
When Unpaid Student Loan Bills Mean You Can No Longer Work - SQL2219
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/business/student-loans-licenses.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Trending&version=Full&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article
======
teslabox
The education industry is kind of a racket. The state pays to send children to
13 years of schooling, but at the end they haven't learned much of anything.
Someone here at HN had this comment about their experience:

"Really just screw public school in general. The whole place was 95% waste of
time followed by a 'congratulatory' piece of paper."
-[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14047919](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14047919)

If a politician was courageous, and didn't care about getting re-elected,
they'd point out that the system could be fixed by getting rid of
Kindergarten, replacing 1st and 2nd grade with structured activities instead
of 'classroom time' (prison for children), replacing high school with
something more like community college, and allowing the remaining years to be
much more flexible - conducted for the learner's benefit, rather than the
system's...

But school has been transformed from an important social institution into a
jobs project. Children & teachers are both trapped.

~~~
awinder
Unpopular opinions: let’s not lose the forest for the trees here,
macrologically the US is turning out productive and world-competitive minds
and workers. The system can have flaws and gaps without it being a total
racket in need of ground-up rehauling. We don’t live in a concrete world so if
you end up holding opinions at the extremes, you’re probably missing nuance.

~~~
kiliantics
There is some nuance missing in your claims too. Those productive world-
competitive people more than likely did not go through the public school
system in the US. They tend to have had a great deal of socio-economic
advantage. The US is the richest global power, so it makes perfect sense that
there are a lot of people who have such advantages in the US.

~~~
morgante
> Those productive world-competitive people more than likely did not go
> through the public school system in the US.

That is highly unlikely. Even at elite Ivy universities, a majority of
students attended public high schools.

Public education is a lot better than people give it credit for. There's wide
variation in quality but there are certainly plenty of excellent public
schools available.

~~~
philipov
Public education is good in the areas where the upper middle class live.

Old Greenwich, Cos Cob, and Riverside have great public schools because that's
where all the IT professionals, quants, and middle managers move to raise
their families. Those districts have access to many adults with an interest
and ability to participate in the school community, and so the district ends
up with a lot of extra resources.

But the hedge fund upper management send their kids to Brunswick School,
Sacred Heart, and the like, and the district on the super rich and the poorer,
primarily-Hispanic sides of town, has a poorer reputation.

~~~
virgilp
The correlation is there, but I'm not convinced about causality. I know people
pay good money to buy properties near a good public school... so, I suspect
it's not that "public schools are great where upper middle class live", but
that upper middle class moved where great public schools are.

~~~
ubernostrum
It's a loop. In many areas, schools are funded by property taxes, so higher
property value leads to more funding for the school, which leads to perception
of better school, which drives more people to want to live there, which
produces higher property values, which...

~~~
TheCoelacanth
That doesn't fully explain it though. Many of the worst schools also have some
of the most funding per student.

------
Sniffnoy
This just seems completely irrational. Do lenders imagine they're _more_
likely to recover their money this way? This article needs more information to
explain how something so completely irrational-sounding could arise.

Questions I still have after reading this article:

* Are we specifically talking about loans by the government, or student loans in general?

* If the latter, does the lender have any say in this, or does the government just do this unilaterally?

* How the hell did this happen? Yes, it was part of a bundle of "aggressive collection tactics" but... really, more information is needed here. Is this, like, a case of the government having the wrong incentives, needing more to look tough than to actually recover their money? If this applies to private loans, what did private lenders have to say about this at the time? Etc.

~~~
danjoc
>Do lenders imagine they're more likely to recover their money this way?

When the mob cripples/kills a gambler who can't pay, they're not trying to get
the money back. They're sending a message to other gamblers.

~~~
derefr
Gamblers are under a very autonomous incentive structure: _they_ want to
gamble, and _they_ can be scared into not doing so by consequences that would
befall _them_ personally.

Student loans don't work like this, I think, because most kids going to
college aren't doing so because _they_ want to. Instead, they think they
_need_ to, either because their parents demand it, or society demands it.

When you think you _need_ to do something (i.e. there are no other
options/routes to not-dying), adding risks to it doesn't have any effect on
the math.

~~~
dzhiurgis
They also _need_ to select correct course and actually finish it...

