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I can get on board with that. All government-backed, non-risk basis mortgages, credit card debts, and so on should not have bankruptcy protection, etc.
I disagree. Super-saturating the market with candidates pushes everyone's wages down. This is directly counter to your point about increasing the financial position of many people. There are only a limited amount of well-paying jobs, and the market says that the more qualified candidates there are, the less a company has to pay to fill that position.
More STEM graduates is not at all related to more STEM jobs.
So you advocate for keeping wages artificially higher than what the market can sustain?
The job market is not a zero sum game. More smart STEM type of people can grow the pie as a whole. Wouldn't you rather work towards a system that grows the net economy instead of squeezing what money you can into a smaller number of STEM jobs?
Quote:
Learning the numbers is worlds different than experiencing the limitations first hand.
Understanding the practical applications of what you learn is essential to say that you have actually 'learned' anything.
Just caught up with a friend I've known since high school. He financed four years of college and three years of law school pretty much exclusively on student loans. Graduated, passed the bar, and is a practicing attorney now. No jobs with firms or government are open, so he's taking a few court-appointed cases and refereeing high school soccer games to make the bills.
Sallie Mae and some group called Nelnet called him the other day, asking for their first payment - $3,100.
He just sent them a copy of his last pay stub and they replied by saying he qualified for their income based repayment program - and the payment due was now zero.
He drives a '94 Corolla with more than 200,000 miles on it and rust around the rear wheel wells. And he's a practicing attorney.
As to how much stress he has due to it? I don't think much. I think he's been desensitized some months ago to the issue.
I don't really care about my student loans as they are all federally subbed Stafford loans at 2.8%. I graduated with just a few dollars short of $22k. I have barely paid off $4k of it since I graduated a million years ago. Deferment, unemployment, economic hardship, IBR. I have a lot of options available to the point where eh, they are fairly low priority. My degree was not worth it financially, but it enriched my life in many other ways, so I don't regret it. I'll pay it off eventually.
I did learn my lesson though and am going to community college now, paying for my second study in cash. I also strongly discouraged my husband from taking out student loans for his degree, so he graduated debt free from grants and merit based scholarships.
My mother will never be able to retire and will die in student loan debt. I think she has around $80k in her own student loans, federal and private, with interest rates and terms all across the board. She majored in one of the most financially useless LA disciplines there is, so no, she is not in better shape period for this degree.
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