Thursday, March 13, 2014

Dear Stupid Students, America Can No Longer Afford Your Stupidity

A student majoring in "Design" gets into $163,000 in debts and asks you, me, and all the other taxpayers to bail her out.

I provide a response where I attempt to be as polite as possible...but more or less fail.

Post post - 60 year old returns to school to get a DUAL degree in British Literature and Creative Writing.  Somebody please make it stop. 

POST POST POST - OK, call off the dogs.  She admits she made a mistake and is owning up to it.  From her site:
 
***UPDATE*** 3/13/2014 Thank you all for viewing this video. It was very hard for me to do. To face the mirror of my own mistake was hard! Thats the just of the sincerity of the video. I understand this is a very passionate subject for most people. By no way am I saying that I want the government or tax payers to pay for the loan I knew I took out. That is not the point of this video. The point is that private student loan borrowers are not eligible for the same consolidation privileges federal student loan borrowers are. That's all. I wish I could go back in time and not take the private loans out.

12 comments:


  1. You need to learn to enjoy the decline, Aaron.

    We need to start a young adult babysitting center and call it an uncredited University.

    We can denounce accreditation as cis-normative patriarchal oppression. And then offer expensive courses that are basically bullcrap, mandate expensive on campus housing, offer expensive drinks in Uni-owned liquor stores, encourage a party atmospher for our own amusement, and generally milk these idiots.

    Make the courses tough, and flunk out pretty students that fail to service us sexually.

    Use the money to buy gold bars in a bank in Singapore. Retire there when the country finally crashes.

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  2. I can't count to $163k, and cannot imagine how miserable her life will be.

    Shared at Ushanka: http://blog.ushanka.us/2014/03/163k-in-student-loans.html

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  3. Anonymous7:29 PM

    Stupid people do stupid things.

    Why should the taxpayer pay for her stupidity?

    Geese, think of the waste that could have been avoided if she had a basic economics course in high school.

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  4. I'm OK with affluent folks getting degrees in arts and literature. This makes sense and follows the standard practice of all but the last 25 years. Those are traditionally degrees for women and 2nd sons.

    The rest of them can go enjoy reality. Crippling debt is often a fantastic selection criteria.

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  5. Anonymous12:09 AM

    Aaron, I feel like you nailed it in the video. However, I feel pity for her. She is partially to blame but so is the system that allowed her to borrow that much money.

    I'm a Senior studying Accounting (aged 30) and I went to Community College for my first two years and still managed to run up 25k. I'm sitting at 46K and by the time I have my Bachelor's, I will have close to 60k in debt. That is only what I borrowed, I got about another 16K in free money (Pell Grant).

    Now I know my degree is more valuable and I will have earned it for about a 1/3 of her BUT I still think it will take me 5-7 years to pay it all off. Luckily I have no children or other major debt,

    I think the Universities need to discontinue some of these useless programs. Or the Dept of Education should cut off funding for these programs which in turn will lower the cost the colleges charge.

    Peter Schiff seems to think that there will be a loan forgiveness program for students with too much debt. My advice to the lady wit $162K in debt: make minimum payments and hope Schiff's prediction comes true. Otherwise Aaron is right, you will never pay it off; Hell you could have bought a house for that amount of money.

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  6. favill4:18 AM

    In grade 9, I remember a math substitute teacher going on a rant the days of the "easy" factory jobs were disappearing and if we were smart we'd pay attention in class so that we could get into university programs that required a high degree of numeracy skills and would teach us to how program or design the robots the factories were just starting to implement--that was 34 years ago. Many of the girls decided talking about their nail and hair products was more important.

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  7. Jones4:34 AM

    "A student majoring in 'Design' gets into $163000 in debts and asks you, me, and all the other taxpayers to bail her out ..."

    Filed under "Arguments That Shall Be Marshalled In Favour of Expatriation Before Captain Capitalism's Decline Becomes Considerably Less Enjoyable". :-)

    Do you seriously want to enjoy the decline that little?

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  8. Spawny Get6:03 AM

    She owes 163k that she took on as personal debt...just imagine how much she'd have run up if someone else was paying the tab from the start?

