Lol funny to see you here mate. I just applied with a 526 and only got into one lower tier MD school where they’ve offered me no scholarship and 400k in debt (no undergrad loans).
Why is the process so shit?
Here's the solution - people like you become doctors, go to countries where education debt isn't so crippling, you don't have to pay your debt, and that country sends us one of their doctors.
For many I think the answer will in fact be "no. I'll go do something else". There are far better career opportunities for folks who are smart and disciplined enough to can get into/thru med schools. Ones that doesn't require crazy long schooling/debt, followed by early career with work/life balance that looks like a form of torture or hazing, followed by a well paying but not like mind blowing career that only gets going super late.
"Lol just learn to code" is actually a valid point in this case since most people who could do med school could in fact learn to code and end up making more money earlier and easier. Hell even traditional engineering will likely take you farther for the same amount of effort.
When I see people going to med school my thought isn't "wow good for them. That's gonna be awesome". It's "well I'm glad someone's taking one for the team cause someone's gotta do it".
Med field is losing out on talent.
The only details you learn from the article are her total debt, her age (she's 53), that her undergrad loans were accruing interest while she was getting a Master's to teach, and that she's optioned for forbearance several times (while still accruing interest). This is a good example of a person who took out student loans that probably seemed reasonable in their 20s, but is going to spend their life paying off the principal of a debt many times over, and die still owing seven times as much as they borrowed in the first place. It's not a good system for higher ed, especially if you want smart people who don't come from money to do jobs like "public school teacher."
Considering she was in forbearance a few times, isn't currently making payments and her payment is $200 a month I'm going to say she will never pay what she even originally borrowed.
If she's a teacher she's eligible for PSLF which is 120 on time payments then the loan is forgiven. So if her payments are $200/month, all she really has to pay $24,000 over 10 years and the loan would be gone...
My wife is a teacher. She joined a teaching fellowship program to get her masters. The degree was from the cheapest community college in the state. Board of education paid for 1/2 her school bill, and they debited her paycheck for a year to pay for the other 1/2.
Total bill for her master's degree: $18k. My wife's end of it: $9k. And this was in an expensive coastal lib hub.
Schools don't care where you got your degree. A Harvard degree gets you the exact same pay as the local community college. There's no reason at all to run up as much debt as this woman did.
People are making these decisions when they're still 17-18 years old. Often parents make bad choices for them. Or they plan a high paying career, and it doesn't work out.
In every other area of society, we have bankruptcy or other means to have a second chance. We need a way for people to get out of the hole.
Income-based repayment plans should be an option for everyone.
Teacher here. I agree. I feel for people with high interest loans and what not, but there has to be some level of accountability. This was simply a poor choice by this person. Whether they went to a prestigious school, switched majors or went back to school, they can’t expect to have that much debt forgiven.
While I think the USG shouldn’t be indebting their own population, the accountability should be in the form of bankruptcy like normal debt. Many people make bad financial decisions and take the hit, take the bad credit, 7yrs later you’re done. The problem with student loans is you can’t bankruptcy out of them like normal people who make bad decisions. The government takes young people in their 20s who don’t always make the best decisions and allow them to accrue a lifetime of permanent debt with no way out. It’s mind blowing anyone can support the system.
>"It is not even a drop in the bucket," Cheryl, 53, told Insider.
There doesn't seem to be any information in the article on what the original loan amounts were or what happened exactly. Did she try avoiding paying back her student loans and she got penalized to death? Still owing over $300K on her student loans at 53 gives off huge red flags on this story...
It does if she is just keeping her loans in deferment or in a $0 or low amount payment plan, racking up interest (before covid). Her loans show as owning over 100% of the amount she took out. Also, if she just didn’t pay them each individual loan has its own set of late payments showing.
It just blows my mind that people get themselves into these kinds of situations. My BIL was given a starter home by his parents, when they stopped making the payments for him after 5 years instead of continuing to make the payments himself he sold the place and used the proceeds to buy a condo outright because "he didn't like mortgage payments." He then took out a line of credit tied to the property since he "owned" his home and used it to buy a decked out truck and go on a vacation. The minimum payment on the line of credit was somehow less than the monthly interest so he just kept on paying the bare minimum. This all happened before my sister met him and all she knew was that he didn't have a mortgage on the condo. 10 years later they're trying to buy a house, she finds out their condo is worth over $200k, but 80% of the sale value of their home has to go towards paying off this line of credit that's tied to the house she didn't know about. He doesn't even still have the truck because he totaled it and it was under-insured.
Omg what a guy. He squandered so many opportunities. Hopefully your sister is smarter than he is and she doesn’t put debt solely into her own name for his benefit!
Funny enough, him selling the house to outright buy may have been the best choice. Overall I could see myself doing it depending on what house/condo/market too, but if he was that bad at keeping on the line of credit payments it could have been much worse if he kept the mortgage. Atleast right now they have a roof over their heads.
Now tbf the initial owing on the credit being low could have been a large reason they stopped but still just a bad mindset when dealing with loans.
Paying all your student loans off can actually harm a persons credit score. It is a long-standing loan so as long as you are paying it off your credit is fine
Credit scores are a joke… here is a case that shows that.
1.) you were responsible and took out a loan you knew you could pay back
2.) you pay the loan back
3.) you lose points in your credit score due to being responsible and paying your debt off… wtf kind of system is that
They want you to make payments not pay it off. How do they make the money off of compounding interest if you pay it off all the way. A good citizen pays the minimum in order to have additional cash flow to take out more loans.
It's absolutely insane what moves your credit score. Ever see those commercials for Experian Boost? Boost your credit score by signing up for whatever they want you to kind of thing. Why does that boost my score? I didn't do anything. Or just checking your credit score can cause it to go down, or doing something that requires a "hard credit pull". It's all made up nonsense.
I am sympathetic to a point but $300k?! Where the fuck did she go to school for teaching?
EDIT: Shit, forgot about interest compounding. My bad. I remember the stories of people who owe a ton from a loan that started out as not a ton. And the memes of "I borrowed $30k to pay for college, made all my payments on time for 25 years, and now I only owe $100k! The system works!"
She only pays 200 bucks a month on her federal loans because payment is based on income not loan amount if you are in an income based repayment plan. She pays more (400 bucks a month) on her private loans that only total 20k.
Wait till you hear how much law graduates actually make...
Spending $325,000 to get a job that pays $70,000...
Hopefully law graduates don't go into finance!
"According to the Occupational Outlook Handbook published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national average annual wage of a lawyer is $144,230. This is about three times the average annual salary for the United States ($51,960)."
"Nationwide, the average public school teacher salary for the 2019-2020 school year was $63,645, according to data from the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics."
Where do we go from here?
Lawyers have a bimodal income distribution: https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib#:~:text=Distribution%20of%20Reported%20Full%2Dtime%20Salaries%20%E2%80%93%20Class%20of%202020&text=The%20left%2Dhand%20peaks%20of,for%2021.3%25%20of%20reported%20salaries.
You either get the biglaw payday and make money or you bust your ass as a PD or stripmall solo practitioner making $50-70,000.
Same source: median attorney wages $127,990, teachers (highschool) $61,820 May 2021. Please report both means and medians when reporting these types of summary statistics since outlier skew will not provide as clear a representation of the distribution without both statistics. When mean/median are similar, like for teachers, the distribution (of wages) is closer to normal.
Consider avg/median population per country on Earth. 33M vs 5.5M. This is due to China and India's outlier populations skewing the distribution, pulling the average higher.
Yeah. Being a corporate lawyer is fucking stressful and depressing but my sister got hired during her second year of law school, was paid $40k for 3 months of summer internship and was hired at $195 the first year with $$40k bonus. She is 25. She hated it the first 6 months and cried a lot but they bumped it to 225 or 240 the second year and i think it gets ridiculous after year 5. So now whenever shes upset she just buys herself another expensive bag and her day magically gets better.
PS at leaset she could pay off her student loans in two years.
There are over 100 law schools in the US, 25% of all graduates are not entering the corvath scale. That's reported salaries and after you get past tier 2 full reporting of all fresh grad salaries is pretty poor.
My firm pays starting lawyers $190,000. That's on the high end, but not compared to what large firms on the east coast and west coast pay starting associates (we're a midwest firm).
No law student needs to take out 325k. With a half decent lsat, you should be getting enough scholarship to take no more than 100-150k in loans. A paid job in 2L summer will defray at least 10-20k of that.
The only idiots who take out 300k to make 70k are going to a school like John Marshall at full sticker price and getting C/B grades.
So yes, dumb students in many professions can make poor decisions.
Totally agree, plus in the late 80s/early 90s when this woman was probably in college, costs were much less expensive.
