People in The Netherlands have done this. They go to S/E Asian countries to skip out on a €30,000 debt. After a while your passport becomes invalid which makes travel very difficult. And with the outstanding debt you are not able to get a new passport.
Which is dumb, because you only have to pay off the debt if you are able to, interest rate is very low, you can pause it for a few years and after 35 years the loan is automatically forgiven. It's not a big deal. Completely uprooting your life to skip out on a €50/month payment is insanity but people see that €30,000 number in their portal and freak out about it.
Approximately 25,000 emigrated debtors are currently untraceable by the student debt collector.
In the US, student loan interest rates and average amount of debt are generally much higher than other countries. And you your student debt is designed to be permanent so that even declaring bankruptcy doesn't discharge it.
I mean, my monthly student loan payments in the US for a degree in healthcare is $1300 USD per month. It comes out to about 40% of each paycheck. That’s a significant amount. I’d honestly consider moving abroad to avoid paying it. It’s debilitating and I can barely survive while making payments.
Wow. For The Netherlands it is 4% of your income, but only the part of your income above minimum wage. If you earn €40k, minimum wage is €26k then you pay 4% over €13k = €520 per year = €43 per month.
The average medical student is around €50,000 to €60,000 in debt.
> Passport Blocks: Arrears exceeding €5,000 can result in registration in the passport alert system, making it impossible to receive a new passport,
I would say that is pretty serious violation of human rights, for relatively small infraction. Soviet countries used similar system to prevent people from leaving their communist paradise.
How are you supposed to pay your debt, if you are not allowed to find new job abroad?!
> that is pretty serious violation of human rights
I don’t think it’s that hyperbolic. But I agree that the existence of debts shouldn’t invalidate one’s right to a passport.
(The counter argument is that passports are a privilege and citizenship a bundle of privileges and duties. Why should the country have the burden of passporting someone abroad who as abandoned it.)
Education is also a privilege. And universities should have no power to block people from leaving a country. It is like Emirates preventing people to go home, because of unpaid speeding tickets. Or Qatar confiscating passports of Indian workers.
They only do this if communication with the debtor is impossible. If this happens to you, you can contact the government, schedule a payment plan for your debt and then they give you a passport with a 12 to 24 month validity.
My best guess is that the embassy in the foreign country gets a red flag when you try to renew your passport and you then have to contact the government debt collector. Different branches of government.
US does same for very small child support debts (I think around $1000) as well as larger tax bills. Of course when I cross to/from Mexico by land at small crossing I've noticed most have no passport and just beg for forgiveness which usually works.
In the US, student loan interest rates tend to be close to market (which I find despicable) and there is no automatic forgiveness. In fact, student loan debt has extra rules in the US making it difficult to get discharged in bankruptcy, so even that route doesn't work for a lot of people.
Had to look it up, it is 2.3% for 2026 which is a bit below the Euribor 1 year rate. Between 2017 and 2022 it was 0%.
Loan forgiveness happens after 35 years so for most academics that is about 10 years before retirement. Forgiveness also happens upon death.
Bankruptcy is a bit different here. We have a program where someone manages your finances for about three years, and after that most remaining debt is forgiven. However, student debt is an exception, that one stays
"Six years after the death of Christopher Bryski, a 23-year-old student at Rutgers University, Key Bank has agreed to forgive his student loan. But Bryski's family is not stopping there: It's now fighting to change the laws in the hope of sparing others the trauma it endured as lenders continued to hound it for payment on its dead son's debts."
Same reason I can't easily start an AT&T/Verizon competitor.
Doesn't mean their pricing is that reasonable, or that funding education should be run this way in the first place. It just means there are big barriers to entry, often established by the existing players to protect their margins. The Fed rate for student loans should be lower.
Finding investors willing to take less than 5% return (after paying for overhead and uncollectable loans being written off due to death/injury/ability to pay/etc) would probably be the primary one. You would likely be offering more or less the same or worse rate as I could get on a 10 or 30 year federal bond with more risk associated with it.
