During Trump’s first term I was convinced that he would try to increase revenue from student loans, so I converted mine to a low interest private loan.
Sadly low interest private options are no longer available for those still stuck in the federal student loan system. The administration knows that low interest private loans are no longer an option, and has a captive market to extract revenue from.
Trump has been grooming his supporters to cheer actions taken against the educated. I hope this move alienates millennial and younger college educated Republicans and finally turns them against the administration.
Owning the libs… bah…
Has a different meaning now.
Non-millenial here, also watching my payments skyrocket by 440%. Can’t get loans with my excellent credit score because my debt to income ratio is super high. At this point it would cost me less to tank my credit, go into default, and be garnished since my credit score is meaningless anyway.
Holy shit!! I won the birth lottery be being born in Norway, and I watch Last week tonight with John Oliver weekly, read the news about what’s happening around the world, to be informed, listen to Behind the Bastards, Lemmy, local news etc., so I feel pretty informed. However, 440% increase? And the other commentary who’s paid for 10 years with no decrease - what in the actual fuck???
There are SO many property owners who could not keep their house with a 5% increase on their house loan (article from COVID years), and I remember reading about people going to the news complaining that they had to cancel one of their streaming services, and others who maybe had to sell ONE of their two cabins.
450%‽‽‽‽‽‽‽‽‽‽‽ Why have people not revolted? How can you still be complacent? I’m so sorry to hear about this happening.
Why have people not revolted?
Our cops will fucking kill us
Same. Born in Belgium and I had to pay less than 1000 € for a full academic year at the University. The quality of education is good. I got a decent job, correctly paid. I did not had any debt when I started my career. What more did you get in the USA ? I would be depressed as hell to be in the shoes of that guy who claimed above that he paid only the interests of his student debt, after ten years of reimbursement.
Funny you think the higher price tag gets us anything more. I spent 60k to get my degree, and graduated into a recession where I couldn’t get a job flipping burgers. I’ve been on income-based payments for my student loans ever since and have never paid even the full amount of interest for one period because of my income. So now I owe 10k more than I graduated with, and km homeless and unemployed cause I’m overqualified for anything entry and don’t have the experience for things that need a degree. Yay for the American dream.
Because apparently they won’t start collecting those new prices until December?
And the other commentary who’s paid for 10 years with no decrease - what in the actual fuck???
Not to justify, just explain: That person likely only ever paid the bare minimum to cover interest. It’s like when you have a credit card. You can make interest-only payments, or you can pay more to start clearing the actual debt.
There are SO many property owners who could not keep their house with a 5% increase on their house loan
But it’s not a 5 percent increase, it’s a five percentage point increase on the interest.
I’ll take a loan calculator with typical Estonian values for an apartment, not a detached house, bought before the Ukraine war with the standard margin + euribor interest scheme.
250k @ 15% down, 30 years, 1.7% base interest + 6 months euribor. Euribor was 0, so we input that into the calculator. Monthly payment is 754 euros. About the same as rent for a decent 3 bedroom apartment, so not a bad deal, right? At least you get to keep it at the end of the 30 years, plus Euribor has been 0% for like a decade, it’s never going to go up. Well, now Putin attacked Ukraine and it triggers raised interests because they’ve already been too low and inflation has been too high. Over the course of the next ~2 years, Euribor goes up to 4%. Now your interest has gone from 1.7% to 5.7% annually, with the euribor part being updated every 6 months. And the payment? 754 euros monthly to 1233 euros monthly. If you’re making 2500 euros neto, 754 euros for a mortgage isn’t a bad deal, but 1233 euros as the prices on absolutely everything is going up 2-3x? Suddenly it’s a lot less affordable, at least if you have a family and such. For a single person it would still be doable.
299.56% for me.
And the kicker is that in the 10 years that I have paid, my principal balance has not decreased at all.
Oh, and the real treat? Since the Federal injunction, I can’t recertify my repayment information, which means I lost all progress towards loan forgiveness.
I am fucking livid.
When the game is that tilted against you, when do you just stop playing? You’re literally getting nowhere playing by the rules.