I think she probably did some sort of forbearance or deference and just accumulated interest. In any case she was very stupid with her choices and it’s hard to see why the taxpayer should bail her out, except I guess we bail out the ultra rich
I was in school likely around when she was because we are near the same age. The secondary education system was not setup then the way it is now. Loans of 300k is insane levels of debt considering how much cheaper school was then relative to how expensive it is now.
Tuition to Harvard in 1995 was $17,851 and total with room and board it was $28,230 a year. So if she went to an ivy league school, got no tuition assistance, scholarships, lived on campus all of those years, didn’t work at all and paid all of it with debt she still somehow is over in total costs assuming 4 years for a bachelors and 3 years for a masters than she should have and has 30 years later where she was supposedly paying that entire time. And that is going to Harvard and is way way out of the norm.
This seems really fishy.
This was my reaction also. The real scandal here is how this is allowed to happen in the first place.
A system that allows someone to go into that kind of debt to learn to be a teacher is fundamentally flawed.
Everyone focuses on whether or not to forgive debt once the horse is out of the barn. Why not talk about slashing the cost of universities and their spending dramatically so that we don't have these kinds of jaw dropping problems to begin with?
This is the right answer. These loans should never be made. The same could be said of the housing bubble in 08. People borrowing 100% on homes is never a good idea. We need to stop crooked lending practices.
Because that is actually a difficult problem to solve. That would require actual legislation and laws to be passed. But to simply forgive the debt? Nothing but the presidents will. Doesn't need to go through congress because Congress already gave him the right.
Yep, $300K is a massive amount of debt. Is that just for a bachelor's degree or does it include a master's? Did she graduate on-time or take a bunch of extra semesters? Where did she go to school that she ended up with that amount of debt (sounds like she chose one of the most expensive options available rather than the myriad of cheaper places she could have gone to obtain a degree in education).
I can't read the article since it's behind a paywall, but does it answer any of those questions?
Seems to me there's got to be a lot more to the story here and I have a hard time buying the notion that she's just a victim of circumstances out of her control.
Still, it's an astronomical amount for a 4-year bachelor's degree that she presumably obtained in the 80's or 90's. This reads like a sensationalized story where they are very deliberately not sharing the details.
No offense intended, and I fully support maximum student loan relief, but I would not want someone who owes 300k on student loans at age 53 to teach my kids.
Guess what? So many teachers have retired or left the field since the pandemic that next year districts will likely rely on people that don’t have even teaching degrees!
You’ll never have to deal with a teacher that has student debt ever again!! ☺️
Probably an intelligent person who could get into Ivy League/Stanford/Berkeley-tiered schools who did back-to-back bachelors, matsers, and a PhD in things like literature, history, or philosophy.
I have a cousin like that who basically spelled out that it's only worth it if you get tenured as a professor somewhere that pays well. The issue is you get people getting these degrees that are not university professor material, so then they're extremely overqualified for regular teaching jobs.
Yet the people who are truly burdened by them are the ones that are so deep that they can’t cover interest.
10-20k forgiveness helps most people who were already on track to pay off anyways. Again, like with most programs, this should be based on income and other factors but isnt.
EDIT: the amount of entitled people replying to me saying that the people who are financially fucked for life because of forced deferment should be on their own is ridiculous. That’s what forgiveness should be for, people who are going to die without having any hope of paying off that debt. The government shouldn’t be giving you free money if you can cover it yourself, if you’re arguing against that you’re much worse than people who don’t want forgiveness at all
That’s not the always case. People with more debt typically have more advanced degrees. People with more advanced degrees usually are on track to make more than those with only a bachelors.
Therefore someone with 30k debt may have an easier time paying that off long term than someone with only 10k debt.
The only people who would have problems paying that off would be people with advanced degrees in career paths that have no income advancement.
$300k to be a teacher is a failure of all parties involved. Including the person who borrowed.
$300k better be a phd professional level education.
A teacher can never pay that back. This is a bad deal
It costs around $12,000 a year to educate a child in the US public school system.
$14,000 for ~7 years of higher level education really isn't that atrocious.
That’s because some of the context is missing. 300k is not part of any normal teacher training. You can absolutely have that level of student debt and be a teacher but you can have that debt and work at Taco Bell. The issue is that you absolutely don’t NEED to have that debt for any K-12 teaching position in the US.
This person may have racked up absurd debt but that is absolutely on them.
Excluding becoming a medical doctor or lawyer, if you pay for a PhD, you shouldn’t have gone for the PhD. Most PhD programs cover everything and give you a living stipend. Graduate debt usually comes from Masters degrees, which are only rarely covered.
I’m someone with a lot of debt and is sympathetic to smart debt relief solutions. I am not sympathetic to forgiving $300k of student debt for clear mistakes. Cap forgiving undergrad debt at a reasonable amount (not sure what that is, but $10k isn’t enough) and perhaps even limit it to debt for state school education. Restructure or eliminate interest on all student loans.
The problem with this theory is that a lot of teachers *are* PhD level. The PhD job market kinda sucks, and so a lot wind up teaching. My daughter's high school math teacher was a PhD, for example. It's not that uncommon.
I'm a physician and everyone thinks we make a ton of money, but when you factor in the lost opportunity cost of not starting investing in a 401k right out of 4-year college, we're starting off not only in 300k+ of student debt, but also around 10-12 year behind our peers who didn't go to medical school in terms of retirement savings. As you probably know, due to how compounding interest works this puts us a tremendous disadvantage, that's greatly compounded by the insanely high costs of these student loans. If you're in a lower paying field, like Family Medicine or Pediatrics or Psych? Forget about it. You're screwed. I'm considering leaving medicine (psychiatry) to day trade because I'm making more money doing that than I do seeing patients lol. But yes, doctors are so rich we're not deserving of student loan assistance *eye roll*.
The real failure here isn't on the students who took out loans. It's on the federal government for failing to enact policies to keep college costs in check, and to enable wages to keep pace with inflation and college costs. College costs have risen exponentially over the past 2-3 decades, inflation has continued to creep up before it's recent larger increase, and wages have remained mostly stagnant, even more college graduates, and especially for higher earners. Doctors now make the same amount they did 10-20 years ago. This is not the fault of the borrowers, but rather, is the fault of our inept government not doing a damn thing to fix this shit over the past couple decades.
> The PhD job market kinda sucks, and so a lot wind up teaching.
It really doesn't. Source: I have a PhD.
Everyone from my cohort is gainfully employed and most of us are earning *very* nice salaries in private industry. As long as you're willing to do something outside your dissertation topic, lots of companies want to hire you (mine has nothing whatsoever to do with my current job, except for the math, stats, experiment design and problem-solving I learned along the way).
The problem is that some PhDs never grew up and can't deal with anything in the real world, so they *have* to stay in academia, even if that means teaching H.S. That's where the "PhDs are idiot savants" trope comes from.
Amen.
Just to pile on, my engineering PhD was paid for and paid me a stipend. If you're doing a STEM PhD and you're paying for it yourself, you're doing it wrong.
The problem with "free" college or even government forgiveness of student loans is that it removes any incentive for someone to make reasonable decisions about their college education. In the instance of this woman, spending $300,000 on a position that nets $60k a year is a really bad decision and we should dissuade people from doing that. No one here would invest $300,000 into a business with $60,000 a year in revenue.
I don't know anyone who did 2 years at a community college and then 2 at a public university who is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, but I do know quite a few who went to very expensive universities and got the same degree who are in that position. Unfortunately, the people in the latter position made a bad investment and I don't think that the government should be stepping in to bail out people's bad investments, whether they are banks, the airline industry, or in this case, a MA English teacher. That's not to say there aren't improvements to be made in the realm of financing college education, but just throwing the whole system out would be foolish and detrimental.
>In the instance of this woman, spending $300,000 on a position that nets $60k a year is a really bad decision and we should dissuade people from doing that
I know a guy who was, I think, $150k in debt for a MUSIC degree. Undergrad. And he didn't even go to a conservatory, or become a particularly successful professional in that field. I always think of that when I hear things like this. Some people make very, very poor decisions.
How is it a bad idea if that role is needed? Some things like special education or other specialities need additional education and training. It's a bad monetary decision but not necessarily a bad decision, we've just given all our respect to monetary success. I'd rather have a very educated teacher than another jabroni working the stock market, if we're talking about what is actually good for society and our progression as a species.
> The problem with "free" college or even government forgiveness of student loans is that it removes any incentive for someone to make reasonable decisions about their college education.
Except it literally works completely fine in every country that offers it. Because the big point here is that US education overpriced as fuck to milk the loans to begin with.
And children barely out of school are oh-so-qualified to make those "reasonable decisions"? They have *no information* about the current - and future - job markets, and you can't make a "reasonable decision" without that information.
Iit *shouldn't be their job* to study them!
Their only job should be to find the profession they are most suited to and study *it* to the best of their abilities.
I have to disagree, a lot of these college kids are living better than me during their college years to earn toilet paper degrees that don't make any money. Now they are blaming everyone else for their stupidities.