I know I’d be completely uninterested in such an investment pitch. It would work better as a charity ask for me.
> Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.
$60 a month for 20 years, and then the debt is forgiven doesn’t sound burdensome at all. Perhaps if she doesn’t return to the US it won’t matter, but it seems a small price to pay monthly to make returning to your home one day a whole lot less stressful.
The psychological burden comes from the endless harassment and attempted scamming from the lenders. They don't just accept your IDR and let you quietly pay $60/mo forever. It's 20 years of endless threatening calls, "urgent notices," surprise debits that must be fought. They'll delay or outright "lose" your annual recertification paperwork every year, reverting you to to some outrageously high "default" plan.
Plus the threat that a hostile administration might come in and change who qualifies for IDR at any point, which just happened and is causing a massive spike in defaults.
I genuinely couldn’t figure out why the article highlighted her. If it were any other publication, I’d suspect rage baiting. But maybe HN sees something I didn’t.
The NYT had a rough patch a while back but it's incredibly good nowadays. They absolutely didn't have to include the details here (like $60/month) but did because they care about the truth.
The most frustrating part of the student loan question is that you can still GET THESE LOANS! The schools will sell you into indentured servitude today! They'll take the money and don't care at all! They take ZERO responsibility for the student loan crisis.
Crisis? This is the intended outcome. Look around - companies and the media are upset when people exercise their ability to change jobs, drop out of the workforce, or move abroad.
The system is working exactly as intended. Debt and healthcare are just ways we are bound to it.
Paying your debts is a business decision, not a moral decision. There is nothing moral about paying your debt to a bank and nothing immoral about not paying your debt to a bank.
Businesses do this ALL THE TIME. Businesses can do this, and will walk away from debt the second when the math makes sense. If it's okay for businesses, then the exact same behavior should be okay for us humans to do. I walked away from my house at the height of the financial crisis. It was a business decision, because the mortgage was far larger than the value of my house.
Student loans are the only reason why tuition has gone up 10x in 30 years. Every financial entity from banks to schools feel like it's okay to hang students out to dry with large debts because they will have to pay for it for the rest of their lives. I hope a large portion of the debt disappears because the students simply walk away from the US.
In my opinion, if you agree to a deal and then decide not to fulfill your end of the deal, that is immoral. Like if you agree to pay me to make you a sandwich and then you take the sandwich but leave without paying, that is immoral.
If you are in a casual agreement with a friend and don't keep up your end then it's immoral.
If you have a contract that specifies expectations and consequences, then it's just a business deal.
The (predatory) school loan business works from contracts and they are obligated to keep up their side only as much as you are yours.
The real immorality is not accepting the consequences embedded in the contract to which you both agree to, it is that the United States has such a business in the first place.
Well actually second place I guess. When the student loan business started it was not predatory. But it got horribly abused, by the borrowers who would declare bankruptcy gaming that system, schools who raised rates because they knew loans were available, and the lenders who astroTurfed children into believing that it was a good bargain to exchange $200,000 at high interest for a Art History degree
She's from Colorado and decided to go to an out of state university (Oregon) and pay full out of state tuition for a degree in "historic preservation"?
Yeah no shit you just signed up for a lifetime of debt.
Reminds me of another story of some lady that got saddled with a couple hundred thousand in debt because she really wanted to go to Duke for a theater management degree. And then fled with her Russian fiance to Moscow so she wouldn't have to pay it.
We all agree that higher education is too expensive in the US. But these are not good examples of that.
She could have easily saved 50+% of her tuition just living in state for 2 years, and attending community college counts. She didn't even need to pause her education or delay graduation.
I'm Canadian, but I know someone from the US who did this. She's living in Paris, moderately successful in academia and as far as I can tell, completely happy to never return to the US. Her family goes to visit her in Europe once in a while.
