
America’s $1.5 trillion student-loan industry is a ‘failed social experiment’ - SQL2219
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-15-trillion-student-debt-is-a-failed-social-experiment-2018-10-16
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anoncoward111
For those who are hardest hit by student loans, they have become a pretty
close approximation of indentured servants or sharecroppers.

If the median college degree holding millenial is making ~50k per year, but is
also spending 50k per year after taxes, rent, transport, health care,
food/entertainment, and of course, loan payments, then they are not much
better off than someone who is working for 30k and spending 30k.

Now, we could make the assumption that the 50k job is more stable over the
next decade, or that there is room for meaningful raises, but so far, the
economy has not made this a statistical reality to my knowledge.

It goes back to the days of the Irish laborer. The Englishman owned a farm
with cattle in Ireland. He hired Irishmen and women to tend to the cows so
that they could eventually be slaughtered and sold for awesome profits in
London and Manchester.

As a token prize for their labor, the Irish were allowed to sleep at the farm,
eat butter from the cows and grow potatoes in the rocky soil in the
ungrazeable land.

This was a system that kept the Irish right in their places, until enough
cycles of potato blight and English refusal of humanitarian aid resulted in
nearly all of their deaths and deportation.

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Gibbon1
> pretty close approximation of indentured servants or sharecroppers.

Considering student loan debt is not dischargable, it's an exact description.

