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If anybody on here has experience with student loans I’d like to hear about it.

I see news stories of people having 6 figures of debt and jobs that only pay like $50-60k per year or less.

My natural response is that they would’ve been better off with no college and no college debt.

I think nobody wants to hear this but some of the people crying about student loans gambled. They bet on themself, and lost. They just don’t have whatever it takes to be successful enough to recoup the costs and it’s too late to know it.

Its very possible they chose a major that just will not provide the income needed

My daughter ran up close to $100,000 to go to law school but was able to pay that off because of a good income

Its much harder to do with a degree in philosophy for example

Honestly, I left that company shortly after. I had been there 6 years in all, and felt unappreciated. I got no raise when I graduated - was told that my degree didn't add any more value to the company. Probably true, but still a nut kick.

Anyway, within 6 months I was at $48K + 1.5XOT and I never looked back.

I think this is an interesting thought, but it doesn't go far enough. All college students are gambles. They're gambles whether they take out loans or not. And in truth, the pricing has shifted to the point where going to college is probably overall a net positive (the average student gets more than they spend), but a gamble you wouldn't be THAT happy to make.

We'll start with betting on yourself. Even though it realistically is that, it's never presented that way. We as a culture spent a long time telling 18-year-olds that borrowing money to this end was a wise and logical move. Shoot, I know people whose parents could pay for school, but remembering how they had done it themselves (when the economics allowed for that), actually said "You do this on your own, take out loans if you have to."

Then you think about the different types of gambles and the issues with making the academy so central. I knew more than a few kids who came in ready to rock as business majors, engineers and doctors (with strong HS backgrounds). But UW is not in the business of making many business majors, engineers and doctors. It makes very good ones, but its goal is to drive a lot of kids who want that away from doing that. And it usually doesn't have much time for guidance once it does. Good guidance sends you to a well-paying adjacent field. OK guidance to marketing or something. Not good guidance to being a math major. Very bad to psych. The blind spot has rarely been well addressed en masse. 

Then you have kids good enough to get into college, either not well-prepped enough academically or just not ready socially. Some wash out with five figures of debt. I'm sure some in the category above might have done the same, but down $20,000 and with no direction, some will add to it because they can still exist in the structure of college and work toward something (something they mistakenly think is long-term stability).

And of course, if you were coming from less, you were caught in an unfortunate vice. The net expected value of college was shrinking, but the net expected value of no college was shrinking faster. And as a society, we did our damndest to make two-year school seem unappetizing (running dang commercials during daytime soaps, alongside ads for shop at home trash). So the road was painted, and loans were just cast as part of the process.

And then you have the academy. You go to a place surrounded by people who usually don't know what your options are. They don't know how a polisci degree becomes a six-figure job (it can, though it isn't totally connected to the major). They know how to research and go to more school. And there isn't enough god damn guidance to prevent people from finding something they like and then trying to set them on that path (some of the grad school choices, what the hell?). You look at how law and business school are waved around like salves for economic woes, oy.

This isn't to say a lot of people didn't make mistakes. They did. And they had faith put in them when they were 18-year-olds, which is to say, when they were direly stupid about the world. And we had a lot of elder perspective that imagined college to be something that could be mostly paid for with a low-end part-time job when it no longer was. We built ourselves an inordinately stupid mousetrap. Covering some of that debt isn't likely to fix the problem, but we damn sure need to come to our senses about the root causes.

(That was long, and I'm sure missed some perspective, but that was just burbling in my mind. Also, fun fact. In 1995, it would take you less than 700 hours of minimum-wage work to pay for a year at UW-in state. A decade later, more than 2,200 hours)