Life led Elizabeth Hadzic and Kim Coles to bankruptcy court.
Hadzic, 50, a psychotherapist in Maryland, doesn’t make enough to support herself and her adult son, whose health struggles set her back thousands of dollars. Coles, an accountant in Oregon in her late 60s, was laid off last year.
Both have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Although they have been making payments on those loans for years, they no longer can. And both, in the absence of an alternative, have resorted to taking the costly, typically unsuccessful route of trying to get their loans discharged in bankruptcy court.
That’s where things diverge.
For Hadzic, bankruptcy is proving to be the answer to her financial woes. After months of litigation, she’s on track for a full discharge. In Coles’ case, the government is putting up a fight − though she is of retirement age − against discharging the balance of a loan she’s been paying down for more than a decade.
“I always paid my student loans,” Coles said in an interview. “I was never late.”
The disparity in how the government is treating their cases is indicative of the intractability of one of the country’s most extreme and inaccessible forms of student debt relief, as the Biden administration grapples with finding alternatives to the kind of sweeping student loan forgiveness option that the Supreme Court struck down in June.
Student debt is sold based on a lie about earnings potential for graduates. Debtors are told that they’ll be making X amount of money and will be able to pay off their debt in Y number of years. Then they graduate and find out it was all a lie.
Not at all. All the data is perfectly clear. Some professions make more money than others. Some of those professions require degrees. There are numerous professions that require degrees that do not pay much more money. The lists of the current professional average salaries per geographic area have been published for decades.
If you are too stupid to read a list and see that a $200k education for a $40k/yr job is a poor life choice, why is everyone else subsidizing you?
A $200k education for a $200k/yr job is currently worth it if that’s what you want to do. It is not a lie. You just have to do literally 10 minutes of work before you decide your entire life’s trajectory. I guarantee these same idiots did more than 10 minutes of “research” to decide what colour $1.5k iPhone they’re going to buy.
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Why the fuck do you want others to suffer like you did though? You gained zero benefits from your suffering, it just put you in a worse position in your life than if you hadn’t suffered.
The cost to you for this change will be miniscule.
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Stupid 18-year-olds not understanding complex economic details and believing it when a financial authority lies to them! What are they, fresh out of high school?
That’s not an escuse lol? Lots of people figure it out properly. By 18 you should know what you have interests in and what you want to do. If you are that misguided you can delay further education until you have figured it out. Or not at all. Being after high school means you need to know what to do with your life. School is an option.
If you haven’t, you’re just stupid and/or lazy. That’s your prerogative to be that way. But don’t drag everyone else down. And this is also why Americans are increasingly laughed at in the world as uneducated and over entitled. Just because you want to make excuses as to why you can’t learn things, doesn’t mean the rest of the world is following suit.
Of course never having been educated on such topics is an excuse. How are you supposed to understand something no one taught you? It isn’t stupidity or laziness despite how much you enjoy calling people stupid and lazy.