> moderately successful in academia and as far as I can tell
Why not pay your debts then? I totally understand debt forgiveness for extenuating circumstances (and imo, it's a crime that student loan debt can't be forgiven, and the interest rates are often predatory—especially in the case of med school and law school), but this just sounds like stealing with extra steps.
Sorry - didn't mean to be vague but I don't want to out my acquaintance too much. She has a good job in STEM. I think she does fine for herself and I would have thought her capable of paying the loan.
One of the people in the article was supposed to pay $60/month for 20 years. That seems manageable for pretty much anyone but the article cites "psychological issues" or whatever
Yeah. I don't know the extent of her debt or current income, but she went to an in-state school for a STEM degree, she's not someone who got a useless degree from an overly expensive school. She definitely doesn't seem to regret her decision, whatever the financial or moral considerations.
She went to an out-of-state school for her master's. Article said that she was a ward of Colorado but went to the University of Oregon for her graduate degree.
No mention of undergrad so hopefully she did go in-state for much lower or free tuition.
I have 2 kids in college and a recent graduate. I am routinely horrified by the choices that some students make in going out of their home state or to a private school instead of a public one.
But jokes aside, I'm curious too. Nothing there seems too extravagant, people move abroad all the time. Maybe it then takes them 30 years to realize they didn't have it so bad after all and move back. I'm not speaking for the US here specifically, but more generally. Those longer term stories I think are more interesting.
"Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome."
Debt is a social construct that the dying olds keep ramming down the next generations throats.
It's ageism and exploitation of youth.
The ledger is never getting paid off because it doesn't exist as anything more than allegory.
We can pay it off with allegory too if we must walk through such incantations for the semantics police.
What a joke of a culture to validate the ramblings of Abe Simpson.
Good in these students. Live anywhere else until America becomes less of a shit hole country. Even if that means dying never stepping foot in the US again.
Bankruptcy is great for human thriving, and the extensive US bankruptcy system is one of the best tools our legal system has for people who wind up in bad situations. It's a complete shame that we decided that student loan debt was ineligible for most forms of bankruptcy once it became clear that federal guaranteeing of loans would generate a lot of high risk loans.
But fleeing to another country and/or simply refusing to pay your debts, regardless of whether or not you are able to are is not bankruptcy. It's simply refusing to pay your debts.
People investing in companies do so knowing that it might be a poor investment.
But if a company borrowed the money and never had the intention to make enough to pay it back or return on investment, we have a different word for that. That word is fraud. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes.
People can decide on what terms they want to loan money to, or invest in, a business, based on how likely they think it is to succeed. And if they guess wrong, tough luck, they should've been smarter. The incentive structure here is to make it easier to raise money with good ideas and harder to raise money with stupid ones.
This incentive structure doesn't exist with student loans: student loans are unconditional, and with terms that don't take into account likelihood of payback.
Many people seem to have been successfully brainwashed into moralizing debt but only for 19 year old serfs who have been lied to about the value of the asset they're taking out debt for. If its a corporation transferring 20 billion of debt into a leveraged buy out so they can shut down the company after squeezing all the assets out of it, that's just doing business.
A similar situation occurs if you bring up usurious bank charges, such as overdraft fees. I lucked into an aptitude for a lucrative paycheque/career, but somehow I still manage to feel enormous sympathy for people being utterly robbed by these fees, banks literally structuring transactions to charge enormous penalties to the very people least able to afford it, for something which actually costs them fractions of a cent.
People become absolutely psychopathic about these sorts of discussions, and become heartless, soulless goblins. Even people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder will desperately line up to show how good of little corporate bootlicking subjugates they are.
I'm eligible for dual citizenship and am in the process of acquiring my second citizenship.