I wonder how that plays out though. What’s the punishment for non-payment?
As I understand things from my own reading, Student Loans typically can’t be discharged with bankruptcy, and they start garnishing your wages eventually if you don’t pay voluntarily.
Short of keeping all your money in cash and living off the grid in a hovel not worth the trouble for the bank to foreclose on, I think I’m pretty much fucked.
You can’t “not pay”, but a million people can “not pay”. You all need to get organised. These student loans are ridiculous, debilitating, crippling maybe even killing.
It is killing people. It’s social murder.
They will garnish any wages that they can. Not to mention the late fees that are added to your principal (and interest is charged) each month you don’t pay.
They will almost certainly change the rules once the injunction finalizes. Call your representative and tell them what’s going on.
These fossils still think that Millennials are kids. Bro, my kids are almost in high school, my back hurts, I feel this flesh prison decaying around me. I’m entering the part of my life where I’m traditionally supposed to be the most economically advantaged, and this bullshit is going to basically nuke my generation’s ability to participate in the economy, because we were all told that we need to go to college to have a good life.
i was in high school when my parents were my age and i think that this generation’s purpose has become a sacrifice to the capitalist meat grinder; same as the generation during the depression.
My student loans should be paid off around when I retire, according to their amortization chart.
At this point I pray for an afterlife so that I actually have a life I can enjoy
Damn too bad I ain’t paying shit
I think this will be a coercive leverage to “encourage” military conscription.
Massive student loans? Sign on the line for 10 years fighting to kill citizens of other countries like Panama and Canada, and your loans will be discharged!
Specific loans like student loans could also act as triggers to deny passports and other ways of escaping the country.
Oh for sure.
The administration has a hate-boner for millennials.
Look at RFK decrying SSRIs and stimulant meds. Wanting to send people to “detox farms” to harvest “organic lettuce” (unpaid) for “years”.
Aren’t like a quarter of millennials on SSRIs and/or stimulant meds?
And of course we are. The world sucks. Civilization is likely to crumble in our lifetimes. And we aren’t good enough for your (boomer/old-X) approval…never have been. Ya damn right we are depressed and anxious. Not to mention overworked and our focus constantly challenged. Literally can’t go through 5 seconds of any form of media without some sort of shiny object dangled in front of you.
Only millennials? Take a look at your own future.
I hate to say this but fucking good. Throwing random people in Gitmo wasn’t enough to piss the people off to do anything, because the only thing that would be enough is when they fuck with everyone’s money.
I hate the “fuck you I got mine” attitude so fucking much.
Millennials were already against Trump. They were and remain the most liberal generation alive
It kills me that we lost Gen Z to fucking streamers.
idk about that. Most people still don’t watch streamers
There’s a decent correlation there. There was an article or study out out recently that demonstrated that Republican narratives and pundits overwhelmingly dominate the podcast/streaming space by like a 5:1 ratio, and that a lot of people (for some reason, disproportionately men) who are exposed to podcasts and streaming tend to drift right as they’re exposed to these pundits and narratives.
Sad that it comes to this and people’s social security + other social safety nets having to be cut for them to wake the fuck up.
You have more hope than I. I seriously do not think Americans will ever do anything. Too many people have been indoctrinated into obedience.
I seriously doubt this will be enough. A whole lot of qons were very grrrr, mad when Biden talked about loan forgiveness for the same reasons, really (“fuck you I got mine”) and many qons never went to school.
This seems… misleading, in a weird way. Even some of the comments are confusing, though I may be just clueless as I’m not American (I’m Canadian, so don’t know any people directly impacted by this to question in person).
There are comments here saying it’s really tough because low interest private loans are less available. People noting huge increases in their monthly payments (by percent, but often not noting the actual dollar value from what I can see?).
