Americans fled the country to escape their giant student debt

This is because of distortions in the student loan market. Risk is not being properly assessed and loans are being made when they should not be. Philosophy majors at non-top schools should not be given loans since it is unlikely they will be able to pay them back and the philosophy majors are hurting themselves in the process.<p>A fix to this distortion is unlikely since the end result would be the closure of hundreds of schools and thousands of faculty and staff being laid off as there would be significantly fewer students.

&gt;Philosophy<p>&gt;Comparative literature<p>Then gets a job as a Medical Courier.<p>&gt;Communications and History<p>Then gets a job as a pizza deliveryman and says &quot;I lost faith in my country&quot;<p>---<p>I find it very hard to relate to such people. They get a college degree, but never learned critical thinking skills. Maybe the issue is colleges producing low quality students.<p>I have friends with similar degrees and they found soulless sales jobs.<p>It seems like a responsibility&#x2F;thinking problem. These arent your best students, these are bottom barrel.<p>Who is to blame? Maybe our high school teachers for telling everyone to follow their dreams instead of learning.

This is actually really excellent reporting. The people and stories in this article are very real, and I bet there are thousands more people just like this and potentially millions who want to be like this.<p>I did the expat thing for 2 years. Sleeping on mountains, on couches, in airports, in cars, everything. It&#x27;s a lot of fun and really cheap. You feel a lot of freedom.<p>But, it is still hard to get things going &quot;legitmately&quot; in any country, and by that I mean finding a job and getting a visa and, if desired, having an apartment or a family&#x2F;spouse.<p>I came back to the USA and luckily found what seems to be a more permanent job than sales. I&#x27;m making $2,000 a month and splitting expenses with my gf.<p>Ultimately that math works better than being a nomad on $500 a month. But I&#x27;m wondering if someday I will give it another shot :)

While immoral I am hardly one to speak, right after the Brexit vote when the Pound Sterling was unusually low against the US dollar (Oct 2016), I cashed everything in to pay off my loans at a stark discount (15% off). Is it wrong to benefit from your home country&#x27;s misfortune? Is it wrong to leave your home country to avoid repayment?<p>I will say that while I consider the morals of things, the wealthy and ultra-wealthy seem to have no such compunction. They will happily move money off-short to avoid tax, re-work income to pay lower capital gains tax rates, or have an official residence in a lower tax location.<p>Somehow I think they will clamp down on this a lot more than they do the ultra-wealthy.

Time for the weekly thread where CS majors call anyone who is not a CS major stupid and worthless.

My wife has $400,000 of medical student loan debt. We are on PSLF but are nervous about the program and question if her student loans will really be forgiven. If they are not forgiven at the end of our 10 years of qualifying payments we plan to leave the country. If you can find a job outside the U.S. and don’t mind learning a new system I think leaving the U.S. is a great option. Will people do this over medical debt in the future? As the world becomes more integrated this option becomes easier. Especially since speaking only English is not as limiting as it used to be.

It&#x27;s interesting to me that the people highlighted in the article are creative enough to do things to avoid repaying their student loans but aren&#x27;t creative enough to turn their education into a higher paying job. It strikes me as misdirected energy.<p>The heart of the article is the debt of student loans are getting so great that more people are taking drastic measures to avoid repayment. The article I wish I had read was how some people aren&#x27;t entrepreneurial enough to turn their college education into cash. More people should learn how to negotiate their employment lives better. I renegotiated my salary immediately after graduating because (A) I knew the market values college grads higher and (B) I wanted to try to raise my pay just to see what happened. Why don&#x27;t others see their degree as a bargaining chip to be played when negotiating? Why aren&#x27;t some people willing to employ riskier plays?<p>&quot;I couldn&#x27;t believe I couldn&#x27;t find a job in America.&quot; -- Albright, from article<p>Creativity and entrepreneurial spirit is especially needed for people who get degrees that don&#x27;t have obvious market potential. For example, some people say a history degree isn&#x27;t worth much However; entrepreneurial individuals with history degrees have gone on to make a great living making educational content for online media. The job didn&#x27;t exist so the individual created it. Sure, it&#x27;s a risky proposition for the individual but they&#x27;re already playing risky from a market potential standpoint. I feel like Albright from the article could have used this framing to his benefit; but instead, he fled his debts.

I wonder if these news stories intentionally pick weak examples of people to highlight. 20k and 30k debt, for communications and history degree, so now you have to flee the country? Okay.