My reasons are two-fold:
1.) I've fallen through the cracks and ended up in a situation the system did not account for. I had a medical incident during my last semester of graduate school that turned out to be a presenting relapse of Multiple Sclerosis. Obviously I couldn't have anticipated this when I went to undergraduate and graduate school. The problem comes in in that the system treats disability as completely binary: Either you can't work at all/can work so little you can't earn more than 1600/mo, or they assume you're fine and can pay everything off. I can work, but I can't work in the field or to the level that I planned for before I got ill. In addition, I have expenses working full time that an able bodied person doesn't just to allow me to do that full time work and that aren't considered in the income based payment calculations. So I fall in the hole of 'make too much to be considered disabled, but not enough to actually pay' due to a condition that is incurable. Also, I have a special Medicaid exemption that allows me to earn more without losing healthcare, but not enough to actually pay back my loans. So even if I could get and maintain a job that would pay a salary that would let me pay, I'd then lose my healthcare and I'd hit the out of pocket maximum every year on any private plan, resulting in a substantial decrease in actual salary.
There's functionally no way for me to pay my loans: If I give up the supports I pay for to pay my loans, I can't work full time anymore and can't pay my loans. the jobs that would pay over 100k in this state (what I would need at minimum to cover supports, healthcare I'd lose, and loan payments) won't hire someone who needs frequent time off, a bunch of employment flexibility, who can't work overtime, and can't be subjected to too much stress. I can barely work one full time job, so additional jobs or hustling isn't an option. I'm just stuck.
2.) I don't consider the US government to be a trustworthy contract partner at this point. I was one of the people who consolidated my loans to take advantage of the SAVE program under Biden's administration. They've struck down SAVE, but haven't done a thing for those of us who consolidated our loans and added to the principal because we trusted what we were told by the government. If I can be told by the government that doing something will help me, and then 2 years later they reverse that with no recourse offered, that tells me none of the terms can be depended on. If our own government's answer to this is 'you shouldn't have listened to the government, sucker', then well... I don't trust them to fulfill their end of the contract, and I don't particularly like the idea of owing money to an institution with both an extreme amount of power over my life and no intent on sticking to agreements or dealing fairly with me. It makes me nervous, especially for 10-20 years down the road.
People in The Netherlands have done this. They go to S/E Asian countries to skip out on a €30,000 debt. After a while your passport becomes invalid which makes travel very difficult. And with the outstanding debt you are not able to get a new passport.
Which is dumb, because you only have to pay off the debt if you are able to, interest rate is very low, you can pause it for a few years and after 35 years the loan is automatically forgiven. It's not a big deal. Completely uprooting your life to skip out on a €50/month payment is insanity but people see that €30,000 number in their portal and freak out about it.
Approximately 25,000 emigrated debtors are currently untraceable by the student debt collector.
In the US, student loan interest rates and average amount of debt are generally much higher than other countries. And you your student debt is designed to be permanent so that even declaring bankruptcy doesn't discharge it.
I mean, my monthly student loan payments in the US for a degree in healthcare is $1300 USD per month. It comes out to about 40% of each paycheck. That’s a significant amount. I’d honestly consider moving abroad to avoid paying it. It’s debilitating and I can barely survive while making payments.
Wow. For The Netherlands it is 4% of your income, but only the part of your income above minimum wage. If you earn €40k, minimum wage is €26k then you pay 4% over €13k = €520 per year = €43 per month.
The average medical student is around €50,000 to €60,000 in debt.
> Passport Blocks: Arrears exceeding €5,000 can result in registration in the passport alert system, making it impossible to receive a new passport,
I would say that is pretty serious violation of human rights, for relatively small infraction. Soviet countries used similar system to prevent people from leaving their communist paradise.
How are you supposed to pay your debt, if you are not allowed to find new job abroad?!
> that is pretty serious violation of human rights
I don’t think it’s that hyperbolic. But I agree that the existence of debts shouldn’t invalidate one’s right to a passport.
(The counter argument is that passports are a privilege and citizenship a bundle of privileges and duties. Why should the country have the burden of passporting someone abroad who as abandoned it.)
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
"Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
Passports shouldn't be a privilege, and violation of the universal declaration of human rights is pretty serious.