The article notes that the average student loan debt is around $38k. Even with a terrible interest rate of like 12%, which is what my local Credit Union offers for personal loans, that’s a monthly payment of $500 for ~10 years. The guy in the article is an outlier it seems, in that he has a 6.3% interest rate and payments around $5000 – so while the average person is out 38k, this guys in the hole by like $400k+?? The reason it costs them as much as a mortgage payment, is cause they spent as much as a house getting his education. I doubt education costs ‘skyrocketed’ partway through his education, so he would’ve seen that bill coming. And for the price of that education, I’m guessing he could run the numbers with more accuracy ahead of time, and make an informed/educated decision on whether to take out those loans.
400k is not uncommon for medical school debt. Blaming it on the ~18 year old that just wanted to get a decent job helping people is bootlicker talk.
Sure, but you’re framing that in a way to be as positive as possible about it. How about, “the 18 year old that wanted to defend criminals and get them out of violent crime offenses for huge profits”, and went into debt to pursue what they thought was going to be a hugely profitable career? Do you really think regular people, who go into debt just ~40k based on what the article states, should also be comp’ing that other case with perks/debt forgiveness? The article is specifically using an outlier case, who went into debt for a profession that’s respectable, to skew opinions…
Student debt is an issue in the states, I don’t disagree on that as far as I understand it at least. It’s just that a lot of the articles around the subject seem very heavily skewed by political bias, which is annoying. And me being annoyed by that, and wanting more neutral discussion, I don’t think of as bootlicking.
The fact that public defenders can’t afford their student loans is a crippling failure of our system which asserts a right to a lawyer for all accused regardless of ability to pay.
It’s not just violent criminals who need these defenders, it’s also the innocent who are accused of violent crimes. Both are equally invested in not going to prison. And you don’t know who’s which.
Sure, I get that not all lawyers are scum – though I do know a few that fit the very description I gave. But the point is more that you can find less ‘noble’ examples of people in massive debt, which may alter opinions on the subject. The article chooses to use a specific outlier to make the case more persuasive/concerning.
Like another thing I’d be curious about is the variance in debt levels between professionals who train at “regular” schools/colleges, and ones who train at “elite” schools like Harvard or MIT or whatever’s good down there these days. The impression I get as an outsider to the US system, is that the costs vary wildly between different tiers of schools – and that it’s entirely possible to get a decent career (middle class) even without a top tier school education. I’d suspect then that there’s a tranche of people who are going in to massive debt attempting to go to these more expensive options, without good reason for doing so – but it’s the individuals choice, at the end of the day.
And contrary to what some folks seem to think on here, an 18 year old is an adult in most countries, as far as I know. They’re old enough to be accountable for their actions. They can vote and all that. And these folks are often mid 20s by the time they get out / have fully accumulated their debt – so even more ‘old enough’. As long as they have ‘options’ to choose from, I find it questionable that people choosing the highest/most expensive options should be given the biggest break.
It’d make more sense to me to regulate the hell out of your schools, and have government enforce things like tuition caps for American citizen under grads etc – rather than have a kind of manic approach to debt forgiveness that flips every four years, which turns education affordability into a lottery. University endowment funds are a fairly clear argument for clipping those institutions wings a bit, and forcing them to give a break to the students. Heck, even here in Canada where we cap tuition, some of our universities have absurd amounts of money stockpiled.
But the point is more that you can find less ‘noble’ examples of people in massive debt, which may alter opinions on the subject.
Oh fuck right off with that shit and stop deepthroating the fucking toes.
What the fuck makes you the arbiter on who is “noble”? Why the fuck do you even want to qualify who is in “good” debt? What is “bad” student loan debt, in your omnipotent opinion?
Millennials, who are coming into their forties now, were told for the first half of their life that they will never amount to anything more than a poor [insert dirty demeaning job here] if they don’t get a good education from a premium school.
Shit I remember applying for colleges and most of the “good” schools were well into 6-digits a year. I graduated HS 22 years ago.
And then we come out on the other side and there’s a fucking recession waiting for us.
And then we are entering a jobs market that’s oversaturated with college degrees, and with wages and career earning potential below those uneducated dirty demeaning jobs we were threatened with.
The system was rigged against us before we were born and you’re sitting there with the boot in your mouth ankles-deep. Fuck off.