    The biggest problem that I see is that there's no incentive for the schools to teach worthwhile subjects. If their cash was partially on the line if an ex-student went bankrupt, maybe they'd rein in the cost a little and stop teaching worthless shit...maybe

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  9. "However, I feel pity for her. She is partially to blame but so is the system that allowed her to borrow that much money. "

    Is he an adult, or a child? The "system" "allowed" her to do exactly what she said she wanted to.

    I'm tired of this patriarchal "somebody should have stopped me from stupid stupid" bullshit. It's just a way to blame other people for your being an idiot.

    As for your costs of college, what community college are you going to where it cost you $25,000 fucking dollars to get an associate's degree?

    I got my entire 4 year degree from a state college with no scolarships or grants at all for less than $40K, which I paid for as I went along and had zero debt when I graduated.

    I'm not sure how the hell people are spending this much money on school ($163,000 goddamned dollars? Even a STEM degree isn't hardly worth that!), but it usually turns out that they are 6 year students because they couldnt make up their mind and switched majors three times.

    It's like that little honeyt hat is doing porn so she can pay for her college (which, as it turns out, her dad was actually paying for it, she was just doing porn for folding money) - she says her college is going to cost $200,000!

    WTF, people? YOu can get a degree without it costing you enough to buy a damn nice house, for chrissakes!

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  10. Anonymous12:42 PM

    @Goober

    Yes I still feel bad for her. It is like the Fed giving free money to the banks and than they do stupid shit with the money. It is the whole reason we had a housing bubble. The student loan [soon to be bubble] is no different. Do you blame the students who took out the loans or the system that allowed them to act that recklessly? Or perhaps a little bit of both? Clearly 162k for any degree is dumb (I agree with you here) BUT you can't tell me that the Dept. of Education who gave her all that money has zero blame.

    Yes I racked up 25K at Community College. They force you to take stupid bullshit classes like Theater Appreciation, Health, PE, Public Speaking and other nonsense courses that are not related to your degree. Hell some of the Business courses I'd say were useless. I also had to take an extra term because I started at a pretty low math. I went nine straight terms straight, taking full-time classes in the summer before transferring.

    There is no way to get a degree going full-time without debt unless you do what Aaron did. I have worked 25 hours a week while going to school and that is not enough to meet the minimum to live on. How do you pay tuition, overpriced books, the $600/term health insurance they force you to buy? If you paid your entire way through college, how did you do it? And does that include [forgetting school costs] rent, food, utilities, car insurance, gas and phone?

    This is a different time than my grandfathers' time from the 1950s. He worked his way up to an Exec job of an airplane manufacturing firm through hard work. He didn't have a college degree. Tell me you can do that today. Even starting a business is tougher because of all the regulations.

    I'd gladly pass on a college degree if all I had to do was work hard to get ahead. It doesn't work like that anymore. You can't even get an interview with most companies if you don't have a college degree, let alone a job.

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  11. The Captain is showing his feminist side here, telling a poor victimized woman to shut up and take it like a man. Women are not men; they are something closer to children in need of lifelong protection. Allowing women to vote and own property was a big mistake, if it wasn't a deliberate plot to turn women away from men and into the tender embrace of government.

    Except for my wife and daughter, I will not lift a finger to help distressed females until those females are permanently denied the vote. No exception for my sister, an ardent feminist. Voting is power, and anyone who asserts power over me has no right to ask for my aid.

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  12. Once one brings compound interest into the picture, your scenario for how long it will take CB* to pay off her student debt becomes quite optimistic.

    Using the Mortgage Calculator from Dave Ramsey's Web site**, and assuming a 5% interest rate on CB's student loans, it would take monthly payments of $831.63 for CB to pay off her student loans by the time she reaches the age of 65 years old. That adds up to annual payments of $9979.56. CB will need to average $40K/year from now until she retires to have this payment plan consume only 25% of her gross income.

    To get this loan paid down in 15 years, CB would have to pay $1296.63 per month, from now until the loan was fully paid off. That adds up to approximately $15,560 per year, at which time CB would be 46 years old. CB's average gross income would need to be $62,240 to have this payment plan consume no more than 25% of her gross income. Good luck with that....

    * "CB" = "Clueless Bint"
    ** Without checking the exact assumptions behind said calculator, I figured that it would give a reasonable approximation of the effect compound interest might have on student loans.

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