Opinion: Student loan...

[meadowlander]

80. Earning a degree in something doesn't guarantee you a job in it

particularly if you're not a white man.

Also most people at 18 don't know absolutely what they want to do with the rest of their lives. You can't know absolutely if you're suited to a job until you do it for a while. And life happens.

Maybe someone racks up $200,000 in debt for veterinary school because they thought it was their life's passion and then finds out it mostly involves putting animals down and develops clinical depression and can't keep working. So they end up running a no-kill shelter for $40,000 a year.

Maybe the plan was to borrow $60,000 for a marine biology degree which you would have been able to pay off if you hadn't accidentally gotten pregnant with a baby you chose to keep or had to take care of suddenly ill parents or other family members. By the time you reenter the work force your degree is seen as out of date and you're competing with new grads with no strings attached.

Maybe you borrowed $100,000 for a computer science degree on the basis of reports of high starting salaries and then found out all the jobs are going to H-1B visa holders or that it's impossible to find a company that will hire you for more than a 3 months contract and you spend half of every year job searching or you're expected to work 80 hours a week for your "high" salary and you burn out and can't keep doing it.

Why would someone borrow more than a google search tells them is easily repayable on the average salary (assuming that all degrees correlate easily into jobs with predictable starting salaries)? Because people can't see into the future. Obviously. And because they are subject to forces (racism, sexism, offshoring, exploitation, mental health issues) which are beyond their control and which you have left out of your equation.