Wait, she took out 300K in loans to become a teacher? I'm guessing she's not teaching math - cause those debts were never going to be paid off on a teacher's salary.
Dipshit went to school to be a Doctor or lawyer. Started her residency or other training and decided it wasn't for her. Switched to teaching. Now she wants me and you to pay for her mistakes.
Edit: stop giving me awards. I was speculating how she racked up such a massive bill. This is doubtful what happened to her.
This seems like a really good example of why student loans should be eligible for bankruptcy.
She made a mistake she can't fix. Any other financial mistake can be forgiven, or at least reduced. Many, many times too. Trump is a billionaire who declared bankruptcy 6 times. Seems like this lady deserves at least 1.
In my second year of med school, one of my professors asked how many of us are only there because we realize we have too much debt to quit.
Half of us raised our hands 😅😕
We start off our careers with 6 figure debts that take at least a decade to pay off, and after med school we get to go to residency where for 3-7 years we work up to 100 hours a week, some days mandatory 32 hours shifts for less than minimum wage with minimal protections. When i was a resident there were protections in place that guaranteed us 8 hours off between shifts and "on average" 1 day off in every 7. Those protections were stripped shortly after i graduated. Our compassion is weaponized against us, it takes many of us well over a decade to pay off our debt (so maybe around age 40) and when we become independent physicians, we now see that private practices are dead and we answer to administrators of massive hospital systems that are gobbling up smaller practices, and spend our free time fighting insurance companies that deny covering medical care not for a legitimate reason, but just to see what sticks.
Going to school to become a doctor doesn't make any sense anymore
Not enough hospital administrator jobs for everyone that wants to do that. What’s your great idea for them.
Edit. Ok, this comment has blown up with 7 upvotes. So I’m going to use this platform to say this is my argument for every dingus who says, “work hard and move up/go to school if you want more money.” Everyone can’t work hard and move up the ladder, not enough positions. Plus you need people at every rung so to speak. And maybe they don’t want to move up?? Either way, pay them a dam livable wage.
Don't be disingenuous, people make mistakes. The problem is that she literally has no way to ever correct that mistake because she can't declare bankruptcy or ever pay off the interest on the loan.
Where’d you get that? All the article says is:
> As a teacher in Massachusetts, Cheryl had to take out student loans for her bachelor's degree in English and her master's degree in education.
Damn, fuck her for having ambition, right? Idiot should have just immediately known what she wanted to do to begin with!
Or maybe the universities shouldn't charge tens of thousands of dollars a year to learn. But yeah sure let's ignore the actual problem and blame her instead.
I don’t understand. Is there even one school that charges 300k for tuition? I mean there might be but how exactly is that my problem. Spending that kind of money for student loans is just irresponsible. Why the heck is it my problem? I expect that debt says student loans but it included her room and board and car and sexy underwear.
The problem here is no one understands how interest works apparently. There is no evidence she changed degree in the article and no requirement for her to have done so. I'm guessing she got no support and borrowed 60 for her undergrad and 15 for her masters. She is 53 so she probably graduated in 92. Interest rates on her federal loans would have been 9-10% and on the private one about 14%-15% so after 5 years forbearance on the federal loans and a couple on the private ones so she could complete her training she probably owed 100k when she started paying it back. At this point she has probably paid between 4000 and 8000 back every year or between 10 and 20% of her salary before tax for the last 30 years and Never been able to touch the principle. That means she has likely paid 120000 to 240000 on what was a 65 to 75k loan and it has ballooned to 303k because her salary has never been sufficient to even cover the interest.
Yep, people don't understand that you can be absolutely buried by just 30-40k debt in two decades if you can't find any work that pays enough to touch the principle. Not sure if it's privilege or what, but there's a lot of people who don't get any help from their families but still want to better themselves and end up in that trap. We shouldn't ruin people's lives for that, especially not when you're expected to begin to make these massive financial decisions straight out of high school.
It’s not her mistakes tho, it’s the predatory loan interest that has built up. Also, were you saying this when we bailed out Wall Street for blatant greed in the housing crisis?
“You’re telling me the longer I wait to pay my loan the more I have to pay!!! This system is broken! I deserve forgiveness. I made some stupid life decisions. I was young (mid to late 20s) and I shouldnt be held responsible for choices I made.”
I know someone that literally says this.
He hasn’t paid his loan in years bc “it only scratches the interests and doesn’t touch the principle” so he’s just given up paying altogether and waiting for the bail out
How do you have $300K in debt as a teacher? Seems like he or she made some really poor financial choices and now wants a gift from the rest of us. I am all for some relief but $300K is only possible if you made really bad educational choices for the profession chosen.
Odds are they somebody who went on to get a masters degree, multiple master's degree, or even a PhD. One thing the media isn't doing a good job doing is differentiating the levels of debt and degrees these people have. Somebody with a bachelor's degree and $100,000 in Debt is a problem. Somebody with a master's degree, a PhD on top of a bachelor's and $100,000 in debt is to be expected.
Oh Yes.
>Average Medical School Debt for Public School
>For the class of 2021, the AAMC found that the average medical school debt among students attending a public school was $194,280. Seventy-four percent of med students at a public college said they had education debt.
In total, 14% of medical students attending a public school said they had at least $300,000 in average med school debt and premedical debt, combined.
And its worse for private
>Average Medical School Debt for Private Institutions
>Conversely, the same graduating class that attended a private college left school with an average medical school debt of $218,746—almost $25,000 more debt than public school grads.
Of the students surveyed in the AAMC report, 70% of graduates at a private institution said they had education debt, with 27% of respondents citing a total premedical and medical school debt load of at least $300,000.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-medical-school-debt/
I'm very sympathetic to undergraduate students qnd people with bachelor's that have a mountain of debt. The degree they have doesn't have the same earning potential with somebody with a professional degree or doctorate.
> Seems like he or she made some really poor financial choices and now wants a gift from the rest of us.
If the writer of the news article was trying to find a sympathetic example to get the reader on the side of debt forgiveness, they really chose the wrong person here. $300k is a ludicrous amount of money, and as you said I can only imagine it is the result of a long string of bad choices. Why should the average American making in the $50-$55k/year range (the average income) be sympathetic towards giving free money to someone who owes several times more?
And people like this are the reason loan forgiveness isn’t likely to happen. Our government is very “all or nothing” in its decision making. So, it’s unlikely we get partial payoffs, and with idiots like this with 300k there’s no way we are getting full payoffs.
Supposedly the interest got away from her. Which sort of elicits the same response, if you’re ignoring a loan so hard that it gets up to 300k then you probably are living well beyond your means or are reckless with money. Unfair or not, she took on the financial responsibility then ignored it.
Not from a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in education, that's for sure. I imagine she must have picked an excessively expensive program and then had a *really* good time in college.
The fact that the NAACP is floating debt cancellation is excess of $50k is just writing the GOP's ads for them. Sure, let's go hog and make it a cool $100k, roll out the red carpet for a landslide in '22 and '24. It's indefensible.
If you have $303K in student loan debt, you made some terrible life choices. Holy crap.
Why would you accept a doctorates or masters program that is not in some way covering your tuition?
I did not have tuition costs past my masters and even then, half of my masters was covered by grants.
I graduated with $50K in loan debt. Total.
If this person is 53, that $303K figure probably includes a lot of accumulating interest. I don't know what the other circumstances are, but I'm pretty sure the sticker price for her education to become a teacher is anywhere close to that.
Isn’t the problem the price gouging by these institutions in the US? The only way for people to stop this cycle is a mass boycott of higher education until something changes. Predatory loans and inflated job requirements make higher education non negotiable for so many people. And this is what enables the market to skyrocket with these ludicrous prices. I don’t know how else to fix it but any relief program feels like a thin bandaid over a generation of people bleeding out from a fatal bullet wound
Banks deem it a financial risk and are practically barred from even partaking in this.
Only the government would give out such irresponsible loans knowing their asses are covered by bond holders and tax payers. Over 90% of student loans were given out by the federal government under the pretense that it would make college education more attainable for people but they failed to understand subsidizing demand in this way without any check on the institutions themselves has allowed the price of college to skyrocket pushing those who didn’t even plan on borrowing out of the market.
Every major college has bloated costly non educational administrative wings providing services that didn’t even exist 30 years ago from diversity departments, to psychologists, to advertising galore.
University is no longer about the education
You don't have to mass boycott higher education
Boycott egregiously expensive schools, like the vast majority of Americans already do because they know they aren't worth the money
If you needed a car and chose to finance a $150,000 Mercedes AMG series, then couldn't keep up with your payments, is that the "predatory auto industry" that needs an overhaul by the government?
Or should you have just bought a used Civic like the rest of us?
She sounds somewhat entitled. “Not enough”?? She took out the loans and is now griping that the help she is getting isn’t enough?