Education is also a privilege. And universities should have no power to block people from leaving a country. It is like Emirates preventing people to go home, because of unpaid speeding tickets. Or Qatar confiscating passports of Indian workers.
> universities should have no power to block people from leaving a country
They don’t.
They do, state owned education
They only do this if communication with the debtor is impossible. If this happens to you, you can contact the government, schedule a payment plan for your debt and then they give you a passport with a 12 to 24 month validity.
> They block your passport because they can't reach you
Wouldn’t one applying for a passport involve the government and person connecting on some level?
My best guess is that the embassy in the foreign country gets a red flag when you try to renew your passport and you then have to contact the government debt collector. Different branches of government.
No, they also do that, if you have no money to pay.
The Dutch embassy will be happy to get you home, where you can find a job.
Right, for tiny fee of 6000 euro return ticket, and 2000 euro monthly rent. Great plan to save money and pay debt!
US does same for very small child support debts (I think around $1000) as well as larger tax bills. Of course when I cross to/from Mexico by land at small crossing I've noticed most have no passport and just beg for forgiveness which usually works.
In the US, student loan interest rates tend to be close to market (which I find despicable) and there is no automatic forgiveness. In fact, student loan debt has extra rules in the US making it difficult to get discharged in bankruptcy, so even that route doesn't work for a lot of people.
Had to look it up, it is 2.3% for 2026 which is a bit below the Euribor 1 year rate. Between 2017 and 2022 it was 0%.
Loan forgiveness happens after 35 years so for most academics that is about 10 years before retirement. Forgiveness also happens upon death.
Bankruptcy is a bit different here. We have a program where someone manages your finances for about three years, and after that most remaining debt is forgiven. However, student debt is an exception, that one stays
> Forgiveness also happens upon death.
"Six years after the death of Christopher Bryski, a 23-year-old student at Rutgers University, Key Bank has agreed to forgive his student loan. But Bryski's family is not stopping there: It's now fighting to change the laws in the hope of sparing others the trauma it endured as lenders continued to hound it for payment on its dead son's debts."
https://abcnews.com/Business/bank-forgives-dead-students-loa...
Yeah, I find this deeply frustrating. Interest rates are supposed to reflect the level of risk, and student loans are deeply low-risk to the lender.
Risk is only one component. Opportunity cost and the time value of money is another.
Risk premium is on top of the other bits.
> student loans are deeply low-risk to the lender
Based on the other comment, they absolutely reflect that.
I don't think the other comment is accurate.
edit: Yeah, that other comment is talking about European rates, not American rates.
https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/interest-r...
6.39% to 8.94%, and that's for Federal. Private ones tend to be even higher.
Hmm. I wonder why it doesn’t make sense to launch a private lender that offers lower rates.
The Fed rate is too high for the low risk involved.
Private student loans are similarly protected from bankrupcty, and don't have things like income-based repayment; they are, if anything, safer for the lender. https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/federal-vs...
Sure. I’m saying why couldn’t you and I start C & J Lenders Inc. and undercut those guys. Say, 5% for a 20-year loan [1].
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/...
Same reason I can't easily start an AT&T/Verizon competitor.
Doesn't mean their pricing is that reasonable, or that funding education should be run this way in the first place. It just means there are big barriers to entry, often established by the existing players to protect their margins. The Fed rate for student loans should be lower.
> there are big barriers to entry
What are the barriers? Can I make non-dischargeable student loans at 5%?
Finding investors willing to take less than 5% return (after paying for overhead and uncollectable loans being written off due to death/injury/ability to pay/etc) would probably be the primary one. You would likely be offering more or less the same or worse rate as I could get on a 10 or 30 year federal bond with more risk associated with it.
I know I’d be completely uninterested in such an investment pitch. It would work better as a charity ask for me.
> What are the barriers?
Lots of startup capital?
> Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.
$60 a month for 20 years, and then the debt is forgiven doesn’t sound burdensome at all. Perhaps if she doesn’t return to the US it won’t matter, but it seems a small price to pay monthly to make returning to your home one day a whole lot less stressful.
