” and the rest of the table followed her lead. Maybe
the next generation would do better, but I felt like we were broke and broken.
No number of degrees or professional successes would put us back together
again. For now, though, we knew where our next meal was coming from."

Knowing that making decisions based upon personal status rather than financial
sense is what got this group into trouble this sentence is more than a little
disheartening.

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oculusthrift
This person really tries to absolve him and his family for anything. For one,
don’t get how it’s valid to complain that banks were willing to give him
loans. It’s his choice whether take them. In addition, this is exactly what
people in the past campaigned for: loans for low income people to go to
college.

Second he blames society for selling dream that any education was an
uncontested pathway to success. Which, once again, is up to him and his
parents whether or not they buy that lie

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PhasmaFelis
You don't think the people who lied to him have some culpability?

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rabboRubble
I find it deeply ironic that our legislators find that 17 and 18 year olds are
too young and irresponsible to drink alcohol. That experience is reserved for
the 21 and older crowd. Signing up for 4 year plan at 17 and 18 years old that
gives the young person $100,000 dollars inexpugnable debt by the time the
young person turns 21, no problems with this at all.

This whole system is headed for a major reckoning.

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skookumchuck
17 and 18 year olds have no assets and no credit history, so there's no
recourse for the lender. The reason for the inexpungable debt is so lenders
will be willing to lend to them.

Otherwise, you'll have people graduating, declaring bankruptcy, and getting a
free ride through college sticking lenders with the bill.

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candiodari
So what you're saying is people would be robbing the banks, rather than the
other way around ! That would be SO unfair !

Say, what happened in 2008, when lenders couldn't pay their bills ?

These arguments would make sense if they were applied consistently. But in
practice, socialism for the rich, debtor prisons for the poor.

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eftychis
The bailout should not have happened perhaps. Banks have trapped us into the
too big to fail, we are above the law.

Think it like this: You have a sibling that is a bad gambler. They play
roulette and lose big as expected and drive the whole families finances to the
bottom. They then go to your parents complain that roulette is bad and ask
your parents to bail them out. Your parents instead of punishing your sibling
and make them repay the debt, say that it is fine please don't do it again and
we don't want you to declare bankruptcy, but we will have your brother/sister
(that is you) pay the bills.

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fred_is_fred
You spent over $100k on an MA in English from a private school in the most
expensive city in the United States to live. Sorry, but that's on you. There's
no math in the world to make that a good decision.

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candiodari
Humans reason based on personal status, and the whole article is full of
personal status decisions ignoring economic reality time after time after
time. Then, of course, society is blamed for providing loans, and for (I
think) allowing personal status to exist at all ...

And the article is -unintentionally- terminated with a statement confirming
that despite all these events, the author has not changed strategy since
before he left high school: "M.H. Miller is the arts editor for The New York
Times Style Magazine.".

Anybody who thinks this person can be helped is kidding themselves. This
person can't be helped. Not with law changes, not with refinancing, not with
financial education, not even with money.

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pseudalopex
According to sites like Glassdoor, the average salary for a New York Times
editor is in the low six figures. The author made some bad decisions, but do
you think switching careers now would be a good one?

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RickJWagner
"My debt was the result, in equal measure, of a chain of rotten luck and a
system that is an abject failure by design."

No. The author chose to go to school out of state and also decided to pursue a
master's degree with added debt.

College is not free. Debt compounds. Unwise decisions have consequences.

We need to start basic financial education, fast.

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Johnny555
What is the expected career path for an English Lit major? I know there are
lots of fields related to writing like copywriting, editing, news reporting,
etc but is there a job that's a more direct application of the degree (besides
English Lit professor)?

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cannonedhamster
The fact that you cannot discharge student loan debt is what encourages risky
loan behavior. I can say that I got myself into a terrible loan because I was
told that the prospects of a career were far better than they
were,unfortunately this information was significantly harder to find back in
that time. I didn't even know community colleges existed and thought I'd have
it paid off in no time. As it is, I don't know how long it will take me to pay
off, but it's going to be years.

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kevin_thibedeau
At least he helped finance a comfortable lifestyle for the NYU admin staff.