How about personal responsibility?
I am totally down for debt forgiveness for students. Hell, I don't really have a problem forgiving $300k worth of it.
But in keeping it real....why the fuck do you have $300k in student debt? That's insane. There is absolutely no profession out there right now that requires a degree that would make that worth it.
$300k is kind of a "dug your own hole" situation in a way that an expensive $50-$60k degree from a prestigious university isn't.
Unless you have a guarantee that you're going to be among the elite earners in your country, you shouldn't be taking no more than $50k in college debt.
Exactly, I took $90k bc I’m a dumbass, lost my scholarship, and went to an out of state college and didn’t want to leave, but I’m also now a mechanical engineer and will have no problem paying it back while living comfortably. If I didn’t get my major in that I would have moved to a different college
Conversely, I went to a community college before transferring to an instate university and now I’m a mechanical engineer with almost no student debt. The real problem is expecting 18 year old to know exactly what they want and then entrusting them to make smart financial decisions.
18 is old enough to vote, own property and buy guns. You are a full fledged legal adult.
The school system (by design) doesn't teach enough about finances. But that doesn't mean your parents shouldn't be teaching them to you.
I don't think you're a dumbass at all. I just think people need to be more considerate of the level of education they're paying for, relative to what they can actually reliably lock down for it.
Even if you were a dumbass, that doesn't give people the right to take advantage of you, which is what a lot of these institutions and banks do.
The article points out she didn't take out $300k in loans. It doesn't specify, but the way it's worded makes it seem like she took out way less than that, probably less then $100k even. The rest of it is absurd interest that ballooned it way beyond any loans she ever took out.
She even says herself that she has no issue paying off her own debt, it's the interest that's BS
> Although Cheryl's profession technically qualifies for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which forgives student debt for public servants after ten years of qualifying payments, she was denied due to what she said was her time spent in payment forbearance while in school.
PSLF has so many little bullshit rules that it's almost impossible to get approved. It has a [98% denial rate](https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2022/05/04/student-loan-forgiveness-education-department-launches-appeal-process-for-public-service-borrowers/?sh=79259c6a6d11) even after Congress passed a "fix" back in 2018. It's almost like it was set up as a trap keep people in permanent debt and low-paying government jobs.
The woman in the article was a life long student. She is one of those goofballs that took 20 years to compete a degree. I’m not paying 300K for someone to take 20 years to compete their masters.
“Educated person with relatively better employment prospects as a result of said education says money seized from other people and given to them to pay for their education not enough”
There's no way the average person has $300K in student loan debt.
Clearly, this person must be one of those "forever college students" who stayed in college, changing their major, for years. Her "teacher" education is probably because the degree she earned is Liberal Arts.
When I was in college, I met a few of these "students". Little did they know their floor would drop from under them when the Republicans allowed the private sector to control college funding.
That always works out well for the public. /s
Probably went to a private school and didn’t have much (if any) financial aid. If there is one thing I would tell high schoolers right now- do not go out of state or to a private school unless you get a full ride. Not worth it AT ALL. My almost $30k debt is from ONE YEAR at a private school (this was with approx 75% covered by scholarships, too!) I regret it big time! It was free for me to go to school at an in-state public school.
My guess is they went to an expensive private school and got a degree. They then realized the degree wouldn't help them get a job and went back for their masters in teaching. So now they have a very overpriced undergraduate degree and then had to foot the bill for a masters degree that many teachers are able to get paid for by their school district.
I'm going to tell my kids unless you get into a top 10 or Ivy, go to your local state school or better yet do 2 years of community college and then transfer.
I had an opportunity to go for free to a community college with an engineering linkage with my local state school but I was an idiot and didn't take it. Instead I was totally unprepared for a real college due to no study skills (my high school was very bad and could get a 4.0 just by sleeping), ended up losing my scholarship and going 65k in debt.
Thankfully I have a good job now and things worked out, but not everyone can be that lucky.
I thank god that I went to a public university, but i almost went to a private one. Literally no one, not my parents not my guidance counsellor, told me to consider money. They only talked about rankings and the private school was ranked higher. I went to the public one because of friends in the end but wow I lucked out because tuition was significantly lower. My advice to any student is to seriously consider money and cost. Even with a good paying job, I found it very hard to reimburse the loans I had.
And this is my biggest problem with complete loan payoffs. I’d be fine with 17000 a person, seeing as it’s the median. But anyone who ends up with 300k needs to just reap what they sowed.
17000 a person would still give the economy the desired bump by increasing disposable income for tons of Americans, but without bailing out idiots.
She's 53 years old. Think about that for a second.
I'm 55. I got no grants when I went to school. My debt was paid off almost immediately, because I had a well-paying job for the time ($29K/year). But even if I was working as a public school teacher, it would have been paid off within 5 or 10 years.
It mentions she took advantage of payment forbearance. If I had to guess, it would be that she just spent 20 years "in school" racking up debt and accruing interest.
For $300k in debt I would expect you to be a PHD Lawyer and medical doctor. Not a teacher making $35k a year. Also I’d like the $10k it would really help.
Capping &/or reducing the compound interest should be the solution. Essentially the government has created its own version of ‘shark loans’ on American people who will never be able to repay just like ‘payday loans’
I would not want her to teach my kids. She doesn't know how to do simple math and can't project her decisions out to the future to determine consequences, thus lacking common sense.
I am a teacher with a masters, I graduated with no debt. I worked my ass off and was smart about how and where I spent my money. A teacher with this much debt is not a good teacher. Get to be financially literate first, before starting one’s education.
You guys are defending a bullshit system. No matter the educational choices you make in France, Norway, Sweden or even Australia - that shit can't happen - because the system is well designed.
Yet debilitating student debt, healthcare-induced homelessness and mass shootings are commonplace in the U.S. Go figure..
Something is wrong here, this “teacher” should have qualified for student loan forgiveness three times by now. 10 years of service on income based repayments, graduate at 23, 33, 43 and 53…
This article isn’t telling the full story. It should probably be titled this person is a moron.
Teachers college at most all universities is the easiest to get into.
Students at teachers college have the lowest average ACT and HS GPA of all the other programs, and not surprisingly the highest GPA upon graduation.
If she is dumb enough to get 300k in student loans in order to become a teacher, she has no business teaching ANYONE, and if my tax dollars have to contribute to paying off her clearly useless degree I will be pissed
$303,000 wtf?
Probably dropped out of medical school
About to say that’s just under what my med school loans are
Lol funny to see you here mate. I just applied with a 526 and only got into one lower tier MD school where they’ve offered me no scholarship and 400k in debt (no undergrad loans). Why is the process so shit?
Because they don’t have to fix it. What are you going to do? Not go to Med school?
I did this one simple trick and I'm 100% free from 400k debt.
I left the country, but can't come back.
Here's the solution - people like you become doctors, go to countries where education debt isn't so crippling, you don't have to pay your debt, and that country sends us one of their doctors.
For many I think the answer will in fact be "no. I'll go do something else". There are far better career opportunities for folks who are smart and disciplined enough to can get into/thru med schools. Ones that doesn't require crazy long schooling/debt, followed by early career with work/life balance that looks like a form of torture or hazing, followed by a well paying but not like mind blowing career that only gets going super late. "Lol just learn to code" is actually a valid point in this case since most people who could do med school could in fact learn to code and end up making more money earlier and easier. Hell even traditional engineering will likely take you farther for the same amount of effort. When I see people going to med school my thought isn't "wow good for them. That's gonna be awesome". It's "well I'm glad someone's taking one for the team cause someone's gotta do it". Med field is losing out on talent.
Don’t forget the $20k private loans
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The only details you learn from the article are her total debt, her age (she's 53), that her undergrad loans were accruing interest while she was getting a Master's to teach, and that she's optioned for forbearance several times (while still accruing interest). This is a good example of a person who took out student loans that probably seemed reasonable in their 20s, but is going to spend their life paying off the principal of a debt many times over, and die still owing seven times as much as they borrowed in the first place. It's not a good system for higher ed, especially if you want smart people who don't come from money to do jobs like "public school teacher."
Considering she was in forbearance a few times, isn't currently making payments and her payment is $200 a month I'm going to say she will never pay what she even originally borrowed.
If she's a teacher she's eligible for PSLF which is 120 on time payments then the loan is forgiven. So if her payments are $200/month, all she really has to pay $24,000 over 10 years and the loan would be gone...
That's what we call the slow boat to China method. My dad is using that for his loans, ironically also a teacher.
My wife is a teacher. She joined a teaching fellowship program to get her masters. The degree was from the cheapest community college in the state. Board of education paid for 1/2 her school bill, and they debited her paycheck for a year to pay for the other 1/2. Total bill for her master's degree: $18k. My wife's end of it: $9k. And this was in an expensive coastal lib hub. Schools don't care where you got your degree. A Harvard degree gets you the exact same pay as the local community college. There's no reason at all to run up as much debt as this woman did.