The psychological burden comes from the endless harassment and attempted scamming from the lenders. They don't just accept your IDR and let you quietly pay $60/mo forever. It's 20 years of endless threatening calls, "urgent notices," surprise debits that must be fought. They'll delay or outright "lose" your annual recertification paperwork every year, reverting you to to some outrageously high "default" plan.
Plus the threat that a hostile administration might come in and change who qualifies for IDR at any point, which just happened and is causing a massive spike in defaults.
I genuinely couldn’t figure out why the article highlighted her. If it were any other publication, I’d suspect rage baiting. But maybe HN sees something I didn’t.
The NYT had a rough patch a while back but it's incredibly good nowadays. They absolutely didn't have to include the details here (like $60/month) but did because they care about the truth.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm about the newspaper that just worried yesterday about the North American Treaty Organization.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15705545/New-York-T...
The most frustrating part of the student loan question is that you can still GET THESE LOANS! The schools will sell you into indentured servitude today! They'll take the money and don't care at all! They take ZERO responsibility for the student loan crisis.
Crisis? This is the intended outcome. Look around - companies and the media are upset when people exercise their ability to change jobs, drop out of the workforce, or move abroad.
The system is working exactly as intended. Debt and healthcare are just ways we are bound to it.
Paying your debts is a business decision, not a moral decision. There is nothing moral about paying your debt to a bank and nothing immoral about not paying your debt to a bank.
Businesses do this ALL THE TIME. Businesses can do this, and will walk away from debt the second when the math makes sense. If it's okay for businesses, then the exact same behavior should be okay for us humans to do. I walked away from my house at the height of the financial crisis. It was a business decision, because the mortgage was far larger than the value of my house.
Student loans are the only reason why tuition has gone up 10x in 30 years. Every financial entity from banks to schools feel like it's okay to hang students out to dry with large debts because they will have to pay for it for the rest of their lives. I hope a large portion of the debt disappears because the students simply walk away from the US.
In my opinion, if you agree to a deal and then decide not to fulfill your end of the deal, that is immoral. Like if you agree to pay me to make you a sandwich and then you take the sandwich but leave without paying, that is immoral.
In my opinion, if you make a $50,000+ bet on an 18 year old's future career, whether or not that bet works out for you is entirely your problem.
Investments don't always work out, tough luck. That's obviously not the same as buying a sandwich.
My comment was specifically about the question of morality, not about whether it's a wise business decision.
I think you both are a little bit right.
If you are in a casual agreement with a friend and don't keep up your end then it's immoral.
If you have a contract that specifies expectations and consequences, then it's just a business deal.
The (predatory) school loan business works from contracts and they are obligated to keep up their side only as much as you are yours.
The real immorality is not accepting the consequences embedded in the contract to which you both agree to, it is that the United States has such a business in the first place.
Well actually second place I guess. When the student loan business started it was not predatory. But it got horribly abused, by the borrowers who would declare bankruptcy gaming that system, schools who raised rates because they knew loans were available, and the lenders who astroTurfed children into believing that it was a good bargain to exchange $200,000 at high interest for a Art History degree
No need to leave, use the Sam Hyde method. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD2gXY4piF4
She's from Colorado and decided to go to an out of state university (Oregon) and pay full out of state tuition for a degree in "historic preservation"?
Yeah no shit you just signed up for a lifetime of debt.
Reminds me of another story of some lady that got saddled with a couple hundred thousand in debt because she really wanted to go to Duke for a theater management degree. And then fled with her Russian fiance to Moscow so she wouldn't have to pay it.
We all agree that higher education is too expensive in the US. But these are not good examples of that.
Get a tech degree, or be a loser forever!
But only from a university that has a top "Prompting" school. Otherwise your degree is worthless!
Those are no longer mutually exclusive options.
Yes
She could have easily saved 50+% of her tuition just living in state for 2 years, and attending community college counts. She didn't even need to pause her education or delay graduation.