------
zipwitch
Well-connected banks and major corporations who make bad decisions and
financially crash get bailouts. Citizens who make similar mistakes when
they're young get their lives destroyed. Makes it pretty clear who "our"
government really serves.

~~~
jdavis703
When major banks fail they take out major parts of the economy. I'm sure we
all remember the mayhem the big banks caused in the Great Recession.

Secondly, the bailouts the banks received were loans -- they've now been
repaid with interest, and the federal government has wound up making a profit.

I'm no banker or Wall Street apologist, the big banks and executives should've
faced large punishments for their role in the fraud that triggered the
economic crisis.

But we also need to be pragmatic and realize that the Bush and Obama
administrations had very limited choices to fix the recession, which was made
worse because banks basiclly stopped lending any money.

By all means let's elect politicians who will regulate and break up big banks,
but let's not score cheap populism points by deriding economic policy without
proposing a viable alternative.

~~~
dreamdu5t
So a viable solution to student debt is for the government to forgive it all?

~~~
eropple
Realistically, I think that's going to have to be what happens. The horse is
out of the barn. We can close the door through reforming student loan
programs, but we have to bring the horse back, first.

I say this as somebody who graduated college in 2010 with fairly minimal debt
that I've already paid off. I was extremely lucky in my choice of career (and
knowing I wanted to do it at the time) and I made better choices than most
with regards to picking colleges and what school I attended, and so it kinda
pisses me off a little bit--but me being pissed off is distinctly secondary to
_we have saddled two entire generations with impossible debts in the chase for
"employability"_.

------
bbarn
Yes, student loans are a disaster in this country, but of all things.. nursing
is used as the example here?

Nursing is one of the easier ways to get value out of an education. A fresh
graduate with a 4 year BSN can make ~70K to start, and nearly every major
metro has an affordable community college nursing program. This isn't
underwater basket weaving here, this is a very marketable skill that requires
a fairly low cost (compared to many fields) amount of schooling.

The article also states the program is in fact successful at getting people to
repay loans, and that people truly unable to pay simply had to enter into a
payment arrangement to get their licenses reinstated. This sounds more like
people flat out not paying their loans, more than being unable to because of a
predatory student loan culture. It's the exact same thing they do to child
support non-payers in most states, and it works because the reality is rarely
true inability to pay - and when it is, the states are generally sane about it
and have programs to accommodate. Pitchforks are coming out way too fast about
this, I think.

------
uiri
South Dakota is kind of crazy when it comes to this. They cross references
people who hold SD drivers licenses with student loan debt databases and buys
up the debt. If people fall behind at all, they get a letter warning them that
their license will be suspended in 30 days unless they pay up.

South Dakota is a very rural state. There are no metros like NYC, SF, or
Seattle where you can rely on public transit to get around.

[http://www.ksfy.com/content/news/State-law-sparks-student-
de...](http://www.ksfy.com/content/news/State-law-sparks-student-debt-
controversy-446255773.html)

------
Arubis
From the article, it sounds as if records are pretty informally kept in most
cases, if at all. I’d be interested in how this breaks down across gender
lines. When I think of (jobs requiring licensure) INTERSECTION (jobs that
don’t pay enough to pay down student loans), I come up with non-doctorate
level healing/helping professions, like nursing, social work, and education,
all of which are predominantly female.

------
lisper
This is another example of society putting morality above practical
considerations. The result is cutting our nose off to spite our face. The
moral calculus is: people who welch on their debts are cheating. Cheaters must
be punished. The most effective way to punish someone who hasn't actually
committed a crime is to strip them of their "privilege" to work. The net
result is to make it even harder for them to pay their debt, which nobody
actually wants.

This is not an isolated example. Another is the way in which "cheating" is
discouraged in school. If one kids convinces another kid to do their homework
for them, that's called cheating and it's punished. But in fact the ability to
persuade other people to work for you and negotiate a deal where both sides
feel like they've come out ahead is one of the most valuable skills a person
can develop. What the education system calls "cheating" is often budding
entrepreneurship, and it really ought to be encouraged. But it isn't.

~~~
zanny
If society put its morals in front of its face they would abolish bankruptcy
and let people drown in debt.

Society doesn't because those writing the rules _like_ having bankruptcy
protection. But at the same time, the electorate dictating laws is also way
past college age, but also wants their kids to be guaranteed to go to school
(and if student loans weren't protected there would be dramatically less money
for kids to go into lifelong debt with). If they are in debt for the rest of
their lives... thats their problem, but I'll be damned if my kids are _not_
going to college!

------
abalashov
I’m surprised how little attention is given to the fact that things like this
are a side effect of a car-based society. If you don’t build a world where
people depend on their cars to do absolutely anything or to economically
function, restricting their freedom isn’t nearly as easy.

