If you believe it is just below average IQ kids or lazy kids in school for meaningless degrees, you are being deceived by the divisive propaganda.
A graduate degree in STEM does not guarantee hard working, high IQ Americans jobs that will pay off the student loan debt.
What I have seen over the past 10 years is that only about half of American STEM graduates can land a job in a STEM-related field; the others end up underemployed, working as a cashier in a garden supply store or doing odd jobs to survive while living out of a van.
If you are an alien, you will get a good job due to the $25,000 dollar subsidy to American corporations for every foreigner hired.
In contrast, the universities, government, authority figures etc. tell you at every turn the only way to secure a future is education.
It is a lie; The jobs are not there, especially if you are an American who wants to work hard instead of playing politics.
The HR department hires based on these criteria: Diversity, obedience, lack of creativity and lack of initiative/ambition. The subordinates are supposed to complete the tasks they are assigned, but no more. It is not their job to think critically, that will only cause problems for HR.
You will notice that "hard working", "intelligence" and "competence" are not in the hiring criteria; The idea of "working your way up" through a company is a rare exception in today's world; Today's administrators are born, not trained and they must not be questioned.
This situation is so unbelievable to many in the older generations that they refuse to believe it is real; they would rather ignore it or blame it on laziness, low IQ or for some reason claim their children are the problem; their children who share the same DNA as them; their children who they raised and taught.
The primary reason for taking out loans is the absence of other options; most people of the younger generations can't expect to afford a house, a spouse and a family before middle age (or later) unless they are in the top 10% of earners. It is very unlikely they will achieve their parent's, grand parent's or great grandparent's standard of living if they don't play the gambit and pay the universities whatever price they are asking. For most people, working while in school will not even come close to covering the cost. The only way to cover the cost is by taking out loans they know they likely will never be able to pay off.
These are not loans offered honestly, in good faith and at reasonable amounts.
This system is usury; it is coercion into debt slavery.
Christianity has traditionally viewed usury as a sin.
Judaism has prohibited usury within the tribe.
It is the avocado toast paradox; they have enough money to buy avocado toast, because it is unrealistic they will ever be able to afford the larger, more important expenses of buying a house or starting a family by saving their money.
(Thinking you will be able to save up to build a better life by saving a few dollars every day, or even $30, when a degree costs $100,000 and a modest house in a sketchy neighborhood costs $500,000+ would be a really stupid thing to do.)
It's worse than you think: The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think - Marginal REVOLUTION
Did you get that? Here’s a stylized example. Suppose a student will make 150k per year for 10 years working in the public sector. If they have 200k in debt they pay 15k every year to the government for 10 years and then 50k is “forgiven.” But now the law school comes to the student and says ‘heh, I have a deal which will make both of us better off. We are going to raise the price of law school to 400k but don’t worry not only won’t that cost you a penny more than the 15k a year you are already obligated to pay it will actually cost you much less because we will pay your payments of 15k per year!’ This indeed is a great deal for the student who pays nothing and it’s a great deal for the law school which gets 200k more revenue immediately in return for 150k of payments paid out over the following 10 years. Win-win! Except for the taxpayer of course.
These last 3 posts, Yngvi's, yours and Jovan's, describe the problem of fiat currency perfectly.
Until we find a substitute, and as I said before I believe Bitcoin is it, shit like this will keep getting worse. Fiat currency is designed to enrich very few people in the short term and devalue everything else in the long term. It's a big bubble, and it will have to explode at some point, and it won't look pretty.
I'd say even to above-100 kids "college is not for you". A lot of people think the trouble finding work is limited to shitty degrees in sociology-derived fields. It's not. You can have a degree in something like an actual tech field and never get any work. In those fields, they want to hire people they know, people who have lots of experience, or H1B workers that they have tons of leverage over. That's it. I'm lucky I only paid for mine with money I had, but even with that I still feel like I wasted it. I learned all this shit about fixing and building computers, various programming languages, and building and maintaining networks...and now I'm a security guard. I could be doing that without all the time, work, and money I put in to the college shit.
That about sums it up. This is what it's like to be a millennial and onward in this wonderful world we have created. It is criminal how strongly the adults in these kids' lives will push them down this path. They are many times told that if they don't take the loans and go to college, they can look forward to being thrown out of their homes, and into a job market where whatever meager work they can get couldn't even come close to sustaining their life in a studio apartment, much less give them enough money they can save to improve their lot in life.
So many of them don't even understand what is fucking them and why. So many are turning to communism/socialism because it represents such a radical change from the way things are now. But the machine already consists of government muscling around in what should be private business. Their "fixes" are inevitably what have made things worse, and worse, and even worse still as time has gone on.
The "avocado toast" thing is an infuriating generalization anyway. I've never had "avocado toast" in my entire life. I do my grocery shopping at ultra cheap grocery stores like LIDL and ALDI. I remember once hearing some out of touch Republican politician bitching about how, "these young people complain about not having enough money, but they all own smartphones with expensive data plans!" Even for shitty, low end jobs, employers now expect that you will have a smartphone, and you must use an app that keeps track of your location to clock in and out at work. Your employment opportunities narrow quite a bit if you do not have a reasonably up-to-date phone with cellular data. This "it's so easy, just do what we did!" attitude on display from people who did not have to try and get lives started in these conditions just makes me so goddamn angry.
Clip: What Having Privilege Actually Means - YouTube
The first part seems relevant to the discussion. What do you guys think?
It is not really a problem, the only question is who gets to default first. It is usually the party with the strongest military. The fact that nobody has defaulted yet tells you that we are not quite sure who is the strongest.
And yet you continue to live in Long Island...