So your college degree seems to have been poor quality, as your approach to discussing a topic is to just insult the other person to try and make your point. You’re also conflating your personal experience, from the sound of things, with the framing I was referencing in the article. Pointing out that the article is highlighting an extreme example of an outlier, who works in a field that most people find ‘more respectable’, is a valid criticism of the article’s bias. The article would read a lot differently if it was someone who’d gone to an ivy league school to get an arts degree, went into debt for $500k doing so, and now works as a Starbucks barista struggling to make payments. The way the article is structured is intended to cause people to get triggered and be all out-ragey, without properly engaging with the subject / thinking about what’s going on, the issues, and potential tweaks to make things work.
The article does include a reference to the ‘average’ debt level of ~40k, for people that took out student loans. But it doesn’t comment on how those “average” students debt servicing amounts are changing due to the changes in policy. It references via secondary links a more regular example, one where the person is just 2-3x more in debt than average – where a woman comments that her payments are going from $250 to $900.
One of the ‘horror’ stories we hear out of the American system, is that people will be paying these amounts for decades and decades, without chipping away at the principle. Not a surprise, if your payments are less than the monthly interest costs – and if she’s paying just $250 out of a payment that ‘should’ be $900 on a 10 year term, she isn’t covering the interest at all. If they’re allowed to take out loans from regular FIs, they could theoretically get that down to around $450-500 by extending the amortization out to 25 years and adding options for over payments if they want to get out of debt faster. You could get that even lower, if you have a guarantor (ex. Parent) or other security behind the loan to reduce the interest rate further – with that setup, you get a monthly payment of like… $250. A more practical middle ground. Yes, it’d potentially increase the payments, but it’d also remove the common complaint of not being able to get ahead on principle payments.
And again, that referenced example is one where someone’s gone into twice as much debt as the average person who uses that system. The average person, based on the numbers in the article, is looking at a payment of about $400 after the change, from the look of it. A difficult, yet far more manageable change than putting out there that people are suddenly seeing a 10x increase up to $5000, which is the ‘shock and outrage’ approach taken in the article.
I don’t think anyone from a more sane country is looking at the American system and thinking its ‘good’. In another response, I noted that here in Canada, from what I recall at least, we cap our tuition amounts for Canadian citizens / undergrads – so its far less common to hear of people going into massive debt to get degrees from local universities. Doing so aims to place the ‘pressure’ on Universities to figure out how to fund their operations. Many ended up relying on foreign student income, where tuition isn’t capped. Even with some restrictions, universities still have massive endowment funds, so they aren’t ‘hurting’ for money at the institutional level – for example the University of BC is sitting on about $3billion in its fund. Putting pressure on the Universities/institutions to give students a fair shake, is more practical in my view than saying the government should cover student loan debts / interest issues. I mean, if the Universities “fraudulently sold degrees that they claimed would get you 6 figures”, shouldn’t they be the ones holding the bag – not the government / regular tax payers?
You say you graduated HS 22 years ago. It may be time to act more like an adult, and treat other people/discussions with some decorum.
*just an edit to add in, that if you watch the clip of the lady with the 5k payment… she openly admits that, while complaining about the increase, they’re aiming to put in about $7k/month to get it all paid off in 5 years, while still having more left over for ‘prioritizing other investments too’. So, the article’s ‘outrage’ increase, is one where the person clearly got a really high paying job out of it, and isn’t exactly ‘hurting’. So they earn way more than enough to cover their debts – and are essentially 1%'rs who were getting subsidized by the government by thousands of dollars per month.
The second sentence doesn’t only apply to folks going into the medical field, and I would say a lot of jobs help people.
Do you really think regular people, who go into debt just ~40k based on what the article states, should also be comp’ing that other case with perks/debt forgiveness?
Yes.