I mean, to the residents of most European towns and cities, this statement
sounds absurd. So you took away my driving licence: so what?

~~~
zanny
Trick is the residents of those European towns and cities are going to school
for free or nearly no cost that they can pay for in real time, don't have to
declare bankruptcy if they break a bone a month out of college, and don't need
to invest in a car to be able to go anywhere.

I really feel the future is in Europe. The winners of American capitalism
might be burning a great fire, but it has no kindle to last. Most of Europe
burns calmer but more sustainably, at learn in terms of having an educated and
skilled population that isn't endemically mentally ill or drug addicted from
all the abuses of their society.

------
qwerty456127
Whether it's about a student loan or some other kind ow loan, how exactly are
people supposed to pay with their professional licenses suspended? Isn't this
policy purely nonsensical? Doesn't suspending such a license in such a case
mean preventing the person from ever repaying the debt actually? Isn't it in
the best interests of a creditor to help their debtors earn money rather than
to prevent them from earning?

~~~
Asooka
The idea is to set an example. You basically write off this debtor, in the
interest of encouraging your other million debtors to think before defaulting
on their loans.

~~~
qwerty456127
Thanks. This way it makes at least some sense. But isn't it a way too brutal
and still a way irrational from the society point of view? Effectively ridding
a skilled person of a life, setting them broke and probably homeless as the
result at the same time while funding other peoples welfare and undertaking
all kinds of efforts to solve homelessness and joblessness problems on the
other hand?

~~~
bbarn
The article states that those with inability to pay were able to get their
licenses back by entering into a payment arrangement. This is targeted at
negligent non-payers, not people unable to pay.

------
rayiner
The dismal quality of state government is a damning indictment of federalism.
Any idiot would realize that blocking someone’s professional license is a
completely counter productive way to collect on a debt. It’s no comfort to
realize that the same people who make laws like this also craft laws
regulating key aspects of our economy, from zoning and construction to
policing.

------
robert_foss
I would call this as yet another consequence of not having free education.

~~~
randomdata
I would call it a consequence of supply management. Once you get past the
headline, you soon see this has nothing to do with education at all. Rather,
these professions have created a regulatory environment where only those who
buy into it are allowed to participate. This artificially limits the supply of
workers to artificially inflate incomes. If the 'quota' was freely accessible
to anyone then the whole reason for the supply management would be lost
altogether.

~~~
robert_foss
So not having student dept would not help these people, is that what you are
saying?

~~~
randomdata
More or less. If schooling (education truly is free already) was
hypothetically free and accessible to all, then the professional bodies would
simply move the fees away from the school system entirely. The debt would
remain, just as it already does in professional organizations who aren't tied
to the school system (taxi medallions, for example). You're not really any
further ahead as it relates to this topic. The regulatory body wants their
money, and if you don't pay up they will happily give the spot to someone
else.

------
emilfihlman
I find absolutely ridiculous that a license can be taken away because of not
having money.

It is unbelievable.

------
protomyth
In North Dakota's defense, the law here was probably put into place when the
Bank of North Dakota was doing the majority of loans (SLND). It was really,
really hard to default since you could get a deferment with a phone call or
change your payment amount the same way. I had about 5 years (various lengths
over the loan) where I didn't pay on my student loans because my take home was
too low.

I don't know what the situation is now but SLND was really, really easy to get
to something that was acceptable.

[edit] hold the heck up: The section of the North Dakota Century Code these
websites are quoting is 28-25-11 which has the title "28-25-11. Property
applied - Wages exempt - Suspension of recreational licenses for nonpayment of
defaulted state guaranteed student loans." \- note the word _recreational_
www.legis.nd.gov/cencode/t28c25.pdf - no hunting for you - _The court may
withhold or suspend any certificate, permit, or license issued by lottery,
tag, electronically, or over the counter by the director of the game and fish
department which the judgment debtor is required to obtain before engaging in
a recreational activity._

------
hourislate
I live in Texas (DFW). I pay close to 10k a year to the school district. They
spent over 2 million dollars on my sons high school this summer to replace the
grass on the football field with artificial turf. They also destroyed what
looked like a brand new baseball field to replace it with a brand new baseball
field. Across the street at the middle school they also replaced the grass
with artificial turf for the grade 6-8 kids. The football field is of the same
caliber as the Dallas Cowboys use.

My son told me a couple of days ago that the PC's in his computer lab are
complete garbage and barely work (I bought him an Mac Airbook for his
birthday) so he uses his own laptop. He says the lab equipment(physics,
Chemistry, Biology) is also marginal. The ignorant fools in my district just
passed a Bond Election for like 300 million dollars for God only knows what.
My taxes went up by about $500 bucks to the school district.

It now almost costs the same amount to send one kid to High School as it does
to send the other kid to UoT (Dallas). Where does it end? I don't know.