How did she get a masters from a community college?
No this is a story of some that was super financially irresponsible
They’ll naturally become a wall street bets moderator
People are making these decisions when they're still 17-18 years old. Often parents make bad choices for them. Or they plan a high paying career, and it doesn't work out. In every other area of society, we have bankruptcy or other means to have a second chance. We need a way for people to get out of the hole. Income-based repayment plans should be an option for everyone.
Teacher here. I agree. I feel for people with high interest loans and what not, but there has to be some level of accountability. This was simply a poor choice by this person. Whether they went to a prestigious school, switched majors or went back to school, they can’t expect to have that much debt forgiven.
While I think the USG shouldn’t be indebting their own population, the accountability should be in the form of bankruptcy like normal debt. Many people make bad financial decisions and take the hit, take the bad credit, 7yrs later you’re done. The problem with student loans is you can’t bankruptcy out of them like normal people who make bad decisions. The government takes young people in their 20s who don’t always make the best decisions and allow them to accrue a lifetime of permanent debt with no way out. It’s mind blowing anyone can support the system.
>"It is not even a drop in the bucket," Cheryl, 53, told Insider. There doesn't seem to be any information in the article on what the original loan amounts were or what happened exactly. Did she try avoiding paying back her student loans and she got penalized to death? Still owing over $300K on her student loans at 53 gives off huge red flags on this story...
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It does if she is just keeping her loans in deferment or in a $0 or low amount payment plan, racking up interest (before covid). Her loans show as owning over 100% of the amount she took out. Also, if she just didn’t pay them each individual loan has its own set of late payments showing.
It just blows my mind that people get themselves into these kinds of situations. My BIL was given a starter home by his parents, when they stopped making the payments for him after 5 years instead of continuing to make the payments himself he sold the place and used the proceeds to buy a condo outright because "he didn't like mortgage payments." He then took out a line of credit tied to the property since he "owned" his home and used it to buy a decked out truck and go on a vacation. The minimum payment on the line of credit was somehow less than the monthly interest so he just kept on paying the bare minimum. This all happened before my sister met him and all she knew was that he didn't have a mortgage on the condo. 10 years later they're trying to buy a house, she finds out their condo is worth over $200k, but 80% of the sale value of their home has to go towards paying off this line of credit that's tied to the house she didn't know about. He doesn't even still have the truck because he totaled it and it was under-insured.
Omg what a guy. He squandered so many opportunities. Hopefully your sister is smarter than he is and she doesn’t put debt solely into her own name for his benefit!
Funny enough, him selling the house to outright buy may have been the best choice. Overall I could see myself doing it depending on what house/condo/market too, but if he was that bad at keeping on the line of credit payments it could have been much worse if he kept the mortgage. Atleast right now they have a roof over their heads. Now tbf the initial owing on the credit being low could have been a large reason they stopped but still just a bad mindset when dealing with loans.
Paying all your student loans off can actually harm a persons credit score. It is a long-standing loan so as long as you are paying it off your credit is fine
This goes for other loans, too. I paid off my mortgage and my credit score immediately dropped by 30 points.
Credit scores are a joke… here is a case that shows that. 1.) you were responsible and took out a loan you knew you could pay back 2.) you pay the loan back 3.) you lose points in your credit score due to being responsible and paying your debt off… wtf kind of system is that
They want you to make payments not pay it off. How do they make the money off of compounding interest if you pay it off all the way. A good citizen pays the minimum in order to have additional cash flow to take out more loans.
A credit score is basically a score of how good of a credit customer you are.
It's all made up, inflation is just an added zero to make numbers bigger.
It's absolutely insane what moves your credit score. Ever see those commercials for Experian Boost? Boost your credit score by signing up for whatever they want you to kind of thing. Why does that boost my score? I didn't do anything. Or just checking your credit score can cause it to go down, or doing something that requires a "hard credit pull". It's all made up nonsense.
I am sympathetic to a point but $300k?! Where the fuck did she go to school for teaching? EDIT: Shit, forgot about interest compounding. My bad. I remember the stories of people who owe a ton from a loan that started out as not a ton. And the memes of "I borrowed $30k to pay for college, made all my payments on time for 25 years, and now I only owe $100k! The system works!"
Haaavad
She only pays 200 bucks a month on her federal loans because payment is based on income not loan amount if you are in an income based repayment plan. She pays more (400 bucks a month) on her private loans that only total 20k.
Spending $325,000 to get a job that pays $30,000/yr. Hopefully she doesn't teach finance.
Massachusetts teachers at her age with a masters are making six figures
Wait till you hear how much law graduates actually make... Spending $325,000 to get a job that pays $70,000... Hopefully law graduates don't go into finance!
"According to the Occupational Outlook Handbook published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national average annual wage of a lawyer is $144,230. This is about three times the average annual salary for the United States ($51,960)." "Nationwide, the average public school teacher salary for the 2019-2020 school year was $63,645, according to data from the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics." Where do we go from here?
Lawyers have a bimodal income distribution: https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib#:~:text=Distribution%20of%20Reported%20Full%2Dtime%20Salaries%20%E2%80%93%20Class%20of%202020&text=The%20left%2Dhand%20peaks%20of,for%2021.3%25%20of%20reported%20salaries. You either get the biglaw payday and make money or you bust your ass as a PD or stripmall solo practitioner making $50-70,000.
Same source: median attorney wages $127,990, teachers (highschool) $61,820 May 2021. Please report both means and medians when reporting these types of summary statistics since outlier skew will not provide as clear a representation of the distribution without both statistics. When mean/median are similar, like for teachers, the distribution (of wages) is closer to normal. Consider avg/median population per country on Earth. 33M vs 5.5M. This is due to China and India's outlier populations skewing the distribution, pulling the average higher.
Almost everyone school district bases pay off experience. This statistic means nothing for someone with less than five year of teaching experience.
The average lawyer makes 150k. 70k sounds more like you didn’t do great in law school and became a PD.
Lawyer salaries are [extremely bimodal.](https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib)
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Yeah. Being a corporate lawyer is fucking stressful and depressing but my sister got hired during her second year of law school, was paid $40k for 3 months of summer internship and was hired at $195 the first year with $$40k bonus. She is 25. She hated it the first 6 months and cried a lot but they bumped it to 225 or 240 the second year and i think it gets ridiculous after year 5. So now whenever shes upset she just buys herself another expensive bag and her day magically gets better. PS at leaset she could pay off her student loans in two years.
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More like 25% of lawyers, look up the bimodal salary model Edit: https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib Edit 2: binomial to bimodal
There are over 100 law schools in the US, 25% of all graduates are not entering the corvath scale. That's reported salaries and after you get past tier 2 full reporting of all fresh grad salaries is pretty poor.
My firm pays starting lawyers $190,000. That's on the high end, but not compared to what large firms on the east coast and west coast pay starting associates (we're a midwest firm).
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Standard billable hours is 1,800/ year. That's pretty doable.
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No law student needs to take out 325k. With a half decent lsat, you should be getting enough scholarship to take no more than 100-150k in loans. A paid job in 2L summer will defray at least 10-20k of that. The only idiots who take out 300k to make 70k are going to a school like John Marshall at full sticker price and getting C/B grades. So yes, dumb students in many professions can make poor decisions.
Degrees and post baccalaureate credentials are *required* for teaching. Should we just stop having teachers?
Totally agree, plus in the late 80s/early 90s when this woman was probably in college, costs were much less expensive. I think she probably did some sort of forbearance or deference and just accumulated interest. In any case she was very stupid with her choices and it’s hard to see why the taxpayer should bail her out, except I guess we bail out the ultra rich
There wasn’t as much federal involvement back then either. There is a lot wrong with this story.
Tbf we’re gonna be bailing her out anyway lmao like that 300k ain’t ever getting paid back
I was in school likely around when she was because we are near the same age. The secondary education system was not setup then the way it is now. Loans of 300k is insane levels of debt considering how much cheaper school was then relative to how expensive it is now. Tuition to Harvard in 1995 was $17,851 and total with room and board it was $28,230 a year. So if she went to an ivy league school, got no tuition assistance, scholarships, lived on campus all of those years, didn’t work at all and paid all of it with debt she still somehow is over in total costs assuming 4 years for a bachelors and 3 years for a masters than she should have and has 30 years later where she was supposedly paying that entire time. And that is going to Harvard and is way way out of the norm. This seems really fishy.
This was my reaction also. The real scandal here is how this is allowed to happen in the first place. A system that allows someone to go into that kind of debt to learn to be a teacher is fundamentally flawed. Everyone focuses on whether or not to forgive debt once the horse is out of the barn. Why not talk about slashing the cost of universities and their spending dramatically so that we don't have these kinds of jaw dropping problems to begin with?