It’s just that a lot of the articles around the subject seem very heavily skewed by political bias
I think this is why I am not super interested in engaging with the particulars of your reply. Because you’re right, there is selection and political bias in this article. But not in the direction you think. Because the article completely omits the culture pressures that started the issues of student loans. That for many it was seen as the only path out of poverty, and wanting to foster that while still allowing markets to drive everything in the country, the government decided the loans was the correct solution. Since these were 18 year olds getting goods that could not be returned, the only market solution to that was make the loans not discharged on bankruptcy.
Once the costs were abstracted into the future, the tuition start to quickly rise, and with government backing the student loans, the loans rise with them. Since schools are now getting an order of magnitude more from each student they lure in, they heavily push the idea that you will be flipping burgers for minimum wage unless you have a degree, reframing university as not a place of higher learning for those with exceptional interest, to the necessary step after high school. This taking root devalues all degrees, but 4 year degrees in particular, leading to a drop in the salaries expectations of the professional class with 4 year degrees.
With this market driven strategy giving rise to these new problems, income driven payment plans become much more common, and with those being cut off, suddenly the 1.6 trillion dollar debt bubble in the US starts to become realized. Which is what this article is touching on from a more personal level.
All of that being said, reaching for criminal defense lawyers as your example of a morally abhorrent and greedy career track says much more about your bootlicking than anything. If you had a worthwhile conception of the problem and reality of it, you would have picked one of the much better examples.
It’s not just bootlicking. It’s outright anti American bootlicking. The right to a state provided attorney is a longstanding fundamental right in America. Its something we did right even though implementation has lacked. If you want every person who’s accused of violent crime to go to prison forever without defense you can go to el Salvador or another country without human rights
The difference is our student loans are not predatory, and our schools are not as expensive, tho we can’t discharge our loans through bankruptcy either. I’ve had 3 loans and even paying minimum they were paid off in a decade or 2, repayments are higher in the states and from what I understand the minimum payments there are interest only.
Wasn’t there a story going around about how Harvard is doing tuition free if you make less than $200k or something? lol
It’s messed up how low my federal student loan interest rates were. I was paying my loans off in the early 2000s and I swear my interest was only like 2%!
I stopped paying mine. It was homelessness or student loans. Fuck em. If they can write off billions of small business loans, they can write off my student loans. Fuck that game.
I agree with you in principle, but they won’t do it and you’re likely going to end up struggling. There are other payment plan options that I encourage you to research before you end up in more debt which you can’t offload. It’s fucked up, I know. And I’m sorry you’re having to decide between a payment or shelter. Obviously shelter comes first. But there might be other options to allow you to have both.
NO we should all stop paying. If everyone of us who have student loan debt stop paying we crash the system. It needs to burn like Elon dealerships.
The necessary prerequisite to this is to organize.
Consider killing a CEO
oh honey. we’re so fucking far past that.
My student loans were private, not federal, which actually worked out great when it came to discharging them.
Defaulting on them fucked my credit for a while, but then it left my credit report after 7 years. And my debt to income ratio was so fucked from them anyway that it really didn’t hurt that bad, and it was okay in 7 years, whereas paying double my rent every month would only cover interest and keep going indefinitely.
Just remember the two pieces of shit that sued to stop student loan forgiveness. I think one of them had PPP loans forgiven.
remember to get paid under the table whenever you can, so they can’t garnish your wages. you might take a pay hit, but it will be a smaller bite than your loans take.
Last month, a federal judge blocked the Biden administration-era SAVE plan, an income-driven student loan replacement program with 8 million borrowers, claiming it lacked the authority to forgive millions of dollars in debt.
It’s almost funny how when Biden was President he had no authority to do anything, however trump doesn’t seem to have that issue as much. Almost funny.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
I knew Lemmy would find a way to make this Biden’s fault.
Probably everything over the next 4 years, honestly.
I never said, nor implied, that Biden’s apparent lack of authority was his fault. Also, my name is Bob, not Lemmy.
I don’t know why Biden didn’t just go full dictator like Trump. Dictators that do the thing I want are actually good and there’s absolutely no possible repercussions.
I mean, I’d love a dictator who says “You must value trans rights as human rights, or to the Gulag with you!”, while running labor camps for… CEOs who underpay their janitors.
He’d have my vote!