In Malaysia, those who default on their student loan are barred from traveling overseas. Since it&#x27;s taxpayer&#x27;s money, people are not happy when you are free to travel overseas without settling your responsibility. At least that&#x27;s the impression from asking around (I&#x27;m not local).<p>&quot;Can&#x27;t find a job&quot; won&#x27;t fly here, as you can literally get burger-flipping jobs easily—you can&#x27;t walk to a mall without seeing dozens of &quot;Admin&#x2F;sales&#x2F;waiter staff needed&quot;. Also, most uni graduates have a family (rent-free stay).<p>What makes US different? Student loans not from taxpayers money? Low-paying jobs impossible to get? Parents don&#x27;t let their kids stay until they can afford their own place?<p>In Indonesia, the govt doesn&#x27;t even have money to give loans to students.

&gt; He then went back to school to pursue a master&#x27;s degree in comparative literature at the University of Colorado Boulder.<p>You graduate with a degree that has little market value and can&#x27;t pay your load, so your solution is to accumulate more debt for another degree with little market value?

There are many sources of this problem, but I suspect the three that get the least attention are:<p>- parental pressure to attend college<p>- guidance counselors and school administrators pushing for college<p>- the wholesale destruction of vocational schools<p>As a result, the US K-12 education system produces a never-ending deluge of students who believe their only life option after high school is to get a four year degree. Or joining the military, but that&#x27;s a different discussion.<p>Like the people in this story, many HS grads study subjects with little economic viability.<p>Why?<p>That&#x27;s the story I&#x27;d like to see. What motivated the choice to waste four or more years and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a credential that will never pay for itself?

Two of the three have become teachers in other countries, and one wanted to be a professor here. So they have at least some desire to teach, some ability to teach, but would rather move to a new country than teach K-12 here. And somehow we have a teacher shortage.<p>From my experience, quite a few people getting the degrees being criticised in this thread want to become a professor in that field. Teaching is what they want to do, but they just saw how terrible being a high school teacher would be.

This is ridiculous. I left school with $30k in debt and paid it down with my $35k job. What we don’t hear enough about are the people who foolishly go to a bank for their loans, and then take out massive amounts, avoiding all work and scholarships, then get some degree that has little to know market value. Student debt is not the problem. Banks, universities and the students are the problem.

Where’s a good place to park money if you’re worried about an imminent student loan collapse? Or, put another way, what’s a good hedge?

I couldn&#x27;t afford to go to college when I left HS. So I took my life savings and certified as a CNE back in the day. I found a job and was able to attend school part time. My employer ended up funding a lot of it. It took a while but it worked out. I had no school debt and actually made a really good living.<p>If you can&#x27;t afford it, find another way....

The federal government shouldn&#x27;t be in the loan business. Those are my tax dollars being redirected for uses for which taxes should not be applied. I&#x27;m not an ATM.

Other than that time I payed off one of my student loans with a lump sum check I&#x27;ve been perpetually in default and they never came after me (other than an occasional letter) or garnished my wages...actually, now that I think about it, I can&#x27;t remember getting a letter in quite a while, years perhaps?<p>Admittedly, I did try to skip the country a couple times but it never stuck.<p>Now I just work as an &quot;independent contractor&quot; so have no wages to garnish, no retirement plan and will have to work until the day I keel over dead from who knows what (or get replaced by the robots).<p>And yet I blame nobody but myself...

I personally like to see loans during the first couple years capped and community colleges more subsidized.

I honestly think the mess the US is getting into here is just another example of failure of capitalism just like the health care system.<p>Now everybody struggles to get education and health care right but few places in the west does it seem to go as wrong as in the US.<p>People also choose dumb stuff in more socialized educational systems but because the government regulates the school system they don’t make tons of useless study places.<p>In fact we have seen this effect in Sweden as private enterprise started taking over more schooling. The number of popular but useless studies shot up. It is a classic case of market failure. It is one of those areas we’re bureacrats actually do a better job than the market.

This article should be titled “How some dishonest people made bad decisions and instead of fixing them ran away.” They blame others for their choices, and take no responsibility. Nobody made them get those degrees, take out those loans, or any of it. I get that the cost of education is a problem, but using loans and then skipping town to avoid repayment isn’t only dumb, it’s dishonest.

Preventing educational debt from discharge in bankruptcy is one of congress&#x27;s greatest crimes. The fact that they exempted their own children from the law is just the icing on the cake.