I went back to college in early 1980’s to learn computer programming. The junior college I attended was free. My total debt was $5,000. I quickly got a job as a programmer after I graduated and paid off the loan fast.
All that has changed. College is no longer affordable and the amounts of student debt are staggering. The junior college I went to is still very low-cost, however it takes six years or more to get a two-year degree because classes are so over-booked and you must be a student to get priority on new classes. So you are forced to take classes you don’t care about.
Non-dischargeable debt like this, with such inflated sums to go to college is just insane. This system is not optimized for students. It’s optimized for lenders, who often have no skin in the game because the loans are guaranteed by the government. It’s a racket.
From the comments to the post.
“Why aren’t millennial buying houses?”
“Learning about the utter uselessness of modern liberalism by trying and failing to qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program despite qualifying in every category, I don’t qualify because I don’t have the right type of consolidation loan. Jokes on me for choosing the wrong type of consolidation loan checks notes 7 years before the law was written”
“That’d pay for only half of my 4 year program’s tuition. Everything is awesome.”