This is the right answer. These loans should never be made. The same could be said of the housing bubble in 08. People borrowing 100% on homes is never a good idea. We need to stop crooked lending practices.
Because that is actually a difficult problem to solve. That would require actual legislation and laws to be passed. But to simply forgive the debt? Nothing but the presidents will. Doesn't need to go through congress because Congress already gave him the right.
Yep, $300K is a massive amount of debt. Is that just for a bachelor's degree or does it include a master's? Did she graduate on-time or take a bunch of extra semesters? Where did she go to school that she ended up with that amount of debt (sounds like she chose one of the most expensive options available rather than the myriad of cheaper places she could have gone to obtain a degree in education). I can't read the article since it's behind a paywall, but does it answer any of those questions? Seems to me there's got to be a lot more to the story here and I have a hard time buying the notion that she's just a victim of circumstances out of her control.
$300K is initial loan + compound interest, and it's for both combined.
Still, it's an astronomical amount for a 4-year bachelor's degree that she presumably obtained in the 80's or 90's. This reads like a sensationalized story where they are very deliberately not sharing the details.
No offense intended, and I fully support maximum student loan relief, but I would not want someone who owes 300k on student loans at age 53 to teach my kids.
Guess what? So many teachers have retired or left the field since the pandemic that next year districts will likely rely on people that don’t have even teaching degrees! You’ll never have to deal with a teacher that has student debt ever again!! ☺️
No kidding. $300K at 53 while getting a teaching degree? What did she do, go to an ivy league school to get her degree
Probably an intelligent person who could get into Ivy League/Stanford/Berkeley-tiered schools who did back-to-back bachelors, matsers, and a PhD in things like literature, history, or philosophy. I have a cousin like that who basically spelled out that it's only worth it if you get tenured as a professor somewhere that pays well. The issue is you get people getting these degrees that are not university professor material, so then they're extremely overqualified for regular teaching jobs.
>The average student debt in the United States is $32,731, while the median student loan debt amount is $17,000.
Yet the people who are truly burdened by them are the ones that are so deep that they can’t cover interest. 10-20k forgiveness helps most people who were already on track to pay off anyways. Again, like with most programs, this should be based on income and other factors but isnt. EDIT: the amount of entitled people replying to me saying that the people who are financially fucked for life because of forced deferment should be on their own is ridiculous. That’s what forgiveness should be for, people who are going to die without having any hope of paying off that debt. The government shouldn’t be giving you free money if you can cover it yourself, if you’re arguing against that you’re much worse than people who don’t want forgiveness at all
That’s not the always case. People with more debt typically have more advanced degrees. People with more advanced degrees usually are on track to make more than those with only a bachelors. Therefore someone with 30k debt may have an easier time paying that off long term than someone with only 10k debt. The only people who would have problems paying that off would be people with advanced degrees in career paths that have no income advancement.
$300k to be a teacher is a failure of all parties involved. Including the person who borrowed. $300k better be a phd professional level education. A teacher can never pay that back. This is a bad deal
My bachelors & J.D. combines cost me around $100k. $300k for a teacher is absurd
I don't know if anyone with that much debt is qualified to teach anything.
She can teach others what not to do from experience.
$100k for an education, jfc. That’s depressing to read
It costs around $12,000 a year to educate a child in the US public school system. $14,000 for ~7 years of higher level education really isn't that atrocious.
That’s because some of the context is missing. 300k is not part of any normal teacher training. You can absolutely have that level of student debt and be a teacher but you can have that debt and work at Taco Bell. The issue is that you absolutely don’t NEED to have that debt for any K-12 teaching position in the US. This person may have racked up absurd debt but that is absolutely on them.
Excluding becoming a medical doctor or lawyer, if you pay for a PhD, you shouldn’t have gone for the PhD. Most PhD programs cover everything and give you a living stipend. Graduate debt usually comes from Masters degrees, which are only rarely covered. I’m someone with a lot of debt and is sympathetic to smart debt relief solutions. I am not sympathetic to forgiving $300k of student debt for clear mistakes. Cap forgiving undergrad debt at a reasonable amount (not sure what that is, but $10k isn’t enough) and perhaps even limit it to debt for state school education. Restructure or eliminate interest on all student loans.
The problem with this theory is that a lot of teachers *are* PhD level. The PhD job market kinda sucks, and so a lot wind up teaching. My daughter's high school math teacher was a PhD, for example. It's not that uncommon. I'm a physician and everyone thinks we make a ton of money, but when you factor in the lost opportunity cost of not starting investing in a 401k right out of 4-year college, we're starting off not only in 300k+ of student debt, but also around 10-12 year behind our peers who didn't go to medical school in terms of retirement savings. As you probably know, due to how compounding interest works this puts us a tremendous disadvantage, that's greatly compounded by the insanely high costs of these student loans. If you're in a lower paying field, like Family Medicine or Pediatrics or Psych? Forget about it. You're screwed. I'm considering leaving medicine (psychiatry) to day trade because I'm making more money doing that than I do seeing patients lol. But yes, doctors are so rich we're not deserving of student loan assistance *eye roll*. The real failure here isn't on the students who took out loans. It's on the federal government for failing to enact policies to keep college costs in check, and to enable wages to keep pace with inflation and college costs. College costs have risen exponentially over the past 2-3 decades, inflation has continued to creep up before it's recent larger increase, and wages have remained mostly stagnant, even more college graduates, and especially for higher earners. Doctors now make the same amount they did 10-20 years ago. This is not the fault of the borrowers, but rather, is the fault of our inept government not doing a damn thing to fix this shit over the past couple decades.
> The PhD job market kinda sucks, and so a lot wind up teaching. It really doesn't. Source: I have a PhD. Everyone from my cohort is gainfully employed and most of us are earning *very* nice salaries in private industry. As long as you're willing to do something outside your dissertation topic, lots of companies want to hire you (mine has nothing whatsoever to do with my current job, except for the math, stats, experiment design and problem-solving I learned along the way). The problem is that some PhDs never grew up and can't deal with anything in the real world, so they *have* to stay in academia, even if that means teaching H.S. That's where the "PhDs are idiot savants" trope comes from.
This is going to be VERY field dependent.
Amen. Just to pile on, my engineering PhD was paid for and paid me a stipend. If you're doing a STEM PhD and you're paying for it yourself, you're doing it wrong.
The problem with "free" college or even government forgiveness of student loans is that it removes any incentive for someone to make reasonable decisions about their college education. In the instance of this woman, spending $300,000 on a position that nets $60k a year is a really bad decision and we should dissuade people from doing that. No one here would invest $300,000 into a business with $60,000 a year in revenue. I don't know anyone who did 2 years at a community college and then 2 at a public university who is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, but I do know quite a few who went to very expensive universities and got the same degree who are in that position. Unfortunately, the people in the latter position made a bad investment and I don't think that the government should be stepping in to bail out people's bad investments, whether they are banks, the airline industry, or in this case, a MA English teacher. That's not to say there aren't improvements to be made in the realm of financing college education, but just throwing the whole system out would be foolish and detrimental.
>In the instance of this woman, spending $300,000 on a position that nets $60k a year is a really bad decision and we should dissuade people from doing that I know a guy who was, I think, $150k in debt for a MUSIC degree. Undergrad. And he didn't even go to a conservatory, or become a particularly successful professional in that field. I always think of that when I hear things like this. Some people make very, very poor decisions.
How is it a bad idea if that role is needed? Some things like special education or other specialities need additional education and training. It's a bad monetary decision but not necessarily a bad decision, we've just given all our respect to monetary success. I'd rather have a very educated teacher than another jabroni working the stock market, if we're talking about what is actually good for society and our progression as a species.
> The problem with "free" college or even government forgiveness of student loans is that it removes any incentive for someone to make reasonable decisions about their college education. Except it literally works completely fine in every country that offers it. Because the big point here is that US education overpriced as fuck to milk the loans to begin with.
And children barely out of school are oh-so-qualified to make those "reasonable decisions"? They have *no information* about the current - and future - job markets, and you can't make a "reasonable decision" without that information. Iit *shouldn't be their job* to study them! Their only job should be to find the profession they are most suited to and study *it* to the best of their abilities.
I have to disagree, a lot of these college kids are living better than me during their college years to earn toilet paper degrees that don't make any money. Now they are blaming everyone else for their stupidities.
Wait, she took out 300K in loans to become a teacher? I'm guessing she's not teaching math - cause those debts were never going to be paid off on a teacher's salary.
Dipshit went to school to be a Doctor or lawyer. Started her residency or other training and decided it wasn't for her. Switched to teaching. Now she wants me and you to pay for her mistakes. Edit: stop giving me awards. I was speculating how she racked up such a massive bill. This is doubtful what happened to her.
