I’m college educated and working in a call center, so I do feel it.
I personally think that all student loans should be forgiven.
Then college graduates would have money to spend. It is frustrating that I went to college, did what I was supposed to do, and for what? To work with people who barely graduated high school. It does drain me emotionally at times.
I have a daughter who owes around $40,000 in college loans, and we owe close to the same amount after paying for a lot of the college expenses for both of our daughters. So I share your frustration and suspect that we will die in deep debt. With a lot of discipline, we should be able to pay it off, but that assumes that we will both stay healthy and keep our jobs, and both of those are very big assumptions!
I think that in the future, there will be some forgiveness of some college loans. I think that it might happen for students who graduate with degrees in health fields or in teaching, and are actually working in these careers years after they graduate.
But think about it. Various organizations and companies LOANED you (and my daughter) the money and these organizations expected to someday get their money paid back again. There’s nothing wrong with that. These companies have every right to expect that their loan will be paid back.
If you loaned someone a great deal of money, someone that you didn’t know personally and had no friendship with–in other words, it was strictly a business loan–wouldn’t YOU expect that person to pay you back? (If you loaned money to a relative or friend, it’s realistic that you might just forgive them the loan for the sake of your love for them.)
Companies (banks, loan offices, etc.) in good faith, gave money at a very low interest rate, to strangers. That’s how the people who run these companies make a living–they loan money and people pay them back with interest. It’s an honest job (assuming they are charging a reasonable interest rate).
If people don’t pay them back, they don’t earn any money. And that’s not right. It’s stealing–those who don’t pay them back have essentially stolen their money. It’s not right.
So as much as I wish it were otherwise, I think that those of us who borrowed the money are obligated to pay it back.
Another possibility is that the government will step in and pay back the loans. But where does the government get their money? From taxpayers. And it’s not right to ask taxpayers to pay the bill for my daughter’s college education, or for your college education. It’s just not right. My husband and I could have made a series of different decisions while our daughters were growing up, and we could have saved the money up so that we didn’t have to borrow money. But we made decisions that made it necessary for us to borrow money to pay for college. And we encouraged our daughters to attend expensive private colleges out of state instead of local state colleges. That’s OUR bad, not the taxpayers’ bad! Other people shouldn’t have to make up for our stupid financial decisions.
Please don’t get the wrong idea–we have no regrets. For example, we spent a lot of money (and still spend a lot of money) on the sport of figure skating while our children were growing up. (Around $25,000 a year when the kids were teenagers.) We don’t regret that. And we sent our kids to a very expensive private prep school while they were growing up ($10,000/year tuition each girl). We don’t regret these choices. We would do it all again. But probably what we would have done is plan more carefully so that we didn’t blow money on foolish purchases (those little doo-dads really add up!), and we would have made a more serious effort to save money for college. We definitely would have moved to a different city, and I would advise any of you who live in a city which is facing a deseg lawsuit to MOVE now unless you like throwing your money through a shredder.
But I don’t think others should have to pay back any of our loans. We just have to get serious and pay them off ourselves or die trying.
prayers for us all!!