Comment by PhunkyPhil
19 days ago
I simply don't agree that an IBR loan is a good enough deal to not justify one needing useful and employable skills coming out of higher education.
The utility of a degree, from what I've seen, _does_ end up being better than the accrued debt on average, but the distribution of these cases (I simply imagine) leaves enough people on the margin to be harmful.
If you don’t have family money, you probably need to have a plan for what you’re going to do as a career even if college is free.
My point is that whether they need a marketable skill or not has very little to do with student loans. Provided they go to a state school.
If you borrow $40k to go to a state school, the most you’re going to pay is something like $450 a month for 10 years. Any degree no matter how vocationally useless will allow you to make more than $450 a month extra than you otherwise would have.
There are of course cases where this doesn’t hold, but you’d almost have to try for it not to be worth it. The program is good enough that I think we’ve mostly reached the point of diminishing returns, and there are other things we could spend additional money on with higher ROIs.