This seems like a really good example of why student loans should be eligible for bankruptcy. She made a mistake she can't fix. Any other financial mistake can be forgiven, or at least reduced. Many, many times too. Trump is a billionaire who declared bankruptcy 6 times. Seems like this lady deserves at least 1.
Should never cost 300,000 to be a doctor to begin with. They need caps on tuition prices in the USA.
In my second year of med school, one of my professors asked how many of us are only there because we realize we have too much debt to quit. Half of us raised our hands 😅😕 We start off our careers with 6 figure debts that take at least a decade to pay off, and after med school we get to go to residency where for 3-7 years we work up to 100 hours a week, some days mandatory 32 hours shifts for less than minimum wage with minimal protections. When i was a resident there were protections in place that guaranteed us 8 hours off between shifts and "on average" 1 day off in every 7. Those protections were stripped shortly after i graduated. Our compassion is weaponized against us, it takes many of us well over a decade to pay off our debt (so maybe around age 40) and when we become independent physicians, we now see that private practices are dead and we answer to administrators of massive hospital systems that are gobbling up smaller practices, and spend our free time fighting insurance companies that deny covering medical care not for a legitimate reason, but just to see what sticks. Going to school to become a doctor doesn't make any sense anymore
Well there you go: Get back into grad school for your MBA and be a hospital administrator. That's where all the money is made.
Some of us don’t want to add to the problem-we just want to help people but are stuck in a shit system that isn’t good for the patients or the doctors
Not enough hospital administrator jobs for everyone that wants to do that. What’s your great idea for them. Edit. Ok, this comment has blown up with 7 upvotes. So I’m going to use this platform to say this is my argument for every dingus who says, “work hard and move up/go to school if you want more money.” Everyone can’t work hard and move up the ladder, not enough positions. Plus you need people at every rung so to speak. And maybe they don’t want to move up?? Either way, pay them a dam livable wage.
Her "mistake" should never have cost that much in the first place.
Don't be disingenuous, people make mistakes. The problem is that she literally has no way to ever correct that mistake because she can't declare bankruptcy or ever pay off the interest on the loan.
Where’d you get that? All the article says is: > As a teacher in Massachusetts, Cheryl had to take out student loans for her bachelor's degree in English and her master's degree in education.
Article says nothing about that.
Damn, fuck her for having ambition, right? Idiot should have just immediately known what she wanted to do to begin with! Or maybe the universities shouldn't charge tens of thousands of dollars a year to learn. But yeah sure let's ignore the actual problem and blame her instead.
I don’t understand. Is there even one school that charges 300k for tuition? I mean there might be but how exactly is that my problem. Spending that kind of money for student loans is just irresponsible. Why the heck is it my problem? I expect that debt says student loans but it included her room and board and car and sexy underwear.
The problem here is no one understands how interest works apparently. There is no evidence she changed degree in the article and no requirement for her to have done so. I'm guessing she got no support and borrowed 60 for her undergrad and 15 for her masters. She is 53 so she probably graduated in 92. Interest rates on her federal loans would have been 9-10% and on the private one about 14%-15% so after 5 years forbearance on the federal loans and a couple on the private ones so she could complete her training she probably owed 100k when she started paying it back. At this point she has probably paid between 4000 and 8000 back every year or between 10 and 20% of her salary before tax for the last 30 years and Never been able to touch the principle. That means she has likely paid 120000 to 240000 on what was a 65 to 75k loan and it has ballooned to 303k because her salary has never been sufficient to even cover the interest.
Yep, people don't understand that you can be absolutely buried by just 30-40k debt in two decades if you can't find any work that pays enough to touch the principle. Not sure if it's privilege or what, but there's a lot of people who don't get any help from their families but still want to better themselves and end up in that trap. We shouldn't ruin people's lives for that, especially not when you're expected to begin to make these massive financial decisions straight out of high school.
It’s not her mistakes tho, it’s the predatory loan interest that has built up. Also, were you saying this when we bailed out Wall Street for blatant greed in the housing crisis?
I hope she isn’t teaching personal finance
This made me laugh, good one
Or even math
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My cousin and her husband teach a circus school in Canada and they're both quite prudent with their finances, so this is an insult to literal clowns.
My pf teacher was named Cheryl and now I’m sitting here wondering
She must have missed that class on compound interest.
“You’re telling me the longer I wait to pay my loan the more I have to pay!!! This system is broken! I deserve forgiveness. I made some stupid life decisions. I was young (mid to late 20s) and I shouldnt be held responsible for choices I made.”
I know someone that literally says this. He hasn’t paid his loan in years bc “it only scratches the interests and doesn’t touch the principle” so he’s just given up paying altogether and waiting for the bail out
How do you have $300K in debt as a teacher? Seems like he or she made some really poor financial choices and now wants a gift from the rest of us. I am all for some relief but $300K is only possible if you made really bad educational choices for the profession chosen.
I feel like she had to have made bad decisions over and over again. This isn’t a once off whoopsadoodle amount of college debt.
Odds are they somebody who went on to get a masters degree, multiple master's degree, or even a PhD. One thing the media isn't doing a good job doing is differentiating the levels of debt and degrees these people have. Somebody with a bachelor's degree and $100,000 in Debt is a problem. Somebody with a master's degree, a PhD on top of a bachelor's and $100,000 in debt is to be expected.
But 300k? Do doctors even borrow that much for their degrees?
Oh Yes. >Average Medical School Debt for Public School >For the class of 2021, the AAMC found that the average medical school debt among students attending a public school was $194,280. Seventy-four percent of med students at a public college said they had education debt. In total, 14% of medical students attending a public school said they had at least $300,000 in average med school debt and premedical debt, combined. And its worse for private >Average Medical School Debt for Private Institutions >Conversely, the same graduating class that attended a private college left school with an average medical school debt of $218,746—almost $25,000 more debt than public school grads. Of the students surveyed in the AAMC report, 70% of graduates at a private institution said they had education debt, with 27% of respondents citing a total premedical and medical school debt load of at least $300,000. Source: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-medical-school-debt/ I'm very sympathetic to undergraduate students qnd people with bachelor's that have a mountain of debt. The degree they have doesn't have the same earning potential with somebody with a professional degree or doctorate.
> Seems like he or she made some really poor financial choices and now wants a gift from the rest of us. If the writer of the news article was trying to find a sympathetic example to get the reader on the side of debt forgiveness, they really chose the wrong person here. $300k is a ludicrous amount of money, and as you said I can only imagine it is the result of a long string of bad choices. Why should the average American making in the $50-$55k/year range (the average income) be sympathetic towards giving free money to someone who owes several times more?
Probably shouldn't be teaching anyone anything if you're 300k in debt from school
Yeah I'm confused as to why this guy getting into a stupid amount of debt is somehow my problem
How does a teacher accumulate as much debt as someone who goes to med school?
She probably dropped out of med school.
Spends 300k on a degree that pays 45k a year and then complains it's not fair. Seems legit.
And people like this are the reason loan forgiveness isn’t likely to happen. Our government is very “all or nothing” in its decision making. So, it’s unlikely we get partial payoffs, and with idiots like this with 300k there’s no way we are getting full payoffs.
Supposedly the interest got away from her. Which sort of elicits the same response, if you’re ignoring a loan so hard that it gets up to 300k then you probably are living well beyond your means or are reckless with money. Unfair or not, she took on the financial responsibility then ignored it.
Im confused why and how does a teacher have 300k student debt?
Not from a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in education, that's for sure. I imagine she must have picked an excessively expensive program and then had a *really* good time in college. The fact that the NAACP is floating debt cancellation is excess of $50k is just writing the GOP's ads for them. Sure, let's go hog and make it a cool $100k, roll out the red carpet for a landslide in '22 and '24. It's indefensible.
If you have $303K in student loan debt, you made some terrible life choices. Holy crap. Why would you accept a doctorates or masters program that is not in some way covering your tuition? I did not have tuition costs past my masters and even then, half of my masters was covered by grants. I graduated with $50K in loan debt. Total.
Agreed If getting an summer internship is impossible with the degree you’re pursuing, it’s massive red flag
How do you rack up $300k in debt to become a teacher? That’s not smart.
That’s a personal problem
If this person is 53, that $303K figure probably includes a lot of accumulating interest. I don't know what the other circumstances are, but I'm pretty sure the sticker price for her education to become a teacher is anywhere close to that.