Perhaps we should encourage people to learn things other than what best services ad tech billionaires.
They can stay in their own state and do that for 1/4th the cost and then maybe they won't have to run away
I'm Canadian, but I know someone from the US who did this. She's living in Paris, moderately successful in academia and as far as I can tell, completely happy to never return to the US. Her family goes to visit her in Europe once in a while.
Perplexing.
> moderately successful in academia and as far as I can tell
Why not pay your debts then? I totally understand debt forgiveness for extenuating circumstances (and imo, it's a crime that student loan debt can't be forgiven, and the interest rates are often predatory—especially in the case of med school and law school), but this just sounds like stealing with extra steps.
I may be wrong but I read “moderately successful in academia” as meaning: they have succeeded in gaining some social capital but make little money
Sorry - didn't mean to be vague but I don't want to out my acquaintance too much. She has a good job in STEM. I think she does fine for herself and I would have thought her capable of paying the loan.
One of the people in the article was supposed to pay $60/month for 20 years. That seems manageable for pretty much anyone but the article cites "psychological issues" or whatever
Yeah. I don't know the extent of her debt or current income, but she went to an in-state school for a STEM degree, she's not someone who got a useless degree from an overly expensive school. She definitely doesn't seem to regret her decision, whatever the financial or moral considerations.
As I said, I'm a bit perplexed.
She went to an out-of-state school for her master's. Article said that she was a ward of Colorado but went to the University of Oregon for her graduate degree.
No mention of undergrad so hopefully she did go in-state for much lower or free tuition.
I have 2 kids in college and a recent graduate. I am routinely horrified by the choices that some students make in going out of their home state or to a private school instead of a public one.
[dead]
Which part perplexes you?
That they're Canadian.
But jokes aside, I'm curious too. Nothing there seems too extravagant, people move abroad all the time. Maybe it then takes them 30 years to realize they didn't have it so bad after all and move back. I'm not speaking for the US here specifically, but more generally. Those longer term stories I think are more interesting.
"Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome."
Say what? $60 per month is not that much!
Make universities pay for this.
Debt is a social construct that the dying olds keep ramming down the next generations throats.
It's ageism and exploitation of youth.
The ledger is never getting paid off because it doesn't exist as anything more than allegory.
We can pay it off with allegory too if we must walk through such incantations for the semantics police.
What a joke of a culture to validate the ramblings of Abe Simpson.
Good in these students. Live anywhere else until America becomes less of a shit hole country. Even if that means dying never stepping foot in the US again.
Who wouldn't want to rack up a bunch of debt and just not pay when the bill came due?
Companies do this all the time, then declare bankruptcy and move on.
Totally agree - there's a lot of double standards here:
Bankruptcy is good for entrepreneurial risk, but not for human thriving apparently...
Bankruptcy is great for human thriving, and the extensive US bankruptcy system is one of the best tools our legal system has for people who wind up in bad situations. It's a complete shame that we decided that student loan debt was ineligible for most forms of bankruptcy once it became clear that federal guaranteeing of loans would generate a lot of high risk loans.
But fleeing to another country and/or simply refusing to pay your debts, regardless of whether or not you are able to are is not bankruptcy. It's simply refusing to pay your debts.
People investing in companies do so knowing that it might be a poor investment.
But if a company borrowed the money and never had the intention to make enough to pay it back or return on investment, we have a different word for that. That word is fraud. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes.
Its not bad intention from the start. Im sure the succesful ones who land well pating jobs after school do pay off their loans.
Student loans should also get discharged in bankruptcy and the schools who are benefiting from predatory lending should take the bath.
People are corporations too.
That’s intentional to foster the growth of entrepreneurship. It’s the ability to do something without being personally liable. It’s a good thing.
How does your argument fail to also apply to student loans?
People can decide on what terms they want to loan money to, or invest in, a business, based on how likely they think it is to succeed. And if they guess wrong, tough luck, they should've been smarter. The incentive structure here is to make it easier to raise money with good ideas and harder to raise money with stupid ones.