And he wouldn’t even need it! But it would be nice to have.
Biden is the nice cop in the bad cop good cop bit. He’s still a fucking bastard.
Remember all those trolley memes? You are in the trolley calmly discussing who you should run over next. Asshole.
If a democrat went dictator they would immediately have the DOJ, entire media ecosystem, and courts united against them because those that support the democratic party recognize dictators as bad.
If “full dictator” is defined as ignoring established law to enact their agenda, then Biden did go full dictator multiple times. Most notable is how he circumvented established law in order to continue sending lethal aid to genocidal Israel.
And you’re right, Biden going “full dictator” does have negative repercussions. Trumps’s illegal actions are somewhat normalized by the illegal actions of his predecessors.
I just wish for once a president would go “full dictator” for the working class and not for the billionaires and genocidal regimes.
Waiter, this whataboutism is cold
I understand that questioning your liberal worldview can be painful, but thought-terminating clichés like “whataboutism” do a disservice to rational discussion.
It is not whataboutism to discuss how Trump’s illegal actions are enabled by his predecessors’ illegal actions.
It is not whataboutism to point out the Biden administration routinely circumvented the Leahy Law in order to continue the genocide in Palestine.
especially since Israel has gone from ethnic cleansing to simple genocide by bomb with Trump in power.
Trump has support in all levels of government, and a great amount of it too. This didn’t happen just overnight in Jan of 2025. Biden had opposition who would hold him accountable for dictator stuff (as well as supporters who would hold him accountable depending on what he did) but Trump now has a larger support base to pull off his shit because control at the top is across his party.
That’s why Biden couldn’t do it but Trump can. It’s bullshit and we know it, but no one (including myself) is willing to revolt the way we should yet. We’re all worried about covering our own butts because the system we’ve grown up with is still mostly here so there is still hope that we can change it via our system. We may very well regret this later though.
you must be well positioned not be to regretting it already.
I have a child. I’d rather not screw his life for an ideal where I alone will have minimal/no real impact. I am indeed in a better position than most though and I fully admit that.
the last election showed that the more well off you are, the more pro-trump you become, which means that your child will be proned to whatever for trump-ism takes in the future if they’re not socialized well.
there’s also a correlation with education, so maybe putting them through the best education you can afford would be the best hedge against your child turning into future maga.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing or trying to say here.
My family is quite left and my child constantly stands up for kids who are different. In summer he always does a lemonade stand to donate to a charity of his choice and has been doing this for about 5 years now. He’s raised money and donated 100% to GLSEN, refugees (like UNHCR), a local charity that helps provide toys and needed goods for children, a cancer research group, and more.
None of that is stuff we pushed him into. He is just that kind of a person and has been consistently. He fights the good fight, we support him, and we try to help others when we can.
If you’re arguing that I should be out there causing disturbances, then I’d just like to ask what exactly you are doing in the same vein?
my goal is to share the knowledge that the petite bourgeoisie and the deeply uneducated are the reason why maga exists.
Lol bro maga exists because of dumb people and extremely rich people who take advantage of them, full stop. Every increase in education level favored Harris, as did $100k+ earners, aka your “petite bourgeoisie”. Stop trying to sow discord where it doesn’t exist.
https://youtu.be/rRndMiVIB-w Even trump himself admits it
Republicans always crash the economy.
Do Americans not have eyes?
How do they not see this pattern?
50 years of targeting rural propaganda
I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. They’re in a death cult. They want this. They want anyone who is opposed to them to suffer as much as possible even if it means destroying their country in the process. This is what “owning the libs” is about, and it’s all they have left because their pathetic ideology can only make things worse for the working class.
I don’t think most of the cultists actually want it to crash. Sure, there’s a subset of accellerationists, and for sure they want to teach their enemies a lesson, but I think for the most part, they think that everyone is lying, overreacting, or it’s just temporary and things will be much better afterwards. The problem is, they can’t ever get out of that modality because of the sunk cost. No matter how bad things get.
All the better to declare himself supreme leader for life so he can “fix everything” and MAGA.