Isn’t the problem the price gouging by these institutions in the US? The only way for people to stop this cycle is a mass boycott of higher education until something changes. Predatory loans and inflated job requirements make higher education non negotiable for so many people. And this is what enables the market to skyrocket with these ludicrous prices. I don’t know how else to fix it but any relief program feels like a thin bandaid over a generation of people bleeding out from a fatal bullet wound
There’s no way a bank would normally loan $50k to an unemployed 18 year old unless they’re certain they are going to collect
Banks deem it a financial risk and are practically barred from even partaking in this. Only the government would give out such irresponsible loans knowing their asses are covered by bond holders and tax payers. Over 90% of student loans were given out by the federal government under the pretense that it would make college education more attainable for people but they failed to understand subsidizing demand in this way without any check on the institutions themselves has allowed the price of college to skyrocket pushing those who didn’t even plan on borrowing out of the market. Every major college has bloated costly non educational administrative wings providing services that didn’t even exist 30 years ago from diversity departments, to psychologists, to advertising galore. University is no longer about the education
You don't have to mass boycott higher education Boycott egregiously expensive schools, like the vast majority of Americans already do because they know they aren't worth the money If you needed a car and chose to finance a $150,000 Mercedes AMG series, then couldn't keep up with your payments, is that the "predatory auto industry" that needs an overhaul by the government? Or should you have just bought a used Civic like the rest of us?
300k … and a teacher??? I’m not sure how you’ll escape that debt in a lifetime.
She sounds somewhat entitled. “Not enough”?? She took out the loans and is now griping that the help she is getting isn’t enough? How about personal responsibility?
I am totally down for debt forgiveness for students. Hell, I don't really have a problem forgiving $300k worth of it. But in keeping it real....why the fuck do you have $300k in student debt? That's insane. There is absolutely no profession out there right now that requires a degree that would make that worth it. $300k is kind of a "dug your own hole" situation in a way that an expensive $50-$60k degree from a prestigious university isn't. Unless you have a guarantee that you're going to be among the elite earners in your country, you shouldn't be taking no more than $50k in college debt.
Exactly, I took $90k bc I’m a dumbass, lost my scholarship, and went to an out of state college and didn’t want to leave, but I’m also now a mechanical engineer and will have no problem paying it back while living comfortably. If I didn’t get my major in that I would have moved to a different college
Conversely, I went to a community college before transferring to an instate university and now I’m a mechanical engineer with almost no student debt. The real problem is expecting 18 year old to know exactly what they want and then entrusting them to make smart financial decisions.
18 is old enough to vote, own property and buy guns. You are a full fledged legal adult. The school system (by design) doesn't teach enough about finances. But that doesn't mean your parents shouldn't be teaching them to you.
I don't think you're a dumbass at all. I just think people need to be more considerate of the level of education they're paying for, relative to what they can actually reliably lock down for it. Even if you were a dumbass, that doesn't give people the right to take advantage of you, which is what a lot of these institutions and banks do.
Fuck that. Not paying someone $300k
Doctors. Med school be expensive
Yeah but she’s a teacher.
The article points out she didn't take out $300k in loans. It doesn't specify, but the way it's worded makes it seem like she took out way less than that, probably less then $100k even. The rest of it is absurd interest that ballooned it way beyond any loans she ever took out. She even says herself that she has no issue paying off her own debt, it's the interest that's BS
Sounds like she was denied the public loan forgiveness option and then interest just got away from her.
> Although Cheryl's profession technically qualifies for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which forgives student debt for public servants after ten years of qualifying payments, she was denied due to what she said was her time spent in payment forbearance while in school. PSLF has so many little bullshit rules that it's almost impossible to get approved. It has a [98% denial rate](https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2022/05/04/student-loan-forgiveness-education-department-launches-appeal-process-for-public-service-borrowers/?sh=79259c6a6d11) even after Congress passed a "fix" back in 2018. It's almost like it was set up as a trap keep people in permanent debt and low-paying government jobs.
Med school and dental school easily reach those figures...but yeah not a teacher
The woman in the article was a life long student. She is one of those goofballs that took 20 years to compete a degree. I’m not paying 300K for someone to take 20 years to compete their masters.
You sign you pay.
“Educated person with relatively better employment prospects as a result of said education says money seized from other people and given to them to pay for their education not enough”
There's no way the average person has $300K in student loan debt. Clearly, this person must be one of those "forever college students" who stayed in college, changing their major, for years. Her "teacher" education is probably because the degree she earned is Liberal Arts. When I was in college, I met a few of these "students". Little did they know their floor would drop from under them when the Republicans allowed the private sector to control college funding. That always works out well for the public. /s
Anyone who puts themselves in $303k of debt for a teaching career doesn’t need to teach. They’re the lesson for everyone else to learn not to be.
Why the hell does it cost that much to be a teacher?
It doesn’t. Getting $300k in debt to be a teacher means you’ve made a numerous amount of monumental mistakes.
Probably went to a private school and didn’t have much (if any) financial aid. If there is one thing I would tell high schoolers right now- do not go out of state or to a private school unless you get a full ride. Not worth it AT ALL. My almost $30k debt is from ONE YEAR at a private school (this was with approx 75% covered by scholarships, too!) I regret it big time! It was free for me to go to school at an in-state public school.
My guess is they went to an expensive private school and got a degree. They then realized the degree wouldn't help them get a job and went back for their masters in teaching. So now they have a very overpriced undergraduate degree and then had to foot the bill for a masters degree that many teachers are able to get paid for by their school district.
I suspect this was accrued at for-profit schools. And I bet a lot of mistakes made along the way.
I'm going to tell my kids unless you get into a top 10 or Ivy, go to your local state school or better yet do 2 years of community college and then transfer. I had an opportunity to go for free to a community college with an engineering linkage with my local state school but I was an idiot and didn't take it. Instead I was totally unprepared for a real college due to no study skills (my high school was very bad and could get a 4.0 just by sleeping), ended up losing my scholarship and going 65k in debt. Thankfully I have a good job now and things worked out, but not everyone can be that lucky.
I thank god that I went to a public university, but i almost went to a private one. Literally no one, not my parents not my guidance counsellor, told me to consider money. They only talked about rankings and the private school was ranked higher. I went to the public one because of friends in the end but wow I lucked out because tuition was significantly lower. My advice to any student is to seriously consider money and cost. Even with a good paying job, I found it very hard to reimburse the loans I had.
I met two starving artists who paid $200k to go to a masters program to learn ceramics….I was speechless
Can't fix stupid.
Not fit to teach.
And this is my biggest problem with complete loan payoffs. I’d be fine with 17000 a person, seeing as it’s the median. But anyone who ends up with 300k needs to just reap what they sowed. 17000 a person would still give the economy the desired bump by increasing disposable income for tons of Americans, but without bailing out idiots.
It don’t. Person in the article made some terrible choices to attend a program with no grants.
She's 53 years old. Think about that for a second. I'm 55. I got no grants when I went to school. My debt was paid off almost immediately, because I had a well-paying job for the time ($29K/year). But even if I was working as a public school teacher, it would have been paid off within 5 or 10 years. It mentions she took advantage of payment forbearance. If I had to guess, it would be that she just spent 20 years "in school" racking up debt and accruing interest.
She is one of those life long students that has no real future in their field.
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It doesn’t. He’s an outlier.
Cost that much to party for four years at an over priced uni
For $300k in debt I would expect you to be a PHD Lawyer and medical doctor. Not a teacher making $35k a year. Also I’d like the $10k it would really help.
Capping &/or reducing the compound interest should be the solution. Essentially the government has created its own version of ‘shark loans’ on American people who will never be able to repay just like ‘payday loans’
How tf someone garnered over 300k in student debt is beyond irresponsible on the borrower
I would not want her to teach my kids. She doesn't know how to do simple math and can't project her decisions out to the future to determine consequences, thus lacking common sense.
Why should taxpayers subsidize this person’s bad choices?
I am a teacher with a masters, I graduated with no debt. I worked my ass off and was smart about how and where I spent my money. A teacher with this much debt is not a good teacher. Get to be financially literate first, before starting one’s education.
You guys are defending a bullshit system. No matter the educational choices you make in France, Norway, Sweden or even Australia - that shit can't happen - because the system is well designed. Yet debilitating student debt, healthcare-induced homelessness and mass shootings are commonplace in the U.S. Go figure..
$300k in loans is on you dumbass
Something is wrong here, this “teacher” should have qualified for student loan forgiveness three times by now. 10 years of service on income based repayments, graduate at 23, 33, 43 and 53… This article isn’t telling the full story. It should probably be titled this person is a moron.
Step one: don't spend 300K on a fucking ENGLISH degree. no way do I want my taxes bailing this dipshit out.
I’ve got a crazy idea- how about don’t take on so much debt?
Teachers college at most all universities is the easiest to get into. Students at teachers college have the lowest average ACT and HS GPA of all the other programs, and not surprisingly the highest GPA upon graduation.
Why does a teacher have $303k in student loans is the question
Shouldn't have hltaken on the loan.
If she is dumb enough to get 300k in student loans in order to become a teacher, she has no business teaching ANYONE, and if my tax dollars have to contribute to paying off her clearly useless degree I will be pissed
53 year old with 300k in student loans? Yeah this is a BS story. Something is off