This incentive structure doesn't exist with student loans: student loans are unconditional, and with terms that don't take into account likelihood of payback.
When companies declare bankruptcy they have to liquidate their assets and pay back as much as they can. How is it different from student loans?
The difference is you _can't_ do that for student loans. There is no option to get rid of them via bankruptcy.
So, this happens instead.
Ask Oracle.
Many people seem to have been successfully brainwashed into moralizing debt but only for 19 year old serfs who have been lied to about the value of the asset they're taking out debt for. If its a corporation transferring 20 billion of debt into a leveraged buy out so they can shut down the company after squeezing all the assets out of it, that's just doing business.
Exactly! I like the analogy of:
When the bank is giving you a sub-prime loan, who is more sophisticated in that transaction?
If the bank (with their fancy risk models, etc.), why shouldn't they be the party to take the bulk of that risk?
In the United States at least, a bank who is offering a subprime loan is taking the bulk of that risk.
Student loans are guaranteed by the federal government. That is not the same thing at all.
A similar situation occurs if you bring up usurious bank charges, such as overdraft fees. I lucked into an aptitude for a lucrative paycheque/career, but somehow I still manage to feel enormous sympathy for people being utterly robbed by these fees, banks literally structuring transactions to charge enormous penalties to the very people least able to afford it, for something which actually costs them fractions of a cent.
People become absolutely psychopathic about these sorts of discussions, and become heartless, soulless goblins. Even people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder will desperately line up to show how good of little corporate bootlicking subjugates they are.
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I'm considering doing this.
I'm eligible for dual citizenship and am in the process of acquiring my second citizenship.
My reasons are two-fold:
1.) I've fallen through the cracks and ended up in a situation the system did not account for. I had a medical incident during my last semester of graduate school that turned out to be a presenting relapse of Multiple Sclerosis. Obviously I couldn't have anticipated this when I went to undergraduate and graduate school. The problem comes in in that the system treats disability as completely binary: Either you can't work at all/can work so little you can't earn more than 1600/mo, or they assume you're fine and can pay everything off. I can work, but I can't work in the field or to the level that I planned for before I got ill. In addition, I have expenses working full time that an able bodied person doesn't just to allow me to do that full time work and that aren't considered in the income based payment calculations. So I fall in the hole of 'make too much to be considered disabled, but not enough to actually pay' due to a condition that is incurable. Also, I have a special Medicaid exemption that allows me to earn more without losing healthcare, but not enough to actually pay back my loans. So even if I could get and maintain a job that would pay a salary that would let me pay, I'd then lose my healthcare and I'd hit the out of pocket maximum every year on any private plan, resulting in a substantial decrease in actual salary.
There's functionally no way for me to pay my loans: If I give up the supports I pay for to pay my loans, I can't work full time anymore and can't pay my loans. the jobs that would pay over 100k in this state (what I would need at minimum to cover supports, healthcare I'd lose, and loan payments) won't hire someone who needs frequent time off, a bunch of employment flexibility, who can't work overtime, and can't be subjected to too much stress. I can barely work one full time job, so additional jobs or hustling isn't an option. I'm just stuck.
2.) I don't consider the US government to be a trustworthy contract partner at this point. I was one of the people who consolidated my loans to take advantage of the SAVE program under Biden's administration. They've struck down SAVE, but haven't done a thing for those of us who consolidated our loans and added to the principal because we trusted what we were told by the government. If I can be told by the government that doing something will help me, and then 2 years later they reverse that with no recourse offered, that tells me none of the terms can be depended on. If our own government's answer to this is 'you shouldn't have listened to the government, sucker', then well... I don't trust them to fulfill their end of the contract, and I don't particularly like the idea of owing money to an institution with both an extreme amount of power over my life and no intent on sticking to agreements or dealing fairly with me. It makes me nervous, especially for 10-20 years down the road.