~~~
positr0n
I live in the same area and agree with your complaints.

You may have already accounted for this in your $10k figure, but keep in mind
that because property taxes are pretty much the only funding for school
districts in Texas a percentage of rich school district's budgets are
recaptured for redistribution among poor school districts. I paid $3300 for
the school district portion of my property taxes this year, and about $800
goes to the state (which I don't have a problem with for the record).

------
peralp
While not directly related, Bryan Caplan of George Mason University argues
that pushing everyone to college doesn't make sense and most of what's learned
in school is a waste of time from the job market perspective. The degree is
about signaling how competent someone is instead of the useful skills and
knowledge obtained via education.

The link to the podcast from 2014 better represents this nuanced argument.

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html)

His book on the topic will be released in January 2018
[https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-
Waste/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-
Waste/dp/0691174652)

------
lkjlakjsdf
I'm not sure what california's policy is but I have licensed work with 5
defaulted school loans, and nothing has happened in 5 years

------
kirykl
Isn’t this what garnishment is for? Garnish their wages if necessary why
revoke the ability to work

~~~
Celarnor
There's garnishment limits. Since they have to leave you with at least 30
hours worth of minimum-wage earnings per week, a lot of people who can't
afford their loans are effectively un-garnishable.

------
qwerty456127
I believe that legal barriers restricting qualified people's working rights
are the next big thing ought to be abolished after slavery has been. Hopefully
in future every person that actually can and wants to do a job will be legally
allowed to apply, no matter what.

------
Overtonwindow
It seems like having a license to work is more about barriers than making
things safer.

------
exabrial
So... Don't get student loans, but if you do, don't borrow an amount your
career wont pay for?

------
SQL2219
Modern day debtors' prison.

------
throwanem
The two photos in that article tell two different stories. I wonder why.

~~~
abiox
what is the difference, and why is the difference noteworthy such that you
wonder about it?

~~~
throwanem
One is set in a spare hospital corridor. Its subject wears scrubs and a
woebegone expression. The sense is one of desperation - of at best a forlorn
hope, if not of hopelessness outright. It is in every respect commensurate
with the textual depiction of the subject as someone struggling nobly under an
unjustly imposed burden.

The other is lush, full of color and interest and expensive appointments: fine
curtains, musical instruments, a leather sofa. Its subject wears a stylish
outfit and a look that lies somewhere between a smirk and a sneer. One need
not read a subtext of entitlement into the image. Entitlement is the whole of
its text.

Yet these photographs depict two people whose situations the article they
accompany would have us regard as effectively parallel. It's an odd
juxtaposition, and one whose origin in mere happenstance would surprise me
greatly of so consummately professional an A-list blog as this.

The cliché is that a picture is worth a thousand words. These two pictures are
worth two very different thousands of words. Such things do happen by
accident, but not, I think, at the New York Times. So I'm curious about the
purpose that underlay their selection.

~~~
throwawayjava
This is the most odd post I've read in quite a while.

I was going to reply defending the subject of the article -- a middle-class
person with hobbies and a home who fell on some temporary bad luck and was
pounded into the ground by an objectively bad confluence of policies. But then
I realized you think blue and red pigments are symbols of extravagance, and
even in 1905 I'd be pretty lost on how to reply to that...?

~~~
throwanem
No, I don't. I wonder why one person is made to look like she's living an
extravagant lifestyle, and the other just this side of privation. I'm not a
professional photographer, just an amateur - and if I did that, I wouldn't
have done it by accident. I see no reason to imagine a professional would do
it by accident, either. You don't take just one photo and call it good, after
all. You take a lot of them, and then you sort through them to choose the ones
you publish. The question I'm asking is: why choose these?

I think I'm seeing a deliberate attempt to manipulate the reader's sympathies,
is what I'm saying. I don't understand what purpose that would serve, but I
think it must have been done to serve _some_ purpose, and so I wonder what
purpose that was.

~~~
throwawayjava
I see.

I think you're reading too much into it.

