• whalebiologist@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Students don’t even know who they owe money too. People “hear” biden wants to forgive some parts of some loans and immediately stop paying Sallie Mae/Navient/Whatever Private lender they ALSO owe money to in addition to the gov.

    The thing about student loans is nobody understands they have typically borrowed money from the government AND private lenders to pay for their degrees. You can borrow X$ from the government each year and coincidentally thats how much the schools charge. How lucky.

    This is all handled for them by college financial aid offices, all the kids have to do is show up to class, and the money keeps rolling. in. When told they can borrow more money than they need to cover costs to get funds disbursed to them directly for “educational expenses” like a new car and a ps5. Now I’m on a paid vacation for 4-6 years where I log in to my courses once a week to complete assignments by copying and pasting answers from google searches. If I somehow manage to become one of the 2% of college students that graduates from college I have 6 months to land a job and start paying it all back. Who knows how long it will take before I figure out that I am supposed to pay more than the minimum amount each month. If I am like most students I find myself in whatever office daycare job I can manage to land after dropping out of college because life as a “criminal justice major” falls short of my expectations. Or I just continue to change majors until the money runs out repeating a self-oblivious cycle of chasing greener pastures of career fulfillment.

    As unlikely as it is to graduate, it is even less likely that you can exit school with an understanding of how unerringly fucked you are if you dont pay down your debt and end up getting your credit obliterated by the private lender and your wages garn’d forever by the government lender. There is so much money locked up in education that this microscopic percentage of people who are actually paying anything back are enough to prop up the entire industry of higher education.