Record Surge in Past-Due Student Loans Adds to US Debt Burden

Another thing is some of these kids getting a degree in Lesbian Studies and wondering why they're still poor. Do they ever think about these things in advance?
How does a degree in "womyns studies" not raise a red flag with potential employers, that the applicant, if selected, will spend their time suing over every perceived slight?
 
She does lots of real estate business with her law firm.

Lots of international buyers with money to spend.
Ah... I was talking about criminal law
They were/are good people, some would take on a fair share of pro bono cases to make right wrong injustices for the poor. Lots of nasty stuff in our legal system years back. Without proper representation you were screwed.
 
How does a degree in "womyns studies" not raise a red flag with potential employers, that the applicant, if selected, will spend their time suing over every perceived slight?

They try to be relevant by makings ads on linked in on how to integrate employees together to create a more collaborative work environment 😂
 
They try to be relevant by makings ads on linked in on how to integrate employees together to create a more collaborative work environment 😂
In my experience, a "collaborative work environment" means the women's studies types do a lot of useless blabbering while the rest of us got all the work done.
 
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This topic is making its rounds on fintwit. I thought you might like this chart - its delinquencies by age group. Seems like the 50+ crowd are the worst. I suppose if your 50 and still have student loans you probably figure there really is no point I guess.

From @KobeissiLetter on X:


1754690416151.webp
 
You reap what you sow. I have paid.. every.. single.. debt I ever owed on time all my life. No sympathy at all for them.
Agree, but there is sometimes an element of predatory lending to the vulnerable. I know a gal who holds a PhD, maybe a double PhD, in a Social Science discipline. Her family offered no fiscal guidance when the loans were offered. A huge mess that hounded, perhaps crippled, her for many years. The worst part is, I am not sure she has learned her lesson.

Personal finance needs to be taught starting in grade school and continued through HS.
 
This topic is making its rounds on fintwit. I thought you might like this chart - its delinquencies by age group. Seems like the 50+ crowd are the worst. I suppose if your 50 and still have student loans you probably figure there really is no point I guess.

From @KobeissiLetter on X:


View attachment 294243
I imagine some in the 50+ category have their own loans and parent plus loans.
 
It's my opinion that a significant percentage of people attending college have no business being there. Probably half of female students choose degrees that should never be funded via public money. I would guess the number would be a bit lower for male students but it's still away too high.

Almost zero performing arts students will be able to pay off their loans. The same goes for the vast majority of undergraduate psychology graduates (140k per year), Sociology, Art History, Anthropology, Decolonization and Migration Studies, etc.
 
Tuition at the community college I went to in 2010 was $130/credit hour. 15 years later it's $274
At least down here at my middle of nowhere community college in Illinois, we actually JUST went to $137/hour for this coming A/Y after sitting at $125 for at least a decade. We are a bargain compared even to the state regional university in the same county, that the last I checked ran about 4x that.

in order to overpay professors

I've seen a few references to "overpaid" professors in this thread, and I'd sure love to know how I missed out on that gravy train.

Just as a reality check, faculty pay can be fairly complicated, but I'd say my experience across a couple different state schools and now a community college is that if you see 6 figure salaries, a big chunk of that is likely coming from grants, or in other words external money that the professor applied for, primarily to fund their research but also to pay part of their salary. Grants are insanely competitive, especially big money grants, and you're not getting them unless you both have an established track record of results AND continue showing that you're using the money as you said you would.

At my school, someone making 6 figures is likely someone who's been there 25+ years and teaches well above their contracted amount.

There's a lot of pressure too to shut down tenure track lines or even non-tenured full time faculty and replace them with adjuncts. Adjunct pay largely is terrible(at my school it's $818/contact hour for a semester) and rarely does it offer any benefits.

Administration, though...that's a different story both for raw salary numbers and how many assistant to the assistant deans, vice presidents, and other administrative bloat that wasn't there 20 years ago.

Some, but not all, loan contracts had a "public service loan forgiveness" clause. Do something they defined as "good" for ten years, make minimum loan payments, then apply and get the rest of your loan forgiven.

Of course that "good" might be teaching elementary school, which pays poorly compared to private industry. So one may make actual financial sacrifices under good faith that their contract will be honored for their public service.

As these programs go, they didn't define "good" very well when writing the law, because the first applicants would have been ten years out when the law went into effect. So there was confusion by the end users if they qualified.

I'm someone who's had qualifying employment for public service forgiveness(PSLF) my entire working life, first as academic staff and now as faculty. I could earn double or more with my degree in industry, but enjoy teaching way too much.

The whole PSLF program has kind of been a mess, and before 2020 the number of people who had actually received it was pretty small(I think in the hundreds, out of all the tens of thousands of people potentially eligible who actually applied for it). It has to be done in a VERY specific way, and that way was not particularly well documented nor were all the "catches" that would disqualify an application. Over the past few years, a lot of work has been done to clean it up, and that included offering a period of amnesty to count payments that were made but were previously disqualified for several reasons. A whole lot of poeple were able to sucessfully get their loans discharged under PSLF. I'm on track to hit 120 payments in November, but right now as far as I'm aware no applications are being processed.

Just to be clear too, the program requires that you make 120 on time payments for at least the full amount monthly amount your payment plan requires, and only payments while you were employed at a qualifying employer count toward this. The typical person who has their loans discharged under PSLF will still have repaid the principle+a good amount of interest, but just not as much as if they'd paid for 20+ years.
 
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